An economic forum took place in Davos in January. Describing his feelings on the event, head of Rosnano Anatoly Chubais said that it was for the second time in his participation in these meetings that he saw how horrified were participants by the approaching out of nowhere catastrophe.
They say that the same feeling was shared by participants of the Munich Security Conference held in mid-February. They were presented with the 90 page report, whose authors tried to collect and analyse the most important, in their view, threats to peace and the established world order.
The authors of the report perceive the current situation as very apocalyptic end of the familiar and comfortable world for them. They are disturbed by the loss of unconditional domination of so-called "Liberal values," the split within the EU, the coming to power of Donald Trump in the US, the actions of the banned in Russia ISIS, the growing tension in the Pacific region and many other issues. However, the report’s common thread is that Russia is to blame for many if not all of the misfortunes that have struck the world.
- Probably, it's time for us to get used to the fact that our country in the eyes of the West will always be the homeland of bears walking through the streets and wild barbarian hordes.
The problem lies elsewhere. The problem is that basing on false assumptions of the ruling ideology, Western analysts risk missing -- and do miss -- really serious dangers threatening the humanity.
- What is the report about? What has frightened the authors?
Well, for example, the authors of the report consider information security as the serious threat to Western civilization. And they mention the wide spread of "fake" false news. Moreover, they themselves immediately quote one of them: allegedly the budget of the Russian TV channel RT, financed by the Kremlin, amounted to 400 million euros. The actual amount is only half of that and this data is in the public domain. But the authors caught red handed were not embarrassed at all. They just apologized without making any amendments to the multi-page work.
- Yes, I know. They do not even mention, for example, the US Federal Communications Commission, which $750 million budget apparently does not bother them and they see the threat only in the Russian media?
This doublethink has long become part of the Western mentality. I know this from my own experience. According to the US Department of State, Ilyumzhinov deserves to be sanctioned because someone wrote something about alleged links between me and the legitimate authorities of the Syrian Arab Republic! And the US Treasury, forgetting about the presumption of innocence and without making a single attempt to see the clearer picture, imposed sanctions against me. However, nobody pays attention to the widely circulated photo of the meeting between US Senator John McCain and representatives of the very terrorist organization that scared the authors of the Munich’s report!
Meanwhile, the authors of the report do not point to really serious threats. Should not every sane person on Earth be worried about the growth of terrorist attacks around the world?
However, there is something that cannot be ignored: Russian President Vladimir Putin warned about these threats to the world peace at the Munich conference ten years ago. Even then, he said that the unipolar world had failed. It has nothing to do with democracy that implies majority power and minority rights. Putin warned that the world order based on the strength of one sovereign and a single ideology is dangerous not only for the entire world but for the sovereign itself by inevitably destroying it from within.
However, our President was not heard then. They did not want to hear. His speech calling for a pooling of efforts in the fight against real but not imaginary threats was considered as the Russia's claim for a return to the dominant role. As a result, Western politicians only intensified anti-Russian rhetoric. And now they wonder why the world has come to such a deplorable state.
It is interesting that the authors of the Munich report mention outbreaks of dangerous diseases that turn into a pandemic among other threats to civilization. Indeed, such threats are more real for the modern world, in which people move quickly from one point to another, than the victorious march of plague across Europe in the Middle Ages. But would this threat be so significant if at least half of the money, which our countries have spent to increasingly protect from each other, has been spent on health care in those ten years that passed since Putin's speech?
- Two years ago, astrophysicist Steven Hoking has listed a number of threats that may destroy humanity in the next 200 years.
Well, if we exclude from this series such exotic phenomena as the outburst of a supernova near the Sun or the aggression of extra-terrestrial civilizations this list will contain only those threats that were caused by humanity. This is a massive use of nuclear or biological weapons, climate change due to industrial development (which is caused by an irrepressible consumerism), etc.
- As a recipe for the survival of mankind, Hawking suggests taking up a programme to explore other worlds.
Even if we start to fly to Alpha Centauri -- the closest star to our planetary system -- will this significantly help us provided that we take all the unresolved problems with us?"
Not having learned to hear each other and to respect the interests of the opponent, not knowing how to calculate the consequences of our actions, not realizing our share of responsibility for everything that happens not only in our world but in the whole universe, without developing spiritually, without learning to live in harmony with nature and without limiting our material needs we will only infect another planet with our sores and soon will have to look for another world.
-Is it time to prepare to flee to another planet?
No, a flight is not an option. Further development of science and technology also cannot be considered a way out. As long as most people are on a primitive spiritual and conscious level, breakthrough discoveries will only give rise to new troubles.
The head of SpaceX and Tesla companies Ilon Mask spoke about his vision of threats simultaneously with Hawking. Two years ago, he warned that the development of artificial intelligence is "akin to summoning the demon" and today, many scientists and economists claim that robots will soon deprive hundreds of millions of people of their work. That, of course, will only worsen the existing problems and even add diversity to them.
I'm not saying that we should completely stop scientific and technological progress: it's simply impossible. But, it seems, it's time for us to seriously take up the progress of the man himself. We must put the development of human intelligence in the first place. We shall develop spirituality and understand our place in this universe.
I do not know a better tool than chess, which is just as effective in developing not only the intellect but also many other aspects of human nature. Therefore, we in FIDE declared the slogan "one billion chess players -- one billion smart people". I think we are close enough to this goal. And this gives us some hope that we will still be able to overcome the current crisis, which frightened the participants of Davos and Munich conferences.
Humanity -- even the richest and most successful of its representatives -- will not be able to run from their problems to either Mars or Alpha Centauri. They need to be solved here on the Earth. And by us all together.