Palden
Jenkins

The Age of People

An adventurous assessment of the present and impending future.

by Palden Jenkins

Written in 1991, for chapter two of Crop Circles: Harbingers of World Change, ed Alick Bartholomew, Gateway Books, 1992.

The collective unconscious and its power to manifest
A major key to understanding the meaning of current events is the collective unconscious: what humanity is unwittingly thinking, feeling, imaging and believing. Also, in visualising the future, we are dealing not with a simple mechanical extrapolation of events and trends – we are dealing, perhaps more now than in most times, with the Great Unknown. The Great Unknown speaks in a language of paradox – and paradox building on paradox.

In this sense, there is no major difference between the crop-circle phenomenon and overall world events. Both share enigmatic characteristics: a pattern shows itself wherein the latest theory has to be perpetually updated or scrapped, and new data comes in hot on the heels of the last lot.

I work on the basis that life and events happen in order for us to learn, and are manifested by us – consciously or unconsciously – for the purpose of quickening our evolution. Towards what evolutionary end is anybody's guess, but it is indeed possible to feel when progress is or is not being made. In a paradoxical situation, reality is difficult to identify clearly – and what it has been is no longer a yardstick. For me, reality is anything which makes a perceptible difference in the lives of people: history is a strange mix of events, situations, subjective impressions and dispositions, and society regularly has to revise its grasp of things in order to accommodate to new a-rational predicaments. What we tell ourselves is happening, or ought to be happening, and what is happening, are very different things. The former is the work of the public conscious, while the latter is the work of the unconscious.

A recent example of the public unconscious at work is the 1989 reaction to Salman Rushdie's book Satanic Verses – in itself a medium-fair book of no immense consequence, but in its effect, a world-shaking phenomenon. Why such a reaction? The reason is primarily psychological: book triggered issues already sitting in the unconscious of two already-dissonant cultures, ready-loaded with charged feeling – Euros and Muslims have roots of enmity stretching back through many centuries and chapters. Rushdie's book was the event, while the charged issues, dating back at least to the Crusades in the 1100s (if not earlier) gave the real energy behind this chunk of history. Resolution of the book-publishing details to please Muslims did not fundamentally heal the deeper emotional charge: rather, it left the issue unresolved, festering there for future use.

The Islamic-Jewish-Christian cultural triangle constitutes a historical minefield – the deepest, most insidious bomb being the prophecy of the Last Judgement, neatly woven into the psycho-spiritual fabric of the city of Jerusalem and the nation of Israel. One of the biggest choices available to humanity is to change this program: do not each of these religions teach how humanity can live in peaceful coexistence? Why has territory become identified with security? Security and insecurity are, after all, chosen feelings.

Even Iron Curtains can fall
Since 1986, we have moved into something of a different dimension. Deeper issues and unconscious factors have surfaced, announcing themselves in the shape of frequent and intensely-tricky catalytic events. Since 1986 (this was written in May 1991), examples of such events have been Chernobyl, the Ethiopian famine, the Stock Market crash of 1988, various disasters, perestroika and potential civil war in USSR, the fall of the Iron Curtain, Tiananmen Square, the Palestinian intifadeh, the second Gulf War and the Shi'ite and Kurdish rebellions – to omit many.

The underlying shifts in operation during this time have been:
* growing environmental awareness;
* subsiding economic aspirations amongst the affluent;
* realisation of many of the details of the immense global task ahead;
* European integration and Soviet disintegration (mainly psychological);
* a shift of world power from two competing super-powers to a patchwork of formative and indistinct continental and cultural blocs;
* the ending of command-Socialism as a viable system;
* emergence of a new Second World (Pacific-Rim industrial countries and Middle-Eastern oil-producers);
* an outbreak of contagious nationalism, regionalism and Fourth World (disadvantaged minorities) influence;
* the failure of development aid and the growth of North-South differences;
* a rising crisis in the Third World (disaster and disunity);
* and the integration of many ideas and initiatives born in the 1960s, and technologies born in the 1890s.

Many noticeable non-happenings have also been underlyingly visible:
* oppression of many minorities (Tibetans, Uighurs, Timorese, Mayans, Palestinians, Kurds, Islamic women, children everywhere – the list is large;
* dangerous unchangingness in China and India, despite large-scale economic changes – this might shift soon;
* ongoing use of torture and coercion in many countries;
* the absence of fundamental world economic reform or preparations for it;
* continued environmental degradation (despite campaigns, summits and tinkerings);
* the lack of major progress in disarmament or arms-trade de-escalation;
* media and governmental trivialisation and evasion of major issues;
* and much more.

In the 'civilised' (town-dwelling) world, fed by up-to-the-minute media coverage, events are examined, analysed, edited and archived – such that they remain separated, unconnected, uncontextualised. Yet, things have accelerated to a pitch where many people are establishing unconscious connections, perhaps uncertain, yet nevertheless sensed. A sense of history has crept up from behind. This, together with a sense of future appearing like a gaping void ahead, as we sail toward a daunting yet anticipated precipice.

Notice how I moved into using imagery in that last sentence: 'gaping void', 'sailing', 'precipice'. Imagery is the language of the unconscious – not just visual, but total, charged up with underlying emotion. The imagery in the collective unconscious derives from the past experiences (especially traumatic ones) of social groupings, nations and races. But it also contains the dreams and solutions of each land and culture as well.

When the turbanned, scimitar-bearing Islamic Arabs threatened Europe in the 800s, they scared the disorganised Europeans deeply. The Arabs didn't get too far, but they struck a nerve. When the Crusaders entered Jerusalem in 1099, massacring every inhabitant in a five-day holy bloodbath, they set up a shadow which Nasser, Arafat and Saddam Hussein, nine centuries later, found easy to play on – using imagery of the unconscious. Yet also, human hope can attach itself to pandas and dolphins, libertarian students in the streets of Beijing, Mother Theresas and Nelson Mandelas: the power of potent symbolic representation is immense. And different sections of humanity can see the same figure or situation in totally opposite ways – Mikhael Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher both enjoyed popularity abroad and distrust at home, and their magics worked accordingly (for a time, at least).

Things are not what they once seemed to be
The shift in 1986 was subtle, but also critical. Until that time, it was possible to get away with all sorts of outrages and half-truths, and to believe everything was alright (with a few exceptions): after that time, truth has had a nasty habit of prevailing, even against the best-protected and most unlikely figures and organisations. Up to 1986 the collective psyche had been labouring through a nuclear winter, a dread of evil- empire end-games. Everyone obeyed the rules, and dissidents were simply psychiatric cases, no-goods or traitors. After 1986, a new wind started blowing, howling by 1989. It was blowing from the most unexpected quarters – who would have guessed that the Soviet Union was to be the source of world reform initiative?

The two mass-psychological events of 1986 which most symbolised the new time were the Chernobyl melt-down (causing a shiver of fear worldwide), and the worldwide Live Aid concert (which caused tens of millions of people to think positively for one day – possibly enough, according to the '100th Monkey' hypothesis, to catalyse a deep tidal swing in the world unconscious).

Chernobyl invoked a rumble of the fear of death (and change), while Live Aid invoked a feeling of hope, a sense that we might have the power to 'Feed the World'. This combination of dread and hope was lethal to the existing world-view. They were the first clear signs of the beginning of a process of inevitable change. Their form was symbolic too, underlining the toxicity of unregulated high-tech progress, and the plight of masses of people beset by man-made adversity. Modern folk were reminded how privileged and how vulnerable we are. Even though the 1990s have seen the growth of ever more sophisticated ways of reducing this underlying insight, the cat was out of the bag.

Waves in History
Deep history doesn't manifest in single events: it unfolds over periods of time, in the streets and fields, in the forums and kitchens of the world. Yet, at times, it also intensifies and accelerates, and people are stretched and shaken by a mixture of circumstance and tides of collective feeling. These periods I call power periods in history. [The logic of how I identify them is outlined in my books Living in Time (Gateway Books, 1987) and The Historical Ephemeris (privately published, 1993), and there are more details in my article On the Meaning of our Times on this website.]

If you cast your mind back to the atmosphere of May-December 1989, you have an example of such a power-period. They don't happen often. Historically recent power-periods have been:
* 1792-4, the French Revolution and outbreak of the democratic urge;
* 1818-21, the steam engine, industrial lift-off, and the colonial race;
* 1850-51, extension of industrialism, capitalism and social movements, growth of USA and Russia;
* 1891-1910, a deep historical mega-change (the previous being the 1390s): the European zenith, global exploration and colonial integration, development of electricity, flight, motor vehicles, plastics, allopathic pharmaceuticals and medicine, socialist parties, atomic physics, psychoanalysis, tinned and frozen foods, telephones and theosophy (amongst many other things!). Plus, a cultural transfer to all parts of the world: everyone came to wear trousers! This was the beginning of the modern global village, and a zenith in European industrialism;
* 1932-34, crisis: Depression, Nazism, New Deal, social democracy, Keynesian economics; jazz, cars, radio, films, automation;
* (note, however, that the two world wars did not take place during power periods);
* 1945, world peace, reconstruction, United Nations, World Bank, welfare systems, world carve-up, the nuclear age, the re-establishment of Israel;
* 1965-66, a new awareness dawning amidst new conditions (supermarkets, jet travel, satellites, TV, the nuclear age), together with new thought- forms later to move into mainstream (feminist, pacifist, green, self-help, dietary, third world liberation, minority and citizens' rights, internationalist and inner-growth movements), plus high-tech advances such as the microchip and genetic engineering, plus new social realities – help-lines, social workers and aid agencies; plus a growing discomfort with the escalating bizarrity of modern life. A new question arose: "is humanity going to survive?".
* 1986-90, with a peaks in 1989;

Power periods to come are likely to be:
+ 2012-15 (opening test-point of a 140-year cycle beginning in 1965-66);
+ 2039-48 (opening test of a 170-year cycle beginning in 1993, and climax of a 140-year cycle starting in 1965-66);
+ and 2061-65 (opening test-point of the 500-year cycle beginning in the 1890s).
Note that the Millennium itself is not such a power-period, even though its public psychological impact might be quite large. The purpose behind giving these dates (identified by astrological means) is to put the current world evolution into a time-context: an emergency is with us, yet there is possibly time in which to handle it. Since these dates represent the critical points of cycles, the periods of buildup and aftermath can expand either way by a decade, if not several – for these periods deal with seeds and longterm evolutionary developments. We are living through one such critical point now.

Order and structure
Let's go back to 1989, which was one of two connected waves in a bigger wave – the other being in 1993. 1989 was a year when the collective unconscious was twanging Bly. A shift of perspective emerged within the collective unconscious, causing some ideas and images to mature, and others to become obsolete. Of maturing ideas 'Freedom and Democracy' (the urge for pluralist liberalism and public self- determination) formed the core: a growing social readiness which was edging close to critical mass. A new picture, greener, more just and humanitarian in basis, but as yet lacking a full profile and method, was surfacing. 1993 and 2012-15 should also be notable in this evolution.

Marxist-Leninism became obsolete, largely through its incapacity to deliver the goods. This shook the world. Meanwhile, the West, having created a mass of increasingly discerning consumers, was forced to begin to rein back unscrupulous business-political practices, to appear more caring – though there is far further to go. In 1989, we witnessed simultaneous collapses and arisings of new belief, sufficiently B to change social systems – and to turn the spotlight on all countries' weaknesses. This will not go away. It was but a beginning.

Everywhere, the slate was suddenly wiped clean of illusions, and nothing solid took its place. Attention fell onto social and international structures, since these are the means by which things are changed or allowed to change, and had been proving to be more part of the problem than of the solution. A surge of power arose within the collective hearts of people, aware that they had a chance to affect things. The cruxpoint was practical viability, and the issues were constitutions, law, vested interests, the ecosystem and its use and natural products, money, financing and trade, technology itself, health – and for most people, sufficiency. Ecology and economics began a long process of fusing together. All of these were practical issues, demanding widespread, thorough, global and visionary reform, for practical reasons.

The expansion of everybody's own backyard
The wonderful thing about the human psyche is that it's wiser than it knows. Homofemina sapiens. The busy intents and thoughts of our thinking minds are one thing, and the deep longterm tides of human destiny are another. While humans have been striving to conquer their environment and each other, the deeper collective heart has been unconsciously dreaming up a 'one earth, one human family' potentiality, which has been weaving a web of preconditions behind the stage-show of history. Hmmm, that's a bit far-fetched... or perhaps not.

The funny thing is that we're having to trick ourselves into meeting our future. In conquering the world, people have created circumstances and adversities (war, pollution, distrust, cancer, poverty, injustices, you name it) which only a globally-coordinated effort could end. Not only that, but also we have tricked ourselves to the extent that we have created a situation where there is no alternative but to end ancient habitual ills and malpractices – for the price of failing can be extinction. It's a very simple equation. Within our civilisation we have developed both the sources of destruction and of salvation – the latter often as a by-product of the former. The nub of the Big Trick is the global village – we're all in the same boat! Seers saw this in the 1960s: ordinary thinking people saw it in 1989. It's now here, affecting us in our daily lives.

It fell upon the Machiavellian, alcoholic, nit-ridden, energetic Euros of the Renaissance and afterwards to colonise the world and to transfer their economic and political legacy to all cultures and corners – whether or not it was welcomed. The Chinese and the Arabs were possible contenders, but the unruly Europeans seized the opportunity. This was not merely the expansionist urge of one race aiming to rule over others – although it produced grave symptoms of coercion and devastation. It was the world psyche unconsciously creating an infrastructure for a global village, and production-line industry gave the tools.

Yet we have stepped over a planetary threshold without knowing what the purpose of the next step is – except the somewhat backward-looking redemptive purpose of healing the ills of past. In a sense, the world is finding out what its purpose is by finding out what it is not. It has created the conditions for a new world order, but a lot of obstructing and obsolete dispositions must first be shed: the social 'dominator model' (rulers-and-ruled), the multiple schism of gender, culture and race, the evils of parochialism and xenophobia, the habits of environmental and human rights abuse, prejudice and alienation – again, to name but a few. In other words, the unwholesome customs of millennia need dismantling – not for idealistic, but for practical, survival-oriented reasons.

Here's another thought: have you ever considered that, while we evolved from the lap of mother Nature, we are still in her lap? That is, have you ever wondered whether Nature is using us as a way of mutating? We are restocking her species, altering her topography, geology, atmosphere and ecosphere, and we are introducing some things and removing others. Potentially, we are turning planet Earth from a wondrous wilderness into a garden, balanced according to new laws, managed by us. Potentially – on behalf of nature, which we have changed, and which we also are. It might be that we're part of a larger plot to change this whole planet into something other than a heap of plastic-encrusted cinders, which it looked as if we were creating. Think about it – it doesn't matter if it's true or not. Or does it?

Psychic Quanta
The 1989-1993 period has qualities of dream-nightmlare to it. Time stretching and skidding wildly. Things going awry, the rules of the game changing – and, most unpredictable of all, masses of people expressing it. Yet this slippage of reality is part of a reality-shift. So many people, perhaps even a majority, are aware of the need for fundamental world change, yet they are unable to conceive of how it can be brought about. Thus we're directionless, approaching global gridlock. Resignation is one of our biggest diseases – cancer- producing and cholera-inducing. Such a seized-up situation, such a sense of needed change which nevertheless seems unlikely or impossible to actually occur, is a characteristic symptom of the imminence of quantum change.

In a quantum shift, energy rises to a critical point where it can no longer contain itself: systems become overloaded, sparks fly and fuses blow until a new circuitry evolves, channelling flows efficiently. Things suddenly become easier, even though more energy is moving. It's like discovering your car has a fourth gear. The whole world looks different, and previous problems become subsequent solutions, even to questions no one knew were there.

Mikhael Gorbachev took the world by surprise by changing the rules of the international game, and all nations of the world had to reconfigure to a new constellation, as if he had waved a magic wand. His success in altering the world's thoughts lay in his speaking the message of the time: something which was already close to the surface, to which people simply needed to say "Yes". This almost-magic power left him by the end of 1989, and he then became a normal, fallible politician, with bloodied hands. The thought- form, like a virus, had used him as a transmitter and left him when the job was done. Where did this virus come from? Possibly from the same source as crop-circles.

What Gorby set in motion was more than he himself could have imagined: he set up some evolutionary goals and principles but also he created some allopathic side-effects which had a kick-back. One of these was the 'nationalities question', which arose as soon as he lifted the heavy weight of post-Stalinist pressure from the Soviet public. A typical social situation arose: on the lifting of a focusing influence of oppression, ordinary people, inexperienced in co-determination, reached out in a hundred directions for solutions, real and imagined, and thereby undermined the very liberation which had occurred. In a sense, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, and an opportunity was missed to try a new option, the creation of an entirely new system out of the wreckage of the old Soviet system, rather than the crass adoption of the foreign capitalist system.

Yet this is understandable: we humans are well-addicted to known quantities and safe options – we don't like the Great Unknown or wide-open questions. As a result, when faced with the unknown, we can grasp and grapple everywhichway, unfocused and chaotic. This phenomenon was visible in the crop-circle movement in the early 1990s – an almost-desperate grasping for answers, to fill the yawning gaps of unanswerable questions. We are likely to see much of this in future, in many countries, as realities flip. Yet, this is a key part in social education and evolution: to determine our lives effectively, we must be collectively mature enough to do it and to hold together – and to continue doing it and holding together, through thick and thin.

Miracles
In the 1990s, as a result of the preceding waves of the mid-1960s and the late-1980s, we are stepping into globalism – or perhaps, at last acknowledging that we have already irreversibly done so. We have realised that we are one humanity sharing one small world – and now we're in a kind of shock at the thought. We are faced with a profusion of interrelated mega-questions, all resulting from erroneous and myopic actions in the past, and we are threatened with chaos, hardship and devastation if we omit to rise to our full potential. What a wonderful situation! It is the sort of stuff of which miracles are made – the necessary precondition for a miracle being an absolutely impossible situation.

I'm quite matter-of-fact about miracles. They are, quite simply, revealed breaches in our understanding of things, oiled by faith or by depths of despair. Solutions come when we've truly given up finding them. Most people who choose to read a book like this will have experienced various miracles in their own lives, particularly during crises. But there is nothing mysterious or mystifying about a miracle if witnessing or participating in it brings a change in the way we see things – such that the miracle becomes part of a new normality. Going back to Gorby, his strength was the utter plain sense he was exercising and advocating in 1985-89 – it was a miracle-working of the magic of appearances, yet it all seemed so obvious. Why hadn't anyone else done it?

I'm harping about Gorby because he is symptomatic of the kind of figures who walk on to centre-stage to deliver to us the consequences of our secret wishes. This is a temporary mass-psychic phenomenon which never lasts: once their message is broadcast, such leaders lose the magic influence quickly – and rarely are trained to recognise this. Saddam Hussein embodied a different archetype, threatening horror, yet in truth representing the horror we have allowed to pervade our world: such archetypes exist and have power only as long as we need them to be there.

Democracy
The general recent demise of outright dictators (Franco, Marcos, Pinochet, Ceausescu, Galtieri, Duvalier, Zia and more) and parental-figures (the Gandhis, Mao and Deng, Khomeini, Ronnie Reagan and Maggie Thatcher) is an example of a declining collective need. You might think it's a bit extreme of me to say that people need such people as dictators: nevertheless, until people are able to take matters in their hands and deal intelligently with social and political choices, we do need abusers to teach us (by aversion-therapy) how to exercise our rights – and public duties. Even in the western democracies, where abuse is subtler, vested interests and lobbies pull the major strings in a disguised totalitarian way.

Freedom and Democracy, so movingly called for in 1989, by so few on behalf of so many, is more difficult to actualise than it looks: it is a generational and historical evolution. Getting rid of an old order is but the first step – in some respects the easy step. The second is establishing a new order. The third is the test of facing challenges which threaten the new order, and the fourth is the test of time and ongoing reality. To succeed, a liberal democracy requires sharp and intelligent vigilance and mass awareness of the issues and alternatives. Without these, democracy is but a whitewashed oligarchy with a pastel eggshell finish and a few free offers thrown in.

The hijacking of the new East German democracy by the West German parties and PR machinery in 1990 demonstrated clearly the poor state of democratic health in the West: the West could not tolerate the idea of a new, potentially even more democratic alternative arising to undermine its own semblances of freedom. The poor state of Western democracy results from cynical public complacency, acceptance of short-term political objectives (usually money and votes), and from the confederation of business, media, political parties and other vested interests who define the ballgame and even the score. Mercifully, this is not an absolutely watertight hegemony, since no single lobby steers the democratic-capitalist world. Other forces periodically impinge – like people, volcanoes or events. As Margaret Thatcher once said, "The greatest problem for a prime minister is events".

The solution for the world is not specifically democracy. It is genuine public participation in decision- making, on local, national and global levels – especially when the acts of decision-makers come into question. Voting in elections doesn't necessarily do this. As Confucius said, the people have the final right and obligation to withdraw the 'Mandate of Heaven' from the Emperor – to withdraw legitimacy from an ineffective or oppressive government. However, each country and culture has its own ways of effecting this – and democracy, as such, is useful only for some. What is needed is for people at the periphery of society to be heard by people at the centre, and for people at the centre to be visible to people on the periphery – organisational transparency. A government is a communication-centre for people, no longer the institutional overlord, and we are likely to see major changes in the basic philosophy and method of governance in the coming century – out of expediency as well as higher principles. Public opinion and popular will are the shaping forces of our time, be it through consumer preferences, migrations of people, issue-campaigns or uprisings.

Nowadays we are treading a fine line between chaos and repression. It is ethically less acceptable to mow down people with guns than it once was – yet, conversely, order needs maintaining if a society is not to degenerate into disintegrity. Everyone relies so much on everybody else. Here comes the liberal dilemma: how to create workable consensual reform, keeping its pace fast enough to meet genuine needs and slow enough to be assimilable. The answers for this will be evolved through force of events, and the competence and popular legitimacy of governments and international organisations will be crucial – especially since this is an era of precedents. But even more crucial is the capacity of people in crowds to make intelligent decisions when they vote for, pressurise or unseat governments.

Proceed now to second half of this article

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