Has Progress become a suicidal Liability?

My answer: yes, it has, from all indications

Economists, as a rule, focus on short-term conjectural fluctuations, often ignoring the medium-term, decades-long cycles, not to mention longer trends or 40- to 50-year long cycles. If one pays no attention to such things, it is not difficult—it’s even inevitable— to overlook a big crisis, of a type that breaks out with comparative infrequency, and surprises most people.

I was not at all surprised when suddenly the world economy headed by America developed itself , on an unprecedented scale, into a tailspin and burst in the third week of September, leaving a corporate-led-fed human society, particularly the more economy-conscious American society literally stressed out over financial meltdown, and running helter-shelter for cover. More than 80 percent of Americans reportedly said the economy is causing them significant stress, according to the American Psychological Association. What however surprised me was the courage and shrewdness of the world, after a few weeks, to go things as usual, and in its corporate confidence that some temporary ‘bailing out’ and doling out will do the magic remedy.

The crisis literally leaps across the planet. The future is not what it used to be. A regional financial instability could lead to a global financial "meltdown." Modern society perched on the corporate time bomb—bubble economy-- is facing the moment of truth and the turning point is now. We are meeting head-on not merely a financial crisis, but a crisis of civilization, and that its underlying causes must be rooted out.

One should not expect the world economy , lately identified as the ‘bubble economy’ (headed by America), to grow and stabilize for long when almost today 99% of the people in the world are dependent upon the speculative margin of a wealth production process the real production force of which is only less than 1% of the people in the world. Many, of course, may not suddenly agree with this concept. But that exactly is the actual logic behind the modern ‘hypothetical’ process called MECHANIZATION.

Modern man works on dreams—‘hypothesis’. This development has, at last, come to the saturation point and reached the end of the road. This is the chain marketing development that has reached up to the last man who, out of no other option, is looking for the imaginary buyer to sell. The modern market idea that if we just "give people money" by urging them on selling and buying from the market without proper realistic education and social control, ending up in the waste or abuse of it or become alcoholics or the addicts of the market technical system that goes on exploiting addicts.

While we are struggling with the global financial meltdown brought about by borrowing heavily in mortgage and re-mortgage of our house, splurge on spending, the money going to clothes, restaurants, and hairdressers and thus bankrupting ourselves, Earth's ecological debt crisis: mankind's 'borrowing' from nature too hits new record.

For millions of years, man lived by gathering food from nature and then, by doing agriculture and animal husbandry; thus every man lived by producing food for self consumption. Today nobody produces food for self consumption; everybody is engaged in some kind of work to produce something for sale to others for earning money with which he purchases his consumption items produced by others. However, it is seen that most of these consumption commodities produced by these ‘others’ and handled by different stages and types of markets are virtual poisons because of the sole imperatives of this process being a profit making venture which include various types of mechanical process like adding preservatives, longer shelf life, longer transportation, different types of refinements to make the commodities’ look outwardly attractive and their marketing successful.

As the child of nature, man is ordained to live by feeding on nature. And rightly, by exploiting the natural habitat, man lived for hundreds of thousands of years that finally helped to evolve man as the crown and pride of all other creations in nature. However towards the fag end of that natural evolutionary process, or with the start of what we call the modern era, man began to develop certain shortcuts in the process of his exploitation of nature with more ease and with greater returns. We call the production process of these shortcuts—speculative or hypothetical-- techniques of exploitation as MODERN SCIENCE and the sophisticated, again speculative or hypothetical, selling process of their products as MODERN (ART) PHILOSOPHY.

Soon man—modern man—began to depend more on exploiting his techniques and less on exploiting or feeding on nature. As his dependency on exploiting techniques led to the sale of techniques to others, who were still feeding on nature, a stage soon developed, as a cumulative effect of this artificial process, wherein the expanding or increasing the members of this category of ‘others’, for selling and buying of products and service—market—became a prerequisite which led to the total elimination of the nature-dependents (productive human species) who were left in where we find as the ‘undeveloped’ regions of the globe.

And the world thus ended up in making the whole mankind to be dependent—no, not on nature--on each other, for selling and buying techniques of exploitation of man and nature. In other words, modern mankind, despite being the long exploiters nature, became exploiters of one another or just the PARASITES of the same species. And the trend soon got mandated and globalized with the market getting the lead and globalization becoming the norm.

In other words, assuming that the world has a certain quantity of natural resources that can sustainabley be used up each year, today is the date at which this annual capacity is reached. And environmentalists warn that just as a company bound for bankruptcy plunging into the red or a borrower "maxing out" on credit cards must face the consequences, so must man, in his borrowing from nature using his highly non-cyclical process.

Planet earth, with its rich biosphere, was host to man for millions of years. And the long man-nature cyclical homogeneity only further enriched the live biosphere. But only since about the last 300 years, when the newest form of the Primate (humans belong to the scientific order named Primates, a group of over 230 species of mammals that also includes lemurs, lorises, tarsiers, monkeys, and apes and the last of the Hominoidea as Australopithecus afarensis, Homo erectus and Homo sapiens) namely MODERN MAN appeared, has planet earth got such damaged and plundered due to the unprecedented non-cyclical and parasitical character of modern man that today it looks like a barren wasteland and a vast graveyard of all that were once living. No wonder, most of the scientists today warn us about the hypothetical imperatives of finding ‘two or more similar earths', as host planets, to accommodate and support the modern parasitical mankind.

Thus it is utterly futile to go after the biology of the financial meltdown alone and try to save it again through speculative or hypothetical dose of ‘bail outs’. The meltdown is simply civilizational—not merely confined to the financial sector alone. It is encompassing the entire gamut of the life-friendly environment that include material and spiritual faculties of man and his society.

The call is that the underlying causes must be rooted out. In that, we face a defining choice between two contrasting models for organizing human affairs: Mechanical and Natural. Will we be able to celebrate a time of the Great Turning and embrace the higher-order potential of the human nature that can turn crisis into opportunity, and learn to live in creative partnership with one another and Earth?


Let us accept truth while we are in a position to do something about it, and not when we have become totally helpless. I hope we are not in such a state, already.

The hitch is that we are seeking the local solutions to problems that are basically global, a process that only helps the problem creators; that we are seeking physical solution to problems that are largely mental, and the process helps only to aggravates problems; that we are seeking material solutions to problems that are largely spiritual; that we are seeking scientific solutions to problems that are basically philosophical and that we are seeking solutions to problems which are visibly the symptoms of a problem or problems, be it the fight against coco cola or global warming. We are trying to solve the end results of the problem; we are able to recognize the problem only after it has grown to its multifaceted results and maturity and thus all our attempts end up as futile exercises.

There comes a time in a society’s life when its sense of dignity and purpose must be reclaimed from the chaos of crises into which it may have fallen. Today modern mankind is facing a highly volatile and even exploitive situation, both internally and externally, that may prove very detrimental to human existence as a species.