Friday, December 24, 2010

Laser-fusion energy, justice, and a plausible new governing paradigm for a New World Order

Do the ends justify the means? It is a disturbing question that challenges our collective ethic and understanding of right and wrong. That my story, On Deception Watch, seems to answer this question in the affirmative disturbs many readers. Conditioned and formulaic story lines lead readers to anticipate an ending where everyone "gets what they deserve." I knew On Deception Watch, because of its break with the traditional formula, would rattle many readers’ sense of justice. Be clear. The book presents not a preferred scenario, but rather a plausible scenario.

My understanding of history tells me that justice rarely plays out on the big stage of international interests as it more acceptably does on the smaller stage of local interests. What would be deemed criminal locally, on the grand scale is more often than not justified as necessary at best, expedient at worst.

Acts of brutality and degradation occur regularly (and often to no more apparent end than to terrify) but because they are state sponsored in one more or less contrived way or another few people, if any, are "brought to justice" as we commonly understand the meaning of the expression. To me it is fascinating how justice is finely tuned to scale. The Polish/American poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and the Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai,  both lived and wrote about the difference between a few and a million killed. They understood how the size of the number inversely affects our ability to engage emotionally with the act and even with our sense of justice..

For example, to the military mind a few thousand people (they need not even be soldiers but "collateral damage") killed in order to achieve an important objective may not be too high a price. The element of ethics rarely enters into military calculations other than what is required of them by the rules of war. However, in a serious matter, where the outcome is really, really important, the phrase "rules of war," as we have witnessed so many times, becomes an oxymoron.

In the twentieth century there were a hundred million war-related deaths. This is more, even as a percentage of the whole population of Earth, than at any other time in the history of humanity. Civilization slipped a gear on its quest for perfection.

The fact that in my novel, General Slaider succeeds, despite his methods, in his plan to leverage laser-fusion energy into a New World Order is just a fortune of war. However, his actions and the plan that he promotes to replace an ineffectual United Nations with a kind of super corporation, "The World Federation Holding Company," raise questions about what we mean by "the legitimate government" and what we mean by "good governance." International practice is to confer legitimacy on whomever picks up the phone when the UN calls. How they got to the phone and whom they killed to get there are more or less irrelevant by long tradition and continuing practice. Similarly, General Slaider and his followers enact on a large scale what we would find utterly criminal and intolerable on a local scale. 

On Deception Watch attempts to present a plausible new way of conferring legitimacy to those who govern by using economic grading algorithms instead of possession of the instruments of force and coercion. These algorithms can be designed to promote policies that protect economic stability and the attendant economic opportunities and to punish by a global and inescapable economic "shunning" including, most significantly, refusing a fusion energy franchise to the offending government.

Innumerable reports prepared by the UN invariably and primarily blame bad governance for the failure to move forward on almost every issue of significance to human well-being. The powerful, the corrupt, and the murderous loot the countries they control bringing economic ruin in their wake. Serious business interests are now largely global and highly interconnected. Global economic interests are so intertwined that current international political protocols are losing their ability to control events because of the blurring of the "boundaries of economic interests." Political boundaries are becoming less and less relevant in the global economy.

History teaches us that "doing the right thing by our people" is not a powerful motivator to change the ways of local tyrants like Robert Mugabe. Nor in The People's Republic of China has the similarly vague concept of the “mandate of heaven” proven itself an effective guide to legitimacy. Likewise, military occupation is demonstrably not a viable option for correcting the ways of tyrants because indefinite occupation challenges the local culture, arouses jingoistic nationalism, and where there is determined resistance, it is economically unsustainable.

Another pressure, a new power paradigm, is required to secure good governance. In my novel that method is denial of energy, which by about 25 years from now will become a credible threat as the reserves of fossil fuels quickly plunge down the production curve. In that period of accelerating energy depletion, within the lifetime of many of the readers of On Deception Watch, denial of fusion energy technology and related materials and the threat of subsequent economic collapse become the attention-getters that awaken self-interest in a way that warfare no longer can achieve. The demise of the Soviet Union almost overnight demonstrated the comprehensive national consequences of economic collapse in the most vivid terms imaginable in living memory.

So, On Deception Watch is complex and not meant to end with the cleaning up of the stage, the Shakespearean denouement. Parts are left undone; people get away with bad things; rules are broken because they can be by people with the power to do so; good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. In fact, the meaning of “good” and “bad” lose their objectivity and if we are lucky, when the dust settles, sometimes it all turns out for the better. And who better to take the risks of world stage confrontation than the commander of the most powerful military machine on Earth? And how closely General Morgan Slaider resembles George Washington, who rejected a crown when the job was done, having done what it took to do the job!

My novel, On Deception Watch, (the first in a series as I am now working on the first sequel) is about revolution, with its own set of rules, not evolution. The whole thing happens in little more than a year. The next stop is the moon, and ultimately Mars. But you'll have to read the continuing saga to find out about that.








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