We are a non-profit organization Humanity Integrated that is comprised of people who find themselves in the most interesting yet trying times of human evolution – the time of global crisis, which is the first stage of a profound change.
Nicholas Boyle, a Professor of German history at Cambridge University, claims in his book, 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis, that his study of human history has led him to conclude that major defining events, for previous centuries, have occurred within the second decade of those centuries; and that these great events were to define the course those centuries took.
For instance, in 1914 World War I began and this, Boyle claims, set the course for
…international discord throughout the 20th century.”
He says,
If a century is going to have a character it is going to become apparent by the time it is approaching 20 years old, the same is true of human beings.”
Here is Boyle speaking on 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis [6 min.]
Boyle sees the global financial crisis as being the trigger for this next “Great Event” and the United States as the pullers of it; stating,
The U.S. will become the key player in a series of make-or-break decisions and either condemn us to a century of violence and poverty, or usher in a new age of global cooperation.”
He sees the U.S. as having this position due to the combination of their economic influence diminishing and their military power being unparalleled.
The answer? Boyle suggests that nations must today realize that the previous reign of nation states has ended and that global governance must now take its place.
It is a profoundly hopeful sign that we begin the 21st century with very many more international and intergovernmental organizations than we had at the start of the 20th,” he says, and getting back to America, “The only conceivably peaceful route to that goal is through a continuation of the pax Americana.
But both the world’s understanding of America, and America’s understanding of itself, will have to change fundamentally for that goal to be achieved.”
We will conform to the group. We’re very social creatures. We’re very much aware of what people around us think. We want to be liked. We don’t want to be seen to rock the boat so we will go along with the group even if we don’t believe what people are saying, we still go along.” *
This is a conclusion from what is known as “The Asch Experiment,” an experiment originally conceived in the 1950’s by Social Psychologist Solomon Asch, demonstrated in the video below [2 min.]:
The 3 Levels of Distortion
As indicated in Martin Shepard’s video about conformity [10 min.], “Asch proposed conformity could be explained by distortions occurring at any of three levels: perception, judgment and action.”
At the action level: subjects believe the majority are wrong, but go along with them anyway.
At the level of judgment: subjects perceive there is a conflict but reject their own judgment, concluding the majority are right.
At the level of perception: subjects’ perceptions are genuinely distorted by the majority’s answers”.
“If it’s true that the subjects’ perceptions are genuinely distorted, that means that group opinion has the potential to affect an individual’s information processing on a very profound level.” **
And there you have a group of (effectively) strangers who were exerting the pressure not to intervene, not to help; and it’s very difficult to rebel!”
This Bystander Effect is demonstrated in the following video [3 min.]:
Using Other People’s Behavior As Clues To Reality
There are, in fact, many reasons why bystanders in groups fail to act in emergency situations, but social psychologists have focused most of their attention on two major factors. According to a basic principle of social influence, bystanders monitor the reactions of other people in an emergency situation to see if others think that it is necessary to intervene. Each person uses others’ behavior as clues to reality. Since everyone is doing exactly the same thing (nothing), they all conclude from the inaction of others that help is not needed. This is an example of pluralistic ignorance or social proof.
The other major obstacle to intervention is known as diffusion of responsibility. This occurs when observers all assume that someone else is going to intervene and so each individual feels less responsible and refrains from doing anything.”
Bystander Effect Extends To Cyberspace
The bystander effect also extends beyond reality and into cyberspace. Specifically, in a study performed by Markey (2000), the experiment focused on the amount of time it took a bystander to provide assistance. The researchers examined the effects of the gender of an individual seeking help by measuring participant response time (dependent variable). The perceived gender was manipulated by the usage of a male or female screen name in an Internet chat room (independent variable). The treatment conditions examined the number of people present in the chat (two to nineteen), and then asked the stimulus question: ‘Can anyone tell me how to look at someone’s profile?’
The findings reflect a correlation between the number of people present in a computer-mediated chat group and the amount of time it took for an individual to receive help. The higher the number of participants, the longer it took for someone to help. This research reveals that bystander interventions in Internet chat groups reflect the same patterns as interaction in non-computer based environments.”
The Bystander Effect was first demonstrated in the laboratory by John Darley and Bibb Latane in 1968. These researchers launched a series of experiments that resulted in one of the strongest and most replicable effects in social psychology.”
Is it time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that could be responsible, just and humane?”
Professor David Harvey, PhD, researches to
figure out the role of crises in the whole history of capitalism and what’s specific and special about the crisis this time around” by looking at “the internal contradictions of capital accumulation.”
An Internal Contradiction Of Capital Accumulation
Financial profits in the United States were soaring after the 1990s” while “profits in manufacturing were coming down … you can see the imbalance … you’ve screwed industry to keep financiers happy,” and as a result “the wealth of the rich … has accelerated.”
How Did This Happen?
Since the 1970s, we have been in a phase that we call wage repression.”
If you diminish wages, where is your demand going to come from?”
The answer was, well … get out your credit cards.”
Capitalism Never Solves Its Crises Problems, It Moves Them Around Geographically
Out of this comes a theory which is very, very important: that capitalism never solves its crises problems, it moves them around geographically.”
In other words,
you had a finance crisis … you sort of half solved that, but … at the expense of a sovereign debt crisis!”
If you tell someone they don’t influence anybody, they’re not going to do anything. But if you tell them they influence a thousand people they’ll change their lives. And that’s why I think it’s so critical for us to understand first and foremost how and why we are connected.”
James Fowler, Professor of Medical Genetics and Political Science at University of California, is the co-author of Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends’ Affect Everything You Feel, Think, And Do.
The book describes conclusions from statistical analysis of data that was collected as part of a heart study in Framingham, Massachusetts, tracking over 12,000 individuals for 32 years.
For the first time,” says Fowler, “we are able to get a birds’ eye view of networks like the networks that you live in.”
Here is a 9 min. clip with highlights from Fowler’s talk on social networks at Pop Tech:
Fowler describes a:
Three Degrees of Influence” concept: “Your friends’ friends’ friends’ have an impact on you. They’re going to impact whether or not you’re obese, whether or not you smoke… whether or not you’re happy, whether or not you’re lonely, whether or not you’re depressed…”
Fowler explains that this interconnection works two ways,
We shape our networks but our networks also shape us.” Therefore, “If you do a kind act to a person they’ll do a kind act to another person and that will also spread…” And that this serves an “evolutionary purpose… Human social networks are in our nature… we have grown up over hundreds of thousands of years in these social networks.”
What I would consider the tragedy of our times is that we are more connected than ever, and yet, we don’t realize it and don’t truly live it.”
Michael Wesch, PhD, a Cultural Anthropologist, stated the above at the end of a talk at PopTech where he shared insights from an exploration of one of today’s most defining characteristics – the development of online culture.
Here is a 6 min. clip with highlights from the lecture:
At the start of the lecture, Wesch clarifies the significance of media in shaping human culture and relationships:
Media is like an environment, it takes us over, and sort of consumes us in many ways. Media are not just tools, they’re not just means of communication, media actually mediate our conversations. Media, in some ways, determine or dictate who can say what to who, what they can say, how it will be said etc. And so, when media change – our conversations change.”
He later adds that the really deep question that he and his students are trying to get at is
not only how our conversations are changing but how our communities might be changing, and even how our selves are changing.”
In contrast to old forms of media, Wesch analyzes the nature of new social media as:
• not controlled by the few, • not one way, • created by, for, and around networks, not masses • having the potential to transform individual pursuits into collective action.”
Towards the end of the presentation, he shows the most responded-to video in the early days of YouTube – an anonymous video that encouraged people all over the world to share messages of love and oneness.
I hope it doesn’t come off as blind optimism,” he says, “because, in fact, these people would not be writing these messages if these things actually existed. If we were one world and one people and all those types of things, then they wouldn’t need to say it.”
If you haven’t been in a coma the last couple of years, then you might have noticed that the economy is crashing, food and gas prices are on the rise, and if people weren’t protesting in your city square, then they were protesting in one close by. However, as shown by the following 6 films, these instances and many others are tightly interconnected, and there are people looking into what’s causing them, where they’re leading humanity, and what can be done about them.
The realization of the negative influence of a society that prominently values individual self-interest upon human development & the need to build a new kind of social influence that promotes people’s well-being
I’m talking about a revolution that’s probably the hardest kind, the kind that takes place in the human soul, in the human mind. To be able to tear everything down, throw everything out, and start with a completely fresh paper and say… ‘okay, how do we solve this problem?’”
Starting with peak oil, Ruppert clarifies how oil is literally everywhere in a person’s life…
All plastic is oil. Most paints, all pesticides are made from oil. Everything from toothpaste, to toothbrushes, is made from oil. There are seven gallons of oil in every tire. There is nothing anywhere, in any combination, which will replace the edifice built by fossil fuels. Nothing. Peak oil is probably now very easy to explain. Much easier than it was a long time ago. People have felt what $147 a barrel of oil feels like.”
…and how the running out of oil in the world will force humanity to make very big changes:
The end of oil is like end of the way of life. We’re hitting a new era.”
What Will You Do When Money Runs Out?
Ruppert continues by painting a bleak fade-to-black picture of the world as it heads into the future, stating the complications or even impossibility of replacing oil with the alternative energies usually proposed – ethanol, electricity, coal, nuclear, tidal and solar power – and explaining how food and monetary systems throughout the 20th century were setup in a way that would lead to a collapse of humanity’s systems, and which is being felt globally today.
The whole global economy cannot be sustained, it requires infinite growth. But infinite growth collides with finite energy. … So you have finite energy and you have a financial paradigm which demands infinite growth and we’re at the point of human history where the infinite growth paradigm collides with something that is more powerful than money is.
By 2006, I knew that the collapse was very imminent, that there would be a major implosion of the US economy. … And now, collapse is happening, these pieces are falling exactly as everything else had written, said, done. All the peak oil activists, all the sustainability advocates. Our map was proving deadly accurate. Things don’t break up, they break down.
When a government collapses, what happens? The mail stops getting delivered. Air traffic controllers don’t get paid, so they don’t go to work, which means planes don’t fly. Bridges and highway inspections don’t get made. Food and drug administration inspections don’t get made. Maintenance is going to be defrayed. Law enforcement stops working. I mean, it’s no secret now. You see the headlines every day. California’s bankrupt, Michigan’s bankrupt, Ohio… They’re shutting down services left and right. There are tent cities springing up all over the country, there are homeless, displaced people. The great many billionaires, who we would call the elites, the many very, very wealthy people are getting crashed, burned and eaten alive.
What you don’t hear is the fact that all over the world economies are collapsing much faster than the US economy. Britain is an absolute basket case. There is a curtain of despair descending across Eastern Europe. There’s a revolution underway in Greece: it’s not riots, it’s not civil unrest… it’s a revolution. Drug violence right across the border in Mexico. This is all part of the collapse. Pakistan, Afghanistan, there’s lots of violence. The people who have run the planet to this point and who are running the planet now are losing control.”
Will You Be Concerned About Humanity’s Basic Survival? Will You Try To Find Balance Among People & Nature? Will You Change The Way You Think?
Ruppert continues by discussing a paradigm shift for humanity, involving:
The need to shift to a concern about humanity’s basic survival
The need to find balance between people and nature in order to survive
The need to change the way people think, which Ruppert considers as being “humanity’s greatest challenge ever”
The human race now is only going to be concerned, not with an ideology, but what allows them to survive. Capitalism, socialism and communism are all terms that need to be tossed in the trash can immediately, because all of them were created on the assumption of infinite resources. Not one of those ideologies – which are now dead dinosaurs, archaic fossils – is relevant to our way of life. Not one of them recognizes that there must be a balance between growth, the resources, and the planet.
Forget the idea that you can have as much as you want, because until mankind surrenders to the fact that it lives on a finite planet, and it must have balance with that planet, with the planet’s resources, with the animal life and all the other life, there can be no happiness for anything. Anything. It’s all about getting balance back.”
Maybe You Will If Everybody Does…
After confronting the viewer with a situation that seems impossible to solve, Ruppert’s final words in Collapse shed a thin beam of optimistic light, hinting that when 10% of the human population realize a change of thinking, then that thinking will spread to the entire human population.
There is a legend, or a fable about the 100th monkey. A long time ago, in the late ’40s, early ’50s, when atom bombs and H-bombs were invoked with above ground testing, we set off an atom bomb on an atol in the Pacific. And then we waited a number of years, because we wanted to answer questions like how soon after we nuked something, would it be possible to get any kind of life started again? So they went back to this island and they decided to repopulate it with monkeys. And the monkeys ate coconuts. Everything was pretty healthy, except for the fact that the husks of the coconut were slightly radioactive. So the scientists took 10 monkeys or so, and taught them to wash the coconuts in the fresh water stream on the island before they cracked them open, and turned the whole thing loose to see what would happen. Well, you know, pretty soon maybe 12 monkeys out of a population of 10,000 were washing their coconuts. And then 20, and then 47. But a funny thing happened. As soon as the 100th monkey started washing his coconut husk, all 10,000 started washing simultaneously. I guess one way that I have always looked at my life, especially since I clearly understood what this issue was in late 2001, is – this is my quest for the 100th monkey.”
Based on current scientific research and expert views about the accumulating crises humanity is expected to face over the coming century, Earth 2100 is a predictive portrayal of the century through the life of Lucy, a fictional woman born in the U.S. in 2008.
No Crisis Exists On Its Own
Earth 2100 paints a picture of the global crisis’ tight interconnectedness, how no one crisis exists on its own and cannot be dealt with in a pin-point manner. What the film shows is that:
an oil crisis becomes a food crisis,
they both connect to increase climate change and global warming,
which increases drought and affects a water crisis,
bringing about famine and thus, mass immigration of people seeking food and water,
as well as deforestation and mass animal and plant extinction,
rising sea levels and thus, floods,
which then bring about outbreaks of infectious diseases,
and this all becomes intensified by rapidly increasing human population, increasing worldwide consumption demand and natural disasters.
The Need To See Things At A Global Level
In presenting this complicated global crisis tangle humanity is expected to face, i.e. many individual crises as one global, integral crisis, Earth 2100 fundamentally proposes the need for a change in people’s approach to the world, from approaching problems locally and nationally to approaching them globally. As mentioned toward the film’s close:
[By 2100] we’re going to have joint management of water resources, of energy resources, of disaster management. We’re going to be living on a planet where we don’t see things at a national level, but we see things at a global level.”
–Peter Gleick, Ph.D., world renowned water scientist, President and co-founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security
By the time we get to 2100, the challenge of building a global, green economy where we’re sharing technologies and where we’re not fighting wars over water and oil… That’s going to bring out the best in the human family.”
–Van Jones, senior fellow at the Center For American Progress and a senior policy advisor at Green For All
That’s if we move in a positive direction. However, Earth 2100 also points out a major threat if the change toward a global, integral approach to the world is not met in time. This would result in much suffering, verging on the brink of civilizational collapse.
If we continue on the business as usual trajectory, there will be a tipping point that we cannot avert. We will indeed drive the car over the cliff.”
–John Holdren, advisor to President Barack Obama for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Inside Job presents how a chain of actions and decisions underpinned by increasing self-interest in the U.S. financial sector over the past 50 years has brought the U.S. to its current worsening socio-economic state.
Maximized Self-Interest – The Financial Crisis Time-Bomb Ticker
The key point that Inside Job presents is how the “securitization food chain” developed – borrowers, lenders, investment banks, investors, ratings agencies – governed by the commonly held value of maximized self-interest at every rung of the chain. It shows how precisely this chain was the ticking financial crisis time-bomb that exploded in September 2008, the effects of which are felt worldwide until today.
Here’s how maximized self-interest worked at every level of this chain:
Borrowers wanted loans for buying homes or other high-cost assets (and since it was in the financial interest of people in the higher parts of the chain for as many people as possible to get loans, then loans were highly promoted during the first years of the 2000s)
Lenders wanted the extra money they could make from any loans they provided, no matter how risky, since they sold all the loans to investments banks
Investment banks wanted the extra money they could derive by collating all the loans they bought into complex derivatives called CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations), and selling those CDOs to investors
Investors wanted the extra money they would get from the borrowers paying back the loans (the CDOs)
Ratings agencies, which were hired by investment banks to evaluate the CDOs, wanted the extra money they would get from giving high ratings to the CDOs (since people in the ratings agencies would get paid more for giving CDOs high ratings, regardless of the actual value of the CDO)
This setup presents how the financial crisis of 2008 hit, showing one bankruptcy after another of major firms as the securitization food chain imploded:
Lenders could no longer sell their loans to the investment banks
As loans went bad, dozens of lenders failed
The CDO market collapsed
Investment banks held onto billions of dollars in loans, CDOs and real estate that they could not sell
Who Is Accountable For The Financial Crisis? A Few People Or Commonly-Held Values That Frame Society?
As the film follows the effects of the 2008 economic meltdown, it searches for a voice to be held accountable among the major players of the financial sector, finding none. No person or group of people could be found responsible, but speaker after speaker, what becomes clarified is that everyone in this chain was simply subjected to the commonly held value of “maximize your profit at any expense.”
As long as everyone in the chain was getting what they wanted, everything seemed fine. However, when the system imploded, resulting in bankers having to lose those profits, and millions of people losing their homes and jobs, it shows how the commonly held value at every layer – “maximize your profit” – is in dire need of a revision.
![Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse [Movie]](https://mutualresponsibility.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/meltdown_C_600.jpg "Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse [Movie]")
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