Audio (On Primeval Ghosts)
This lecture is to pull together some of the thoughts that have guided us since
the founding of World Future Fund in 1995.
It's to pull together a vision of the real future and the challenges to come. We
should discuss the point that life has always been a challenge. It's something
that has been lost in all the propaganda of the Utopian political
ideologies of the last hundred years and the fake and false promises of American
imperialism. There is this idea that American imperialism is going to provide freedom and justice
and prosperity for all using an economic system that involves the destruction of
the biological foundations of life. This is not real. This is disastrous.
SEVERE NATURE OF REAL PAST
Now some of what we're going to say may sound gloomy or depressing but
here's the reality of life as opposed to the fairytale of the false promises of
false ideologies like American imperialism. Life has always been a struggle. If
you look back to our ancestors living in the forest, it wasn't some cute little
paradise. Life was a daily struggle. You'd wake up freezing cold. Go out and
hunt in the middle of winter, maybe not catch much, go back to your cave or
whatever and it was a daily struggle and a very high level of death, a very high
level of death from suffering, from the elements and also a very high level of
death from violence. The notion that everybody was at peace and eating berries
or whatever is absolute nonsense. The history of primitive societies is huge
levels of violence and often very grim rituals in terms of religion, such as
human sacrifice and so on. But there was a will to live. In people
there's a will to live. And grim as it was these people had a raw crude will to
live and we know that is why we are here today.
RELIGION
Now another issue which we have not discussed adequately is the issue of
religion because religion helps motivate and set moral
guidelines. The honest answer is we don't know a whole lot about primitive
religions. And even with so-called primitive or pagan religions that are
known about today, our knowledge of them is extremely imperfect. Part of the
problem is that Christianity in its conquest of Europe and the so-called New
World, which wasn’t new, it was there all along but dumbbells in Europe didn’t
know it was there, North America and South America, the Christian religious
leaders, this was very much ecumenical meaning Protestant as well as Catholic
tended to destroy which they conquered in terms of the record of the religions
that were there and a lot of those religions were based on an oral tradition, so
a lot of what we know about “pagan” religions is not clear. Even the Edda in the
case of Europe was written by a Christian priest so we don't really even know
how accurate what is said. That's one of the problems. A lot of our pagan
friends want to go back to paganism. Do they
even know what they're going back to? So that's an issue.
Looking at the world in a global manner, the issue of religion is is very
complicated. It's very complicated and this is also a subject which we need to
discuss more, which is the evolution of the world structure in terms of different parts
of the world. After the Cold War, there was this fantasy that American
imperialism was the magic solution to everything, and everybody was going to
become an American and all this nonsense and everybody would have a stock
exchange and a website and live happily ever after. That to a large extent went
up in smoke in 9/11, in the chaos that followed in war and death that followed,
but has taken a further drastic series of hits with the war crimes committed by
America since it became the dominant country in the world and the massive
internal problems in the American political system, where the losers of two major
elections, Mr. Bush and Mr. Trump ended up becoming president.
In 2016 things really took a turn for the worse in America, where a racist
psychopath was elected president, and this really marked the beginning of the
end of the American imperialist experience. Biden, a reactionary force, is
trying to revive it but he is not doing very well. So, we need to step back and look at things from a global point of view because
as the crisis unfolds, it's going to unfold in different ways around the world. It's going to unfold differently in China, differently in Russia and
differently in the Islamic world than here.
We are going to try to avoid setting up some kind of rating systems of global
religions. Our view is there can be good people in most major religions, we’re
not going to say necessarily all, but it is also the view of major philosophers
in history that people can get to heaven in in a series of different religions.
They don't have to belong to this religion or that religion and that's been one
of the problems with Christianity, of its intolerance towards other religions.
GROWING MOVEMENT TOWARDS VIOLENCE IN WORLD RELIGIONS
The problem with the whole subject of religion is that media elites and academic
elites in the West are largely atheist and tend to dismiss or ignore all aspects
of religion.
CHRISTIANITY
What to do about religion is a very tough issue because the structure
of world religion today is that extremist elements and unstable elements are in
the driver's seat in all too many parts of the world. In America you have an
extreme faction of evangelism that became the dominant form of religion in
America, when Reagan was elected in 1980 and this has just gotten farther
and farther out of control, where these people have been opposing
climate change reform are cheering on the Iraq war crime situation and
ultimately cheering on Donald Trump as their Lord and Savior. So this has gotten
very far out of control. We’re not saying that all evangelicals are bad people,
we’re not even saying that all conservative evangelicals are bad people, we're
not saying that there couldn't be some sincere evangelicals who genuinely
thought Trump was the was the solution, but this on a macro level is an enormous
disaster.
ISLAM
In the case of Islam you’ve had a ongoing crisis since Western imperialist
helped an utterly lunatic faction, the Wahhabi faction of Islam, seize
control of Mecca and become, via the petro power of the Saudi state, the
dominant form of Sunni Islam and this is very bad news for the
world. We admire Islam. If we had to pick a religion, we would pick classical
Islam. It is a simple religion. It is a moral religion, but classical Islam has
gotten very confused in the eyes of the world with Saudi intolerant Wahhabi
Islam. Classical Islam was a tolerant religion. It might not have been tolerant in
terms of the modern ACLU, but it was it was very tolerant in terms of the
seventh century and eighth century A.D., which is why it spread so fast as
opposed to the intolerance of Christianity. When Islam was founded, within 200
years, the majority of the world's Christians converted to Islam and really
didn't look back. That's a very important point. It was probably the
greatest, most spectacular religious revolution in history and the dominance of
world religion by Christianity, we must understand, is a recent force. If a
person from outer space visited the world, say in the year 900, they would see
Islam as the dominant religion on the planet for sure. Christianity was stuck in
northern Europe and what was left of the Byzantine Empire, that was that was the
only place where it really was there, was some small factions like the Nestorian
Christians in Asia, but it was it was concentrated in northern Europe so that's not very encouraging but what what can be done to encourage
Classical Islam. That that's a subject for another lecture.
HINDUISM
Now in Hinduism, more problems there, the right wing BJP came to power in India and
again I can’t say everybody supporting the BJP is bad or whatever, but there are
disturbing nationalist tendencies in Hinduism today and there's also the
question of their treatment of their Islamic subjects. There's also the question of race in Hinduism and the caste system and
efforts to sugarcoat that are not are not credible. The part of the problem
is that the Western view of India... involves self-deception. The idea that
people like Gandhi and Nehru represented India on the level they did... On a much
bigger level they did not. They represented a Western veneer over India, and the
rise of the BJP is a is an example of that.
BUDDHISM
Now moving further across the world, the situation of Buddhism is extremely
confused, and Shintoism in Japan is extremely confused. The religious situation
in Japan has been extremely confused since the defeat of Japan in World War II,
where the war was enthusiastically supported by the Shinto and Buddhist
religions during the war and up to the war. So that's very confused. The other
aspects of Buddhism around the world, there’s also troubling aspects of Buddhism
being a source of of intolerance and racial violence in in places like Myanmar
and so on and so forth, so that's also very troubling. Again, people confuse the
Dalai Lama as being Buddhism. That's ridiculous. Tibetan Buddhism was a warlike
religion. The Dalai Lama, maybe he's a good guy, maybe he isn’t, is an American
political promoter in the West, is not a legitimate representative of Buddhism,
and again this is an example of the West seeing somebody who looks like them and
thinking that's them.
CHINA
In the case of China, China represents the greatest religious enigma in the
world because China, modern China, is based on the imposition of an alien
Western ideology, Marxism, on China in a horrendously bloodied manner where 60
to 80 million people were murdered and China represents a big religious paradox
because it's always been a bit of a paradox between the different religions. The
folk religions, sorry people Confucianism is not a religion, Buddhism and Taoism
and so on, the whole structure of this is not clear. What is clear is the
Chinese government is terrified of the issue of religion. Yes, they are and that
is a real question mark. Can China maintain its legitimacy with the
government presiding with an atheist Western ideology? It's possible but that's,
in our view, there's potentially dangerous undercurrents in Chinese society if
the ruling elite were ever to falter and the pressure being placed on China by
the West and by the war policies of Trump and now Biden. How does that affect
China? That's that's a question mark and that's why we think the war policies
of Biden and Trump are extremely dangerous. Just a further thought, getting back
to Buddhism and the fantasies in the West of the Buddhist Emperor Asoka
in India. Asoka was no great humanitarian. He was a dictator. He wrote some
things that sounded good to Western intellectuals but he was no great
humanitarian and the whole structure of the empire that he presided over in
ancient India was a totalitarian state such as the Arthashastra.
Now, we are going to take a break here to keep the size of this lecture smaller
and then we're going to start up another lecture to continue this.
As we look into the future we need to think of things that give people's lives meaning, and we can't comment about all these different religions but it's going to be very critical that governments find a way to give people's lives meaning. Now this has to be put in the context of the great crisis that we face which is the global environmental crisis and how the sacrifices that are needed can be politically explained. Now a very big problem that's coming up is the likely very large death toll. That's probably going to come because of the failure to deal with environmental problems. That's a very big situation. So we need to think about that and see how people can come to terms with that.
FINDING MEANING IN THE FACE OF DESPAIR
Unfortunately, history shows that this sort of bubble right now, environmental bubble, that makes people think it's real when it's not. When these bubbles burst, the results are usually not pretty. They are not and there's a tremendous amount of violence and chaos and death, which is what is probably coming. So so what to do? Despair? Commit suicide? We think not. People in their own lives need to find meaning in what what matters and what matters is how they treat other people the nature of their relationships and going on from there.
THE NEED FOR MORAL LEADERSHIP AT THE TOP IN A CRISIS
It's extremely important that there should be clear moral leadership from the top. Now it is extremely disturbing that in the United States today under Biden that is not happening. The number one moral issue in America today is healthcare. It is the moral structure of taking care of people. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has ignored a commitment to national health insurance and taking care of everybody which is unconscionable in light of the fact that we have a real epidemic and an hundred thousand people have been killed because of a lack of health care.
But people were in disasterous shape before before Covid and so on and so for so that's not so good. And it is only through moral leadership that you can hold a society together. So good people need to strive to put that forward as a course of moral leadership. That is absolutely essential.
It's also absolutely essential that the momentum toward war around the world be reduced. Unfortunately, again, on Biden things are not going in a good direction. The policies of war toward China are being accelerated. People need to fight those.
FINDING MEANING IN THE SUFFERING
It is not hopeless but you need to look at the situation in terms of our ancestors and it may seem depressing but they were in a severe world. People lived through the Black Death. The wheel of history is not not happy. There are an endless series of catastrophes and people ask how such suffering could exist. This is an idea that's discussed by many philosophers. How could a good God allow these horrible nightmares to take place and the wholesale mass slaughters to take place. We don't pretend have an answer to that. I mean, these things do take place and the only answer that we have is that's fundamental to the major religions of the world which is that there's a a future beyond the current reality. That life here is just a short existence and there's a bigger future beyond. You see this in the walls of the paintings in ancient Egypt with Osiris and so on so. That's not the world's happiest answer. It's not and if somebody's had their city annihilated you can't say, "Hey everything happens for a reason," and smile away. So that's not the world's greatest answer but is probably the only answer that exists and people need to be prepared for that. That's the point of this whole lecture. People need to be prepared.
WORLD LEADERSHIP IN THE CURRENT CRISIS
Now on a larger level, we need to talk about the Lords of the earth. America, which is a total disaster in terms of social policies, and the total study of immorality in terms of social policies, and the number one source of environmental destruction, but it is very important not to fall into the trap of many of our leftist friends which is to blame everything on America and assume that because America has committed terrible crimes that China is just a wonderful thing we should all support .
Part of the problem in history in general is people conclude that the enemy of my enemy is my friend and sometimes that's true but other times the enemy of your enemy maybe just one more enemy and might in the long run be an even bigger enemy than the original . You need to keep your head straight and not get preoccupied by anger and hate and get so obsessed with hating one enemy that you ignore the potential threat from another enemy.
This is hard to do. You can't just say because America is in many ways a very horrible place that China is the solution because the big problems in China...and China's environmental horror stories becoming an even bigger environmental horror story than than America. The other next big area of the world you need to look at is Western Europe, which in our view, should be offering hope, but isn't because of rotten leadership. But there you do have a social welfare state that merits attention. Latin America is a mixed bag of countries. It's a little hard to generalize about that but that would be considered another area. Africa would be considered another area and again we're not going to generalize about what can happen in which country but we're just saying this is another area.
THE MIDDLE EAST
We could discuss this country or that country and the Middle East is another area and the Middle East has significance because this is the heart of Islam and this is where the future of Islam may end up being sorted out. The Middle East is in a big state of trouble because as we mentioned the Saudi dominance of Islam and also the tremendous crisis produced by the decision of Western religious forces to re-create the state of Israel in the Middle East and we're not to get into a discussion here of who's right and who's wrong in the Arab-Israeli crisis. That might disappoint some people in light of the horrible persecution the Jewish people experienced from the religious lunacy of Christianity, there is legitimate reason to have their own state. We disagree with Israel's policies towards places like Gaza but trying to sort all this out would require another lecture and we're not going to do that right now.
Suffice it to say though, the Western betrayal of the Arabs after World War I and the creation of Israel has created a huge long-term problem in terms of the West and Islam and the Western betrayal of Islam in World War I which has created a huge long-term problem and the American support for crushing Islamic governments and you know installing dictators has also created long-term problems. So that's going to be very difficult.
RELIGION IN ASIA
In China we discussed the religious crisis. In India there are severe problems. Those are two other major areas. Japan is a very strange situation because the disaster of World War II has left a a very peculiar government and social structure where the history of Japan was sort of cut off and where does it go under the current situation? We don't know where that goes.
IT IS TIME FOR PEOPLE TO WORK TOGETHER OR DIE TOGETHER. THERE IS NO OTHER OPTION
However, when we look at the whole picture and in organizations like the UN, we need to have people try to work together and to sacrifice. Ultimately what is a source of hope is people working together. That's gonna require a number of basic things we want to stress this. It's the Western powers that need to come to terms with something that certainly the Biden Administration has totally failed to come to terms with, that to make up for all the years of disaster this has to be a long-term period of sacrifice and austerity and this may be true for the whole world to make this conversion and part of this thing has got to be a willingness to share with the developing world what the West has. Now this is not happening. The rich nations are not sharing the vaccines and to a large extent have left the developing world to die. This is not a good start and we are not optimistic. We will try to put through some ideas here that you know what's a source of hope, it's people trying to work together, not working toward war, the willingness of the rich to sacrifice to help the less needy and these are ideas that are long-term and religion. That is the way to deal with anger and to deal with rage.
THE NEED FOR THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD TO OFFER MORAL GUIDANCE IN A TIME OF CRISIS
We don't see things going in the right direction. We don't see a willingness of the rich to make the sacrifices that are needed to make this whole situation work. We don't see a willingness of the world's governments to deal, not just with climate change but with the whole environmental structure. Until those things become at the top, then the prospect for war and violence grow. So and again these things are beyond our capability to say how does all this fit into the religions of the world, we don't pretend we got the magic solution for Hinduism, or the magic solution for the Catholic Church. Those of you who are Hindu out there listening to this, those of you who are Buddhist out there listening to us, those of you of any decent religion, you need to sort this out for yourself and figure out how does this relate to the people in your country and how does this relate to trying to come up with a just caring society in your country that is your job. That is your responsibility. That is what you need to do.
THE MOMENTUM TOWARD TOTALITARIANISM
We're simply pointing out that the momentum is toward totalitarianism. Democracy isn't working and that may be inevitable. That's just one more thing to deal with. With the scale of the disasters bearing down on the world, the economic disasters, the climate disasters, the environmental disasters, there has to be a centralization of power. This is already taking place. In America and we are deeply troubled with where it is going because it is going in the direction of the suppression of civil liberties, massive censorship in other words America is kind of destroying itself because for all Americans faults one of its strengths is the issue of freedom of speech. We beat the Communists because we can study their ideologies and discuss it and they couldn't and that's one of the great weaknesses of totalitarian states. So that's not going in a good direction and that needs to be fought. We need to, in conclusion, concentrate power, centralize power. You can't have one or two people knock off a filibuster and completely destroy essential legislation. You can't. On the other hand, the filibuster, you know can be used sometimes to stop bad legislation. However, the momentum is toward a centralization of power. This is risky and people want to defend the filibuster. We're not going to say their all evil people or whatever. This is risky, but there has to be a centralization of power as we've said since our founding. The key issue is, is there going to be a responsible social Democratic centralization of power which keeps open freedom of speech and and tries to take care of people and keep a lid on things? It's still not going to be easy and tries to reduce international tensions and reduce arms.
GROWING ECONOMIC INEQUALITY LEADS TO VIOLENCE
So we need to concentrate. We as a human species are facing an existenial series of threats in the environmental area. We are also now facing an existential series of threats by the debts run up by the rich countries to prop themselves up after the corruption and and disasters of Wall Street in 2008, and most important, the disasters of the Covid crisis. So these have happened and this is not very encouraging and puts more pressure but ultimately people need to be willing to sacrifice. They need to be willing to work together. That is the hope. We don't claim we have all the answers, we don't. And this lecture could be much more fine-tuned. It's a limited lecture. We can't cover everything, but we're trying to cover 25 years of work and that's what we want to sum up. That there has to be a willingness throughout history to make this work. You can't when you have a tiny group of people at the top in any society having a party and everybody else going down the drain. That leads to violence and today inequality is its highest level in history. It's a paradox. There has been more talk about democracy and less equality and we don't believe equality is an end in itself but if you have massive inequality in the system failing as badly is this, this is a prescription for trouble. So there has to be some kind of coherent way in which people will share with each other, will come together and will come together internationally.
IS RESEARCH ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS REALLY A PRIORITY RIGHT NOW?
In conclusion, if somebody's looking at this world from outer space they'd wonder, is it really a great idea for everybody to be involved in the largest nuclear arms race in history? And do we really have a shortage of nuclear bombs? Or maybe we don't. Do we really need to make more? And does it really make sense to pull out of and destroy the intermediate range nuclear weapons treaty in which limited nuclear weapons could attack with a much shorter warning time? At the same time, does it make sense to be developing hypersonic missiles? So between for instance, US and Russia, this 40 minutes warning time or less between when a missile is launched or an apparent missile is launched and the other side has to decide whether they launch everything because they don't want to get their missiles blown up. This nearly blew up the world in 1983 do to a false alarm. So we think not.
IS RESEARCH ON BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS REALLY A PRIORITY RIGHT NOW?
Does it really make sense for the nations of the world to be doing research on biological weapons? It's hypocritical to say we condemn China (and so far they have been involved) but America's involved too. It's a loophole in the in the biological weapons treaty. Do we really think it's a great idea to have the some of the smartest people in the world trying to figure out a much more potent form of anthrax to kill people? Is that something we need? More anthrax? Do we need new variations of Covid that can kill more people? We think not.
PEACE MAKING INVOLVES TRUST
We think that's not something we need and again we need to come together. We've been involved in peacemaking. It involves trust, but people from outer space looking at our world would not take a very happy view. There needs to be change. People need to work together. There needs to be a commitment to cooperation and peace. Again, we don't have all the answers, this is our contribution. Those of you out there who hear this...hopefully it resonates with you...and in whatever country you're in, if you encourager leaders to try to work together in organizations at the UN to deal with the crisis we face.
THERE'S NO PLANET B. THE TIME FOR CHANGE IS NOW
Martin Luther King said we either have the wisdom to live together or the foolishness to die together, and that there is a very potent warning and death on an enormous scale is getting closer, so people need to put away national hate, put away put away that kind of attitude and look at us as one world. There is only one world. There's there's no planet B. So we don't get a second chance if we screw this thing up, and the billionaires can build all the missiles they want. There's no life on Mars. That's all a part of their fairytale promises. So that's the agenda. That's our effort today to sum up 25 years of work, and we hope it helps people to do things constructive that are necessary to keep our planet from being destroyed and in the best of said scenarios to build a just society on a global basis.