“But it was too late to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of  conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on; the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but the pocket.” —Mark Twain

We refuse to admit it, but we humans are in a perilous position. Not being civilized—and as I see it, unlikely to be so in the foreseeable future—we have at least two ways to bring about our extinction: blowing ourselves and pretty well everything else to pieces, or reducing our environment to an insupportable desert. Either way, in the equivalent of the universe’s twinkling of an eye, we could be gone.1

Comprehending the potential of self-annihilation doesn’t come easily. The conventional wisdom is that America is the owner of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.  Ostensibly, this is the best defense we can buy. But others are also proud members of the nuclear family: Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, Ukraine, Egypt, South Africa, South Korea, North Korea, and Australia, with Iran possibly warming up in the wings. And it is certainly possible that fifty or so other nations may soon join us in this nuclear club. As Jonathan Schell points out in The Seventh Decade, the common heritage of human thought for more than the last sixty years has “defeated every attempt to deliver the world from the danger of nuclear annihilation.”2 Mutually assured destruction keeps us all from dropping the bomb, but it doesn’t stop anyone from building one. How strange it is that our safety depends on how much destructive capacity each of us owns. Is America the safest since we own the most? This is an obsolete concept in a world where a nuclear device may soon be small enough to fit in a suitcase.

With this happy state of affairs in mind, let’s move to the other potential man-made extinction event, the one that is now underway.

As we know, the first law of ethology is “The greater the variety of species, the greater each has for survival.” We are all, in a myriad of ways, dependent upon each other: lions on springbok, elephants on acacia trees, fish on plankton, squirrels on nuts, cows on grass. We all have our survival requirements, which must be continuously met; otherwise, we die out. And this has happened often enough during the 3.5 billion years of life on this planet—itself the best part of 4.7 billion years old—for, as we have seen, at least 99 percent of all life forms are already extinct. So what are the chances for survival of humans since we are so new to this earth and so keen on killing each other?

Our behavior is very likely to create our own extinction by destroying the diversity of life on which we omnivores depend. We destroy things not by accident, as other forms of life may do, but by design. We plow the fields and scatter, but to do so we cut down trees the squirrels and birds need; push the big animals like lions and elephants, as well as our own companions, apes, chimpanzees, and gorillas, off our arable lands into smaller and smaller habitats; and even inflict the captivity of zoos or the cruelty of cages for medical research. We fish the rivers and seas so rapaciously that aquatic life is disappearing to a vanishing point. We have accomplished all this in just a few dozen years. Worse still, as our numbers grow, so too do the rates of extermination of natural animal and vegetable life. Living in the most diverse of environments, we ignore all warnings and pillage the earth as if it can survive us. Well, it can and it will. Unlike us, the earth has the astonishing capacity to regenerate itself. So if the nuclear holocaust doesn’t get us, we can rest assured the destruction of our earth will. We are doing precious little to stop it.

Our nature is to want to believe in hope for a decent future. But “how easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again,” as Mark Twain pointed out. This lie that we the people are in control of our destiny is obvious to all of us if we ever get around to thinking about it. We the people don’t own the airwaves, the media, think tanks, NGOs, lobbies, and certainly not those we vote into power, with the exception of a very small minority that you can count on your fingers. Political power today is centered in the corporate world, just as well-known members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group are the key decision makers influencing that world. It is these privileged few who control the financial, industrial, banking, and other institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank. They rule the world through ownership of Capitol Hill, the British Parliament, the European Union in Brussels—democratic sideshows that give these interests the pretext of being bystanders, whereas, in reality, they are the puppet masters. And we the people are their puppets.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers, British parliamentarians, European politicians, government bureaucrats, corporate officials, Ivy League deans, and military generals are all well known to us. There is no conspiracy here. They are out in the open, speaking their minds, yet saying virtually nothing while generally behaving admirably. Nevertheless, they share a common purpose. Through their obsession with buying influence, they have come to control the destiny of all of us around them. And while there is no obvious collective impulse, they are themselves influenced by a common interest: the power of the purse. What money dictates, they will be guaranteed to follow. If they are told to bail out Big Banks, continue war in the Middle East, devastate our rainforests, allow illegal immigration, maintain a drug culture (legal or illegal), it really doesn’t matter to them. That’s business. They are mere spokes in the wheel of fortune, grinding personal liberty and freedom of thought into the vacuum of endless TV claptrap. In that sense, they think they own us—not all, of course, but enough of us. George Orwell certainly got that right.

The Quality of Renewal is Not Strained

It is hard to visualize a turning point, a way out of this global decline. But we don’t have a choice. We must come up with a radical new view. Now that we see our very existence growing more tentative every day, it is time to make the paradigm shift to a far healthier future.

Let me be presumptuous and offer a compelling possibility. I am thinking now of a worldwide revolution inspired by the moral majority of the world’s people: women.

What might happen if we took into account the ideas, suggestions, insights, and wisdom of such valued brains of (to name just a few) Vandana Shiva, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Helen Caldicott, Michelle Bachelet, Tarja Halonen, Maud Barlow, Mary McAleese, Portia Simpson-Miller, Vaira Vike-Friberga, Marghanita Lasky, Helen Clark, Rutthy Taubb, and the millions of other intelligent women the world over who have so much to offer this world but are so rarely listened to.

“Know thyself” was the foundation of Greek thought twenty-five hundred years ago. Since then we men have been found wanting. The making of the modern world must be less about building bombs and destroying the life forms with which we coexist, and far more about men and women living together in harmony with all forms of life on this beautiful planet, cooperatively using the brilliant resources of all of our brains.

1. Jim Knapton, Defining the Civilized State http://thedebtweowe.com/changing-our-world

2. Jonathan Schell, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (2007–ISBN 9780805081299)

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The preceding was a guest post for The End Of The World by author Jim Knapton.

To know more about Jim Knapton’s new book, Changing Our World: Solutions for a Future, visit his website at http://www.ottolinepublishing.com/. You can send him mail at info@ottolinepublishing.com.