Convergence of 30 Disabling Global Trends
Mapping the social climate change engendering a perfect storm
Introduction
Checklist of 30 disabling trends
Spiraling trends: cyclones in a climate of change?
Interweaving “cyclones” and “anti-cyclones” in a global system
Emergent polyhedral configuration of alternating systemic functions
Insights from the Conference of the Birds?
Conclusion
References
EXTRACT:
Checklist of 30 disabling trends
- Systemic erosion of confidence and trust, most notably with regard to:
- Politicians, with a vested interest in ensuring their re-election at any cost
- Science, with a vested interest in justifying costly research
- Professions, with their vested interest in overselling on the basis of their authoritative advice
- Business (especially the financial community), with a vested interest in overselling and miss-selling
- Religion (as highlighted by widespread sexual abuse by clergy)
- Security services
- Rapidly decreasing coherence of statements by authorities(official declarations, “promises” by governments):
- Encouraging gullibility, credulity and overconfidence by some
- Encouraging fundamental suspicion and counter-arguments by others (perceiving such statements as “empty”)
- Extending to any articulation of “meta-statements” about this trend (such as this checklist)
- Emergence of evident contradictionsundermining confidence in those involved:
- Primary role of Permanent Members of the UN Security Council in arms manufacture, marketing and sustaining a demand
- Indictment of many in positions of authority, suggesting similar behaviour by others (for which evidence is lacking)
- Limited transparency in institutions acclaiming its merits for others (banking, etc)
- Increasingly evident disparities(notably correlated with forms of discrimination) in:
- Income inequality
- Housing and quality of life
- Opportunities for employment (nepotism, etc)
- Increasingly uncertain individual social security:
- Evident reduction in employment opportunities
- Evident insecurity of employment contracts
- Vulnerability of employment to delocalization
- Uncertain social security coverage (pensions, health, care, etc)
- Progressive replacement of people by robots to reduce costs
- Increasingly perceived meaninglessness of life(especially for the underprivileged), with respect to:
- Employment and career opportunities
- Entertainment opportunities
- Alternative lifestyle opportunities
- Increasingly constrained efficacity of remedial action:
- Evidently limited capacity for remedial global decision-making
- Restriction to narrow technical initiatives (characterized primarily by advantages to military-industrial complex)
- Reliance on controversial forms of remedial action (quantitative easing, geo-engineering)
- Obliging tax-payers to compensate for errors in institutional strategies (and complicity of government therein)
- Cultivated delusionsregarding possibility of fruitful consensus regarding:
- Possible emergence of spiritual harmony between the religions (cf. The God Delusion, 2006)
- Scientific consensus, as indicated by the climate change debate (cf. The Science Delusion, 2012)
- Possibility of effective political consensus regarding remedial strategies
- Inability to delivereffectively according to strategic vision and contractual agreements:
- Characteristic major cost overruns (with which increased profits are acknowledged to be significantly associated)
- Subsequent emergence of dangerous design defects (structural faults, etc)
- Subsequent emergence of problematic side-effects, systematically neglected in project design
- Dysfunctional game-playing as an increasing characteristic undermining collective undertakings
- Increasingly evident influence of unchecked organized crime (and official complicity therewith)
- Need for ever more extreme forms of distractionand the questionable means of ensuring their availability:
- Media violence
- Violent interactive online gaming
- Sexually extreme content
- Encouragement of momentary mass enthusiasms as a consequence of media
- Escapism (games, drugs, alcohol, tourism, etc)
- Human trafficking, prostitution, etc
- Effective “grooming” of the population:
- Ensuring acceptability of violence (via the daily media diet)
- Ensuring increasingly commodified “quality of life” (reminiscent of intensive farming systems)
- Manufacturing consent, notably with regard to products of lower quality and to the framing of “enemies”
- Increasing constraints on dissemination of challenging informationevocative of (unwelcome) questions regarding current modalities:
- “Dumbing-down” by the media (and cultivation of collective attention to trivia)
- Increasing emphasis on distraction
- News management (spin)
- Censorship in support of political, ideological or religious agendas
- Increasingly omnipresent “security” systems:
- Implementation of a pattern of global satellite systems and “mapping” (eg Google Earth and street view)
- Increasing levels of surveillance and invasive security (far exceeding those deprecated during the Cold War)
- Worldwide implantation of military bases (replicating a final phase in the Roman Empire)
- Widespread instigation of “stop and search” procedures (frequently experienced as unjustified)
- Increasing incarceration of population
- Increasing pattern of failure of security systems(purportedly “guaranteed” not to fail):
- Hacking of private information held for electronic transactions (passwords, banking details, etc)
- Official and unofficial use of cyber warfare tools
- Increasing sense of personal insecurity:
- Physical insecurity (personal and family)
- Property insecurity
- Financial insecurity (savings, etc)
- Much-challenged relation to “life“, evoked as an unquestionable justification for problematic initiatives:
- Inability to resolve the debate on: Right to life (abortion) vs. Right to choose
- Ensuring life support at all costs (notably to the family and for the benefit of health care services)
- Right to die for those wishing to (euthanasia)
- State-authorised assassination and capital punishment
- Heavy economic dependence on weapons development, manufacture and ensuring a need for supplies
- Dependence on death to activate legislative remedial action (reminiscent of past needs for human sacrifice)
- Much-challenged relation to principles and values:
- Devaluation of acclaimed values and principles
- Systematic exploitation of principles as fig-leaves to justify questionable initiatives
- Exploitation of opportunities offered by neglecting principles, or setting them aside conditionally
- Use of “moral easing” as a systemic equivalent to the dubious process of “quantitative easing”
- Erosion of judicial process:
- Political pressures on judiciary (including appointments to judiciary)
- Fabrication and tampering with evidence
- Impunity of agents of state or people of influence
- Exploitation of extra-judicial environments and processes (rendition, etc)
- Evident interference with due process and incidence of miscarriage of justice
- Systematic manipulation of representative decision-making, disguised as democratic processes:
- Electoral fraud
- Influence peddling (“cash for questions”, bribery, etc),
- Promotion of the apparent necessity for citizens of a democracy to bear arms
- Indications of questionably classified initiatives lacking effective democratic oversight:
- Population surveillance
- Research: genetic engineering, geo-engineering, biological warfare, etc
- Cyber warfare
- Targetted assassination
- Preoccupation with short-term outcomes, whether problems or benefits (and consequent neglect of long-term implications)
- Profit (immediate “bottom line”)
- Solutions to (immediate) problems (“fire-fighting” strategies)
- Satisfaction
- Spurious justifications(invoking health, security, jobs, advancement of knowledge, etc) with respect to:
- Increasing indications that the rule of law is systematically by-passed
- Investment in costly, prestige projects of questionable significance in a time of crisis
- Investment in risky research, notably involving animals and potential threats to the environment
- Impunity of agents of the state
- Emergent pattern of “ranting and raving“:
- Widespread “ranting” against problematic situations and those responsible
- Widespread “raving” about isolated achievements of little more than symbolic significance
- Increasingly ineffectual argumentation:
- Decreasing significance of rational arguments
- Increasing emphasis on the “positive” and avoidance (or denial) of the problematic
- Decreasing credibility of any systemic or meta-perspective
- Automatic condemnation and demonisation of “other” perspectives (“You're either with us, or against us“; There Is No Alternative, TINA)
- Unquestionable dependence on aggravating processes:
- Exploitation of non-renewable resources (most notably oil)
- Automobile manufacture (upheld as vital to the economy and jobs)
- Destructive exploitation of natural resources (forest areas, marine ecosystems)
- Unrecycled waste disposal (marine disposal, nuclear waste, etc)
- Population increase (as vital to ensuring a pattern of increased consumption necessary for the economy)
- Asystemic analysisof resource overshoot and remedial possibilities (most notably in relation to population increase):
- Over-emphasis on optimistic forecasts and deprecation of counter-indications
- Avoidance of consideration of problematic possibilities and surprises
- Downstream thinking (concern with current “shortages”, rather than with engendering “longages”)
- Avoidance of consideration of systems management with ever-increasing complexity
- Evident emergency unpreparednessand vulnerability to “surprise':
- Shortage of resources (food, water, shelter, etc.)
- Construction on vulnerable terrain (flood plains, earthquake zones, coasts exposed to freak weather, etc)
- Natural disasters (earthquakes, Earth-crossing asteroids, etc)
- Epidemics
- Dependence on systems of untested robustness
- Inability to reframethe evolving situation and unchallenged resistance to considering that possibility
- global vs local — reframed
- growth
- wealth / worth / meaning
- property (territorial, intellectual, spiritual)
- Ineffectual gatherings of those acclaimed as effective, influential, well-resourced, intelligent, wise, or spiritual
- Ever-increasing impatience at the evolution of the situation (with the evident probability of social unrest)
Read full post with many links and also active graphics.
Phi Beta Iota: At root this is about a complete loss of legitimacy across the eight tribes or communities of information and intelligence – academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, non-government/non-profit. They have all, isolated exceptions not-withstanding, so clearly and persistently betrayed the public trust as to be beneath contempt among those able to reflect on our current circumstances.
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