Basic Call to Consciousness

Continued from last week.

Our strategy for survival:

The invasion of the Western hemisphere by European powers was preceded by centuries of social development which had resulted in societies in which the interests of the few had effectively become national policies, and the interests of the many were without voice in national affairs. In order that we might formulate a strategy for survival in the modern world, it had been necessary that we look at the forces and processes which threaten survival, and to begin to understand the real motivations behind those forces. With such an analysis in mind, we may then begin to create viable alternatives and strategies which will enable us to survive in a predictable future.

When history has been presented to us by colonies, the focal elements have always been political histories. Alexander the Great’s armies conquered most of the known ancient world, and when ancient history is studied, Alexander is studied. But are political histories really the correct focus? Did it make any difference, in the long run, that Alexander the Great, or Nebucadnezzar, or Akhnaton, or any other figure in political history ever lived? Other than the effect that Julius Cesar’s rise to power had on some individuals in the Roman aristocracy, would history have been any different if some other general had ever dared cross the Rubicon? Are political histories the correct focus of history in the search for that which has affected the lives of billions of the earth’s population?

The really crucial developments in world history have been largely ignored by historians. The most profound changes which have taken place have been in the areas of technological change. Social history has largely been the recounting of the fortunes of the interest groups which were committed for one reason or another to some forms of technological and/or cultural movement. When we are seeking the real Cultural revolution of history, do we not find that the rise of agriculture or animal husbandry or irrigation technology was a thousand times more significant in the history of humankind than were the adventures and political fortunes of the aristocracy and rulers of European countries?

It is important that we who are seeking ways of survival in the 20th Century begin by establishing new definitions and new fields of vision as we try to better understand the past. We need to look to history primarily because the past offers us a laboratory in which we can search to find that inherent process of Western Civilization that paralyses whole societies and makes them unable to resist the process of colonization. We need to identify that process which so often leads people who are honestly seeking to resist and destroy colonization to unconsciously recreate the elements of their own oppression. And, lastly, we need to understand that within colonization are the exact elements of social organization which are leading the world today to a crisis which promises a foreseeable future of mass starvation, deprivation, and untold hopelessness.

The current crisis which the world is facing is not difficult for people to understand. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States, with six percent of the world’s population, uses 40 percent if the world’s energy resources. The world’s supply of fossil fuels is finite, and it is estimated that within 30 years, at the present rate of consumption, the people of the world will begin to run out of some of those sources of energy, especially petroleum and natural gas. As the planet begins to run short of cheap energy, it is predictable that the world market economy will suffer and the people of the world who are dependent on that economy will suffer likewise. When the reality of world population growth is placed beside the reality of the current relationship of energy resources and food production, it becomes obvious that worldwide famine is a real possibility.

Continued next week.