QUANTUM SHIFT IN THE GLOBAL BRAIN
HOW THE NEW SCIENTIFIC REALITY CAN CHANGE US AND OUR WORLD
ERVIN LASZLO
INNER TRADITIONS 2008
www.InnerTraditions.com
PART II
PART ONE
MACROSHIFT IN SOCIETY
Chapter 1: Evolution or Extinction: That is the Question
A Chinese proverb warns, “If we do not change direction, we are likely to end up exactly where we are headed.” Applied to today’s world, this would be disastrous:
v There is deepening insecurity in countries both rich and poor and greater propensity in many parts of the world to resort to terrorism, war, and other forms of violence.
v Islamic fundamentalism is spreading throughout the Muslim world, neo-Nazi and other extremist movements are surfacing in Europe, and religious fanaticism as appearing the world over.
v Governments seek to contain violence through organized warfare; world military spending has risen for the past 8 years running and has reached more than 1 trillion dollars a year.
v One in three urban dwellers in the world live in slums, shanty-towns, and urban ghettos. More than 900 million people are classified as slum-dwellers. In the poorest countries 78% of the urban population subsists under life-threatening circumstances.
v Although more women and girls are being educated than in previous years, in many parts of the world fewer women have jobs and more are forced to make ends meet in the “informal sector.”
v Frustration and discontent continue to grow as both power and wealth are becoming further concentrated and the gap widens between the holders of wealth and power and the poor and marginalized populations. 80% of the world’s domestic product belongs to 1 billion people; the remaining 20% is shared by 5½ billion.
v Climate change threatens to make large areas of the planet unsuitable for human habitation and for an adequate level of food production. Very few countries are still food self-sufficient – and the internationally available food reserves are shrinking.
v The amount of available fresh water is diminishing rapidly; over half the world’s population faces water shortages. On average, 6,000 children are dying each day of diarrhea caused by polluted water.
We are not heading in the right direction. Where do we go from here?
TWO SCENARIOS
- No change: the BAU (Business As Usual) Scenario
Continuing in this way, the prelude to the inevitable breakdown manifests as critical conditions arising in the regions most directly exposed to the pernicious effects of climate change. In these regions, home to hundreds of millions of inhabitants:
v Changing weather patterns create drought, devastating storms, and widespread harvest failures.
v Coastal areas are flooded by rising sea levels.
v Famine spreads in areas dependent on adequate rainfall for food production and areas exposed to tornados, hurricanes, and violent storms.
v Massive waves of migration from the worst-hit areas seek areas where resources are more assured.
The breakdown of the poorest and most directly exposed regions creates a global security threat:
v Epidemics of infectious diseases spread over Africa, Asia, and the Americas owing to heat waves, outbreaks of agricultural pests, and contaminated drinking water.
v The waves of migration to relatively well-off regions overload the local resource base and create conflict with the established populations.
v Terrorist groups, nuclear proliferators, narco-traffickers, and organized crime form alliances with unscrupulous entrepreneurs and expand the scale and scope of their activities.
On the way to breakdown we can anticipate drastic changes in economic and political processes and ecology, accompanied by military fallout.
The economic and political processes
v Terrorism spreads, together with declared and undeclared attacks on countries suspected of harboring terrorists.
v The North Atlantic Alliance linking Europe, the United States, and Russia collapse.
v France, Germany, Russia, and China form a coalition to balance what they perceive as growing U.S. military-economic hegemony, joined by Brazil, India, South Korea, and other developing countries.
v Global military spending experiences a sharp rise, as the U.S. and its allies and the opposing bloc countries enter the spiral of an arms race.
v Global economic stagnation combined with U.S. unilateralism weakens the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. As regional economic agreements become more attractive than multilateral trade arrangements and bilateral trade with the U.S., trade wars become frequent and destabilizing.
v North-South trade agreements are cancelled and trade flows disrupted; the international economic/financial system is in shambles.
v People pressed into poverty join rebellions against local landowners and government officials.
The ecological dimensions
v Water and food shortages in Sub-Sahara Africa, China, southern Asia, and Mesoamerica generate water- and hunger-wars.
v The overexploitation of soils and overfishing of seas and rivers reduce yields in the industrialized countries and produce growing dependence on a shrinking stock of international food reserves.
v Starvation and unsanitary conditions accelerate the spread of HIV/AIDS, SARS, and other epidemics throughout the poor countries.
v The Gulf Stream vacillates, producing icy temperatures in spring and summer in western and northern Europe.
The military fallout
v Political and economic conflict between the U.S. and its allies, and the opposing military-political bloc reaches a crisis point; hawks and armaments lobbies press for the use of weapons of mass destruction.
v Strong-arm regimes come to power in the Southern Hemisphere, determined to use armed force to right perceived wrongs.
v Regional wars erupt in the traditional hot spots and spread to neighboring countries.
v The major military-political-economic power blocs decide to make use of their arsenals of hi-tech weaponry to achieve their economic and political objectives.
v Some among the new strong-arm regimes employ nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons to resolve regional conflicts.
v War fought with conventional and nonconventional weapons escalates to the global level.
No change leads to breakdown, but there is another path we could take.
2. The Timely Transformation Scenario
The first steps
v The experience of terrorism and war together with rising poverty and the threats posed by a changing climate trigger positive changes in the way people think. The idea that individuals and small groups themselves can be effective agents of transformation toward a more peaceful and sustainable world captures the imagination of more and more people. People in different cultures and different walks of life pull together to confront the threats they face in common.
v The worldwide rise of popular movements for peace and international cooperation leads to the election of similarly motivated political figures, lending fresh impetus to projects of economic cooperation and intercultural solidarity.
v Political and opinion leaders wake up to the urgent need to come to the aid of the most immediately endangered populations and create a world-level organization to monitor the threats, provide warning, and raise the funds to undertake rescue operations.
v Local, national, and global business leaders decide to adopt a strategy where the pursuit of profit and growth is informed by the search for corporate social and ecological responsibility.
v An electronic E-Parliament comes online, linking parliamentarians worldwide and providing a forum for debates on the best ways to serve the common good.
v Nongovernmental organizations link up through the Internet and develop shared strategies to restore peace, revitalize war-torn regions and environments, and ensure an adequate supply of food and water. They promote socially and ecologically responsible policies in local and national governments and in business.
The crystallizing contours of a cooperative world
v Money is reassigned from military and defense budgets to fund practical attempts at conflict resolution and the implementation of internationally agreed and globally coordinated social and ecological sustainability projects.
v A worldwide renewable energy program is created, paving the way toward a third industrial revolution that makes use of solar and other renewable energy resources to transform the global economy, provide clean water, and lift marginalized populations out of the vicious cycles of poverty.
v Agriculture is restored to a place of primary importance in the world economy, both for producing staple foods and for growing energy crops and raw materials for communities and industry.
v Business leaders the world over join forces in creating a voluntarily self-regulating eco-social market economy that ensures fair access to natural resources as well as industrial goods and economic activity to all countries and populations.
The rise of a sustainable civilization
v National, continental, and global governance structures are reformed or newly created, moving states toward participatory democracy and releasing a surge of creative energy among empowered and increasingly active populations.
v The consensually created and globally coordinated eco-social market system begins to function; as a result the natural resources required for health and well-being become available throughout the world community.
v International and intercultural mistrust, ethnic conflict, racial oppression, economic injustice, and gender inequality give way to a higher level of trust and the shared will to achieve peaceful relations among states and sustainability in the economy and the environment.
We could change direction: with a timely transformation we could create a peaceful and sustainable world. Will we create it? Einstein told us that we cannot solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that produced it. yet, for the present we are still trying to do just that. We are fighting terrorism, poverty, criminality, cultural conflict, climate change, environmental degradation, ill health, even obesity and other “sicknesses of civilization” with the same means and methods that produced the problems in the first place – we are resorting to armies and police forces, technological fixes, and temporary remedial measures. We have not mustered the will and the vision to bring about timely transformation.
Is it too late?
- “I think we have little option,” British biologist James Lovelock concluded in The Revenge of Gaia, “but to prepare for the worst, and assume that we have passed the threshold.”
- The threshold refers to the point where the self-maintaining dynamic of the system breaks down and leads irreversibly to catastrophe.
- The global climate is crashing, full of tipping points and feedback loops beyond which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden self-perpetuating collapse.
- A number of critical processes feed on themselves and are out of control. As the Arctic ice melts, the sea absorbs more warmth, which makes for more melting; as Siberian permafrost disappears, the methane released from the peat bog below exacerbates the greenhouse effect and makes for more melting and thus for more methane.
- Doomsday arguments miss a basic point: they do not recognize that not only is nature a dynamic system capable of rapid transformation but humanity is also.
- “Butterfly effects” – the idea that the tiny stream of air created by the flutter of the wings of a butterfly can amplify many times over and end by creating a storm on the other side of the planet – are possible.
- In today’s near-chaotic, unstable, and hence ultrasensitive world such “butterflies” as the thinking, the values, the ethic, and the consciousness of a critical mass in society can trigger fundamental transformation.
The positive outlook
- We are nearing a tipping point, but the situation is far from hopeless.
- At the present time retrograde policies are still dominant. This is not a bad thing as in the more advanced segments of the population it raises the level of urgency of economic, social, and political reforms.
- We must, and still can, head toward a timely shift in values, vision, and behaviors.
- Evolution to a sustainable civilization, or descent into crisis, chaos, and possibly extinction: that, as Hamlet would now say, is the question.