Episode 53 - Humanity's Recurring Test and the Lesson that Keeps Eluding Us

In today's episode, we're going to explore the topic of humanity's recurring test. What is the lesson that keeps eluding us, and why is this test continuing to recur?

Transcript

Sovaida 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In today's episode, we're going to explore the topic of humanity's recurring test. What is the lesson that keeps eluding us, and why is this test continuing to recur? There are times in each of our lives when we lose sight of the forest for the trees. We find ourselves caught in a loop of a test that keeps coming back over and over. It sometimes feels like we're trapped and we can't get out of this recurring test. We get caught in the weeds, we get myopic, and we miss the big lesson. The same is true of our collective existence as humanity. We tend to also become myopic when it comes to global problems and global challenges and recurring problems, including the big challenge of war and conflict. So what's really helpful to do at a time like this is to zoom out and basically take a greater, more holistic view of what's going on in order to try to identify what the lesson is that we seem to be missing, the lesson that has been eluding us, in the hopes that if we can identify it, learn it, then we can get out of this cycle of recurring wars and conflicts. Now the first thing to notice when we look at the conflicts and the wars around us, that they are having an ever widening global impact. And I thought it'd be interesting to look at just a few in order to illustrate this point, starting with the Syrian civil war. What started happening was that conflicts that had traditionally been viewed as local or regional conflicts began to spawn global challenges and impacts and ever widening ones. So let's start with the Syrian civil war. Starting in about 2014, we started to see that in Syria because of the civil war the soil and conditions were created in which ISIS was able to grow and flourish and threaten not only the country of Syria, but essentially countries everywhere and people's everywhere. So it became a threat to the world as a whole. The second crisis that was spawned by the Syrian civil war was a refugee crisis that put tremendous pressure, social, political, and economic, on countries around it, and as far afield as Europe. So countries like Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and then, Europe started to feel these burdens. And in fact, the third crisis it precipitated was the crisis of Brexit. It was actually one of the main precipitating causes of Brexit and the rise of right wing populist groups in Europe with anti-immigration agendas. The fear had set in that Europe and European countries would get overrun by these foreigners who were fleeing conflict in their own lands and coming to settle in Europe. The next crisis spawned by this Syrian civil war was the crisis of dividing the world into camps. In fact, there was a really interesting article written at the time in the New York Times in which the war started to be described as a"proto World War," which at the time I took note of and I found very interesting. So now let's look at what happened with the next big crisis that started to have global impacts in ways that were very visible and tangible was the Ukraine war. So it spawned a few global crises of its own. It spawned a global food crisis, Ukraine being regarded as one of the food baskets of not only Europe but the world. Ukraine is also a source of fertilizer needed by many countries to ensure that they can produce foods in requisite quantities for people. The Ukraine War also spawned a global energy crisis. It was really our first taste of this global energy crisis causing the costs of energy to spiral, especially in Europe. So really since the 1970s, we hadn't experienced this. The third global crisis spawned by the Ukrainian War was that it raised the nuclear threat around the world to the highest level it had been at since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Then after Ukraine came the war in Gaza and we had a new element introduced in that war, actually two new elements in some sense. The first was the threatening of supply chains by ships in the Red Sea and the Suez Canal coming under attack, particularly from the Houthis in Yemen. And the cost of goods started to go up in the fear that supply chains would be interrupted and ships have to travel around the Cape of Good Hope and go the long way in order to get to Europe and the Americas. And the other thing that this crisis spawned, which was actually a very interesting social global phenomenon was the unexpected global outcry about the humanitarian situation brought about by the war on Gaza. Now we have had wars that have been just as bad as the war in Gaza for instance, the DRC and the Sudan and Tigray and Myanmar and Yemen. There's been no shortage of wars with absolutely horrendous atrocities. But what was so interesting is it seemed like it was time for humanity to sort of wake up and say,"Well, gosh, this sort of war and destruction is really unacceptable." Ukraine also has resulted in tremendous destruction and levels of atrocity that are unacceptable. But it seems like that the time was ripe for humanity's sensitivities to be aroused. This brings us to the war now with Iran, between Iran, Israel, the United States. So what's going on now? We're starting to see the global impacts, the ever widening global impacts, getting greater, intensifying, deepening. So things that we started to witness in the Ukraine War, we're now seeing on steroids, essentially in exacerbated form. The first thing is the fertilizer shortages and the global food shock. Recent reports indicate that this war is likely to trigger a global food shock much worse than the one resulting from Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, because fertilizer shortages threaten food production on multiple continents. Now, what's happened with the Iranian attacks is that they've shut down large segments of the Middle East's productions of urea, which is what goes into the leading form of nitrogen fertilizer used around the world to grow crops. And making it also requires ammonia that's produced from natural gas. A third of the world's fertilizer exports also passed through the Straits of Hormoz. The blockade has already disrupted shipments of fertilizer to major agricultural producers like India, Thailand, and Brazil. And at the same time, the gas shortages have forced South Asia fertilizer producers to also cut output. For example, India is requiring fertilizer plants to reduce gas consumption to 70% of normal levels because of shortages of gas. And in Pakistan and Bangladesh, plants have stopped producing fertilizers altogether. We also have to take into account that even if the war were to be over, restarting ammonia and urea facilities can take weeks, because they require careful temperature control and pressure. And to make things worse, shortages have started during the northern hemisphere's planting season, threatening lower harvests for staples like rice. So vulnerable countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and the south of Asia, are likely to suffer severely from a shortage of food and malnutrition. And experts are warning that even if this spike in fertilizer prices ends up being temporary, it will have a lasting impact on global food production. So that's one of the impacts of this new war. The second impact is that an ever widening number of nations are being drawn into this war. So remember in Syria we said it was described as a proto world war. Well, this war is even more so. The New York Times yesterday had a really interesting article with very interesting GIF showing the widening circles of countries that it says are being drawn and pulled into this conflict, almost as if by gravity. On Iran's side you've got Russia, China, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Turkey, and Egypt. And on the other side you have the U.S., Saudi, Germany, Canada, the UAE, Jordan, Israel, and so on. As more countries' facilities are being hit or attacked, they're being unwittingly drawn into the war. For instance, ships were hit in the port of Sri Lanka and Sri Lanka is finding itself in a position of, being dragged into a conflict that it really doesn't want to be dragged into. Now the third global impact of this war in Iran that we're starting to see, and we described this with respect to Ukraine, is that the nuclear threat is rapidly going up, in several different ways. First of all, the danger of nuclear proliferation. The increasing number of nuclear arms is rising in many ways. For one, Iran having suffered the attack it has, is more likely to try to make a dash for the bomb at some point, thinking, perhaps calculating, that maybe if she has a nuclear capacity, then countries would be less likely to attack her. Secondly, other countries in the Gulf-- let's start with the Gulf-- are learning a lesson that's an unfortunate one: that they themselves may be best off protecting themselves if they have their own nuclear weapons, especially if they feel that the country that has hitherto promised to protect them under its nuclear umbrella, namely the United States, may prove to be unreliable and untrustworthy as a partner and unwilling to follow through on its promise. So you've got that calculation. The same is true in Asian countries like South Korea and Japan, who themselves may be calculating that at this stage there are question marks around whether the United States would come to their aid in the event of a large conflict, say with China, and would they not be better off if they had their own nuclear weapons? This is truly an unfortunate message that is being sent unwittingly to countries around the world. And then we've got the other component of the nuclear danger, which is the danger of nuclear accident, because nuclear sites are being hit. So the parties have bombed nuclear facilities in Iran, Natanz natanz and the Bushehr reactor have been targets of attacks. And on the other hand Iran has tried to attack the Demona nuclear plant in Israel. So we're living in a very dangerous time when one little slip and escalation could really set the whole world on fire. Now the next massive global crisis that is impacting all of us is that the economy of the world is being battered. For one, oil and financial markets have been upended. Shipping costs have gone up, as we all know,'cause we don't need to repeat this, but the Straits of Hormoz carry about 20% of the world's oil passes through it, as well as about 20% of the world's liquid natural gas. And so, given that that amount of oil and gas can no longer pass through the straits, we've got shortages, we've got another energy crisis. And releasing certain amounts from storage facilities by 32 iEA members--International Energy Agency members-- is not going to be enough if this war goes on for a period of time beyond a few extra days. There's only so much you can do with stuff you have in storage. Oil wells in Kuwait are being shut down because they have nowhere to store the oil that they're drilling, and then it takes a long time to get these oil wells going again. LNG, the liquid natural gas facility in Qatar has been closed and it would take a while to get that up. Experts say about a month, because you have to lower the temperatures to minus 160 degrees. And it's a finicky process, so it's not like you can just turn things back on as soon as the conflict ends. There are lots of interesting ramifications, also. Pakistan for instance, has closed its schools and ordered government offices to operate four days a week, in order to save on energy. And, other countries are doing something similar. Several local governments in the Philippines have moved to a four day working week. Sri Lanka has also moved to four day working week. It's fascinating to see how this conflict in this part of the world, in the Middle East, is having broad ramifications on the lives of people everywhere. In Bangladesh, the government has ordered fuel rationing and closed universities, so university students in Bangladesh are being affected by this as well. Another impact that one wouldn't think of: global aviation has been severely impacted. The price of jet fuel has jumped, making flights more expensive. The routes are more circuitous,'cause now airlines have to try to avoid not only flying over Ukraine and its surrounding areas, but also flying over the Middle East, for fear of being hit by an errant missile. And so the routes are longer, which means that everything's more expensive, along with the jet fuel being more expensive in any event. How ironic that in an age of climate change when we all should be burning less fossil fuels, we're now burning more because we're having to make all these journeys longer. And the last thing I wanted to mention was the danger of water shortages. The fact that in this war desalination plants, especially in the Gulf States, who rely excessively on desalinated water to meet their basic water needs, those are being threatened. They've already been targeted and hit, and there are current threats that if the war continues, that they will be targeted again. They will continue to be targeted. So why have I spent all this time looking at the global, increasing, widening ramifications of this war, even broader than the ramifications of the Syrian civil war, Ukraine, Gaza, and so on. The reason is, this is evidence. You know, when you go to a court of law, you have to induce evidence to prove a point. Well, this is evidence of something that we are missing, a lesson that as a global community and as humanity, we have failed to recognize. And the question is, what is that lesson? The lesson that we fail to recognize is that humanity has become interconnected in unprecedented ways. And has become so interconnected in fact, that it is like a single organism, like a single body with various organs and limbs. And that the truth, the reality that we have to truly take into account, is that in order to guarantee the advantage of any one nation, the only way is to guarantee and ensure the advantage of the whole. In other words, if we want one organ of the body that represents the nation, so if the lungs want to be healthy, we have to make sure that the kidneys and the liver and the heart the spleen and so on, all the other organs, the pancreas, are healthy. This is a key lesson that we have simply failed to learn, that has alluded us. And this is the benefit of zooming out and recognizing that everything that's going on is pointing us to this lesson, saying,"Hey! Wake up!" This is the time of the great awakening. It's an opportunity to grow up for humanity, to really grow up and mature and learn. Meanwhile, various countries have been trying to achieve self-sufficiency, the United States, China, India. But self-sufficiency in today's interconnected world is a chimera. It is impossible. And this war in the Middle East has highlighted the enduring reality of global economic integration. Supply chains, as The Economist says, are not only intact, but they're expanding and heightening the risks when movement of goods is interrupted. Until we learn this lesson, until we learn this lesson, the disasters and calamities that are raining down upon us are not avoidable. They're going to be mostly inevitable, are only going to result in increased suffering. This is not going to change. The analogy that I love to use, and if you take nothing else away from today's podcast, I think this might, I hope this captures your imagination. Humanity is basically suffering from an autoimmune disease. You know what happens in autoimmune diseases: the body loses its ability to distinguish between foreign agents that are attacking it and itself. So it attacks itself. The body attacks itself as though it were a foreign intruder coming to attack the body. It wreaks havoc as a result. This is exactly what's happening. These wars that have arisen are flares, flares of this autoimmune disease, where the body politic is attacking itself. And every flare gets worse and worse and worse. Rheumatologists will describe these flares as fires that run through the body and the importance of quelling the fire,'cause if you don't, it starts to attack different organs, including the skin, the heart, the eyes. You never know what the next organ is that it's going to impact. It's not just the joints; it can be basically anything. The eyesight can go. You know, the digestive system is impacted and so on. So if we want to spare ourselves a massive breakdown of this organism that is the human race, then we have to learn to quell this fire of flareups in the body and to learn that the time has come, that history has been all about an ever expanding arc of development marked by ever widening cycles of integration. That our loyalty at this stage in our collective growth is, should be loyalty to the human race as the primary loyalty. And that that loyalty trumps every other loyalty. All other loyalties--national, ethnic, whatever, religious-- should be subsumed within that higher loyalty. Because it's premised on the recognition that each country, each nation, each people, has a unique and valuable contribution to make to the totality of the human body. Once we embrace these key insights, we will then be ready to recognize and be motivated to act with determination to reconceptualize and build a new system of governing ourselves at all levels, local, national, international levels. And build systems of administering our affairs, of governing ourselves in ways that are built on the foundation, the assumption or the premise of our oneness as a human race. In which to ensure the good of the part, we have to ensure the good of the whole. And the last thing is in which we learn to elect deserving, worthy, and responsible leaders, whose primary interest is the welfare of the human race as a whole and the interests of others, rather than their own personal interests. These are skills that we have to muster the courage to develop. Without this courage we won't get the leaders we deserve. There are many thoughts and ideas of where we could start. I am not going to go into that in detail today. However, if you're interested in learning more about particular next steps we can take in order to build the sort of world that we're talking about, there is some recommended reading. There is the book, The Alchemy of Peace. The tagline is six essential shifts and mindsets and habits to achieve world peace. And there's also a book, Bridge to Global Governance, that demonstrates how we can create a high authority for energy in the world into whose hands we pool critical energy resources that are collectively managed and equitably distributed on the basis of principles of oneness and justice, using a historical model from Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community. So the name of that book is Bridge to Global Governance: Tackling Climate Change, Energy Distribution, and Nuclear Proliferation. I hope that you have benefited from this podcast. If you want to learn more about the idea of a High Authority for Energy, you can go to episode 13 in this series, either in podcast form on your favorite podcast platform or on the YouTube channel The Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG. I wish you well. Thank you for joining me today, and I look forward to seeing you next time. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.