Will we get it right this time?

So much to consider, to encompass, to distill to the core, that we may unravel the messy enterprise before us. How will we bootstrap out of the ruins of an entire world laid waste, do so in a few short generations, to reach again for the stars ? This is to broach headlong, and all at once, the overwhelming and the awe inspiring. To know humility is the begining of courage and a different road out of madness on a planetary scale that is our inheritance.

What follows is a brief, fallible, muse that serves as preface to the detailed history of the last 100 years that is the work ahead.

Let me first offer these key terms defined. They frame the matrix of the past and will surely shape what is to come to the extent we understand why we cannot repeat it all again.

Power - the ability to cause or prevent change.

Value - whatever we would strive to attain and hold onto.

In the palpable dark, pacing restless side to side, just the other side of the tree line, their eyes glowed, their bellies rumbled, thier maws grined long in tooth and tusk.

Base survival, day and night, especially night, was all consumming.

This primal fear, endured over millenia and countless generations, of being nought but meat ripped to shreds and eaten by the great carnivors, has shaped our journey to the celestial heights of 21st century global civilization and our present fall from grace.

If we could gain a measure of control over uncertainty, over mortality, over the daily risk to life and limb, we could amass the assurances of a long life of comforting leasure, of security, all told the culminating insurance that was fundamental in our collective quest for power.

Whatever would mitigate the sense of powerlessness over our existence, we would possess, more often than not, at any cost to others outside the circle of our blood ties. Over time there came to be an exception to the blood circle. We would mingle with the outsider, the stranger, the lurking threat, if we felt we had the edge, if we got more than we gave up, if we got something for nothing. Both sides held to the same ends. But only one could adscend to dominance over time. It was a zero sum game and there had to be losers to have winners but for an invisible player that neither side acknowledeged even while pilfering, and that player would not forever be ignored. There would always be a rechoning, a just accounting, where there would be no winners, only losers, the playing field leveled and all unsustainable constructs relegated to the scrap heap of lost illusions.

Besides an agreed upon medium of convenience in the exhange of value, money was our most abstracted construct. It created a greater and greater distance from the root cause and effect of the natural, unmediated, world. Inturn, accumulating this construct within the compass of idolotory became an instrument of escalating, self perpetuating, power over others as a means to the greater good of elite individuals.

From nomadic tribes, to villages, to cities, to nations, to empire, to the end of days. It all reverted to power, real and imagined. The carnivors are still in our head. The power within being the difference that could make a difference after the ramparts of metal and the bulwarks of governance crumbled with the monstrous rising tides of our making and undoing, teasing the fires of cosmic creation itself.