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 IV

Chapter 2: Macroshift: The Dynamics (Cont.)

Phases of a Macroshift

Macroshifts have recognizable phases. Typically there are four major phases: first an initial phase of gradual but ongoing change, then a subsequent phase of more rapid build-up. After that comes a phase of crisis and bifurcation, and ultimately a concluding phase that can be one of breakthrough to a new and more stable system or breakdown into crisis and chaos.

The trigger Phase

Innovations in “hard” technologies (tools, machines, operational systems) bring about greater efficiency in the manipulation of nature for human ends.

The Transformation Phase

Hard technology innovations, irreversibly change social and environmental relations and bring about, successively,

v A higher level of resource production,

v Faster growth of population

v Greater societal complexity, and

v Growing impact on the social and the natural environment.

The Critical (or “Chaos) Phase

Changed social and environmental relations put pressure on the established culture, placing into question time-honored values and worldviews and the ethics and ambitions associated with them. Society becomes chaotic in the chaos theory sense of the term: it does not lack order but exhibits a subtle order that is extremely sensitive to fluctuations. The evolution of the dominant culture – the way people’s values, views, and ethics respond to change – determines the outcome of the system’s chaos leap, that is, the way its development trajectory forks off.

4(a). The Breakdown Phase

The values, worldviews, and ethics of a critical mass of people in society are resistant to change, or change too slowly, and the established institutions are too rigid to allow for timely transformation. Social complexity, coupled with a degenerating environment, creates unmanageable stresses. The social order is exposed to a series of crises that soon degenerate into conflict and violence.

4(b). The Breakthrough Phase

The mind-sets of a critical mass of people evolve in time, shifting the culture of society toward s better-adapted mode. As these changes take hold, the improved social order – governed by more adapted values, worldviews, and ethics – establishes itself. Society stabilizes itself in its changed condition.

For an established social order, technological innovations are a mixed blessing. On the one hand innovations in the “hard” (matter- and energy-transforming) technologies help people do what they want to do with greater ease and less investment of time, energy, and money. They amplify the power of muscles to move and transform matter, they extend the power of the eye to see and the ear to hear, and they enlarge the power of the brain to register and compute information. On the other hand new technologies have unforeseen and often seriously undesirable “side effects.” They place in question established practices, institutions, and ideals. They change people’s ways of working and living, and they have a negative impact on the environment.

A time comes when the accumulation of innovative hard technologies exceeds the ability of society’s structures and institutions to govern and to manage.
Resource production increases, both through a more effective exploitation of the already exploited resources and by opening up new resources.
A larger quantity and a wider variety of resources enable more people to produce and to consume. As a result, the population grows.
There is a need for special skills and special-purpose organizational structures.
The complexity of society grows, compounding the instability created by the growth of its population and its resource base.
Dependence is created between previously separate people and economies. The range of interaction expands.
This puts pressure on society’s institutions and governance structures; new ways of governing and administering communities and doing business are required.
Some people and some societies come up with new ways and reap benefits; others fail to come along.
Society polarizes into modern and traditional, rich and poor, and powerful and marginalized segments.
A complex society using sophisticated technologies places a critical load not only on society’s institutions and governance structures but on the environment.
Forests fail to regenerate, soils are impoverished, the climate changes, freshwater tables are lowered, ocean levels rise, and the atmosphere becomes polluted.

Ultimately the Macroshift builds toward a point of bifurcation, the critical third phase at which society’s evolutionary path is rapidly decided. As in nature, bifurcations are triggered by instabilities that are beyond the ability of the system to overcome: this is the true meaning of “unsustainability.” The status quo becomes untenable, and the system either comes up with new ways of maintaining itself or it goes under.

In contemporary society unsustainability is the result of economic and social expansion combined with environmental change and degradation.
Frustration breeds resentment and generates hate and violence. Society enters a period of social and political crisis.
Then comes the Macroshift’s final phase.
Depending on the evolution of the dominant civilization, society either breaks down in violence and chaos or breaks through to a more adapted sustainable civilization.
This four-phase process is the reality of the world we live in. Two of the phases are behind us, and the last phase is ahead of us.
We live in the third phase: the critical phase of a societal bifurcation.
The challenge is not to enter phase 4(a), the breakdown phase, but phase 4(b), the breakthrough phase.

Navigating the global Macroshift

In the human world, unlike in nature, a bifurcation can be decisively influenced by conscious will and considered purpose. Human will and purpose decide whether the world heads toward breakdown or toward breakthrough. This sensitivity to human intervention is a remarkable feature of today’s civilization. It places a unique opportunity in our hands: the opportunity to tip the scales of human destiny.

We need a deeper understanding of the direction of evolution through Macroshifts. We begin with the concept of “suprasystem.”

The over 190 nation-states of today’s world claim independence and sovereignty for themselves, but their autonomy is increasingly restricted: for the most part nation-states are highly dependent on other states and on transborder economic and financial flows. National governments no longer have sovereignty over their own territory: all manner of weapons penetrate their frontiers, the same as information, goods, and people. Given that international and transnational exchanges of goods and technologies are in the hands of transnational corporations, national governments are unable to ensure the viability of the nation’s economy, and given that pollution knows no frontiers, they are likewise unable to guarantee the physical integrity of their territory.

Even if they are large and wealthy, nation-states cannot survive in isolation; a condition of their self-maintenance is that they produce viable conditions for the states with which they are economically and politically linked. This constitutes a supranational cross-catalytic cycle. It is the basis for the functioning of the transnational organizations of which the European Union (EU) is a prime example.

In today’s Macroshift the suprasystem-building process leads from national to regional level systems, and ultimately to a system on the global level.
Regional groupings such as the EU and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) operate in conjunction with global intergovernmental organizations, such as the World Bank group and the World Trade Organization, and take over more and more of the functions of national governments.
Control of the flow of goods, information, and people shifts toward the global level.

A note on the global corporation

The global business corporation is a potent and remarkable but not an arbitrary phenomenon: it is the outcome of a coherent evolutionary process, spurred by two developments. One is the intensification of transborder flows of matter, energy, and information, and the other is the decoupling of the private sphere of business from the public sphere of the nation-state.

Until the second half of the 18^th century, the economic activities of the citizens of nation-states were largely limited to local resources and locally developed skills.
By the second half of the 19^th century the first industrial revolution brought a battery of new technologies on the scene.
In the course of the 20^th century technological innovations shifted industrial production from coal and steam, textiles, machine tools, glass, pre-Bessemer forged steel, and labor-intensive agriculture, to electricity, the internal combustion engine, organic chemistry, and large-scale manufacturing that was soon to grow beyond the borders on national states.
In the last quarter of the 20^th century vast quantities of information came to be stored on optical disks and communicated by fiber optics and networked computers.
The new technologies intensified the transborder flows of information, energy, raw materials, and finished products.
They brought into play the natural and human resources of whole continents, ultimately the entire globe.
The operational units and technological installations of innovative corporations spread to all parts of the globe.
Today some global corporations are wealthier than all but a handful of nation-states, and the largest among them employ more people than the population of the majority of the world’s nearly 200 nation-states.

In conclusion

Societal evolution is a long-term process, with roots extending back to our species’ prehistory. It is on the whole irreversible, and it is nonlinear, beset with periodic bifurcations. The current bifurcation takes human community-building from the nation-state to the planetary level. It is as profound as any evolutionary process in history, but it is incomparably faster than anything that went before. It poses enormous challenges of adaptation for individuals and societies.

The principal challenge facing people and societies today is to shift the civilization that now dominates human life and determines its future. This, as we shall discuss in chapter 7, means a shift from Logos, today’s economically, politically, and culturally fragmented civilization, to Holos, a global civilization that processes the will and the vision to achieve solidarity and translate it into international and intercultural coexistence and cooperation.

Chapter 3: The Roots of Unsustainability

Quantum Shift in the Global Brain Part 4