Introduction: Establishment of Global Financial Power

Complex Nature of Global Economy

Use of Fuzziology

Logic Cannot Be Criterion of Reality

"The Cure lies in the Poison"

Global Consciousness Resonance in Post-Internet Era

References

According to a publication in "Le Monde Diplomatique" [1], Marcos - the leader of the world-widely supported Zapatista movement in Mexico - was the first to construct a theory linking economic globalization to the marginalization of a great majority of the world population.

"After the fall of the Berlin wall a new superpower appeared, stimulated by neoliberal policies. Although the big winner of the could war - which we could call the third world war - was the US, a new power began to emerge over and above it, a financial superpower which began issuing global directives. This produced what we refer to broadly as globalization. For globalization, the ideal would be a world transformed into one big business, which an executive board made up of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the president of the US. In that situation, governments of other countries would function just as representatives of the executive board, local managers, if you like... At the world level, the big battle now taking place - which we call the fourth world war - has its own line-up forces. On one side, the supporters of the global economy and, on the other, everyone who, in one way or another, is resisting it. Anything that obstructs the onward march of globalization is now under threat of destruction."

"The financial market rules everywhere" - continues Marcos. "It doesn't just govern the workings of governments, but also the media, education, even the family. Individuals only have a place in this society if they can produce and buy. So market criteria eliminate a whole section of humanity that offers no prospect of profits." Such is the situation of the indigenous and the poor people whose number ever increase in to day's world; Marcos is convinced that the globalization requires their elimination as they pose a serious problem through their potential for social rebellion.

top | menu

Complex Nature of Global Economy

The wider the process of economic globalization, the narrower the circle of those who mostly benefit of it. The free global market started to appear less and less free. Both the trade and the investment seem to be governed by more and more complicated laws and procedures in favor of monstrously rich economic and financial corporations - the real beneficiaries of the free global market. With every day, these unaccountable corporations with unlimited life, size and power are taking ever-increasing control over the national economies - largely to the detriment of the individual consumer, worker, neighbor and citizen.

One can find many evidences that corporate-led globalization negatively effects the environment, financial stability, equity, security, food safety, health and cultural diversity of millions of people; the number of the countries classified as the most poor countries in the world has doubled in the last several years.

There is a tendency for the governments in the Western 'free' democracy to act as the armed militia for the large financial corporations and banks, and majority of people live under constant stress when watching the value of their money erode and their stock markets go into a lunatic whirlwind of insane proportions. It looks like a great, illegal and unlawful collusion is going at the core of the economic globalization, and there are many people finally beginning to understand that it is by virtue of this collusion that our existential rights have become privileges and our money has become worthless: the harder we work, the less we have.

As far as the economic globalization is a process that involves complexly interwoven social, political, psychological, anthropological, etc. dynamics, it is difficult to grasp it holistically, let alone predict its unfolding. Only to protest, foresee and preach catastrophes for the largest part of humanity does not help much.

top | menu

Use of Fuzziology

The present study explores the role of fuzziology [2] in understanding economic globalization.

Fuzziology is a study of the fuzziness of human knowing - its sources, dynamics and ways of transcending of its limitations. Fuzziness is a constant companion of human knowledge; it reflects complexity and unpredictability of the life dynamics considered in their integrity and wholeness. The fuzziness of human knowing is not an obstacle on the way to understand ourselves and the world in which we live; just the opposite is true: every time when we replace the fuzziness with 'precise' knowledge, we are certainly wrong. This is because, the precise knowledge is possible only when involved in partial studies, that is, when we study a phenomenon or process in isolation. As far as there is no isolated phenomena and processes in life and nature, our knowledge about them is always fuzzy - always open for changes, evolution and growth.

Every act of holistic understanding (and there is no other kind of understanding of life and nature!) is inevitably fuzzy. The fuzziness and truth are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary: they go hand by hand in the lifelong journey of every individual.

According to one of the main theorems of fuzziology, it is possible to grasp as much of the external world in which we live as we have developed and realized within ourselves. The inner world is made of our senses, perceptions, feelings and thoughts shaped into images, ideas, narratives, emotions, aspirations, expectations, hopes, dreams, spiritual beliefs and attitudes. The power of our will is also in the inner world, together with our infinite potential to create and realize ourselves in innumerable activities. We never cease to modify the external world through actions emerging from the inner world of each of us. The more our consciousness expands and grows, the stronger becomes the voice of our inner nature and the more clearly we are able to sense the creative projections of this nature onto the world around us.

The fuzziness of our understanding and dealing with the economic problems that emerge out of the process of globalization, as it unfolds and strengthens, cannot be resolved at the same level of consciousness that drove our action in the pre-Internet era - consciousness that emanates a narrow-minded and ego-centred thinking oriented primarily towards accumulation of power and fight for realizing it. It is this kind of consciousness, which is responsible for the most serious economical, social and ecological problems today. One can see here a simple analogy with the Gödelian problems in mathematics and other fields of the human inquiry - problems that cannot be resolved using the same assumptions under which they have appeared.

The qualitative transition (either continual or punctuated) to a higher level of human consciousness may result in emergence of a simple and comprehensive picture of reality - a picture which appears complicated, fuzzy and incomprehensible for any lower level of development of our consciousness. As far as consciousness is a holistic characteristic of human nature and not only a product of mind, its growth and transformation are possible when the factors responsible for the integrity of the three vital and inseparably connected constituents of human individuality - body, mind and soul, become simultaneously activated. We referred to this simultaneous activation ('firing') as a consciousness resonance [1]. The fuzziness in human understanding can be transcended when the consciousness resonance occurs.

It is important to emphasize that he consciousness resonance cannot occur when neglecting the soul factors of human individuality. We can name some of them: sensitivity and responsiveness, awareness and ability to stay awake, passionate desire to get out of the 'attractor' of egocentric thoughts and desires, empathy, sympathy and compassion to each other, willingness to explore more subtle and spiritual dimensions of reality and mutually to share skill, knowledge and wisdom.

top | menu

Logic Cannot Be Criterion of Reality

Economic globalization follows an apparently simple logic: what is good for the banking and the big business is good for the mere mortals of the world. This 'simple' and yet perverted logic deliberately hides the issue of power. The majority of "the mere mortals of the world" continue to immerse in debts that are spiraling out of control and their wealth continues to be sucked into the hands of faceless corporate institutions whose greed is insatiable. While pervading economic, political, social and cultural structures and institutions, the corporate power and greed silently banish the critical voices wherever they come from.

Being a product of mind, logic cannot be used as a holistic criterion of reality; the more we rationalize about the character and features of today's globalization, the more paradoxical and incomprehensible it appears to our mind and the denser the fuzziness of what we seem to know about it. Rational thinking is of very limited help when trying to grasp the issue of economic globalization. Any rigid (non fuzzy) reasoning in this case leads to what subcomandante Marcus suggests: confrontation, rebellion, fight and war. At the beginning of the third millennium, when the technology of killing and destroying humans and nature is supper-developed, such a 'rational' conclusion is suicidal.

As we pointed in other publications [1], fuzzy logic is also a product of rational thinking and entirely subjected to its ëIF...THENí rules of inference. Although this kind of logic ësoftensí the problem of choice by replacing ëeither...orí with ëas well así, it remains rigidly attached to already pre-determined sets of alternatives (inputs, outputs, goals, criteria) and rules describing their mutual relations. With fuzzy logic we can never generate (discover, create) a new alternative.

When applying fuzzy logic to globalization, the 'most probable' result 'might be' to yield and confess that globalization is 'more or less' unavoidable and irreversible, so 'almost' nothing can be done to stop its expansion. Such a soft conclusion is exactly what the rigid corporate brain wants to hear; but for the greatest majority of people and their natural environment, this conclusion is disastrous.

No one type of logic rooted in human reasoning can transcend its own limits as a tool of inference (based on certain premises) and thus, no one type of logic can serve as a leverage to a higher level of consciousness. The mind knows how to generate confrontation and make intellectual abysses; when the heart and soul join the mind, only then, while acting at-one, they three are able to transcend the confrontation and to bridge the abysses.

But how to unite the tree 'fractals' of the wholeness of human complexity - the 'body fractal' expressed through technology- and economy-based actions in the material world, the 'mind fractal' expressed through all kinds of creative ideas in the world of science, philosophy and arts, and the 'soul factor' revealed through human spirituality?

top | menu

"The Cure lies in the Poison"

The ancient wisdom offers an answer of this question: the cure lies in the poison. The best cure for a deadly snakebite is a serum made using the same snake venom. It is the toxic substance that is used to give us immunity from its own effect. This is the way in which today's medicine prevents us from quite severe diseases.

Globalization contains in itself a possibility for transcending the fuzziness of our understanding and dealing with the danger of its economic consequences. This possibility is the Internet and the world-wide web. They are an incarnation of the process of globalization; an all-embracing and ever-expanding electronic web globally connects millions of institutions and individuals and make them able to communicate instantly with each other. The world-wide web and Internet provide us with the integrity of an infinite virtual space able to absorb the expressions of our intellectual discoveries, our feelings and spiritual endeavors and to map them into concrete material forms - texts, pictures, voice and movie records instantly accessible at the screens of the computers.

The world-wide web represents a kind of realization of the prediction of the Russian ecologist Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945) and the French paleontologist and philosopher-theologian Pierre Teilhard (1881-1955) about the emergence of the noosphere. Vernadsky imagined it as a "sphere of intelligence, wherein humanity could employ its evolutionary gifts as a creative collaborative agent of evolution - and where the widening conflict between technosphere and biosphere could be transformed into synergy" [3]. For Teilhard, the noosphere is a "planetary thinking network - an interlinked system of consciousness and information, a global net of self-awareness, instantaneous feedback, and planetary communication" [4].

By uniting the creative capacity of each individual consciousness into a virtual web with unlimited creative potential, the Internet and the word-wide web provide excellent conditions for the consciousness resonance to occur at the global scale of humanity.
 

top | menu

Global Consciousness Resonance in Post-Internet Era

The consciousness resonance is like a spontaneous coherence occurring with a swarm of 'agents' (insects, birds, ants, neurones, thoughts, feelings, and people acting under critical conditions) - all the apparent fuzziness of the swarming behaviour suddenly disappears in a magic way: the 'agents' become able to act in sync and harmony, as if they are at-one - one multi-agent entity, one multi-facet unity, one inseparable whole - a flash of understanding whose light is able to penetrate through any layer of fuzziness.

"We say that we 'resonate' with an idea or another person when we share an unusually rich set of perceptions that implies to us that we are 'on the same wavelength' - another form of the metaphoric link to physical models. It is a common experience that often is striking in the strength and complexity of shared understanding, and it is associated with successful interactions in pairs and groups of people, and with universally recognized shared experiences. Productivity and creativity are evidently enhanced, and cooperative responses to emergencies and catastrophes seem to be facilitated" [5].

By making possible instantaneous sharing of the fuzzy thoughts, feelings and actions of people, the Internet and the word-wide web serve as a powerful catalyzer for the emergence of conscious resonance resulting in powerful insights for understanding and dealing with the global economy.

Besides providing insights in understanding, the global consciousness resonance can instantly stimulate the emergence of efficient actions of solidarity between people to stop the corporate offensive. The classics of Marxism could only dream about such an infinite potential for solidarity between those who are deprived of economic power! It was the resonance achieved through Internet communication that played an important role in the organization of the massive demonstrations against FTAA in the City of Quebec, Canada, in April 2001. It is the international resonance evoked through the world-wide web, which is crucial for the significant practical achievements of the Zapatistas movement in Mexico.

Another advantage of the phenomena of the Internet-based global consciousness resonance is in stimulating people's creative experience - an experience which helps us to transcend the rigid limitations of logical thinking. The global post-Internet economy is crucially dependent on the rigid logic of the computers; a tiny perturbation in the complex logical mechanism of the 'intelligent' computers serving 'devotionally' the big financial corporations can make the profit of these corporations to goes to zero. So the world bosses of the global economy are also vulnerable, and not only the people whom they persistently try to brainwash in order to suppress and exploit. This kind of vulnerability related to the ever-increasing dependence of the global economy on the logic of computers and robots is a factor which can facilitate resonant understanding of the agents in today's global economy.

Global consciousness resonance has also a significant role to play in changing the nature of the national governments in the era of the global economy - from governments serving corporations to governments serving people and communities, a process which is easier at a local level but vital at all levels of government.

top | menu

References

top