I have been reading about the end of the world since I was a kid. First The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey in the 1970′s and then again when he wrote Countdown To Armageddon in the 1980′s.
Also in the 1980′s we had the Russians who were going to nuke us all to ashes at a moments notice.
The 1990′s were OK expect for the last 2 years were everybody and their mother thought computers would melt down and cause airplanes to fall from the skies at midnight January 2000.
2001 brought us a whole decade of being scared of “them” and waiting bare foot in line at the airport for our body-scans and anal probes.
And we can’t forget that by the end of this year (2012) we are all doomed as some lazy Myan only wrote his calendar a few thousands years out and happened to end it right before I go Christmas shopping.
Now along this same line we read and talk about how “The man”, “The Elite”, “The Rich”, “U.N.” or the classic “Government” is going to close in on us all and take over the planet with spy drones, stealth helicopters and mind controlling vaccinations.
For some reason we imagine that these organizations who for the most part can’t even get a stop light fixed most of the time have the ability to control things on a planetary scale. Am I saying that there are no groups that may wish for these abilities? No, I am not. As I am sure they are out there. And maybe some of the above listed groups are trying with all their might to grab power, right this moment. But can they succeed at ever taking over the world for any extended time period?
I say no for a number of reasons…
- Daylight: With access to worldwide information 24/7 thousands if not millions of people can learn about events in real time as they are happening. Few large scale events can slip by the general public’s view any longer and with Face-book, Twitter and the many other “social” sites anything you don’t know right now will be told to you by your friends or family anyway.
- Made Numb to Fear: Most people in the western world have been made so numb to fear this past decade that anybody trying to pass off yet another group as our collective mortal enemy will be pretty much laughed off the stage by large portions of the general public.
- Easier to Ignore: With our new found ability to communicate with each other without the help of any outside agency (TV, Newspapers, Magazines) we get to choose who we listen to and how important they are to us. In addition, instead of just a handful of sources we can read and cross-reference thousands. And then talk with hundreds of “friends” to get their views as well.
- To many People to Control: Back in the days of Knights and Kings only one or two people in a village needed to be controlled as few people had education (priest and the upper classes) or the ability or power to do anything about issues they thought were important. Today the average person has access to a world of information never dreamed of in the past (Wikipedia, Web MD and tens of thousands of scientific papers). Combined with direct connections to vast funding (crowd-sourcing). One person by themselves today can in many cases make or cause change that would have been hard for a whole kingdom in the past. Multiply this by millions or even billions and how do you put a stopper back in the bottle of knowledge? A example would be the Linux O/S. One person started a project that now runs most of the worlds web servers, TV’s and Phones. This one persons impact can be measured in the billions of dollars.
- Every Authoritarian Institution in history has always become more centralized, brittle and less able to respond to changes as it has aged and grown. So any “faith” that some globe spanning “empire” will not self implode or be made obsolete by the very people they try and rule over is just a dream that can’t ever be realized.The new trend I see coming will be small groups of individuals forming many distributed groups based on their current “needs and wants”. These groups will end up forming their own natural distributed networks (even if they don’t know it) and they will by their very nature be extremely hard for the “Elite” to stop or control long term.
In short what has been happening over the last few centuries is coming to a head. Regular people are gaining more and more power and the internet has let us all connect and combine this power.
The old powers will fade just as many of the kingdoms of the past have. The groups that hang on to the “Old School” mindset of “Empire” will find themselves as useful as a chamber pot.
The future belongs to people.