Art of Victory Strategies for Personal Success And Global Survival in a Changing World

Prologue The Emerging Global Revolution Turn and take one last look around at your life, at the life we humans have built over the past few thousand years. It is already gone. The granite columns of antiquity remain, though they crumble, and humanity, more vast in its numbers, remembers little of its past. This great upheaval we see today is how the epochs change. Our ego, our strong and vital sense of self, tells us that this era of change is different from all past human experience, that the future is unchartable and unmanageable. But that is not so. We can shape the future, as we have always done, perhaps more so now than ever before. There are golden times again for us to make. And yet we are in the eye of the hurricane, an Age of Global Transformation, a pivotal time for humanity. The pace of change has been accelerating, and not just in science and technology: Human numbers are surging, and flooding into urban, mostly coastal, populations. As with organisms at any level, increasing the population within a confined space generates activity, friction, heat. We cling to the known world, but are also fixated by the promises and fears of the future. But we have forgotten that in the past mankind was more aware of the tools of survival with which nature equipped us. It is approaching four decades since Alvin Toffler, inFuture Shock, noted that humanity was entering an age when the pace, scale, and embracing nature of change would be overwhelming. Add to that the impact of compounded population growth, coupled with climate change. Little wonder that much of humanity feels a deep sense of unease, and searches for answers, though futurists John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, writing inMegatrends 2000in 1990, optimistically forecast "a period of stunning technological innovation, unprecedented economic opportunity, surprising political reforms, and great cultural rebirth." They were not wrong, but they foresaw only part of the emerging world. There are indeed many reasons for optimism, but the obsession with current technology and with imagined future innovations obscures the fact that human nature itself has not changed. It is only when faced with great threats to our existence -- or merely to our comfort -- that we contemplate who we are, and what we must do to reach that promising future. And we have largely forgotten the implicit, innate laws of survival, which remain critical to our ability to cope with the massive change we now confront. Man, unique among species, uses technology to improve his chances for survival. These tools enable, with increasing certainty, the existence of an ever-greater number of humans in an environment once only capable of supporting far fewer people. Massive population growth coupled with vast changes in weather and the globalization of communications and the tools of human interaction, such as computing, and abstraction and "remote engagement," have created vast swaths of people disconnected from any sense of the past, motivated solely by the present and self, yet with ready access to cheap technologies. Through such changes do we now see, for example, great tools in the hands of the historically illiterate. "Knowledge" has replaced wisdom. This maelstrom, gathering pace over two centuries -- like a burgeoning hurricane over the ocean -- has obliterated from our consciousness the intrinsic principles of human societal survival. But the survival of our bloodlines and societies is our victory over nature and our rivals. The reality is that we have seen great change before. Not on the same scale. Not at the same speed. Not with the same glittering technologies. There are core principles -- for the moment obscured by the accumulating detritus of centuries -- which can allow us to find our horizons in this new age. They can give us comfort and direction, and enable us to contrCopley, Gregory R. is the author of 'Art of Victory Strategies for Personal Success And Global Survival in a Changing World', published 2006 under ISBN 9781416524700 and ISBN 1416524703.