GEAB 161

Dear readers,

A new year is beginning, the sixteenth anniversary of the GEAB, and the team believes that the bulletin should now be declared of public utility.

At a time when mental health is faltering throughout the West, under the new shock of societal transformation causing loss of bearings and meaning, the GEAB seems to have become one of the rare havens of reason and understanding of the chapter of history we are going through.

Balancing factuality and interpretation, resolutely non-judgmental, the GEAB provides a both distanced and detailed view of the process underway, which is very similar to the cold work of historians but applied to the present. And, after all, isn’t that what our method of anticipation is all about?

The GEAB writes the World History of the present from a European angle by identifying the most indisputable systemic trends suggested by logic and signalled by commonly accepted facts. In this way, a dispassionate Common Sense emerges, which helps to relativise the importance of the shocks recorded and to reduce the anguishing uncertainty running through and fracturing our society.

From this sensible and consensual narration of the present, a clearer vision of the future emerges, suddenly reconnected to the historical continuum and to understanding.

And although we don’t see everything, and we are sometimes wrong, we are rarely surprised. And world news quickly finds its place in this story we have been telling for 16 years, that of a great global systemic transition which is neither the first nor, above all, the last, whatever the forthcoming violence.

No paranoia, no great conspiracy, even if the story told by the GEAB is not disembodied and is permeated by the strategies conceived by a multitude of large, more or less visible interests: governments, states, financial and economic interests, religions, mafias… are struggling, like all of us, to survive in the roar of passing time, with their eyes riveted on the major factors of change – demographics and technical adaptation – and their systemic consequences. But like all of us, they are not so much making the future as surfing it, they are reacting to it more than acting on it.

Sixteen years of political anticipation have taught us to look for certain changes, those that are systemic and not contingent on human decisions. For example, we are less interested in guessing who will win an election than in anticipating the policy that the elected official, whoever he or she may be, will have to implement.

Thus, the great paradox of the GEAB is that it is both a crisis bulletin and a pill of optimism because it sheds light on understanding and decision-making and activates the capacity to react/anticipate. It also tends to bring everyone together, as the ideological diversity of our readership testifies and is a source of great pride for us: the GEAB brings people together… perhaps because it is modest and feeds the thoughts of its readers rather than imposing certainties on them.

Anti-stress, anti-paranoia, resocialising… this is why we have decided to open the new year with this humorous note by calling for the GEAB to be declared of public utility!

This allows us to wish you all a very happy new year despite the new challenges lying ahead, about which our “panorama of trends” gives an idea.

Yours sincerely

Marie-Hélène Caillol, Publishing director