p33 Soon to Come

Winter Parliament

By John Taylor; 2008 March 09, 08 Ala, 164 BE

Sensitized by the fast, I thought I would pull out my antennae and indulge in some prognostication. This is part of the fast's goal of getting us ready for the new B.E. year... So here is how I imagine how a future news magazine might sum up the events of the next decade, perhaps if it were written on the centenary of the Ascension of Abdu'l-Baha in 2021.

The Winter Parliament Soon to Come

In the year 2015, on the centenary of Abdu'l-Baha's Tablets of the Divine Plan, the Greenland ice sheet slipped into the sea, raising sea levels precipitately around the world. As expected, this caused massive destruction on a global scale, not to one country or one coastline but all at once. With all the planning and initiative in the world, the dislocation of this capital "T" Tsunami was too sudden to cope with; suffering resulted in anger and conflicts broke out around the world. There was great loss of life.

This was the first truly global disaster. By its very nature it demanded a response on more than a regional level. Ways and means had to be rapidly devised to take in the sudden influx of millions of refugees from coastal areas. At the same time, in order to prevent further global warming and the now seemingly inevitable melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, industry had to switch over immediately to carbon-neutral energy sources.

But still, it turned out much better than it might have.

Ten years before the Tsunami, a setback like this might have been just another turn of the screw for "disaster capitalism," the opportunism of a wealthy elite who, while discouraging democratic planning, used their own resources to turn the aftershocks of wars and other cataclysmic events into profit. It was clear that disaster capitalism was unjust, and that its materialist philosophy was just another obsolete ideology that did not work.

It was seen that there is no substitute for large numbers of people -- and not only the educated and privileged, or those in so-called "developed" countries -- learning to plan, consult and work together under a world embracing government. Though it was impossible for those living through it at the time to take all this in coherently, later historians observed that this cataclysmic event, the Tsunami, marked the death knell of an old order dominated by materialism and the inauguration of a new order based upon principle.

In order to coordinate the radical changes demanded by this crisis, a continentally-based World Federation was formed on the anniversary of the Armistice ending World War One. Its mandate was based on an ideal never before implemented: true representation by population. The situation demanded such an unprecedented mandate because the entire economy had to be made over, as radically as if in preparation for war.

The parliament's initial to do list was a long one. It had to convert from hydrocarbons to an all-electric industrial base running solely on renewables like geothermal, solar and wind energy. In order to make for a more benign human impact on the environment, higher-density construction methods had to be adopted, the transport system integrated by full containerization connected by multi-modal interfaces; agriculture had to be made into a more diverse, organic and sustainable activity. And, most challenging of all, the cornerstone of kleptocracy, exclusive proprietorship, had to be replaced.

Trusteeship was to replace ownership.

This meant combining the oldest ways, communal values of the world's aboriginal peoples with the newest. An Internet-based stock market of goods, manufacture and services applied banks of supercomputers to decide whether each item was to be used, reused, recycled or replaced. While personal ownership was not completely abolished, the economy had now to encourage the more environmentally friendly alternative of trusteeship instead. An entrepreneur could lease, rent or borrow goods and services in order to create new wealth, which was systematically fed back to the community and workers who sustain his or her enterprise. Algorithms and formulas, both fixed and variable, projected onto openly accessed computer-generated displays, made all costs, even costs formerly hidden, clear from the start.

This was not as difficult or hard to implement as might have been expected, since the old exclusionary system of ownership had clearly led to the corrupt order of unfettered capitalism backed by political despotism that had caused the Tsunami in the first place. This left such a bad taste in people's mouths that the new system of trusteeship was eagerly adopted. The old materialist ideology was abandoned as decisively as communism, fascism, imperialism, nationalism and all the substitutes for thought that preceded them.

The Tsunami made people of all cultures conscious of the need to take their destiny into their own hands and use principle, individual vigilance combined with a strong, democratic international authority, to build a new order. The result was a universal gathering, a parliament of humanity, known as:

The Winter Parliament

Once inaugurated, it met on an ongoing basis, year round, always in winter. It did this by alternating among five southerly and five northerly continents. From April to September, when it is winter in the southern hemisphere, the gathering was held in one of the five southern continents (based on population as well as geography), either India, Indonesia, Africa, South America or Australia. When it is cold in the northern hemisphere, from October to March, sessions were held in one of the five northern continents, North America, Europe, the Middle East, China and the Far East.

Because of the urgent needs of the refugee crisis, each sitting of the world parliament was held in a new city built according to world standard architecture. Each new city showcased the latest technical means for accomplishing the goals of the Parliament. When each winter session was over, the parliament's newly abandoned facilities were settled, largely by the coastal refugees most in need. Because the world parliament left in local springtime, the new city dwellers had the chance to plant their first crops in the surrounding fields, using the newly empty facilities. The effectiveness of the cities buildings and designs was closely monitored by scientists, who constantly improved construction methods each time the world capital moved to the next continent.