VII
Systems of belief are by no means immune to change, but they are less likely to foretell external events than to explain them after the fact. This is notably true when a culture is losing control over such events. Reality, for that culture, is changing; the belief-system is signaling “no change”; the members of the culture believe and act on the signal; and sooner or later the gap between belief and verification becomes too great to be ignored. Unfortunately, that discovery may occur during the millisecond before a nuclear holocaust. Let me be more specific: Western ethnoscience defines the geography of the present-day world in a way that is so grossly unrealistic that we can only hope for a change in belief that occurs in time to save us, or a slow enough intrusion of reality so that beliefs may somehow respond in time. The Western model has persuaded the West that imperialism is under control, that economic development is just around the corner, and that peace is only a matter of right thinking. The Third- World model, on the other hand, describes a world in which imperialism is far from dead—instead, it has changed from colonialism into neo-colonialism, a cooperative enterprise of the European world as a whole—and that resistance to imperialism is mounting throughout the world. If the real world bears any resemblance to this model, then we are on the brink of disaster