The Case for Universal Love

We have come to the edge of a precipice, facing a crisis that could end civilization as we know it. The crisis cannot be avoided, but we can determine how we respond to it.

We have two options before us. One option is to stay the present course. If we stay the present course we will open the door to events to be set in motion by which the world would likely enter a New Dark Age in which the population would probably collapse to less than a billion, within a relatively short period of time. The other option is to acknowledge the roots of the failure that led to this crisis and chart an appropriately different course. The pivotal time frame in which our future will be determined is close at hand and may be reached in the year 2004, as numerous trends are coming to a head simultaneously to precipitate the crisis that will determine our future.

The crisis that we cannot evade has multiple facets which can be categorized as political, economic, strategic, and social, but which all have a common root. Band Aid measures have been applied in all of these areas, in order to hide the symptoms. This has become a response without curing their cause, by which the entire situation has become untenable.

Economically, we have come to the end of the rope. We have created a world that is awash in debt. The USA, all by itself, owes over 38 trillion dollars in debt, four times its GDP. That is the equivalent of a household of four with a yearly income of $30,000 carrying a debt of $480,000, while it costs such a family close to $40,000 a year to live. The bottom line is, this debt can never be paid, especially since it is rapidly destroying the industries and infrastructures society requires to live. By this process, in conjunction with irrationally leveraged up equity portfolios, the entire global value system has become meaningless. Propped up by financial derivatives gambling on the order of several hundred trillions of dollars, the entire world-financial system has become a house of cards that is doomed by its own fragility. It may be compared to a soap bubble, a shiny sphere filled with compressed air. When the tensile strength of its structure fails at one single point, the resulting rift will tear the whole sphere into a spray of fine droplets that blow away with the wind. When this happens, no one will be able to put the bubble back together again. That is what we face financially on a global scale.

Politically, no government on earth is presently prepared to deal with the impending economic and financial crisis. Argentina stands out as a minute test case for the coming crisis. Argentina is one of the great food producing countries on Earth, with a capacity to feed 300 million people, but its tiny population of just over thirty million is starving to death. It has become so bad that the poorest of the poor have to buy themselves salvaging rights to plots on the garbage dumps, because there just isn’t enough garbage to go around. When one hears about stories like that of a mother whose dying child in her arms asks, "mommy is there food in heaven," it becomes apparent that there is a limit to what a nation can bear to service its debt. And still, the vultures are circling to collect more. Argentina is presently under huge pressures by the big financial institutions to cough up more, to pay what it is not able to pay. The stakes are huge. If Argentina succumbs it will cease to exist as a functioning nation, and this in not so distant times, and nothing will be paid in the end. If it resists and refuses to kill its population further, the entire IMF system will likely collapse, which is doomed in either case. Brazil, Mexico, Turkey are not far behind Argentina, and many other nations are not far behind them. An epoch is coming to a close that began in the 1760s with the founding of the British East India Company and related banking institutions. These institutions were created as sovereign private entities as tools for looting the world. We are facing the bankruptcy of this system and a coming contest for its survival against the sovereign rights of nations to exits and their populations to survive. No one can foretell how this battle will end, except that it is huge and global in its unfolding dimensions, as is already apparent.

Strategically, too, we are in a mess. In order to prop up the dying financial world-empire, fascism has been reintroduced and brought to the foreground. America, which has once been the most admired and envied nation in the world, has become the most hated and despised nation, because of its ever more fascist policies; its war policies and its economic looting of the world. Collectively the world is awash with nuclear weapons that were once intended to establish a world-emporium in the shadow of irresistible terror.

Officially, we face 22,000 actively deployed nuclear terror weapons, with which we terrorize one another, deployed by nine nations, the USA, Russia, China, UK, France, Pakistan, India, North Korea, and Israel. We probably also have just as many more nuclear weapons sitting on the shelf held in reserve. These figures are unimaginable in what they represent, and they do not include tactical nuclear weapons, which are not reported. For over fifty years already, humanity has struggled to rid itself of nuclear weapons, but has failed. Instead, new crash programs are under way to build more. 

The has USA presently a multi-billion-dollar crash program in operation to develop new types of mini-nukes that can be more readily used and given to field commanders. In response to America’s global nuclear threat-posture, Russia developed a whole new ICBM missile system, the Topol system, with three divisions already deployed to counter America’s Missile-Shield-threat. It has been publicly stated by the American synarchist movement that America is now in a position to wipe out Russia and China together, and absorb with its Missile Shield anything that anyone can throw against the USA. In response, Russia is developing other "asymmetric" systems for nuclear warfare. Nobody can foretell where this New Cold War will end.

Socially, humanity has become a tragedy of equally unprecedented proportions. Never before, except perhaps during the times of the Roman Empire and the Spanish Inquisition, has violence and general indifference penetrated the public consciousness more deeply than we find it today. We find it thick and heavy in entertainment, games, sports, politics, military adventures, even in religion. 

At the same time we face the rise of global pandemic diseases, such as AIDS, malaria, and others, and an astonishing reluctance by society to deal with them. Instead of fighting them, we have movements afoot for decades already, which work against the development of new, and the utilization of the existing means, to deal with the major pandemic diseases.

If one looks at these vast civilizational challenges that we face, it becomes evident that no isolated solution is possible in any one area. The only hope that we have for maintaining and advancing our civilization is to become human again, and to begin to deal with one another as human beings. Can this be done? 

It appears that this can be done, even though the looming challenge is immensely great. In researching this problem it became quickly obvious that life isn’t a political process, or religious, economic, strategic, or whatever type of process. It is process of human development, impeded by barriers that stand in the way of this development. These are typically barriers that isolate and divide us from one another.  Many of the barriers have been artificially created to maintain oligarchic power structures. In order for us all to survive the coming crisis and to have a future, these barriers need to be dealt with.

As much as we might wish to, we cannot evade taking responsibility for the crisis and place our own failure in eradicating these barriers into the courts of governments and institutions, and blame them. The blame rests with us. The deepest division in the world is rooted in our own inability to see ourselves primarily as human beings. 

The most deeply rooted division that exists in the world today is of course the sexual division of humanity, and the resulting isolation of people from one another. Nothing cuts more deeply than that, and sets up artificial barriers behind which we stop seeing one another as primarily human beings. Instead of seeing one another as human beings, we regard each other as members of classes, institutions, relationships, arrangements, or whatever. The huge problems that we currently face on the global scale are fundamentally not in any way different, they are merely bigger with enormously larger consequences. It makes little sense therefore, for instance, to demonstrate against war, while we maintain the roots within ourselves of the processes that lead to war.

Unfortunately it is a terribly difficult problem to deal with the barriers that divide us from one another as human beings, especially those of our sexual division and its numerous related divisions. We have dug ourselves a hole that we have fallen into, and cannot get out of. For example it is virtually impossible for two people of the opposite sex (who are not married to one another) to say to one another "thank you for being alive in this world." The divisions we have created do not allow this. It even prevents us from opening our eyes from recognizing the great treasure we represent in this world as human beings in terms of our capacity to build civilizations, recognize beauty, cherish one another, express love, joy, hope, the sublime, support one other, enrich one another, create art, music, literature, and much more. 

No other form of life known to us can match the human being in any of that. And yet we kill that which is most precious, we close our eyes to it at best, and even where we would honestly embrace one another in love, we close our heart because the walls we have built around ourselves don’t allow a way out.

Since the 1980s I have dug deep into the issues of our division and isolation in order to explore that challenges associated with an honest exploration of the principle of universal love which would be expressed if the barriers were dealt with. I have written ten novels to explore the subject, in order to expose some of the dimensions of the barriers. But even those, barely touch the surface. Nevertheless they represent a necessary step in the necessary movement for mankind to pull itself away from the precipice of a civilization-threatening crisis that none of us living today may survive if an intelligent solution is not found, and is not found soon.

The novels are made available online in the Internet, accessible for 'free' in order to help enrich our world and one another with expanding dimensions of love. (See book index)

Rolf A. F. Witzsche