The Progress of Dimensional Man
Like many of the 20th Century’s great historical figures, Peter Drucker lived on the cusp in man’s perceptual evolution. The 1900’s can in hindsight be seen as a time for which the old tools of perception and conception were inadequate, and the new tools were exponentially more dangerous than any that had existed before.
Oppenheimer, Freud, Hitler, Drucker: all possessed means for which the ends were unforeseeable. Stalin, Mao, Roosevelt, Ford, Rockefeller and others were joined together in a configuration that was unimaginable a hundred years prior. The power of people to create and destroy had finally encompassed the planet. The atom bomb was not only a turning point in the collective topology of Japan. Hiroshima marked the turning point of all of Man. As Oppenheimer remarked, “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,” a quote from the Bhagavad Gita.
All the effects of decisions and proclamations by leaders of religions, governments and businesses in human history were converging on a point. The ideas and migrations of individuals and collectives were simultaneously yielding solutions and generating problems by orders of magnitude in pace and scale. The progression became exponential and geometric in its movement and depth, seemingly infinitely expanding and contracting consequentially.
The policies and decisions of leaders no longer affected the lives of the immediate hundreds or thousands of people. They affected millions and then billions.
Leaders tried to solve problems with command and control techniques. They employed psychology and planned obsolescence. They created chaos, psychotics, and the slacker.
In the end, the great leaders of the world generated a reactionary backlash that introduced a new term to the English language: “the suicide bomber.” Man individually learned to model himself in alignment with the New World Order. Men, women and children had been redesigned in the collective topology as “Hiroshimas of One,” to paraphrase the US Army ad campaign. Incidentally, the US Army has discovered no innovation to defeat the Hiroshima of One.
The world’s greatest fear is a small band of suicide bombers, eyes alight with religious fervor, pushing the buttons on the atom bombs strapped to their chests. Finally, the Age of Epistemological Superiority, spanning at least two thousand years, will culminate with the confrontation between the Davos man and the WMD-strapped suicide bomber.
If man will survive, it will be as dimensional man. If America is to survive, it will be without private ownership or corporate personhood to quell the progress of dimensional man. This is our new Manifest Destiny: to choose between the two futures.
