A New World or No World?

Societies never act in totally predictable ways. In response to the global economic crisis of the mid-Seventies, induced by OPEC tripling the price of oil overnight, every country was put to the test. Energy policies proposed by Jimmy Carter, which rested on the notion of consumer restraint (e.g., turning the thermostat down in the White House to 68 degrees), were unpopular, demoralizing, and ultimately a flop. But England, France, the Soviet Union and others adopted widely differing energy policies that were equally a flop.

Today OPEC is enormously stronger than thirty years ago. Thomas Friedman of the NY Times calls the Arab oil producers “petro-dictators.” With unrestrained speculation driving oil prices skyward, Saudi Arabia alone possesses more wealth in its oil reserves than all the stock and bond markets in the world combined — and that was calculated with oil at $100 a barrel. In addition, by silent collusion the Saudis and the American oil companies started keeping more of their income as pure profits while no longer planning adequately for new oil fields. As a result, even if OPEC decided to undertake new drilling today, the first drop wouldn’t enter the pipeline for a decade.

This looks like the making of a global crisis lasting for the foreseeable future, intensified by the sudden and dramatic demand for oil from India and China. No extra production and ever- growing demand means that $200 a barrel oil will arrive soon and stay there (absent unexpected changes like switching to ethanol on a massive scale, as Brazil has done, or radically new car engines that get 60 miles to the gallon). The shock to the American economy has been swift and highly threatening, but the psychological impact is equally severe. Americans are used to being rich and stable. We accept without question that this country deserves to bestride the world as the British did before 1900.

So far, during the disastrous years of the Bush administration, no energy policy has existed, and all the toughest problems were kicked down the road willy-nilly. Denial has lulled the public into thinking that global warming, overpopulation, pandemic disease, and the end of cheap energy would somehow solve themselves. This attitude, based on the right-wing worship of the free market, made the country’s recent economic woes more shocking psychologically. Now the consensus among global analysts is as follows:

1. Severe swings in the economic outlook for America cannot be avoided.
2. Continuing to do nothing would be disastrous on all fronts. Yet no general agreement on what to do has been found. Divisive politics still trumps intelligent reform.
3. Arab oil producers are absorbing undreamt of profits so fast that its effects cannot be dealt with either by them or their customers.
4. The political will barely exists to cope with emerging problems, much less the radical policies that would solve those problems.
5. Escalating oil prices threaten the world with food shortages and widespread outrage against OPEC, creating the conditions for global rebellion and, at worst, an attack on the Middle East to seize their oil fields.
6. Worldwide inflation has begun and could spiral out of control.
7. As China and India rise, the U.S. will slowly but surely become less relevant as a dominant economy. We are already highly dependent on foreign lenders and hugely in debt.

What, then, the future?

We find ourselves at a fork in the road. One way leads to a new world, one being born with frightening convulsions but eventually benefiting every economy. This is the way of globalization. The other way is the road to protectionism, tariffs, anti-immigration, and the shutdown of alliances. This is the way of nationalism. One way is optimistic and evolutionary, the other is pessimistic and reactionary. One way looks outward to the world at large, the other looks outward and puts national security ahead of every other interest. To date, the general U.S. response has tended toward the latter. Nationalism, including toxic xenophobia, is the province of the right wing, which blocks all things progressive and stigmatizes anyone who opposes them.

Until two or three years ago, hesitating at the crossroads was excusable. Suddenly the dam broke with the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the irrational rise in oil speculation. Decisions must be made in a matter of months, not years (the only historical parallel is the first hundred days of the New Deal in 1933 and the immediate postwar era when Stalin invaded Eastern Europe). Therefore, one needs to look carefully at the forces that will drive us to choose one road or the other. In particular, how can we gain enough confidence, will, and optimism to create a new world instead of collapsing into no world that we would ever recognize today?

Eighty years after the great economist John Maynard Keynes observed that the market is psychological and goes up and down primarily because of how investors feel, few people grasp how profound he was. We still rely on objective standards that are only marginally credible: graphs and models, price swings turned into predictive software, and battling academic theories that never come to a consensus. But understanding Keynes’s insight is absolutely vital, and then going even further to comprehend why we behave the way we do. For a new world to be born, a new mindset is necessary. “Mind before money” encapsulates the truth. There has never been a more threatening time for the U.S. and the global economy since the Great Depression and the era of totalitarianism.

The future depends on consciousness in undeniable ways. Here are the major factors:

1. Self-confidence and optimism.
2. Giving value to things that really matter.
3. A vision of the future.
4. The courage and will to carry out that vision.
5. A viable definition of personal happiness.

Today, the vast majority of decision-making rarely takes these factors into account. Instead, we pretend that economics is a science, and we measure success sheerly in terms of wealth. We maximize selfishness while encouraging the neglect of others. As a result, huge portions of the world’s population have in essence been thrown away. Human beings are now disposable because they are economic pawns. For example, Thailand’s economy was devastated in the 90s by currency speculators on Wall St. who first inflated the Thai economy as part of the “Asian miracle”, and then allowed it to collapse once the returns of speculation had run their course from boom to bust. The immorality of an outside agency destroying innocent people’s lives meant nothing when Thailand was reduced to a computer model that set to jump ship as soon as profits dropped below expectations. The vaunted free market may “work,” but only if you’re willing to take no responsibility for the harm it does in human terms.

Let’s evaluate what it means to look at markets as Keynes suggested, as a byproduct of how people feel.

1. Self-confidence and optimism.
These qualities emerge naturally when people are prosperous. They dwindle in the face of adversity, just when they are most needed. The trick is how to remain confident under pressure and optimistic when the going gets rough. At present, objective measures of confidence and optimism are basically useless. They are seen wrongly as byproducts of money. We have diminish ourselves into pawns of outside forces. But if that view is false, what replaces it?

The answer is consciousness. People gain in confidence and optimism when they have self-esteem, when they can successfully carry out big projects, overcome obstacles, and acquire an unshakable sense of their own worth and skills — all subjective qualities. Growth of consciousness is the only viable way to obtain inner stability under stress. Look at the American economy. People were made confident by getting richer, but once the housing market retreated by a small degree, near panic set in. Our confidence, it turned out, was tied to low mortgages, high salaries, and cheap goods at the mall. The shallowness of “consumer confidence” is obvious. What’s not so obvious is that true confidence must stand up to change and rise above downturns. By ignoring consciousness and clinging to money, we opened ourselves up to crippling insecurity.

2. Giving value to things that really matter.
In the past, people inherited their sense of value, which came to them ready made and second-hand. Religion, for example, held that nothing mattered more than faith (in Christianity, at least). Obedience was rewarded by God. Original sin doomed humanity to perpetual guilt and whatever could heal that guilt. But with the astonishing rise of science, not only was religion displaced, but it left a vacuum of values. People became more and more free to decide for themselves what really mattered. The good news is that each person could espouse values that don’t come from the outside, imposed by authority. The bad news is that false and trivial values rushed in to fill the vacuum, far ahead of meaningful values.

In the consumer culture that arose, a gorgeous supermodel, a Mercedes, five bedrooms, and the right labels on your clothes leave us helpless to deal with something like global warming. We are submerged in distractions and pulled into a spiral of narcissism. Fickle desire trumps stable human values, and in time consciousness gets stuck in a self-indulgent rut. The greatest harm, however, was done out of sight. Awareness became dull and detached. This is what spiritual teachers mean by being asleep. People get used to a total lack of alertness and self-awareness. “I am what I buy” is so much easier than “I know myself.”

Thus we created a permanent sub-class of Cassandras, awake enough to see looming disasters but unable to attract anyone else’s attention. The warmakers in the White House had ample access to experts who knew the Middle East and foresaw the disastrous results of invading Iraq. Instead, decisions were made with almost no forethought or curiosity about the unknown. Indeed, being too awake came to be seen as a political threat. Trying to alert the public and wake up their conscience was anathema. Leaving the war aside, this dumbing down shuts off growth of consciousness itself, lulling us more and more into the delusion that sleeping through life is good enough to make for a comfortable existence.

3. A vision of the future.
When people are asleep, the future is a repetition of the past, because inertia can do little else. Conservation, the party of inertia, represents the impulse in each of us not to wake up –it says “Leave me alone. I like the way I am.” The growth of consciousness never happens until a person overcomes inertia first. All progress occurs first at the level of consciousness and then, as if by magic, a discovery appears in the outer world. A famous example is the discovery of penicillin. In the lab millions of petri dishes had been thrown out because common air-borne Penicillium mold had contaminated the bacteria that a researcher wanted to culture. The mold was a nuisance until Alexander Fleming saw instead that killing bacteria was a positive thing — he was awake to a new possibility. The key was a change of perception.

New discoveries don’t occur because Nature suddenly reveals more of its potential. All of Nature is available all the time. We are the discoverers of hidden dimensions in ourselves, and a tiny flicker of waking up stimulates new revelations. Ultimately, science is a way for mind to speak to itself — it’s an inner exploration that leads to external findings. But at the present moment, with reactionary forces so dominant, there is no viable vision of tomorrow. By definition reactionary forces want to freeze progress, usually by idealizing the past and grossly exaggerating the risk of moving forward.

4. The courage and will to carry out that vision.
The unknown is frightening to contemplate (a fear bolstered by anything that represents losing control over our surroundings — e.g. oil prices, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and a planet made unstable by global warming. But being uncertain is also necessary. Finding a new way means destroying and old way, and nobody can predict what happens when both forces hit each other head on.

It takes courage to discard what we know — the tried and true, the comfortable and reassuring . It takes no courage to enforce “traditional values.” Traditionalism rarely, if ever, advanced the world at large. However, that lesson must be relearned over and over, because fear is ever-present. It must be surmounted every day. Driving fear away doesn’t solve anything; it only sets the stage for what really solves problems: quantum leaps in creativity, new discoveries, liberating insights.

Clearly we are at a point where traditionalism has shown far more negatives than positives. Religious intolerance taints the churches and mosques, homophobia and anti-immigration taint the desire for community. We live at a time when traditional values shouldn’t be allowed to hold consciousness back. After all, it wasn’t long ago that racism was a tradition — the recent Democratic primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky show how enduring that tradition is. Courage is a dynamic quality. It must be seized eery day. Courage is the implementing force of vision, and both begin in consciousness.

5. A viable definition of personal happiness.
In the end, arriving at a new world comes down to what makes us happy. We use oil because driving our own cars and traveling at will makes us happier than being limited to railroads and mass transit. Reformers lament that more people don’t give up their cars and resort to mass transit. When you think about why they don’t, the answer isn’t decades of cheap gas, ingrained American selfishness, or a crass indulgence in personal pleasure over the health of the planet. We don’t change to a new way of life because we are following an old way of happiness. Duty and guilt tell us to save the planet. But another voice speaks louder, and it asks if we would be giving up our happiness. Global warming won’t be solved by lecturing the human race about saving the polar bear.

Here we face the most difficult challenge of all. Our conception of happiness has to move away from materialism. Every wise teacher has declared that external comforts are unreliable and not to be trusted. Christ didn’t say “The Kingdom of God is within a four-bedroom condo.” He said it lies within us. In India, turning inward became a powerful social force because people agreed that the inner path was real and desirable. To back up this conviction, .most ancient people looked around and saw disease, poverty, and violence in all directions. The seductions of money and physical comfort weren’t present. Our situation now teeters on the rink of peril, too. We have reached a crossroads that appears only once or twice a century. Two roads aren’t diverging in a yellow wood, however the divide exists in consciousness. The world’s wisdom traditions inform us which way to go. Only time will tell if waking up was the way we chose. If so, peril will turn into a creative opportunity. The other way surely leads into more inertia, reactionary values, dead habit, and worst of all, deeper and deeper sleep.

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