We live in a fast changing and highly complex world in which stability, predictability, order, prosperity, and harmonies are almost equally matched by disorder, conflict, contradictions, unpredictability, chaos, crises, poverty and despair, wars, and threats of catastrophic nuclear annihilation. The shadows of a constant threat of global nuclear annihilation seem to have consciously and unconsciously penetrated into and paralyzed the minds of billions of people, young as well as old, in developed as well as in developing countries of the world. The world has seen its horrors before, yet there still are those either ignorant or arrogant or both in positions of power with access to the buttons of destroying the entire planet (with its outer space) keep threatening the world with such annihilation. Indeed, we live in an age of madness. But, madness is not made by nature; it is the human actors who create and commit madness.The tyranny of survival is as invasive and powerful as the hope and aspiration to overcome and defeat it in public and private life. This is a powerful dialectical challenge of modern time, our time and our children's future time, indeed the humanity's time. The only way to meet this dialectical challenge, and to overcome it, is to educate ourselves and our children, to expand the realms and scope of knowledge and spread the forces of enlightenment and hope worldwide deep into remote areas where it was impossible to reach until a few decades ago. Today, information and communication technologies are blessing tools that enable such possibility of reaching out to billions of current and future generations so they can learn the contraststhe good, the bad, and the uglyof what we human beings are capable of and have indeed done and can do it again. These tools help spread and disseminate knowledge, and knowledge is power, and power makes things happen or break things in place. Every human being with the power of knowledge has a moral and ethical as well as rational obligation to help in overcoming the evils of tyranny, exploitation, and repression, and to contribute to the enlightening dialectical forces of critical thinking, hope, empowerment, and humanity.In the realms of public administration, public policy, governance, and management, knowledge and information is paramount to rational and ethical functioning at the community, local, national, and global/international levels. Men and women of wisdom (both theoretical and practical) and expertise in modern organizations of governance, public administration, policy making and implementation, and management, and those outside with counterbalancing v vi Preface
