The Ten Labors of Hercules Today

Accepting that we can reshape our world only little by little, we, as tragic lovers, have to know where to concentrate our efforts. We have to know what is important in the myriad events and problems in the world around us. What are the challenges of our time?

I take one list typical for the period after Limits to Growth, showing probable international crises for the coming decades:

1.     Monetary crisis;

2.     Scarcity of raw materials and energy;

3.     Food shortages;

4.     Degradation of the natural environment;

5.     Inadequate distribution of wealth;

6.     Nuclear war.

Many such lists have already been made. In identifying the most important challenges, I have applied to global challenges the business technique of strategic issue analysis. Important clues are to look for developments that:

1.     Snowball, having consequences that worsen the problem;

2.     Have almost irreversible consequences;

3.     Affect the problem-solving capability itself.

As an illustration of these three dynamics, I cite some examples from the criminal justice system. Use of hard drugs leads to drug dealers. Drug dealers have an interest in selling more. Drug addicts have an interest in becoming drug dealers. So there is a feed-forward loop, or a snowballing. Prisons do deter crime, but they also make many convicts more criminal. Lack of prison capacity increases the chance that petty criminals will meet hardened criminals. The more that prisons stimulate crime, the more fed up with the subject are the public and politics, and the less they tend to increase capacity. When drug dealers or other criminals have reached a certain critical mass in organization and finance, they will be much harder to convict. Eventually they will buy their way into the police and the justice system. Corruption of police and the justice system is the classic example of a problem eating into the problemsolving capability itself. Many forms of corruption and demoralization fall into this category.

A natural environment such as a freshwater lake may become so polluted that its capacity for self-recuperation breaks down. Deforestation leads in many places to immediate topsoil loss, making reforestation almost impossible. The spread of a desert is a similar process that is practically irreversible, as is depletion of oil resources. We may find ways to address the problem, but we cannot find ways to create new oil reserves in the time it has taken to deplete them.

After some study and much thought I have come to a list of ten major challenges to the development of a sane, humane, civilized planet. Maybe ten is the limit of my imagination, and maybe it is the limit of the complexity I can handle. Maybe unconscious or aesthetic principles are at work. Maybe ten is the magic number for social challenges, but ten it is. Anyway, the more challenges, the fuzzier the picture; the fewer challenges, the poorer the picture. So here is my balance between mental fuzziness and mental poverty:

1.     Cruelty, torture and terror;

2.     Lack of control and loss of control;

3.     Depletion and pollution of nature;

4.     Transition to the post-industrial society;

5.     The ailments of democracy;

6.     Social injustice;

7.     Nationalism and international tensions;

8.     The probability of another great war;

9.     Global emergency planning;

10.  Nihilism.

The next ten chapters will deal with these ten challenges. So, I am taking the road of the evolutionary strategies. In each chapter I will sketch the key problem as I see it. I will give a historical brief, analyze the dynamics behind the problem, try to project the future consequences if we do not meet the challenge, and suggest our most promising avenues for responding to the challenge.

To provide a general picture, I will give short descriptions of the challenges here. They are the ten dragons to slay, the ten sphinxes to confront.

1. Cruelty, Torture and Terror

Terror is the oldest challenge. ‘A tyranny is worse than a devouring tiger’. Terror brings with it the world of cruelty, of torture, of atrocities, of wanton slaughter. Civilization begins where terror is stopped. Civilization ends where terror starts. Terror is the prime challenge, the basic inhumanity, the first and most terrible sphinx. It raises the deepest doubt; it generates the deepest despair about the possibility of real civilization. Cruelty, torture and beastly slaughter are the worst nightmares in broad daylight. They are, in a sense, the ultimate reality.

Real is what makes a difference. Fear, despair and excruciating pain make all the difference in the world. The bestial or demoniacal or mechanical infliction of pain by other people is an experience so intense that no serenity of armchair thinking can make up for it. In the body of civilization, terror is the most malignant, open festering sore.

Joan Grant in one of her novels about old Egypt describes a resistance network. This network is called The Eyes of Horus, because its participants should be able to see with one eye the rising sun, and with the other eye the worms in the belly of the crocodile. That is what this challenge is about, facing this sphinx steadfastly with one open eye. Our other eye should be free, so that we do not succumb to the sickening power of this horror. As long as terror exists, it will always be the first challenge.

2. Lack of Control and Loss of Control

The second challenge is that many developments we once started seem to get out of hand. Whatever we do seems to worsen the problem. This is the problem of the vicious circles, spirals that accelerate or jam. This challenge is about those snowballing developments and accelerations that appear to be the hallmark of our time. Everything seems to increase and go faster.

In 1944 more bombs were dropped than in all years before 1944. During one year in Vietnam more bombs were dropped than during the entire Second World War.

Today there are more scientists alive than there have ever been in all the years of the past. The best IBM personal computer of 1987 cost 12, 000 dollars and had the same capacity as a huge computer that twelve years earlier had cost half a million dollars. A PC of 1, 000 dollars today will do better.

Many processes enter a loop after their takeoff stage. Machines produce other machines that are better and faster, computers produce other computers that are better and faster, and software produces software that is better and faster. In the population explosion, more people produce ever more people (though not better or faster).

Loops are processes that have feed-forward -- consequences that intensify the process itself. This process is one of snowballing or spiraling out. It is similar to inflation that may ‘spiral out of control.’ Other processes do the same when two parties react to each other in a way that intensifies their current reactions. We call this process escalation. The arms race is an infamous example of such spiraling.

Inward spirals also exist and lead to jamming. Bureaucracy leads to more bureaucracy, legislation leads to more legislation, more lawyers lead to more complicated justice and so to more lawyers. Some of these loops lead to desirable results, such as economic takeoff and ever-decreasing prices. More often, loops spiral out of control, as in the classic story of the sorcerer’s apprentice.

This sphinx is one that is hysterical, with a contorted, twisted face like a whirlpool. It is not a basic challenge to our humanity, as was the first sphinx. This sphinx is the basic challenge to our capability to respond.

3. Depletion and Pollution of Nature

The next challenge is the depletion, pollution and destruction of our natural environment. In the first place, this depletion and destruction is a result of the population explosion. In the second place it is a result of the scale and nature of new industrial processes. In the third place we have a throwaway and who-cares attitude that has decreased more slowly than the two first factors have grown.

The best-known aspect of this challenge is the pollution of air, water and soil. In the end, however, the degradation and destruction of nature beyond recuperation may be this challenge’s most important aspect. Destruction includes erosion, deforestation, desertification. One other effect, even more extensive, might be a global climate change.

This sphinx shows an ugly, barren, polluted wasteland.

4. Transition to the Post-Industrial Society

The fourth challenge is the massive change of our economies and consequently our social life, because of the advance of technology. Just as the Agricultural Revolution ten thousand years ago sparked a wave of changes in how people lived, so did the Industrial Revolution. A further wave of massive changes is occurring right now with the latest phase of the Industrial Revolution, that of microelectronics, computers and telecommunications.

In the industrialized world this change means a transition to the post-industrial society described by Bell, Toffler and Naisbitt. This post-industrial society requires different products, different work, less work, and above all, a vastly different life.

This sphinx has a puzzled look, anxious and alienated.

5. The Ailments of Democracy

The fifth challenge is to continue to run societies in a way that prevents both anarchy and repression. Since the second half of the sixties there has appeared what Herbert Simon calls a ‘loss of nerve’ in our democracies. The most important challenge of modern democracies is to prevent their degradation into oligarchies, or worse, into totalitarianism.

In a democracy we cannot easily blame others for social imperfections. Nothing prevents any one of us from becoming prime minister or president. The feeling of impotence that an individual citizen may easily harbor in any political state becomes more paradoxical in a democracy.

The face of this sphinx is our own unimportant face, the face of one lost among many.

6. Social Injustice

The sixth challenge is injustice - institutionalized injustice, social injustice. The first level of injustice is that of people becoming victims of violence: the social violence of gangs, the political violence of paramilitary groups and terrorists, and the commercial violence of organized crime. To live in a neighborhood that is under control of the Mob is near to living under the threat of the first challenge, which is that of torture, cruelty and terror.

The second aspect of social injustice is grinding poverty, the poverty that breeds despair, demoralization, indifference, and loss of human dignity.

The third aspect of social injustice is discrimination based on background: race, religion, language, sex. Race and sex discrimination are probably the most vicious, because race and sex are conspicuous and impossible to change.

The fourth aspect of social injustice is the arrogance of power of official institutions over individual citizens, in the machinery of government, especially of the law enforcement agencies themselves. This is an old challenge indeed.

The face of this sphinx is one of unfeeling arrogance.

7. Nationalism and International Tensions

The seventh challenge is the challenge of nationalism and of its resulting international tensions. Since nations have armies, international tensions may cause or aggravate armed conflicts. With the present global economy and access to global transport and information, all of us are interdependent. Policy decisions are made within national boundaries, and many of these boundaries are hardening. Think of growing protectionism. Political states are considered to be machines to stimulate wealth and dispense welfare. Each state wants economic growth. Thus fierce competition, distrust and outright envy are present, but so is mutual dependence. The GNP race that has followed the old colonial race has many runners. All of them are struggling to get to the top, but they are interconnected with strings of trade, of finance, of knowledge, and of people.

After any revolution of rising expectations, disappointment in progress becomes widespread, and much scapegoating appears. McCarthyism was just one example of the universal tendency to look abroad for causes of domestic problems and frustrations. Behind each problem are the commies, or the CIA, or the multinationals or the heathens. However, as Daniel Boorstin reminds us: ‘All social ills are indigenous, especially in our time, in which each nation asserts its divine right to go to hell in its own particular way.’

8. The Probability of another Great War

This leads us to the eighth challenge: the chance of new global wars, possibly nuclear, ultimately with the potential of destroying our civilization. By its nature, this challenge is the biggest.

The face of this sphinx is as awful as that of the first one, but this sphinx is incomparably larger. This monster rises sky-high, with a metal face and a slumbering volcano inside. It is like a lethal spirit in the bottle, but on a planetary scale. This sphinx is tied to a viciously spiraling arms race, which enlarges both the spirit and the bottle that holds it. We are long past the stage of trading off the opening of a limited bottle now for the chance of having a bigger one opened later. More specifically, the challenge is to make the outbreak of a new world war less probable, and to decrease the extent and intensity of such a war.

9. Global Emergency Planning

The ninth challenge is global emergency planning, to prepare for relief and reconstruction after a global war or any other global disaster. This challenge is partially a problem of means of medicine, transport, industry, agriculture, and most basically, of knowledge. It also is a problem of ends. The survivors of such a disaster may be miserable, confused, demoralized people, lacking spirit and guts to battle the odds.

This sphinx is a collection of shifting shadows at the horizon.

10. Nihilism

This brings us to the last challenge - nihilism. Why bother? Is there any meaning in all this struggle for a better world? All of these earthly problems may just be part of an educational experience or an experimental laboratory. Or maybe they are a chance happening in a chance universe, in which some creatures have the strange fate to be self-conscious and doomed to choice. This is the sphinx with the empty eyes, black holes that stare from nothingness into nothingness.

Of course, there are many doctrines, mostly religious, which offer escape from this sphinx. But if we do not want to escape it, if we want to confront it, then nihilism is the ultimate challenge that separates the men from the boys, as well as the women from the girls. I will explore those modern developments that seem to bring this presumably unsolvable issue at least into focus, and that appear to offer new material.

From: The Ten Global Challenges: How People Make the World. An Essay on Politics, Civilization and Humanity. Ordering the book 

Educational Strategies to Develop our Society

Moral strategies develop civilized role patterns, and educational strategies civilize individual minds. Moral strategies improve social conditions and assume that individual personalities will move their own peculiarities to the background. Educational strategies appeal to individuals and assume that social conditions will follow suit. Education may transcend academic learning, stimulate personal experience, offer new insights (eye-openers) and show examples. I see three educational strategies that are useful for developing civilization: example strategies, eye-opening or awareness strategies, and deconditioning strategies.

The eye-opening strategy is by far the most popular, because it tries to convert by words. The example strategy works with deeds, a quite different game. Example is the most basic strategy. Even other mammals use it.

A pure example strategy may be to organize cooperatives or communes as illuminating examples for the outside world. Example strategy could also be used outside of these alternative working and living communes. A personnel department that wishes to stimulate cooperation, personal growth, and the quality of leadership in the organization can try to make its own department into a shining example. Likewise, top management sets an important example if it avoids the trap of do-as-I-say-but-don’t-do-as-I-do.

For the eye-opening strategy, language is indispensable. Religions use both example strategy and eye-opening strategy to make converts. Evangelization, literally meaning: spreading the gospel, spreading the ‘good message’, uses preachers, and preachers use words. What the use of words wins in efficiency over the use of deeds, it often loses in validity.

The most effective strategy involves words and deeds going together, right words accompanying right deeds. But example strategy remains basic, because deeds and facts are more basic than words. Therefore, mission is more effective than evangelization, because mission offers facts, although usually only indirectly related to the doctrine it wants to spread. When facts are cited only to induce people to hear words, unbalance is present. Deeds will be exploited, even prostituted, to serve the words. It is easy to feel sympathy and respect for religions such as the Salvation Army that convert mainly by example, or the Quakers who convert almost exclusively by example. This sympathy and respect may be present despite what we think of a religion’s belief or style.

Though writing is hard work, the relationship between words and deeds is a dangerous subject for a writer, so I had better move on to the next subject.

Awareness strategies often use verbal violence. With awareness strategies, people are almost compelled to discover how something works and what they ought to want. Such strategies assume that if people deviate from, say, Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, they deviate only because they yet lack awareness of their own needs. The assumption is that people would like nothing better than to realize themselves, but they are still ignorant of that fact, and therefore they should be made conscious.

Awareness strategy is often relevant, and often not. Many people who have just become aware, are then especially aware of the necessity to make other people aware, too. However, if anything is difficult and burdening, becoming aware is. One consequence, for example, is a realization of impotence. Becoming aware may be so upsetting that preferably it is channeled within a stringent ideological framework. Ideology makes us aware of answers, not of questions.

Becoming aware without practical consequences is a favorite intellectual and emotional infection. It leads to evangelization, the repetitive, stuck-in-a-rut kind of awakening. We have become aware of what makes people and society tick and of what should be done. What we do next is to make other people aware of this insight. We become convinced that if only enough people become aware, then everything will change. In this respect, social movements resemble chain letters. To involve other people in liberating experiences is an addictive surrogate for factual transformation. Movements like Transcendental Meditation solve this problem by believing that if only one percent of people have come around, then society already will change automatically.

Enthusiasts of a new order of things often believe that their gospel will spread over society like wildfire. Luckily, things go differently. When a movement becomes large, it acquires different priorities, different interpretations, different schools, applications to specific areas, combinations with other approaches. There will be conferences, training centers and associations. Tensions grow between the crystallization of an establishment and the urge to return to the simple, original, personal source of inspiration. Tensions grow also between orthodoxy and revisionism. Splits, compromises and new doctrines abound, and the original innovation dissolves in the general turmoil of society, leaving many or just a few fossil institutions.

Even with successful movements, often very little remains that is recognizable, precisely because success leads to absorption into society. Things begin to go much more slowly and in a less revolutionary way than enthusiast protagonists initially assume. In the 1920s people pointed to the success of the cooperative movement, convinced that within several decades the whole society would be organized into cooperatives.

Common reactions to inevitable disappointment are impatience, frustration and pessimism. If little progress is made, this lack of progress is due to people’s lack of awareness or to devious conspiracies of the powers that be. This explanation leads to incrowding of early converts. Their difference with the outside world grows, and so does the need for scapegoats. The oasis accuses the desert of barrenness, and invents demons of barrenness.

The usual scapegoats are the conspicuous insiders in society, those who are as fish in the waters of public institutions: businesspeople, magistrates, politicians, religious authorities. Frustrated outsiders paint these insiders in glaring colors of narrow-mindedness and power (apparently regarding themselves as broad-minded and powerless).

Frustrated converts may feel forced to engage in such unworthy activities as power games, assuming that the evil world will later condone their dirty hands! Often these people become political radicals. Such groups can intersperse progressive and human pieces of wisdom with slogans full of cynicism and power politics.

Educational strategies are, at best, based on a partial acceptance of the present state of affairs. Such strategies imply a certain dissociation from the actual social or organizational state of affairs. The image of another, better society begins to appear in the new ways of thinking and examples shown, in the new experiences gained. Some educational strategies are based on dissociation without taking distance or judging normatively. I call these approaches deconditioning strategies. Classic examples of such strategies are Taoism and, partially inspired by Taoism, Zen Buddhism.

Deconditioning strategies liberate, making us participating outsiders who observe participants of the organization or community we are in. We participate, but with inner freedom, both serious and playful, almost aesthetically. Simultaneously within and outside the situation, we find ourselves free of worry.

To what does Zen lead? A Western student who had been training in Kyoto for seven years answered: ‘No parapsychic experiences, as far as I am aware. But you wake up in the morning and the world is so beautiful you can hardly stand it.’ This remark reveals not a cultivation of sentiment, but a getting rid of filters and dampers.

Deconditioning is a lively and personal experience that can be effective as a change strategy, but with obscure and unpredictable consequences. It is perfection, but in terms of Transactional Analysis, it contains more of the Child than of the Adult. Chang-Tzu wrote beautiful poems about the easy, natural perfection of life. Especially recommended for busy people is Active Life.

A deconditioned person brings about changes as does leaven, without care, without doubts, without intentions, contagiously. Zen is a combination of example strategy and awareness strategy, without putting up examples to reach awareness. In contrast to (Confucian) conditioning, (Taoist) deconditioning is a strictly personal process, although other deconditioned people can stimulate it. Apparently this stimulation can even be done methodically, although this approach remains, as evidenced by Zen Buddhism, precarious and paradoxical.

Precision with ease gives a ‘dancing’ impression. Next to Zen in the Art of Archery and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there will be Zen in Social Change. Why not? According to Gary Zukav, even the natural scientists dance.

The main lesson of deconditioning strategies for people who want to improve things is to avoid inflated pretensions. Change without wanting to change too much. Find the natural points of access, the natural leverage points. Be yourself. Stay oriented on society and others, with goodwill, but without intentions. This attitude may create an atmosphere of inner freedom and ease in all social activities - perfect freedom, free perfectionism.

A Zen-Buddhist would suggest: ‘Do not entertain ideals, do not present precepts. Liberate without telling people what is good for them or how the world is or should be. Create breathing space, open air, freedom, vitality, light-footed seriousness. Undefinable, light, without any negative emotions, without fear or hate or jealousy and, above all else, without guilt.’ Such an attitude is wise but innocent, and surely dancing.

From: The Ten Global Challenges: How People Make the World. An Essay on Politics, Civilization and Humanity. Ordering the book