Synergy
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 didnt 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 hadnt done that, Germany could have overcome the Soviets
in World War II, but we werent even thinking about that at the
time. That war was another syncrenistic debacle we didnt 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 doesnt 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 worlds 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.
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