This month’s news comes to you from “down under” in New Zealand. I am enjoying a second summer visiting my eldest son in Wellington. It's a long way to NZ – 7 hours to Dubai, 13 hours to Melbourne and 3 hours to Wellington – effectively 24 hours in the air.
The trip brought me face to face with modern humanity and many of its proud inventions. The Emirates Airbus A380 is the biggest airliner ever to enter service – it weighs more than 570 tons at take-off, can fly 8,500 miles non-stop and takes more than 800 passengers. Having said all this, it is superbly quiet, spacious and comfortable – half as noisy as a 747. It's quite a miraculous testament to clever engineering. Dubai was over in less than an hour – rushing from one gate to another. Melbourne was a shock.
Melbourne must be the perfect modern city. It's efficient, clean and pretty well soulless. The streets are straight, arranged in square blocks but they are not particularly busy. There is a good free tram system in down-town. Most people seemed entirely geared to work – lots of quick eat plastic cafes and electric delivery drivers. Shiny skyscrapers dominate the scene – my hotel room was on the 34th floor. In my efforts (fruitless) to find a convivial pub all I found was a massive gambling hall where silent victims sat quietly pushing their money into glowing machines. The whole place seemed like a monument to misplaced human folly. Our electrically powered steel and glass towers will not be around in 1000 years unlike the cathedrals and amphitheatres of our ancestors.
New Zealand, on the other hand, is on a much more human scale. Buildings are smaller, people are calmer, and prices are cheaper. Here all the miserable mismanagement of Europe seems 10,000 miles away (which it is). The climate is kind, power comes from water or thermal, the food is wonderful and the people down to earth. There is a complicated arrangement with the Maoris (12% of the population) which constantly pushes itself forward and the whole island is waiting for the next earthquake. But generally, it seems to be a splendid place to live.
THE MYSTERIES OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES!
Over many thousands of years our human species has devised many clever tricks and devices to make life easier. But history shows us that these inventions which were intended to solve one problem almost invariably produced a shower of even more significant “unintended consequences”. We can immediately think of obvious examples:
the insecticide DDT which killed the birds
the printing press which empowered Martin Luther's reforms and the emergence of democracy
bank money whose “elasticity” enables war
the threaded needle which allowed humans to colonise the north (by making clothes)
the plough which increased the productivity of agriculture which was necessary for the evolution of great cities
the laptop computer which gave rise to crypto currency
You don't have to think for very long before you realise that history and evolution of human civilisation has been dominated more by “unintended consequences” than by the deliberate planning of events. In truth the best made plans of mice and men are usually confounded by unexpected complications! We are not quite as smart as we think we are!
Now is a very important time to think about all this. As most readers will know, we have just had meetings of Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum in Davos and the associated G20 summit in Bali. These meetings of the world's most powerful and wealthy elites are determined to move the human species towards a highly controlled system of world government. They see this as the only way to “save the Earth” from disasters such as viral pandemics, environmental collapse and global warming. We may also imagine that they also believe it's the best way to make sure they keep their elite status!
The plan is for the new “world government” to make us all behave well (get our injections, burn less fossil fuel and make less pollution) by using the new possibilities of digital technology and big data. They have announced that there will be four systems of control:
Central Bank Digital Currencies will mean every transaction can be monitored so taxes cannot be avoided, and unwanted behaviours can be punished
a Global I/D system will uniquely identify every human on the planet and include such information as their medical status (vaccination), credit history, carbon footprint and social credit score
a Social Credit Score system which will record against each person their significant behaviours both good and bad and link these scores to the money system by sophisticated algorithms
a system of information censorship which will prevent the spread of any “mis-information” which contradicts the narrative being promoted by the elites and ensure that their desired messages dominate the mass media.
All of these plans are being promoted ‘in plain sight’. There is no conspiracy and, for the most part, the mainstream mass media are happy to go along with this new emerging world order. Clearly, we are now at a point where science and technology are the effective “gods” in a secular world where money and the law (police) are the primary means of ensuring “good behaviours”. For thousands of years before this it was religion, pagan spirituality and love of family and community which made the rules providing functional effectiveness. The new wealthy elites seem to have forgotten this! They are also quite unprepared for the mysteries of unintended consequences!
We probably cannot stop this “great reset”. It is simply the inevitable end result of this predatory phase of human civilisation founded, as it is, on the amazing successes of science and economics. What we can do is speculate about what (now) mysterious consequences may come from this all-embracing attempt to “save the Earth”. We may realise, for example, that spiritual beliefs and love have always in the past triumphed over the power of law and money. People are prepared to die for their beliefs. We may remember that every previous attempt at deliberate central planning has caused massive disruption, starvation and unrest. We may wonder how the misleading signals given by money will ever be replaced in the next co-creative phase of human existence. We may finally realise that the most powerful weapon we have as individuals facing this dystopian future is the way we spend our money. It may be inconvenient to stop buying things from corporations/activities you don't like but, in the end, it is the best way to “pull the rug out” from under the now dominant wealthy elites. The more we can become self-sufficient the less we are beholden to the new world order.
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