The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  REALITY ATTACK

  The twentieth century was the century of oil. Cheap to extract and available in seemingly inexhaustible supply, we treated petroleum and natural gas as free resources and priced them primarily by the costs of extraction, processing, and delivery. We shrugged off the environmental costs of releasing CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and ignored the fact that within the scale of human time oil and gas are finite and nonrenewable resources.

  The forms of economic development that followed World War II, from the Green Revolution to export-oriented industrial policies, suburbanization, and automobile-dependent transportation systems, in many respects constituted a drive to convert the world to dependence on petroleum and natural gas. By 2001 world oil consumption was 7.5 times as great as its 1950 level. Consumption of natural gas, nearly 24 percent of current world energy use, increased to 12.9 times its 1950 level.18

  Earth creates the real wealth on which human life and well-being depend. We humans convert it to our use and consume it. During the twentieth century, we humans perfected powerful technologies to accelerate the rate of conversion by several orders of magnitude. We thought we had mastered the secrets to creating wealth without limit. In truth, we were not accelerating the creation of wealth so much as we were accelerating its consumption by drawing down the natural wealth and living capital of the planet. We similarly failed to recognize that the profligate lifestyles of the world’s consumer class that we had taken to be a measure of our economic and technological genius were unsustainable and more accurately represented a measure of our capacity for shortsighted self-delusion. We are now on the threshold of a serious reality attack.

  Journalist James Howard Kunstler spells out the details in The Long Emergency.19 Virtually every feature of modern life now turns on the availability of cheap oil, including automobiles, computers, synthetic fibers, plastics, construction and manufacturing processes, central heating and 63air conditioning, air travel, industrial agriculture, international trade, suburban living, and modern warfare. Without oil, much of the capital infrastructure underlying modern life becomes an unusable asset, including the infrastructure of suburbia, the global trading system, and the industrial food production, processing, and distribution system.20

  Dislocations caused by climate change and the disruptions from terrorist attacks by desperate people will greatly exacerbate the consequences of withdrawal of the oil subsidy. Economic incentives will shift dramatically in favor of downscaling and localization, shifting the focus from mobility to making a life in the place where one is. Business models based on twelve-thousand-mile supply lines will become increasingly expensive, giving the advantage to a more energy-efficient, smaller-scale local production of food and basic necessities.21 The advantage will go to compact, self-reliant communities that bring people close to their places of work, commerce, and recreation; rely on wind, solar, and mini-hydro as their primary energy sources; and devote arable lands to growing food and fiber using low-input farming methods.

  By any measure it will not be an easy transition. The adjustment can play out in the mode of Empire, as a violent, self-destructive, last-manstanding competition for individual advantage. Or it can play out in the mode of Earth Community, as a cooperative effort to rebuild community; to learn the arts of sufficiency, sharing, and peaceful conflict resolution; and to marshal our human creativity to grow the generative potential of the whole. The process depends on whether we find the courage and vision to embrace the transition as a moment of opportunity.

  Too far removed from reality to recognize the stresses eroding the foundations of the societies they rule, the Cloud Minders of planet Earth have responded in classic imperial mode. They have sought to deflect attention away from tensions created by real security threats by declaring war on real or imagined enemies—apparently unmindful that changing human circumstances have made war itself a futile and irrational act of self-destruction.

  WARS OF SELF-DESTRUCTION

  The military battles of the Roman Empire were fought with swords, spears, and arrows. Our wars are fought with bombers, tanks, missiles, cluster bombs, land mines, nuclear bombs, high explosives, lasers, computers, and munitions tipped with depleted uranium. The increased 64killing efficiency of the individual warrior made the twentieth century the bloodiest in human history. As the killing efficiency of modern weapons continues to increase, they produce ever more devastating consequences not only for those they target, but as well for those who deploy them.

  Weapons of Self-Destruction

  The World Health Organization estimates that 72 million people died during the twentieth century from war and another 52 million from genocide. Other estimates place the combined total as high as 203 million.22 For every person killed another three were wounded—which in many instances means they were maimed for life.23 Millions more escaped serious physical injury but suffered permanent mental disabilities. Whole cities were reduced to rubble, economies were disrupted, priceless cultural artifacts were destroyed, millions were rendered homeless, and the wealth of Earth was consumed to destroy life rather than to nurture it. Worst of all, some modern weapons go on killing long after hostilities have ceased and render uninhabitable vast areas of a crowded world.

  A buried mine can remain active for more than fifty years. The United Nations estimated in 1996 that more than 110 million active mines lie in wait for hapless victims in seventy countries, and that they kill or maim twenty-four thousand people every year—mostly civilians and often children.24 Depleted uranium, which is used to increase the power of advanced munitions to penetrate armor, vaporizes into a fine powder on impact to slowly kill and maim both friend and foe, deform the children they sire and bear, and render vast land areas permanently unfit for habitation.25 A 1996 United Nations resolution classified depleteduranium ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction. The United States and other nations continue to use it in large quantities.

  Of the 696,778 U.S. personnel who served in the Persian Gulf during the 1991 Iraq war, only 760 were killed or wounded in action or as a result of accidents. By May 2002, the U.S. Veterans Administration had classified 168,011 persons who served in the Gulf during 1991 as “disabled veterans” due to combat-related injuries or illnesses and reported that another 8,306 had died from service-related causes. This brought the total casualty rate from the first Gulf War to a staggering 25.4 percent—and the numbers continue to grow. Former army colonel Doug 65Rokke, who was in charge of the military’s environmental cleanup following that war, attributes the majority of these casualties to exposure to depleted uranium, as do other experts. Pentagon spokespersons deny the charge. Whatever the actual cause, the cost to U.S. military personnel was horrific, to say nothing of the cost to Iraqi civilians who live in the contaminated area.26

  The harm to the victors is not solely physical. When a nation sends its children off to war, it first sends them to boot camp not only to learn the arts of death but also to break down their natural moral resistance to killing other humans. Those who survive the horrors of the battlefield return to their families and communities trained and practiced in settling disputes by violent means and with minds filled with images of death. A study of soldiers returning from combat in the second Gulf War estimated that one in six suffered from major depression, generalized anxiety, or posttraumatic stress disorder.27 Big weapons in a small world have made the act of war a strategy of mass self-destruction.

  Nuclear Bombs versus Box Cutters

  The most powerful military forces are unable to prevail over small but committed terrorist networks and popular resistance movements in an age of easy access to high explosives, automatic firearms, shoulder-fired rockets, nuclear materials, deadly biological agents, cell phones, instant messaging, and the Internet. Such weapons give resistance movements the means to make sustained occupation by the military forces of a foreign nation virtually impossible and place the invading army’s homeland at significant risk. Call the armed resi
sters terrorists, guerrillas, freedom fighters, or minutemen, the mechanized military machinery of Empire is useless against a determined population adept in the ways of terrorism and guerrilla warfare. France faced this reality in Algeria and Vietnam. The Soviet Union faced it in Afghanistan, and Russia faced it subsequently in Chechnya.

  The United States has the capability to liquidate whole nations, but its terrifying firepower is of little use in ferreting out clandestine international terrorist networks, gaining the willing submission of the peoples of occupied nations, or securing civilian populations against attacks by committed terrorists. Economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein points out that the U.S. military fought three serious wars between 1945 and 2002: Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War. It fought to a draw in 66Korea and the Gulf and was defeated in Vietnam. None of the three opponents was close to being a credible world-class military power.28 Failing to learn the evident lessons of this experience, the United States was in 2005 bogged down in enormously costly, unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  Conventional armies are organized, trained, and equipped to control territory. Since terrorist networks are everywhere and nowhere, the control of territory is not at issue. Responding to terrorist attacks with conventional military force can take a devastating toll in lives and property, but as a response to terrorism, it is actively counterproductive. The only way to defeat terrorism is to eliminate the conditions that motivate it.

  The contemporary reality of warfare presents a strange paradox. Although modern technology has given the world’s ruling elites the power to make the planet unlivable, it has also stripped them of their capacity to impose their will on subject people by armed force.

  Clueless rulers order searches for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq and elsewhere, while ignoring the WMDs in our own midst. Jet airliners, chemical plants, oil refineries, nuclear facilities, power grids, gas pipelines, and municipal water systems are easily turned into instruments of death and disruption by a committed terrorist of modest means, as the September 11, 2001, attack on the United States so graphically demonstrated. Metaphorically speaking, in a contest between nuclear weapons and box cutters, the box cutters hold the strategic advantage.

  As argued by geopolitical analyst Jonathan Schell, we now live in an unconquerable world.29 Unless we learn to live in peace by eliminating the causes of violence, we will live in perpetual fear and insecurity. Rather than address the root causes of the violence, however, the rulers of planet Earth respond by augmenting their security forces and attempting to lift their city in the clouds to a higher orbit further removed from the spreading devastation on the planet’s surface.

  GOING TO A HIGHER ORBIT

  Had the benefits of the sixfold increase in global economic output achieved since 1950 been equitably shared among the world’s people, poverty would now be history, democracy would be secure, and war 67would be but a distant memory. Driven by the imperatives of dominator power, however, the institutions of Empire allocated more than 80 percent of the benefit of this extraordinary growth to the most fortunate 20 percent of the world’s people.

  Growing Gap

  In the 1990s, per capita income fell in fifty-four of the world’s poorest countries; already high poverty rates increased in thirty-seven of the sixty-seven reporting countries. More than 1.2 billion people now struggle to survive on less than $1 a day. Some 2.8 billion, nearly half the world’s population, survive on less than $2 per day.30

  At the other end of the scale, the number of billionaires worldwide swelled from 274 in 1991 to 691 in 2005, with a combined net worth of $2.2 trillion.31 It is estimated that 1.7 billion people—27 percent of humanity—currently enjoy the material affluence of the consumer society.32 The demands of the existing consumer class continue to surge as its tastes turn to ever larger cars and homes. It would take at least an additional three to four planets to support the excluded populations of the world at the level of consumption now prevailing in Europe. The United Nations projects that the world population will continue to grow from the current 6.4 billion to 8.9 billion in 2050,33 requiring the resources of yet another one to two planets to support everyone at the current European standard. The human species is quite literally consuming the future of its children, consigning billions of people to lives of desperation, and calling the survival of our species into question.

  It is a grim calculus. The response of the orbiting Stratos dwellers is to further shift the tax burden from the investor class to the working class, increase downward pressure on wages, ease restraints on financial speculation and the extraction of monopoly profits, and free corporations from bearing the social and environmental costs of their actions. Those who object are condemned as advocates of class warfare and instructed to focus on bringing the bottom up by giving greater freedom to the top to create new wealth, rather than on bringing the top down.

  The persistent claim of the ruling Cloud Minders that raising the top will ultimately bring up the bottom by expanding the total pool of wealth is a cruel deception. Justice and sustainability are impossible in an inherently unjust and unsustainable system.

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  Grand Illusion

  The key to the deception is money. To understand how it works, it is necessary to be clear on the distinction between real wealth and financial wealth.

  Real wealth consists of those things that have actual utilitarian or artistic value: food, land, energy, knowledge, technology, forests, beauty, and much else. The natural systems of the planet are the foundation of all real wealth, for we depend on them for our very lives. Without these natural systems, none of the other forms of wealth, including human labor and technology, can exist.

  Money by contrast has no intrinsic utilitarian or artistic value. It is only a number on a piece of paper or an electronic trace in a computer file. It is an accounting chit that has value only because by social convention people are willing to accept it in exchange for things of real value. Money, however, bestows enormous power and advantage on those with the power to create and allocate it in societies in which access to most everything of real value requires money.

  The Cloud Minders have enjoyed rapid growth in their financial assets throughout the period of deepening environmental decline, thus bestowing on them claims against a growing portion of the real wealth of planet and society, and creating an illusion that we are all growing richer, when the opposite is true. Take just one key indicator: the combined market capitalization—financial asset value—of the shares traded in the world’s major share markets grew from $0.8 trillion in 1977 to $22.6 trillion in 2003.34 This represents an enormous increase in the buying power of the ruling class relative to the rest of the society. It creates an illusion that economic policies are increasing the real wealth of society, when in fact they are depleting it.

  Bear in mind that in the United States less than 50 percent of households own shares of stock in any form. The wealthiest 1 percent of households own 42.1 percent of the value of all stock shares, more than the total for the entire bottom 95 percent of households.35 Although specific figures are not available, it is a safe estimate that far less than 1 percent of households globally have consequential stock holdings.

  Unfortunately, most people miss the true implications of this inequality because we are in the habit of thinking of money as wealth. Indeed, although the distinction between money and real wealth is essential to understanding the allocation of power in society, the language 69of finance provides no easy way of expressing it. The terms capital, assets, resources, wealth, refer equally to financial wealth and real wealth. If people understood the difference, they would know that when a financial pundit joyfully announces that a rising stock market is “creating wealth,” this means the richest households are increasing their claims over what remains of the real wealth of the rest of us. We might then feel less inclined to share in the pundit’s exuberance.

  Living High on Borrowed Money

  Entranced by the bubble eco
nomy of the 1990s, delusional pundits of the Cloud Minder class declared an end to the laws of economic gravity. By their reckoning, the business cycle had become a relic of the ancient past, U.S. trade and financial imbalances with the rest of the world no longer mattered, and environmental limits had been transcended. Realists who expressed concern about a financial bubble were dismissed as know-nothing pessimists, out of touch with the miracles wrought by the new information economy. The real value added, so the delusional argued, was in finance, marketing, entertainment, information technology, and intellectual property rights. They concluded that the most profitable economic strategy was to import finished products produced by cheap nonunion labor in the poorest countries rather than to import raw materials for domestic fabrication by workers who expect a family wage. The U.S. trade deficit, which in 2004 was an annual $665 billion and growing, was covered by borrowing from foreigners at the rate of $2.6 billion every business day.36 This accelerated a precipitous decline in the U.S. dollar, starting at the beginning of 2002. By the end of 2004, the dollar had lost roughly a third of its value.37 In his 2002 European bestseller After the Empire, French demographer Emmanuel Todd characterizes the United States as “a sort of black hole—absorbing merchandise and capital but incapable of furnishing the same goods in return.”38