Ladies and Gentlemen,
When speaking about Agenda 21, the main form of attack coming toward us is the accusation of conspiratorial thinking. What they say about us is that we either misread or misinterpret the tenets of humanity's greatest plan for evolution. Essentially, we are accused of not knowing what we're speaking about and making things up.
So, let's first remember the fact that the UN Agenda 21 or the Agenda for the 21st Century, is a plan of action to build a global partnership for sustainable development, signed at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, enlarged in its initial scope by the Millennium goals in 2000 and then, taken a few steps forward by the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
We went from the initial 27 principles of sustainable development to the 8 UN Millennium Goals and then, in 2015, to the Agenda 2030 17 goals, 169 targets, 230 indicators, 193 countries in on it and 1,5 trillion dollars/year estimated cost for reaching all SDGs.
All in the name of fighting poverty and hunger, improving health and education, protecting the environment, managing climate change, reducing inequality, and bringing peace and justice to the world. End quote.
Now, I ask you: why wouldn't we cheer for the SDGs? Are we evil contrarians, opposing just for the sake of it? Are we cheering for poverty?
Well, no, we are not. So what are we seeing and they are not? What are they choosing not to see?
We Romanians have a saying: It is the unseen part which is decisive in all matters. A Romanian sociologist made an angry observation about a century ago, after studying folklore and the rural way of life. He said it is the city and its material wealth that see all the hunger and the despair, all the famine deaths, not the village where nobody ever dies of famine and continuously generates culture, folklore, beauty and good spirits.
Now how could this be? Well, in order to briefly answer that, I will say one thing about complex systems and another about a book I read a while ago, about a working framework for human error.
First let's bring about a book written by James Reason called Human Error, where he goes on to classify errors and failures of human experience and comes to a certain taxonomy that is of interest to us. So after reading about Human failures, Organizational failures, Technical failures, Strategic failures, Operational failures, Systemic failures and so on, we arrive at the distinction between active failures and latent failures.
Active failures are mistakes or errors that are made by people while operating a system. These are the "bad decisions" and "mistakes" that we typically think of when we talk about failure.
Latent failures are flaws in the design or construction of a system that can lead to accidents and suffering if they are not caught and corrected. Bad design is often about bad planning, but not always, bad design may also be about good technical planning that is a cultural misfit.
Complex systems, such as human communities, societies or civilizations, have one very interesting characteristic. Complexity is the amount of information necessary to describe a system. All complex systems have what are known to be emergent properties. In the theory of systems, the emergent properties are those that arise from the non-linear interactions of the parts of the system but are not present in any of the individual parts. Let's think about the immune system that is able to fight off infections, the braincells that generate emotions, and feelings.
When we mix these two concepts together we end up with what I define to be: emergent failures. These are negative consequences losely related to bad design, negligence or breach of duty to care, consequences that do not necessarily stem out of one bad action, one bad policy, one bad principle or one bad agenda. Emergent failures are not the same as policrises because we do not talk about bad outcomes that stem out of crises that compute, that build one on another, and scale up to a catastrophic outcome.
Emergent failures are a totaly new characteristic of a disrupted system. They are of latent nature but we can objectively observe the manifestation of emergent failures as phenomenon of political, economic or social nature: such as demographic colapse, increase of predatory lending, fraying of moral integrity, breakdown of public services, the epidemic of lonliness, the return of colonial politics through Agenda 21 and so on.
If these are all emergent failures, then why are we fighting over the relevance of one or another harmfull individual component of the entire system? Is the evil stemming out of one precise economic policy, phone addiction, populism, fake news and conspiracies? is the evil generated by bad political action, by will to yeild power, by greed?
Or, are we better off understanding that technocracy and transhumanism are the new emergent failures of our way of living and gouverning our lives? The emergent failure of the temporary victory of liberalism?
Isn't this the unseen, decisive part of the centralising UN Agenda that we opose? Rather than denouncing the active mistakes or the bad planning with the 169 goals and 230 indicators, aren't we all just experiencing the failure and the un-fulfillment of its promise?
I will end abruptly by saying that failure of this magnitude cannot be resolved with political action but, as a 500 years old political handbook written by a romanian prince that is also an orthodox saint has shown, failure and unfullfilment get healed by intentional mercifull exercise in all aspects of life. Could this be so?
Well, as christians, we shall know it the by their fruits, not by studying the botanical scriptic descriptions.
Thank you so much!
