By January of 1998, the world's preoccupation with the impending millennium will dramatically intensify. Prophets of Doom will be talking Armageddon, Prophets of Peace and Love will be talking the Age of Aquarius and Prophets of Reason will be talking Business as Usual.

Opinions on the meaning of the millennium will differ radically but the debate itself will be lost in a prevailing atmosphere of seismic change -- for which there is no precedent in the historical record as we know it. A paradigm shift is under way that will revolutionize system structures and redefine humanity's role on the planet.

The unmistakably new look of the millennium will be generated by more than simply advances in science and technology, as technophiles and futurists predict. Advances in science and technology do not automatically translate into advances in civilization. Real advance is not just intellectual; it is qualitative and emotional; it is heart generated as much as mind generated. The Renaissance of the new millennium will be generated by the advance of a new set of ideas and feelings, giving rise to a new set of values.

Obey Authority

For the past 2000 years, a central tenet of society's value system has been an acceptance of institutional authority. However violent and chaotic this period of history may look, its major political, military, philosophical, religious, scientific and academic institutions have operated under a widely accepted set of ideas; a reigning philosophy in which obedience to authority was both required and rewarded. But as the millennium approaches, its most salient characteristic is the undermining of that authority.

Distrust of authority is no longer confined to a minority of malcontents. Poll after poll shows the institutions themselves under attack -- from all sides and often from within. (See Trends 2000, pages 264 and 310.)

Paradigm Found

As the old paradigm of institutional authority diminishes, a new paradigm of personal and planetary responsibility will replace it.

The new vision of humanity will produce a global fusion of 21st Century scientific and technological advances with ancient earth wisdom from traditional peoples (Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, tribal Africans, etc.).

Under the new paradigm, individual creativity directed toward the collective good will be fostered and rewarded. People will live with an understanding that their lives, individually and collectively, have a higher meaning; that humanity plays a real role in the unfolding of the grand cosmic scheme.

Whether this dramatic change in human thought and feeling is a function of the millennium shift or merely coincidental hardly matters. What matters is that the old ideas are dead or dying and new ideas are replacing them.

The society that will evolve around these new ideas is, within limits, forecastable. Organizations and institutions that intelligently embrace, rather than blindly resist, the changing order will both help direct the course of change and prosper within it. When ideas change, and they are acted upon, everything changes.

Note: While the overall picture of the new paradigm may be broadly sketched, its details are not yet clearly defined. This is part of a normal, organic process: The hard husk of the acorn dissolves into a formless, apparently chaotic mass of jelly just before the new seedling that will grow to a mighty oak germinates.

Ideas, trends, societies, civilizations, planets, galaxies -- all are subject to the same universal law of process. What seems chaos today is that germinal "jelly" from which tomorrow's "oak," the global Renaissance, will grow.

Gerald Celente is the President of the Trends Research Institute and author of "Trends 2000: How to Prepare For and Profit From the Changes of the 21st Century" (Warner Books). For more information on new millennium trends call the Trends Research Institute at (914) 876-6700.

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