What Stifles Human Development?

Developing & Developed Nations 

Of all the countries that exist today the majority of them are considered developing nations or nations that do not have adequate human development such as high life expectancy, access to medicine ad adequate healthcare, poor standards of living as well as poorly developed infrastructure.  On the other hand, only a handful of countries have a high level of human development.  The natural question to ask is then why are so many countries lacking in human development while very few countries are high in human development? 

Many ideas have been put forth to explain this discrepancy in human development such as the controversial idea that some humans simply aren't able to develop because they are genetically capable of doing so while others assert it is due to big corporations and historic colonialism that have drained certain development of their valuable resources until there is almost nothing left leaving these people to scramble for scraps of what was there once their abundant source of potential wealth.  

Well, I believe that neither ideas are entirely correct because even if resources have been drained from their countries or some people are incapable of developing on their own, the underlying and sole reason behind stunted human development has to do with how the people who live in developing view themselves and the world around them and to understand what this means we need to look into the history behind human economies.

Traditional Trade

What do the Rajputs of India, The King of Mali Mansa Musa, and the Medieval Muslim World have in common?  They all had wealth that was all sourced from nature.  The spices of India & the East Indies were grown and cultivated en masse by farmers who would adequately profit from such spice production.  The massive reserves of Gold, a highly valuable metal, found within the Mali Kingdom and neighboring areas allowed the famous king Mansa Musa to become the wealthiest man to have ever lived & The Muslim World which stretched from Northern Africa to India controlled the famous Silk Road which was the very trade network that traded silk, spices, porcelain, and other valuable goods that were all either sourced from animals, plants and other natural resources.  

Everything that was a source of wealth for most of human history had always been sourced from natural or agricultural processes & because these very goods came from nature and only nature the people believed that such wealth was from God himself.  This belief was especially permeated into the Muslim World where most of this natural wealth was controlled and derived from & because of this very belief people only ever saw wealth coming from God and God only because, especially within the point of view of Islam, God, unquestionably, controls and rules all of humanity and the Universe

But while such natural wealth was enjoyed by those who had it for millennia; something would eventually come along that would butcher this natural wealth and leave the people who once had it stuck in the past and that was the Industrial Revolution.  

The Industrial Revolution 

While most of the world was largely agricultural other kinds of trades such as baking, blacksmithing, and mercantile trading occurred in more urban areas of the entire world from Europe to Afro-Asia,  the Americas & Oceania all had relied on natural wealth to live and prosper as a people with some places, Such as Asia & Africa, doing better.  But then a bunch of very smart people used their knowledge in applied physics & chemistry to engineering new inventions such as the lightbulb, the steam-powered ships & trains, and modern appliances such as microwaves, gas stoves, & refrigerators while other smart people discovered and invented new ways to cure disease and increase life expectancy through their knowledge of the human body which rapidly increased the standard of living and access to better medical treatment for everyone.  

These new inventions were then spread to other parts of the world through colonialism and trade, allowing even more people from distant lands to also achieve a better standard of living with some of them even improving and enhancing this technology such as the Japanese.  

These new creations by humans then become the new source of wealth for people rather than the natural sources of wealth that humans had produced before the Industrial Revolution with this new source of wealth, called Inventive Wealth, even continuing to this day with the development of computers, electric cars, and more environmentally friendly energy production such as wind or solar.  But while all of this new wealth was making human living much better than it ever had been throughout history some people while accepting this new technology did not bother to understand it in any way because they thought that such technology wasn't due to human ingenuity but due to God himself. This brings me to my next point.  

God & his People

Let's just first start by saying that within religious communities; the only thing that is of concern is the upholding of God-Given morality and God-Given standards of life and behavior.  Everything else is due to God’s will only.  So people within this community, who are subjected to God must always act and do what he believes is right and wrong & what he believes is proper behavior & thought so anyone that does anything which steps out of line from God’s standards of behavior and living is something that not only isn't socially unacceptable but punishable by torture or death.  So humans need to be obedient little subjects and nothing more and this very idea itself is what holds people back from innovation.  

Because God can only create wealth from the Earth he created, the people must rely on God’s grace to be wealthy but when the very natural wealth from God has become obsolete due to modern technology the people who still follow God’s standards and still consider themselves subject to God would not ever think that they could produce the same kind of inventive wealth that has brought the world into a better place because doing so will anger God because it shows that humans are equal to God when they create something new or innovative.    

Repression

It is no surprise that a country whose population is highly religious is also the one that doesn't have high or adequate human development while countries whose populations are more secular tend to have high human development and the reason behind this is simple.  Secular people understand that they can create wealth based on their knowledge and creativeness within the sciences and arts respectively while also knowing that the Universe at large is not run by some divine entity but is, in fact, a system with a stable constitution of existence with certain laws that run the chemical and physical processes of the Universe while those who are religious think God runs the Universe and that science and subsequent human ingenuity is an act of blasphemy and so no one should ever do it o risk eternal damnation or physical punishment from religious zealots.  These opposites of religion and science are opposites with science being more about understanding the objective world around us, which we do not yet fully understand,  while religion is about believing in a certain worldview, morality, and law that is always asserted to be right but is just a subjective viewpoint of the world.

So to answer the question of what stifles human development; the answer would probably b religion or more specificity the religions that have a God who asserts control over his creations with an iron fist to the point where humans are afraid or are unable to create new sources of wealth from new knowledge because doing so is an act of blasphemy which can mean death or severe punishment that can damage one's psyche & willpower to learn and think independently. 

This isn't to say that embracing secularism is good however as secularism has its ways of causing human destruction such as hyper individuality and a disregard of one's community due to wanting to make oneself “happy” while those who are religious relentlessly beat back modernity because of its high stance of individuality which can destroy the human group which these religions stand on.  

Nonetheless, it is now obvious that to bring about human development to all parts of the world; people need to start relying on tier own abilities and willingness to learn and innovate for the sake of achieving high human development for their own countries rather than turning to belief and living in fear of punishment or hell for daring to go against such beliefs which are subjective hogwash anyway.  Human intelligence itself is a gift brought about through thousands of years of human development and so every human should use it for the betterment of others and themselves as well as their nations.