The New Era
What’s happening in London and other UK cities are not riots. What’s happening in Port Au Prince, Syria, Yemen, Madrid, Libya, etc, are not protests nor revolutions. The world is witnessing the embryo of a global insurrection that’ll take place over the course of the upcoming years. This promises to change the way in which we live, work and communicate and is part of the pain of delivering the world into a new era.
The modern man has six basic fears; fear of poverty, fear of old age, fear to lose love, to critics, to ill-health and of course, fear of death. In the process of voting someone in an election, choosing a product or taking whatever decision in our lives, we overcome one of those basic fears as well as some minor ones such as the fear of the unknown.
However, those fears and the result of battling against them, the tools and strength of spirit used to overcome them, the needed support from peers, beloved and even strangers, not too long ago circumscribed themselves to the realm of the immediate, of the close, only being shared with the world by those individuals who had access to media. We now live in times of unprecedented change in the history of humankind whereby everyone can express themselves, and what’s more important their message, if understood by an audience can be acknowledged and eventually amplified.
The unrest spreading throughout the globe isn’t something new or spontaneous, it’s the result of the coming together of several major factors; increased awareness, lack of illusion, the death of capitalism and increased empathy.
Increased awareness as a result of the adoption by mainstream of real-time sophisticated bidirectional multipoint broadcasting systems, i.e; Twitter, Facebook, blogging and the like. Increased awareness derived from the analysis of more unfiltered, unbiased, non manipulated information, in the way we now don’t receive our news or “stimulae” through the looking-glass of some major corporation or government adept or run broadcasting company, i.e; CNN, BBC, et, etc…
The death of capitalism is, paradoxically enough, brought about by the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the Communist system, in the way capitalism, without finding a counterweight, went “all-in” and what before was a suitable deity to fight against the alienating communist maxima “we’re all the same, therefore we should all have the same”, money, no longer satisfies the needs of workers and citizens living in the knowledge society versus the ones from the industrial or post-industrial times.
The empathic civilization is a direct result of genetics, but also of the increase in direct information from “normal” people. In the process of putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we get closer to forming part of super entity gaining consciousness of itself through identifying problems and the way to feel about them, through the aggregation of feelings and points of view of millions upon millions of beings. (I won’t go into the empathic civilisation now, but you can find Jereny Rifkin’s Theory video HERE)
The bottom line is that all these revolts and shows of disturbance come as the first skirmishes in the process of delivering a new era and hopefully a better world, where unjustness is rapidly shared with the world to condemn it, where action, relief and solidarity are overwhelming, massive and almost instantaneous as we saw in the case of Haiti, Japan or the Tsunami, where the theory of James Lovelock according to which the earth and all its inhabitants and matter are part of a coordinated supra-being called GAIA is closer to be acknowledged by all of us.
As a matter of fact, it’s not that we’re redrawing or reinventing the world in which we live in, its itself, as a result of our evolution as a civilization, the one which is redrawing the boundaries through an increase in our consciousness and awareness of all that surrounds us, let it be the environment, oppressive political systems or racism.
I have no doubt we move towards a new era where political, economic and social frameworks will be reinvented to suit a more natural human being than that resulting from the industrial revolution, and, as history has taught us via the collapse of precedent civilizations, the decay of the former way of living will become the fertilizer for the growth and eventual blossoming of a healthier, truer, kinder, more natural person and society.
Hoping our generation and the coming ones are strong, brave and wise enough to raise to the occasion, I think of Julius Caesar’s words in Shakespeare’s play;
“There’s a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
IS bound in shallows and miseries”
William Shakepeare – Act 4, Scene 3
