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The Global Crisis is the Birth Pangs of a New World                                  By You-Sheng Li             20/03/09

            What began as a reversal of the real estate market in the United States has spun out of control and ended as a full blown global crisis that humans have never faced before. There is almost a meltdown of the world's financial and banking systems; trillions of dollars worth of assets have evaporated. Even some governments have collapsed, investors are devastated, and consumers terrified. According to the World Bank's estimation, 53 million people will be pushed back into poverty, joining up to 155 million who now live on less than US$2 a day.

            There are three types of economic recession, the V and the U type, and the English letters show graphically how soon the economy recovers. Now experts begin to predict the third one, the L recession that never rebounds back. In fact, the crisis is much more than a mere economic one. In a recent lecture in New Delhi, India's former foreign minister Shyam Saran said, "The crisis may be changing, in a fundamental manner, the global geopolitical landscape." Former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge said in an exclusive interview a year after he left the bank, “Canada and the world are facing a long and deep recession that will fundamentally alter the nature of capitalism.” Michel Camdessus, a former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told an Asian Development Bank forum in Manila last week, “This crisis is the first truly universal one in the history of humanity." To be precise, we are standing on the threshold of the collapse of the current human civilization, a civilization based on competition and war and oriented towards wealth accumulation.

On January 26, 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for the economic crisis to be be seen as nothing more than “difficult birth-pangs of a new global order”. He called for a “new global order,” and a new form of internationalism, a mantra that is becoming all too familiar as globalists exploit the very problem they created to centralize power into fewer hands.

            William Eckhardt (A dialectical evolutionary theory of civilizations, empires, and wars. In: Civilizations world systems studying world-historical change, ed by S. K. Sanderson. Walnut Creek, USA: AltaMira Press, 1995. p75-108.) found a close correlation in human history between war measured in the frequency of battles, empire measured in the total area of empires, and civilization measured in the number of geniuses whose superiority was established by the consensus of encyclopaedia and textbook authors. While the whole world tended to spiral upward, as a general rule during the last 5,000 years, regional areas had their ups and downs, rises and falls. When expenditures exceeded incomes in the evolutionary process, then came the falls, which were characterized by decentralization, feudalization, or foreign conquest. In all cases, the way up not only increased the quantity of civilization, empire, and war, but also changed the social structure to one of greater inequality, indicated by slavery, caste, class, social stratification, and so forth. Therefore it is justified to call our current civilization a war civilization, which stimulates the growth of both populations and wealth enormously, since a wealthy nation with the largest army always wins.

            Since we would need five earths if everyone was to live their lives as Americans do today and the world population will reach 7.5 billion soon, the prospects of this war civilization have been painted as one that we will spend all our current wealth wiping out 6 billion people in the next world war with an assumption that we will generate no less wealth soon after the war to support the left over 1.5 billion people. Fortunately as pointed by this web site three years ago, this war civilization has been dying out rapidly since the end of the Second World War and the Cold War Era. This global crisis may be the first sign that history may choose a more dramatic end to this war civilization with an accelerating speed.

           Here we review what kind of life humans lived before our war civilization started. A notable American anthropologist, Marvin Harris, wrote, “ Archaeological evidence from the upper paleolithic period (the Old Stone Age), about 30, 000 BC to 10,000 BC, makes it perfectly clear that hunters who lived during these times enjoyed relatively high standards of comfort and security. They were no bumbling amateurs.” For example, the bones of over a thousand mammoths were excavated from one site in Czechoslovakia, and the remains of 10, 000 wild horses that were stampeded at various intervals over a high cliff near Sohitre in France, testify that those were sophisticated hunters. It was proved beyond any doubt that as long as population density is kept low, hunter/collectors can enjoy both leisure and high diets. (Marvin Harris: Cannibals and Kings. New York: Random House, 1977.)

            It turns out that those prehistoric people practiced birth control, as it was impossible for a woman to carry two babies to move around. Scholars believe that high protein diets reduce birth rate substantially compared to the high carbohydrate diets of later times. Women have to gain a certain amount of fat reserve before any pregnancy, and carbohydrate diets apparently speed up this process. Those ancient people also used birth control technique which cannot be used today such as homosexuality and mating of infertile with fertile people. Of course they knew how to eat certain plants to induce an artificial abortion. The average height of those men was 177 cm while women, 165 cm. The average height of men was only 175 cm in 1960 in the United States. There are not enough data for me to outline what kind of life humans lived from 10,000 BC to 3,000 BC. The human life during these times must be closer to that before than that after, since humans only started to work as hard as we do today after the idle class of people appeared to supervise others' work. They used the prospects of violence and execution to force people work the way they wanted, which is the main feature of the war civilization.

            The world population was estimated to be half million in 30,000 BP (before present) but 6 millions in 10,000 BP (before present). Let say the average population was 1.5 millions for the whole period from 30,000 BC to 10,000 BC, one 4,333rd of our current population. But our average possession per capita is many more than 4,333 times of that of the people who lived during the Old Stone Age. They possessed literally nothing except the world. We have every reason to believe that we will be able to enjoy relatively high standards of comfort and security with leisure as those ancient people did ten thousand years ago after this war civilization collapses into a more humane world. The current global crisis may be the first step of this collapsing process.