America’s Fourth Great Test — Part I
2001 to Present
Joseph F. McCormick and David A. Palmer, Ph.D
The Fourth Great Test for America began with “the events” of 9.11.2001, events that fit into a much larger geostrategic context. We will discuss the more centralized, Imperial aspects of the context here, and the more decentralized, Utopian aspects in Part II.
The premise we will take is that the current Great Test of national character we are experiencing is to determine if America has reached the stage of spiritual maturity necessary to finally balance and integrate within itself all the major governing polarities we have been analyzing in the past many essays: Imperial, Utopian, Matriarchal, Patriarchal, Spiritual and Material.
We will begin here by focusing primarily on the challenge of integrating the Imperial, Patriarchal and Material governing impulses, the three that have been most challenged by the rise of the Utopian, Matriarchal, and Spiritual movements since the advent of “the Projects” over 400 years ago.
Imperial Geostrategy
It seems the “end game” of the Imperial, Patriarchal and Material aspects of the Projects are:
— to establish dominion over the resources of the earth,
— to establish a global system to manage these resources, a divinely destined moral obligation to civilize the world according Judeo-Christian patriarchal governing principles.
These aims — as well as the aims of the Imperial Project’s consort the Utopian Project — were established by Queen Elizabeth I’s advisor John Dee and assented to by the handful of other “founders” at the very beginning of the articulation of “the British Empire” dream in the 1570’s (see our essay on this subject.)
To get a reading on the current trajectory of the Imperial Project, and the attendant War Culture that necessarily accompanies it in its current efforts to establish dominion over the resources of the earth, it may be helpful to analyze the leading geostrategists of America in the past half century. What has been guiding their thinking?
But before we look at the strategy it may be helpful to understand “what, exactly, are the material resources so many find so valuable as to be willing to send others to their deaths over?”
In material science there are only four categories of materials on earth used for building civilization: metals, polymers (including wood and now plastics), composites (mixtures like straw and clay), and ceramics (rocks and cements). Therefore, if you view yourself in the role of “civilization builder,” as most within the Imperial Project seem to do, you need building materials. In other words, you must own and control the resources of the earth, the beginning of the supply chains of oil, coal, wood, iron ore, bauxite/aluminum, uranium, gold, silver, copper, gems and precious stones, etc. It is from these everything else is made.
So now to the question of strategy of gaining control of these resources.
To understand geopolitcal strategy of the past 100 years — an extension of British Imperial strategy for over 400 years — it is helpful to look at its most influencial scholars/actors, beginning with, perhaps, British geographer and London School of Economics professor Sir Halford Mackinder, considered to be one of the founding fathers of both of both geopolitics and geostrategy.
“Between 1904 and 1943, Mackinder developed and refined his influential geopolitical view of global politics based on an understanding of history in its geographical setting. The roots of Mackinder’s worldview reach back to a series of lesser-known writings that foreshadowed key aspects of his geopolitics, including the world as a “closed” political system; the relationship between physical and political geography; the recurring struggle between land powers and sea powers; great powers as “going concerns”; the effect of technology and scientific advances on the political cohesion of continental-sized states; and the impact of population and demographic trends on the global balance of power.” Source: Foreign Policy Research Institute
According to Mackinder, the Earth’s land surface was divisible into (source: Wikipedia):
- The World-Island, comprising the interlinked continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa (Afro-Eurasia). This was the largest, most populous, and richest of all possible land combinations.
- The offshore islands, including the British Isles and the islands of Japan.
- The outlying islands, including the continents of North America, South America, and Oceania.
The Heartland lay at the centre of the world island, stretching from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic. Mackinder’s Heartland was the area then ruled by the Russian Empire and after that by the Soviet Union, minus the Kamchatka Peninsula region, which is located in the easternmost part of Russia, near the Aleutian Islands and Kurile islands.
Mackinder’s “Geographical Pivot of History” can be summarized as:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
who rules the World-Island commands the world.
— Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, p. 150
The historical effort to control the rich resources of central Eurasia had previously been termed The Great Game, a “political and diplomatic confrontation that existed for most of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century between the British Empire and the Russian Empire, over Afghanistan and neighbouring territories in Central and South Asia.”
The New Great Game
At the height of the Cold War in the 1970’s a confluence of British and American Imperial-Patriachal-Materialist opinion seemed to emerge that the weakening of the Soviet empire could best be achieved through destabilization in it’s “soft underbelly” i.e. the Heartland. From this confluence emerged a phenomenon later described as the New Great Game.
In 1996, The New York Times published an opinion piece titled The New Great Game in Asia in which was written:
While few have noticed, Central Asia has again emerged as a murky battleground among big powers engaged in an old and rough geopolitical game. Western experts believe that the largely untapped oil and natural gas riches of the Caspian Sea countries could make that region the Persian Gulf of the next century. The object of the revived game is to befriend leaders of the former Soviet republics controlling the oil, while neutralizing Russian suspicions and devising secure alternative pipeline routes to world markets.
Who were the key players in this New Great Game and what were their influences? Five men, at least, seem to stand out:
— Henry Kissinger, Harvard professor later mentored by Nelson Rockefeller later Nixon national security advisor and secretary of state.
— Zbigniew Brzezinski, head of the Trilateral Commission, Carter national security advisor, Kissenger/Huntington geostrategic academic colleague.
— Samuel Huntington, long standing Harvard professor of government, co-founder Foreign Policy magazine, co-author of The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, a report issued by the Trilateral Commission in 1976, and author of Clash of Civilizations theory that Islamic extremism would become the biggest threat to Western domination of the world.
— Bernard Lewis, a less well known British-American academic (University College London then Princeton), former intelligence orientalist and, what some have termed the intellectual “godfather of the neoconservatives,” strategic advisor to George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney (who referred to him in 2006 as the “greatest living authority on the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and Islam.”)
— All the above men shared a particularly close, long standing relationship with David Rockefeller, the eminence grise most responsible to constructing the international system as we know it today (see our previous essays.)
It is clear that all of the above subscribed to Mackinder’s analysis of the centrality of the Heartland in governing the world along with now several generations of international relations and foreign policy pofessionals who have viewed Mackinder as a “must read.”
In service of escalating the New Great Game Brzezinski coined the phrase “Arc of Crisis” in 1978 to foreshadow — telegraph— the decades of Islamic unrest and Pan-Turkism that was to keep the Heartland sufficiently unstable as to remain beyond the reach of America’s geopolitical rivals Russia and China. In The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), Brzezinski wrote that after 500 years as the centre of world power, the Heartland was still “the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played…. It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges [i.e. China], capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America.”
In the 1970’s Bernard Lewis published numerous books on the history of Islam with an emphasis on political aspects and potential conflict with the West. In them he promoted “his vision of a fracturing of all the countries in the region from the Middle East to India, along ethnic, sectarian, and linguistic lines…Known as the “Lewis Plan” for dividing up the Middle East into statelets this design was nearly identical to Brzezinski’s Arc of Crisis.”
CIA Operation Cyclone from 1979 to ‘89, supported by British MI-6, was one of the first steps in the New Great Game. This covert operation included support for Pan-Turkish organizing like the May 1992 New York based World Turkic Congress (visas obtained through CIA facilitation) which:
“heralded the idea of a revival of a “neo-Ottoman” or Pan-Turkic empire. Two hundred participants, including representatives from Turkey, Central Asia and Xinjiang, heard speeches by Heath Lowry, the successor to Bernard Lewis as the premier Turcologist at Princeton University, and Lowry’s own mentor, Justin McCarthy of the University of Kentucky. McCarthy gave a keynote straight out of Lord Palmerston’s propaganda handbook from 130 years earlier, claiming that Turkey and Turkic peoples must be avenged against Russia for inflicting massacres and genocide against them. A map of the projected Empire of “Turkestan”, handed out at the conference, encompassed all of Central Asia and Xinjiang Province, renamed on the map as “Uighuristan”. — special report from the Australian Alert Service entitled Xinjiang: China’s Western Frontier in the Heart of Eurasia
Operation Cyclone also included Anglo-American-Saudi-Pakistan promotion of violent jihad aimed at the former Soviet Union. Under this program Pakistan received $3.2 billion in US aid including support for Islamic training centers in Pakistan for the re-interpretation of Quranic teachings to emphasize Wahhabism, the official Saudi form of Islam, which embraces “a fanatical interpretation of an obligation to kill non-believers.” In “The Great Game for Oil”, Defense and Foreign Affairs: Strategic Policy, June/July 2000 Yossef Bodansky wrote that Washington was conducting “yet another anti-Russian jihad … seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist forces.”
According to “From US, the ABC’s of Jihad”, Washington Post, 23 March 2002 international sponsors supplied religious literature in 1980s to schools in Afghanistan, including millions of US government dollars to fund textbooks for schoolchildren that were filled with anti-Soviet text, violent images, and promotion of jihad and militant Islamic teachings. Similiar books were provided to Pakistani religious schools called “madrassas.” “The books were designed by the Centre for Afghanistan Studies (CAS) at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, which received US$51 million in government grants for education programs. Another one of the funders, the oil company Unocal, was evidently looking forward to contracts in post-war Afghanistan.” (Source: above referenced Special Report from the Australian Alert Service.)
Immediately after the withdrawal of Soviet/Russian forces from Afghanistan in the early 1990’s a consortium of oil companies, initiated by Unocal, put forth a plan to build a pipeline to get eastern Caspian oil to world markets with a similiar plan begun in 1995 for exporting natural gas from the world’s second largest gas field. This was just the tip of the iceberg of the efforts to secure the rich resources of the Heartland. The subsequent decades saw a proliferation of oil, gas, and mining joint ventures:
— former Soviet Kazakstan: 2nd largest uranium, chromium, lead, and zinc reserves in world; 3rd largest manganese reserves; 11th largest proven reserves of both petroleum and natural gas; 5th largest copper reserves; and ranks in the top ten for coal, iron, and gold. It is also an exporter of diamonds.
—former Soviet Uzbekistan: 80tons of gold/year; 10th ranked copper deposits; 7th ranked uranium production; 11th ranked in gas production; “significant” untapped oil reserves.
— former Soviet Tajikistan: hosts one of the world’s biggest aluminum mining operations producing about 517,000 tons/year; Tajik Academy of Sciences place their gold deposits at 429.3 tons.
— former Soviet Turkmenistan: ranked 6th in proven natural gas reserves and 10th in world in natural gas production; rich reserves of high-grade oil can be found in the offshore oil fields located in the Caspian Sea west of the Cheleken Peninsula.
New Pearl Harbor
The above background is provided to establish the motive for dominion over the Heartland. The next question is to establish means and opportunity — motive, means and opportunity being the criterion used for establishing responsiblity for a crime, for indeed, in Christian tradition since St. Augustine, unjust overt or covert wars of agression are a crime.
For American geostrategists 9.11 represented both means and opportunity.
At least one credible public document predicted an “event” such as happened on 9.11 as the necessary rationale for the social and institutional transformations required to support a more dominant role for America in the Heartland.
A Washington think tank called The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) co-founded in 1997 by William Kristol with directors including John Bolton and founding statement signed by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld among other leading “neo-conservatives” expressed a simple, clear purpose: “to promote American global leadership.” “PNAC played a key role in shaping the foreign policy of the Bush Administration, particularly in building support for the Iraq War.”
To achieve such an agressive interntional vision, however, would require significant domestic policy re-organization. New systems of domestic social control, beyond the long list of 1975 Trilateralist ones (see previous essay), would need to be put in place. Again, as the pattern clearly demonstrates, the means by which domestic policy would be “efficiently transformed” was through the political mechanism of manufactured/opportunistic crisis.
In September 2000, in the last two months of the Bush-Gore presidential election and a year prior to 9.11, PNAC released a 90 page report called Rebuilding America’s Defenses (the word “Defense” used in an Orwellian sense as a substitute for “offensive capability,” a necessary psychological step for convincing American warriors they would be shedding blood to “defend American interests,” “defend democracy,” “defend freedom,” or “defend America from terrorism.”) In this report it is stated:
“Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”
It is clear in hindsight that a “new Pearl Harbor” event like 9.11 and a subsequent “Global War on Terror” with its massive expansion of expensive weapons systems were aimed at a larger objective other than rogue cells of Islamic terroists. Afterall, the arts and science of counter-terrorism had been developing within the U.S. military following the 1979–80 Iran hostage crisis when the U.S. realized it had no single force capable of responding to such an asymmetric threat. In the intervening decades, under the U.S. Special Operations Command this expertise and capacity was progressively developed. The reality was, however, these counter-terrorism forces are small, light, highly mobile and, thus, relatively inexpensive.
It is now apparent, therefore, given the massive new weapons systems purchased following 9.11, there was a longer view, a view toward preempting access to the Heartland by Russia and an emerging China, America’s two strategic New Great Game competitors. In the intervening two decades the Military Industrial Complex asked for and received over $6.4 trillion in appropriations for major weapons systems like aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, a national missile defense system (“Iron Dome”), as well as the technology to begin to weaponize space. Few, if any, of these systems being germane to fighting asymetric terrorists.
Within weeks of 9.11 — an event that resulted in the collapse of two mightily built towers which suffered structural damage well below their rated capacity to sustain (plane strikes were part of the design criteria), a physics defying mystery to over 3,000 professional engineers (PE’s) and architects — the 400+ page USA Patriot Act was passed. This “pre-cooked” legislation established the new Department of Homeland Security, the Foreign Intelligence Security Court, and sweeping new financial disclosure regulations that effectively eliminated the citizen’s right to privacy.
These regulations were the final step in the 1975 Trilateral effort to “know everything about everyone” — a doctrine first established by William Cecil and Francis Walsingham in the 1570’s from the outset of the Project (see our previous essay) — through the merger of government, financial, insurance, medical, retail, consumer and social media records. Justified by the New Pearl Harbor it was now possible to complete the big data digital dossier on every living American.
One of the necessary conditions for “winning this war” would be the circumvention or suppression of the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution including the right to free speech, the right to free assembly, and the right to privacy. In the minds of the Imperial Project these freedoms had been abused in the past — i.e. “excesses of democracy” identified in 1975 by Huntington’s report to the Trilateral Commission — and would need to be significantly curtailed.
To speak against any of these new changes was to be considered “unamerican” making you a potential “terrorist sympathizer” or even a “suspected threat,” all now new terms-of-art defined in legal statute.
Within a decade using the rationale of “defending America from terrorism” the Imperial Project was more or less completely successful in intimidating the American public into passivity. A great chill, insecurity, and contracting fear spread over the country.
War Culture
The “Global War on Terror” was an opportunity to train an entire generation of American warriors, contractors, and mercenaries under combat conditions in the middle east and Afghanistan. It was also an opportunity to field test new weapons systems under development (as Hitler had done in Spain in the late 1930’s) that would later be vital for securing the Heartland.
The traumatized veterans from these conflicts — the senior commanders of which, like LTG Douglas Lute who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, openly admitting “they didn’t have the foggiest notion what they were fighting for” — were rapidly transitioned off active duty into private security forces like Blackwater and its successors, militarized police forces, Homeland Security, ICE, TSA, or the burgeoning new industry of security consultants i.e. “contractors” paid to “protect U.S. interests around the world” i.e. pipelines, ports, ships, infrastructure, refineries, mines, factories, etc.
Within a generation America became immersed in a newly intensified, pervasive culture of war. The U.S. public was fed a daily diet of films like American Sniper and online games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, targeted at the minds of boys and young men, and especially those from the south and poorer parts of cities on which recruitment depended. The aggressive, offensive mercenary became a cultural icon for young men. The super-secret CIA “spy” or NSA cyber-operator who casually busts up terrorist cells on the other side of the globe through remote assassination before heading off for drinks in Georgetown — the extreme of cowardice and corruption of the soul of the warrior — became a politically correct career path on campus for aspiring bilingual minorities.
Every war needs to have a “hated enemy” for it to serve its “unifying” purpose and this one, like the Cold War, by design, needed to not only extend for decades, but be against an enemy so elusive as to justify a search for him “under any bed” domestically or internationally.
World War I produced the League of Nations and the domestic FBI, institutions that would never have arisen were it not for the the need to combat the dreaded “Hun” and “Red.”
World War II produced the Bretton Woods System, the United Nations, the CIA and the Pentagon, institutions unachievable, unjustifiable, and unfundable without Pearl Harbor, Hitler, and the Second Red Scare.
The 1960’s war on poverty produced the Department of Housing and Urban Development (1965), the modern welfare state, and the centralization of K-12 education, the “root of poverty,” under the Department of Education (1979); the war on drugs massively increased border control and security; the war on cancer channelled billions of dollars into consolidating an insurance-health care conglomerate representing one-fifth of the U.S. economy.
This new war, the “Global War on Terror,” aimed, its seems, at securing the resources of the Heartland would similarly justify sweeping domestic security and policy changes needed to compel acquiesence to a forthcoming Great Reset, an even more ambitious vision by the Imperial Project to “rebuild society and the economy” in a way that fuses both global progressive and conservative agendas.
The Great Reset
The New Great Game followed by the New Pearl Harbor and the Global War on Terror in parrallel with the emergence of the global climate and health crisis has forged an uneasy union between the Imperial Patriarchal and Matriarchal global agendas. This “odd bedfellows” marriage is at the heart of the Great Reset.
As the Imperial Project reaches its final stage of maturity in this time of Great Testing the Great Reset, in practice, it is looking more and more like corporate and non-profit boards with diverse faces and agendas united in a belief in centralized solutions — economic control on the one hand and social control on the other.
Under these circumstances the more patriarchal board members tend to end up using the more matriarchal members, and vice versa. Each are cooperating with the other in order to advance a vision they feel they need the other to achieve. The conservatives, for instance, need the “cover” of the progressive sensitivity to the environment for their resource extraction operations. The progressives need the philantropic support of the conservatives, i.e. “daddy’s money” to fund their social ventures.
The result is a number of interwoven strategies, fully mature versions of those implemented in the 1920’s and the 1970’s in response to Utopian “uprisings” we discussed in previous essays. During these earlier periods of “social awakening” corresponding social/economic control stategies aimed at distraction from the original, Utopian “ideal commonwealth” American Dream were implemented. At the same time a plasticized, materialist version of the American Dream — bigger, better, more, faster — was offerred. One that required people to acquiese to the notion that “the business of America was business.”
Economic and social control strategies that emerged — either by design or simply by taking advantage of opportunities — included:
— The extension of large scale consumer debt and the mortgage to young families, as well as the rise of widespread “blue chip” stock ownership that result in long term loyalty to “the system”;
— The rise of corporate philanthropy that results in the co-optation or control of progressive social ventures;
— The expansion of major league sports that results in the syphoning off of social aggression;
— The rise of radio and TV that results in the re-shaping of cultural values;
— The manipulation of female beauty standards that results in the disempowerment of women;
— The practice of keeping domestic intelligence dossiers on American citizens that results in the intimidation of those most critical of “the system”;
— The manipulation of partisan political theatrics that results in the distraction of attention from the consistent trajectory of Imperial vision regardless of party “in power”;
— The ocassional reminder of political violence —i.e. 1960’s assassinations and 9.11 images of burning buildings with people jumping to their death — that results in the re-traumatizing and re-passifying of the social movements.
Post 9.11 America saw the maturation of all of these strategies as well as the addition of new methods of economic and social control — again, as before, either by design or by taking advantage of the opportunity presented — to include:
— Algocracy: Government by algorithm came into its maturity with the advent of the, now global, vision of the “Smart City,” an urban/suburban area that uses “electronic methods, voice activation methods and sensors” to “collect information, to manage assets, resources and services” i.e. to know everything about everything and every one all the time.
— Hollow economy: Through the “off-shoring” of U.S. manufacturing a great sense of economic insecurity set in as the country realized it was no longer self sufficient. Dependence on distant manufacturing resources and global supply chains had the effect of weakening domestic capacity to resist Imperial vision.
— Third Red Scare: Beginning in about 2013 with the promotion of Harvard professor Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap thesis the narrative about China began to turn sour, no longer was China a “partner” but now a “competitor” and then “adversary” in the geostrategic quest to secure the resources of the Heartland.
— Media consolidation and censorship: The end of the pretense of “balanced reporting” and the beginning of open censorship of all narratives that threaten or run counter to Imperial narrative.
— Managed bankruptcy and currency substitution: The progressive weakening of the U.S. dollar through admittedly insane levels of central bank debt financing leading to a predictable crisis, the solution for which will likely be a centralized, or series of centralized, digital currencies that change the fundamental nature of money. In the future issuers will have the capacity to keep track of the exact location of every unit of currency, requiring the “banknote” serial numbers used in every transaction be reported to the central bank i.e. a complete digital profile of every American’s precise buying behavior, and thus, personal values.
— Green economy: Arising out the efforts of a couple generations of sincere environmental activism the advent of the “Green Economy” based on “sustainable development goals” not only mollifies those desperately seeking solutions to global climate change, but has become a codeword for the “warehousing” of vast tracts of lands in the name of preservation. The result has been to make the preserved/protected land available for lease by resource extraction industries.
— Netizenization of citizenship: The role of the citizen, considered an office of responsibility in Tocqueville’s time, has been cropped into the role of the “netizen,” an insecure, confused, harried individual with a lot of opinions about what should or shouldn’t be done, but walled off, literally, from his government, without any effective mechanism for influencing or shaping actual policy decisions beyond a now clearly meaningless “vote” every two years.
There are likely many others strategies of economic and social control unfolding by design or opportunistically, but these should convey the essential dimentions of the pattern.
The New World Orders
The phrase “New World Order” is among the most taboo three words in American culture today. Uttering them immediately establishes you as a “conspiracy theorist” and thus the potential target of cancellation, ridicule or dismissal. It may be wise, however, to analyze this phrase to seek to discern its origin, meaning and implications.
The phrase “new World Order” was first utterred in a prison cell in the Ottoman town of Acca by Baha’u’llah in 1873, in his Most Holy Book:
“Soon, will the present day Order be rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead. The world’s equilibrium, hath been upset through the vibrating influence of this Most Great, this new World Order. Mankind’s ordered life hath been revolutionized through the agency of this unique, this wondrous System, the like of which mortal eyes have never witnessed...
This propehtic announcement was made at a time when Baha’u’llah was an exile/prisoner of the Ottoman Empire, but as his writings and the unity movement his new faith had ignited out of the heart of Islam in his native Persia began to spread, westerners began to take notice. Within a few decades Baha’u’llah’s son Abdu’l-Baha traveled to England, Europe and America in 1912 and ’13 to share his father’s teachings with the west. He was received by all levels of society and spoke nearly daily in public and private venues about various principles underpinning the Baha’i vision of world peace, often to members of the Imperial class, some who clearly took careful note. These principles were further elaborated by Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Baha’i Faith, in letters dated 1924 and 1931:
…A world federal system, ruling the whole earth and exercising unchallengeable authority over its unimaginably vast resources, blending and embodying the ideals of both the East and the West, liberated from the curse of war and its miseries, and bent on the exploitation of all the available sources of energy on the surface of the planet, a system in which Force is made the servant of Justice, whose life is sustained by its universal recognition of one God and by its allegiance to one common Revelation — such is the goal towards which humanity, impelled by the unifying forces of life, is moving.”
The first published reference to the phrase “New World Order” following Abdul-Baha’s public usage of the term seems to have been in 1919 by social reformer and preacher Samuel Zane Batten in an American Baptist Publication by this title. By 1940 the phrase was used by H.G. Wells, an influential British futurist of his day, also as the title of a book by the name, espousing a sort of global Fabian collectivism (these two instances seem to be forerunners of the current Imperial Matriarchal New World Order, see below).
By 1991 with its use in a speech by George H.W. Bush announcing the first invasion of Iraq it took on a more conspiratorial tone that made many suspicious of the possible hidden economic agendas at work (“coming out” of the Imperial Patriarchal New World Order, see below):
“We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order — a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful — and we will be — we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U.N.’s founders.” George H.W. Bush, January 16, 1991
Today, however, there seem to be at least three distinct “new” or “New” world order visions:
— Imperial Patriarchal New World Order (archetypes: warrior, ruler-king) — Motivated by a desire to establish dominion over the world’s resources and to spread the benefits of market capitalism to the world. They place their faith in large, centralized multinational businesses and the international financial system. Their strategy for advancing their global agenda is through conflict and competition (survival of the fittest), not shying from “managable war” for acquisition of resources and markets. Their representative think-tanks are the World Economic Forum, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Business Roundtable. Their greatest fears seem to be economic collapse and social chaos.
— Imperial Matriarchal New World Order (archetypes: lover, ruler-queen) — Motivated by a desire to establish socially progressive policies of universal health care and education, protection of the environment, and a more equitable distribution of wealth. They place their faith in large, centralized government and non-profit social programs. Their strategy for advancing their global agenda has been incremental fabian socialism. Their representative think-tanks are the Rocky Mountain Institute, Aspen Institute, and World Wildlife Federation. Their greatest fears seem to be environmental collapse and military violence.
— The original, spirtually mature, fully integrated “new World Order” system of governance as articulated by Baha’u’llah in the 1870’s — and forshadowed by John Dee and Francis Bacon in the earliest articulation of the Imperial and Utopian Projects in the late 1500's — that manifests, in practice, the highest ideals of the American “ideal commonwealth” by finally reconciling the Imperial-Utopian, Matriarchal- Patriarchal, and Material-Spiritual governing polarities at all levels of society, individual, communal and institutional:
Some form of a world super-state must needs be evolved, in whose favor all the nations of the world will have willingly ceded every claim to make war, certain rights to impose taxation and all rights to maintain armaments, except for purposes of maintaining internal order within their respective dominions. Such a state will have to include within its orbit an international executive adequate to enforce supreme and unchallengeable authority on every recalcitrant member of the commonwealth; a world parliament whose members shall be elected by the people in their respective countries and whose election shall be confirmed by their respective governments; and a supreme tribunal whose judgment will have a binding effect even in such cases where the parties concerned did not voluntarily agree to submit their case to its consideration. A world community in which all economic barriers will have been permanently demolished and the interdependence of Capital and Labor definitely recognized; in which the clamor of religious fanaticism and strife will have been forever stilled; in which the flame of racial animosity will have been finally extinguished; in which a single code of international law — the product of the considered judgment of the world’s federated representatives — shall have as its sanction the instant and coercive intervention of the combined forces of the federated units; and finally a world community in which the fury of a capricious and militant nationalism will have been transmuted into an abiding consciousness of world citizenship. Shoghi Effendi, World Order of Baha’u’llah, pg. 39–41
The path to the third, more spiritually mature “new World Order” seems to be destined to be through the learning experience of reconciling the painful dynamic tension between the Imperial-Utopian, Matriarchal-Patriarchal, and Material-Spiritual governing impulses.
The main topic of Part II of this essay will be the state and trajectory of our more decentralized, Utopian governing impulses, the polarities to the more centralized Imperial ones presented here.
