The world is rapidly integrating. This is putting nations into a new light. Nations, by force of circumstance, are increasingly having to surrender their sovereignty to treaties, international and regional organisations – and to global emergencies which rage, like tsunamis, into people's own backyards. Yet, paradoxically, the growth of large-scale organisations will become top-heavy without a mirroring growth of local communities, power-bases and nodes of activity.
This is not all. Nations have been cobbled together for diverse reasons, and not all nations reflect a genuine national identity – especially those created by colonial powers or by war. While regional and minority autonomy grows, established borders come into question, since they often divide peoples and regions arbitrarily and ineffectively. In some cases, the very existence of borders is the problem. The peoples of the Middle East have frequently lived under one empire (Umayyad, Abbasid and Ottoman), and different groupings occupied neighbouring villages frequently coexisting on the same territory. Then came the Europeans, with their maps and theodolites, drawing lines across the lives of people. The result has been ongoing war and threats of war in that region. It's perhaps up to Europeans to catalyse and guarantee new solutions.
It emerges in our day that every social grouping which identifies itself as a nation or people has some right to determine its way of living, should it feel the need to do so. A nation can willingly enter the international order only if it has the sovereignty with which to enter it. Coercion and force are not means by which an international order will thrive and survive: people can no longer accept this. Thus, each region and nation which needs sovereignty (a subjective feeling as much as a state of law) needs to be drawn into the world community by assuming power over its own life and by guaranteeing self-determination – to its members and to all its neighbours. Disputes must be fairly sorted out internationally, with safeguards for enforcement. A chain is as B as its weakest link.
This rise of nationalism, particularly in countries where national identity has been suppressed, is surely healthy for the world, for true globalism is a 'trickle-up' process, bestowed, in the end, by people, not by governments or multinational corporations. However, nationalism is positive only in the light of its contribution to international order and cooperation. If it becomes inward-turning, or if it involves the assertion of one nation's rights over those of another, then it is poisonous.
In the long term, we are likely to see an entirely new world geographical pattern emerging: people will inhabit places not so much because of blood, inheritance and traditional ties, but because of consciously- chosen preference and identification. This process has already started for the growing number of refugees, expatriates, asylum-seekers and world-people of the late 20th Century, be they users of flimsy refugee boats or business-class seats in jumbo-jets. Rootedness to land or kin will then become a choice. This has a potential to strengthen indigenous and local cultures within the protection and context of an international community. Regional boundaries will need to adapt to new situations. The Antarctica World Park is the first major challenge. Cultural interweaving
The decline of the great world powers has led to a rebalancing – the first sign was the muscle-flexing of the OPEC nations in the 1970s. Oil-producing countries and the industrialising countries of Asia and Latin America have gained an economic and cultural clout which gives them potentially as much influence on the world arena as the industrialised sphere. The world is gradually turning into a new patchwork with no inherent centre or dominant regional culture – unless China is to become the new world-dominating power. Even New York and Geneva, the UN capitals, are beginning to look peripheral. But the global village isn't just a political-economic phenomenon: it is becoming a cultural issue. Culture is the stuff of people's minds and hearts. The question is, whose culture? Or a new one? Or a pluralist patchwork of cultures?
In the last few centuries, European culture has been imposed or emulated, and is now retreating – or adapting. It is taking time for Third World nations and groupings to mature, held back by combinations of debt, adverse terms of trade, infrastructure-deficiency, mis-applied aid, ill-governance, war and internal division – yet current weakness becomes future strength, for the resolve and creativity of people creates progress in any rising culture.
Yet there are cultures with an identity which has withstood colonialism – Islam and China, particularly – where concepts, practices and moral codes can be more relevant for the future than white-men's values. Tibetans are demonstrating the resilience of a culture – in the logic of the unconscious, the quiet suffering of Tibetans guarantees that they might well be catalysts of change in both China and the world. While Islam itself seems destined for an internal reform process, it also has a lot to teach the world on law, politics and ethics: the Western world has double-standards which will bring it into increasing trouble in decades to come. Also, which nation has more experience in questions of governance (and mis-government) than China? The most oppressed peoples of the past are likely to be the most exemplary peoples of the future.
Globalisation is happening anyway: the focus is on our capacity to keep up with it. The business world has created worldwide linkages, but now the onus lies with people – and especially our capacity to get on with each other. Everything has changed as the world has grown smaller. Our best friends no longer live next door – they're the other side of the world. Which is now next door.
Monergy
When people take certainties for granted, it's a sure sign that the collective unconscious anticipates them to be uncertainties. Arrogantly, as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, people in the West smugly felt we had won some sort of historical football game between capitalism and socialism: in this smugness was a warning of downfall. For the market-based 'free' world rests on ground as shaky as the Soviet world did – its advantage is simply that it has more flexibility and changeability than the command economies had. To a degree.
Nowadays we have vast computer-networked international financial markets, for which no one body is accountable. The markets rest entirely on the confidence of their participants, whose allegiance is primarily to themselves rather than to the world as a whole, and whose primary objective is to maximise their own profit. The assumption is that if any change is needed, it will become profitable to bring it about, and unprofitable to avoid it. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case: it pays financial operators and governments to collude in defining what is permissible as a profitable possibility, and to oppose alternatives. Meanwhile, institutional investors, ruling the markets, maintain the status quo until such time as they are forced to change.
From a short-term viewpoint, this self-maintaining system makes sense: the sheer scale of debts and economic ties, rooted in promises to pay, backed up by guarantees which are frequently unrealisable in cash or usable resources, makes any system-change virtually impossible – a vast settle-up would be necessary, demanding realisation of funds into cash, bills, commodities or land of guaranteed value. Since banks and financial bodies lend far more than they can realise at any time (this usually works!), since the markets rely on a backed-up system of zillion-scale trading without up-to-date account-settling, and since the values of guarantees are themselves fluctuating in response to market demand the whole financial system is carefully locked into its own self-defined reality and cannot fundamentally change. It cannot change until such a day arrives when confidence in the system is hit on a substrative, fundamental level. The Gulf War of 1990-1 was brought about over financial market stability: Iraq was temporarily capable of dominating the economies, energy-supplies and currencies of the whole world. Saddam Hussein touched a deep nerve in the international financial system. Unfortunately, the medicine applied was military, and thus solved little except for arms dealers.
Many other such exposed nerves exist. To name but a few:
* the computerised markets, providing instant market responses, are programmed to parameters based on relatively normal market conditions. Yet what happens when a massive 'spike' shakes the system, and the cause is not found fast enough to override the computers and handle it manually (as in the 1987 crash)?
* if an earthquake wrecked Tokyo or California, currently-inflated collateral values of property there would crash, and with them guarantees, insurance and confidence – affecting the world;
* debt levels are far higher than can be sustained in a major crisis, and a massive calling-in of debts and settling of contracts within a short time is impossible – be they national, governmental, business or personal debts, or simply unsettled accounts. This means that the whole economic system can seize up;
* the whole system relies on confidence, a subjective and volatile psychological factor. The stability of the system thus rests in the shared subjective beliefs of investors, institutions and traders;
* market confidence is no longer directly related to real factors such as trade, output, employment or true economic indicators – they are related to financial devices and traders' expectations, which makes the markets resemble a closed system, generating confidence on the strength of its own behaviour and situations, not that of the world at large;
* political factors, such as the unwillingness of governments to lose elections over tough economic measures, or to change ideas, can skew the markets to a precarious degree;
* immediate considerations override longterm ones, leading to an increasing dissociation between the markets and the real world situation.
In other words, we have a sophisticated system which works while rules and conditions of this system hold up. What is now needed is a sustainable system which is responsive to the real needs of people and the real availability of resources. It needs to reckon in the whole costs and benefits of transactions and investments, and to assess profit in social-environmental terms rather than private ones. This sounds like an impossible ideal, but from a survival viewpoint, it is absolutely imperative: thus, force of necessity is likely to precipitate such changes. Money will continue to be used (as long as there is confidence in its value), but the values given to everything must change. This involves a massive re-pricing.
Accounting in terms of whole costs and making choices reflecting real benefits will immediately slow or stop many common economic activities – bringing a risk of worldwide economic seizure. But it will bring upswings in other activities – especially those involving preparations, research and development of a new economy and world system. In the developed world we have developed a sophisticated and expensive medical care system, yet disease has not declined, only changed: thus, we have been expending vast resources on an activity which has not achieved its aims. A new medical care system needs to deliver genuine, useful results of greater benefit to humanity and the longterm future. The resources to be released from ending wasteful practices are immense. The Big Question, simply, is How fast can we adapt?
We return again to force of circumstance and crisis. The wonderful thing about the former is that it concerns reality, and the wonderful thing about the latter is that it throws whole bundles of issues into question, demanding solutions to all of them, simultaneously, since they are interrelated. During a crisis, action is urgently essential, and pandering to lobbies and conflicting interests is suicidally lengthy and compromising: the challenge is to respond rapidly, and to create mega-solutions which appear, at least at the time, to be the best option. And the best strategy, for now, is to begin now with researching the options.
During the 1990s, we are likely to see our world economic system start restructuring itself. Many of the ideas which can form the basis for restructuring exist already: they remain hidden to avoid undermining market confidence. Such restructuring is likely to come in waves, where paradoxical, seemingly irresolvable events put the system under stress, to the point where restructuring is unavoidable. 1993 represents a watershed-time in this restructuring, even though it might take years for the signs to become widely evident or officially acknowledged. This will not affect economic affairs alone, for the consequences reach out in all directions. The crux is likely to be debt problems, insolvency-overload, excessive insurance liabilities, social crisis or excess market volatility, which at some point would lead to a situation of seizure similar to that of 1989 in East Europe:
* a collapse of faith in the system (the consequences of the past catching up on the present), leading to paralysis in government and finance;
* spontaneous measures being taken by individuals, which demand that regulatory bodies act quickly and fundamentally enough to plug leaks;
* rapid personnel, conceptual, legislative and systems changes;
* dislocations in society and in delivery of goods and services – by what degree depends on many factors;
* problems in dealing with perpetrators of 'economic crimes' – also compensation and organisational questions;
* gradual readjustment of society, capital flows, industrial processes, economic factors, technology and all areas of life – not least public ideas – to the new conditions.
This can imply short-term collapse of many economic activities, but it does not have to do so: disruption- levels depend on how late things are left, on the skill and clarity of new decision-makers, on the willingness of the public to trust, support and make sacrifices in the short-term – and on unknowns which can be assessed only at the time. Longterm, many things which we have taken as normal are likely to disappear or change, to minimise waste, adjust consumption-production levels, increase equity and reallocate capital and resources to where they are needed. If anything, the main problem will be to keep up with the sheer breadth and depth of shifting present in all strata of society and in all countries. Paradoxically, armies have a good future in rescue and logistics – they are, after all, trained to achieve their objectives, and there will be operations a-plenty to deal with.
Allah and Gaia
All religions and religious bodies are going through transformation. The secular world also has a moral crisis in front of it. Old historical shadows remain deeply embedded, bringing friction and schism, even where religion has been overridden by TV-culture. How can there be One God, how is God Great, how is God Love, when a believer looks at the infidel over there as being without God? In the global village, such unneighbourly thinking comes into question.
The Salman Rushdie affair was a manifestation of the Islamic-Christian collective psyches purifying themselves. How can prejudices become healed unless they are permitted to come to the surface – and if necessary frighten us into movement beyond fixity? Many are the spiritual crises which are likely to emerge over the next century, as the most fundamental illusions – religious illusions – are burnt out from friction created by a clash with reality, life-as-experienced. Traditional churches, preservers of the Faith, lose their congregations; evangelists become exposed for manipulative rackets; Allah Akbar, invoked in war and threat, fails to serve victory upon believers; Leninism collapses; Buddhist nations lapse into violence – and politicians, high-flyers and TV stars, the lesser gods of the secular world, err an fall with credibility-destroying regularity.
And yet, the Big Frontier of our day is not territorial, neither primarily technological: it concerns the very heart of religion, the very heart of human life. The intensity of world events leads virtually every human alive today, in some way or another, into a crisis of conscience and consciousness. A major dissonance grows between life-as-it-presents-itself and the beliefs we hold – even the most modern of beliefs. And, as was the case in the Soviet bloc before 1989, deep doubts and conflicts are usually held privately until such time as they attain critical mass, to break out into the public sphere – whether this concerns Catholics using contraceptives, Jews befriending Palestinians or Hindus forgiving Muslims.
The frontier is one of consciousness, and the catalyst of consciousness is real live experience – of which there is plenty to be had nowadays, of a blatantly contradictory and ungentle kind. In our individual lives, when raw experience rubs us up, we tend to blame others, or circumstances, as a way of escaping taking responsibility. But in doing so, our problem is not solved, and the experience becomes even more deep- rooted or abrasive – the government might change, but the problem is still basically the same. Sooner or later, a major crisis comes – tragedy, unemployment, marital disintegration, setbacks – in which the blaming turns into questioning and disorientation, even into thorough breakdown. Internal struggle ensues, leading to catharsis or exhaustion. Then silence, emptiness. Followed by rebirth, a new reality. Even if the situation is unchanged, the experiencing of it has shifted radically. This is, at root, a spiritual reorientation, a nuclear fusion, a quantum shift. All over the world, such changes are going on in the personal sphere, and now are leaking out into the public domain. People are being forced to form their own conclusions, for the traditional authorities in the definition of Truth are themselves experiencing crisis – and the truest leaders are those who can show and share their crises with others.
From two directions – from our social-ecological environments and from the collective unconscious – the Big Picture is shifting. Deity takes on many forms, and forms are transforming. The new religion has no doctrine, no church, no priesthood. But it has soul and spirit. In the earthly sphere, the Quest is now Survival, and the Victory to be won is a victory over ourselves and our fixed habits and conceptions. This is the new frontier. Crop-circles, as but one omen from the heights and the depths, form entirely new patterns, new codes for decipherment. And perhaps it is the case that we will decipher them at the time when we have already come to understand their message.
Intelligent faith is liberating, for it takes us beyond ourselves and our humdrum daily realities. All of the greatest teachers have exhorted followers to examine their belief in the light of personal experience – doctrinal, unquestioning faith has arisen through insufficient communion with the spirit, inadequate personal examination of the essence of the faith or the teachings. Prejudice arises out of authoritarian followership – a psychological, not properly a spiritual issue.
The breakthrough humanity needs to make is on the human level. And the bringers of the breakthrough are those who most feel the pathos of humanity and the instinct of nature... mostly women. And the woman, the anima, within men. Without this feminine influence, no rebalancing can take place. Without this, no future is worth embracing. For it needs to be a co-created new world.
The Big Solution is very simple: forgiveness, understanding, compassion. If the Holy Land is truly holy, it will be a place where love and trust in the human family is demonstrated. Yet the simplicity of this transformation is, in the current context, not quite so easy, for we are in the deep-historical habit of avoiding such simplicity. We have to be stopped in our tracks, and only two things can do it: awareness, which stops to take stock of the situation as it is, or crisis, which comes at us from outside to pin us down, thrashing and cussing, to accept the reality we have created.
Catastrophe
There doesn't have to be a world catastrophe. But the avoidance of it requires a conscious, intentional effort which is just as strenuous. When wars are declared, nations are mobilised to enormous lengths: without needing to create war, we need such mobilisation. Kalashnikovs and Patriots missiles contain valuable metals and components with much better uses.
As revolutionaries have found, people take time to change, but there's nothing better to catalyse change than force of circumstance. And there is no better circumstance than crisis. The grating of circumstance with human delusion creates pain. As Sakyamuni Buddha once taught, the experience of pain is the beginning of enlightenment. The darkest hour is just before dawn.
An underlying fear pervading the 1990s is: if we accept, embrace and legislate for change, will we unleash forces which are beyond our power to handle? The answer is YES, but such an unleashing will also unleash genius, energy and cooperation. Omission to unleash such forces will bring even greater suffering – the outbreak of totally uncontrollable forces to which adaptation might be difficult or impossible. This is a risk – a step into the Unknown.
When Death is trying to take us, things become simple – you live, or you die. Before a transformative breakthrough, change looks difficult, complex, even impossible. When change is rife, however, it comes easier than expected, and in unexpected ways. It is the buildup to change which is most nightmlarish, not change itself.
In any change, some people rise and others fall, and dislocations and wrenchings exhaust and irritate people. Mistakes are made, some problems seem irresolvable, others get overwhelmed by bigger ones following, and others simply take a long time. But the difficulties of change are not, in our time, as great as those of stability: we expend vast amounts of energy and happiness maintaining our status quos, carrying our burdens of civilised normality. Status quos are habitual, while transformation needs courage, heart.
The status quo in the world is not working, and things are changing. We're in it. The only choice we have is to make it easy or difficult for ourselves. If we facilitate and allow changes before the final need arises, we will find time and energy enough to adapt, to use crisis positively. If the historical default pattern is continued – walking backwards into the future, changing only when forced – the chances of catastrophe grow.
There is a way to deal with this: START NOW. Two major preparatory undertakings are now imperative, over and above meeting immediate issues: a serious assessment of the means by which the world can be restructured, and a compiling of an inventory and timetable of world strategy for the whole of the coming century. Followed by commitment, as we do with warfare. The assessment will train the spotlight on international institutions – UN and its agencies, the World Bank, multinational corporations, the world legal system and, above all, the state of humanity and nature. If our decision-making bodies reflect but paradigms of the past, they will not be able to solve the large-scale questions of our time. They will also obstruct the grass-roots solutions which arise from ordinary people in their areas of abode. Thus, a timetable of world strategy will give a starting-place for concerted, overall action.
If there is no inventory and timetable, there is no perspective, and we remain imprisoned in the short- term and the parochial. We do not now know the full extent of the world 'problem', but we certainly can attempt a full assessment, fearlessly. We do not know the extent of possibilities available to us, but we can invest in researching them. We do not know the timetable or order of appearance of major issues, but we can certainly hypothesise a timetable, to clarify our ideas and priorities – even if it must be revised each decade.
The dividing line between catastrophe and transformation is very thin. Yet treading that line is the probable reality of the coming century. Danger and impossibility is the precondition for miracles. Governments will need to attract the very best people to serve in them, and to serve in ways which stay urgently close to the pulse of the time. Often, there will not be opportunity for consultation, for much of the work of government will be competent response to immediate events. But people must feel they have a say. And grass-roots solutions must be acknowledged and supported, for the revolution needs to move from bottom- up and from top-down. If people do not have a say, they will exercise it in other ways. This is the age of people. In the year 2000, there will be six billion of us.
The onus lies with people. People the world over. You and me and the person over there. Do we meet the intensification of world energy with fear or with willingness? Do we avoid the Big Issues or welcome change? I can answer this only for myself – and the same goes for everyone else. But if, in a specific knotty circumstance, sufficient numbers of us decide to make a step forward, a tide lifts off, and the contagion spreads. Conversely, if large numbers decide for doubt and fear, human evolution is blocked.
When something utterly new and incomprehensible presents itself to us, it can be exciting or terrifying – an increasingly common experience for all. Eitherwhichway, preconceptions inevitably turn out to be inaccurate: the Great Unknown eats preconceptions for breakfast. Now, a crop-circle or pictogram, in relation to the vastness of our world and its problems, is physically like a peanut in Antarctica: yet, on an inner level, it is a paradox of continental proportions. That's why they have come to us – a zen ko-an (an answerless question) which can nevertheless be measured and photographed. They – plus our reactions to them – are symptoms of our time.
What I thus propose to you is that, if we looked at world events as a kind of educational game by some over-arching power (call it what you will) which seeks for us to evolve through learning, then we might perceive and understand the chaos of world events in a much more useful light. As in the case of crop- circles, if we cease trying to effect the quick fix, the mystery grows deeper, and solutions, paradoxically, might be more easily found.
Crop-circles and pictograms are a first-class mind-bender: there's no way to feel comfortable with them except by changing our way of thinking, seeing and being. It's the same question as What-to-do-about-China, the Khmer Rouge, or Sudanese refugees, or intractable Afrikaaners, or Party apparatchiks or disposable nappies or nuclear waste, or What-to-do-about-the-people-down-the-road or What-to-do-about-myself? There is no easy solution, yet we can start now in sincerely seeking it out. One ancient rule is quite useful here: as Confucius once said, The Creative works through the Easy, the Receptive works through the Simple.
Resolving the future of the world and answering the questions crop-circles bring up – these are but two fields of enquiry amongst many. Yet they are in essence the same question. And we have perhaps fifty years in which to crack it, before bare survival and tragedy render investigation useless. The writing is clearly on the wall.
I am deliberately not offering a Big Answer for the future – there isn't one. I would be deluding you if I tried to offer one. Yet the answer lies inherently within the heart of humanity. We shall, I believe, uncover it, through wrestling our way through the impending future, and it will come quicker and easier if we cultivate an attitude of learning. Force of circumstance will lead us to the solutions we need to make. But it is we who, in our decisions, can turn problems into solutions. We have no alternative: this is the beauty of the mess we've got ourselves into!
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© Palden Jenkins, 1992. 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: