Allegiance requires a cause; a cause requires an enemy. This muchis obvious; the critical point is that the enemy that defines the causemust seem genuinely formidable. Roughly speaking, the presumedpower of the "enemy" sufficient to warrant an individual sense ofallegiance to a society must be proportionate to the size andcomplexity of the society. Today, of course, that power must be one ofunprecedented magnitude and frightfulness.2
The first consideration in finding a suitable threat to serve as a global enemy was that it did not have to be real. A real one would be better, of course, but an invented one would work just as well, provided the masses could be
Poverty was examined as a potential global enemy but rejected as not fearful enough. Most of the world was already
Only those who had never experienced poverty would see it as a global threat. For the rest, it was simply a fact of everyday life.
1- "British Soccer's Day of Shame,"
2. Lewin,
522
THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND
An invasion by aliens from outer space was given serious
consideration. The report said that experiments along those lines already may have been tried. Public reaction, however, was not sufficiently predictable, because the threat was not "credible." Here is what the report had to say:
Credibility, in fact, lies at the heart of the problem of developing apolitical substitute for war. This is where the space-race proposals, inmany ways so well suited as economic substitutes for war, fall shortThe most ambitious and unrealistic space project cannot of itselfgenerate a believable external menace. It has been hotly argued thatsuch a menace would offer the "last best hope of peace," etc., byuniting mankind against the danger of destruction by "creatures"
from other planets or from outer space. Experiments have beenproposed to test the credibility of an out-of-our-world invasion threat;it is possible that a few of the more difficult-to-explain "flying saucer"
incidents of recent years were in fact early experiments of this kind. Ifso, they could hardly have been judged encouraging.1
This report was released in 1966 when the idea of an alien presence seemed far fetched to the average person. In the ensuing years, however, that perception has changed. A growing segment of the population now believes that intelligent life forms may exist beyond our planet and could be monitoring our own civilization.
Whether that belief is right or wrong is not the issue here. The point is that a dramatic encounter with aliens shown on network television—even if it were to be entirely fabricated by high-tech computer graphics or laser shows in the sky—could be used to stampede all nations into world government supposedly to defend the Earth from invasion. On the other hand, if the aliens were perceived to have peaceful intent, an alternative scenario would be to form world government to represent a unified human species speaking with a single voice in some kind of galactic federation.
Either scenario would be far more credible today than in 1966.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL-POLLUTION MODEL
