The four 'heads' heading us toward extinction

Civilization expands not only in space ("uncontrolled' population growth), but in its power to build on and change its environment to suit the agendas of those seeking to make life better for themselves and others and maybe for some fellow-creatures.

The founders of Syai, aware of the potential dangers to nature and society of so-called progress, determined from the start that civilization's expansion and progress would  never be allowed to be achieved at permanent loss to ecological diversity and damage to the 'commonwealth' of the planet's biosphere. To follow the Syai example, not only would many of our practices have to change, but to sustain the change would take a great deal of soul-searching. We can no longer dismiss the task as too hard on our human natures, with the cynical view that the only thing mankind ever learns from history is that mankind never learns from history.

I am at the stage of translating (with Terres's help) the part of the Syai myth-story where what I have just been outlining becomes particularly relevant. It deals mythologically with what brought death into the world on a grand scale. Of course we need to die, but not prematurely as individuals, nor prematurely as a species. Nor should be be, as individuals or as groups, enjoying long and luxurious lives with the consequence that many 'outsiders' are condemned to poor lives and premature deaths. It could be said that the Syai equivalent of the four horses are the four heads of the creature of Syai mythology that destroyed the Lesser Wheel of Creation. Terres calls that creature "the zombie-dragon".

The Story
Rescuing their child from a storm, the child's parents, "pre-humans", disobeyed orders, leaving it too late  to reach their hide-away cave. The fiercest of the Titans, the Lady of Light, appeared in a flash of lighting before them, and questioned them. She found out they had not been naturally born as divine children of the Goddess Sunchild, but  had been made by the gods on a magical machine - the Lesser Wheel of Creation. The titanic lady, in a rage, sent down one of her own creations on the Greater Wheel  to smash up the Lesser that the gods had constructed by stealing the 'blue-print' of the Greater. That ended all avenues of immortality to the pre-humans, and introduced the destructive forces that not only cause individuals to die but keep all of mankind-to-come under a permanent cloud of threatened self-extinction.

The negative, collectively self-defeating nature of mankind is symbolized in the four heads of the Zombie-dragon. Translated (as best Terres was able), these are:

• corruption
• greed
• trivia-fixation (/apathy)
• fanaticism