Today's global financial crisis is a systemic consequence of the Neo-Martian political and economic decisions made in the 20th century. Desperate but unavailing measures are being taken to stem the accelerating collapse of the whole rotten system. The 21st century will see many more profound systemic collapses as the Neo-Martian paradigm takes it terrible toll. All the proposed financial rescue packages will accelerate the collapse of the basic life-support systems of the planet. The scientific consensus is that if our governments try to pursue the Neo-Martian goal of restoring “Business As Usual” (BAU), long before the end of the 21st Century, humanity will
exceed , probably by around 100 per cent, the capacity of Gaia to supply our needs for food and water. At the same time, if we continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, global warming will have produced hundreds of millions of climate refugees, as rising sea levels drown great cities and low-lying deltas, while tropical forests burn out of control, and ferocious hurricanes sweep across the planet.
Just as whistle-blowers were poo-poohed for trying to warn of impending financial collapse in the 1990s, so today, governments are largely ignoring the scientific whistle-blowers who are trying to warn them of the consequences of continuing with the Neo-Martian model of BAU. They see themselves at the helm of a monstrous super-tanker, a rigid, monolithic system that takes decades to “turn-around”. That's how Command and
Control Leaders see the systems of government they control. But at the 2008 Tallberg Conference, David Wasdell, offered a brilliant alternative view. Instead of the dinosauric super-tanker vision of government and society, he proposed the model of 'the shoal'. To survive the perils that the rigid, inflexible
centrally controlled, Command and Control Neo-Martian BAU model has created, our societies will need to have the instantaneous parallel information processing and signalling capacities that make shoals of fish so flexible and resilient. Only with such a systemic transformation will the human family be able to act with high levels of shared purpose and understanding that will take us from low carbon to zero carbon and beyond.
Kicking the centralising, dinosauric Command and Control paradigm of leadership is therefore the key priority for first envisaging such a transformation and then making it possible.
