The four scenarios revisited ‘The business of the future is to be dangerous.' – Alfred Whitehead In Chapter 4, four different scenarios were summarised in the figure 9. 11 Corporate Millennium Abundance
Sustainable
Hell on Earth
Careful Communities
We can now better understand how Sustainable Abundance relates to the other three scenarios. The Corporate Millennium is the result of what the Taoists would call an 'excess Yang' deviation from Sustainable Abundance, where Yang-driven businesses and currencies take over all other aspects of society as the old order dissolves. It would tend to occur if the benefits of information and money waves were monopolised by the corporate sector. This is most likely to happen if monetary and political authorities were to suppress the small-scale local currencies, while remaining unable or unwilling to tackle the corporate-issued currencies. In contrast, Careful Communities is an 'excess Yin' deviation where concerns about community cohesion have taken over when a monetary meltdown triggers widespread socio-economic disarray. Finally, Hell on Earth occurs when no faction in society fills in the power vacuum left after a monetary crash. Alvin Toffler claimed: 'What appears to be emerging is neither a corporate dominated future nor a global government, but a far more complex system ... We are moving toward a world system composed of units densely interrelated like the neurons in a brain rather than organised like the departments of a bureaucracy.'