Geophilos: Issue 2, Spring 2001

The orientation of public policies, and the priorities of scientific research, are heavily determined by perceptions of what is going to happen in the future. When expectations are seriously distorted, we face a heightened risk of avoidable mistakes occurring.

Serious political miscalculations during the next 15 years are probable because of a flawed analysis of the driving influences that will shape the world. This conclusion is based on a reading of Global Trends 2015, which was prepared under the direction of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC), and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The report attempts its forecasts on the basis of seven key drivers. These include demographics, natural resources and environment, governance and globalisation. Missing from the list is one of the most important driving forces in the world today, which arguably will exercise greater influence than some of those identified by the NIC. That driving force is ideology: specifically, the doctrines that have shaped Western society over the past century, and advocated now by the USA. Rightly or wrongly, that ideology will continue to cause conflict on a global scale, and therefore it ought to be factored in as one of the drivers of trends. Its absence from high-level discourse is an omission with potentially lethal consequences.

That ideology was vigorously propagated over the last decade in a variety of geo-political theatres that spanned most of the world:

  • The transformation of Eastern Europe was strenuously promoted by the champions of Western ideology, with emphatic prescriptions as to the nature of the values and institutions that ought to be embedded in formerly Soviet soil.
  • The US vigorously canvassed the need for the government in Tokyo to reconstitute Japanese society on the basis of social relationships favoured by that ideology.
  • The international financial institutions coerced developing countries to adopt the economic processes known as "the Washington Consensus", which is at the cutting edge of the proselytising ideology.

It may be that the aggressive propagation of that ideology is legitimate and in the interests of all 6.1 billion people who populate the globe. But we know from the way in which many communities and countries actively resist some of its key tenets that the ideology itself ought to be acknowledged as a key driver of events. For example, Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, told Japan in a speech in Tokyo in January that the country’s economic problems were "due almost entirely to your attempt to adopt western practices and western norms". He proposed that east Asian countries should create an independent regional financial and trading system that would take them out of the sphere of western influence. If that happened, it would be as a result of the vigour with which western values were sold to Asian nations in recent years; there would be serious negative consequences for the global economy, which need to be anticipated. Better still, a reevaluation of that philosophy may assist policy-makers to develop strategies capable of fulfilling everyone’s aspirations.

The celebration of the individual is one of the defining features of Modernity. If the monarchs, statesmen and aristocrats who shaped the outcome of the Enlightenment project had continued to locate the individual within the social framework within which he and she derived personal identity, the development would have been a progressive one in the history of social evolution. Instead, people’s desire to deepen knowledge of nature, and their wish to extend personal development as a result of a new awareness of the latent possibilities within each of us, were hijacked and transformed into a cult-like reverence for the individual.

The narrow focus on the individual, which has been turned into an art form by social scientists, corresponded to the abject abandonment of community. As a consequence, along the road to the 20th century, many people were made to suffer as they were uprooted from their communities and transformed into modern individuals. How and why was an enlightened project to refine knowledge and empower people - through a rational extension of the possibilities defined by our biological heritage and cultural endowment - appropriated and transformed into the worship of an idealised entity that was abstracted out of social reality?

Contents

  • Editor's Introduction (Download PDF)
    The Individual as an Ideological Construct

  • INSITE on Russia

    • The Dangerous Myth (Download PDF)
      Methodological individualism as a tool of ideology
      Tatiana Roskoshnaya & Fred Harrison

    • The Demographic Crisis (Download PDF)
      Fertility and mortality in transitional Russia
      Irina Veselkova

    • Rent as Public Revenue (Download PDF)
      The strategy for Russia’s breakthrough to the future
      Dmitry Lvov

  • Towards the Moral State (Download PDF)
    Constitutional reform & the wrongs of ‘human rights’
    Ron Banks

  • The Ethiopian Model (Download PDF)
    Equal land rights in a unique social development
    Gail Warden

  • Creating Global Economic Justice (Download PDF)
    Nicolaus Tideman

  • Property Rights and Public Administration (Download PDF)
    Malcolm Hill

  • Territorial Acquisition (Download PDF)
    A taxonomy of tenure by humans and other species
    Herbert Barry III

  • Herbert Spencer (Download PDF)
    The shaming of the science of society
    Fred Harrison

  • The Geophilos Interrogation - Taxation & Ideology

    • A Coming Tax Revolution? by Vincent Cable MP (Download PDF)

    • The Psychopathology of Taxation by Fred Harrison (Download PDF)

    • General Equilibrium Models & Tax Policy Analysis by Florenz Plassmann (Download PDF)

  • BOOK REVIEW: George Miller on Michael Zweig’s Power and Capitalism (Download PDF)
WORKSHOP

NAVIGATING THE DEPRESSION OF 2010

24 January 2009

The Renegade Economist team invites you to draw upon their knowledge and insight.

This one-day London workshop decodes the political spin and provides tools to navigate the contraction. Anticipating shifts in the economy empowers your decision-making.

Please email us to receive details of the programme and speakers.