On at least three accounts, the world witnessed the effect of the invisible links that tie us into a single system. In the two World Wars, virtually entire continents engaged in active fighting. The Great Depression sent multiple financial tsunami waves across the globe, destroying the lives and incomes of millions. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Since the U.S. was the major creditor and financier of postwar [WWI] Europe, the U.S. financial breakdown precipitated economic failures around the world... Isolationism spread as nations sought to protect domestic production by imposing tariffs and quotas, ultimately reducing the value of international trade by more than half by 1932.” [130]
Yet, despite the evidence, humanity did not recognize that it was a closed, interdependent system. Each time adversities unfolded, countries turned to protectionism and isolation by raising tariffs, employing punitive measures against the apparent wrongdoers, and ignoring or overlooking the fact that adversities are never created or executed by a single culprit. Rather, they have always been the culmination of a prolonged process that involved many partakers.
Therefore, when you realize how deeply we are all connected, that at the deepest level, we are actually a single entity, it becomes very hard to point a blaming finger at any one perpetrator. At that point, you begin to examine issues and situations from a broader perspective, understanding that what each of us does affects every person in the world. But for this, one must be aware that all people form a single soul (desire to receive), whose self-centered modus operandi blinds its parts to the truth of their interconnectedness and interdependence.
For as long as humanity was evolving under the influence of desires Zero through Two, our obliviousness to our interconnectedness was tolerable. In Stage Zero, there was basically no discernible desire to receive; man was a part of Nature. In Stage One, during Abraham's time, egoism appeared for the first time. Yet, at that point, humanity was in its infancy and there was no danger of us causing irreversible harm to ourselves or to the environment. In Stage Two, there was evidently more egoism but it, too, was managed, primarily by religion, as we have shown in Chapter 7.
In Stage Three, the desire to receive became active. As a result, since the debut of Stage Three in the late Middle Ages, humanity has launched a frenzy of accelerating development and growth which have now reached an uncontrollable rate. As we will see below, this rate of growth has long been recognized by science, as well as by Kabbalah.
In the previous chapter, we cited researchers’ observations that humanity is advancing at an exponential rate. But perhaps the most compelling evidence of science’s recognition of this trend is that of Charles Darwin. Through his observations and those of his predecessors, we learn that exponential growth is not a recent phenomenon. Instead, exponential growth is how the whole of Nature works.
In On the Origin of the Species, Darwin discusses exponential growth and quotes Swedish botanist, Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), who also observed this pattern: “There is no exception to the rule that every organic being increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny. Linnaeus has calculated that if an annual plant produced only two seeds—and there is no plant so unproductive as this—and their seedlings next year produced two, and so on, then in twenty years there would be a million plants” [131] (On the Origin of the Species, The Struggle For Existence, pp 117-119).
When desires are small, such as in plants, animals, or even in the early stages of the evolution of desires in humans, Nature finds ways to balance the exponential growth rate by presenting equally powerful elements such as competing plants and animals that form a delicate balance. This is why Darwin writes in the above quote, “Every organic being increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered…” [132]
Put differently, Nature’s own mechanisms guarantee that excess reproduction of plants and animals would be restrained. But when desires grow exponentially in a dominant species, and especially when they manifest a self-centered trend such as begun to manifest in Stage Three, the environmental balance is breached and a serious problem arises.
The Exponential Effect
To better understand the shift that unfolded during the 20th century and is unfolding still, we need to understand the nature of exponential growth. The decisive factor in exponential growth is not the initial quantity, but what is known as the “doubling time speed.” This refers to the length of time it takes for the amount of the measured object to double.
To understand the difference between exponential growth and linear growth, consider the following scenario: Mrs. A is a poor woman with only one dollar in her savings account. Mr. B, on the other hand, is much better off and has 10,000 dollars in his account. Both Mrs. A and Mr. B save what they can for a rainy day, and have thirty years of work ahead of them before they retire and collect their pension.
Mrs. A’s savings grow exponentially and her doubling time is one year. Thus, after one year she has two dollars in her account ($1 x 21(year) = $2); after two years she has four dollars ($1 x 22 (years) = $4), and after three years she still has a meager eight dollars in her account ($4 x 23(years) = $8).
Mr. B’s savings grow linearly, hence adding a fair 10,000 dollars to his account each year.
After five years, it seems as though Mrs. A is destined to a life of indigence, with only thirty-two dollars in her account, while Mr. B seems headed for a life of relative affluence with as much as 50,000 dollars in the bank. However, if they continue their savings curve for the entire thirty years until their retirement, at the end of the term, Mr. B will have accumulated a handsome sum of $10,000 x 30 years = $300,000 in his savings account.
Mrs. A, on the other hand, will be no longer poor. After thirty years of exponential saving, her account will have accumulated a whopping 1,073,741,824$ ($1 x 230)—over a billion dollars!
As we said above, Kabbalists have long known about the exponential pattern of growth in human nature. They described it in a frequently cited quote from the 1,500-year-old text, Midrash Rabbah: “If one has 100, he wishes to make them 200, and if he has 200, he wishes to make them 400.” [133]
Yet, there is a not-so-subtle difference between the exponential doubling time in an ordinary exponential formula and the Kabbalistic doubling time. In a traditional exponential formula, the doubling time is fixed. When the annual growth of a country’s GDP, for example, is seven percent, the doubling time for the GDP is ten years. Thus, economists can plan ahead even when the growth is fast, since it is still predictable and therefore somewhat manageable.
The growth of desires, however, is unpredictable. In desires, as the above quote demonstrates, what doubles the desire is not a fixed length of time, but the fact that one has satisfied one’s wish. Notice that the quote says, “If one has 100, he wishes to make them 200,” etc. This means that the condition for acquiring a twice-as-strong desire is the realization of the former one. In other words, you can never have what you want because the minute you have it, you want twice as much.
Thus, if Mrs. A’s desire to have one dollar in her account were satisfied, she would immediately want to have two dollars. And as soon as she had two, she would immediately want four dollars in her account. Hence, the Kabbalistic exponential formula dictates that Mrs. A’s desires would always double one step ahead of her accomplishments. Consequently, as her accomplishments doubled, so would her desires, leaving her not only with a sense of eternal deficiency, but one that doubled every time she obtained what she wanted.
If Mr. B’s wish was to save $10,000 each year, then for the past thirty years he has been a content (if not happy) man and can now retire in peace. Mrs. A, however, whose initial wish was for only one more dollar, has now become deficient of over a billion dollars, because this is what she has in her account.
What’s more, with the exponential growth of her wealth (and consequent dearth), she is destined to a life of hopeless pursuit of wealth and happiness, which will only lead to misery and pain for the rest of her life. The Babylonian Talmud says of one with this type of desire, “Anyone who is greater than his friend [in this case financially], his desire is greater than himself,” [134] and (Midrash Rabbah, as earlier cited), “One does not leave the world with half of one’s wish in one’s hand.” [135]
The World Wide Web
As we have just noted, human desires double every time we satisfy them. This forces us to continuously innovate, devise new instruments, explore new seas, and conceive new ideas in order to obtain what we want. During Stage Three in the evolution of desires, when desires first became active, the effects of the exponential pattern were clearly showing in the accelerated pace of progress.
Thus, in search of new avenues for pleasure, we have turned the world into a web of trade routes by air and by sea, and by numerous technologies of communication. The World Wide Web is not just a virtual entity that lives in our computers; it is a name that describes the reality of our lives. This was recognized many years ago by sociologists, as well as by Kabbalists.
Today, globalization and financial interdependence are well-recognized facts. Yet, globalization is far more than financial interdependence; it entails a profound mingling of culture, society, civilization as a whole, and in the end, a common fate. Professor of International Relations and prolific author on globalization, Anthony McGrew, made very clear statements about the impact of this process on human society. In an essay titled, “A Global Society?” he writes, “In comparison with previous historical epochs, the modern era has supported a progressive globalization of human affairs. The primary institutions of western modernity—industrialism, capitalism, and the nation-state—have acquired, throughout the twentieth century, a truly global reach. But this has not been achieved without enormous human cost… While early phases of globalization brought about the physical unification of the world, more recent phases have remade the world into a single global system in which previously distinct historical societies or civilizations have been thrust together. This… defines a far more complex condition, one in which patterns of human interaction, interconnectedness, and awareness are reconstituting the world as a single social space.” [136]
Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag, too, recognized the trend and its hazards, and explained it from the perspective of the evolution of desires. In his essay, “Peace in the World,” Ashlag provides both his observation of the state of the world in his time, as well as the approach humanity should adopt if it is to cope with the situation. In the essay, he writes, “We have already come to such a degree that the whole world is considered one collective and one society. This means that because each person in the world draws life’s marrow and livelihood from all the people in the world, one is coerced to serve and to care for the well-being of the whole world.” [137]
Subsequently, Ashlag explains how we are all connected and interdependent, and concludes as follows: “Therefore, the possibility of making good, happy, and peaceful conducts in one state is inconceivable when it is not so in all the countries in the world, and vice versa. In our time [he wrote the essay in 1934], the countries are all linked in the satisfaction of their needs of life, as individuals were to their families in earlier times. Therefore, we can no longer speak or deal with conducts that guarantee the well-being of a single country or a single nation, but only with the well-being of the entire world because the benefit or harm of each and every person in the world depends and is measured by the benefit of all the people in the world.” [138]
In the last paragraph of that section, Ashlag predicts that mere intellectual, scholastic comprehension of the situation will not be enough for people to internalize their interdependence. Rather, life’s experiences will compel them to do so: “And although this [interdependence] is in fact known and felt, the people in the world have not yet grasped it properly… because such is the conduct of development in nature, that the act [impact of interdependence on our lives] comes before the understanding, and only actions will prove and push humanity forward.” [139]
In hindsight, we can say that regrettably, Ashlag’s prediction came true on more than one occasion in the 20th century, and in the most gruesome of ways. In “Peace in the World,” as well as in several other essays, Ashlag predicts what will happen if we continue to let the act precede the understanding. He suggests how we should conduct ourselves in order to build a sustainable, and indeed desirable existence. Now that we understand our interdependence, these suggestions will be the topic of discussion through the rest of the book.