– Marshal Zhukov (1896-1974, USSR Marshal in the Great Patriotic War, WW2).
Do we need a disaster?
Once something is sufficiently common, it becomes normalised and accepted by younger people as given reality, upon which they themselves build as they grow older. The urbanism of recent centuries has moved these parameters a long way, downgrading environmental awareness and basic rules of human decency in favour of commercial metropolitan values – values in which things and people become production resources in an accelerating value-adding process without limits to its growth. Property has become more valued than humans. This ongoing historic deterioration – counterbalanced by insufficient evolutionary improvements – has compounded the damage humanity has caused to nature and itself, leading today to an exponential growth in critical factors which now are becoming disastrous in their actual and potential consequences.
Disasters are already with us, and the evidence is widespread. Large-scale world changes have already been overwhelming and irreversible, in every department of life. Much damage is already done, and damage-output is rising annually toward a brinkmanlike horror-point, where a large variety of critical factors could precipitate a major global crisis. Only a radical change in the core tenets of world civilisation will prevent precipitous outcomes. It comes down to three simple core factors in human society: money, sex and power (or, put another way, greed, lust and envy). These motivational issues, and the choices any culture makes to set levels and standards in these areas, stand at the core of any set of social arrangements of whatever philosophy. Today, these three raw forces continue waxing B, unbridled and unbalanced.
We are aware of this, yet we bury our awareness because we fear its implications. Deep in our souls, we fear disaster – a full-frontal confrontation with the outcomes of our history. We fear disaster of a totally nightmarish, sci-fi variety, in which people, in terror and confusion, run hither and thither under a sky turning black, while enormous forces rumble the thunderous resonances of utter destruction. The nuclear overkill of the Cold War certainly invoked such a spectre: obliteration of all life, mass-incineration, deadly radiation, nuclear winter, decimation of everything on both the victor's and the loser's side.
Similarly, environmental fundamentalists foresee a time when nature suddenly decides to hit back, to re-establish ecological balances by cutting back or eliminating human life. The fear of social breakdown and a cruel descent into chaotic disarray, retribution and depravity has been a long-standing fear, going back at least to medieval times – the decline and fall of Rome left painful memories of this kind in the Western psyche. The likelihood of experiencing nightmarish scenarios increases as the inherently destructive tendencies in our civilisation continue to grow. Such deep-lurking horror-scenarios reflect humanity's hidden guilt over its rampantly deteriorative activities and values.
However, what we fear is not necessarily what is likely to happen. It could be better – and it could be worse. This depends a lot on our choices – contrary to some doomsters' opinions, it is not fore-ordained or precisely mapped-out. While we might visualise big-screen disaster scenarios of epic, crashing proportions, more realistic disaster scenarios need examining too. Not only this, but we need to factor into this equation the responses of people themselves, since perceptions of disaster vary greatly, depending on one's disposition and susceptibility to fear of change.
Nightmarishness is in the eyes of the beholder, and for many, simpler disruptions like hyper-inflation or electricity black-outs can be sufficiently nightmarish to send them into a spin or break down as a nervous wreck. Yet, to other people, disaster, paradoxically, can also be a relief. Why? Because, in many people's experience, we are already in a disaster, a time of great tribulation, and any fundamental change in this can, for some, represent the end of an ongoing nightmlare. For exile Palestinians in refugee camps, for mill-treading executives with tense lives and protruding bellies, for farmers who have been turned into lonely engineers and chemical-spreaders and for winners and losers of many kinds, release from the prison of their lives could be a breakthrough.
If we work on the basis of believing that human life on Earth has meaning and purpose, and that our evolutionary story is not yet over, then, from the viewpoint of higher intelligences overseeing our history and current time, disaster has a purpose. If we look at life and events as mirroring reflections of the dynamics of our psyches, then while disaster might reflect a disastrous condition of the psyche of the human race, it also represents a teaching opportunity and a chance to take hold of ourselves and get the message: that we are the creators of our reality and our future. Seen from this viewpoint, disaster has a fine-tuned purpose: to awaken and transform us, not to destroy us. In other words, in this light we are unconsciously creating disaster-conditions in order to force ourselves to act and to change ourselves. As with, say, cancer sufferers, the outbreak of disaster faces us with a deep, total choice: to affirm life and our will-to-live, or to give up as victims of our circumstances and to let pain and death take us. And just as many people believe that there is no cure for cancer – an idea tragically reinforced by official and public opinion – so also, under the surface, many people believe that disaster simply kills. This kind of attitude needs to change if we are to get anywhere.
However, in the light of the above proposition – that disaster has meaning and purpose – it follows that, if we are to be confronted with a big lesson, disaster needs to be great and momentous enough to cause us to change, but not disastrous enough to actually destroy us. This line of thinking changes the disaster-scenario quite fundamentally. It brings up a secondary question: how much shock and horror do we need in order to awaken us? How far do we need to take things before we get the message? No one really knows – including higher intelligences[1]. Why do we not know? We don't know how much force humanity requires in order to overcome its complex resistances to change. The problem is that we have had sufficient opportunity throughout history to learn our basic lessons, and we have not learned. Even when the writing has been clearly on the wall – which, most recently, it was in the mid-1960s and even the late-1980s – we have turned the other way.
However, there seems to be a 'holding strategy' at work. Many people who work in the business of awakening humanity are surprised that blatant disaster has not yet hit us. It cannot be said our world is in good health, yet the Big One hasn't hit us yet. What does this mean? It could mean that disaster is being held back, in order to give us last-chance learning experiences and opportunities to choose. Of these, we have in recent decades had many. Every single localised outbreak of catastrophe is an opportunity to learn, and a chance to precipitate a process of change and awakening, if we choose to learn from it.
A little local difficulty (or two)
Acute localised crises have a direct or psychological worldwide impact. The wholesale shoot-out in Lebanon in 1975-89 not only fuelled cross-national Islamic fundamentalism, destroying a prosperous cosmopolitan hub-city (Beirut) and affecting the stability of many neighbouring countries, but also it horrified and dispirited the world as a result of the simple existence of this crisis. This psychological effect is much more important than many realise – it hits the collective unconscious in a deep, dark place. Globally, people are actively disheartened and disempowered by the very occurrence of nonsensical, tragic, unjust traumas – especially of the visibly man-made kind. Earthquakes and famines do have man-made causes, but civil wars and outbreaks of violence and depravity unequivocally show us what bastards we are: they confront us with our biggest failings as humans.
Places such as Beirut and Sarajevo have served as a cesspool for the world's accumulated negative unconscious feeling. Notably, Beirut and Sarajevo both were cities where inter-ethnic relations had long been sound and harmonious – a triumph of human variety and cross-fertilising creativity. Yet this was destroyed. It is as if there were in humanity a need to destroy positively exemplary situations, to wipe out happier areas of human life, to enforce the message that social love, tolerance and pluralism do not pay. The Yugoslavian war began soon after the Lebanese civil war subsided – both concerned historic Christian-Muslim ghosts. It was as if a negative virus switched host-bodies, having exhausted the Lebanese, seeking new susceptible people. The Yugoslavs were unconsciously receptive.
This can happen anywhere, where there is a vulnerable, changing social situation. Civil war is a world issue concerning the redemption of an age-old embattled psychology called 'Them and Us'. Yet the crucial issue facing us in the future involves global cooperation and unity of action – the precise opposite to such things as civil war. And localised horrors such as Beirut and Sarajevo can stop the whole of humanity in its tracks: if inter-ethnic relations can get so bad as they did there, what hope is there for success elsewhere – in Nigeria, Israel, India, Malaysia, even the United States?
Single-issue crises can have an enormous impact, even in cases where people are aware of what's happening. While single-issue crises appear at first to affect only limited areas or departments of life, they nevertheless have greatly wider effects. Consider, for example, the 0.5mm natural skin of the oceans – a small matter in the minds of most. This is an organic interface between atmosphere and ocean which in this century has been globally polluted by a veneer of industrial chemicals and complex hydrocarbons which do not break down[2]. These chemicals, now distributed worldwide, is microwaved from above by solar and cosmic rays no longer efficiently filtered by the ozone layer, and it is churned by boats and bombs and added to by emissions, outflows and dumpings every day, worldwide. This defiled skin has now begun to block the natural passage of oxygen and nutrients across this surface interface, affecting both ocean life and atmospheric replenishment of oxygen in a potentially drastic way. Should the constitution of this skin change beyond a critical threshold, life on Earth could be severely threatened simply from one crucial, though thinly-spread source. Not only could plankton and fish stocks collapse, but atmospheric warming could accelerate rapidly, crucial species and water supplies could be threatened, harmful marine algae or viruses could multiply, and ocean temperatures and currents and atmospheric circulation could change.
Such slowly-accumulating chronic crises turn acute when critical thresholds are crossed. Another chronic crisis, well-known worldwide, is the growing insufficiency of worldwide forest cover, together with the secondary effects of deforestation – however, only gestures and localised measures have been offered to remedy the situation, despite the knowledge that it takes at least a half-century to regenerate forest. Short-term economics prevail over environmental considerations. In a world beset both by large-scale unemployment and by forest depletion, reafforestation is a logical step to help both problems, yet it is deemed cheaper and better to block such labour-intensive, longterm-return activities. Globally, the forestry crisis is currently sub-acute, waiting to go acute. However, forestry practices are now slowly beginning to change, though with a dreadful lack of scale and urgency.
Chronic ills turning acute are theoretically possible – yet we lack previous experience in macro-ecological issues. However, do we need to wait for sufficient experience and hard evidence to be garnered before we act? Is it not possible to exercise basic commonsense in the making of many decisions? During the 1996 British BSE crisis (in which beef cattle had contracted 'Mad Cow Disease', which passed into the human food chain and caused a new strain of a brain-rotting disease called CJD), the government insisted on following indecisive scientific advice and denied its own complicity in causing the problem and favouring food-industry profits over public health. However, farmers' commonsense had warned of the looming problem some fifteen years earlier: many observers had felt doubts over adding sheep offal to cattle feed, and that offal had turned out to be partially diseased. The problem was avoided until it was too late. This brought up a deeper issue – accumulated public distrust in the pronouncements of government, authorities and scientists. The moral of the story was: pay attention to any activities which commonsense says are risky or questionable – regardless of the utterances of experts and authorities.
Commonsense is widely regarded as unscientific and irrational, therefore an unsound basis on which to make political decisions. Decisions should be made (goes the rationale) only on the basis of demonstrable proof. The problem here is that proof, if politically unacceptable or unwelcome, is easily questioned or ignored – thus, scientists offering the opinion that world climate is warming and changing are ignored in favour of business interests which point to the costs and risks of change. However, this is a case of double-think. The key global decision-making bodies are the financial markets, and these run on a gambling principle involving risk- and profit-assessment and investment based on calculated likelihoods, with a B measure of irrationality thrown in. Trillions change hands every day on the basis of calculated risk – the world economy rests on betting in shares, currencies, commodities and financial instruments. Yet political decisions on ecological and other longterm matters are regulated on a basis of certainty, not risk – in other words, there must be proof that things must change before changes are made. Why does this dichotomy exist? Why are ecological policy-decisions not made on the same basis as financial decisions? This irrational and ideologically-biased double-think is itself a disastrous course to take: while vast sums can be written off or insured against in the financial sector, ecological and human losses and waste cannot be treated likewise.
Countdown
Interestingly, the meaning of the word disaster is 'an unfavourable aspect or star' or 'out of harmony with the stars'. It's an old astrological notion – still used, even though astrology is out of official favour. This ancient idea of the inherent symmetry between macro-systems and micro-systems interlocks with modern ecological thinking, scientific systems theory and chaos theory, all of which underline the notion of interrelatedness and mutual sensitivity, pointing to the need for sustainable ecologically-friendly practices to ensure survival. Additionally, sustainable social practices, not to mention attention to the psycho-spiritual condition of humanity, imply similar macro-scale considerations. In other words, cultivation of harmony – adjustment to the laws and rhythms of the larger whole – is a primary priority if we are to get to grips with the fundamental causes of likely disaster. We are part of something much bigger than us. It is this which forms the basis of a body of thought known as 'deep ecology' – the linking of ecological with social, psychological and spiritual realities.
When is major disaster likely? Here we are treading into the unknown. The problem here is that we lack sufficient knowledge, experience and motivation to make an accurate estimate. However, we could make estimates based on an assessment of possibilities – which is the way that financial and investment planning works. The presence of unknowns doesn't bring the money-markets to a halt, but it does seem to constitute a sufficient excuse not to make other kinds of assessments. The second problem with this question is that the answer depends on who is answering it: fundamentalists tend toward drastic and imminent predictions, moderates tone down their prognostications on the basis that they cannot prove too much or gain acceptance of their proofs, and people in positions of power occasionally utter concerned noises and make symbolic gestures, while demonstrating a singular lack of concern over the issue – they are likely to be out of office or dead by the time the problem really arises. The outcome of this is that, apart from a small number of voices in the wilderness, the world lacks any sense of a timetable or strategy.
However, this official befuddlement conceals the import of the question – to some extent it is an obfuscation technique to remove the issue from the public eye, stowing it away in ivory towers, and to some extent it reflects fear of setting in motion the necessary processes of change, which are likely to unseat many of the power-holders currently in office. Nevertheless, there is a clear and simple answer. We are likely to see large-scale disaster within fifty years of 1990. On this, many scientists, futurologists and experts loosely agree. Put another way, youngsters born from the 1960s onwards are the people who will have to deal with it. People older than these risk losing pensions and comforts, but they don't stand to lose a future – only some peace of mind. Unless, that is, one looks upon life from a more metaphysical viewpoint, experiencing concern over our future incarnations, or unless we take a compassionate, trans-generational, historically-aware viewpoint which might feel concern for the future of humanity. However, such viewpoints have no influence on the money-markets and little influence on people in power, so, in the view of many, they matter little – events surrounding the life of HRH Prince Charles demonstrate how influential people who become concerned about the world are dealt with.
This fifty-year timetable is subscribed to by thoughtful ecologists, demographers and other pundits, and it is likely to be quite reliable. However, nobody knows exactly what mechanisms are likely to tip us into crisis. This might be a void question, inasmuch as so many critical factors are known to exist that the likelihood is that we experience a chain-reaction of crises in different domains of life – volcanic explosions can lead to climatic changes, sparking economic crises and social disturbances, and off we go into an unstoppable slide which no government might be in a position to handle.
There is a second answer to the big When? question. We're already in the crisis, and it's growing yearly. Agreement with this assertion depends on your viewpoint. There are those who look at news broadcasts and count each presented crisis as a local, isolated occurrence, symptomatic of nothing much – in other words, today's situation is unexceptional, and life goes on as it always did. There are those who believe that government, technology and the experts will handle it – and the fact that these are (apparently) unanxious about it shows that doomster-style paranoia is unfounded. There are those who perceive underlying connections, messages and symbolism behind current events, and who thus read an all-pervading and growing crisis into the whole situation. All of these approaches are subjective and liable to error. However, it is not difficult to see that we are in crisis – to deny it involves assertive ostrich-imitation. Our climates are visibly changing, social stress-levels edge toward breaking-point, market vulnerabilities loom, species die out, earthquake activity has risen, and hosts of other indicators blink and bleep their presence to any relatively open-minded observer.
There is a third answer to the big When? question too: we do not know. The fact is that nothing is proven unless solidly demonstrated, and all predictions, speculations and assessments on whatever basis can talk only of possibilities and probabilities. Major uncertainties are involved and the sumtotal of our knowledge is limited. In addition, we do not know how nature and humanity adapt to changes – in theory, the extinction of species or the release of radiation into the atmosphere are harmful, though redeeming outcomes can arise which counterbalance the damage. We do not know how increased ultraviolet light-frequencies affect the growth of vegetation (it could be helpful) and we do not know how masses of humans respond to crisis (they could respond well).
Our lack of knowledge and experience in macro-futurological questions does not mean that we should abandon all attempts to answer the question, however – lack of data or knowledge is not uncommonly used as an excuse for avoiding the question. This is where we must resort to commonsense again. Also, we do know enough to address issues which we know need addressing (such as fossil-fuel burning and its atmospheric effects), and we also know of possibilities of risk (such as the connection between environmental dioxin poisoning and male sperm counts). So while this lack-of-knowledge qualifier is valid, it is not a major determinant of strategies – if anything it demands investment in research and actions to find the necessary information and to act on the basis of possibilities, just as financial markets act.
There are also the more metaphysical predictions proffered by psychics and seers of the present and past. These are unpopular with most, and over-popular with some. Some take such pronouncements and their current interpretations to be gospel truth – many are the interpretations of the Book of Revelations or the quatrains of Nostradamus[3], Mother Shipton or numerous other seers. Many are the psychics and intuitives who make their own pronouncements too – whole maps have been drawn to show the sinking and rising of land in relation to the oceans, and many have been the dates and details given for the end of the world or other catastrophes. The danger here is that the proliferation of inaccurate or outlandish prognostications makes people trivialise or reject them all.
The profusion of predictions conceals potentially valuable material in its midst. Useful material has to be distinguished from less-useful material, and interpreted correctly. Here, predictions must still be taken as possibilities, not immutable definites. The fact that several prognosticators say the same thing is proof of nothing: proof is found in events and facts only. The fact that a prognosis is regarded as having authority (galactic commanders, retired scientists, successful healers or biblical or quranic sources) gives it interest-value but no claim on reality until fulfilled. However, there is value in familiarity with such forecasts, if a mature attitude is taken.
For example, students of the Olmec[4] and Mayan long-count calendrical system name a specific date, 23rd December 2012, as the end of the 'Fifth Sun' or age – each 'sun' being ended by an all-encompassing disaster[5] which wipes the planet clean and makes for a new start. This calendrical system goes back millennia, possessing a sophistication which is impressive. However, it is to be noted that the Olmec, Aztec and Maya cultures were themselves rather transitory and subject to cultural paranoia over the matter of downfalls and tragedies – in this regard, ancient Chinese prognoses would theoretically be more valuable, though few are known. The problem here is not with Mayans and their kin, however – it is with moderns and our fears. People interested in such predictive instruments as the Mayan calendar already tend to possess a predilection for disaster-scenarios, rightly or wrongly using the historical authority of Mayan culture to justify and substantiate their belief. Also, the translation and interpretation of Mayan concepts is not direct and simple: when Mayan texts and traditions mention the 'end of the world', this does not mean the world will end, and neither does it reckon in the actions and choices of humans or higher intelligences and their capacity to alter future possibilities. Predicting the end of the world sells lots of books, but we shall have to wait until 2012 to learn the final truth of the matter. However, the period of 2012-14 does figure in many completely independent prognostic systems – it's worth watching.
While our knowledge and experience is scanty compared to the scale and precedent of the problem, much of the reason for this is a lack of investment in researching the many matters at stake. Expensive, risky projects such as the 1990 unification of Germany or the 1950s-70s space race were pursued without prior experience too: vast resources were invested and risked on both projects on the basis of calculated risk and political ambition, flimsy evidence and lack of precedents. Yet they were done. Similarly, while we must go on current facts and knowledge, it is time to take risks to redeem our future. The risks of not doing so are surely greater.
The telling factor here is the will to do it: we are hamstrung by the reality that current vested interests are yet to perceive an advantage in saving the world. Current facts contain well enough information for us to know how things are going. The price of disaster is being paid now, not only in the form of compensation and rising insurance premiums, but in every niche of the world. Perhaps if these costs were ingeniously quantified, more notice would be taken. Were information-suppression to end, allowing public access to large swathes of information on everything from the causes of AIDS and cancer to the effects of nuclear detonations or groundwater pollution, we would know a lot more. Suppression, amnesia and avoidance are dangerously common modern ailments. However, the issue is simple: where there's a will, there's a way. So the big question now concerns will.
What crisis?
However, what happens if something entirely new takes place – something of which we have no previous knowledge or forewarning? What happens if large nations go bankrupt, causing a settlements, currency and confidence crisis of unprecedented and irreparable proportions? What happens, realistically, if there were indeed a major impact of stellar debris on Earth? What if a debilitating virus swept through humanity in two weeks? What if the Earth's crust were suddenly to heave in a multiplicity of places at once (such as the phenomenon of crustal displacement[6])? What happens if there is a sudden unpremeditated mass-reorientation of consciousness, source unknown, which caused everyone's psychology to change overnight? While there is no way of knowing whether such possibilities could become actuality, it is valuable at least to consider options and to make conceptual adjustments, without paranoia, to help structure research and to consider worst-case responses and precautions. We need to make an inventory of likely forms and magnitudes of disaster and to assess responses to them. This is politically risky business, however, which no government relishes entertaining publicly – however, it has been done secretly, within certain limited frames of reference[7].
Secret ballot
Catastrophe-awareness surfaces in the public domain whenever the force of events breaks through the blanket of public disinterest – as was the case during the Chernobyl melt-down. Faced with the news of this, the collective unconscious worldwide rumbled and quaked severely for several long days. People were wondering whether this was the beginning of the end. Great relief dawned when it was announced that the crisis was more or less under control – this gave permission for the public ego to restore normality, and within months the dread and fear was forgotten and buried. Nevertheless, this was a serious wobble of collective composure and a sign of things to come. Similar rumbles took place as the Gulf War built up in 1990 – the public had believed that major war was somehow over when the Iron Curtain fell. Smaller news items nibble away at underlying confidence like woodworm, quietly, secretly, until, at some point, the strength of known structures collapses. It is this slow mass-psychological erosion which is a crucial factor in our discussion on disaster, since it is our perception of events which makes the crucial difference to our actions.
While it is important neither to ignore disaster-possibilities nor to talk them up into hopelessly fear-inducing cataclysms, it is very important to look into the deeper choices offered by potential disasters. The primary choice is this: do we protect ourselves against potential hurt and loss, fighting off all threats, or do we cooperate and hold together with others in the face of adversity? This is both a personal and a collective question, affecting everybody. It is a fundamental trust question and an area of power for humanity – we might or might not be able to affect events, but we can affect our responses to events. It is on this question that humanity will make or break itself.
The problem with the self-protection option is that, whatever security is derived from preparing for and arming against the worst, it is still impossible to forecast exactly what to prepare for, when and how it might happen and what to do. Many who 'went back to nature' in the 1970s in anticipation of urban collapse now find themselves again involved with city-life, computers and busy lifestyles – even if, as a result of their countryside or wilderness years, they have landed up making nature documentaries, running ethical businesses dreamed up over a log fire or simply making up for time spent not racing rats! The dropping-out ethic of the 1960s was not necessarily incorrect: at the time it could not be foreseen that 'the system' would go into a new gear, creating a second wind of effort to stimulate techno-economic growth, consumerism and gross delusion in the 1980s – even though the 1970s were constituted quite a shaky, uncertain decade.
In the 1990s, right-wing Christian survivalists of the American Mid-West have similarly anticipate threats from Big Brother or from masses of marauding poor and black urbanites, almost wishing to precipitate the anticipated circumstances to prove themselves correct. Their hypothesis is not entirely incorrect, yet their interpretation of the 'New World Order' and how to respond to it ranges between extremist and cranky: shooting at all threats to one's survival is unlikely to yield fruitful longterm benefits. This is a lonely, tragic option in which, in the end, there would be no winners. So, looking after one's own personal, family and local interests in a paranoiac way doesn't necessarily pay off, even though it might stave off some dangers.
What about the other option – holding together? The problem here is that, without instituting a mass social-education process to lay sound foundations for cooperation and conflict-resolution, the matter is left entirely open. This is a civil defence issue of enormous and holistic proportions: it concerns the building up, on a mass-psychological level, of a condition of basic trust toward other people, change and the Unknown. Fruitful social solidarity demands an emotional-spiritual shift in which insecurity and suspicion are transformed into faith, sharing and adaptability. Such a shift would entail an enormous programme of social process and therapy – it would demand a level-shift of unprecedented proportions. Jesus didn't manage it, and the Reformation was peanuts compared to this. One consequence of such a transformation would be the undermining of the very institutions which might organise it – media, religious, governmental, educational and public health bodies, not to mention the whole of society. This presents us with the unlikely scenario where institutions and authorities undergo a thorough change of heart, motive and form.
There is a second alternative, engaging a more grass-roots process involving influential new social-spiritual movements and shared collective insight. The consequence of this would likely be an undermining of the role of all authorities, since they would generally be regarded as part of the problem. Even if authorities underwent a dramatic responsive change, there would be credibility problems inasmuch as governments and other institutions have, in recent times, engaged ever-increasingly in appearances as a substitute for realities. Also, such authorities are organised on an authoritarian, hierarchical basis which is designed for centralised control, not devolved facilitation. We shall discuss this matter at greater length when we investigate apocalypse. However, we shall leave this question here with the observation that, without entering into a global mass-training and re-education process, such a synergistic social shift would need to arise unrehearsed and ad lib, through an insightful mass combustion-process. The way things look today, such a spontaneous and perhaps chaotic bushfire-effect is more likely than any intentionally-legislated and orderly social process.
The possibility of catastrophe does have a spiritually-sharpening effect on humanity. Since we have a historic habit of acting only when forced, we are perhaps unwittingly preparing ourselves for such a sharpening encounter with hard reality. Awareness of the nature of things in today's world is now present amongst a large proportion of humanity, yet it is dormant and it needs activating. People do not think much about catastrophe, yet society is nevertheless underlyingly expectant and susceptible – future-anticipation ferments deep down in the world psyche. While collective behaviour is programmed to screen out these deeper feelings, event-intensity periodically tips it over a critical threshold. Our modern advanced avoidance techniques, while delaying activation of deeper energies and insights, are nevertheless compensated for and counterbalanced by a secret truth-process in the unconscious. The larger the avoidance, the more the can of worms, festering deep down, grows toward overflow.
To counteract mainstream avoidance, minority groups – Bosnians, AIDS-sufferers, single mothers or Vietnamese boat-people – take on the burden of wider concerns, carrying the weight of denied reality for others. Also, concerned citizens compensate for majority avoidance by organising campaigns, welfare and aid programmes and support groups. This has the temporary effect of limiting impact on the wider population, yet it has a longterm effect of building up cells of experience and knowledge which themselves seed wider outcomes in the course of time. In our cynical age, we under-acknowledge genuine victims who carry others' burdens and selfless people who dedicate their lives to remedying humanity's ills – human history would be very different were it not for such people, providing a thread of pressure-relief spanning the centuries.
The social mainstream tends to contain or even suppress such concern-groups. Yet, in the fullness of time, circumstances inevitably militate against repression, which is, after all, a disconnection from and denial of reality. Reality has a way of correcting this by perpetrating crises. What were once suppressed ideas – powered flight, a round world, women's rights, remote electronic communication – eventually become mainstream realities. The same will likely be the case in future for free energy technologies, alternative ecological methods and social structures, close encounters with ETs and other major areas of knowledge now unavailable to the general public. This is a prevalent process in history: what is hidden sooner or later becomes revealed.
Disaster is both an outer global process and an inner personal and transpersonal process – they interlock. Pollution in the world is the result of pollution in the human psyche. Disaster in the world is caused by a disaster afoot in the hearts and minds of the majority of humanity. We know not what we do. Yet we approach a point in time where an enormous choice stands before us.
Summitry
A century is, for us, a long time. Most humans averagely live 40-80 years. Looking over a whole future century can stretch us beyond our normal imaginative capacity. A lot could take place during each single decade of the coming century – and there are ten decades! Yet it is natural for humans to think foresightfully, to think of our grandchildren and to plant trees for future generations – it's just that we moderns tend to have forgotten this natural ability. Consequently we busily create circumstances which could make the 21st century even more dire than the 20th century. We have lived through a century of tanks, nukes, bulldozers, screaming chain-saws, horror movies, child suicide and serial killers, and we are not yet through with our mass self-destructive tendencies. In the coming century we need to find new ways which have less tragic spin-offs.
In the mythology of disaster, it is common to anticipate times of tribulation – times when things get so tough that human life is hardly worth living. This expectation might or might not in our current circumstances be correct: the 20th century has itself been a time of tribulation, an ongoing disaster for billions of people. We have become accustomed to the pain, by a process of hardening and desensitisation, yet it is very much there. Even affluence is a disaster, bringing spiritual poverty, obesity, social isolation, heartlessness and periodic nervous breakdown. Normality, economic development, trade surpluses, education systems – aspects of 20th century life which are taken to be positive – are themselves disaster-zones. Spiritual poverty and institutionalised cultural violence are likely to be what the 20th century is remembered for. It could well be that the averred times of tribulation lie not in the future – they but exist now. We'll fully realise how disastrous our century has been when the pain and insensitivity lift off us, allowing a deeper feeling of the deep pathos and suffering lurking underneath the concerns of daily life. Time only will tell.
A historically-sensible game-plan would be to institute a serious audit of the state of nations, societies, environments and the world, to formulate a decade-by-decade global strategy covering the next fifty or one hundred years. We could have started this in the late 1960s, when the writing went up on the wall. This would have meant immense research programmes, debates and investigations through the 1970s, followed by foundation-laying corrective schemes and projects, experiments, planning and investment, education, plus withdrawal and replacement of harmful technologies in the 1980s. In the 1990s further developments and breakthroughs would be necessary, together with serious addressing of social-cultural issues, plus more immediate projects dealing with current emergencies.
All this could have prepared the ground for larger-scale, global projects in the early 2000s. By the 2010s, many issues needing attention would be in progress or already surmounted: a new threshold would appear, clarifying the next phase to be addressed. The research and technological lead-times involved, plus social and environmental changes (it takes time for results to be obtained, values to change and trees to grow) require such a time-scale of reorientation – one which would probably stretch for up to a century from 1960-2060. This all sounds rather easy in theory, and the blood, sweat and tears involved would be great, yet this might well be more desirable than the likely alternative – eventual and growing disaster, conflict, pain and emergency. Blood, sweat and tears become meaningful if they lead toward a constructive end.
World change is such a complex and immense matter that it could only partially be planned in advance. Much of it would involve ongoing crisis-management, dealing with many unknowns and taking large risks. Many situations would develop – as they have indeed done in recent decades – for which humanity is unprepared, demanding rapid response and concerted action. An additional problem is that, when a programme of reform is undertaken, further, larger and more tangential outcomes inevitably emerge than previously expected – yet eventualities such as these would emerge anyway, as a compound result of inaction or half-heartedness. However, the difference between willingness and unwillingness to change is immense: the latter generates more friction than the former. Even if such a longterm programme had been instituted in the 1960s or today, there would be large technical difficulties and delays, inertia and complications to overcome, capital and resource shortages to meet, public psychological thresholds to cross and intricate infrastructural, constitutional and systemic arrangements to work through, together with ecological and social projects never before tried. But compare these to the alternative!
Arguably, such long-term global strategic planning could even have started around 1900, had humanity followed its visions and been more receptive to such a change. In the late-Victorian period there was an undercurrent amongst advanced thinkers and inventors which suggested a radically different future course. Innovators of the time were working with water-powered combustion engines, anti-gravity and free-energy machines, vitalist medical methods, new economic structures and many new concepts. These might have by-passed many of the ills of the 20th century. However, this was not the path chosen.
In the 20th century we have dallied fatally, attending to techno-economic growth at the cost of wider considerations. We have lived off our resource-capital rather than nurturing our total capital-base and harvesting the interest generated from it. This capital-base is constituted of people, knowledge, materials, landscapes, energies. Each element of this natural capital yields a 'profit' (in the widest and deepest sense) by being cared for and enhanced: a person given a wholesome upbringing and educational opportunities yields outputs of many kinds – not least, further offspring who themselves will tend to be well initiated into life. A piece of land which is caringly fertilised, planted and cultivated will yield increasing benefits over the generations. Yet what is extracted from such a person or such a field needs to be extracted in a way which not only avoids reducing its overall value and 'happiness', but also in a way which enhances it: people's skills and assets need appreciation and use, and thereby these skills develop further.
In the 1980s-90s, many high-level conferences and summits were staged – the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, the 1993 Human Rights Summit in Vienna, the 1994 Population Summit in Cairo, and the 1995 Social Summit in Copenhagen and the Beijing Women's Summit. Laudable principles were diplomatically established, yet fundamental and cynical weaknesses accompanied them. International conferences have been characterised by rhetoric and political fixing, by national and vested interests, by insufficient commitment, minimal action and funding. These conferences have given the impression something was being done but cosmetic politics overrode real commitment.
One pledge made at Rio was that developed nations would invest 0.7% of their combined GNP in aid to less-developed countries to finance energy-saving, pollution and waste clear-up and eco-technological adaptation costs – such as clean-burning generators, forestry re-planting schemes and non-CFC refrigerators. In reality, such aid sank from 0.33% ($61bn) in 1992 to 0.29% ($55bn) in 1993, and it continues sinking. Of the $510m pledged for the period 1994-96 for development of CFC-free technologies in developing countries, $31m was delivered[8]. Tax-cuts at home were more important. Environmentalists and prognosticators continue to be looked on as cranks, idealists and extremists. Meanwhile, 20,000 species per year are becoming extinct, and millions of children lack parents and a decent upbringing.
What hampers international summitry is unclarity over the sovereignty of nations and the re-prioritisation of global and human agendas over national and business ones. The work of UN diplomats is sabotaged by national interests and controlling lobbies, worried as the latter are about election results, media coverage, taxation, profits and other short-term and (in this context) narrow perspectives. Fragmented, complex and inappropriate solutions arise, failing to tackle the root core of the question: the nature and purpose of the human social-economic system in which we live. While this failure is understandable, given the immensity of the information and issues involved, it avoids the need for a necessarily integrated transformative strategy. It reflects piecemeal thinking looking for piecemeal, easy answers. Most of all, it reflects fear.
Dramatic sound-bite summitry gives the impression of progress, when ongoing high-powered discussion, monitoring and practical action are required. Key issues need moving to the front pages of our news media and of public awareness. A decade-by-decade integrated action plan needs establishing, with controls and pressures to ensure adherence. Uncomfortable inter-cultural issues have to be aired, and priorities agreed – difficult, though imperative. This action plan would need regular review, since events arising over time would necessitate pragmatic modification of intent and application. However, the salient factors here are commitment and motivation. A dearth of commitment and motivation hampers us today – whether it be from above (institutions) or below (people). Urgency, without panic, is needed.
Political fixing, however, is only one path into the future – it concerns social and international arrangements. Meanwhile, the core of the matter rests around people and what they think and feel. Here the agenda is at least twofold: what is going on 'on top', and what's afoot 'underneath'. The background fundamentals deciding the course of the coming century are being thrashed out today, in homes, streets and fields worldwide, in the rear rooms and concealed cellars of the psyches of billions of people. It is literally an underlying battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. Two fundamental ethics are at stake: the principle of materialism, individualism and authoritarianism, and the principle of inner growth, awareness and collective evolutionary responsibility. Alignment with the first involves conformity with the current world system, and alignment with the second tends to undermine it and to create alternatives to it. They are not mutually exclusive, since each person positions themselves along a spectrum of possibilities between the two extremes – these two poles have a fluid relationship and are going through a rebalancing process where the danger is that we veer too far one way to avoid the other. However, at times these principles appear to contradict one another, especially when sanctions are applied against non-conformity with authoritarian rules. © Palden Jenkins, 1995. All of these articles are copyright. They may individually be copied and shared with others in a spirit of knowledge-sharing and fair play, but they may not be sold, printed or reproduced in quantity or changed in form without the permission of the copyright holder. Magazine and other editors may e-mail me for permission to reprint. E-mail:
We are victims of a historic collective amnesia. As a result the standards and norms of previous generations are lost, forgotten or rejected, and each generation thus tends to downwardly re-define its benchmarks of acceptability or desirability, its 'quality-control' in matters of civilisation, environment and psychological standards – unless, at the time, there is a standard-raising movement or impulse to counteract this. In our modern civilisation, standards have risen for a proportion of people, though for the rest, and for nature and the general psychic field of humanity, standards have sunk – brown seas, wastelands, violence and hurt psyches have increased.
A limited nightmare in one locality or department of life can be overwhelmingly disturbing to wider populations – it depends on how humans perceive and interpret events. The social devastation of the Bosnian civil war, while localised, was indeed a nightmare scenario for Europeans, for Muslims and for the whole world, not only for Slavic peoples: Bosnians, Croats and Serbs have fought over universal human issues – inter-ethnic distrust, insecurity and territoriality, with a measure of historic vengefulness thrown in. Bosnia has been the focus of a rampant outbreak of suicidal mass-behaviour, acted out in the Balkan theatre on behalf of all of us, worldwide. The very existence of this conflict, even discounting the 80-120 other conflicts (depending how you count them) in the world in the 1990s, is a crisis for humanity, prodding us to action.
The possibility of a variety of crucial disasters breaking out was clearly established some three decades ago. In the 1960s, news of pesticide damage, critical population curves, the North-South divide, the dangers of radiation, technological excess and ecological catastrophe became publicly known. Yet willingness to carry out necessary global remedies has been noticeably insufficient, characterised by much institutional, business, media and public foot-dragging. A historical correctional possibility was thus missed – truth-speakers lost jobs, were ruined or landed up in jail, and this still happens. At the millennium, we face much greater and more visible risks than we did at the time we first clearly perceived them in the 1960s. Every year of delay increases the damage, cumulatively. Yet the crisis has not reached a sufficient pitch to force remedial action. We have been served warnings and reminders, and the final reminder is not far away.
There exist so many potential causes of large-scale disaster that it would demand whole libraries to contain it. However, here we can sum up already-known themes and issues likely to surface in coming decades (in no order of priorities):
* toxic industrial, agricultural, pharmaceutical and nuclear waste and general pollution (wastelands, algal blooms, food-chain penetration, water-tables, oceans, long-term disposal issues);
* oversized military arsenals and arms trading, redundant soldiers and fighters, proliferation of arms ownership, explosives and land-mines, military waste, war victims;
* social stresses in cities (crime, alienation and social disintegration, minorities tension and intolerance, poverty-and-wealth, urban pollution) and inter-ethnic conflicts in ethnically-mixed regions;
* ecological-climatic problems (species extinction, UV bombardment, climatic extremes, global warming-cooling, wind-systems and ocean currents, temperature and humidity changes, compound ecological imbalances, natural degradation, de-fertilisation, desertification, pests etc);
* human disasters and famines, connected with unwise land-exploitation, misgovernment, misdevelopment, population movements, ethnic insecurities and war;
* governmental, authority and leadership breakdowns, decline in institutional legitimacy, unreadiness of governmental structures to deal with issues beyond their scope and power;
* breakdowns of confidence and hyper-fluctuations in financial markets, insurance, commodities, currencies, national and world economies;
* demographic criticals – overpopulation, imbalanced weighting of age-structures, growth of underclasses;
* social crises, change-shock, risk of mass confusion, disintegration of socially-reinforcing behaviour and ideological disarray;
* migrations by the young and needy, by disaster-ridden, economic and political refugees;
* conflict between the advantaged and the disadvantaged;
* power-struggles between competitive power-elites (intelligence services, establishments, organised crime, military-industrial interests, political factions, organised dissenters, ethnic groups and world spheres) – whether covert and unseen or publicly-evident;
* erosion of law and order and corruption, as much by lawmakers as lawbreakers;
* diseases arising from lifestyles (cancers, heart problems), pollution (allergies, birth deformities, leukemia) and stress, and symptoms of public immunity-breakdown (AIDS, Ibola, ME, TB);
* technological disasters (ships, planes, computers, electronics, secret projects, power stations), including from technologies left unmonitored as a result of potential systems-breakdown (nuclear installations and toxic waste);
* terrorism, outbreaks of social insanity (Rwanda), civil wars or genocide;
* astronomical incursions (debris, meteors, comets, solar wind, orbital perturbations) or planetary catastrophes (axial tilt, tectonic turbulence, sudden sea-level change or atmospheric shift);
* unhelpful or destructive ET intervention or conflict between governments and ETs;
* and (most predictable of all) utterly unforeseen situations.
It's a daunting list and a likely cause of many sleepless nights. It is important not to be scaremongering and paranoiac, yet it is equally important to be aware of disaster-potentials – and how to respond. We know we live in a dangerous world. It pays to attend to issues we can attend to, such as man-made toxins, arms and economic injustices.
Future-paranoia exists because we fear matters going out of control. To counteract periodic waves of potential social paranoia, disastrous possibilities are routinely discounted and gloomsters and doomsters belittled – social paranoia would itself constitute a disaster. The matter is thus left to 'extremists' or 'dreamers', or it is run past the public through epic Hollywood catastrophe movies, as if to safely dispose of the possibility, which is, of course, merely fantasy. The difficulty with this is that disaster-archetypes continue to reside in the collective unconscious, awaiting event-prompts or apocalyptic preachers to awaken them.
Futurology can help us get our bearings as we peer forward in time, yet it draws on historic data and lessons learned. Wonderful things have been achieved today and across history – yet they are counteracted by the painful and distasteful fallout accompanying them. Automobiles are remarkable as long as one is not oneself subjected to the exhaust, noise and deadly dangers they bring – yet this almost-deified transportation-module kills more people than wars, drugs and murderers, popping them off in ones and twos like invisible snipers. We are (hopefully) entering upon a new century of correction – just as, in the 20th century, we had a century of rampant though destructive 'progress'.
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