One Second

When you are counting down to a catastrophe, or collapse, or a nuclear explosion, there is little difference between the second that separates 9 seconds and 10 seconds to go from the second that separates 89 seconds and 90 seconds to go. The ticking continues. The countdown goes on.

Anyone hearing that another second has ticked down towards doomsday should be concerned.

And that is what happened this week when the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists¹ revealed how close to midnight the Doomsday Clock now is. (Midnight is the metaphorical time at which doomsday occurs.)

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been using the Doomsday Clock as a graphical way to illustrate how close the world is to doomsday since 1945. That is eighty years’ worth of watching the state of the world and how perilous it is, or isn’t.

This year (2025) they moved the clock from 90 seconds (one and a half minutes) before midnight to 89 seconds before midnight. A shift of just one second.

But, that one second is significant.

89 seconds is the closest the Doomsday Clock has ever been to midnight. The closest in eighty years!

In 2023 the hands of the clock were moved to 90 seconds before midnight; then, the closest ever to midnight. In 2024 the time remained at 90 seconds to midnight. Then this year, in a move of just one second, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have shown just how concerned they are.

Amongst the reasons for the shift of that one second are:

·       Continued failure by national leaders and countries to address the issues raised by scientists over the past year.

·       The war in Ukraine

·       Conflict in the Middle East

·       Increasing size of nuclear arsenals

·       Rise in global temperature leading to increased climate impacts

·       Climate change given low priority by world leaders

·       Rapid advances in AI increasing the risk of terrorism

Any one of these threats is reason for concern. Lumped together we should be greatly concerned, for the threats do not function in isolation from each other. They interact and mutually enhance the dangers of each other.

One second may not sound like much. But when we are running out of time each second counts.

Notes:

1. https://thebulletin.org/

Machiavelli’s Legacy: Deserved or Not?

Niccolò Machiavelli

What other personal name could be more associated with many of the nasty sides of human behaviour than that of Niccolò Machiavelli. His name is synonymous with traits such as ruthlessness, cruelty, manipulation, deceit, despotism, and fear. Indeed, the word machiavellian has now become a synonym for these traits.

A diplomat, philosopher, author, and historian, Machiavelli lived during the Italian Renaissance and is best known as the author of The Prince.¹

In that book, Machiavelli enunciated his ideas about what it takes to be a ruler and/or leader in those times. He has been called the ‘Father of political philosophy.’ His writings, especially The Prince, became foundation stones of politics from his time onwards. We still see his ideas played out in the actions of rulers all around the world today.

Male leaders in particular aim to be seen as tough, uncompromising, and decisive. All qualities that Machiavelli would have admired. Of course, female leaders have also attempted to rule in likewise manners. The UK’s Margaret Thatcher comes to mind; she wasn’t nicknamed the Iron Lady for nothing.

When Machiavelli was writing The Prince sometime around 1513 (although not published until 1532 – 5 years after his death) Italy was divided into a number of kingdoms, duchies, republics, and states – notably the Kingdom of Naples, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Florence, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Sicily. These various regions were constantly forming and unforming alliances and attacking one another.

Machiavelli’s attempts then to summarise and define the qualities of a leader under those circumstances becomes obvious. His intention was to provide leaders with means by which they could maintain their position of authority.

When viewed at from this distance, five centuries later, Machiavelli may not deserve his legacy,

However, as with so much, context is everything.

Let us consider a few of Machiavelli’s statements. The best-known Machiavellian maxim is the end justifies the means. For centuries this statement has enjoyed an almost self-obvious truthfulness about it. Yet, it is unhelpful and flawed. A whole systems understanding of the world and how it works recognises that ends and means are not discrete events but, rather, describe portions of the same continuous whole. Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, asserts that ‘means are ends in the making.’

In today’s highly connected, and increasingly polarised, this Machiavellian axiom is extremely unhelpful.

Some lesser-known statements from The Prince include: 1. ‘A leader mustn’t worry about being labelled cruel when it is a question of keeping his subjects loyal and united.’ 2. ‘It is a natural and ordinary desire to acquire.’ 3. ‘Is it better to be loved rather than feared?... since they don’t go together easily, if you have to choose, it’s much safer to be feared than loved.’ 4. ‘…fortune is female and if you want to stay on top of her you have to slap and thrust.’

Each of these statements, when applied in today’s world, tend only to exacerbate polarisation, violence, and hatred. The fourth of these statements, although Machiavelli was using it metaphorically (applying his comment to fortune) it does display the manner in which women were treated at that time. Today this would be outright misogyny.

Within our cultural psyche we tend to pay more attention to negative thoughts than towards positive ones. This negativity bias is an evolutionary adaptation. Our survival once was more guaranteed if we paid greater attention to perceived threats than if we ignored them (and even more so if we paid attention to the juicy fruit hanging from the tree instead!)

Thus it is with Machiavelli’s writings. We pay more attention to his negative expressions, even though circumstances have changed.

Consequently, with Machiavelli’s writing being still quoted and applied to positions of leadership today, we must view Machiavelli’s negative legacy as deserving.

In other words, the word machiavellian remains a synonym for cruelty, misogyny, deceit, manipulation, despotism, violence, and fear.

Sadly, leaders and rulers of today keep listening to the advice of Machiavelli.

Notes:

1. Quotations taken from the Penguin Classics edition of Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, UK, 2014.

Castles, Forts, and Walled Cities

Imagine you were set down in a region of the world where you had no idea where you were, no idea of which country or indeed even which continent. As you wander about you notice that there are many castles, forts, and walled cities dotted throughout the countryside.

What would you deduce from this about the occupants of this region?

One thing that you might infer is that warfare is a recurrent activity.

Such a situation is the reality for one specific part of the world.

A plot of the world’s castles, forts, and walled cities is a graphic illustration. Around 98% of all the castles, forts, and walled cities of the world are located in the region of the world to the west of the two big rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates, and to the north of the Mediterranean Sea. Many of the remaining 2%, although located in other parts of the world, were built following European/western colonisation of these areas. For example, USA has more than 300 castles, all of them built since the first European colonisers arrived.

This is the region of the world in which warfare took hold in a significant and meaningful manner.

It is often claimed that warfare is an innate human trait. Humanity has been engaged in warfare since time began it is said. If not that long ago, then at least over the past 15,000 to 20,000 years.

Yet, such an assertion is a Eurocentric one. There remains an assumption that because something has been experienced by, and applied by, those of European descent then it must relate to the whole of humanity.

But, as the example above shows, this is clearly not the case. Indeed, Europe is atypical in the building of castles, forts, and walled cities. Europe is also atypically warlike.

So, what was going on in the hearts and minds of Europeans – especially the males of that region?

Native Americans have an answer. They call it wetiko¹ which Jack Forbes² defines as the disease of cannibalism without any sacredness and no respect for the cycle of life and death.

Paul Levy, in his book simply titled Wetiko³, describes wetiko as, ‘A contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind… (that) covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests.’

Locating the emergence of warfare within western culture does not mean that violence did not occur in other parts of the world. However, as Jack Forbes points out, ‘Non-wetikos may, at times, be cruel, but their cruelty is individual and sporadic, not part of a system of cruelty.’⁴ Furthermore, Jack Forbes recognises that not all Europeans show wetiko tendencies, but that European culture is the major carrier of the wetiko disease.

That wetiko is a systematic psycho-spiritual disease and is unconsciously carried by one identifiable culture is what makes it so pernicious. It seeps and creeps into the psyche and belief systems of individuals and societies within that culture. Wetiko manifests, as Paul Levy notes, ‘as a cannibalising force driven by insatiable greed, appetite without satisfaction, consumption as an end in itself, and war for its own sake, against other tribes, species, and nature, and even against the individual’s own humanity.’

Wetiko, as Forbes and Levy describe it, is a major contributor to warfare.

And, castles, forts, and walled cities illustrate graphically where it originated.

Notes:

1. The word appears in many native North American languages, for example: wendigo, windego, windago, windiga, wentiko, wijigo, windagoo, and many others, indicating that the concept was widely known throughout the continent.

2. Jack Forbes was a prominent author, activist, and historian. Although identifying as of Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape descent he did not enrol in any native American nation.

3. Paul Levy, Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus that Plagues Our World, Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2021

4. Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism, Seven Stories Press, New York, London, Melbourne, Toronto, Revised Edition, 2008. First published 1992.

Fragments and Parts

David Bohm

In May 1984 a group of forty people of varying age, nationality, and professions met with Professor David Bohm to converse with him about his theories of the implicate and explicate order of the universe. Over the course of a weekend, this ground-breaking conversation was recorded, then transcribed, and published as the book Unfolding Meaning.¹

David Bohm (1917 – 1992) is one of many distinguished theoretical physicists that emerged between the late 19^th century and the middle of the 20^th century. Along with such well-known physicists as Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Pauli, and others, Bohm helped pioneer concepts in quantum physics, relativity, and the wave-particle duality.

Together these theoretical physicists also began to recognise, and explain, that things were not always as they seem. Bohm, as with others, also recognised that attempting to discover the workings of the cosmos (and the human mind in Bohm’s case) could not be done by looking at the world piece by piece. Things were much more intricately linked, and entangled, than a mechanistic worldview could explain.

Early in the dialogues Bohm noted that too often the world was viewed through a mechanistic lens. In expanding upon this he stated that there was a ‘…far reaching and pervasive fragmentation that arises out of the mechanistic world view.’ He went on to distinguish between a fragment and a part.

He used a metaphor to do so. ‘To hit a watch with a hammer would not produce parts, but fragments that are separated in ways that are not significantly related to the structure of the watch.’²

Indeed, as Bohm noted, the words fragment and part both come to us from Latin. The Latin word fragmentum means a piece broken off. The Latin word partum, however, means a portion of a whole. Quite different meanings and consequences.

After many centuries of breaking up phenomena and trying to explain the resultant mess, at least some sectors of the scientific world are realising that phenomena cannot be broken; a holistic, systems view, must be adopted.

The next step must be for other fields of human endeavour (e.g. economics, politics, business, education, and health) to recognise this as well.

The step after that is to remove the splitting of human endeavours into fragments and realise that humanity is part of this wonderful body called nature.

Notes:

1. David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm, Ark Paperbacks, London & New York, 1987

2. p.23