2012 – Welcome to the age of DUNNO!

Before the global financial meltdown everything resembled writings on stone tablets – you name it, and I can bet you my last dollar it probably had a defined shape, form and symmetry that we can all recognize without too much fuss: macroeconomics, the laws of demand and supply, GDP, market fundamentalism, capitalism, democracy right down to maybe the idea, if you munch too much carbs, you will probably end up looking like a two metric ton Soviet tractor – sure, from time to time, these giant blocks of schools of thoughts did generate a great deal of heat, especially, when they were challenged.

But by and large they were pretty robust and could easily blunt any attacks emerging from the “lunatic fringe” to still retain their primacy as the governing principle to run the economy, country, firm, family – right down to whether it makes sense for you to splurge out on a new iPod on your next pay day – my point is when you consider all of the “changes” that has occurred in the last 50 years cumulatively they were all so mainstream that it even permeated the groundwater of our consciousness to regard them as principia written on stone.

Yes somewhere along this timeline of 50 years, there were certainly disagreements galore, but my point is even in the heat of the debate – differences were always within set limits and agreed parameters of understanding.

In the aftermath of the financial meltdown, everything is now up in the air again. In this new age, where the world is beset by doubt, nothing can be taken at face value any longer. Will the Europeans be able to sort out their shit? I dunno. Is fiscal stimulus in the US working? Dunno! Are monopolies and price controls a solvent that requires market interventionist policies? Ditto. Should the IMF and World Bank cap the price of credit and regulate the supply of government money? Your guess is as good as mine. Will China implode economically circa 2012? Dunno again! Dunno!
I agree Gentlemen, the school of thought of dunno may not share the same pedigree as perhaps the laws of macroeconomics in their beliefs, in their persuasiveness or even in their elegance of marvelous completion. Yet they also have a lot in common. The former thrived in the age when everybody believed that markets moved according to deterministic laws very much like Newtonian physics – the latter shattered these assumptions and somewhere in this carnage, the word Dunno has no occupied the same venerated space as Ohm – in this age of confusion, “DUNNO!” is the word that best describes you, me and everyone reading this page.

DUNNO! is the new ferment that is surely spreading into every aspect of life challenging everything that we once considered timeless and universal – altering even how we all work, live and play – coloring everything from economics, market fundamentalism to the whole idea of what it even means to be human – many of us may not even realize the changes that is taking place all around us, as we are so caught up in the gyre, but whenever we turn on the TV and see droves of people clamoring for this and that in distant lands or watch how so much of what we once believed in has given way to a new quintessence slowly pecking its way out of its shell, to make its presence felt in the mainstream, be it in the field of mathematics, economics, sciences or just how to bake your cookies by using another way – what we may be witnessing is a revolution that the human species will probably go through only three or four times in the history of mankind.

I don’t think it is possible to predict anything for 2012 and beyond for a very long time. And I am not going to even try for fear of bringing pain to thinking folk – all we can really do is go with the flow and hope that our hunches can past from the realm of theory to reality with relief day by day, hour by hour and minute by minute – but whatever happens, for better or worse – take heart, one thing will remain certain: we will never be the same person who walked out from this age known as DUNNO!

Do have a Happy Dunno! Year

Darkness 2012

(This New Year Message was broadcasted to all channels (1 to 16) in Ekunaba, Phi Beta Kappa and the whole of the Strangelands onboard the Free French Cruiser KDD Marat somewhere in the Constellation Belt of Biblao Izmusth – The Brotherhood Press 2012)