THE EFFECTS OF RESOURCE PSYCHOSIS WILL CORRODE WHATEVER UNITY REMAINS

Many years ago now I pondered how our species was going to deal with increasing demands and shrinking resources.

I coined a term for the conclusions I came to at that time, determining them to result in what I named ‘The Black Nexus Age’.

The term I coined at that time was ‘Resource Psychosis’. Demand spiralling out of control as a result of the relentless push toward luxury materialism while the ability to supply the energy needed to supply that demand began to fail. Alongside this phenomenon, I foresaw the coincident effect of climate change.

As a species, we are on course for disaster in my view due to the effects of the factors mentioned above. The description ‘Black Nexus Age’ was my attempt to describe in three words the world I foresaw some twenty-five years ago and which I believe we are on a headlong collision towards. This is a world where multiple negative factors are present and serve to exaggerate the effect of each other while humanity finds it impossible to deal with it all happening at once. Especially when humanity remains divided, fighting with its “enemies” and where one side attempts to win out at the expense of all others. Only unity of purpose could save the situation… but that crucial element will be the one most sorely missing in the years ahead if I am right.

We may emerge from this darkness if one power emerges as a sufficiently dominating entity. If it is the USA and its coterie of powers then those it defeats will be used as a cheap energy source whose leaders have been tamed and/or replaced. If it is China then the western empire will fade to a shadow of its previous power and the east will gain ascendancy bringing with its rise an interconnected trading empire where war is avoided as bad for business.

But what of the shrinking resources. What about the end of nuclear, the potential of green sources and the continuing necessity for oil and gas? How will the constant drive to create ever more economic growth in almost totally materialistic cultures where the mall is the new church be sustained if growth MUST continue forever… or societies collapse, infrastructure fails and finances dwindle. All pressured to sustain themselves on less while seducing humanity to keep buying into an ever shallower dream that corrodes it from within.

Resource Psychosis will exacerbate all the other problems we see arising, particularly in the societies of the West where fault lines of irreconcilable division are sure to continue to tear communities apart, atomising and isolating, dividing and individualising them. Criminality will be only one aspect of a growing anarchy as old models of stability, unity and sustainability fail.

Naturally, there will be good people trying to make things better as ever… but the task will become ever more hopeless as roots are lost to habits of community that once served us all well. Individualism, narcissism and the widespread self-interested greed culture rise and rise. Governments can only do such much to encourage cohesion in any society and like parents trying to guide their children toward lives that will bring them positive outcomes social media and the powerful influence of social media, peer pressure and lack of interest in anything but personal pursuits, ambitions and desires will ruin many a good intention and bring it to nought.

The world of the future was once envisioned as bright with innovation, expanded leisure time and opportunity. There were hopes that children would have far more fulfilling lives than their parents, that so much more would be affordable by them, their interests looked after by benevolent governments who concentrated on bettering lives at home rather than wage wars abroad… and that even world peace might one day be achieved. Those dreams have evaporated and have been blown away by a hurricane of depressing events including a forever war against both drugs and terror… and another to divide the world completely in two.

We lack the resources of our forebears. The politicians of our day with very few exceptions are laughable incompetents compared with some of the great statesmen of the past. This is true also for the women who gained some semblance of power along the way, the most recent being Margaret Thatcher who did more than most to stimulate greed, avarice, division and endless materialism and along with Reagan set the stage for the western world of dog-eat-dog individualism we see today.

The scarcity of resources is not only in the field of energy you see. Our populations of everyday citizens are still by the vast majority all for getting along with their fellow humans, creating families and nurturing them, helping others whenever they can. The resource of wise politicians who preside over the societies they consider to be below them is woefully lacking. The resources of imagination, vision and the will to effect changes that would truly enhance the lives of the many as opposed to the few are lacking to the extent of being almost non-existent.

It’s a baleful screed I know. But you feel it in your gut too, don’t you? We are going wrong. It wasn’t meant to be this way. Our parents didn’t struggle through hard lives with so much less than we have at our fingertips now for this mess to exist? They didn’t come through everything including the traumas of war to see it all wasted and delivered to the living hell we see all around us now. Where is the political will to stop this madness? Where is the urge to find unity of purpose? Where is the good sense to meet the challenges facing us now with solutions that truly better things rather than simply improve cronies’ bank balances?

So many resources are lacking and are in fact dwindling by the day.

Leaving those of us looking on in bewildered anxiety and confusion helpless to discover a route that can bypass the chaos that grows all around us for those we care about, love and would protect with all the will absent in those who hold all the power as we grow ever more powerless.

This is the broad and debilitating scope of resource psychosis that will drive masses to compete rather than cooperate, to grab the best life possible for self and family before others can get it, fighting them off as unwelcome competition, not at all as part of the community of mankind. Resource Psychosis will, if we let it, be the final nail in the coffin of humanity as any kind of dignified and civilised species. It will encourage us to tear each other apart for the last possible million “good lives” before the final recognition that we are at the end of ALL dreams.