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Tuesday, 14 December, 1999 - 21:00
Of all the possible endings to this century, a Brilliant one seems most a propos, as in Dr Ashleigh Brilliant.
Brilliant is a British born historian of modern western life and most quotable commentator to not win the Nobel prize for
literature (his words).
Some parts of the past must be preserved, he writes, and some of the future prevented at all costs.
As we look back at the most extreme century in mankind’s history, we see more wars in which more people were killed defending more wealth held by fewer people for the least good of the greatest number of people in poverty, ever. Tomorrow this will be part of the unchangeable past but fortunately it can still be changed today.
We can all too easily get bogged down in the gloom and doom of a world apparently determined to destroy itself at an exponential rate.
Despairing hopelessness can render us immobile – I think I’ll just sit here until life gets easier.
Our established bureaucratic institutions encourage the maintenance of the status quo, to not change.
I find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future.
This has also been a century of the greatest achievements. Within seventy-five years of the first aeroplane flight, we placed a man on the moon.
Look – before our very eyes, the future is becoming the past.
While the first computer is arguably the abacus in use by the Chinese for thousands of years, it is microchip technology
created since the fifties, with knowledge leaps since the
seventies, that has enabled the computational power for
scientists to demonstrate that the Darwinian concept of the world being a zero sum game, or
survival of the fittest where a plus must be equalled by a minus, is not the accurate big picture of life on our planet.
This also tends to refute the basic assumption underlying capitalism and economic rationalism – that the world is based on competition.
Five years ago your mobile phone was analogue. Now digital everything is almost taken for granted, along with electronic commerce, teleconferencing, telemedicine, telemarketing, and encyclopedias free on the Net.
The rate of change is still speeding up. Some changes are so slow, you don’t notice them, others are so fast, they don’t notice you.
It is said it took forty-five years for radio, fifteen years for television and just five years for the Internet to reach 100 million people.
We enter a century which global futurists label as the Century of the Pacific (our region), the Century of Women (our feminine traits will come to the fore for cooperation,
commercial and social health), and the Century of Healing.
It’ll be a nice world if they ever get it finished.
Brilliant is a British born historian of modern western life and most quotable commentator to not win the Nobel prize for
literature (his words).
Some parts of the past must be preserved, he writes, and some of the future prevented at all costs.
As we look back at the most extreme century in mankind’s history, we see more wars in which more people were killed defending more wealth held by fewer people for the least good of the greatest number of people in poverty, ever. Tomorrow this will be part of the unchangeable past but fortunately it can still be changed today.
We can all too easily get bogged down in the gloom and doom of a world apparently determined to destroy itself at an exponential rate.
Despairing hopelessness can render us immobile – I think I’ll just sit here until life gets easier.
Our established bureaucratic institutions encourage the maintenance of the status quo, to not change.
I find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future.
This has also been a century of the greatest achievements. Within seventy-five years of the first aeroplane flight, we placed a man on the moon.
Look – before our very eyes, the future is becoming the past.
While the first computer is arguably the abacus in use by the Chinese for thousands of years, it is microchip technology
created since the fifties, with knowledge leaps since the
seventies, that has enabled the computational power for
scientists to demonstrate that the Darwinian concept of the world being a zero sum game, or
survival of the fittest where a plus must be equalled by a minus, is not the accurate big picture of life on our planet.
This also tends to refute the basic assumption underlying capitalism and economic rationalism – that the world is based on competition.
Five years ago your mobile phone was analogue. Now digital everything is almost taken for granted, along with electronic commerce, teleconferencing, telemedicine, telemarketing, and encyclopedias free on the Net.
The rate of change is still speeding up. Some changes are so slow, you don’t notice them, others are so fast, they don’t notice you.
It is said it took forty-five years for radio, fifteen years for television and just five years for the Internet to reach 100 million people.
We enter a century which global futurists label as the Century of the Pacific (our region), the Century of Women (our feminine traits will come to the fore for cooperation,
commercial and social health), and the Century of Healing.
It’ll be a nice world if they ever get it finished.