Ill fares the Globe

I’m not particularly fond of prophecies – unless they tend to become reality.

The past decade we saw many visionaries, who claimed that the new millennium was the beginning of a new era.  Back in 1999 people got quite nervous about it – and now, in 2014 we can try to establish the current state of affairs in hindsight.

For the average reader, major trends became clear: the dominant social-political solutions have not been able to solve the problems we face today. The social democratic project that created the welfare state after WWII in the modernity (some West European Countries) failed. Its guarantee for a life-worth-living for the masses proved to be rather unsustainable.  Since the seventies, the neo-liberal project proclaimed free market as the end and the beginning of every human society. This project proclaimed the rational choice model as the standard human behavior in literally every corner of inter-human relations. And it failed in its promise for humankind. Money and capital do not trickle down, but simply concentrates in the hands of a lucky few. Thus ever increasing the gap between the rich and the poor and making the life of billions of people ever more precarious. The third solution: socialism combined with centralized economies, was hardly ever heard of, since the Berlin wall was torn down in 1989.

Project Europe is facing its self-created democratic deficit and is hardly surviving. The world government in its various forms such as United Nations, IMF and World Bank developed as a play ground for the international elite – who every now and then apologizes for its wrong doings. For example; the IMF recently apologized for its destructive actions in the Greek tragedy.  “Today, neither left nor right can find their footing” as the late Tony Judt put it in his famous book Ill Fares the Land – in 2010. We might well extend his observation to ‘ill fares the Globe’. Certainly as long as both BRIC countries and the underdeveloped countries seem to have the ambition to re-do all mistakes the modernity made.

It is altogether clear that we are longing for a new era, for new energy – both literally as metaphorically. And history shows that if enough people have that ambition – it will happen.

A trained observer can already see, however, the shape of an upcoming, globally interconnected society: smaller scale government, increasingly better informed consumers and citizens, attempted redefining of labor and work, back to money and free markets as a means to serve society– not as a goal in itself, restraining the limitless desire for profit within the corporate world, repulse the inequalities in chances and income, re-establish cooperatives world wide. Smaller scale, self-sufficient entities however, need not to exist in splendid isolation – the combination with internet and social media infrastructures will guarantee free access to information and expertise any time, any place. (If Mr. President allows…)

Energy, environment and natural resources should not be a limiting factor for development in a better world –as we learn gradually how to use them. The least we can do is explore the possibilities: better understandings of nature and unknown resources of Breakthrough energy are key issues in this journey. Full comprehension seems far away –but there is enough ground to cover.Only then can we hope to answer the three basic questions in every ones life: ‘What can I know?’, ‘What should I do?’ and ‘What may I hope for?’.

For the answer to the first two questions: see also Sterling Allan’s article ‘Awakening to Breakthrough Free Energy Technologies Required’ in PULSE – the quarterly magazine of the Global Energy Movement.

The answer to the third question: I let you gladly decide for yourself – I suppose you will invent something ‘good’. Whatever that may mean….

Lex Ros