| When a tree has fulfilled its intrinsic potentialities, we say it has attained its climax. It then dies and falls. When people have spent their individual energy supply, they grow old and die. When, over the next ten billion years, the sun exhausts its stock of hydrogen and, later, of helium, it will become a shining star and die, slowly turning into a white dwarf and, ultimately, a black hole—but having earlier dragged into itself the entire solar system and our own planet earth. The entire universe and each one of its beings, particularly the organic ones, fall under the law of entropy. They have limited potentialities: one day they will all disappear. Doesn't the same thing happen with social systems? Isn't our system of social intercourse losing or wasting its potentialities and on the way to dissolution? It is undoubtedly facing a major crisis. The question is, is it a crisis of circumstance that, once overcome, will usher in a new age of prosperity, or is it a structural crisis paving the way for a terminal outcome in an intensive care unit? I adopt the hypothesis that we are in the heart of a structural and terminal crisis. It is structural because it affects every aspect, as bacteria take over an entire organism, producing septicemia and, eventually, death. And it is terminal because it represents the depletion of a paradigm—of all energies, all dreams and all strategies that might be able to cope with the system's own internal contradictions. The system marches irrevocably towards death. Nothing can stop this. Is it the end of the world, then? Yes and no. Yes, because it represents the end of this kind of world. No, because the world will go on. The end will bring forth the opportunity for a new world to emerge, that is to say, a new civilizing standard capable of providing us with a new meaning to life and all the peoples of the earth with a new horizon of hope for humankind. This dual perspective of death and life is present in the original Sanskrit meaning of the word crisis. Crisis derives from kir or krl—to cleanse and purify. There is an undeniable affinity between crisis and crucible. The severe process of purification implies death and rebirth: the death of worthless gangue, of aggregates, of contingency; and the rebirth of the gist, of essence, of necessity. Whatever is put into the crucible of a crisis, and remains, acquires the potential or virtuality of founding a new future. It is a catharsis we are undergoing at the present moment. Two Mortal Crises in the Current System Two crises have arisen from our current system of social intercourse, two crises that are unsolvable by the system's intrinsic resources: the social crisis and the ecological crisis. The social crisis plots the rich against the poor as never before in the history of humankind. The production process, by using automated technologies, can produce goods and services with extreme swiftness and on an ever-increasing scale. However, these goods are appropriated exclusively by a small elite of nations or by the upper classes in poor, dependent countries. This logic gives rise to an immeasurable injustice and a widening chasm between the haves and the have-nots. |
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