Thirteen years ago (an appropriate number in the circumstances) I began writing about what I called ‘The Black Nexus Age’.
What I foresaw was a nexus of negative forces that would begin feeding off one another, strengthening one another and becoming totally unmanageable. I foresaw this leading to a situation where the norms of everyday life would be increasingly disrupted.
My vision of this world to come was more apocalyptic than we have yet reached, though I see enough signs to believe my predictions are being increasingly validated.
Back in 2008 I wrote a series of verses in an attempt to put my fears into a semi-poetic form of words.
In reading a few of them please note that I DO see a way out whereby we can save the situation I believe we are now in:
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Here we are at certain world's end
With policies no one can now defend
But without any new ideas emerging
While further problems are converging
They will all meet at the nexus point
Where a cursed generation they will anoint
A generation whose future is already spent
By those who on all-consuming hell were bent
The Nexus Age has long begun
Where all that was good will be undone
Where lessons hard learned are now lost
All at our unborn childrens' cost.
(From ‘The Nexus Genesis’ - 2008)
\O/
It was my view then and remains to this day that the drive for material benefits through ever-increasing consumption has in large part brought us here. Even the current pandemic which is believed by many experts to have originated by our expanding infrastructure which intrudes ever deeper into the domain of the other animals with which we share this planet.
After WWII there was an enormous focus and impulse on the part of both manufacturers and consumers to upgrade homes with devices that could alleviate drudgery and enhance lives. One labor-saving or life-enhancing device after another entered our homes and won our hearts. There was nothing at all wrong with these devices which have since become standard in our lives and that we would find it almost impossible to live without. Greater happiness ensued through an increase in leisure time and the diminishing of arduous household labor.
It is my view however, that this positive period of product-related life-enhancement and enhanced individual happiness ended within decades of the end of WWII. This through the endless enticement to buy, to consume and to live in an unending contrived disappointment manufactured by our peers, expectations and the seductions of the primary device, the television.
In summary, we overshot the sweet point of balance where free time met opportunity and the result created happiness. From there on that simplicity descended into ever greater complexity and happiness very quickly became more and more elusive.
\O/
So it is with this system of ours
Of spend and waste in idiot towers
Borrowing to make us a pile
Thinking products will make us smile
Now we reach the end game of that
We arrive at the crunch with economies flat
The game is over and the price must be paid
For all the greedy instincts we obeyed.
\O/
(From ‘The Nexus Genesis’ - 2008)
As complexity dominated our lives and minds, daily dealing with issues our parents and grandparents could never have even dreamed of we left simplicity behind and embraced the changes occurring around us as if they were inevitable. Politicians were doing the same, desirous of ever more income from taxes to deliver the next round of expected improvements. Manufacturers moved more and more into luxury and not essential items, portraying them as having a psychological benefit rather than a practical one. They would make us feel good, feel like a winner, a real man or woman, a success or even a star. Artifice was becoming all.
\O/
Each negative vector combining
with others of deadly force
Each strengthening the other
and threatening us of course
The Black Nexus Age is here,
nothing can stop it now
No politician, no scientist, no savior
no posturing holy cow.
(From ‘The Black Nexus Age’ - 2008)
\O/
Dark forces arrived with the Seventies after a brief last flourish of love, hope and dreams in the mid to late Sixties. That kind of simplicity exemplified in those years would never be seen as again as the descent into complexity and darkness gathered pace.
\O/
We should have known
but were too busy with our lives
The Black Nexus is upon us
who knows what now survives?
The forces have been building,
we sort of knew it inside
It has been clear all along
but our minds made us hide.
(From ‘The Black Nexus Age’ - 2008)
\O/
Few sought out the signs of negativity as simplicity bled into increasing complexity. Most kept their heads down, many completely seduced into buying all that was offered thinking each item would enhance and increase happiness as promised. A maze of stress was entered as the predictions of ever more leisure time within a future world of automation evaporated. What did emerge was employment instability, the threat of a stagnating lifestyle, or worse still a collapse in lifestyles attendant with a collapse of hope that improvement was possible.
Those with the desired skills the new systems required climbed whatever ladder they could find away from those they knew were suffering below. Their eyes were set on the stratosphere above them, seeking one of the last few million good lives available before the final collapse.
\O/
We can hide in our minds a while,
take holidays, spend, ignore
But the forces now unleashed
will rock us to our core
Welcome to the Black Nexus Age,
I hope you've enjoyed life so far
It's all downhill from here on in,
with scar upon scar on scar
Don't look to others to help you,
we've all left it too late
The Black Nexus Age is upon us
and we can’t escape our fate.
(From ‘The Black Nexus Age’ - 2008)
\O/
I didn’t foresee at that time that there would or could be a way out, that the future needn’t necessarily be as dark as I envisaged things then. I expected no solution then, simply an inexorable pull downwards into ever-increasing complexity, strife, stress and an eventual total collapse of a system dependent upon infinite economic growth.
\O/
Sooner or later we have to decide
Have we reached the point of no return?
Have we come to the crossroads
On one path of which we'll burn?
Just think about it
Right now we have a system of consume and waste
Of growth at any cost
No matter how crazy or how bad the taste
But why have we grown and struggled to here?
What was it we were aiming for?
A world fighting over its resources?
Where increasingly there'll be war?
(From ‘We Are At A Crossroads’ - 2008)
\O/
Geopolitics was not the constant focus of attention for me then as it is now. The growing materialism and complexity of life along with the juggernaut of endless consumption I saw all around me, and that I had seen as I grew through the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and onward was.
But in the late Nineties I began to be aware that new negative vectors to those already plaguing humanity were being initiated and that they were emerging from the same source as the majority of those from the past, the USA. Nine Eleven occurred and I new it would herald the most powerfully negative vectors of all. I did all I could to warn against the violent “solutions” to come which I could see clearly would only cause more problems leading to other “solutions” creating even more problems in their turn. And so it has been.
\O/
If you think the present crisis is bad
I believe we’ve not seen ANYTHING yet
This is only the start of the resource wars
And equilibrium you can forget
There’s no way we in the west can survive
Thinking we can get all we need
By flexing our muscles that now are weak
Or insisting for us they bleed
Our debt is greater than any other land
Our savings are small and shrinking
Third World countries are growing fast
And their needs are quickly expanding
Soon China will overtake the western powers
Russia and India will soon follow
They will demand the resources they need
And our demands will soon look hollow.
(From ‘We Are At A Crossroads’ - 2008)
\O/
Above I mention China and Russia for the first time. I saw clearly in 2008 that a new geopolitical landscape would quite inevitably emerge from the economic trends visible at that time. The West’s time of dominance in which it gloried was ending. New actors were rising and their influence would be felt. The greater their influence would be the less would be that of the West. At that time however, I didn’t foresee the rabid reaction of western elites to this prospect.
\O/
Oh, it was fine for us to set the tone
When we were big and strong alone
Please look at how empires fall
When they fall they drop like a stone
It may well be in our best interests now
To consider the other path
The one where we share our technical skills
Because we’ve looked hard at the math
Do we really want to go on competing
On a field where we're so handicapped
Where the future clearly does not favor us
In fact it's clearly mapped
Our greed and arrogance have made us blind
We thought we'd ALWAYS be here
Able to dictate exactly how things were
And if not, threaten others with fear
Think it through and look where we are
Do not simply deride
Blind arrogance will no longer win the day
It's time now to decide.
(From ‘We Are At A Crossroads’ - 2008)
\O/
And this is where the hope I alluded to at the beginning of this overlong text comes in.
It is tempered to some degree by my earliest thoughts regarding the iniquities that come with a reliance upon endless economic growth however I see no other area of hope for transformation than the one I am about to relate.
Across our world I see only one factor that has the potential to bring relief from where the nexus of negative forces are leading, only one factor which prioritizes toleration and agreement above division and distrust, one that emphasizes stability and peace rather than chaos and war...
That factor is the economic rise of China and her increasing influence spreading from the east to the west, bringing with it the change in the geopolitical environment I believe we need to save us in the nick of time from what is to come.
As I say, I mistrust the longevity of positive factors which are relied upon in the sphere of endless economic growth and this is very certainly central to the rise of China and her influence upon the world. However, for me, the negatives involved are decidedly secondary when compared to the positives involved in unalterably changing the present parameters which, unless altered, will bring about a U.S.-controlled prison planet for all of us.
For me this is the most crucial and important threat of our time, and I would argue that the intent by the elites of the USA, assisted by its allies, is completely obvious and well beyond any doubt at this point.
There is only one nation that can stop its progress, only one nation with the existing and future power to do it. No other nation comes close. That nation is China. And that is why the elites of the USA and their allies are at war with it so obviously now.
My final verse here from the ten or so I wrote back in 2008:
\O/
The Crucible of Major Change
We are headed into the crucible of major change
The collisions there will cause much to rearrange
Some things will be crushed completely out of shape
Where there were smooth walls wide holes will gape.
Within the crucible all will be strained and stressed
As each established system is addressed
Weaknesses will be found and some destroyed
Underlying values regained, perhaps unalloyed.
Within, both pearls and diamonds will appear
As well as both venal and evil elements I fear
As all structures are reduced within the flux
And tested to destruction while the vortex sucks.
Who knows when its spinning force will stop?
And who knows what will be left then to drop?
Down to a world standing before those surviving
Who, with hope will have an understanding.
That what collapsed could not face the future
Being too short-sighted and selfish to endure
And that it could not help but be swept away
By the forces we see unleashed today.
Any warnings to act sooner were largely ignored
In preference to consumption which was so adored
We left all those changes to some future generation
Greedily exploiting the now for our satisfaction.
So now it is too late to act well before the storm
And another process entirely will create the norm
We had our chances to prepare for this
But we chose to rush right to the precipice.
So, into the distillation we are now headed
Into the nexus which many have dreaded
Those who the majority thought quite odd and strange
Who warned of this crucible of major change.
They were given names to minimize their message
Doomsayers or rebels, leftists or garbage
By those who proclaimed the great merits of greed
And who brought us to disaster with such speed.
It is far too late to tinker with this corrupted system
The politicians who do STILL fail to listen
The change that was needed was of root and branch level
Not simplistic theories of God and Devil.
It was never about a simplistic good and evil fight
But of steering our togetherness with a guiding light
We have been acting like prize-fighters on the Titanic
Hitting out at all others in our panic.
There is no way we can make it forward in this way
Only working together can we seize the day
Remember this later when our lives we rearrange
After emerging from the crucible of major change.
\O/
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