THE FUTURE -- EXPONENTIAL FORCES OF YESTERDAY ARE AT WORK TODAY!

THE FUTURE – EXPONENTIAL FORCES OF YESTERDAY ARE AT WORK TODAY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 6, 2010

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REFERENCE: EXPONENTIAL REDUX


A reader here responds to my missive, WINNERS AND LOSERS (December 30, 2009, www.fisherofideas.com) sharing how the economic downturn has become a personal struggle to find professional connection again. He, like many others, has had a rocky couple of years. My daughter, after graduating in December 2007 from the University of South Florida, experienced the same difficulty before making connection in 2009. They are WINNERS because they stayed the course against a sea of distractions and alarmism.

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A conversation with another reader generated CORPOCRACY and “THE CULTURE OF CONFUSION” – OMEN FOR THE FUTURE? (January 1, 2010, www.fisherofideas.com). That missive looked at the situation in specific terms. This missive is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), as was the title of my book.

* * *

My objective is to provoke thought, to reveal you to yourself. It is not to solve your problems. I am reminded of Ethan Watters new book, “Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche” (Free Press 2009), where the author shows we have successfully exported our madness. He writes:

“In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been, for better or worse, homogenizing the way the world goes mad.”

Watters shows how we have exported Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) to pump up sales of such drugs as Paxil. By 2008, GlaxoSmithKline was selling over $1 billion worth of Paxil to the Japanese, who didn’t know they had a problem with depression until drug marketers informed them.

We have banned cigarette advertisement on television. We should also ban drug advertisements as drugs may be damaging to the suggestive prone consumer’s health as well as pocketbook.

* * *

The future, despite all the noise to the contrary, is not a new experience, or something we should dread. It is something we experience collectively every day. In a world of information overload, telling us what everything means and what everyone needs, we forget we have the moxie to cut through this wasteland.

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Jim,

Why do you think 2010 will be a tougher year than 2009? I am hoping that it will be better because 2009 was not a good year. I did land a full time job after 18 months of looking which was good but I had to take a lower salary than my last position. But I am grateful that I have a job.

I know the economy is still bad and a lot of people are out of work, so that may cause more problems. Housing foreclosures are still high. The government may reduce its spending to bail out the housing and financials markets so that may cause a decline. But I was wondering what prompted you to say that things will get worse.

John

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

John,

I don’t mean to be flippant when I say 2010 may be a tougher year. True, I don’t have a crystal ball, am not a soothsayer, but do pay attention to trends and forces, especially forces.

In fact, I am thinking back to the year 1510, which compares strikingly to the transformation of forces we are experiencing today, forces, which we take for granted because they operate around us and in us as the very air we breathe, but forces that periodically shift from a tectonic pace to explosive breakthroughs such as the current electronic age of the Internet. We are witnesses to a new history. The future is now!

* * *

We are all creatures of history, but few other than scholars take an interest in it. I am no scholar. I am not even well informed. I am simply curious. I read books. I observe. I reflect and interpret what I read and experience in certain ways. Is my way right? Not necessarily. The value is not in that I read and perceive history, but that my missives stimulate thought and further inquiry.

We are living history. Few would argue with this. They might quarrel with the idea we are reliving history of the distant past, which I believe we are and the reason for this missive.

* * *

OUR DEBT TO THE ARABIC CULTURE

After Rome fell in 476 AD, the next thousand years were traumatic and chaotic. Europe drifted into the “Dark Ages,” and was victimized by “The Black Death” that wiped out half its population.

Europe, during this period, retrogressed to a level of barbarism that left the door open for hoards of invaders to fill the vacuum. The Islam nations of the East moved through Greece, the Balkans, and into Sicily, Italy and Germany, and up from Africa into Spain.

The Muslim nations nearly conquered backward Europe, which was coming out of the Dark Ages, but failed for a number of reasons to advance beyond the Rhine and the Danube in Germany.

The Ottoman Turks were spread too thin, ran out of logistical support, had a run on the treasury, lost popular support at home, could not sustain brilliant leadership over the centuries, and eventually retreated back to Persia and their respective homelands as Europe progressively gained its own military, political and economic strength, its ethnic identity and its will to exist.

The Ottomans, however, imbued Europe with its rich culture, a culture that has sustained Europe for the past 500 years, a culture that has found Europe blossoming into the jewel that it has become.

Europe “borrowed” art, architecture, science and engineering, philosophy and language, mathematics and manual arts, navigation and shipbuilding from the Turks, who had before “borrowed” it from the Ming dynasty of China. America would in turn “borrow” it from Europe, and so it has been since the beginning of time, a succession of borrowers.

* * *

By 1500, Europe was on its own feet, having assimilated the rich legacy of the Islam culture as if it had itself invented it. Europe was exploding into what became known as the “European Miracle,” being able to do so because:

(1) Europe wasn’t a monolithic culture as was Islam;

(2) Europe had no central authority or pecking order as did the Ottomans;

(3) Europe was alive with energy, enthusiasm, and an élan that had faded with the Ottomans over the centuries having lost its appetite for conquest. Constant war had depleted the Ottoman Empire of manpower, materials, machines, and treasury not to mention its optimistic aspect.

* * *

Scholars tab 1500 as the beginning of modern society. The political, social, economic and intellectual consequences of Europe’s decentralized, largely unsupervised growth of commerce and merchants and ports and markets were significant in establishing a new power center, towns.

Feudal lords, who had operated like tribal chiefs, suspicious of the emergence of town centers where dissidence might meet and serfs might find sanctuary, had ruled in thousands of separate fiefdoms as Machiavelli would describe and immortalize in “The Prince.” He drafted the manuscript in 1513 to gain favor with the powerful Italian Medici family, but it was not published until 1532, five years after his death.


* * *

By 1510, feudalism was already eroding, as it could not confine history to its will. Nor could feudalism curtail freedom and openness of minds as well as markets. The Roman Catholic Church, which was in league with these feudal lords economically, politically and militarily as well as spiritually, counted on their viability to sustain church authority and control of Europe’s masses. Church power was in a state of erosion. It was a new day. New forces were at work.

The Roman Church was bankrupt due to the extravagances of Pope Leo X. He believed, wrongly, that the papacy could impose its will on the people and the people would oblige.

With this conceit, the pope authorized the selling of indulgences to finance the completion of St. Peter’s Basilica. After all, he was born a prince, himself, a Medici no less, and had been made a Cardinal of the Church when he was 13, and pope at the age 38. He would live only to the age of 46, but in that tempestuous period the history of Western Civilization would change dramatically.

Martin Luther, a scholar of scripture, but a simple cleric and son of a miner, was preaching in a tiny church in remote Wittenberg, Germany, when he posted his 95 theses on the Wittenberg church door (October 31, 1517), where he had been sharing his radical theology with his parish. Called to Rome to attend a conference he saw church corruption first hand. He had seen enough.

* * *

Luther’s 95 theses stated boldly that neither the papacy nor the clergy had the authority to forgive sin, and that salvation could be realized by faith, alone. That cataclysmic idea shattered the universe of conventional Christendom. The posting threw Catholic dogma into the sky shattering it forever falling to earth with new identities, and new rationale to support those identities.

Later, England’s King Henry VIII, who renounced his allegiance to the Roman Pontiff, established the Church of England with himself as its head. His friend Sir Thomas More opposed the move, and refused the king’s appeals to renounce Rome and pledge his loyalty to the throne. He was beheaded in 1535.

In contrast, the Dutch humanist and scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, a close friend of Sir Thomas More, slid through the ecclesiastical void unscathed and in ambivalent fashion. Erasmus agreed with Sir Thomas of the need for a more rational theology and radical reform of the clergy, but was disinclined to take on the historic church, or to make his views too incendiary. Instead, he timidly and surreptitiously published his “In Praise of Folly” (1509), hiding his wrath in sarcasm. He did, however, play a major role in the Counter Reformation that kept the church afloat and intact during this troubling period.

* * *

Ideas are never new, never rise out of virgin soil, never materialize fully blown or precise in meaning much less gravitas. They change as they mature. Some ideas are ephemeral, like soap bubbles, disappearing as quickly as they appear. Others at first only cause a ripple to turn ultimately into tidal waves. This was the case with Pope Leo X who gave Luther’s posting no significance. He did so because he was out of touch with the mind of the times, Luther wasn’t. But even the reclusive cleric failed to understand the symbolic impact his act had on the German imagination.

To measure the significance of the idea, chances are there never would have been an American drive for independence were it not for The Reformation. It championed individualism, while giving a gentle boost to fragile capitalism. The Reformation provided a platform for these nascent ideas.

Adam Smith would describe capitalism as an invisible hand in political economies controlling the “Wealth of Nations” (1776). His book was published the very year our Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.

* * *

Ideas come together when the soil is fertile. Reformers surface. John Calvin took the broad ideas of Luther’s theology and focused on individualism and the work ethic to create the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. The doctrine holds that God appointed the eternal destiny of some to salvation by grace, while leaving the remainder to receive eternal damnation for all their sins. Selection to “The Elected” is demonstrated by leading an ethical and prosperous life through diligence and integrity. Controversial from the start, Calvinism stimulated economic growth and wide prosperity.

Sociologist Max Weber’s book, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1905), captured the essence of the celebrated work ethic, a claim author Weber rejected stating his study was not deterministic. Still, for the past 100 years, the work ethic has resonated with Europeans, but even more so with Americans giving rise to the twentieth century being called the “American Century.”

The work ethic that Protestantism sponsored, noted Weber, although unplanned and uncoordinated, was an obvious mass movement that ultimately influenced the development of capitalism.

* * *

An idea still needs a catalyst to drive it to completion. That catalyst in 1510 was Gutenberg’s mechanical printing press with movable type invented in 1455, or some sixty years before the Wittengerg saga. A printed version of the 95 theses appeared in Germany two weeks after Luther's posting of his edict, and all over Europe within a month.

Gutenberg had published a 42-line Bible, but it was Luther’s publication of the German Bible that electrified the people. The Word in German gave a sense of identity to German speaking peoples. The new print language created unprecedented ease in daily communication among speakers of a wide variety of accents. By reading German on the page they became aware of their commonality, and began to take pride in this new perception and connection. Thus was born a German way of thinking.

Perhaps not surprising, standardize grammar and vocabulary followed, while punctuation was introduced. Printing of language became a vehicle of conformity and codification paving the way for linguistic and national purity. What happened in Germany was repeated in England, France and Spain, and then in the smaller pockets of local people in the Balkans and Baltic regions.

Nationalism caught fire and spread across the mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, plains and craggy cliffs that separated indigenous people geographically and demographically from each other. Decentralization and scattered “power centers” proved an enormous positive political, social and economic force. No group or region was strong enough to dominate another.

* * *

In 1455, there was no printed text in Europe. By 1510, there were more than 20 million books in 35,000 editions, or one book for every five inhabitants. In 1455, the only printing press in Europe had been Gutenberg’s. By 1510, there were 245 cities from Stockholm, Sweden, to Palermo, Sicily with printing presses. No innovation in history had spread so far so fast.


* * *

Protestantism slowed but did not eclipse the power of the Roman Church, which relied heavily on a strong hierarchical authority and dutiful obedience of the clergy and laity. The 500-year decline of Catholicism, however, did commence in 510 at the apogee of its power. Meanwhile, Protestantism was finding a new role and identity as individual consciousness grew and the work ethic spread. Feudalism was seemingly replaced with blinding speed by capitalism, but that was not quite true.

The Roman Church was the first to see the potential benefit of Gutenberg’s new technology. It was seen as a means to increase its social authority with the production and dissemination of identical devotional books. This was meant to establish liturgical conformity and obedience on an unprecedented scale. It instead had unintended consequences.

By 1466, or fifty years before Luther’s bold act of defiance, Rome moved to entrench its power among the growing number of literate non-Latin speakers in the rising artisan class with the first printing of the vernacular Bible in German. It failed to produce a ripple. Why?

The answer is one that has held special interest to me. Then as now, the corporate mindset, which then was that of the Roman Church, failed to get it even when it was on the right track.

While it attempted to solidify its power by printing devotionals, kings were solidifying their power through the politics of the printed word in the vernacular language and common idiom of the people leading to a new kind of society, the nation.

Item No. I:

In 1471, an Italian Bible was on sale in Venice. In 1477 the Delphi Press had printed a Dutch Bible. By 1500, there were 30 editions in six languages. Why did these publications not create a groundswell of spiritual renewal?

The fifteenth century Catholic Bible, although translated from the Latin into extant languages, was impossible to be read or understood by common churchgoers.

Item No. 2:

The scriptural text of the Catholic Bible was adulterated consistent with church dogma and teachings. That was not otherwise apparent as only the church owned Bibles, and these were read to the laity in Latin. Priests also taught what they wanted the people to believe, picking and choosing and changing scripture to support doctrine and liturgical practices while omitting sensitive points vital to the Gospels.

Item No. 3:

Luther wrote his Bible not only in German but consistent with scriptural scholarship. He was, after all, a professor of Biblical exegesis at Wittenberg. He went to great pains to write in a German that would resonate with the rich and the poor, kings and plowboys, and would confront them with the pure and unadulterated truth of the Word. The force of the Word, its logic and reality, could not be easily compromised. It was Luther’s format and delivery that was electric. Language and grammar and careful expression of ideas enriched his text. Peoples throughout Europe copied Luther’s blueprint.

Item No. 4:

The unexpected consequences of common people being able to read and understand the Bible in their native tongue were political as well as spiritual. Common identity developed consensus that was spontaneous, first starting in small conclaves with the unity and power of the Word producing social cohesion. This happened with Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Wales, Ireland, Catalonia and Finland, despite the fact that these smaller communities were economically dependent on more powerful countries.

To dramatize the point, where the Bible was not translated into a provincial language, the people and the culture disappeared absorbed into and subordinate to the political and economic language dominant in the region, surviving if at all only as a dialect.

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ETERNAL FORCES A WORK

If this gives you a modicum of identity with the past, and how the Information Age of 500 years ago differed little with the Information Age today, we are on the same page. Momentum then was less contrived, less goaded on by false prophets because the medium of the message was less mechanized, and more spontaneous.

Today it is easy to get caught up in the moment, to think times have never been worse, when they are only different. It is a matter of perspective. The forces operating now that could not be countermanded then are the same forces today:

(1) There are the forces within us.

We want freedom but we need security. We want wealth but we need certainty. We want happiness but we need comfort. We want fame but we need acceptance. We want success but we need safety and security. We want something for nothing. We never want to pay for anything, and above all, we don’t want to pay for what is most important for us. We know that everything must be paid for, and that it must be paid for in proportion to what is received. But we actually think to the contrary. For trifles, for things that are perfectly useless to us, for those things, we will pay anything. But for something important? Never. That must come to us itself.

Five hundred years ago when the majority had little formal education, and life was hard, wants and needs were undifferentiated as need was the only thing 95 percent of the population knew. Now, 95 percent of the population translates wants into needs.

* * *

There are conscious and instinctive forces at work within us. We need food to live and maintain our energy. When want becomes need, we live to want and call it need.

The five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch we take for granted and have been known to abuse ourselves by overeating, smoking and drinking and taking drugs.

We have an internal calibrator in us sensitive to weights, temperature, to dryness and moisture, and yet show a general indifference to sensation, when sensation warns us of danger.

We react sensibly to physical pain but insensibly to psychological pain. We persuade ourselves it is psychosomatic and not real, when it is very real, and can be quite damaging. Disappointment, sorrow, betrayal, grief, hate, and envy are as real as an unpleasant taste or smell. When we have an eerie feeling about someone, we find it odd but reject it as meaningless. The eerie feeling could be a signal of danger or exploitation. We will avoid food or beverage that makes us sick, but not people who make us sick. Why is that?

We are reflective and given to laughter and yawning, stretching and dancing in place when we have memory of pleasant or boring moments, moments that gave us pleasure or pain but that happen to surface now without prompting. Why do we see this as odd?

We have motor skills that function as if we are on automatic pilot, driving to work not remembering when we left home, finding ourselves at the workplace, wondering how we got there. We walk, talk, write, eat, and then catch a falling piece of paper off our desk in mid-flight without thinking, and call it an instinctive move. What do we call all the others?

Instinctive functions are inherent. Moving functions are learned behavior.

Moving functions we don’t think about, but are aware of at least after the fact. Then there are the “useless moving functions” such as dreaming, imagining, daydreaming and talking to ourselves. I talk to myself every day with my recorder in hand as I walk. Are these expressions of wasted energy?

* * *

So, there you have the four forces within us that color everything we do:

(1) Intellectual;
(2) Emotional;
(3) Instinctual; and
(4) Movement.

These operate within us and to a large degree determine our understanding of our conscious self.

* * *

Now why would I fold this expository essay into this missive on THE FUTURE?

The year 510, Gutenberg, Martin Luther, the Roman Church, time, and history, among other things were rattling around in my head when I thought of our obsession with the idea of the future. People got through events of the past and have given us what we experience today.

Yes, I am fascinated with Martin Luther as I am with other individuals who changed the course of history. It is true he was supersensitive, maniacal, self-centered, manic, given to depression, but passionate and deterministic. In other words, he wasn’t too different from many of us.

Yet Luther changed the world that popes and kings could not because they did not have his eyes, his mind, or his heart. Luther was just a man. He had to know himself to leverage his complex drives to some foreseeable end. Otherwise, he would have spontaneously combusted and self-destruct.

Sanity and insanity, self-realization and self-destruction are kin to each other, as are good and evil, love and hate. You can’t have the one without the other. Men have gotten rich promising you can, but you can’t. We sit on the shoulders of men who understood this.

The forces within are elusive to self-observation. In a way, we are not one but many. We are a Darwinian specimen evolving, the product of many iterations and generations in our genealogical chain, forced by circumstances to confront, compare, verify, and straighten out what we think we have experienced to what we actually have, and always, alone! (See the Fisher Model of Conflict and Stress Resolution in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND 1996).

A gift of our resilient mind is that as wrong headed as we sometimes are we still manage to believe in ourselves, which is good. We should realize though how deceptive our observations could be, and therefore learn how to punch holes in them, not for anyone else’s satisfaction but only for our own.

(2) There are the forces outside of us.

They can be people, places or things. It doesn’t matter. They are bound to impact us, and no place in more real terms than on the job.

Since we are people ourselves, and I use the plural because while we are an individual many ghosts haunt our presence from our unconscious ancestors to every person of influence that was there in the dawn of our creation and came to influence the way we think, feel, operate on automatic pilot, and react to crisis.

In a word, we are programmed, and that programming may not serve us. It is my considerate opinion we have failed to take proper measure of it, failed to acknowledge it was designed for another time, failed to assess its detriment to our health and well being.

* * *

2010 was not created in a vacuum. It represents the tsunami of past excesses and false steps to impact the direct future, and the days beyond.

Our programming is illustrated in the way we talk and walk, think and write, work and live, and how we face the world that confronts us. Today we are rich in denial because the problems we face are too complex to solve. We find it easier to attack those problems we know but aren’t facing. We have reliable solutions for them in our hip pocket. After a while, no one seems to notice these solutions are wrong for the problems we face, or that our problems are getting more toxic. Everyone finds satisfaction in doing something.

* * *

A curious operative word is key to this dilemma, “acceptance.”

If we accept others as we find them, we don’t own their problems. If we don’t own their problems, then we won’t attempt to solve them. The moot point is it is impossible to solve them in the best of circumstances because they are not our problems. Imagine that? Simple, right? Well, if it is, why do we try to solve other people’s problems?

The quick answer may be guilt, but I don’t think so. I think we believe we have better answers. We want to demonstrate this, which gives us an excuse to avoid our own. We derive satisfaction in telling others what they should and shouldn’t do. We think we are helping by imposing our answers to their problems, when we are muddying up the works.

Individuals, groups, companies and countries think in this way, and it always results in a muddle. We can’t get it out of our heads that not everyone wants to live in a Georgetown flat outside Washington, DC.

* * *

When we fail to accept others as we find them, warts and all, we own their problems. We have made their problems our problems. We have complicated our already overloaded consciousness with their stuff. By volunteering to be their problem solver we have made an impossible situation worse because their problems aren’t ours.

You shake your head, and say, I hear you. I don’t do that. But you do. Every time you give advice, make a suggestion, loan people money, carry their load to lighten their burden, while they stand around watching and cheering you on, you have sunk the ship before it clears the dock.

* * *

The more successful we are the more vulnerable we are. Others have a way of making us feel guilty for our success.

When I was 27-years-old and doing well, I loaned a neighbor $400, of which he never paid me back a dime. He was going through a rough patch with three little kids, on the road a lot, and a harried wife who often was crying on my shoulder. That $400 today would be worth $2,860.27 (www.google.com “value of the dollar over time”).

Eventually, he got angry when I asked for the money, and never spoke to me again. I was the bad guy, and I was. I owned his problem, and he reminded me of that fact when I failed to change his circumstances, which I couldn’t of course, because they weren’t mine. A variation of this always happens when we loan money because a problem doesn’t get solved with the loan, it only gets postponed.

Incidentally, there is one person we can influence, and only one person, ourselves. The influence we have on others is greatly exaggerated.

* * *

If we can accept others as we find them, then there is a much better chance that we will accept ourselves as we are.

The two ideas – self-acceptance and acceptance of others -- are mutually inclusive. Animosity, contempt, hypersensitivity, and revulsion may be projected towards others but the origins of such malcontent are in self-hatred, self-contempt, and self-revulsion.

Beware of the person who is going to save you from yourself.

Your savior is likely to be projecting a reflection of his own inner demons and chaos. There has never been a guru out to save the world that was not a closet manic.

People are always surprised when the manic side of the “savior” surfaces in some shocking scandalous way. They have a predisposition to trust the “saviors” more than themselves.

Think of that! To trust a stranger more than the person living within one’s own skin. But the “savior” knows that. He knows the susceptible ones to his silver tongue are looking to be rescued, and paradoxically and coincidently, the savior finds by rescuing others he rescues himself. It is madness but legitimate business in the poltergeist shop of the guru. So, when the guru fails in life in some shocking way, the “saved” one feels betrayed when he had already betrayed himself by being so cavalier with his trust.

* * *

We have seen in recent years Catholic priests accused of sexual misconduct with children. Here in the Tampa Bay area there have been repeated cases of middle school female teachers seducing male students. There was a case of a middle school official responsible for funds for countywide school activities guilty of stealing more than $560,000 over the years. We have had county school principals of middle and high schools caught in Internet stings attempting to have sex with teenagers. Trust is a commodity in bankruptcy court at the moment.

We put our hands over our mouths in disgust, but fail to see we are complicit in these affairs. Novelist Joseph Wambaugh, a long time police sergeant of the Los Angeles Police Department, states a community gets the law enforcement it deserves. Community standards are in trouble across the nation as there is little sense of community much less standards. We cannot wash our hands of public malfeasance anymore than we can wash our hands of our personal wrongdoing. They are interconnected.

* * *

“Know yourself,” we are told is the answer, but knowing is not enough. Knowledge is not action. We must understand ourselves. We must know, understand and accept the way we behave and why we behave that way without being judgmental. Once we see our behavior in the light of day we can choose to change, or not.

No one can corrupt or compromise us except ourselves. When we are not a stranger to ourselves, we have an advantage other people don't have. We are aware and accepting of ourselves as we are, not because we are perfect, not because we don’t have demons taunting us, but because we are all we have, and if it is not working for us, we can choose to change, but we cannot change if we don’t first establish self-acceptance.

Something happens when we have clarity as to who we are. We define situations more accurately, and in doing so, we have a better chance at solving them, a better chance at making good choices, and a much better chance at happiness.

* * *

An aside:

In 1969, after Prentice-Hall, Inc. accepted my unsolicited manuscript that would become my first book, CONFIDENT SELLING (1970), the publisher asked me to describe the essence of my book in one paragraph. Readers, who have become accustomed to my lengthy missives, might be surprised that I did it in a single sentence:

“The key to confidence is the acceptance of ourselves as we are and others as we find them.”

I didn’t realize it at the time that I was also defining “tolerance.”

* * *

In the dynamics of interpersonal exchange, in life’s conversations as well as the selling situation, there are two forces at work simultaneously in each of us:

(1) Essence; and
(2) Personality.

Essence is what we are born with. It is our physical and mental makeup.

Personality is learned behavior. It is what we acquire. We are male and female, but sex role identity is learned behavior and is culturally dependent.

That said we are imitators and from a very early age we unconsciously start building our personality. Our acquired tastes, our artificial likes and dislikes are acquired by imitation and imagination. Everything we see, experience, read, study, succeed or fail in doing ratchets up our acquired self. Artificial likes and dislike play an important, and sometimes disastrous part in our life. We can become addicted to what is not good for us. That can be people, places or things.

* * *

We are in the computer age of cell phones, iPods, laptops, and the Internet. They bombard our senses as Gutenberg’s printing press did 500 years ago.

In 510, reading books in one’s own language opened minds of the Enlightenment to new ideas, new discoveries, and new biases. Nations set boundaries, so did owners of private property. Industry, commerce and world trade were changing the role of artisans and the relevance of guilds. A new entity, the factory, was on the horizon. People moved from the country to the city and from an agrarian society of staid and predictable values to an urban society of constant change, uncertainty and ambivalent values.

New city dwellers with little education or skills crowded into slums sending their children off to work in factories instead to school to fend off benumbing poverty. The gap between haves and have nots now exceeded that of feudalism. Serfs became misplaced persons with no skills or place or space to call their own. Fanaticism of all stripes was on the rise. It was modernity.

The Information Age of Gutenberg created a more worldly society that threatened the authority of the Roman Church, displaced moral sensibilities, and spawned the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and new discriminations. Nations large and small – Great Britain, Portugal, Holland, Denmark, Spain, Belgium and Germany – claimed the spoils of indigenous peoples of South and Central America, Africa and India. The sins of colonialism haunt the world today in Third World poverty, pollution, pestilence and pessimism that has in recent days metastasized into metamorphic terrorism.

* * *

We are now in the dawn of the Cyber Nation. It has no boundaries, no distinct nationalities, no dominate language, no specific cultural identity, but is robust and ubiquitous with electronic connections to the most remote regions of the globe.

“Power cells” still exist in the Cyber Age, but they are like Forth of July sparklers, likely to flash colorfully in the sky, radiate artificial beauty, and then dissipate like phantoms in the night. Meanwhile, man goes forward in postmodernity.

* * *

Celebrity once tantalized the fringes of our consciousness. It has become central to our existence. We are in the Age of Celebrity, the age of personality. Barak Obama was elected to the presidency on the strength of his personal charisma, his artful facility with language, his mensch from east coast matriculation, and his stolid game face as bombs blow up all around him to background elevator music.

Obama, make no mistake has essence, but does his essence trump his personality or does his personality trump his essence? He has one of the finest minds to occupy the White House, but this is no guarantee his essence will prevail.

* * *

When personality begins to dominate essence, we begin to prefer what is bad for us candy coating it as good; we become wrongheaded when we choose to believe we are clear minded; we make decisions that are disastrous while using the power of our essence to paint them in positive hues; we lose our perspective and fall victim to our demons. It happened to President Richard Milhous Nixon with Watergate. By a curious turn of events with 9/11 it happened to President George W. Bush, who is the antithesis of celebrity. Yet, after 9/11, he found himself in the “Klieg lights” of celebrity but only in a negative sense.

In the Age of Celebrity the popular trend is to seek fifteen minutes of fame, confirmation of the superficiality of our times. Looking good trumps doing good, and what you see is not necessarily what is there.

(3) Unexpected forces wreak unintended consequences.

In 510, we saw the facile dissemination of books, the lust for learning, and the quest for social and cultural identity in a common language turn people into nations, towards secular pursuits, and away from the Roman Church. Protestantism started out as a religious movement but quickly became a new political and economic force.

Fast forward to 2010, we see chaos and conflict everywhere: Israel continues to build houses on the West Bank of Jerusalem derailing peace talks with the Palestinians; Iran continues to enrich uranium in defiance of the United Nations Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; Wall Street continues to defy Main Street providing million dollar bonuses to its employees after receiving a multi-billion dollar bailout from taxpayers; North Korea continues to launch missiles into the Sea of Japan; the war in Afghanistan continues unabated with little progress. It is a bleak picture, but is it really? Or is it only the world rumbling toward a new configuration?

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We are in the first days of a WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS, a world in which nothing gets past the amateur iPod camera, a world in which common humanity embraces people of different cultures and countries superceding the political jockeying for power, a world that is becoming increasingly young, idealistic, ideational and passionately concerned for the two-thirds of the world impoverished, diseased and left to rot.

Religion has been the scapegoat. It is not the culprit. Religion is now more important in the World Without Borders. Followers of the great religions are attracted to them by love not hate, by harmony not violence, by a common humanity, not exploitation. Followers are a world ahead of their leaders who still don’t get it, but followers do.

Many journalists and commentators who write books and fill the air with doom don’t get it either. They blame religion for the chaos and conflict and point to corruption and chaos in churches, temples, synagogues and mosques, and with some reason. Human groups of the highest forms are vulnerable to the weaknesses of their times.

Media sound the alarm, titillate with stories of gloom and doom. It sells books and attracts advertisers, while failing to show the World Without Borders has a different agenda. The unintended consequences of the ghoulish focus of nightly television news, radio and television talking heads on terror without a balanced presentation of constructive activities of the day stokes the boilers of fear, hate and mass hysteria. It is no accident “Law & Order” and other network programs have found a market for the macabre, the more ghoulish the wider the audience.

The agenda of A World Without Borders is to provide safe drinking water where terror cells exists, not more soldiers; to create an infrastructure with jobs, not fly drones across neighborhoods to seek out and kill terrorists; to learn the language and customs and dreams of the indigenous people where terrorists are successfully recruiting new members; to build churches and synagogues and mosques where suicide bombers have laid villages to waste; to support Doctors Without Borders and build hospitals and clinics that provide a lifeline to remote communities.

Terrorism will die where poverty is abated, where the rule of law is established, where jobs are readily available, where schools and hospitals serve all the people. Doing too little too late in Third World countries has caused the cancer that terrorism feeds upon.

Terrorists frustrated the Romans when they attempted to conquer Europe a millennium ago. Terrorists frustrated the Russians when they attempted to exploit Afghanistan a generation ago. And terrorists in Afghanistan today demonstrate the pusillanimity of a military solution to a tribal society.

Young Afghans in A World Without Borders may approach a postmodernity society in fifty years, but not today and not tomorrow. The country today is mainly roadless, mountainous and craggily inhospitable to outsiders. With less than 20 percent of the population literate, or skilled in any craft, with most Afghans living essentially as their forefathers lived centuries ago the challenge is real.

Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is Afghanistan. It is unique. Somalia is Somalia, Yemen is Yemen, and people of the World Without Borders understand this if their leadership doesn’t. The world they envision doesn’t only melt guns into plowshares, but turns ideas into food, clothing, water, shelters, hospitals, schools, and trust.

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We have seen the unintended consequences of the real estate subprime fiasco, Wall Street meltdown, and the hollow factories of American manufacturing as Detroit failed for forty years to see the unexpected forces of global warming, the economic rise of India and China, and the spiraling cost of petroleum. .

For more than two years I researched and wrote NEAR JOURNEY’S END? CAN PLANET EARTH SURVIVE SELF-INDULGENT MAN? (2004), which was never published. Whether you have been self-indulgent or not, we all share in the fruits and burdens of our collective actions.

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The forces of history, the cumulative forces of time and circumstances eventually affect us all.

Sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin claims we are at the end of a 600-year Sensate day and are entering an Ideational and creative tomorrow. In “THE CRISIS of OUR AGE” (1941), published seven decades ago, he outlines the collapse of conventional morality, predicts the sexual revolution, scopes the loss of direction of society, outlines the domino effect of crumbling traditional institutions, and details the continuing lapse of society in crisis gravitating to the ordeal of change to the spiraling superficiality of charismatic leadership while people wait for the new age to arrive.

Some think that Ideational tomorrow is the current Information Age. I think it is only an aspect of it. The future, as I see it, is the arrival of a collective civilization in a WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS. What do you think?

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