Insecurity reigns. Traditions--and in particular, our Judaeo-Christian spiritual life-models--are no longer relevant to society as a whole, and they have left an untenable void, which is not filled by rampant consumerism. A misguided minority retrench reactively into regressive ideologies, fundamentalism and neo-fascism and threaten what stability we have with sinister plots for random episodes of mass destruction.
Meanwhile, another minority is turning to other means of support: drug use is growing exponentially and has led to an unprecedented upsurge of violent crime and social unrest.
To top it all, the global economy is behaving unpredictably and people no longer feel secure in their jobs.
Intensive farming methods have denuded the soil while sustaining improbably large populations, causing immense overcrowding and helping alter weather patterns, which are now totally unpredictable. The ice-caps are melting, even showing signs of meltdown on the continental shelves, possibly leading to sea level rises of up to 500 feet, thus threatening to submerge every major population centre other than Denver and La Paz.
Why the insecurity? Well, look at the statistics: according to Thom Hartmann's The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, in the past 24 hours, approximately 12 million tons of toxic waste have been pumped into the atmosphere, 48,000 people have starved to death (the majority children), 160 plant or animal species have been driven to extinction and rainforest acreage the size of Wales has been irreversibly destroyed.
Antibiotic superbugs and old diseases such as TB, as well as HIV and Hepatitis C are spreading at uncontrollable rates globally.
And oil, the very lifeblood of the global economy, upon which we have grown utterly reliant for our survival, will, at the most optimistic estimates by the oil industry itself, have run dry within 40 years.
The leaders needed to steer us through such challenging times are little in evidence. We have cosmetic surgeons for politicians, when what we need are brain, heart and liver transplant specialists.
As a result, though easily distracted into denial by political spin, football, soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip, the population instinctively feels our predicament, just as animals instinctively feel an earthquake coming.
This engenders extreme insecurity at the most profound existential level, albeit unconscious in the majority.
It is no wonder paranoia rules the atmosphere and one in four is on antidepressants.
We are living in an unsustainable reality on an overdraft we have absolutely no chance of ever repaying. As a result, people feel fundamentally disempowered and without even a plausible sense of hope for a brighter future.
A pretty dismal scenario, you will concede. But, darkness never comes without light, and since the mid 60s, there has been an explosion of interest in alternative ways to re-empower yourself, both on a personal level through ancient and modern self-help disciplines and on a social level, through the exploration of sustainable food and energy sources, holistic communities and even political conflict resolution.
Most self-help systems have their roots in Oriental culture, specifically, Taoist, Buddhist and Hindu, and thus offer a fresh, though tried and tested cosmological map with which to fill the existential void. It is a map therefore with thousands of years of agreement behind it, so it is no mystery that the initial uptake during the hippie era was so great. This established cultural base for alternative approaches to personal and social health, which soon found its way into opinion-forming and media circles, as does any new movement. Then followed wave after wave of increasing media focus on alternative health systems, spurring ever increasing public interest.
This has been helped along by peoples' growing frustration with many aspects of western medicine, finding it useless in many respects and more of a distribution system for pharmaceuticals than one for healing people.
In the end, the individual has to reclaim responsibility for his or her life on every level: the spiritual, mental, physical and social. It is this power over your future that, at their best, alternative disciplines offer. At their worst, of course, they represent just another marketing scam.
Barefoot Doctor is a columnist on the Observer. www.barefootdoctor.tv
COPYRIGHT 2002 New Statesman, Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
