AN AGE OF DESTRUCTION
Today humanity stands at the turning point. At the heart of the matter is the destruction of the biological foundations of life by human beings. Most experts believe that we are living in the greatest age of extinction since the massive Permian Extinction 250 million years ago. In other words, we are living in the age of the greatest mass murder, the greatest destruction of life in 250 million years. Now this is not an abstract intellectual point because human beings depend on the biosphere. So if you destroy the biological foundations of life you’re destroying the biological foundations of human life. It’s important to understand that nature goes on. Nature is really going to be very unaffected by all this in the larger scheme of things. Nature is billions of years old, human beings are at most tens of thousands of years old and industrial civilization is 200 years old in total and only really about 50 years old in on a global scale. So nature has millions of years to clean up the mess that human beings have made. Human beings are in all a different situation. The point is that there are so many warning signs about things going wrong today that we could be talking about cataclysmic disasters in the next five or 10 years, not the next hundred years.
Global warming has gotten a lot of publicity and rightly so, but global warming is just 15-20% of the global environmental crisis. There’s a whole series of other things in terms of mass murder that are equally alarming, such as the destruction of the oceans, the emergence of enormous garbage islands, the horrifying spectacle of garbage islands in key parts of the world’s oceans and you can go to our website read World Future Outlook to get a detailed view of all this. It’s not necessary to get into details of all this now and it would take too long. There’s just too much destruction. Plutocrats at the top of the system such as Mr. Gates of the Gates foundation are trying to tell us everything’s okay. The very fact that people would make such statements in the face of overwhelming scientific reality shows that these people are not well. There is something very wrong with these people and there is something very wrong with the society that would do something like this, that would destroy the biological foundations of life. As Al Gore pointed out this is a moral issue, it’s not just if the physical scientific issue. If you look at the film Midway, which we have the trailer on our website, to see the appalling cruelty, and that’s just a tiny fraction of the cruelty, to other forms of life that animals are horribly tortured to death by plastics that human beings have created.
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
Now we need to ask, How did this happen? How did how did this occur? And here’s where things get quite controversial because they occurred under Christianity, they occurred under so-called parliamentary democracy in Europe and the United States, so-called because it is not entirely clear particularly in American that this is actually a democracy, but it’s a so-called democracy. Now it's a reality that this all occurred under the capitalist economic system. Communism has been certainly a total disaster environmentally too, in some ways even worse, so it’s very important not to just restrict this to capitalism or Christianity because atheist communism has been a total catastrophe in terms of the environment as well. So we need to look at these systems and realize that these are not benevolent systems. No they are not. And the moral claims that these systems make are simply unacceptable. They are. The sanctimonious claim that the American dream is the only way and so on and so forth.
AMERICA'S IMPERIALISTIC INSANITY
The arrogance and totalitarian delusions of a country such as America since the end of the Cold War have gotten into the realm of pathological insanity, such as the desire to invade and murder people in other countries. First with Bush but then Obama provided a liberal face to an even bigger campaign of mass murder and totalitarianism overseas. Obama bombed more countries than any other president since World War II and until he was stopped by the crazy budget nonsense in the US he was trying to promote the largest military budget since World War II.
Since Trump has come in, Democrats and Republicans have come together to send military spending soaring and have broken new records in constant dollars military spending since World War II. Now just sit back and process that one. What this means that we are spending more money on the military, its not really defense, its an imperialism budgets, it's not a defense budget, than we spent at the very height of the Cold War. I mean just think about that and process that. So that’s a serious problem there.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Now the question is what’s going to happen and what’s going to happen is a series of major dislocations that will lead to very high levels of violence. In America you have a very heavily armed population that’s also very heavily doped up, particularly by drugs from the pharmaceutical industry, mental drugs from the pharmaceutical industry of, alcohol so on and so forth. At the same time you have a sort of upside down pyramid of debt that’s getting more and more topsy-turvy. Debt as a percentage of GDP in America is at its highest level ever recorded. That’s total debt and Trump is going to send the levels of debt soaring even higher. So this doesn’t bode well. This doesn’t bode well.
AMERICA'S LACKING SAFETY NET
What’s coming will be some forms of revolution which will be different in different parts of the world. The global crisis will be different in China from what it is in America. It will be different in Russia from what it is in America. It will be different in Europe from what it is in America. When we look at the world, contrary to the arrogant claims of American imperialists, America looks like one of the countries most vulnerable to having major crises with its lack of any national health insurance setting the stage for epidemics or biological warfare and so on as well as the lack of a safety net. So America could be on the receiving end of this more so than other countries in spite of its arrogant protestations. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 is a turning point in American history. It’s very important to understand that Trump is a creation of people such as Hillary Clinton and Obama. People say they love Obama but hate Trump, but if Obama hadn’t betrayed everything the Democratic Party is supposed to do, if he hadn’t ignored almost every major problem and spent his eight years dishing up happy talk, not that he didn’t do some good things, he did do some good things and help save the world from the economic disaster created by Bush, so we're not saying everything Obama did was bad before anybody gets agitated about that, but overall Obama betrayed what the Democratic Party was supposed to do in terms of social justice and totally betrayed it in his campaign of really neofascist imperialism abroad and neofascist totalitarianism at home. Obama will go down in history as probably one of the most disastrous presidents in the history of this country and the establishment of the Democratic Party who nominated a war criminal, Hillary Clinton, and a Wall Street whore, Hillary Clinton, as their nominee and sabotaged the nominee that was supported by most people, who was Bernie Sanders, will go down in history as one of the most catastrophic and shameful decisions in the entire course of world political history.
THE ELECTION OF DONALD TRUMP BODES ILL FOR AMERICA
The election of Trump bodes very ill for America. Donald. Trump is not a well man. But he represents diseases and illnesses deep in American society. So this is part of a structural problem and an illness within the society finally coming out. Now Trump’s policies, particularly on the environment, with being the one country to pull out of the Paris Accords and the disastrous environmental policies pursued such as the psychopath Mr. Pruitt that he puts in charge of the EPA are a pathological criminal attack on life. These are crimes against humanity and when you sow the wind you reap the whirlwind and these are not good things. Donald Trump has the legal authority to launch nuclear weapons. We are extremely concerned about that particularly with the appointment of Mr. Bolton of his ability to get America into some kind of disastrous war.
THE BIPARTISAN ROT IN AMERICAN SOCIETY
Meanwhile the political liberals, the liberal establishment, particularly the media, MSNBC and people like that, are hog-wild for war with Russia because they still are trying to come up with some excuse other than their own moral depravity for why their support for Hillary Clinton was a disaster and they want to pin the blame for the whole situation on some supposed Russian conspiracy buying some poor quality ads on Facebook somehow changed everything. This is crazy. But it’s an example that the rot in American society is bipartisan. Yes it is. The rot in American society is bipartisan. These are systematic problems. And in the case of the establishment liberals you have to take a very dark view of them because these are the people who engineered the most appalling war crimes in Vietnam. Mr. McGeorge Bundy is a guy who engineered the use of chemical weapons against civilians the largest use of chemical weapons against civilians in history. And yet after he left office he was made president of the center of establishment liberalism in America the Ford foundation. Mr. Robert McNamara Secretary of Defense, he got more blame than Bundy because he stuck around until things really blew sky high, but even in spite of that he was appointed as head of the World Bank after that. So you see these are very malevolent people. And it goes back to the people such as Livingston in the 19th century where this man was a total charlatan but he managed to sell imperialism to the liberals in England as being a way to the "white man’s burden" and so on and so forth and repackaged imperialism as anti-slavery and unleashed a tidal wave of death and destruction all over Africa as a result of his evil plans. So these are malevolent forces and they are going to produce malevolent results.
THE SCALE OF THE DISASTER
In conclusion, we are living in the midst of the greatest mass murderer in history. This is the evil we face. And this is either going to destroy all human life on earth, or at a minimum lead to a very high death toll. And there’s virtually no planning in the US government about the scale of the death toll because you see if you had to admit that it could lead to a high death toll, you would have to raise questions about the elites that are in power. You would have to raise questions about why somebody like Hillary Clinton is considered a marvelous person and so on and so forth. Why people like that at the top of the liberal establishment are in power. You would have to raise questions about why a guy like Mr. Gates has so much money. You have to raise questions about that, because if you look at the scale of the disaster that these people have created, you raise questions about the structure of who was in power. Now you just you just cannot avoid these facts. We're not saying that that all Christians are bad. But you do have to come to the terms of the fact that this was created under a white Christian patriarchy. That is what the what created this. You cannot ignore that reality you cannot ignore these systems that created this. And my mindlessly cheering on parliamentary democracy, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence as some sort of "solution" is absurd. It is worse than absurd. It’s criminal irresponsibility. If these systems are not working, they need to be swept aside and they will be swept aside by what has always happened when democracies fail, democracy, parliamentary democracy or pseudo-democracy whatever you want to call it that exists in the West has very shallow roots in history. It failed in Greece and failed in ancient Rome and it will be swept aside just as it was swept aside in the past.
THE COMING CAESARS
So what will come out of that is the emergence of Caesar’s, the emergence of emperors, they will be the people who will do what they’ve always done, which is to clean up the mess, and this may not be pretty. We're not saying these people are nice people or good people. There's likely to be a lot of bloodshed as this whole situation sorts itself out. But it will get sorted out. And we need to plan for real future, not a real fairytale future. We are one of the few organizations in the world that looks at this, that looks at the fact of what happens in a post-democratic world rather than mindlessly cheering on a system that obviously isn’t working, that we have to think creatively about that.
THE LIFEFORCE WITHIN
HOPE FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE
As in all periods of life there is a life force to keep people alive and there will be religious aspects of the coming political Caesars who are coming and this will give people hope it as far as life as a continuum. That people may fail here, but they will go on to something else better or worse. In other words karma. That you reap what you sow. You sow evil you reap evil in a chain of incarnations. These are very old ideas, very widespread ideas in world religious and philosophical history, from ancient India to Plato and so on and so forth. So there will have to be some kind of theological vision about all this. This will be all put together in mass movements that will emerge here. And we’ve documented in Building a Sustainable Future what the criteria will be what does reform look like. Thing's aren't absolutely hopeless. But time has already run out to avoid major catastrophes, but total catastrophe is not inevitable, and some people say well that’s gloomy, well boo-hoo people. Within everyone is a life force. If you are going to give into depression then you will be swept aside and you’ll be one more one more statistic in the large body count that’s coming. But people will mobilize, will try to do the right thing and this will determine whether humanity survives or exterminates itself. So that’s the basic agenda and that’s the end of this lecture.