Essays on geopolitics
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The mythology of Millennialism: Anti-Christs, Riders of the Apocalypse, nuclear incineration, Second Comings, the coming of the space-people, galactic Null-Zones, impacting comets and overwhelming disasters. Who wants to be there? Many people deal with it by ignoring it – perhaps it will all go away. After all, isn't the Millennium a good reason for a drunken Auld Lang Syne super-party, with some extra construction contracts and media spectaculars thrown in? The majority of people are pitifully stuck between two forms of denial of the full implications of our situation: a majority subscribes to fundamental disbelief or joking half-belief in millennial ideas, and a minority tends toward a compensatory over-belief – and there is little careful consideration of realistic issues in-between.
It is easy and habitual to evade looking at writing on the wall – everyone is too busy making a living or a profit. If someone threatens to stir disquiet in the ranks, and if even highly-respected scientists speak out, they tend to be passed off by media commentators and spin-doctors as fomenters of extremist or biased opinion. Scientists may opine and provide data, but politicians and media editors decide what is true and important – and they have a big say in the allocation of research grants too. On the other side, it is equally easy for millenialist dramatists make big and definite-sounding future predictions: prognosticators are rarely held accountable for their forecasts, and people forget about them anyway, adopting new forecasts to suit passing moods. The failure of end-of-the-world predictions in a gullible age has hardened people into rejection of all predictions. Take a look at the following quoted example, culled from the Internet.
THIS IS THE GALACTIC CONFEDERATION (excerpted from a New Age newsletter)
This is the Galactic Confederation. We are here to announce the opening of a new dimensional portal which will take place on November eleventh this year [1996]. Planet Earth is approaching initial phase of its mutation into a body of light. In winter 1995/96 it began to change its position from the old into the new ley line grid system. As a result of this planetary activation, the following things will be achieved: Galactic light code 11:11:83 will be anchored. This light code will align etheric planetary axis and grid system with the Galactic central sun. Thus planet Earth will begin its Ascension into fifth dimensional Oneness. New planetary grid system will be sealed. Thus its vibration will be high enough to accept the heightened energies of the Photon Belt, which will arrive immediately after this planetary activation and will begin to mutate planet Earth into its light body.
Mass landings are now set to occur during a 38-day window that will last from November 10, till December 17, 1996. The order to start the landings will come from the Archangel in charge, Lord Zandriel. After the initial calming music is played, there will be a display of crossed shooting stars in the heavens and one's guardian angels will appear in your minds to reassure you of what is about to happen. The landings will happen very quickly. 15.5 million ships descending and landing will be a spectacular sight, especially when it occurs in about four hours. Everyone is assigned a counsellor, and everyone will be told to prepare for shift to full-consciousness. Many people could still fall into denial and become hysterical, but for the most part, people will know that a profound event is unfolding and will just wait and see what develops.
The Hale-Bopp Comet will be arriving in the Earth's atmosphere in April 1997 and its gases will produce toxic air pollution that will affect many people. It has been on this route for many eons of light years. It is very powerful. Its intelligence comes from its energy source. You can liken it to an energy that has gone wild in the cosmos that will cause some to perish, if there is a direct hit on Earth. Its function is not intended to hurt Earth, but Earth is in its path. We on this side are working to deter it from this path. Its course will be known more directly within a few months of your Earth time.
The U.S. government will agree to allow spaceships and beings to land here on Earth for all to see openly within six months. All events are part of the Universal Master Plan. Many lightworkers are needed to keep the focus on Love and Divine Light for this master plan to work for the good of the Universal Consciousness.
However well-meant or carefully devised, many predictions are coloured by current fashionable or prevalent beliefs, predispositions or paranoias. Sophisticated-sounding assertions are made, the reliability of which cannot be checked until after the dreaded or exalted event is clocked to happen. This has the effect of rendering people powerless – which itself is a symptom of our current situation.
Part of the problem is that we lack experience and data in global survival questions. Additional ingredients come in too: religious or ideological advocates of dramatic millennial scenarios often believe that tribulations will affect everyone else but them, or that redemption or rescue will bless them but, fortuitously, not others. Needless to say, prognosticators of all angles are usually sincere, if at times over-zealous, and their predictions can carry a symbolic value which does serve to make at least some people think. Which is better than blanking-out – though a full and serious consideration of what information we have, scientific or belief-based, still needs to take place.
Millennial notions do stretch our sense of possible future reality, making us aware of matters which indeed deserve consideration. It is well worth acquiring a basic grasp of the spectrum of future possibilities – including both the more extreme scenarios and the more moderate probable likelihoods. However, the more one investigates all this, the more one uncovers uncomfortable information and insights which make even moderate scenarios begin to look quite extreme! When one discovers the extent and wider effects of specific forms of large-scale pollution, one is left with a daunted and overwhelmed feeling of frustration or helplessness! Most people deal with this by keeping their heads down and by looking no wider than their own narrow private frame of reference and no further forward than three years. This is an escape from, not a solution to, the enormity of the question that faces us. Whither the future?
The extremism of many predictions does not automatically prove that they should be ignored. Self-appointed rationalists beware! One who takes a strongly rationalist viewpoint often does so from an unacknowledged irrational basis. This irrationality is geared to the denial of mystery, emotional sensitivity or responsibility for past errors. However, anticipation of disaster is not just idle paranoia. We do live in crucial times. If we examine our world situation honestly, looking beneath the surface, we find that many of the most fundamental issues of human history are up for examination and for radical change, whether this is chosen by us or foisted upon us by force of circumstance. If we focus solely on a single issue such as growth in world population, vast and deep historical issues rear their ugly heads, drawing in matters of religion, social structure, politics, economics, tradition and hosts of other complicating factors. The stakes in the global poker-game are now high, and planet Earth is, regardless of official opinion, distinctly not a safe and secure place to live, whether in New York City or in an isolated valley in the High Pamir.
When armies of soldiers, police and security personnel are deemed necessary to guard society from its own members, something is dreadfully wrong. When intelligent beings of the same species threaten each other's existence to the extent of overkill, and when individuals allow their own personal interests to override everyone's collective interests, something is wrong. It isn't necessary to be a visionary or a futurologist to see what's going on! Basic commonsense tells any average human of any nationality that all is not well. Belief in the pronouncements of authorities of all kinds is dangerously weak, even though most people would like it to be otherwise. An old Bantu song goes "Listen more closely to things than to people...".
The world's problems seem to be ever-increasingly interwoven with each other. The solution of one issue rests on the solution of many others, and these rest on yet more interdependent issues. Dedicated conservationists seek to protect endangered species and landscapes and to re-educate the public, yet nature conservation on its own is a symptom-oriented first-aid measure which cannot heal the root-causes of environmental degradation. It proceeds only a small distance before it comes up against blocking issues in other spheres – rhinos in East Africa are decimated by poachers supplying traditional medicinal ingredients for affluent consumers in East Asia, and bird stocks in Antarctica are affected by agri-chemical practices in Denmark, India and Nigeria. Conservationists thus cleave into two camps: those moved toward political action (often direct action) and those pressurised by funding and authorities to attend to localised small-scale, single-issue conservation work to rescue certain specific species or environments – as long as it doesn't raise taxes or greatly affect anyone, especially the smooth flow of business.
Yet times are now crucial. Ominous multiple global issues are by now well-known: over-population; over-consumption by some and under-nourishment for others; ozone-layer depletion, atmospheric warming and climatic change; political instabilities and social stresses; toxic, nuclear or military risks; urban, industrial and agricultural pollution; habitat and species decline; immune-system degeneration; decline in male sperm-counts; creeping corruption, dishonesty, cynicism and profit-chasing; personal, family and community breakdown; and, most crucially, governmental and institutional incapacity to remedy all these. These factors insidiously eat away at the inherent robustness and potential in both nature and human nature. Even though there are strong lobbies portraying our situation as 'normal' and 'manageable', it is all approaching some sort of crescendo. People might prefer business as usual, yet usuality and normality are in decline. It's safer to expect the unexpected.
In every single department and every cranny of human life, large-scale world issues are reflected in people's personal experiences and predicaments. The world is visibly more crowded, and the increase is itself increasing. Sold-out impotence, shoulder-shrugging resignation and individual helplessness pervade many people's lives. Bird-song and contemplative sunsets are forgotten – if they don't happen on-screen, they're unimportant. Foot-tapping restlessness, point-and-click short attention-spans and perpetual busyness lead successive generations into ever-subtler forms of avoidance of the bottom-line questions of existence. Global uncertainties affect you and me: we are now even endangered by over-exposure to natural sunshine! The risk of getting mugged, even in our own home, confronts so many of us. Is this the world we want to live in?
This acutely-loaded situation generates a new undercurrent of worldwide awareness – an awareness which has never existed in the way it exists now. People largely conform to the presented norms modern society expects of us, bound securely into an enormous wage-debt-reward-tax system, acquiescing in a rather merciless reality which clashes horribly with human sensitivities. "You too could win a million dollars!" – yet most people are obliged to subsist with but the possibility of winning. People who do win gilded carrots find their success and fortune brings mixed blessings – worries, responsibilities, ulcers and accountancy bills cancel out the advertised bliss. Underneath this pile of societal carcinogenia something else is being generated: a widespread, deep and latent disaffection, a questioning which emerges only when things get to be too much, or when poignantly symbolic events take place, such as the sudden death in 1997 of Britain's Princess Diana. At such moments, a big question arises surreptitiously in the back psyche of most people: is this what life is really all about? Wasn't there something else we all came here to do or to be?
Such estranged questioning and disillusionment has found expression mainly through the actions, utterances and silences of odd-balls, poets, vocal minorities, far-sighted visionaries or outraged radicals. However, widespread unconscious disaffection has arisen throughout the world's public too: only a small proportion of the six-ish billion people alive today live free of reservations about the state of the world. Most people accept what they get, yet only few experience 100% satisfaction with the manner of civilisation in which we live. Many people work hard to justify how things are or labour long to make things better. Yet they also experience serious, secret, deep, largely unacknowledged reservations – even if these surface only during unusual moments of truth, loss or disadvantage.
Opinion polls rarely investigate people's truly fundamental feelings and might not be capable of doing so. Evangelists and futuristic preachers tap into these feelings, spin-doctors tame them and ad-men prey on them – but what happens afterwards? We are still faced with the same inescapable problems. A short, sharp conclusion lurks furtively in the back recesses of people's awareness, waiting for something to stir it: "We've had enough".
There it is, a spiritual enzyme gnawing at the foundations of our beliefs. It's a secret yearning for a better life and a happier world – a world where the efforts, the aches and joys of life are proportioned to a more natural, human and authentic base-line of reality. We are given to understand that our modern world represents an apex of human achievement, yet there's a sensing that there is a further reality beyond this – a reality we glimpse during periodic 'funny feelings', moments of insightful peace or razor-sharp personal crisis. It's a reality which soon becomes a forgotten fantasy as soon as we return to 'normality'.
Disaffection levels reflect a hidden growing saturation with sales-talk, political spin, moral judgements, public untruths and social control-mechanisms of all kinds. People get to feel quietly hemmed in by the stated categories to which they are obliged to conform. We are told what to feel: if we use a certain flexicard, we shall feel happy, powerful and free, and if we default on our debts we must feel inadequate, failed and ready for exile. People go along with it, perhaps feeling there is no alternative, yet they also have doubts. Fundamentalism of all kinds, including mainstream conventionalism, covers enormous qualms – the quest for black-and-white certainties betrays a gaping insecurity.
A large proportion of humanity is loitering passively in this point of history, underlyingly dissatisfied with the present and discreetly concerned about the future. This covert dissatisfaction has achieved a crucial level of intensity – though where the critical breakthrough-threshold lies is anybody's guess. This intensity arises from daily-life influences culled from the very achievements modern civilisation has given us – world-shrinking satellite TVs, telephones and faxes, global migration and travel, multinational corporations and products, multicultural influences and obligatory education.
We have surreptitiously become global citizens, without having been properly consulted or notified. We're discovering a newly-dawning set of possibilities. A new level has appeared at the top of everyone's personal pyramid of social relationships, called the human race – the endless unknowable crowds we push past at airports, stations and street corners. There they all are, on the TV screen: masses of milling faces. Who are these people? Do they have anything to do with me? We occupy the same planet, yet how many different worlds do we live in?
This new globalised awareness lurks furtively under the surface of consciousness. It generates another kind of historic awareness which has not been present for all peoples of all times: the awareness that things do not intrinsically have to be as they present themselves to us now. This causes a mysterious restlessness and multiplication of wants and aspirations, whether expressed or hidden. Hidden, held-back hopes are dangerous, since they can surge out when the lid is even slightly lifted, like bubbles in a just-opened bottle of sparkling wine. They can cause sudden outbursts of irrational mass-behaviour.
This phenomenon was demonstrated in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s when the promise of change, justice, freedom and prosperity was dangled before unsuspecting Soviet citizens. As soon as the grinding post-Stalinist oppression eased under the guiding hand of Mikhael Gorbachev and his colleagues, newly-visible issues such as 'the nationalities question' bubbled up to the surface – an issue once buried under the prevailing internationalist ideology and centralist controlling forces of Soviet political life. The nationalities question proved to be a stronger force in some parts of USSR than the urge for gizmos and well-stacked supermarket shelves – people in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Latvia, Armenia, Georgia and other states were willing to sacrifice the promise of security and material comforts in favour of national self-determination. Soviet planners had not anticipated this: their plan was to effect an ordered and integral transition to a more appropriate liberalised economy – but they had forgotten the human factor.
Similarly, worldwide, the rush for economic growth and techno-propagation overlooks what's fermenting underneath in the hearts and guts of people in the street. High-growth business centres such as Singapore possess a veneer of achievement, provision and finesse – and, by implication, happiness – yet just as many new social problems arise in affluent, successful economic centres as in shanty-towns and high-rise residential stacks. However, the ills of affluence are less obvious and visible, more private and smoothed over. Yet there they are: loneliness, comfortable alienation, obesity, tedium, stress and diminishing meaning in life. Growing buying-power purchases only limited expressions of freedom, accompanied by a creeping indigestion which arises from a boxed-in feeling, from a privatised subdivision of properties and communities and an insulated, padded world of roles, air-conditioned cars and glass-fronted offices.
Is the game nearly up?
Many contradictions inherent in modern daily life have become visible to increasing numbers of people – especially to younger people, with their penetrating capacity to see things as they are, not as they are made out to be. People of all social backgrounds are seeing things with more piercing eyes than before – they are not accepting traditional handed-down givens in the way they once did. Many people 'play the game' only in case it's true, yet not with certainty. Since the 1960s, 'the game' has grown emptier, yet crammed with more gizmos and intricacies. Emphasis now lies on precautions, regulations, insurance policies and multi-channel escape-mechanisms. Waistlines have grown and nerves have sharpened. Alternative possibilities have been suppressed and subdued – even the whole Soviet system has been packed away – having the effect of preventing ordinary people from considering alternatives and forming and acting on their own conclusions.
Nevertheless, conclusions are formed, hidden underneath the level of superficial daily attitudes, opinions and rationalisations. These are conclusions which many people are hardly aware of. Yet they quickly surface and take shape when it comes to the crunch, when their exhumation is catalysed by symbolic or catastrophic events. We are being obliged by modern circumstance to scrutinise incongruities which do not make sense. Fifty years ago, people were told that they would be rewarded in old age if they worked hard – yet the rewards have fallen only on some. The government was supposed to look after everyone's interests, yet this seems evidentially not to be the case. Even role-models such as bishops, royals and presidents present us with glaring inconsistencies – 'irregular' dealings unbecoming of their station. Occasionally a resignation or a public acknowledgement is made, to give the impression something is being done, yet mistakes are crafted to appear to represent isolated cases. Scapegoat-creation diverts social awareness away from the major issues and decision-makers, for enough time until the heat dies down and it no longer matters.
Errors are repeated in the cynical presumption that we'll get used to them, eventually to stop complaining. Incongruities are explained away, yet this creates an ever-growing schizoid gulf between life-as-experienced and life-as-rationalised. It exacerbates an unconscious irritation deep down which slowly generates a shining pearl of knowing. Multiple falsehoods lead to eventual truths. Or, as William Blake once put it: "The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom". Except that, today, we cannot afford to go too far too long – Blake was alive at a time when widespread industrialisation and its associated devastation were but new. Yet he saw the signs even then, more than two hundred years ago.
This mode of accentuated public awareness has arisen in earlier times in localised ways, particularly in pre-revolutionary or pre-collapse situations. Sometimes these situations can be long and drawn out, as was the case in the last decades of both the Manchu (Ch'ing) dynasty in China and the Ottomans in Turkey around the turn of the 20th century. Such buildups of acute charged perception have indeed led to outbreaks of change, yet this has often led to a raw deal – old repressive regimes are soon replaced with newly-oppressive regimes. Humanity has not yet fully engaged with the fundamental psycho-spiritual causes of its problems, and therefore we cannot fix them. Mixed outcomes from revolutions and major reforms have compounded a historical trans-generational frustration. Things sometimes change for the better, yet in limited ways and with a rather bitter taste.
We unconsciously carry the frustrations and unfulfilments of our foreparents with us, passed down through unconscious programming inherited by successive generations of children. It can go back many generations, covered over with the generational amnesia of guilt and regret. The emancipatory behaviour of many modern women derives not only from frustration with their own life-experience but also from the suppressed feelings of many generations of mothers and grandmothers reaching into the dim, distant past. The danger with rapidly-surfacing changes such as this, however, is that such changes are not usually taken far enough – symptoms of emancipation are accepted instead of fundamental causes. The aggressive-destructive orientation of modern male-created civilisation actually receives an added boost from the promotion of highly-motivated career-women, who bring with them a new competitiveness and a new vested interest in preserving and expanding their hard-fought power. This could hamper the more wholesome transformative core-influence post-modern womankind brings to civilisation as a whole. However, women sitting in men's traditional seats are nevertheless changing things, bit by bit – yet they are still constrained by having to play by someone else's rules and by basic materialist values.
Similarly, the rise to affluence of many formerly poor countries leads toward consumption and destruction levels far higher than in the bad old days of white industrial imperialism. No one would set out to deny others a place in the sun of affluence, yet if truth be known, there's only a certain amount of room on the beach! Revolutionaries of old used to despise liberal reformists – sometimes more than they despised ancien régimes – because liberals can unwittingly dilute and hijack the sharp poignancy of the moment, turning a burning question into a committee of inquiry or a reform law which nevertheless can be evaded or circumvented. The essence of the situation can be lost, and second best is accepted in its stead. This might be a symptom of incomplete readiness for a fundamental change, or it might be a symptom of human attachment to known quantities.
So the cycle repeats. New governments are sworn in on the promise of making things better. New products emerge, with the prospect of making life easier and more exciting. Yet the problems of existence are not fundamentally changed. Reality has always been virtual, since the beginning of time – only our minds have made it unvirtual. The 'war to end all wars' landed up not being so. The 'book of the century' is superseded by a new one three years later. The never-ending story of secret dismay goes on – what is the world coming to?
In parallel with growing issues such as pollution and overpopulation, historic disillusion is approaching critical mass – it adds to the potentially explosive poignancy of our contemporary worldwide condition. It silently awaits a set of circumstances which bring this disillusion to the surface to germinate fundamental change. Critical circumstances in our world (population, climate, etc) escalate in direct proportion to our disillusionment and disquiet, creating a highly-charged totality, a mass of sludgy collective feelings. We are perhaps beginning to notice the mysterious direct connection between the world out there and our world in here, the reciprocal unity between events and thoughts.
Life is made up of two major spheres of experience: what is happening out there (events and circumstances) and how we are experiencing it in here (subjective experiential value-assessments). The pain lies in the friction between the two. Vast incongruities lie in a conflict between what we are told is the case by conventional received wisdom, and what we ourselves perceive in our own personal experience. Sharpness of perception slowly becomes compromised as we mature into adulthood – as we 'grow up' – as we accept given realities and quieten our zeal and ardour. We do however have the option to maintain this acute youthful perceptiveness throughout life – it keeps us seeing, perching poised on our toes. The price to be paid for this sharpness of perception can sometimes be social disadvantage and a grating feeling as our conscience rubs against the demands of acceptable social behaviour. Yet this can be a price worth paying – in the long term.
There come crunchy occasions when holding down our potentialities and 'playing the game' no longer work. The grating eats at our very being. Uncomfortable facts confront us everywhichway – at home, at work, in the neighbourhood, on the news. The irritation occasionally gives us nightmares and illnesses. It can lose us spouses and friends. Inward collapse causes individuals to enter a personal, often secret inner growth process, yet this remains a minority development which, in the 20th century, society has obediently spurned, criticised and denigrated. The art of being spiritually awake in the modern world involves adopting false appearances or gathering into sheltered gaggles and networks of like-minded people with but limited outreach into society as a whole. Yet the individuals involved in this add together into a grass-roots movement.
Society protects itself against a growing tide of spiritual dissidents by trivialising their beliefs and efforts, or by commercialising and containing their activities into the framework of contracts, markets and copyrights. This works for a while. Yet, spiritually, this grating dissent generates a pearl of wisdom which gives deeper sharpness to the contradictions and insanities we witness in our world. It builds up a tide of contained potential energy of enormous historic proportions, which at some point must overflow its banks and dams, turning kinetic, dynamic. If enough individuals turn kinetic, it starts accelerating into a collective form.
The process of becoming civilised, through the socialisation and education we undergo as we grow up, involves the adoption of descriptions and explanations given to be gospel truth. It is implied we must believe them if we wish to succeed and be accepted in society. It's an unspoken contract. Within these parameters we are permitted given individual freedoms. Play the game, and you get a living – play it well, and you get promotion and a raise. Size of income and extent of social influence tend to be directly proportional to the extent of self-suppression an individual has gone through to climb the social ladder. Yet there is an inherent flaw: if a person, thus taught to obey and reinforce the rules, suddenly has an experience where these rules are shown to be incongruous with sense or wisdom, or to be protective of certain vested interests, then a deep discrepancy is found. The itch grows.
We get stuck in compromises, finding our arms tied. We find ourselves being a party to the problem, compromised by the very game we play. Our children eyeball us thanklessly with increasing suspicion, indifference, pity or disdain. We're faced with the nagging threat that we'll end our lives feeling incomplete, unresolved, as if we haven't done what we came here to do – whatever that was! So much conditioning covers our sense of innate purpose that we cannot even remember that it is there waiting to be remembered. This is a norm for the human race. Yet this remembering lurks quietly within the psyche of everyone, itching to get out, awaiting its moment.
Discrepancies continue to take place because we retract ourselves from questioning the continued existence of major inconsistencies. We tend to get tangled up in confusion or impotence or in just dealing with tomorrow. Insight into life, commitment to our path and awareness of the consequences of our acts run counter to everyday busy reality – they cause us to lose the bus and miss the next TV programme. We suppress contradictions to create some sort of peace and security. It is simpler to obey social norms, however much we rue complicity, than to resist or protest, even to be branded a criminal or traitor, even to be betrayed by neighbours and associates, even to be cast out by our own families. It is simpler to conform. That is, until we reach that critical point of despair. Until the guilt of complicity hits us hard. At this point, the bubble pops. The unfulfilment we have accumulated becomes a cancer of the psyche, demanding urgent treatment.
Something goes bananas. It's difficult to handle. We face a Hobsonian choice: we may become a broken person, we may take the role of being a hero fighting against all odds, we may live the life of a social reject or we may even try to thoroughly drop out, heading for the wilderness or the stupour of drugs or cults. However, these options exist only while such breakdown-breakthroughs remain isolated and individual. If such contradictions are one day perceived by sufficient numbers of people simultaneously, and if circumstances pressure-cook that collective perception into something much more contagious and intense, then there can arise an awkward psycho-social situation in which extraordinary value-shifts, people-surges, protest movements or potential revolutions arise. Then there's trouble!
We live in a situation in which civilisation and its repercussions seem to be reaching a crucial crescendo. Billions of people are becoming woven into the modern global buy-sell system. It looks like an all-encompassingly successful market system with a great future. We're massaged with glossy brochures, bribed with debt-purchased cars, pacified with sugary edibles and diverted by sophisticated electronics. We're promised a perpetually-better future. However, when the chips are down and reality prevails, the truth is otherwise.
It is remarkable that modern civilisation still works. In the 1960s the chances of actually reaching the Millennium looked rather slim. People have developed fundamental though largely untested secret reservations. Current history is like a loaded cannon, with the safety-catch only just in place. This fuels growing private and public anticipations for the future. It kindles a sense of future-shock, a dissemination of varying millennial warnings and a deep sense of clueless expectancy, coagulated around the coming of the year 2000. Few people have dared think big, or think beyond the year 2000 – only occasional authors and film-makers do it, with a few crackpot environmentalists thrown in. Futurology is taken as a form of fantasy or mere speculation.
Yet the year 2000 is with us. In the few years prior to the Millennium, people have wanted to be left alone to mosey somnambulantly along pre-laid tracks. Silently wishing the Millennium would go away, we could make it up-beat, have a mega-party just like we did in the 1980s – a super-new year's super-binge. Let's all get drunk and celebrate! Good business for fireworks and packaging manufacturers!
Celebrate what? What are we leaving behind and what are we entering into? The turn of a millennium gives cause to think, to measure up our lives and our children's prospects, to pause for contemplation of Big Questions. Big questions. Bigger questions than any we've contemplated before. So many interwoven questions that it seems too much to address them all. So where do we start? Perhaps it's better not to worry about it and just get on with our lives. Perhaps it will go away. Perhaps someone might deal with it – as long as they don't expect us to change.
The result of all this is the growth of a deep, festering and largely unaddressed global morass of underlying, semi-conscious concern. It goes round and round. Should the turn of a millennium not be a time of hope and emergence of new faith and purpose? Should it not entail a re-evaluation of why we are all here, doing all the things we are doing? Is there the courage amongst us to peer into the far future, to get a sense of where we're going? No, let's leave it to the master of the ship, whoever that is. Let's stay in the ballroom, dancing to the orchestra. It's up to the captain to avoid icebergs. Everything's taken care of. Isn't it?
Essays on geopolitics
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© Palden Jenkins, 1996-2002. These essays may be quoted with proper attribution and printed out in single copies for personal use and study, without permission. For publication on websites, print publication or reproduction for commercial gain please e-mail the author for permission.