Home » multidimensional world (Page 143)
Category Archives: multidimensional world
2012 forecasts – the revolution of the concience
Here is the forecast for 2012 based on the model of the human complexities (“The Global Shift, a quantum leap in human evolution“, chapter 2, 2011) and related to the four quadrants that occupy our world in transformation the coming decade.
The revolution of the consciousness
1. The big splash
Most of our world economies are anchored in the unsustainable quadrant of greed. The credit crisis blew a big hole in the financial hot air balloon that was being filled up by governments, banks and business enterprises. The patchworks of capital injections don’t stop the system from collapsing simply because the collapse is part of a transformation and not a temporary recession. Many organizations and governments become aware of this but feel the burden of the old world still strongly present and are reluctant to take action, hoping for some miracle to happen still. Their professional mission is also to try to keep things going as it was against all odds.
The current world organization is historically fragmented into a network of geographic and business interests with money driven banks that are all linked up in a financial system. In such fragmented, money driven global society we see all the institutions take measures to save their own position, often at the expense of others. It seems all part of the game in which we see the worst of people dominate the scenes with tricks and manipulations to uphold old positions. Meanwhile the perspective of progress is lost out of sight. The consequences are that many institutions fail and crumble into sudden death due to lack of support, competitive strength, slow reaction time or total lack of sustainable basis.
Governments try to keep disaster away by injecting money they do not have, into old systems that do not solve anything anymore, just maybe increase the problem. And if no value is created there is nothing else to sustain the institutions than the injections that just delay their ending a bit more. More and more governments will go bankrupt or will try to slow down the inevitable by some measures (like economic reforms, raising taxes or whatever).
All banks have a large financial bubble that cannot be resolved so they only still remain in the picture because of the ties they have with in the form of debts that the public cannot and will not pay anymore forcing the banks into control of governments who placed trust in them with social security instruments. They fear loosing those too and with it the electoral support of their democratic backing. The outstanding loans of the banks have hardly any collateral anymore. They fall over further in 2012. More and more banks will not be able to comply with their obligations to the public that has its savings in it.
Businesses will try to go greener and greener, not just for marketing sake but also necessarily to compensate the competition for resources that outsizes the competition for sales. Products become more expensive in the markets of basic human needs. The green products do not stop the over- consumption that is still being stimulated by economies of growth, which eventually will create a further inflation due to a demand and growing shortages in deliveries. Prices rise and people cannot afford anymore their basic needs unless they get a higher personal debt which is unpayable already. The whole thing ends up in a big splash when all the global systems break their ties and focus on trying to do something about it locally.
2. Chaos
As the world’s large systems collapse along the line of organization complexities they enter the fragmented world of chaos where the local criminality and confrontations between people and systems grow, demanding local solutions around public safety, cohesion and integrity. The chaos in financial markets will be very large but isolated from the general public unless the systems place unjust dictatorial demands on the public (claiming taxes, mortgage funds, outstanding debts, etc) that will cause the rise of the masses against the systems. The public itself will also have plenty to demand that the old systems cannot give anymore s.a. pensions, social securities, insurance, etc. which will also get groups of people to the barricades.
The greatest problem in a situation of chaos is that groups of people try to take benefit of others through criminal activities and acts for survival. At the same time many will try to find others to blame for the entire situation. This entire process in a multicultural environment of migration is highly unstable and volatile. It will be highly dependent on the type of leadership that develops on extremely local basis to either escalate aggression or keep peace. All hopes are placed on the development of our consciousness, individually but also in the the institutions.
3. Awareness and consciousness
The positive thing is that this process is linear but affects people, countries and institutions in different phases. This means that many individuals already went through their personal chaos, process of letting go and enlightenment through the development of their consciousness. The growing amount of people with deep insight but also the cultural creatives that have views of the unsustainable situation of today, become representative of early experiments around creating a new type of society.
At this stage still it all depends on individuals, even people with a position in the established industries and governments who are standing up showing personal leadership in this complex situation. For quite some time new initiatives in the field of sustainable progress were crushed by the fearless and ruthless greedy systems of power in their attempt to keep their positions. This may still occur but more and more often we see the opposition grow using totally new instruments to organize the basics of a new society.
Most people and institutions do not want chaos, the threat of (civil) war or struggles around resources and gain insight rapidly. Businesses are repositioning themselves to serve a system by not producing products but sustainable results, involving many more people that strictly possible with the financial means they have. They start building on new value systems that are being developed together with the people who contribute to progress (instead of going to work. National governments loose control and need to allow local and regional governance to facilitate local for local recovery based on local self sufficiency and creation of local values.
What will happen with Europe? From an ideological point of view the concept of Europe was excellent but wrongly focused on financials and not on human progress. The financial Europe will necessarily collapse but the unity of Europe will eventually find some continuity in its own human consciousness of the need to develop global unity, not territorial fragmentation. This sustainable progress aspect of glocalization, local for local for global in a network of relations between self sufficient communities, can start in a new Europe.
The Euro will not be necessary in a world based on abundance of human talent and energy instead of the scarcity inherent to economics of growth. The development of content societies will create totally different needs and isolate the speculative systems that our now still powerfully in place. They are already under pressure living through their own shake out while respect and recognition for money itself and systems representing it, is rapidly deteriorating.
The revolution of the conscience will infect the entire global population as the pain of the old systems hits all people and the institutions. There will be large communities that may even not survive and the global human population will be reduced in the process. How much is difficult to say because it will also depend on the power of the grouping of the enlightened and the level of opposition or support received from the old establishments of remaining power and greed.
The revolution of the consciousness represents a new phase in human evolution and will go into our history as a decisive relatively short period of dramatic suffering, a collapse and recovery, but with a totally new elan of human continuity, respecting our species, its vulnerability, its relation with our natural environment and our evolutionary perspective.
In the end the revolution is the best thing that can happen to humankind but the suffering that will spread through the systems, societies and civilizations caused by the darkest side of human mentality, will be unprecedented in history too. There will hardly be any war but the conversion from total global financial dependencies to independence and self sufficiency is so intense that we will face important periods of structural shortages causing local panic, problems and signs of leadership and the lack thereof.
The long term peace that follows everything will not only be needed but will be secured by all involved to avoid new processes that have lead to the point of singularity and collapse. The global conscience will have made a giant leap that will not easily fall back in old human misbehavior. It will become the basis of a totally new phase in human progress.
And all this will happen in just a few decades and will be seen happening by most people that are alive today. The sooner one develops his or her own consciousness the sooner one can act accordingly.
How the Content Economy affects you
The very basic, key requirement in a content economy is that every individual human participant becomes self-aware, self-conscious of sustainable progress and self-sufficient through auto-determination, self-leadership and independence from centralized structures.
That is a lot of responsibility for a single person! How can you cope with self-sufficiency when the entire world seems to be attached to the strings of centralized controls? If you cut those strings where would you live? Get your food? Your water or energy supplies? Health care? Clothing? How would you get rid of your waste or move from A to B?
The transformation from a growth economy of centralized dependencies to a content economy of self-sufficiency in sustainable progress is not just a simple ideological decision, it is a personal commitment to turn your entire life upside down.
Even on the individual level such new type of society would require a structural renewal of the way you address your life on a daily basis. It would take various years of learning new skills and integrating them into your existence in such a way that you get again a feeling of abundance. The learning period will be tough because your self sufficiency would not produce enough yet for you to adequately survive. You are forced to work together with others who are in a similar process.
In essence we see the following happening on the individual level but also in business, local government and institutions. The whole thing boils down again into four phases:
1. Acceptance of the new paradigm: This element is key to understand and commit to the process you go through and find the motivation to endure the tough transition period.
2. Personal leadership: Someone only decides to depart from situation A towards a new situation B if the latter provides better perspectives than the first. For may it is a tough decision to make, requiring reassurance through a growing awareness and consciousness as the local, personal or global crises clarify the ideas. Once the decision has been taken you are ready to address to future with determination keeping that desired new situation in mind during the entire process.
3. New professional skills: gradually you will find what skills are required to address your new challenges. We all have many skills already and today, with the usage of internet we have access to a large diversity of knowledge without having to move from our chair. Applying new skills to produce abundance will totally depend on the environment in which you develop your independence. Nowadays technology is very much advanced to produce abundance in nearly any environment on the planet and beyond. It is up to our creativity and adaptability to implement it for our benefit. Some may argue that access to technology costs money and indeed this may be true in the transition phase. But when we look at the abundance of tools that have grown obsolete in the last few decades, or even now due to the crises, we have plenty to pick from at nearly no other costs than that what we need to get the materials to us. Creativity, wit and guts is much more valuable than the tooling that is lying around us unused.
4. Purpose driven cooperation: when we consider true abundance, with the use of modern technology and our own talents and energy we can and maybe need to work together with our neighbors. For certain requirements we need a certain productivity scale to be auto-sufficient. Combining these interests with those who face the same problem will add up 1+1 and make 3.
Such cooperation is even possible on a larger urban scale involving self aware institutions and governance. Dealing with result driven self sufficiency through applied technology one may find the need to involve such institutions even if they still operate in the old paradigm. Consider the challenge of people living in dense urban city environments. How would they be able to cope with content economy if the only way to access food production is by applying the most modern views on urban vertical and spatial agriculture. And even such fragmented self sufficiency would necessarily be combined with innovative usage of water, waste management cycles, energy production and usage.
Such techniques would become multi-disciplinary and multi-functional requiring the cooperative participation of people with a large diversity of skills. Over 50% of the global human population now concentrate their lives in dense urban environments due to the effects of hundreds of years of economic based paradigm. And this amount is only growing. Even if we wanted we could not turn this clock back fast. So a very intense local small scale urban cooperation will need to develop rapidly to create sufficient output to provide the participating people with a minimum amount of life support in the transition phase to avoid an exodus into the country side or total urban anarchy.
It is a totally new area of development that is still in its teens from an expertise point of view but key for the survival of massive amounts of people who have nothing else than their 26th floor, 80 m2 apartment to deal with when the old paradigm collapses further. The current centralized power positions around food, water, energy and other basic supplies have fragmented the local available productivity into single massive product production lines for global distribution. The diversity of products surrounding the cities is extremely limited and scarce, in such a way that it would never be able to help the starving city population in case of disaster. Sufficient local diversity for self sufficiency would take decades of focused transformation to develop. Eg. With the current footprint the nearly 17 million people counting population of Holland would need a territory of 20 stories to supplies its needs. This is of course impossible so we have two options: reduce drastically our consumptive life styles while trying to use space as well as possible or allow the unthinkable the reduction of the population to sustainable levels by allowing them to perish or move to other places….A reversed migration away from the cities would create such devastation in the encounter of the travelling masses that it would represent a human disaster of unknown precedence. The best option we truly have today, while the old paradigm is still holding up, is to do our best to implement the content economy where ever we can right now, taking individual responsibility while we can, having access to resources and knowledge without yet the stress of surrounding chaos.
Right now the STIR Foundation has already started to work with small scale local new cooperative initiatives to at least create sufficient experience in working with new result driven models based on equality and competences, rather than hierarchy and speculation. Many of the human interests cannot be addressed comfortably in this way because they are still trapped in the economized hierarchies. These old power positions will try to milk their cash cows as long as they can before they fall over, even if this finally means that the transformation will come too late or at the expense of huge sacrifice.
All that people like you and me can do today is to accept the fact that we need to take responsibility sooner or later. The sooner we take our first steps at picking up the right skills, establishing the network of contact for early experiments, the better it is. I personally did and know now how painfully difficult it is. By keeping our initiatives low key or outside the reigning systems we remain at a safe distance to experiment at will. When the openings come due to the recessions and massive crisis we can try to expand expertise fast like fractals. Via twitter, blogs, social media we can share experiences in an open way and stimulate more and more people to start developing their own initiatives and join the movement.
Meanwhile remember the psychology of change that affects most people. For some time to come the largest part of the population will laugh at you while you are at it while the systems will try to do what they can to stop you, uphold themselves at the expense of everything or get you back into the old systems through tricks backed by the reigning laws. That’s the name of the game. At the end the content economy will of course affect you positively and provide you and the surroundings with sustainable progress. But before that it is the process of letting go and diving into the in depth transformation that produces all the pain and challenges. It is up to you if you want to take the leap or wait if the whole thing solves itself.
Government in Content Economy
The transformation from an economy of growth into a content economy also claims an entirely new role for government. Current governments are generally “in charge” of the wellness of a country by determining what has to be done and what not in just about everything that concerns a country. In a democratic government the governance is determined by the public that chooses for its favorite representative. The other political powers, the opposition, are then confined to a political debate and by rule “against” any statement of government. This has its logic, challenging government’s moves and propositions with counter arguments even when these seem far fetched and highly artificial when one watches the debates. The problem we face with any government in an economic growth scenario is that all the discussions tend to go about money, growth and money again, since everything has been translated into financial parameters. That is no democracy anymore and we see that any political party, no matter what color or signature, when in charge does exactly the same as the others simply because there is no other choice than the standard middle way around money. In other times when there was indeed a difference, eg. the left wing parties defending the interests of the working class and the right wing parties the interests of the industrials that provided the jobs, there was still a fanatic debate to be observed and hot emotional encounters in the streets. Now that the jobs have been exported to low wage countries and all the individuals also only care about the amount of money one can spend every month, no matter where it comes from (salary, debt, credit card, heritage), the democratic debate has just one senseless signature everywhere.
The entire political organization has evolved into a machinery to try to create economic efficiency in their own territory and negotiate or even demand forcefully from the weaker around the world, the support to keep that machinery going and growing. This is not something of the last few decades, it is an evolution that is reaching its highest point now but started thousands of years ago. Back then the planet Earth was huge, people has no real awareness of any potential scarcity of resources unless it affected them in the small scale of their own territory and got them to set out to get it from elsewhere, often with violent encounters. In the early 17th century the Dutch started the very first multinational to travel and deal with the East Indies. For over 200 years it traveled the world and is still admired by many. In reality the monopolistic nature, the aggressive speculation, power struggles, self enrichment of the leaders and corruption are equally interesting to see as they can now still be found in the boardrooms of banks, industries and also governments when they obsessively deal with money, power and growth. When one takes on the job of a ruler over such enterprise, political or business, dealing just with money, one automatically becomes a representative of this mentality. Back then it affected over a few 100 years the Portuguese (15th century), the Dutch (16th and 17th century), the Spanish and finally the English (18th century) when they started to “rule the waves”. Now it affects the entire human world with 7 billion individuals in the hands of a few 100 speculative families and political groups that keep up the culture of humanity, producing disaster over humanity for the sake of personal wealth. But then again, it was all possible, they had the opportunity and took it. It is all part of the mentality of an aggressive species that has the morality similar to a cockroach.
The fact that we now talk about footprints, CO2, dirty air, plastic in the oceans, etc only started about 40 years ago. But this awareness does not change the inherited, historical culture of greed and growth that we translated into economies and that drives the political discussion and also the public interest. So why should this suddenly come to end, transforming the selfish cockroach into a (spiritual) butterfly?
Combination of unique factors
We can relate to the results of the Dutch VOC that went down under in corruption, scandals and greed. That was just a minority of people compared to the amount of people that try to outsmart each other today on the world market of speculation, tricks and misbehavior. In the end they will go down the drain, just like the ones that preceded in history and for exactly the same reasons. Especially in time of global crisis in just about every hierarchy that we can think of the secrete codes of conduct that bind the people who pretend to pull the global strings will be broken by themselves. Evil tends to punish itself.
The big difference today is that the speed of backfiring of evil tricks is very fast because of the global interconnected nature of all we do. We see that the bank’s greed exploded into our face after only a few decades of speculative actions. Dictators in Northern Africa and Middle East suddenly face the rise of their populations and within a year disappear from the scenery. Those who feel safe and in power today can be confronted with their own evil tomorrow. That is the effect of the growing educational basis of vast amounts of people that form self-conscious communities willing to claim freedom and auto-determination. Internet, twitter, gsm, fast travel, etc make the human world transparent to everyone including the mismanagement of those who believe in their own power. The borders are opening in a firm step to globalization and even now that politicians start seeing that this undermines their old positions of power it is too late. We are becoming rapidly global citizens that have a growing solidarity between all people. Many people have tasted the wealth of wellness through capitalism and become aware that the same wealth is also possible without the centralized power structures of the few. No one wants to be controlled by the banks, tax offices or dictating commodity speculators, which are the same few that make us vulnerable through their speculation and debt systems. When people cannot pay their debt because of the immorality of the debt system the reaction will be against the system to maintain their wealth but without the impositions. The same goes with food, energy, etc. To avoid (civil) war against banks, governments, business or personal power positions, all these organizations become aware of their own growing vulnerability and need to change attitude. There is no basis anymore to keep up the power positions and the most logical and even wise decision is to use their wealth to invest in their own transformation rather than trying to stop it.
New role of government
In a content economy the full attention of government goes to the wellness of its population within the context of a globalized world. This new focus is a very simple statement which will result in an in depth transformation of government. The very first question one can ask is what role a central government would play in all this? Centralized country governments are the structures around speculation and self interests of a territory but have hardly a role in a situation of bottom up self-sufficient wellness creation. On the contrary, even while they would have the natural tendency to try to avoid interference of their own public.
In a globalized human world around content economies the emphasis is on the small, local communities where social cohesion and self-sufficiency produces purpose driven human interaction. The smallest community with government attention is hence the village or city quarter. What kind of government would be needed above that? To control or govern what? Nothing really, except maybe a cooperative structure among the self sufficient communities for trade among the communities, infrastructures or the strategic interaction to exchange goods, experiences or help each other in aspects related to safety, calamities, migrations, etc. The multi-dimensionality of regional sustainable progress involves the local based interaction of different responsibilities as already introduced in the previous blogs. There is no hierarchy anymore just focus on key responsibilities s.a. applied technology, applied scientific research, local health & vitality and local self sufficient dynamics, all people interacting together on the basis of sustainable progress.
Regional government hence will be small, concentrated on local regional development based on sustainable progress but connected to the global network of communities (local 4 local 4 global or glocalization). Government takes territorial, facilitating responsibility in co-creation with the other pillars for progress. The structure of government will be defined by the community itself without politics but from the individual proven drive and insight of the holistic picture.
The transition has already been happening for some decades as cities started to resemble small countries within the countries, with their own positioning in the world economies and an image of their own. In Europe we see more and more central, general decision making being dealt with in the European Union while provinces or local autonomic regions take more and more responsibility through auto-determination and self-sufficiency. Most government combine now social responsibilities with their speculative origins, creating tremendous bureaucracies over time that are now collapsing because one cannot speculate with human health and prosperity anymore. Global humankind is too well informed to allow new pyramids of power to develop so the financial collapse of the bureaucrats will place the responsibilities back with the public. These will organize their own governance using the know-how, techniques and adaptive flexibility that modern tooling provides us today. The steering that is necessary to manage the freedom effectively is already being experimented with in various scenarios. Sustainable progress is the perfect leading trigger to keep everyone focused. It is only a matter of time for the transformation to show its effects, eliminating the old power structures and hierarchies without excessive violence and with determination. The new government already exists, it is only not yet fully effective or visible because of the old dominance of the hierarchies that still exist and try to keep themselves in place. The more the financial and other crises expand and take their toll the more renewal we will see around us, and many who are now sitting home watching all this on their TV sets may suddenly find themselves standing up and taking the initiatives for self-sufficient sustainable progress in their own street. It can happen just like that.
