a new civilization

I have just been inspired by another Dan W post, which notes Konrad Lorenz's claims that:

animals, particularly males, are biologically programmed to fight over resources

and Gordon Fellman's idea that:

an alternative paradigm sees cooperation, caring, nurturing, and loving as equally viable ways of organizing relationships of humans to each other and to nature. Fellman sees this shifting emphasis from adversarialism to mutuality as essential to the survival of our species and nature itself.

This is the new paradigm I refer to: we are now reaching the point where the human race can only survive by embracing "cooperation, caring, nurturing, and loving". This is the only way forward for us.

Dan W goes on to note that the bigger our human communities get, the more chance there is that we will regress to our "instinctual" state and so form bonds and relationships based upon aggression and domination.

Viewed in this light, the forces of globalization can be seen to be very destructive. Even in our smallest groupings - the family - we are influenced by global media, and programmed to be violent and compete for scarce resources. The larger the community the more powerless we feel individually, and the more alienated from each other: this is witnessed in the typically cold and aloof human interaction in a large crowded city compared to the warmer friendliness typical of small rural communities.

As Dan W says:

the world has gotten way too big ... Sadly I do not, as such, believe that we can aggregate on a global, even national or regional, scale without reverting to the least common denominators of violence, aggression and hoarding. I believe that our salvation (sic) will be found in our smallest communities, and with practice, and maybe over decades, and maybe with the disappearance of such forces as profit and wealth as modalities of discourse, maybe then we will have a shot at Fellman's dream of MUTUALITY.

We need to start again, building communities of only a few hundred people, who recognize their common interest and work together to nourish and sustain the whole community - in such a community, violence and competition will not be recognized as having any value. This cannot work effectively in the context of our current global media and society. But we will not have to wait long now before this global society fractures completely. The world of the old paradigm is crumbling to dust, and the world of the new paradigm will rise out of the ashes of the old. This is how nature operates, in cycles: as the old one decays and dies, the new one is born and emerges strong and vital to take its place. In our case this means a new civilisation.

disbelief

Our existing economic system has reached the point where it has lost all credibility. As Dan W says on the "ashes ashes all fall down" blog, in his article brand new disbelief system is born :

If a system lacks credibility, if people don’t believe in it, than they will not participate in that system....once trust has eroded beyond the point of repair, there is no chance of resuscitation. Either the system has to be thrown out and a new system has to take its place, or the citizens of the system have to be compelled by force and repression to accept the old way of doing things. This is where we stand today. Belief in the credibility of our economy has been summarily destroyed.

This excellent article goes on to say:

..this new belief system bases its spiritual and intellectual foundations upon the idea of disbelief! The leaders of the world---both political and financial---have, through their decades of theft and duplicity and lies, given birth to a new paradigm: the paradigm of disbelief. And it is this new paradigm, this new DIS-belief system if you will, that makes trust in then old way of doing things totally impossible.

It predicts the total collapse of the US economy, listing detailed reasoning for this. Well, I am writing from a European perspective, and I have to say that it is not just the US economy that faces total collapse, but the entire global economy: the US does not have a monopoly on greed and deceit, and in any case the US economy remains the keystone of the global economy. As has long been said, "when the US catches sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold".

The global financial system is a giant confidence trick: it depends 100% on the confidence of its participants. That confidence has now evaporated, and it will not return. The emperor was always naked, but now we are starting to trust the evidence of our own eyes - the emperor has no clothes. We may be duped into other scams, but we will not fall for this one again.

Trust in the old structures will not recover: rather, distrust will spread. Where can we turn to when our overlords and their systems of commerce and government have utterly failed us? We can only turn to each other, as human beings. This "new paradigm of disbelief" will morph into the real new paradigm of cooperation and collaboration, sharing and community. We must build our new world from the ground up.

staring into the abyss

It is now almost 16 months on from my post on spiritualsun.org entitled Capitalism Eats Itself , predicting the death of capitalism. I quote from it here:

Increasingly, over the past 2 decades, capitalism has been losing the plot in a grand way, with the help of the misled masses of ordinary people (who will almost inevitably be the biggest sufferers from the impending implosion). The selfish "greed is good" credo of the '80s has led to widespread and ever more risky speculation by not just the financial "professionals" of Wall Street (and other financial centres), but increasingly by the general public in general, who have been grossly misled by corrupt and greedy agents and "experts". A culture of very high risk financial speculation has formed, whereby loans are taken out "secured" by increasingly zany notional capital gains on housing, and spent on frenzied consumption binges. Saving has become seen as "stupid", and spending borrowed money as "sensible". Borrow borrow borrow, and spend spend spend like there is no tomorrow. And now there will be literally no tomorrow for the finances of many of these deluded suckers. Falling house prices finish the whole game abruptly - negative equity rears its scary head - rising mortgage payments cannot be serviced - foreclosure, bankrupcy, no house, no money, no credit rating, nowhere to go. And it was all so clearly inevitable.

"There are none so blind as those that will not see"

And so, now the serpent of capitalism that has been eating its own tail for quite a while now, suddenly reaches a no-win situation: the tail has been consumed, now it has to eat its own guts, or else starve to death...

Bye bye capitalism. Nobody can say you are not going out with a flourish. You are old paradigm, based on fear, greed, selfishness, dishonesty, and a grossly material focus.

The world is now moving into the new paradigm of collaboration, co-operation, sharing, honesty and openness. Humanity will become more humane. This change is inevitable, and even the most "powerful" capitalist leaders, movers and shakers, can do nothing about it.

The meek shall inherit the earth.

So far, we have seen the cracks that were apparent in the summer of 2007 open up, and the whole edifice of capitalism start to crumble visibly. No longer are those who cry "foul" and "crash" being pilloried by the media and the easily-led. Now the talk is of economic depression, and a "new capitalism" rising from the ashes of the old: this will not happen - who of us will ever be able to trust a bank again? Or a pension fund? Or a mortgage broker?

But our governments and the mainstream media are still not telling us (probably because they don't realize it themselves), that we are only at the beginning of this break-up: the worst has yet to come. The men (and women) in city suits have been very busy through the past few years creating a gigantic ponzi scheme to defraud us all of our savings and pensions, while lining their own pockets with disgustingly huge salaries and bonuses. It may appear that they have already been found out, as our governments are now throwing unimaginably huge amounts of public money at the crooked bankers in a doomed attempt to prop up the financial system, while stockmarkets plummet and girate, and house prices plunge, and unemployment starts to soar...

But you ain't seen nothin' yet!

The banks are much more bust than they are letting on - perhaps they are in denial, or just plain scared to come clean, but they have created a giant mountain of imaginary money (even more imaginary than the standard currency, which is itself a giant confidence trick), and only the tip of this has so far been found out - even that tip has been large enough to kill many of those banks, had they not been bailed out (so far....). The vacuum at the "heart" of the financial system is so massive that is capable of taking out every economy in the world, and destroying the global financial system, and all of capitalism with it - indeed this appears to be inevitable.

Governments are now expected to pick up the pieces, but all they can do is postpone the inevitable, and, as might be expected, they are making a poor job of that so far, as they "firefight" each new scandalous revelation. Effectively they are trying to prop up capitalism, and missing a golden opportunity to create a new socialism.

The New Paradigm is taking the power from the large materialistic control structures (global businesses, governments) and handing it over to the humble individuals: greed and excess will no longer bring rewards, even on a material level. Of course, much crooked fiddling will continue while our global "civilization" burns, but ultimately it is all futile. The game is over. The ball is burst. It is time to start again, with a clean sheet. We are approaching the "ground zero" of capitalism.

So, yes indeed - it is well worth repeating:

Bye bye capitalism. Nobody can say you are not going out with a flourish. You are old paradigm, based on fear, greed, selfishness, dishonesty, and a grossly material focus.

The world is now moving into the new paradigm of collaboration, co-operation, sharing, honesty and openness. Humanity will become more humane. This change is inevitable, and even the most "powerful" capitalist leaders, movers and shakers, can do nothing about it.

The meek shall inherit the earth.