The Prophets of Doom

Part I


Recently, the History Channel brought together six of the leading futurists in the world to discuss America’s leading challenges and what can be done to address and, hopefully, resolve them.

At the end of the meeting, there was a degree of concensus and the good news was that the solutions do not have to be all bad and perhaps the lesson was that the best answer was to rethink what we have been doing and consider what we should have doing all along. Nor does the solution necessarily involve pain.

But while this was the good news, these experts all had dire warnings about what was happening around us and our failure to prepare ourselves for the dangers ahead.

They talked about a diverse range of subjects, their own spheres of interest and concern, that ranged from the economy, the threat of economic dislocation, the prospect of terrorism and nuclear weaponry, the prospect that the solutions we come up with to address these needs, intelligent devices, turn on us, to the shortages we shall face of oil, food, and, perhaps the most threatening, water.

What’s more, each warned that we were not further along in crisis than anyone might have imagined and as the leading expert on finances suggested, there is a kind of cognitive dissonance that tends to shut off a person’s mind when encountering difficulties that would force changes in behavior triggering a kind of reluctance to change and a form of apathy that lulls us into apathy, and an unwillingness to perform corrective action.

The first lesson was that we must learn how to overcome this cognitive dissonance if we want to survive the present range of crises we are confronted with.

That being said, each of the Prophets of Doom entered into a dialog that explained their concerns in their particular province of interest.

The financial guru, who left the management of a hedge fund, quit one day when he realized that the whole economic system was in critical danger of collapse and that you couldn’t solve a credit problem with more credit.

And the challenges we face could result in an end to the money supply, the creation of more money, or other solutions—none of which addresses the problem; nonetheless, he also suggested that at the same time, this dire scenario didn’t spell the end of the world, that there were measures that could be taken to improve the outcome and that man could live under a different set of circumstances but it was the chaos that preceded the new order of things that might impose the greatest hardship.

As was suggested, the story of every Empire is rise and fall. And the analogy to ancient Rome was proferred where Rome was overextended, trying to maintain its presence around the world as its economy fell into disrepair; much of that is very similar to what we face today and understanding the challenges can help mankind change the outcome with purpose and resolve.

One of the speakers indicated that man’s tendency to ignore problems of the first magnitude suggested that perhaps we all needed some kind of environmental cue to alert us to oncoming dangers that threaten our way of life.

Another one of the prophets, John Cronin, who heads up the Beacon Institute of Water and Energy, a group that is in the process of developing a network of professionals for monitoring and reporting on water quality, said that the biggest challenge we may face may be the unavailability or contamination of water; that there is only so much water and the fact that we have been very wasteful with ours, not unlike the ancient Sumarians who’s culture literally disappeared because of their wasteful practices with water. For without water, no society or culture can long survive.

As John Cronin points out, we are a water economy because everything is more or less dependent on the quality and volume of water. But in truth, water is at a crisis level around the world.

We already find signs around many cities that suggest that having fish for dinner more than once a week may prove hazardous to your health. Consider that in San Francisco alone, fish are being hauled in that are already poisoned by caffeine. Why? Because the processing plants do not have a way to process out the caffeine that enters into the water system; nor for that matter, do they have the ability to remove the exotic chemicals that we introduce into the water from our drugs to other chemicals we routinely introduce in a variety of ways into our existing sources for fresh water.

I will continue this discussion in