His thesis can best be summed up as follows: 1) The idea of progress, especially global progress, is logically incoherent and inconsistent, 2) what he terms "ancient wisdom" (i.e. our oldest traditions) has far more to offer than modern science and philosophy does, and 3) that "animate life thrives on a fertile balance of creation and destruction, joy and suffering, good and evil", as one reviewer succinctly and eloquently puts it. He believes that our civilization will inevitably collapse for a variety of reasons, just like every other civilization before us. And granted, he does indeed make some good points here and there. But the one point that he misses turns out to be the most crucial one of all--the influence of patriarchy and the "dominator" paradigm that goes along with it. The entire knowledge base (both ancient and modern) that is the foundation for his thesis orignated during a time when MEN have been in charge, and is thus tainted as result.
Garbage in, garbage out. And a lot of linear thinking.
As Riane Eisler has noted in her book The Chalice and the Blade, patriarchy and the "dominator" model was NOT always the way. In fact, it can be seen as a sort of aberration for the past few thousand years that is not at all timeless. It has a beginning, a few thousand years ago, and it has an end, which will be coming very soon. William Bond has further studied and refined the ideas of this development, as has Guru Rasa von Werder, along with others as well. As all of the futurists are saying now, the future belongs to Women. And Women will soon reclaim their rightful place as the new leaders of the free world. Either that, or we all go extinct, basically.
And the late, great Buckminster Fuller, the Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century must really be spinning in his grave due to Thomsen's tome as well. Not only did he believe that Women should (and ultimately will) rule the world, but also that a world of abundance for all is certainly possible under what he calls the "feminine paradigm of leadership". And the resources and technology to eradicate poverty worldwide, and with no further harm to the environment, certainly do exist, but the mostly male oligarchs in power now simply choose not to do so. In their capricious zeal to use artificial scarcity to "lord it over" the rest of us, these oligarchs are willing to literally let the world burn before they share the wealth. As I like to say, mechanization is no match for the Machiavellian machinations of the moneyed elites.
And lest anyone worry about the possibility that eradicating poverty worldwide will lead to a lack of natural selection and thus accumulation of deleterious genetic mutations, to that I say, just look around you. There is clearly no shortage of candidates for Darwin Awards, and most of them seem to be above (sometimes well above) the poverty line. Natural selection may be different, but it will most certainly still exist--as long as individual rights exist, at least. (Self-determination can sometimes lead to self-termination.) In fact, it reeks of first-world privilege to even consider worrying about such a thing at all. And to quote Charles Darwin himself, in fact:
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
And those institutions, we have learned, are the very brainchildren of patriarchy: capitalism, tyranny, oligarchy, and the scarcity mentality. The latter of which especially, which rather ironically coexists with capitalism and patriarchy's addiction to growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell which eventually kills its host. That includes both population growth (from treating Women like brood mares) as well as economic growth (from treating men--and often Women too--like work horses). It is literally the logic of a Ponzi scheme, and those historically don't end very well.
The problem is quite literally man-made. And now is NOT the time to give up on progress, since we can no longer afford to continue with the same obsolete ways of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. Progress may not be linear, but it is literally our best (if not only) hope for the future.
So what are we waiting for? Let the planetary healing begin!
