The Quantum Leap: An Alternative Universal Model

By Roger Bejjani

Humanity's strength as a species is about to become our downfall.

Due to the size of our population and our increasing life expectancy, humanity is facing an existential threat—one that will cause our world model to collapse by the middle of the twenty-first century.

You don't have to look hard to see it. Humanity's dashboard is lighting up with warnings: environmental, financial, social, and demographic. Our planet is on borrowed time.

Intellectuals around the globe are sounding the alarm, building awareness of these catastrophic problems, but we lack a consistent strategy to reverse our current momentum.

The Quantum Leap presents a case study of a new model—a silver bullet that could change our trajectory, yielding intelligent, long-term solutions to all the threats we're facing today.

With a New Universal Model, we can prevail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781544519159

Book preview

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Copyright © 2021 Roger Bejjani

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-1915-9

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To my children and grandchildren, who I hope will contribute to the world’s reset. I hope that they will enjoy a saved world and will not suffer a perilous one. I recommend they follow the words of my father, paraphrasing Gandhi: Learn and work for your world as if you will live forever and live as if you will die tomorrow.

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Contents

Introduction

1. A Brief State of the World

2. What Are We Worried About?

3. What Will the New Universal Model Look Like?

4. The Switch

5. Democracy and Meritocracy

6. Universal Remuneration

7. Remuneration Illustration

8. Income Tax, Accounting, and the Universal Ledger

9. Subsidy Programs

10. Natural Catastrophes including Pandemics

11. Environment

12. Privatization

13. Security

Conclusion

Glossary

About the Author

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Introduction

The system governing humanity needs to mutate. And it will not be for the first time in our roughly five-hundred-thousand-year history. Obviously, human supremacy is unchallenged when it comes to resilience. Humans have increased and our numbers are still increasing exponentially, whereas all other species are threatened with extinction, unless kept in captivity for our curiosity, tamed to serve our emotional well-being, or raised in concentration camps for our epicurean palate pleasure. However, the human super-species may find itself on the verge of self-defeat. Number, resilience, and life expectancy have become incestuous threats to humanity and its incubator, Earth. Human supremacy, if projected for the next eighty years, with an unaltered world model, will lead to a pyrrhic victory: humankind will be so devastated by the efforts involved in winning over Earth that it won’t be able to enjoy its achievement. Our strength as a species will destroy us in an inglorious mass suicide. The future is about resilience through smart demographic, environmental, economic, and financial management.

Why Do We Need Change?

Why does our existing world model need to change? The balance of humanity is at stake because of an outdated model that is not appropriate for today’s reality nor for our future. In the midst of our shut down and struggle against a stealth enemy, COVID-19, what we have been facing since before the Wuhan outbreak—and will still be facing once we prevail against this virus—are serious threats that may, if not profoundly addressed, instigate a total collapse prior to mid-twenty-first century. Our humanity dashboard is lighting up with several warnings: environmental, financial, demographic, resource management, injustice… If we ignore those red warning lights, as some ignore the warnings on their cars’ dashboards, we will soon be living on borrowed time on our only planet.

Although voices are raised and awareness is building up within a minority of intellectuals and thinkers, what is missing is a consistent global strategy aiming to reverse our negative momentum. This is what I will address in this book.

A Crossroads

We are, today, on the brink of a dramatic leap. Everything we do, consume, earn, and spend should be revisited. Throughout history the world has experienced profound changes, and changes have always benefited humanity. What I will present in this book is a case study of a New Universal Model (NUM), an alternative to the half-baked unsustainable Populist illusions popping up here and there and the dying illusion of freewheeling capitalism. NUM is a silver bullet capable of yielding long-term smart solutions to all the threats we are facing and of awakening hope and dreams in the soon-to-be eight billion humans on Earth. It may take ten years to enact. Unfortunately, sometimes, change has to wait for disasters to happen. Drastic change is bound to take place soon if our species and Earth should prevail.

With a New Universal Model, we can prevail.

What Is This New Universal Model?

Humanity is at a crossroads that will define the next few years of its future and—I would even dare say—its survival. A visionary new world model—made possible by the extraordinary technological revolution that has unfolded at an increasingly fast pace during the past thirty years—is the quantum leap that I ask readers and leaders to lean on as they take urgent, out-of-the-box, serious, smart, and responsible action to implement a New Universal Model. Humans have set the current world model of existence and many previous ones. We should remember that it is still up to us to change gears and cross the Rubicon to make drastic change. It is up to us to set the new rules of existence—hence, the New Universal Model. This book details what those new rules would look like, how they would operate, and how they would benefit humanity.

I will start by presenting the state of the world of today, remembering with the reader events that shaped the world, emphasizing the dramatic changes or quantum leaps humanity has experienced so far, and explaining that what I suggest, as radical as it may seem today, was done many times throughout history and that change has always made us better.

I will explain as well the implementation of the theories developed and the feasibility of the suggested quantum leap.

The Origins of These Ideas

I have lived a life that made me, together with my genetics, who I am today. At risk of sounding cheesy and cliché, my life has been my school of thought.

I had just turned eighteen when a gun landed in my hands, and I had no choice but to defend what was worth defending in what is probably the most complex region in the world, the cradle of the three monotheistic religions, the Middle East. It is a place that has stirred so much passion in the name of spirituality and in the name of God. Being born Christian Maronite (Catholic) myself, I am agnostic but in sync with the Christian non-doctrinal values. What I was defending was my freedom and lifestyle, two elements taken for granted in the Western world and constantly under threat in the Middle East. I saw friends falling, others seriously injured, and my native city half destroyed many times.

Just a few years later, I had my first child, a beautiful boy who we discovered was suffering from a congenital illness called Duchenne de Boulogne muscular dystrophy. This was before the Internet. I researched it in those thick encyclopedia books, and I understood that, together with his mom, I would have to provide unconditional love and care to him for at least twenty years—the life expectancy of victims of this illness. Today, Bachir is thirty-eight, with only two organs working to perfection: his eyes and brain. Through the ordeal of this unforgiving and merciless illness, I became a better person, and I was humbled every day by the growing serenity, wisdom, intelligence, and knowledge of my son.

As I figured out how to help Bachir, I also learned the insurance business on the go. As a young entrepreneur, I quickly initiated a disruptive but innovative dynamic in the health insurance industry in the Middle East and Southern Europe. Throughout my thirty-five years or so of health insurance management, I brought German, Turkish, Greek, Saudi, Emirati, French, Jordanian, Lebanese, and American partners to my table. I lived in many countries, bringing along with me my family, including, of course Bachir.

Outside of work, I began running marathons at forty-three, a rather old age for that game. My wife and I became hooked on running. The runners among you will understand what I am talking about. With hundreds of road races under both our belts and marathon personal bests of 3.03 for me and 3.07 for my wife at fifty-three and forty-five years old respectively, we’ve had a good run. In 2004, I took my passion to another level and formed the Inter-Lebanon Club, a road-running and track-and-field club that has become the powerhouse of athletics in Lebanon, with many championships won and national records broken. I was (and am still) wearing two hats there, acting as both chairman and coach. During my scouting and coaching, I came across the multi-layered fabric of a society that included millions of refugees. My epic solo night run, (when I slept during the day) from the United Arab Emirates to Lebanon—through 1,400 miles of deserts, mountains, and clandestine border passages—deserves a long chapter in my next book, Running: As Good as It Gets.

The quantum leap that I share in this book is a result of this life and the school of thought it has given me. The ideas came from discussions with my son, Bachir, who has a unique perspective on life, and from my exposure to multi-cultural environments and multi-layered societal groups through both international business and the running community. Those in-depth experiences are my life, and they have revealed how a better life, a better world order, could benefit us all. In the following pages, I share these ideas with you, along with a detailed exploration of how a new world order might work. It is an exciting but admittedly extreme idea. To understand why such a revolutionary approach is not only wise but necessary, we must first understand the state of our current world.

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Chapter 1

1. A Brief State of the World

In AD 1, the human population was estimated at about 200 million. In 2020, it’s about 7.8 billion. That exceeds the number of humans who have lived and died on Earth in the past 2,020 years. Only recently, seventy-five years ago, the world population was less than a third of what it is today. During the next eighty years, the Earth will feed and shelter as many people as it has fed and sheltered during those same 2,020 years! Is that exponential growth or what?

Although humans, in general, have never been in better shape, uncontrollable population numbers are creating almost insurmountable problems. The world is suffering from income disparity, the absence of equal opportunities, greed, endless profit chasing, arrogant and shameful corrupt establishments in poor or emerging countries, regional armed conflicts, the environmental concern of a new generation, and even the doping crisis in sport (including the fall from grace of countries like Russia and icons such as Lance Armstrong, previously referred to as the Bill Gates of sports)—all motivated by either glory or greed. This has all built-up into a universal malaise, and since revolution is not the sort of action that fits the twenty-first century, a need for different kinds of social and economic disruption has started manifesting itself in many different forms. But why is this all happening?

Although the rate of reproduction of the human species has decreased from the original seventy newborns per one thousand humans to less than twenty-four per one thousand humans, many factors have caused a dramatic surge of the world population, especially after 1945: (a) medical progress (i.e., invention of penicillin, the sanitary leap, new child labor laws, better nutrition, vaccines, and the hundreds of other signs of progress in diagnosis and treatment that have significantly reduced the ratio of infant mortality and extended the life expectancy to more than double what it was one thousand years ago—with a surge of 15 percent during the past seventy-five years alone); (b) prosperity has gradually reduced the number of people living in poverty to about 10 percent of the world population (at least prior to the disruption of COVID-19), and today, 50 percent of humans can afford to own and do things that only 5 percent could afford seventy-five years ago; (c) humans have been relatively well-behaved during the past seventy-five years and violent conflicts have claimed a number of lives less than 20 percent of what they claimed during the seventy-five years leading up to 1945.

The world business model of the post-World-War-II era—and later, that of the era after the fall of the Berlin Wall—have become unsustainable. Borders, nationalism, flags, races, ethnicities, religions, Populist Democracies,