The earthly achievements of the Maya are well known and beyond dispute. In fact, at their peak they equaled, if not surpassed, renowned contemporaries like the Greeks and Chinese. Accordingly, it is astonishing, allowing even for the stifling effect of the Spanish Conquest, that Maya religion –long since dismissed at best as mythological, and at worst as demonic- philosophy and ethics are simply ignored by both Western and Eastern thought. By way of proof, when was the last time that their standards were mentioned, much less invoked, in the mainstream media?

We do not suggest adopting Maya religion; the world has plenty of them. But we should be cognizant of the irreconcilable difference between their specific religious commandment “Do not sacrifice human beings” and their universal practice of doing so over hundreds, if not thousands of years. Either that commandment never existed or it was ignored. In either case, it suggests profound –if not bottomless- religious corruption, the one element that governed their everyday lives, and the consequences thereof, self-destruction 600 years before the Spanish Conquest.   Accordingly, given today’s predicament –a high and growing risk of thermonuclear war between the U.S. and Russia/China and anthropomorphic climate change threatening to destroy our only habitat, it is long past due that collectively we admit and accept that what we’ve been doing since the advent of the first industrial revolution no longer works and that the status quo is going to succumb, one way or another, before fundamental and radical change. All we can do is make it happen gradually and imperceptibly, and the first step to do so is to deal with today’s abysmal inequality.