Crisis and Opportunity
New Laws
Imagine yourself driving your car when it suddenly begins to choke and shudder. At first, it’s only one system that breaks down, but then another and another follow. It’s not that the car has completely shut down. The main systems, like the engine and the gear, are still running. But the lights go on and off intermittently, and every so often the car jerks to a halt. Then, miraculously, the failing engine restarts.
Yes, you’re still moving but the odds are not good that you’ll continue moving much longer. If this happened to you, what would you do?
In much the same way, our entire world is gradually becoming dysfunctional. There are breakdowns everywhere, but we are still gamely pulling forward, despite the warnings of experts. They tell us that, in the current state of affairs, we must do an overhaul or the whole machine of humanity will come to a complete standstill, at an enormous cost. If the economy continues to deteriorate, the nearly 50 million Americans living on food stamps will multiply many times over, and many others will suffer real hunger all over the world, not just in the poorest countries, as today.
The crisis that’s jolting the world is reality’s way of informing us that we aren’t running it properly. We have built a system of banks, industry, and international relations that have gone out of our control. We are learning that the Keynesian principles of embedded self-interest and invisible hand no longer keep our selfishness in check. Like a spreading cancer, we are destroying our planet, as well as our society.
Nowhere to Run
In a global economic crisis, each country tends to think, “How good would it be if we could separate ourselves from the rest of the world, have all our needs for the sustenance of our citizens provided by ourselves, and be completely self-sufficient just as we were a hundred years ago or so? Why don’t we turn back the wheel, set up high tariffs to impede import, trade with other countries only where we are totally incapable of providing for ourselves, and freeze all business partnerships with overseas companies? Yes, the standard of living may drop, but we would be less dependent on others.”
We don’t understand that there is no way back from globalization. We can no longer separate ourselves from the rest of the world. Globalization and interdependence are here to stay. Cutting ourselves off would be like cutting an organ from a living organism in order to be saved from an illness that has afflicted the rest of the organism. If you cut off a finger, would it survive without the body from which it came?
A Boomerang
At first glance, mutual guarantee may seem utopian, too naïve a concept to work in our self-centered world. But in fact, life is now compelling us to adopt it!
Throughout history we have progressed by acting on the drives that arose within us. We constantly felt a need to do something, to change the status quo. We waged wars, fought in revolutions, and rebelled. We have advanced and grown through conflicts and struggles, but the price we paid was destruction.
Today, when we are interdependent, wars and struggles will not solve our problems. Brute force cannot mend the world. A connected world cannot be run with an egoistic mindset propagated by oppression and forced governance. The rule is simple: If we are interdependent, then whatever one person does to others returns like a boomerang, and just as sharply and powerfully. If we understand that all connected systems operate this way, we will succeed.
Accelerating Exponentially
Time seems to be compressing. In the 20th century, humanity experienced more than it had in all of human history preceding it. The 21st century began only recently, and already much has happened.
We are living in exponential times, and the pace of life is accelerating accordingly. While there will be more hectic times and less hectic times, the trend is unmistakable. The pace of change is evident everywhere—we change our jobs more frequently (assuming we have one), we change our spouses more frequently (assuming we have one), and we change our houses more frequently (again, assuming we have one).
But where the pace of change is most clearly evident is technology. Look at your cell phone and compare it to the phones we were using only 40 years ago. If you consider that today’s average cell phone is thousands of times more powerful than the Apollo 11 computer—which landed the spaceship on the moon—it is easy to see just how quickly and radically we are changing.
A Common Solution
The multiple crises facing humanity indicate that we need to take an inclusive approach to solving them. In an interconnected world, there is no such thing as a local problem. The need for solutions that favor all of humanity will call for consistent deliberation among representatives of all countries as equals. Each side would present the problems it considers urgent, and then every problem would be weighed to see in which order it should be addressed. Only by deliberating in the spirit of our connection in a global web will we find the right way to solve these problems.
The alternative to deliberation is far less appealing—war.
Why Bond?
Many experts already understand that it is impossible for any country to overcome the global crisis on its own. However, Nature’s course of evolution, as explained in Chapter 2, raises another point: cooperation and collaboration must be undertaken not only because no country can solve the crisis alone, but because this is the course of the whole of evolution. This global crisis is an opportunity for us to discover it and unite into a single organism, just as the whole of Nature does naturally.