Beyond Leadership: Balancing Economics, Ethics and Ecology, Revised Edition

The New Global Paradigm

A new and entirely different pattern of thought is beginning to emerge worldwide and in various fields of human activity, driven by a fresh set of conditions and challenges. The new paradigm is beginning to find expression in the natural and the social sciences, especially in education and philosophy and now in political thought as well. The end of the Cold War between east and west has unlocked forces which had been contained on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The Berlin Wall, focal point of more than 40 years of pressure and brinkmanship, almost overnight became the Berlin Mall. The Gulf area of the Middle East erupted in a war which nobody would have predicted only months earlier. Operations Desert Shield, then Desert Storm, were successfully prosecuted under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council and with the blessing of the former Soviet Union and China. Who could have predicted any such thing from within the recent paradigm of the Cold War? Who would have anticipated the rapid demise of the old Soviet Empire, or the peaceful emergence of a new non-racial South Africa?

The new paradigm is being shaped by contributions from a host of new and revitalized academic and scientific disciplines. Insights from quantum physics and chaos theory are being applied in understanding the functioning of the brain, social behavior, stock-market cycles and weather patterns. Traditionalists within the fields of economics, political science, psychology, sociology, ...