„The World Doom Machine“
Scientific evidence is rising rapidly that Humanity has reached a new epoch called the Anthropocene (1), where our culture is the main driver behind observed changes in our Earth-System challenging planetary boundaries (1.1) thus threatening the live support systems of our Planet. With each decade we increase the risk of an abrupt regime shift in our Earth-System (1.2) threatening the functioning of our global culture.
In the last decades we could clearly perceive how all our sub-systems of governance failed to change the current direction of humanity (1.3). Despite hundreds of conferences, goals and treaties nothing substantial was achieved while scientific evidence was building the brick wall with the same speed we accelerated through an astonishing holistic approach loving exponential growth(1.4)!
At the same time humanity is confronted with the rise of a technocratic system of economic entities heralded by an concentration process of capital and influence seeking it's counterpart in our history. In the center of this process we find a small number of mostly financial institutions being strongly interconnected through a web of ownership ties able to control 40% of the economic value of all transnationals(1.5).
In this cluster exist a super entity consisting out of a tiny number gigantic financial corporations holding each other to ¾ able to exert their influence on the whole cloud of transnational corporations via a vast web of ownership ties, credit, and informal influence. E.g. on the central banks policies favouring a QE-Policy on the brink to go ground zero for anybody else save the guilty.
The result is the situation we face today: Our social sub-systems such as global governance institutions, governments, law and regulation bodies, education systems, health care systems, the media etc. have been slowly compromised to function accordingly to the needs of a financial oligarchy standing for the reality behind the so called "Free Markets".
Notably in the last century, especially in the last three decades we could observe a dramatic power shift in form of capital into the hands of global operating capitalistic entities gaining each year more influence over every regulation sub-system of our global civilization – from global to local! The whole development could be described as the rationalism of capitalism ... trickling down from the top to the bottom!
With the rise of the corporations came the rise of the economic science supporting each other like a positive feedback loop of destruction and suppression thus becoming the major lore shaping our world. Customized politics suiting the needs of the global players where the outcome. And out of an Oasis in Theory became a Fata Morgana in reality with the smaller stakeholders dying all over the place ... the barbaric reality behind the self-enforcing principle of centralization of power through capital.
With every passing year this science has gained more influence throughout all sub-systems and stakeholders of governance and markets alike making them a battle ground of eternal conquest. Sadly our mechanics never thought about the consequences of competition on a meta level which we can perceive today in and around us starting at our psyche and ending with our biosphere. The working code of competition always includes in one way or another destructive tendencies of dominance arising out of the opposition thus not harmonizing - bad frequency! Through competition “energy” crashes into each other - often one "vipes out" the other!
We can see this principle working throughout our economic system. Everything competes with each other. The more competition there is - that's the theory - the more dynamic the whole system gets and thereof functions better. This theory is behind the fast increasing structures pushing the competitive mode between individuals and institutions via a broad approach infiltrating slowly every sphere of our societies. All this competition is defined through money becoming therefor the abstraction of destruction!
Money expressed in numbers is the accepted code of conquer deciding the battle in our corporatism world involved in an heroic fight heading for an ultimate end: one to rule them all ... through credit! Out of this extreme competition the negative developments are resulting which create the perfect environment for the universal goal of maximizing profits while laying the dangerous consequences right before our eyes by suppressing live to diversify!
Today the very base of our society is corrupted by a mad approach trying to explain and govern us by the laws of mechanics and competition. A world came into existence which was explained and created through a mechanic approach of evidence allowing only particles and laws to exist without a notion of a deeper sense of existence.
Truth to tell this approach prevented our economic science from understanding the world we depend on, which is much more than the sum of its parts and processes. Our World consists out of Millions and Millions different forms of life shaping altogether the living conditions on our Earth through the main principles of cooperation and self-organization bringing forth emergence with the goal to evolve into more complex forms of existence (1.6). If we understand that the working mode of competition and heteronomy means destruction and declare our code of existence to be cooperation and self-organization a much more complex society will come into existence via variety sharing a common goal: Not to destroy but to create!
Sadly the opposite is happening. Via competition our worlds spectrum of variety is decreasing in manifold ways following a simple rule: profitable wins over unprofitable! Again every sphere is affected like healing methods, young/old, our needs, our wishes or our nature as social beings thus conquering other lines of thought, living concepts, approaches of any kind, cultures or other living species ... driving them extinct you could say!
Over the years an oligarchic system came into existence with centralizing power structure's in the hands of ever fewer financial institutions and multinational corporations. This centralization of power created big mammoths sharing the markets by establishing a kind of global planned economy trying to control globalization. By that logic huge amounts of capital are flowing into business strategies trying to make the maximum profit by creating wastage, destruction and scarcity thus increasing overall control.
This power structure extends around the planet and here lies the true madness. Its decision making structures are stripped from any ethic, moral, social or environmental concerns accordingly to Neo-Classics. With time a self-referential system came into being which is serving only its own needs while destroying what we need - the tragedy of our time!
This science working from behind tries through a deterministic approach to find eternal laws of our behaviour and by defining them pursues the goal to make everything accountable of what we do on our planet in money. An astonishing simplistic approach on society one should think. Quite disturbingly this science has not only lost contact with reality but its denying its very existence in their functions! I think everybody would agree that time and space are important for the system we are living in. Actions need time and and matter moves through space - also quite simple one should guess(1.7)!
But in their futile attempt to make everything accountable and predictable the economists used the advanced mathematics of their time - newtons mechanics. Only that they exchanged mass and distance with price and quantity thus negating reality in their functions. This leaded to the situation that in modern economics space and time mostly doesn't exist. Till today this science is stuck in the mechanical approach while nearly everything else moved on to a quite more sophisticated understanding of the system we are living in.
The next astonishing thing they did was to deny the obvious concept of endless resources via the assumption that any depleted resource would be replaced just in no time by technological advancement and therefore no endless resources could exist. Through that kind of magic the consumption graphs could grow on forever … right through the ceiling. They used the advantage of their models knowing no time and distance over reality depending on them.
To circumvent their problem of irrational acting emotional beings making all the time mistakes our economists created an image called the Homo-Economicus. A rational acting machine seeking only its maximum gain measured in money never making mistakes while acting on perfect information level.
The result where models of our reality which knew no wrong decisions or endless resources, they knew only perfect states with optimal prices, supply and demand swapping between the perfect states in zero time - like a system jumped out of quantum physics. Now their models of reality could run like a machine driven by the quest for maximum profit in no time or space - resembling reality! Truth to tell for complex adaptive systems the imperfect state is their normal code of existence.
This science lies behind our corporate cluster. The result is the power structure that extends around our planet and here lies the true madness. Its decision making structures are stripped from any ethic, moral, social or environmental concerns accordingly to Neo-Classics. With time a self-referential system came into being which is serving only its own needs while destroying what we need ... the tragedy of our time!
Our economic actors where freed from any environmental responsibilities via the concept of the tragedy of the commons assuming that common property would always lead to the destruction of the commons through the selfish behaviour of the community whereas the owners of private property would care for their investment (1.8).
Truth to tell the opposite is happening on our planet. On a global level more and more property is owned by corporations seeking the maximum profit following a simple rule: Make more money out of the investment than was invested ... often leaving behind destruction! We can see it today in the Gulf of Mexico, the Canadian Tar Sands, the global run for Fracking, the water crisis, declining rain forests, degrading arable land on every continent and finish with global pollution, a changing atmosphere and collapsing oceans experiencing their sixth mass dying event right now!
Actually this principle is the core of the madness we are facing. The economic "science" behind this global network hold on to negate any of our basic needs as intelligent, social living beings - such as clean water, healthy food, food, social company, broad education, free access to good information, leisure time, time for learning what we want, the freedom to think critically, stable living conditions and ending with our dependency on a functioning biosphere as a species.
Instead of supplying us with what we need, the cloud of transnationals forms interest groups around the best investment strategies and business models to push their interest through. This principle follows a simple logic: the bigger the market, the bigger the cloud of transnationals forming a group of interest to keep business running against any opposition of common sense and be it collapsing oceans. Out of this principle the network of global corporate governance finance and protect any lucrative disastrous development in every aspect of our culture and biosphere with the final outcome of global societal collapse not accounted for in the economic models knowing only perfect states.
Unfortunately strict hierarchic structures like our cloud of transnationals tent to lose the oversight over our problems out of a simple rule: the quantity of information hierarchies can process compared to everything involved is negligible tiny. Additionally the information level of our decision makers regarding the developments and their consequences for us and our planet is very low – simply no time to understand the interconnected complexity of the matter!
Despite the holistic approach to control our society by manifold means the mechanical approach is not able to cope with a naturally occurring development - rising complexity! Be it our jurisdiction system or any law and regulation system, quality assurance divisions, health systems or social entities in general trying to adapt to a world getting more complicated.
The best example are the financial institutes of our cluster. The real masters of the holistic approach to control everything. They are the incarnations of the Neo-Classics come to Earth to compete and destroy - the very best their approach has to offer! The economists try hard with a growing bureaucracy to control the fast rising complexity of internal and external processes in their financial entities. Their own products and instruments are getting each year more sophisticated while their environment the financial markets undergo the same development while speeding up with technological advancement soon reaching Warp-Speed.
Here the economic science comes to an end via adapting to an environment getting more complex by building ever complexer controlling structures ironically loosing not only the oversight about their object of control but over the very structures they try to control with. They created in their pursuit after control economic entities resembling with all their work definitions, indexes, goals, business plans etc. communist states in their modernest form. Hence we can call this well observed reaction of mechanical operating entities trying to adapt to rising complexity via rising complexity: Mars-Attacks-Symptom! Music gets more noisy, Martians head makes slowly.......boom!
Additionally to loosing the oversight our decision makers are reduced to a function in our self-referential system by defining how they work and for what aim. In this way they are forced to make millions of decisions going against their own common sense. Even the highest decision maker is trapped by his/her job definition. We have to understand that people aren't the problem but the structures that take our freedom of mind away by making out of us functions which dictate our actions and thoughts.
At the end arises a question with dire implications for our future. Could it be that we face at this crucial time an autonomous system created by us that looses not only the oversight but takes with each passing year more of our freedom away to shape the world we are living in while it destroys the future for all the generations to come? At this point our current self-referential system of transnationals bonded by the financial markets would make the transition from stupidity to lunacy while writing the word “Humanity” on Earth's history wall!
Stop the world doom machine!
1: „The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives“,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 13 March 2011 vol. 369 no.
„The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?“,
AMBIO A Journal of the Human Environment (Impact Factor: 2.03). 01/2008; 36(8):614-21.
1.1: „Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity“, Ecology and Society 14(2): 32.
„On the system properties of planetary boundaries“, Ecology and Society 17 (1):r2.
1.2: “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere”, Nature 486, 52–58
1.3: Global Environment Outlook 5 (GEO-5) UN-Report
1.4: “Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?”, Proceedings of Royal Society, 7 March 2013 vol. 280 no. 1754
1.5: “The network of global corporate control”, PLoS ONE 6(10), e25995 (2011) (ETH Zürich)
1.6: “Evolvability Is Inevitable: Increasing Evolvability without the Pressure to Adapt”, PLoS ONE 8(4): e62186.
1.7: “Space, Time and Pinhead Economics”, The Wild Peak
1.8: „Beyond markets and states: Polycentric governance of complex economic systems“ Elinor Ostrom Nobel Laureate