When developed countries became sufficiently advanced, they started developing the so-called “third world” countries (in Asia and Africa) and entered these countries in order to establish factories and prepare all their infrastructures. But in order to set up manufacturing, it’s also necessary to educate people; therefore, they started opening schools there. In addition, developed nations began to accept international students from these regions into their universities. And from that point on, all of humanity became very interconnected at the level of material prosperity, education, science, and culture.

Today, all of the world’s countries are bound together by very close ties. The Americans jokingly say that whenever they want to call from New York to Boston, the call first goes through India, where people sit answering the phones and then connect them. It appears that these phone lines connect us to each other to such a degree that we don’t worry about distances, don’t neglect any country, and aren’t even concerned that we’ll have to install a transcontinental communication cable.

And if we delve into this issue even deeper, we’ll see that the entire planet is wrapped in an enormous multifaceted and multilayered communications network. And today, it’s impossible to build or manufacture something if you don’t have sufficient knowledge or an opportunity to receive the most suitable equipment from any producer in the world, or if you don’t have access to necessary information and specialists. This is how our world is built now.

All these ties developed throughout the last century, but suddenly we’ve discovered that for many reasons this system isn’t working. Analysts in the fields of sociology, political science, economics, and finance are offering their solutions to this problem, each in their own way. But ultimately, there’s just one simple solution: This system now demands a more internal connection of us.

And in order to continue our development, we must achieve a closer connection and understand and accept the necessity of mutual guarantee, that is, the fact that we depend on one another, live on one planet Earth, and that no other alternative exists other than to feel that we all are like one family.

In other words, our development began by trading what we produced: equipment, foodstuffs, and so on. Gradually, joint ventures and international banks started to form; stock exchanges began to join together. I can make transactions on the Tokyo stock exchange and right after, on the stock exchanges in Germany, Moscow, or New York. It doesn’t matter where and what I trade because in any place, everything is essentially the same. I only analyze where it’s worthwhile to invest and where it’s not.

But money is kept in one place, and banks only send each other transaction notifications through electronic means, and this is sufficient. It doesn’t even matter to us where the money is stored physically because we consider gold to be the main equivalent of their value. Perhaps the money itself is kept in one of the “third world” countries as a repository of all the gold reserves, but what’s important is that strict accounting is maintained there.

As I already mentioned, lately we feel that our connection cannot continue in this manner. This is especially true in Europe. On one hand, it’s the most developed place, but on the other, it is the most disunited one. And we are now seeing that due to this disconnection, they are deprived of inner concordance, of understanding and feeling that they belong to a single system. This hinders all the countries of the global market since the single market isn’t enough. It’s also necessary to unite all these countries with much tighter bonds, but this isn’t easy.

The difficulty is that we need to be closer to each other in spirit, based on our understanding of the situation and recognition of the fact that we cannot exist without each other. This is why it’s necessary to cultivate in the nations of Europe an understanding that mutual dependence between them is required.

It’s clear that that’s the case, but the problem is that even though the decision-makers in politics, scientists, the middle class, and the average folk understand with their reason the necessity for changes, they aren’t yet emotionally ready to give up their individual lives and national characteristics.

In truth, we believe that this isn’t even necessary. A person doesn’t need to change their behavior and habits that pertain to culture and national traditions. One should only rise above them towards connection with other people, towards mutual guarantee.
[67795]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 5, 1/2/12

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In the News (from rg.ru): “The experts of ‘Strategy 2020’ [a yearly report prepared by a number of expert groups] propose to reduce social inequality and poverty by distributing food stamps to the poor, increasing benefits for children from low-income families, and implementing the program of the guaranteed minimum income.”

My Comment: This condition is necessary but not sufficient since it does not eliminate the cause of inequality but only smooths it out and hides it. The correct decision is to raise everyone to the level of guaranteed reasonable consumption.

But equality could be achieved only through re-education in the system of integral upbringing, when people become convinced that by striving towards unity, they begin to sense perfection and higher harmony of nature.
 [72914] 

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Opinion (Oleg Deripaska, chief executive of Russian aluminum producer United Co. Rusal): “Oleg Deripaska … said three generations of Europeans will pay for the mistakes and inertia of their past and current policy makers, with no single politician seemingly willing to risk his or her popularity to address key problems.

“In healthier economic times, Mr. Deripaska said, governments and politicians won public support by being extremely generous with social benefits. Unable to continue this now, few governments are willing to make the tough decisions necessary to lift their countries, and gradually the region, out of the downturn.”

My Comment: He is right, but how would he act if he were in the place of those politicians?
[72719]

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Opinion (from AgoraVox): The crisis, which the world is experiencing today, is not financial, but a system crisis; it undermines the whole system of capitalism as an ideology, which espouses the notion that the sum of individual interests matches the collective interests.

“This system no longer works. That is why all the economists of the world cannot do anything about it. And that is why it is absolutely in vain to expect the return of economic growth, jobs, and profitability.

“What can follow capitalism? We need to build a new ideology and solve other problems, concerning the social life of human beings: Is money so necessary, what is democracy, what are the real needs of people, and so on?

“Nations do not need economists with their empty calculations, but a new ideology that will be able to create all conditions for a dignified life, regardless of the birthplace or social status. A life free from poverty is what all people need. And capitalism is simply unable to give that to them.
[61725]

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Opinion (Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist, political economist): “…the excesses of capitalism are a threat to democracy…

“We have had a lot of technological change that substituted for low-skill labor and made many people in Western democracies lose their jobs.

“We have unthinkingly embraced a certain version of globalization that assumed we had to move very quickly into this post-industrial, post-manufacturing world. Doing so, we forgot that the whole reason real socialism never took off in the US was the fact that the modern economy seemed to produce middle-class societies in which the bulk of the population could enjoy a middle-class status. They worked in industries that were abolished in our countries and transferred to countries like China.

“What you are going to see in a democracy with a weaker middle class is much more populism, more internal conflict, an inability to resolve distributional issues in an orderly way.

“The president [Obama] never annunciated a vision of a different kind of economic order that did not just look like a return to a kind of classic big spending, liberal Democratic formula. The Democrats have never articulated an economic philosophy that is not just the return to the 1970s, big government and so forth, or the position of the labor unions which is very hostile to globalization.

“We should never have permitted the Chinese to de-industrialize a large part of the world.

“China is never going to be a global model. Our current Western system is really broken in some fundamental ways, but the Chinese system is not going to work either. It is a deeply unfair and immoral system where everything can be taken away from anyone in a split second, where people die in train accidents because of a rampant lack of public oversight and transparency, where corruption rules. We are already seeing huge protests in all parts of China …

“Liberal democracy still really is the only game in town worldwide, in spite of all of its shortcomings.”

My Comment: This is the end of history of the past history and the beginning of a new history. The next level of human development has to replace a person with a machine, to eliminate excess production, to release people from unnecessary labor, and to free as many as possible man-hours from environmentally harmful production of unnecessary things and services.

We need to look at people’s liberation from labor as a necessity, the requirement of nature, and to become aware of our transition to the next level of development. It involves achieving unity and completing each other, to the point when society will become a single whole in which we will feel the unity of nature—the upper dimension.
[72379]

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Opinion (Zeus Yiamouyiannis, Ph.D): “Debt forgiveness, therefore, accomplishes two important things. It eliminates the increasing and outsized portion of productive enterprise to pay off unproductive obligations, and it clears the ground for new opportunities, new thinking, invention, and entrepreneurship.

“Currently we are mired in a ‘new normal’ and calls for ‘austerity’ which are nothing more than the delusional efforts of a status quo to avoid the consequences of its own error and fraud and to profit evermore. So bedazzled by the false wealth created by debt multiplication and its concomitant fantasy of ever-higher returns, this status quo continues to be stupidly amazed that people are not spending and that the economy is not picking up.

“This subtle debt extortion creates a system of never-ending debt-slavery for a vast majority of the population.

“Debt forgiveness simply calls out either the inherent systemic inability to make good on debts or the recognition that debt was produced through fraudulent means. In the present situation, both conditions obtain. There has likely been no point in world history where debt forgiveness has been so comprehensively merited. The only speculation from my point (barring world-wide global feudalism and eternal debt slavery) is whether we will initiate such forgiveness or be forced into it.”

My Comment: But this is just one of the first steps; we cannot return to the real economy through this. We need to re-educate people in advance and create an integral economy of reasonable consumption.
[72275]

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In the News (from EUobserver): “A first report by the EU commission looking at macro-economic data across the bloc up until 2010 warns that 12 countries, including Italy and Spain are at risk of new crises due to their public debt and lack of competitiveness.

“Part of legislation strengthening economic surveillance, the ‘Alert Mechanism Report’ published on Tuesday (14 February) singles out Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Hungary, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK as in need for further ‘in depth’ scrutiny of their macro-economic policies.”

My Comment: But there is no possibility to review it because without transforming the system of excessive consumption into that of limited consumption, it is necessary to stimulate demand, but it does not exist because the population is becoming poorer. The circle is closed.

The whole system has to be changed—to work as necessary and to dedicate all the free time to integral education, meaning to raising a human being. This will produce positive forces in society and nature and will fill everyone, as if they received all abundance of the world. It is because we have been created this way.
[72316]

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In the News (from Time): “The most important economic story of the first half of the 21^st century is how China is changing the global economy. There are a lot of benefits to this change – hundreds of millions of new consumers to drive global growth, fresh opportunities for entrepreneurship and job creation and heightened demand for everything from American corn to Australian iron ore. But not all of the impact is seen as positive. Low-skilled workers in the West have already felt the pain of competition from China’s manufacturing machine. As Chinese industry advances, it will present an even stiffer challenge to the competitiveness of the US, Europe and Japan. And as the Chinese economy continues to develop, new threats to the world’s established economic order will emerge. …

“Simply put, China’s SOEs [state-owned enterprises] are potentially poised to alter the rules of global economic competition. …

“As China remains wedded to its version of ‘state capitalism,’ Beijing’s support for large SOEs, and the impact that has on global economic competition, is likely to become an even bigger issue in the years to come.”

My Comment: Thus, they will gradually realize that not competition, but only a self-complementing system and solidarity, is possible in the world community.
[72174]

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Question: There was a series of teenage suicides in Russia. People are lost; they don’t understand what is happening. How can we explain this phenomenon?

Answer: These “epidemics” will be recurrent. Right now it is teenage suicide, then something else, then another thing, and so on. What is this connected to? Teenagers, both boys and girls have a period when they do not fully perceive this life. They see it as something virtual that exists between this world and that one. At this time they are very sensitive to any bumps, which can even end in such a tragic way.

Teenagers do not feel death; they don’t feel the end. They are a bit above our world, somewhere in the air, and this is the way they treat the possibility of ending their life so tragically. Psychologists, sociologists, teachers, and educators know this. This needs to be eradicated as much as possible, teenagers access to the Internet should be limited, and we need to have a very precise government campaign regarding the “safety” of the soul.

I don’t think that these cases will decrease or disappear. On the contrary, their number will continue to grow because our egoism keeps growing and there is no answer to it, and it turns out that the person finds himself lost between the earth and the sky. Moreover, teenagers regard adults as the example of their future lives, and they completely disagree with this kind of life. They don’t even care that this life is financially provided for, they don’t like this life.

This is why many problems await us in the future. They will continue to exist in even darker states until we manage to unravel before them the full palette of the shining upper world that they can reach. This will be the part of the population which suffers most, which is susceptible to drugs, prostitution, and different problems. Now unemployment is adding to these problems, which also lead to very different problems; for example: Universities are closing, which means that the future is also disappearing. Young people do not see anything but hopelessness before them.

Why are there revolutions in North African countries? Many young people, including educated people who have graduated from universities in Europe, are returning home to Tunisia, Libya, Spain, and Italy and don’t know what to do since these countries are on the verge of an enormous crisis. Youth will be the part of the population, which suffers most everywhere; it doesn’t have a future.

The main thing for the other layers of the population is to exist in a relatively comfortable manner, but the youth don’t have this, it’s not enough for them, and they naturally will not settle. We need to think about the way to make them realize that there is a way to enter a different dimension, which will give them absolute fulfillment. If we present our method in the correct manner, people will want to bring it to life because it gives the person an opportunity for balance, an ability to become fulfilled regardless of work and corporeal commodities. Minimal necessities will be enough for them, and they will attain everything else by integrally participating in the environment.
[72026]
From KabTV’s “Foundations of the Integral Society” 2/12/12

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In the News (from The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer): “The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer sees an unprecedented nine-point global decline in trust in government. In twelve countries, it trails business, media, and non-governmental organizations as the least trusted institution. …

“Throughout the world, people blamed their governments – more than any other institution – for the financial and political crises they endured in 2011. In seventeen of the 25 countries surveyed, government is now trusted by less than half to do what is right. In Europe, trust in government dropped by more than ten points in France, Spain, and Italy.

“Driven by steep drops in countries in the heart of the eurozone economic crisis, trust in business fell three points globally to 53 percent. …

“The 2012 Trust Barometer’s deep dive into the 16 attributes of trust finds that the factors responsible for shaping current business trust levels (47 percent) are largely tied to business competence – and that those that will build future trust are more societally focused. Listening to customer needs, treating employees well, placing customers ahead of profits, and having ethical business practices are all considered more important than delivering consistent financial returns – and indicate that the path forward entails continuing to do the basics well while also adopting shared values.”

My Comment: People are becoming increasingly aware that the ongoing crisis is a “crisis from above,” a crisis of the entire world of the past. This is indicated by the absence of clear plans about how to resolve it. This is primarily a crisis of development, the death of a consumer society, the race after the percentage of annual growth, deliberate accelerated depreciation of goods, production of unnecessary things and pressure to consume more.

While people are concerned about the economic crisis, there are crises of education and upbringing, and government and family. That is why this is a crisis of the entire system of our civilization.
[72090]

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