There already exists a ‘One World against many worlds’. In effect, the general perception about this “shadow side of the humanity idea”, in the words of Wolfgang Sachs, is so deeply entrenched that most people around the world are given to believe that this is the only way that a One World can be. Our purpose here is to bring up the underbelly of this dominant view of ‘One World’ to public scrutiny.
We share the evidence and insights on the historical backdrop of European genocides of native indigenous people, enlightenment, colonisation, the forgery of history and materialistic filth and pomposity as development that leads us to the predicament facing humanity of climate and ecological emergency. This was underlined in a dire warning on 16 February 2023 at the Munich Security Conference by investor-philanthropist George Soros, who is a member of the United Nations High Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing. He said that our failure to urgently address runaway climate change will precipitate collapse of the modern civilization.
Soros paradoxically is part of both the problem and its solution, much like the two-faced character Harvey Dent in the film The Dark Knight. In his own words, Soros wears two hats – as an ‘amoral’ investor who is there to make money by all good and criminal means running a massive Ponzi racket of Global Finance that is already bust. The other hat he wears is a ‘moral’ philanthropist who wants to do good, to allow him to keep evading the laws of the world to catch up with his ‘amoral’ criminal side. What he seems to be faintly aware of is, in the deeper recesses of his consciousness, both these roles are entangled in a vehement inner conflict. He knows that his game is over , he is already bankrupt and this abject failure is gnawing at his conscientious moral side, that he has carefully guarded. We must listen to him carefully as he said:
“The message is clear: human interference has destroyed a previously stable system and human ingenuity, both local and international, will be needed to restore it. ..The climate system is broken, and it needs to be repaired. That’s the main message I’d like to convey this evening.
The message is urgent because we are dangerously close to breaching the 1.5-degree limit set in the Paris Agreement in 2015. We are already at 1.2 degrees and if we maintain our current course, global warming will reach more than 2.5 degrees around 2070. That would take us past several tipping points such as the melting of the Arctic permafrost. Once that happens, the amount of money needed to re-stabilize or repair the climate system grows exponentially. This is not well understood.”
Ironically, financialization or the belief that more money, even exponentially large amounts, can be part of the solution to re-stabilise or repair the climate system hinges on paranoia. The solar geo-engineering solution will only make the problem much worse. If at all, definancialisation of the economic system and re-localisation of our material needs is the solution, if he is ready to see the truth, as the Open Society he advocates, should.
The cult of financialisation as depicted in The Wolf of Wall Street, a black comedy crime film based on the story of stock marketeer Jordan Belfort is a far more realistic representation. This movie recounts Belfort’s career as a stockbroker in New York City and how his firm, Stratton Oakmont, engaged in rampant corruption and fraud on Wall Street, leading to his downfall.
The solution to re-stabilise and repair climate system, for all that Soros cares for, we need a systemic implosion of the global financial system. Paradoxically, the global financial system itself is not an Open Society that the other moral schizoidal half of Soros represents, the financial side being ‘amoral’ by his own confession. Financialization of our resources, of our basic needs that comes to us naturally, like for all plants and animals, including of our time, sanctioned and protected by political Fiat Currency is the primary instrument by which the One World works against the Many Worlds, by robbing them of their right to have localised currencies, to access their commons and the freedom to trade on their terms.
We also unearth how this already precarious situation is further complicated by the ‘fight or flight’ reptilian response to this emergency that threatens human extinction in the form of a delusionary suicide pact of anti-humanism and trans-humanism. In another brazen display of hubris, ignorance and vanity that mars the Old World Order dominated by Euro-Western Universalism with their self-proclaimed status as the First World, Global North and ‘developed’ societies, in a fresh bout of Enlightenment, ‘development’ has now degenerated into a dangerous dialectic of anti-humanism and trans-humanism. These two religious cults are united in an unholy alliance on the misanthropic and suicidal depopulation agenda despite their diametrically opposite views on development and environment protection.
This interestingly is a sequel to the earlier dominant dialectic of capitalism and communism, which divided people and countries around the world to rival camps on either side of the Cold War. They both competed to better serve the ‘development’ agenda with yardsticks of GDP growth at the cost of climate and ecological damage. Their rivalry hogged much of the global attention that distracted humanity from the more onerous challenge to protect, heal and repair the climate and ecological damage, which continues even today. The religious zeal for ‘development’ and the new yardsticks of GDP growth sucked up even those countries that were non-aligned to the rival camps.
From Soros to Sachs
Wolfgang Sachs is a researcher, writer and university teacher in the field of environment, development, and globalisation. He is the principal author of Fair Future: Resource Conflicts, Security and Global Justice and Sustainable Germany in a Globalised World, both major studies produced by the Wuppertal Institute. He is also a member of the Club of Rome, a lecturer at Schumacher College and an honorary professor at the University of Kassel, Germany. If George Soros is the two-faced character Harvey Dent, Wolfgang Sachs is the Dark Knight, the character Bruce Wayne in the film, who secretly operates as the heroic vigilante Batman.
Sachs, who has extensively researched on environment, development, and globalisation, their interlinkages and historical patterns, wrote a series of essays titled ‘Development: A Guide to the Ruins’ in the New Internationalist in 1992, one of which is eponymously titled, ‘One World Against Many Worlds’.
“The (European) Enlightenment’s idea of one humankind suggested that, as history ran its course, differences would dissolve into one `civilization’. `Development’, especially as exemplified by the UN Charter, closely follows this tradition to conceive of ‘one world’. The `underdeveloped’ have taken the place of the `savages’, but the arrangement of concepts remains the same: a global society endowed with peace does not yet exist but must first be achieved through the `development’ of backward peoples. Whatever is different is seen as a threat which must be neutralised through `development’. Consequently, the unity of the world is going to be realised through its westernisation.
Today it seems almost strange, but the founders of the United Nations as well as the architects of development policy were inspired by the vision that the globalisation of the market would guarantee peace in the world. Instead of violence the spirit of commerce was to reign on all sides; productive power rather than fire power would be decisive in the competition between nations. Global order was conceived, after the Second World War, in terms of a unified world market.
With a naivety hardly distinguishable from deception, the prophets of development polished up a utopia envisioned in the eighteenth century, as if time had stopped and neither capitalism nor imperialism had ever appeared on the scene. After Montesquieu, the Enlightenment had discovered commerce as a means of refining crude manners. In their eyes rational calculation and cold self-interest, precisely those attitudes which make the passion for war, or the whims of tyrants appear self-destructive, would spread with trade. And trade creates dependence and dependence tames.”
The intellectual savagery of the polemics of Enlightenment’s idea of ‘one humankind’, dissolving ‘differences’ into one ‘civilization’ and the UN Charter’s conception of ‘one world’ based on the ‘development’ idea has a longer history that is both barbarous and treacherous, with hideous theological underpinnings that cloak its shocking savagery and unhinged bigotry. This tradition of ‘dissolving differences’ of the ‘many worlds’ at the gross and materialistic level rather than preserving their diversity at the materialistic levels and creating a ‘unity in diversity’ at the subtle and spiritual level is the key defining characteristic of the non-indigenous and the indigenous traditions, respectively.
It is our sincere attempt in this book to uncover those dark chapters of history that has been deliberately erased from our public memories and ‘conveniently’ forgotten, as global attention is deviously diverted elsewhere with heavy-handed propaganda.
The dehumanising and despiritualising character of the non-indigenous tradition with their hideous theological underpinnings are tell-tale in the newly minted religious cults of ‘anti-humanism’ that aims to ‘dissolve the differences’ by annihilating the human species altogether and ‘trans-humanism’ that wants to ‘dissolve the differences’ into its delirious notion of ‘technological singularity’. Both these misanthropic suicidal ideologies are the driving forces behind the depopulation agenda. The ‘savages’ and ‘underdeveloped’ of the earlier episodes are now ‘hackable animals’ in the words of one of its key ideologues Yuval Noah Harari, ‘cult-fiction’ author of ‘Sapiens’ and ‘Homo Deus’ powered and popularised by the propaganda machine.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, coined the term ‘genocide’ in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It originally means “the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group”. It is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, nation or tribe) and the Latin caedere (“killing, annihilation”).
Depopulation with a dark and dreary footnote that reads ‘heinous and treacherous genocide’ is the new Development in the latest bout of Enlightenment that afflicts the already deranged world of Euro-Western Universalism.
UN and Crimes Against Humanity
The Charter of the United Nations is the founding document of the United Nations. It was signed on 26 June 1945, in San Francisco, at the conclusion of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, and came into force on 24 October 1945.
In 1946, United Nations (UN) General Assembly affirmed genocide as a crime under international law in Resolution 96, which stated that “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind.” Genocide is contrary to moral law and the spirit and aims of the United Nations.
On December 9, 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 260A, or the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which entered into force on January 12, 1951. The Resolution noted that “at all periods of history, genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity”. Article II of the Convention clearly defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the groups to another group. The United States ratified the Convention in 1988.
In sanctioning the treacherous and heinous genocide through a biowarfare, under the disguise of Covid pandemic prevention, in its gross violation of human rights, injustice and disrespect for human dignity, and in its overt and covert collusion with the war criminals, the UN today stands in violation of its own Charter, and as stated in the Preamble of the UN Charter that reads:
“We, the people of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”
Resurrection of ‘The Barbarous Years’
Charles Montesquieu who Wolfgang Sachs mentions as a key influence from Enlightenment to Development, was a French judge, historian, and political philosopher. His anonymously published ‘The Spirit of Law’ (1748) was received well in both Great Britain and the American colonies and influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States in drafting the U.S. Constitution. Montesquieu is the principal source of the theory of separation of powers between executive, legislative and judiciary function of governments, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world.
On a grand tour of Europe, Montesquieu went to England at the end of October 1729, in the company of Lord Chesterfield, where he became a freemason, a member of the reclusive secret society and forebearers of the ‘European Enlightenment’. He was admitted to the Horn Tavern Lodge in Westminster and remained in England until the spring of 1731. Highly regarded in the British colonies in North America as a champion of liberty, Montesquieu was the most frequently quoted authority on government and politics in colonial pre-revolutionary British America, cited more by the American founders than any source except for the Bible.
Following the American Revolution, his work remained a powerful influence on many of the American founders, most notably James Madison of Virginia, the “Father of the Constitution”. Montesquieu’s philosophy that “government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another” reminded Madison and others that a free and stable foundation for their new national government required a clearly defined and balanced separation of powers.
Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Law was “the first consistent attempt to survey the varieties of human society, to classify and compare them and, within society, to study the inter-functioning of institutions.” This allowed the obfuscation and refinement of the ‘shocking savagery’ of the European Colonisers in America into the deceptive doctrine of ‘divide and rule’. This had a lasting impact worldwide in fomenting colonialism over past several centuries that continues till recently, in its last but the most treacherous stage of ‘development’. It died with the official discovery of the even far more treacherous and highly divisive Covid Pandemic in March 2020, that heralded the ‘post-development’ phase with new catchphrases like The Great Reset and the New Normal.
Montesquieu is also credited with the delusional and deceptively bigoted ‘meteorological climate theory, which holds that climate may substantially influence the nature of man and his society’, a theory also promoted by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc. By placing an emphasis on environmental influences as a material condition of life, Montesquieu prefigured modern anthropology’s concern with the impact of material conditions, such as available energy sources, organized production systems, and technologies, on the growth of complex socio-cultural systems.
He asserts that certain climates are more favorable than others, the temperate climate of France being ideal. His view is that people living in very warm countries are “too hot-tempered”, while those in northern countries are “icy” or “stiff”. The climate of middle Europe is therefore optimal. Philip M. Parker, in his book ‘Physioeconomics’ (MIT Press, 2000), endorses Montesquieu’s theory and argues that much of the economic variation between countries is explained by the physiological effect of different climates.
Such stereotyping of entire countries as “too hot tempered” and in colder countries as “icy or stiff” however falls flat in the face of evidence. Tropical, sub-tropical and southern temperate regions are most hospitable for human habitation in harmony with nature. More than 80% of human population is in these regions in Asia, Afrika, Southern Europe and Americas. In its reductionist and mechanistic compartmentalisation of human behaviour, the ‘climate theory’ rests on a flawed assumption of ceteris paribus, other things being equal. Climate influences the nature of man and the society, but as empirical evidence suggests, culture and spiritual values arising out of living in harmony with nature have a far greater influence.
Bernard Bailyn was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in U.S. colonial and revolutionary-era history. In ‘The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America–The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675’, Bailyn casts a light on the darkness of the savagery of the European settlers. Bailyn spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread torture that precedes the Enlightenment of the remaining ‘savages’ in America, after 60-70 million of them were either butchered or killed through disease and famine inflicted upon the ‘savages’ by the ‘settlers’, who incidentally migrated from the ‘ideal and optimal’ climate in Europe.
In stark contrast to their portrayal as ‘savages’ in the European narrative, the opening section of the book stands out for his profoundly sensitive appreciation of the sensibility of the original inhabitants whom he introduces simply as “Americans” rather than “Native Americans.” The local indigenous people though call the continent as Turtle Islands before it was christened America after Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who ‘discovered’ that it is a continent.
“Their world was multitudinous, densely populated by active, sentient and sensitive spirits, spirits with consciences, memories and purposes, that surround them, instructed them, impinged on their lives at every turn. No less real for being invisible…the whole of life was a spiritual enterprise…the universe in all its movements and animations and nature was suffused with spiritual potency.”
Bailyn expresses an almost poetic admiration for this sort of spirituality. “All the world was alive!” he exclaims. “And the wind is alive! The mountains are alive!”
In an essay-interview with Ron Rosenbaum titled The Shocking Savagery of America’s Early History after the book release in 2013, Bailyn asks: “Do you really know what being “flayed alive” means?” (The skin is torn from the face and head and the prisoner is disembowelled while still alive.) Such barbaric treatment by the European colonisers to valiant warriors has been meted out elsewhere in the world until the native societies turned submissive and docile. To call the Turtle Islanders as ‘savages’, because they valiantly fought back is unadulterated bigotry.
Rosenbaum notes in the interview that ‘the merciless massacres were elements that gave birth to the rudiments of civilization—or in Bailyn’s evocative phrase, the fragile “integument of civility”—that would evolve 100 years later into a virtual Renaissance culture, a bustling string of self-governing, self-sufficient, defiantly expansionist colonies alive with an increasingly sophisticated and literate political and intellectual culture that would coalesce into the rationale for the birth of American independence.
All the while shaping, and sometimes misshaping, the American character. It’s a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called “the blood-dimmed tide,” the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call “genocidal,” the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased’.
“In truth, I didn’t think anyone sat around erasing it,”. Bailyn shares a handwritten British government survey records of America-bound colonists made in the 1770s, which lists the name, origin, occupation and age of the departing, one of the few islands of hard data about who the early Americans were.
“Nobody sat around erasing this history,” he tells the interviewer, “but it’s ‘conveniently’ forgotten. Look at the ‘peaceful’ Pilgrims. Our William Bradford. He goes to see the Pequot War battlefield and he is appalled. He said, ‘The stink’ [of heaps of dead bodies] was too much.”
‘Bailyn refers to one of the early and bloodiest encounters, between the peaceful pumpkin pie-eating Pilgrims and the original inhabitants of the land they wanted to seize, the Pequots. But for Bailyn, the mercenary motive is less salient than the theological.’
“The ferocity of that little war is just unbelievable,” Bailyn says. “The butchering that went on cannot be explained by trying to get hold of a piece of land. They were really struggling with this central issue for them, of the advent of the Antichrist.”
Rosenbaum portrays ‘The Antichrist’ in the European coloniser’s imagination as ‘the haunting figure presaging the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation. ‘It plays an important part in Bailyn’s explanation of the European settlers’ descent into unrestrained savagery.
The key passage on this question comes late in the book when Bailyn makes ‘explicit connection between the physical savagery the radical dissenting Protestant settlers of America wreaked on the original inhabitants, and the intellectual savagery of their polemical attacks on the church and state authorities they fled from in Europe—and the savagery of vicious insult and vile denunciation they wreaked upon each other as well’.
“The savagery of the [theological] struggle, the bitterness of the main contenders and the deep stain it left on the region’s collective memory” were driven by “elemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness…in which God’s children [as they thought of themselves] were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them. The two [kinds of struggle, physical and metaphysical] were one: threats from within [to the soul] merged with threats from without to form a heated atmosphere of apocalyptic danger.”
Old habits die hard
The last nail in the coffin of nearly 500-years of the European skulduggery is being struck with the legally binding WHO Pandemic Prevention Treaty on 27 February, 2023, when the negotiations start on its ‘Zero Draft’. This harps upon new deceptions of ‘equity’ and ‘solidarity’ in the distribution of bioweapons and Do-It-Yourself genocide by the member nation-states on their own people in a cold and calculative culmination of the 3-year old bio-psycho-spiritual warfare that started in March 2020 after being ‘scenario planned’ since several decades.
The theological struggle against the ‘underdeveloped’, the new savages in the vainglorious conquest of the ‘Antichrist’ and the intellectual savagery of the polemical attacks in their bigoted and belligerent pursuit against the many worlds and to merge them into the One World, continues even today. Continuing with Sachs’ 1992 essay on ‘One World Against Many Worlds’, the rabid urge to ‘dissolve the differences’ through ‘one civilization and a ‘unified world market’ has now morphed into a macabre urge to depopulate and ‘dissolve the differences’ into either the maniacal ‘unified annihilation’ of anti-humanism to save the environment or into the delirious ‘unified technological singularity’ of trans-humanism. Totalitarianism is dissipative and self-destructive, as Hannah Arendt warned half a century ago. She also called Totalitarianism as the monster that devours its own children.
“The world market, once brandished as a weapon against political tyranny, has itself become a closet dictator under whose dominion both rich and poor countries tremble. The fear of falling behind in international competition has become the predominant organizing motive of politics in North and South, East and West. It drives developing countries further into self-exploitation, for the sake of boosting exports, and industrial countries further into the wasteful and destructive mania of production. Both enterprises and entire states see themselves trapped in a situation of remorseless competition, where each participant is dependent on the decisions of all the other players.”
In a profound way, this insightful peek-a-boo from 30 years back sets the context for ‘The Travesty of Development’ as the first book of the trilogy. The weight of evidence overwhelmingly points out that the dire predictions of Development: A Guide to Ruins written in 1992, have come true. We must learn the vital and sobering lessons from the ‘Age of Delusion, Derangement and Delirium’ as history will register for the period from after the Second World War in the mid-1940s to the Covid Pandemic in the early 2020s.
The delinquent chimaera of ‘development idea’ has left behind not just the ruins in the intellectual landscape as Sachs points out but also ‘grey goo’* pollution and debris of a monstrous scale that litter all around our apple-skin thin atmosphere, almost every part of land that was cursed by ‘development’, the lifeline rivers, and our vast ocean. Not to forget, the dehumanising and despiritualising religious cults of anti-humanism and trans-humanism that have polluted the mindscape of large swathes of the ‘educated elite’. And thank our stars that it has finally been exposed and will soon be tamed.
Picking up the pieces of what remains after this calamity and the seeds that survived the sweeping onslaught of ‘development’, it is time to make a fresh new beginning for humanity. We must also be prepared to transcend this great crisis that has brought humanity to the brink of extinction. We must reharmonise human habitats with nature, the central challenge of our times, humongous and humbling, despite all the towering claims of technological advancements.
We need to unleash a new surge of creativity and innovation, leverage existing technologies of data collection, computing, location and communication powered by higher level thinking in the post-development era than at which the problems of ‘development’ were created.
In doing so, we shall realise that the world we truly care about – with peace, prosperity and joy for all in harmony with nature comes from healing, repair and restoration of the diverse and kaleidoscopic array of ‘many worlds’ that dot the landscapes, the rivers and oceans and the atmosphere on this beautiful blue-green planet in all its colourful resplendence and glorious magnificence that have co-existed with the golden periods of human cultures and civilisation over thousands of years.
Can we create a One World that works *for* synergy and creative unity of the Many Worlds?
God is in the essence (Devil lies in the details) spells out how in the essence, ‘weaponisation of everything’ is effectively a mass suicide pact and if this ticking time bomb is diffused carefully, this marks both the end of the delusional and delinquent ‘development’ era and the imminent possibilities of beginning of the ‘post-development’ era. It cautions us not to get drowned in the details, where the devil lies and see through the farce that is floating around as serious business. It pins down as the root cause, the misplaced faith on competitive spirit to make life better even after it becomes counterproductive and blinded to its weaponization. Finally, as we are witnessing, the fatally flawed ‘development’ idea ends up as criminalisation to unleash mass murder at a massive scale to meet depopulation targets. As a way forward, we share an agenda for genuine progress that emphasises on unlocking our potential, as indigenous cultures, by rediscovering ancient wisdom rather than drawing from western sources alone.
The Travesty of Development walks you through the promenades of hubris and conceit, where it was concocted and the last and the most treacherous stage of colonialism that it proclaimed to free humanity from, and surreptitiously spreading its tentacles to distant corners of the globe, cutting across ideologies. It failed to account for environmental side effects as ‘negative externalities’ even when these ‘negative externalities’ threatened to spill over to doom humanity over the precipice riding on an accelerating bandwagon. In its path dependence it persists with GDP growth as an indicator of economic health and progress. It subsumed the cultural life of human societies reducing them to the barren stubble of economy from being societies where economy was just one part with societal checks and balances that ensured all around prosperity, fulfilment, and joy. It traces this abject degradation to materialistic pursuits of a Faustian civilization in its death throes, as Oswald Spengler portrays the Western Civilization in ‘The Decline of the West’ in the early twentieth century to the Mass Formation Hypnosis thesis of clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet,
The Decline of the West (German: Der Untergang des Abendlandes; more literally, The Downfall of the Occident), is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler. The first volume, subtitled Form and Actuality, was published in the summer of 1918. The second volume, subtitled Perspectives of World History, was published in 1922. Calling Western or European as “Faustian”, Spengler recognized at least seven other high cultures: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian (Hindu/Indigenous), Mesoamerican (Mayan/Aztec), Classical (Greek/Roman as “Apollonian”) and the non-Babylonian Middle East (“Magian”). The “Semitic”, Arabian and Persian, and the Abrahamic religions in general as originating from them (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) are combined as “Magian”. He calls modern Westerners as “Faustian”. According to Spengler, the Western world was ending and the final season, the “winter” of Faustian Civilization, was being witnessed. In Spengler’s depiction, ‘Western Man was a proud but tragic figure because, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached’.
Mattias Desmet, Professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University is the world’s leading expert in the phenomenon known as “mass formation,” which is a type of hypnotic state that occurs when people are isolated from one another and free-floating anxiety is prevalent, as in during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism (2022). in which he shares how the new totalitarianism is led by ‘Dull Bureaucrats and Technocrats’ and cautions that people must not let fear stop them from dissent against irrational policies. Reviewing his book, which she finds as a sequel to Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Margret Kopala, community activist and public policy analyst based in Ottawa, Canada, writes:
“Tyrannical rulers wielding fear as a crude tool of control is an ancient and sadly familiar tale, but coldly planning the systematic application of fear to achieve sustained psychological manipulation is another story. It is one about which I had grown apprehensive since the appearance of Covid-19. Although fear is a sometimes useful emotion (among other benefits, it keeps most of us away from the edge of cliffs), the eruption of official fear in the weeks following the declaration of a global pandemic seemed greatly out of proportion.
And it was strangely combined with incomplete or contradictory factual information. Every information source blared that Covid-19 cases were proliferating, yet no one explained what a “case” comprised. People were dying and being hospitalized, we heard, but what about the rest? What was their status? And what categories were truly at risk? Statistics without context was fearmongering, some began to point out, but to little avail as fear quickly took over nearly everything.
The Psychology of Totalitarianism, a newly published book by academic Mattias Desmet, provides a systematic theoretical framework for this worrying dynamic and what has followed. Desmet’s analysis is highly plausible – and, accordingly, somewhat fear-inducing in its own right.”
In Climate & Ecological Emergency: A Sanity Check, we explore how the truth has been shrouded first in denial of the science and now in subterfuge, escapism, hypocrisy and perversion of neo-religious cults. Even as this book borrows heavily from the masterly crafted series of essays on the ‘development’ idea by Wolfgang Sachs, in this chapter, it breaks away from Sachs’ narrative in two distinct ways.
One is that this book brings in an emic view of the indigenous cultures along with the etic view that Sachs relies upon. Thus, we see that in ‘Yagya’ way of life or the classic art and science of creating all around abundance and prosperity by giving. The subtle, scientific and social aspects of Yagya combine to create a much higher – sane and sanguine – form of ‘development’ in a healthy, harmonious and holistic way, than what merely frugality, simplicity and ‘subsistence economies’ indicate, even as they are great virtues, held dearly by the indigenous societies.
Two, with the benefit of hindsight, this book also explores the possibilities of how ‘undressing’ the forms of ‘development’ from the banal to the bizarre, grandiose to grotesque, monstrous and macabre, and in a subliminal way, measly and miasmic that dot our landscapes and are marauding into even the vast and deep oceans and the outer space. This, beyond our wildest imagination, can be made as engaging, exciting and enthralling, especially to the youth and children with a surge of creativity and innovation to discover the beauty in its ugliness with a deep-dive holistic and harmonious design thinking. Its ugliness can be chiselled and handcrafted with a natural and enduring aesthetic sense to undress it in ways that are titillating and tantalising. It applies many modern technologies in gainful and sanguine ways. In the spirit of Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction of obsolete structures’, this new mission of humanity must be ably supported by a global consensus and enforceable mandate to implement the Yagya or the indigenous model, just as ‘development’ was presented as the American or the non-indigenous model in the past decades since the Second World War.
Unmasked: An Ode to Truth is the essence of the book as a poetry. The quest for truth and justice and for peace and harmony continues in the upcoming books of the One World for Many Worlds trilogy.
Keeping up with the larger purpose of this book to raise awareness, to create a worldwide discourse and to build a global consensus, this book is designed as a trilogy for greater interactivity. The first book sets the context as it informs and awakens the readers to the ‘greatest con’ in human history in the name of ‘development’. In the second and third books on the solutions at the local and global levels, respectively, we integrate the responses – feedbacks, suggestions and new ideas – that we receive after the release of the first book on 26 February, 2023. We propose to complete this process for a final launch of the trilogy on April 22, 2023, when we celebrate Earth Day, as our tribute to Gaia, the Mother Earth.
In the second book titled Harmonisation of Everything, we shall dissect the Covid pandemic, a fallout of the fatally flawed ‘development’ idea with the high degree of Terrain Toxicity that it creates, its impact at the local community levels in cities and villages and present a vision that we truly care about and pathways of new possibilities in the form of LACE Model for localised abundance and circular economy, for people to judge for themselves.
In the first section on The Discovery of Pandemic, it uncovers the massive fraud and criminality in gross violation to medical ethics. It trails this to the evil shenanigans* of biotech research and pharma sector who become the trojan horses for a most vicious and treacherous bio-psycho-spiritual warfare. It zooms in on the impacts of rabid globalisation at the local levels in a section on A Vibrant Neighbourhood ‘Goes to the Dogs’.
It then turns to solutions with a vision of new possibilities and pathways for implementation. It starts with Harmonising Human Habitats, as the central challenge of our times, humongous and humbling, leveraging many of the same technologies to heal and repair the natural ecosystems and social fabric that were used to damage and destruct them before. To break the mass hypnosis around the Covid virus and vaccine, it offers a new focal point for global discourse. Is Car Culture coming in the way as the biggest stumbling block to transition from the ‘development’ era of ‘Weaponization of Everything’ to a ‘post-development’ era of ‘Harmonisation of Everything’?
Moving away for Car Culture dominated by private ownership of motor vehicles (or private ridership of taxis with empty seats), it proposes a full-fledged MAAS Movement (Mobility-As-A-Service) as the next big thing for transportation and as a kickstart to our larger solution for food and water abundance; materials library in every neighbourhood (zero to landfill and waste to wealth); people and eco-friendly housing and transportation for all as the 5 verticals of LACE Model for Localised Abundance and Circular Economy and 5 horizontals – Peace & Harmony; Holistic Education, Health and Energy Solutions and our preparedness for Disaster/ Emergency Response and Care Giving.
The third and the final book in the trilogy is titled Creative Unity in a Fragmented World in which we lay down a template for grassroots to global governance that reflects both local needs and aspirations as a whole and simultaneously unifies and harmonises them into seamless vision of One World that is synergistic with the protection, preservation, and progress of the Many Worlds. This outlines the need and urgency for Global Governance as an Emergency Response and shares a vision and pathways for timely implementation without any further delay, before the legally binding WHO Pandemic Prevention Treaty negotiations on the ‘Zero Draft’ starting on 27 February 2023 gets ratified creating a de jure global totalitarian regime.
It proposes creation of a World Government with 80 provinces, each serving 100 million people and further localised as 50 districts each with a population of 2 million with its inalienable rights to land, water, forests, skills and livestocks or the Commons. It thus proposes a ‘dual sovereignty’ at local levels where all the needs are materialised with judicious use of limited physical resources and at global level, where the desires and aspirations are spiritualised at the subtle levels with their unbounded abundance as the consciousness moves higher and higher.
It further explores the relationship of India and the World and foresees a greater responsibility for this ancient culture at a critical juncture for humanity and how it needs to rise to the occasion. It proposes a greater Role of Civil Society to fill up the void left behind by the failure of multilateralism in an intensely globalised world and how the sovereignty of narrow-minded, inward-looking nation-states came in the way of addressing global challenges.
The final and concluding section Creative Unity in a Fragmented World offers a vision of unity in diversity where the one and many are not competing with each other but complement and synergise with each other to together lift the world out of the sinking morass of ‘development’ that has hit the rock bottom with the dead-ends of anti-humanism and trans-humanism and takes it to the safe harbours of sanity and peace for all in harmony with nature and to the glorious heights of indigenous cultures. Let us rejoice in our true and real enlightenment of humanity as a whole, united in the blissful harmony of the One World that embraces the Many Worlds in its sanguine warmth.
GAIA - Global Academy of Indigenous Activism 