Towards A More Sustainable Existential Paradigm of De-growth and De-development to be Established in Our Modern World

In the past couple of centuries, the individual and social ontologies have become negatively affected on a multi-dimensional scale by the anti-environmentalist, anti-ecologist, anti-humanistic paradigms of the Industrial Revolution, giving way to a problematic as well as counterproductive zeitgeist or conjuncture, redundant productionism, metropolitan expansionism and over—consumerism characterized by ontological disintegrations, existentialist crises exacerbated by ecological, mayhems and environmental catastrophes as well as degraded ecosystems experienced on a gradual basis. The focus of our study, therefore, has been to investigate the multi-dimensional and multi-layered effects of over-industrialization processes on the natural environment and the factors that have led to the construction of cities in a manner that is contrary to all kinds of civilizational development, ignoring the ontological well-being paradigms of humanity, and to evaluate the hitherto ignored multi-faceted effects and consequences of such over-industrial and over-developmentalist paradigms and conjunctures in all areas of social, individual, public and educational life, inspired by conceptual and mixed methodologies. Based on the aforementioned particularities of the global conjuncture, our study, which was inspired by mixed methodological postulates and quantitatively adopted research approaches, was conducted in an attempt to highlight the aforementioned negative impacts of industrial civilization and bring up a reinforced and a reiterated critical discourse-analysis of the problematic paradigms of this kind of lifestyle, in order to make a contribution to cultivating a collective awareness for a holistic well-being to be established on the part of humanity in each and every nook of the modern world, chief among them the educational institutions.