The obvious answer is "both!" How much of each depends on how it happens. Will it end? Of course. Will it end soon? Who Knows. We have a lot of paranoia about the UN from all kinds of folk, but what has been showing up more and more is the "fear" of UN Agenda 21. Here's yet one more example:AGENDA 21: THE END OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION. You can read it if if you are curious. What I want to focus on is the mythology that generates the paranoid fear in language that can only be interpreted as an attempt to for see the future as well is possible and prepare for it. The idea that we can somehow" preserve" a way of life that is so obsolete as to not merit further discussion is a only explainable to me in terms of ignorance and fear. My use of those words is not meant to be pejorative, but merely descriptive and explanatory. Read on below and I'll explain what this is all about as I see it.
As a systems scientist and as a biologist and as a political activist I have spent a lot of time giving serious thought to what the state of our current knowledge about matters that pertain to the issue of humankind's future on the planet and how we got to where we are now.
The words "fear" and "ignorance" seem very appropriate to describe our state of knowledge, Certainly, at least in this country, the attitude toward science and the seduction of technology have made it clear that we believe what we want to believe and use only those parts that make us feel better. Religious myth has a strong role and the Western christian myth has become so dominant as to be beyond question.
How can I call us "ignorant" when we have done so much to unravel the secrets of nature and master it? That language was also carefully chosen; for one of the reasons we are in the transition towards the end is precisely that myth. We understand so little as to allow religious myth to be the way so many of us "explain" things. Our scientific achievements are not the result of an unbiased quest for knowledge as we like to think. We adopted certain models and we exploited them to the utmost.
We did this with minimal awareness of how things link together because the central idea of the model we adopted is that you learn about complex whole systems by tearing them apart and looking at parts. We still have a very poor appreciation for the vast amounts of information lost with such reductions. Ignorance.
Two ideas are worth thinking about in this context. Both them center around the concept of "evolution". Evolution is associated with biology and there is much to be said about how the reductionist paradigm has held back our understanding of biological evolution. Many recent works make this so very clear.
The second idea is almost in stillbirth with a few notable exceptions. If evolution is a feature of material biological systems it is also a feature of human social interaction and in fact the only real way of seeing our present state.
This human aspect of evolution has come to be the dominant factor in all of nature because we have have evolved the capacity to do what we do through biological evolution. What we do relative to other aspects of the biosphere just grows and grows.
We have, in the course of our human evolution, developed and discarded ways of behaving and organizing ourselves, transporting ourselves, housing ourselves, feeding our selves, communication with each other, and, especially, entertaining ourselves. The last factor, the way we entertain ourselves, is usually tightly but not openly tied to the most primitive and basic aspect of our biology; the way sex gives us pleasure.
In the course of this evolution, we have evolved an economic system that is easily explained through the link between economic power and gratification. The balance between what people will tolerate in order to get what ever share they get is a never ending struggle but a curious one in that it is usually so well kept in check.
This all seems obvious yet the myths we live by ignore it. Ignorance. One of the byproducts of ignorance is the ease at which fear can be generated. Since the struggle for those things we need and those other things we want beyond that is always one that is uncertain, we fear losing what little most of us have.
The greedy and the insatiable have always used fear to control. look for differences in groups of people and make sure those differences translate into threats. Nations, Clans, Religious Sects, etc.
So here we are. We have a world that is interacting more strongly with each tick of the clock. Our fate is becoming one as the clock ticks. The meaning of the Nation states that once were so important in this evolutionary process is becoming more obsolete as time goes on. Our mythology lags so far far behind, yet the awareness among some of us is growing by leaps and bounds. Publications appeaqr more and more frquently as one by one we "discover" these things.
So why write about it here? The answer is so simple yet so hard to see. We are in the core of the American political process. Yet how much of any of these "inconvenient truths" are at all a part of that process?
I leave you with that question. The system grinds on. You can try to nudge it a bit or just let it grind you up.