One Hundred Years of Insanity

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF INSANITY The dangers of growth, nuclear war, climate change and peak oil; driven by propaganda and on the road to tyranny. This play, on the world stage, is intended to look at the main existential problems facing humanity. These are climate change and the probability of a nuclear war, with energy resource depletion being a close third. It is contended that these problems are predicated by our insistence on never ending economic growth. In addition, the problems are considered as an interconnected complex system encompassing the physical sciences, human psychology, political science and social science. A tangled mix that suggests that a system dynamics approach be adopted. Here the starting point is US researcher, Donella Meadows, thesis, that to solve problems associated with complex systems one must find the pertinent leverage points. But she said, in her posthumously published book, Thinking in Systems, that: “when I do discover a system’s leverage points, hardly anybody will believe me- Very frustrating especially for those of us who yearn, not just to understand complex systems but to make the world work better”. And Donella also references Jay Forrester, her mentor and one of the key originators of system dynamics, and the driving force behind the now 50-year-old Limits to Growth book, (Meadows et al 1972), who said that leverage points for complex systems are often counterintuitive, leading people to act in the wrong direction; to make problems worse rather than better. It is furthermore contended that geopolitics and neoliberal economics have been the main leverage points fostering continued economic growth and, in this regard, we are still moving in the opposite direction to that needed to solve the climate change, resource depletion and global conflict problems. It is also clear that we need to understand how the research community and politicians have been influenced by pervasive global propaganda, to ignore both the geopolitical and the economic lever points, so that solutions can be found to make the world work better.