Menu
header photo

Project Vision 21

Transforming lives, renewing minds, cocreating the future

Blog Search

Blog Archive

Comments

There are currently no blog comments.

Seduction of the moment erases historical perspective

Last Tuesday was a historic day that I will remember for as long as I live. I hope my children and my grandchildren will also remember a day that brought back hope and high expectations for the short-term and for the long-term for so many people.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008, was the day of a historical election. On that day, Argentinean soccer superstar Diego Armando Maradona was elected as the new coach of the Argentina National Soccer Team with the goal of leading the team of the World Cup championship in 2010.

What’s wrong? What did you think I was talking about?

With those same three paragraphs, I began last week a class I teach to young journalists. (I was a guest speaker.) I did it not to diminish at all the undeniable importance of the elections in the United States and certainly not to show any lack of respect to the new president.

I decided to begin the class with those remarks to shake the point of view of the students and to show them that if they allow themselves to be seduced by the fact they are seeing and living a historic moment that seduction will deprive them precisely of the historic perspective they need to understand even better what they just witnessed.

My initial remarks to my young future colleagues (repeated here without the benefit of a face to face conversation) were not a joke, but a teaching technique to call them to reflect on the fact that last week they witnessed a paradigm shift and, because of that, there was also an almost Orwellian re-appreciation of history, with its winners and losers.

For that reason, the most important question we should be asking ourselves is, "What are they really talking about?"

The answer, if it wants to be meaningful, has to include both the old and the new paradigm and therefore it will not come from the fast-paced, short-lived analysis provided by self-appointed “pundits” in the media.

Let’s be as clear as we can: last week’s electoral paradigm shift is only one expression among many others of a global paradigm shift occurring in several areas (cosmology, history, energy). None of those other areas received the same level of coverage, even if they could have a greater and more durable impact on humanity.

For example, last week NASA scientists announced they have evidence our universe is part of another bigger structure, a multiverse, and all matter in our universe is moving at 2 million miles per hour towards that multiverse. Our universe is no longer alone.

In addition, a new book by John Michael Greer analyzes the de-industrialization process in our society. And Los Alamos scientists developed portable and relatively inexpensive nuclear power plants able to power 20,000 homes anywhere in the world at only a fraction of the current cost.

The result of last week’s elections was only one expression among many others of the new techno-scientific and social paradigm, but not its cause or origin.

Go Back