The rise of the human race on Earth was the result, I believe, of the influence for truth working on energy to produce matter, and to the combined influences of truth and energy producing first life, then intellect in human form. The character of human society arose, it would seem, out of the threat of catastrophe. Now we are again on the brink of catastrophe, and whether or not it extinguishes or wholly corrupts and debases our species depends on whether or not we at last succeed in realising our true potential.
The outstanding potential catastrophe recently to face us has been nuclear holocaust, which still threatens and still only requires a button to be pressed by intention or accident. But we are also faced with a series of more subtle potential disasters that could prove equally catastrophic. Autoprogression may continue causing such damage to our biosphere as shall be beyond Gaia to repair so that the Earth will no longer be able to support life as we know it. Our reckless consumption of resources may so deplete them that we become unable to sustain the Machine whilst yet having no planned and workable alternative of any kind to put in its place. The Machine is responsible for all these tribulations to come, but mistakenly overthrowing certain traditional controls is another source of possible disaster.
Failure to understand that false automatic reality contains some humantruth, and that normal human thinking and feeling, though mostly automated, is often well-intended, allows some humans, especially the young, to equate existing society with uncalled-for restriction of personal liberty. They demand freedom to do their own personal or group thing, objecting to restrictions that may happen to be necessary whereas at the same time they willingly conform to other automatic lores that are decidedly unnecessary. For instance, in the 1960's in Europe and America there was a revolt against the fairly rigid sexual morality of the time. This was not the outcome of a broad new moral view resulting from deep reason. It was simply a matter of the release of pent-up feeling that looked like moral liberation in that it cleared away rigidly intolerant, narrow prejudice against homosexuality, hetrosexual relations before and outside marriage, and general co-habiting without licence. But it did little to release humans from their main bondage - to the Machine (which, as always, turned this 'liberation' to its own commercial advantage), and to the limitations of automated thinking. Thus it was ignored that one of the taboos thrown out, that against sexual promiscuity, was a very necessary one that had evolved through the experience of centuries - for good reasons though not in a sensible, acceptable way here in Western society - an outcome of which has been a dramatic and possibly catastrophic spread of AIDS.
That millions of humans throughout the world may be destined to die miserably from AIDS represents a tragic failure of humanity to understand and uphold good, necessary, reasoned morality. But it is well to remember that about seventy million individuals die every year throughout the world in any case, most naturally from old age perhaps but, in a sense, all tragically in that none of them found humantrue fulfilment in their lives. AIDS has become epidemic as a result of misuse of the vital means of reproduction, the abuse of a delicately balanced whole system which in turn has resulted, in the UK, from extremely narrow-minded controls in Victorian times going to extremes of permissiveness in modern times. Other miseries result from the struggle of our inner morality against the overbearing Machine - all sorts of mental disturbance, frequently causing physical illness and often resulting in the tragedy of suicide. Further miseries are caused by wars, which are immoral by humantrue definition but which automatic authority, according to its laws, persuades or obliges millions to fight and suffer nevertheless.
Our awareness is growing but not widely or quickly enough to overtake accelerating autoprogression. Our humanity is still losing the struggle against the Machine at a general level yet may not seem to be so because it is asserting itself on occasion at certain special levels, owing to much wider dissemination of information causing humanely reasoned reaction. For example, events in the Persian Gulf in 1987 would once have caused America and her allies to declare war on Iran and her allies. This did not happen because of worldwide fear of this dispute escalating to world nuclear war. There was similarly concerned human reaction to news of starvation in Ethiopia, and such reaction has even influenced the financial world. The stock exchange crisis of 1987 (Black Sunday), that would once have plunged world society into economic depression, was brought under control by financiers who had to admit, under public scrutiny, that it was 'unnecessary'. But that the false money-economy still holds sway over our habitual thinking is illustrated by the fact that the modern British 99p price tag still attracts buyers (because it seems significantly less than £1) as did the old 19/11d. The fundamental conflicts of reality more or less remain and keep emerging in other ways - terrorism for instance. If such conflicts are to be automatically ended, by authority of the Machine, it is likely to be through a more effective clamp-down on humanity, whereby our affairs will be totally oriented to the automaton and geared to the interests of automated society regardless of humantrue morality.
It is said that our object in life is to pursue happiness. In fact it is the pursuit of truth, which alone is our road to happiness. Automatic reality does not bring lasting happiness because it does not pursue true fulfilment, and the more it autoprogresses the more shallow and transient its unequally shared artificial happinesses become.
I have expressed concern that people can read and even agree with books of a radical kind without actually letting their mind constructions be changed. It is a great menace to the human future that conscious selves remain unchanged despite the fact that the Machine is insane. Rather than change, although the fact of this reality's insanity is clearly and unmistakedly pointed out to them - rather than be compelled by their inner minds immediately to determine that the world must be reformed as a matter of urgency - peoples' outer shells go to the pub, the club, or the dinner dance as planned, and go on playing the automatic game as always.
There are two ways of facing up to the actual world - as it is, and as it should be, according to whether it is seen through the eyes of the automated outer self or the aware inner self. There are then four ways in which one individual might judge another. Two of these depend on whether individual A is seeing through automated or aware eyes, and the other two on whether individual B is automated or aware. If both are automated, or both aware, each will understand the other's views and behaviour and judge them right, reasonable and sane. But if A is automated and B aware, or vice versa, then each will judge the other wrong, unreasonable and insane. In practice individuals and systems are seldom so clearly black or white, but shades of grey, so that judgements, and opinions, are various and confused.
For example, when attempting to judge the English public-school system you may find some features good and some bad. To be capable of definite judgement you have to decide whether the existing automatic reality is inevitable and, if not, what alternative reality ought to replace it. If the former, you will judge the system according to its good or bad effects in terms of existing automatic reality. If the latter, you will judge according to whether the system has good or bad effects in terms of bringing forward a better alternative reality. In the latter case, an education policy that fosters competitive hardness and exclusive privilege can not be justified, but that the opposite is true of the former case is demonstrated by the fact that public schools flourish, as they have done for generations.
It should be quite clear that the decision whether existing reality is to be tolerated or whether it must be replaced is of first importance. It is failure to make that decision, failure even to acknowledge that we are faced with the necessity of making it, that confuses our judgement. We judge situations partly according to automatic reality and partly by comparison with various versions of the ideal. This prevents us reaching united and agreed conclusions and allows a truly insupportable reality to continue. Politics pretends to be waging an imperative war between good and evil, in which mankind in general strives towards good but is perpetually frustrated by forces of evil.
The limited agreement, a decade ago, between Russian and American figureheads to destroy certain medium-range nuclear missiles was a welcome advance of human reason against the Machine. It might be looked back on as a remarkable political achievement. But it should be seen as the least we could expect in view of the fact that the existence of any nuclear weapon is an insanity and an insult to true human intellect.
Subsequent nuclear disarmament agreements have to be judged against automatic developments which indicate that we have not honestly changed direction. For example, there appears to be a black market in plutonium which means that an increasing number of governments of different persuasions and with competing interests are developing their own nuclear weapons. As an instance of autoprogression in another field, all over the world we are over-fishing the seas. Driven by the money-economy to continue 'earning a living' from their occupation, fishermen are devising ever more efficient methods of maintaining the same catches from ever-decreasing fish stocks. And in Britain, going by the number of enormous hyper-markets already built or planned, mostly out-of-town and inaccessible to many poorer people, the available shopping facilities increasingly exceed by far the requirements of even our present high-consumption society. These events are automatically logical but in intellectual terms they are typical reckless developments which, in aggregate, point to human catastrophe.
The result of catastrophe could be our total destruction, through the application of intellect to the instinctive drives. Or it could be our de-humanisation, that would come from taking to extremes our presently growing practice of preferring automatic instinctive motives to those of intellect. For instance, that we should provide for each other is obvious to reason, but the money-economy demands that we charge much more as reward for our services than we would require for our subsistence. The profit and reward motive produces excess money which demands increasing goods and services, so that everybody (particularly those who are included in the equation, the well-to-do and employed, but also even those who are excluded, the 'poor' and unemployed) pays more and more for everybody elses money or material reward and profit. As another instance, Gandhi's life represented a human crusade against the Machine (in the guise of British dominion over India), and he wrote many letters to prominent persons of the time. He is a well-respected and loved figure, yet his influence for good has not prevailed. To illustrate this, a few years ago some of those letters were sold in the market-place at high money-prices that do not reflect a human valuation of his enlightenment as much as the money-economy's valuation of famous mens' letters as profitable investments.
By blindly pursuing automatic intrerests to their extremes we could well commit genocide. For example, the world population is increasing fast. Measures to control this increase cannot be immediately effective and are not being taken everywhere. Millions of people are in yearly danger of starvation from famine but such disasters are not anticipated in order to be forestalled. Instead the world responds, after the event and perhaps only because of public outcry, with unsatisfactory crash programmes of temporary relief. In 'rich' countries such as the USA agriculture is declining in scale because increased efficiency has caused internal food surpluses which the money-economy does not allow to be given away to other countries in the normal course of events. At the same time, out of desperate need in some 'poor' countries, soil is being eroded away as a result of over-working. Elsewhere, owing to the profit-motive, land is being spoiled by monoculture and the excessive use of artificial fertilisers. Yet experience suggests that given wise husbandry twice the present human population of the world could be supported from existing agricultural land without harm to its fertility. It is obvious that this good result would require intelligent co-operative care worldwide, but not clear to what extent it would depend on some degree of advanced but benign technology.
I will mention three other hazards. The first is the possibility of an energy crisis (dealt with at greater length in Chapter 48, Peacable Action). If the world's supplies of energy suddenly fell short of demand, because the developing nations' consumption rapidly and unexpectedly rose to the high levels already reached in the developed countries at the same time as resources began to dwindle and the money-cost to increase, the resultant catastrophe can be imagined, as nations competed to the point of fighting for their share.
The other two hazards I shall deal with briefly because my knowledge of them is slight. One is a threat to the ozone, in Earth's upper atmosphere, that forms a layer which filters out the sun's dangerous ultra-violet rays. This threat comes chiefly from our releasing into the atmosphere chlorofluorocarbons, used in aerosols, fast-food cartons, refrigerators and mobile air-conditioning units. The danger has been recognised for some years but little action seriously contemplated until a growing hole in the ozone layer was detected. Common sense dictated that the release of chlorofluorocarbons should be discontinued forthwith, but common sense does not govern our world's affairs. Eventually the use of aerosols was banned, and other restrictive measures have been proposed but these are resisted all along the line by manufacturers whose commercial interests they adversely affect.
The third hazard is posed by a possible increase or decrease in the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere that could disturb Gaia's delicate regulation of the Earth's temperature. Too much carbon dioxide, also methane and oxides of nitrogen, would increase its 'greenhouse effect' and cause global warming, resulting, amongst other things, in sea-water expanding and polar ice-caps melting, thus raising sea-levels, and in changed weather-patterns. Too little carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect is reduced, bringing about a fall in temperature resulting, for one thing, in extension of the polar ice-caps and a new ice-age. It has been calculated that a change in average temperature of more than plus or minus 2deg.C would be disastrous, although recent opinion seems to be that greater variations could be tolerated. If the Machine continues to dominate, any variations that are due to automatic activities will be impossible to control because they are impelled by autoprogression, or by human reactions to it. For example, the rain forests of the Amazon and elsewhere are being cleared at the rate of fifty million or more acres per year - for timber, to make way for industries and vast cattle ranches, and by peasant people vainly attempting to survive by living off the land - vainly because the land is too poor to sustain crops. These activities are not only destroying the carbon-dioxide-absorbing jungle but also increasing the release of this gas into the atmosphere by the burning of felled trees and scrub. It is now clear that what we are facing is an increasing greenhouse effect - a major environmental concern.
If we approach the problems intelligently, not only of physical survival but also of whole well-being, we will arrive at a humantrue society. If they are approached in the context of the Machine, however, in seeking solutions we shall still be pursuing automatic interests, though less blindly and in a more calculated way. I repeat, this could be the ultimate human catastrophe in the form of a super-Machine able to ensure the survival of our bodies, at least for a time, but so omnipotent as to make our intellectual potential forfeit, with the prospect of true fulfilment lost and gone forever (and if this experience were to be repeated on most planets like ours it could be a catastrophe for this universe's hope of true equilibrium).
Pt.VI ILLUMINATION
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