Synergy, a fateful word and a fairly small one. Now my definition. (and in other essays I warned you I make my own definitions) it is the interaction of various events or trends, that produce unexpected results. It is probably the very basic way the universe works. When you consider all the unusual events that have brought humanity to the present moment, synergy was probably the way that those events produced us and the moment.

First, we live in a universe which should not exist, it should have burned itself out long ago. Yet the stellar reactions are of the type that prolong the life spans of stars beyond the more usual gravitic collapse phase and “normal” fusion reaction cycles. That and the recycling of stars into new populations of stars, has given the universe a chance to exist long enough for us to come into being. And to live on a world that is rich in elements which never existed until at least one generation of stars had burned out, leaving heavier elements as their ash. As Sagan used to say, we are “starstuff.” And that was only the beginning.

In a real way, we and all we have ever experienced are the result of accident, yet not quite. It is like the old children's story of the animals in flight from fire, coming to a great river. None, not even the strongest of them, can cross the swift waters. Yet, they find, that by pooling their separate strengths and talents, they suddenly have a means open to them. The beavers cut down logs. The birds and spiders bind them together with webs and the hairs of the buffalo and rams and the reeds cut by the hares along the river. The bear and the mountain lion and the beaver are harnessed to this raft to pull it across the river. Fox and coyote and wolf, use their tales as rudders, while squirrels sit atop the antlers of deer and elk, telling them which way to steer. Together they have produced what none alone could have done. They worked in synergy. So has our history been.

9/11 itself can be looked at as an example of synergy. True, the terrorists planned things, yet it was a confluence of events which allowed it to happen. From what I can discern, it was a combination of their planning, plus a series of “mistakes” and ignorance, which brought the whole scenario into horrifying reality. So synergy is a real and sometimes terrifying force in our world.

Something we must keep in mind today. Never in all history, has the future been accurately predicted. Sometimes it has been close, but no cigar as the carnival barker says. And it is synergy that has produced such inaccuracy. Even when, in the distant past, there were absolute rulers, respected and considered divinely powered, their plans never quite came out as intended. With near total control, with near worship of their person and authority and with almost the entire population as work force, they did not succeed. In fact the very act of putting such power into practice, seemed to directly divert their well laid plans.

The Pharaohs are a case in point. A good working definition of divine high poobahs if ever you would want one. So they decided to build giant monuments for tombs, supposedly, and used almost all the manpower and financing of the country to do it. They shipped in and dragged in the stone, organized the workers in gangs and began to build. It not only took five or six pyramids to even get the shape right, but then after all the work, they were robbed of grave goods they had buried with them so they could have a happy afterlife. Sometimes even their bodies were stolen. And eventually, due to resource use and social change due to such projects, the very concept of the pharaoh and the government began to change. They went back to burying underground, rather than inside pyramids, and relationships within priest classes and pharaonic families changed. They had planned for those tombs to secure society and religious structure in eternal stone and ended up changing it all.

We live in such flux, in fact in an even swifter version of it. Our technologies, resources, beliefs and human populations are orders of magnitudes above those of the ancients. In both the real world and our metaphysical spaces, like religions, politics and cyberspace, we are experiencing a rate of change and confluence that dwarfs anything from the past. Synergy does not have to rest simply upon revolution or change, it can have as its basis merely the presence of multiple events or tendencies near enough to each other to create a new and unexpected direction or result.

A present example is outsourcing, something a lot of Americans find is sending their jobs overseas or across nearer borders. One must wonder how much forethought has been put into such a widespread practice. If we look back in history just fifty years, we find the last major example of such outsoucring. In fact we didn’t just ship jobs overseas, we shipped entire factories, buildings and all. A few times we even shipped the workers. Thank heavens we have not yet decided on that extreme. And what was the result? Well, thirty years later we faced the country we had shipped all that stuff to, across the Berlin Wall.

It seemed like a good idea during the Depression, to ship our idle factories and tools and machines over to Russia, a.k.a. the Soviet Union. It gave our manufacturers needed capital, gave our workers at least temporary jobs packing the factories up. Gave even our national economy a much needed influx of money or credit. And you could even say we were helping out a poorer country, helping it to modernize and join the more developed nations. You could say all of that and never see the future that was being writ by such actions.

True, if we hadn’t done that, Germany could have overcome the Soviets in World War II, but we weren’t even thinking about that at the time. That war was another syncrenistic debacle we didn’t see coming. We were simply gong with the “streams” of the time, trying to take advantage of the trends around us. So we shipped them the industrial capacity that allowed them to face us across an Iron Curtain thirty years later. I wonder how many such situations we are presently in the process of generating.

And synergy is not limited to politics and its offspring, like trade and globalization. No, it makes its presence felt in far more personal ways, in family, religious and social networks. Presently we seem to be facing a divergence of those three basics of society. Single parent or nontraditional parent families, fundamental and secular religious influences and societal pressures that range from racism to reactionism. And, whether they realize it or not, they are all weaving a pattern that will adhere to no pure doctrine nor create any desired end. Synergy seems to tend toward the unexpected not the planned. It is a fact we must remind ourselves of again and again.

A case in point is the controversy over abortion. Now we are not going to rehash the morality or practicality of that debate, just examine “mightbes” that could synergistically occur from actions surrounding abortion. These might be the widespread legal entrenchment of abortion as a “right,” or the abolishing of it due to legal or constitutional measures. Either stream presents some interesting possibilities.

If abortion is accepted into society, even against widespread opposition, then we have a medical technique given the force of law. Such acceptance could further reduce the birthrate and send us into negative population growth. This might necessitate the loosening of immigration policy to keep America a growing and economically viable country. Of course that presents problems of national identification which might hasten national ID technology. It also presents another possible problem, with the prevalence of birth control, we condone the very early application of hormones to our female population. Such constant hormone “treatment” could result in unexpected medical situations as the females grow older and the use of over the counter abortifacients could cause a form of hormone “abuse” which comes back later in medical abnormalities. These are simple possibilities, not even touching on the problems associated with allowing medical techniques to acquire legal status in the first place.
Such problems are shared by the antiabortion forces. If they use force of law to end the practice, then some problems are likely to develop they might not be prepared for. The first is that laws have a tendency to “grow.” Already stem-cell research is being looked askance at, and who knows what other research might be found unacceptable. And if that happens, then the moral forces who are trying to stop “murder,” will be facing some pretty tough calls in the future. After all, we are not far from cloning and out-of-womb maturation of fetuses. We are also close to genetically changing the human being. In the future, the “anti” forces may face the existence of parent less beings born without human wombs, perhaps even in animal surrogates. And there will no ability to stop the practice or terminate the beings born of such supposed advances. In fact, since we can also change other species genetically, there may be human-animal hybrids. Slavery may again rear its ugly head and if part human, we will have to deal again with questions we thought we had left behind a century and a Civil War ago.

If that is not frightening, or close enough to us, then we might examine something taking place right now. In fact it is supposedly well on the way to fruition, that is globalization and its attendant problems. Remember a treaty has force of law, in fact in some theories is on par with or above constitutional precepts. If it were not so, countries would not engage in treaties because there would be no guarantee they could be honored. And the global treaties of the last few years have resulted in revolution of world economies.

International banking, shipping and manufacturing, has grown rapidly in the last decades. Labor and economic markets have opened where they have never been before. And attendant with them has grown dangers we have never faced in such magnitude. Dangers that include terrorism but not just terrorism. Some might even include outsourcing and zero inventory systems amongst the dangers. However, we will deal with the more mundane results of global synergy. Perhaps the most prevalent examples are international banking, arms sales and international economic disparity.

International banking brings several weaknesses which terrorists can take advantage of. With the ease of international transactions and the existence of large “offshore” banking areas, there comes the possibilities of financing international terrorist organizations. After all, if we cannot stop our national corporations from setting up tax havens offshore, how will we be able to stop terrorists from setting up their own networks. Illicit funds can traverse the world easily and continuously with little restriction and even less scrutiny. If not directly attached to known terrorists, such “violence banking” can deliver money anywhere and in any currency all over the world. It can also use any economy in the world as a profit machine to feed the coffers of those who would ultimately like to destroy those very same economies. In fact global economics has made the job of the terrorists so easy, that we may have to look at the metaphor of terrorism as being an implicit “cancer” that is part and parcel of globalization. As Lenin said, capitalists will sell you the rope to hang them. International banking is selling such rope constantly. And in the greed attached to such enterprise, not only do we not stop it, but we even encourage its spread. It is now self-generating and growing unrestricted. Even economies which had no part in forming it, are aiding and abetting it, benefiting from it and being made victims of it.

Likewise the arms sales. If international banking encourages terror inadvertently, then international arms sales directly supports it. Almost any weapon or weapon system, can be had in some form on the international arms market. From assault rifles to scud missiles to submarines, incredible weapons are in the arms pipeline. It is big business and it is also a form of persuasion. Not only can a country make a profit from arms sales but it can also “bribe” the recipient into doing certain actions or adopting certain ideologies.

Unfortunately the last method doesn’t always work. Sometimes we have given or sold arms to certain groups and they have “promised” to adopt certain ideas. Afghanistan during the Soviet incursion is an example. We armed the Mujahedin and over a decade later some of them visited New York in September. And of course the open arms market that exists and is encouraged throughout the world, makes it easier for new players to join. And some of those players may have nuclear weapons, as well as chemical and biological agents. The framework the developed nations set up in the arms market, is now leaving their control and catering to less savory and ideological elements than those nations ever intended. The final result is a market which is capable of delivering nasty “surprises” to the shores of the very nations that set it in motion.

And disparity is in motion too. In fact it is being used as a means of driving down all labor and materials markets to base minimums. Differentials in wages, work restrictions, raw material costs and environmental laws, are being used to determine where and how goods and products will be manufactured. This results in great profit for those using the disparities and for unintended results. Right now we are dependent upon areas of manufacturing which are susceptible to terrorist attacks. Our industries, as well as many other nations’ industries, are all dependent on the same source line for certain products. Even microchips used in military systems are coming from overseas suppliers, often the same few factories supplying the majority of the world’s market in such chips.

Such situations create “cinch points” which may be easy for our enemies to attack, taking out entire sections of industry with just one or a few attacks. It also places dependence of our basic and defense industries offshore and in hands not necessarily friendly to us. In fact much of the areas of greatest disparity are found in nations that may be our ultimate rivals in the very near future. And, if past trends are any indication, the use of such disparities around the world, will breed new disparities. Low wages in one place are not in isolation, they tend to drive down or dampen wages in other areas. Same with material prices and even environmental restrictions. They tend to the lowest common denominator. And if that is true, the end result can only be left to synergy, because it is beyond prediction now how it will end.

Yet it is probably not in the areas of materials acquisition or arms or economics that the greatest effects of synergy may be felt. No, it is in life systems where the most egregious results may be created. We are on the cusp of a transformation in the biologic sciences. Cloning, stem cells, transgenetic foods, human animal hybrids, genome manipulation and intracellular bionics, are just some of the possibilities that add to the probabilistic streams that synergy can flow along. The very basis of what we and life itself are, is coming under our control. And I use the term control lightly, because biology is based on evolution, change and random mutation. After all, we are supposedly the result of millions of evolutionary changes, in fact all life is. Now imagine us starting to fiddle with that process, sticking a gene in here, changing one there. And with no idea of the ultimate outcome. If we think we have done a sloppy job on banking, disparity and arms dealing, they are nothing compared to what we are doing and planning to do in biology.

Imagine what the transition of plant life to animal life must have been like. What eons of slow and sometimes blindingly fast changes must have led to it. To change from the copper base of chlorophyll to the iron base of blood is neither simple or preordained. It was a strange and mostly random transformation and it resulted in a new order of life, the animal. Yet in just a few decades, we have breached the species barrier and planted animal genes in plants and vice versa. We have created what is almost nonexistent in nature. And we have done it mostly to our foodstuffs. And we have had the ego to say that there will be no deleterious effects from such manipulation. Even to the secularist, this is a case of man playing god. We have breached the categories that nature or God, dependent on your view, have put in place. And we have put most of the products in our food chain. And then we are forbidden to even know which of the foods are altered in this way. If you were to create a recipe for disaster, I cannot think of better ingredients. And we will all feel the effects of this chain of events. In fact the whole world will.

Which leads to another world changing phenomenon, weather. As I write this, the second major hurricane has struck Florida, with a third possibly on its way. Earlier this year a hurricane appeared below the equator, a place we had never seen one before in the Atlantic. Sea levels around the world are rising. Islands in the Pacific, the Aleutians and the Indian Ocean are preparing or starting evacuation, due to slow inundation. Polar ice caps and the Greenland glacier fields are undergoing rapid and massive melting. What can this portend? There are several scenarios and due to synergy probably none of them will be correct. However, let us examine one chain of theory, the one that presently has the most facts to back it up, a world cooling cycle.

Only a few years ago, a new circulation system was discovered in the world oceans. We have probably all heard of the major warm water currents in the Atlantic and the Pacific, the currents that circulate warm water generally around the rims of those oceans and extend from the equator to the northern reaches of those water bodies. In the Atlantic, the new circulation system discovered has been called the Atlantic Pump. It is based on thermohaline currents, or currents driven by differences in heat and saline content in ocean waters. In general, the current that starts in the Gulf Stream area flows into the North Atlantic and eventually sinks towards the ocean bottom. This circulation drives a “bottom” current which surfaces in the warmer southern waters of the Atlantic, and the whole process repeats. What has been discerned about this pumping action, is that if it shuts down weather changes, perhaps globally. Associated with the Agassiz Ice Age, this current apparently has the ability to influence climate and bring on very fast ice ages. The latest work I have heard on it, indicates that an ice age could well be spawned in less than 100 years, if that current shuts down. Even if not an ice age, the resulting weather changes would affect precipitation and snowfall across the globe.

Europe and America would have substantial changes in weather patterns and growing seasons. Plants and animals would have to relocate or die due to such changes. That also means the plants and animals we use for food and the industries we have formed around them. It does not require an ice age, just changes of average temperature and precipitation could be sufficient to toll the death knell of our animal and produce markets. While either might not be enough to bring our markets down, if temperature and precipitation were effected, then we might be in trouble. In many places in our country, animal husbandry needs water as well as climate to produce our animal foods. In fact mapping such industry would show this to be true. And agriculture is even more dependent. Irrigation as well as temperate climate, is needed for most of our fruit and nut growing. Grains are also sensitive. Potatoes and its ilk also need climate and water.

Small changes in the weather, touched off by changes in Atlantic thermohalines, could put stress on our food production. It would also likely affect worldwide markets, stressing not only production but also balance of payments, oil prices and a variety of other markets. In the past, oftimes, such fluctuations in world markets have spawned famine, revolution and war. Today we have over a dozen nations with nuclear capability, a situation we have never had to face before in history. We also have global manufacturing, a situation lending itself to international “blackmail” on an unprecedented scale, if such threats were based on the very survival of nations subjected to weather stresses. The whole situation is like a bad apocalyptic novel, with nukes, oil shipments and direct violence being the cards laid on the international table. It needs only secret agents and self-serving terrorists to make it a bestseller. Unfortunately those elements will doubtless be added and reality will outstrip fiction by a multiplier dependent only on how bad the climate change is.

And that is not the worst. Just about all the things I have mentioned above as subjects of synergy, will now take their place on the chessboard. Humanity does not seem to let go of its pet peeves very easily. In fact, in times of extremes, it is as though such individual bones of contention begin to grow into whole skeletons. Some even take on the cloak of flesh. In the extreme, we could see eugenics reborn, pushing to alter humankind to exist in new climates. We might also see a “breaking away” of corporate entities, setting up pseudo countries where they can practice free trade unfettered by antiquated governments. We might see fundamentalist waldens, set up to preserve religious living for an expected end times. There might even be a revolution in science, aimed at “solving” all the worlds’ ills in one fell swoop of scientific advancement. And none of these will probably happen just this way. Synergy will enter the picture and twist the reality beyond any concept we could ever preconceive. I hope and pray humanity remains viable after such a conflagration. In the past we have weathered such storms. Synergy does not guarantee it will happen again.