Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Nuclear Annihilation, Overpopulation and Environmental Destruction are Still on the Horizon. Death, The Fourth Horseman Is The Proximity Of That Horizon...

The Doomsayers and Conspiracy Theorists have been crying “Wolf” since the end of the Cold War, but just how close are we to being nuked or running out of room to live or trashing the Earth?

Especially when one considers the absolute outside possibility of enough ice accumulating on the poles to cause the earth’s crust to shift?

Or Nibiru dropping off another bunch of Aliens to show us how to get out of this mess or have us for dinner?

One of the many functions of a University is to examine alternatives to taken-for-granted paradigms thar run ‘in the real world’.

Decentralisation in global corporate structures was an early innovation In the rapidly changing world of corporate management, and introduced the idea of Independent Profit Centers within global financial management hierarchies, a paradigm that originated at Harvard while Total Supply Chain Management was the brainchild of a Canadian University brought about by one simple question regarding what was then known simply as Supply Chain Management, a common component of business management.

Later, in the eighties, “Flattening’ management structures” was easy when computers gave productivity data 24/7 beating by miles the quarterly reports of middle managers. It was best described by a Unilever CEO in Europe: “There used to be seventeen people between me and the lowest factory sweeper in Hong Kong; now there are three”.

While I did not attend that institution, my involvement with business innovation began with a postgraduate course at the Harvard School of Business in ’64 which explored some of the implications of ‘The Acceleration in the Rate of Change’ over every aspect of the human condition from the number of people born in a year which influences the number of scientific journals published, the increasing number of patents applied for, increases overall production and consumption – everything.

Faster and faster every day!

I would include the exponentially expanding Internet Revolution in that course today.

The study was confined to learning how to create tools that could be used in building model solutions to problems related to rapidly changing aspects of global commerce including the business of war which had reached the point at which, in Viet Nam, the number of veteran suicides exceeded the number of battle casualties, indicating a failure of the ideologies behind military expansion, but not of any faith in its profits by the practitioners.

The course was packed (even though extremely limited in numbers admitted) as it suggested a chaotic view of the imminent future, “if everything is in a naturally and rapidly accelerating rate of change, everything will eventually reach its own saturation point. But how soon?“

Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse, nuclear annihilation, overpopulation and environmental destruction were only then being seen on the horizon.

The Fourth was the proximity of that horizon.

The course implied that there would come a point where change itself would be so rapid, that in every field the rate of change would approach infinity – easily shown if drawn on a simple graph. 
The irony then – and a conclusion drawn from the course – was that all those saturation points looked like they would be reached at the same time in the very near future – today, the so-called End Times, when other, larger cosmic changes were about to reach a peak, particularly the time of the Earth Crust Shift – which brought one man to declare recently that this period of human existence is “The End of History”.

There is some sense in a few end times theories if one considers the reality of the earth as a living organism of which we are but small, hugely inflated skin-encapsulated egos plastered onto its surface, accellerating toward speeds we simply cannot handle.

Certain saturation points were already being pinpointed by various think tanks – after all, everything comes to an end eventually and most finite resources run out, the earth being a closed ecosystem doesn’t mean one can rearrange its components for ever.

These were described as ‘peak’ energy resource points – peak oil, for instance or peak anything that we totally rely on – phosphates, coal, molybdenum – anything that produces energy that can neither be created nor destroyed, but which certainly can be used up, eventually leaving the Universe at Absolute Zero.

Peaks in local energy resources are points beyond which we go into the second half of a finite resource at a highly accelerated reduction in the amounts available and the ‘second half’ runs out many times faster than the ‘first half’ did.

Like oil, and what we’re fighting over is what’s left.

   Of course, resources like food are sustainable recombinants of energy replenished by the sun.

Another point is theoretically reached when an entire envelope of knowledge in any field simply cannot be contained – or the envelope extended – by any one person, group or understandable computer program facing speed-of-light change – the left hand becomes unaware that there is even a right hand somewhere doing something incomprehensible.

But we do know that an individual can still push the frontier beyond today.

When change becomes so rapid that the average individual, group or ideology in a system cannot keep up with it, most disciplines could slip into short-term chaos, after which the “race” will appear to have been “won” by the most powerful governing paradigm whether it be political, economic, ideological or military.

I do not know.

But there are two major powers fighting it out on the planet today – the US and China; the one using ‘Shock and Awe’ to expand the other using trade and aid. The panic is in the west’s observation that the economic clout is shifting east in spite of the west’s ultra-sophisticated weaponry – did the west fail to understand that Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended any argument for military conflict except for profit?

If so, that horizon is worse than any fiscal cliff.

Politics today is focused on achieving a single global governance while economics has been reduced to a quest for a universal (and possibly still debt-based) currency under that governance.

The addiction to energy has led to a race for a monopolistic control of resources.

The tragedy of profit before people is conventional warfare’s total indifference to damage in human collateral and the continued denial of any real distribution of wealth supported by ideologies that continue to be used as a divide-and-rule tool for absolute control.

But control over an infinity of change may be infinitely difficult.

This is called ‘thinking global’ but its corollary,  ‘acting local’, is much more productive in that thinking local could avoid some of the temporary downsides of any central system attempting to either control everything in sight or destroy enough to establish control over what’s left in the event of a large socio-economic disruption.

THE SEEDS OF ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

Briefly, a nation’s Debt-to-GDP ratio indicates its proximity to the edge of a ‘fiscal cliff’ over which lies total bankruptcy and default.

Most western nations (including the US since the second quarter of last year) are well over the 100% Debt/GDP point and have been both robbing the public purse and borrowing expensive fiat money in a futile effort to push the edge further into the future.

There comes a point at which all GDP revenues will be used for ‘debt servicing’ rather than maintenance of basic infrastructure and at that point lights and water, roads and bridges, food and other distribution systems – must start down the road to eventual collapse, which is where acting local beats submission to any ideology – farmers for instance have been repairing their own rural road systems for a number of years and home schooling must become the norm.

There are myriad examples of small communities not just surviving but living day-to-day in real prosperity during past ideological conflicts or even tyrannical rule – the pre-Industrial Revolution Commons and the original Commons-based American Colonies are probably the best examples of resource availability in terms of production exceeding demand, particularly of food, which is the major concern.

It goes without saying that if Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs remains the simplest outline of steps to any human fulfillment, then the satisfaction of bodily needs – air, water and food, followed by shelter – must necessarily be in place before any further ascent up the ladder to spiritual inter-connectivity can even be considered.

Which is why most religious ‘prophets’ and ‘messengers’ insist that people grow their own food, for “he who controls the granaries, controls the people”.

There are very few socio-political structures existing on this planet today that include an even distribution of wealth along with fairness and honesty in all dealings but there are plenty of working models form the past to draw from including the Roman Empire before it succumbed to the same banking system destroying things today.

North Dakota, most recently Iceland and some African and South American states today, all of which control their own central banks, can be used.

With a political will based on just a modicum of awareness about our potential situation relative to the global financial collapse going on everyone have more than enough resources in hand to create a powerful, independent and prosperous community.

Then the earth’s crust can shift, but we’ll know we’ve conquored ourselves when we actually consider melting the poles… Just in case.

tomdennen