|
We can learn some useful lessons from this period of history that lies between the beginning of the Greek Classical period and the fall of Rome. Momentous contrasting developments occurred in this thousand year time frame. We have seen the rise of a tremendously bright culture with achievements so great and far reaching that they still effect our lives today. We also have seen the destruction of this culture in a rage of political insanity that turned the brightest of days into the dark nights of misery and death.
One can also see a similar "second cycle" of this entire period reflected in modern history, though compressed into a shorter time frame. This modern cycle begins with the development of the Golden Renaissance in the 15th century, and continues on into the present imperial period. The British Empire remains at the present time, the sole surviving force of this imperial period with a near global influence in financial, economic, and social policy matters. This repetition is an important one to recognize as the world is presently facing the greatest financial, economic, and social policy crisis in all of human history. The present world-financial system is nearing a total disintegration as its vast mountains of aggregate instruments exist as unrealizable claims stacked against a collapsing physical economy that can no longer even sustain itself, but contracts and sheds its work forces. The world is also facing an ideological crisis; such that it tolerates genocide on an ever increasing scale and supports ideological 'dictates' such as those that call for the dramatic, global, population reduction already being forced upon many nations by economic policy.
How the present society responds to this crisis in the short term will determine the status of its existence for centuries to come. If the society allows its most vital support structures to disintegrate, an inevitable population collapse would follow. If, in contrast, the present course of self-destruction is reversed, then the whole of humanity faces the potentially brightest future imaginable with near infinite resources at its grasp.
The already demonstrated technology of nuclear fusion will give us boundless energy resources, of a kind that won't be exhausted within a few decades, like oil, but will be sufficient for thousands of millions of years, possibly for as long as the solar system itself remains intact. With these high temperature energies the very rocks of the earth will be broken down into their constituent metals and minerals, of the type that we presently fight wars over to gain access to. We have resources laying at our feet that are infinite in abundance for all practical purposes. All we need to do is develop the technological processes that enable us to utilize them. Unfortunately, the historic trend has been to prevent this development and to create poverty instead. Poverty enables the continuity of feudal, imperial, power structures which exist on a platform of looting, rather than the development of the economic resources on which the future of humanity depends. The imperial tradition has trapped us into an extremely dangerous and tragic stranglehold. But how do we get ourselves out this trap?
Next Page
|| - page index -
|| - chapter index -
|| - Exit -
||
|
