When terrorists get really savvy

Jonar Nader appears in the hotel lobby dressed like a dapper banker: dark trousers, black waistcoat, brightly-coloured tie.

Or it could be the garb of a slick salesman. This Lebanese Australian, who has a background in sales, marketing and technology, has a book to sell.

But, he suggests, he has much much more to offer. Salvation from fear itself, not to mention freedom from wasting our lives sweating the small stuff.

And the device with which to achieve this is his self-published book, Z, a thriller of Orwellian proportions but one he says is far from make-believe.

The method is to scare us witless, to the realisation that all we can really change is how we react to life itself.

He wants us, he says, to live zestful and enchanted lives, presumably as he has since leaving the corporate world six years ago and making a career as a speaker and writer.

On his business card he describes himself as "post-tentative virtual surrealist". Yet in person he doesn't seem nearly so pretentious, though he is a marketer who knows the benefit of a good gimmick.

His book is loaded with them.

Take the cover, for example. A teaser announces that "for legal reasons, this book is a novel". There are endorsements from numerous security intelligence types - people who spent their careers with the likes of FBI, KGB, ASIO. But the eyecatcher is the LCD display, its numbers ticking over like a timebomb.

Yes, he says, that cost a bomb. Powered by batteries embedded in the thick cover, the numbers tick over at the rate of 11 per second, but rather than countdown to disaster, they ascend. Yet catastrophe may equally result.

The counter records the relentless growth of the world's population. It's the basis of a Nader theme. In a world characterised by rivalry, greed and competition is there a point at which it will destroy itself?

Add in the potential of an entrepreneurial Bin Laden type to unleash undreamed-of devastation.

The idea for the novel in part took root in the events of September 11, 2001.

What amazed Nader was not so much the sight of a jetliner flying into one of the world's tallest buildings but that we were so shocked and that so many leaders and commentators spoke of it as changing the world.

"It was only a building and it was only an aeroplane. I'm shocked to think they never thought it would happen.

"Then I thought, if that shocks you, imagine if Osama Bin Laden has access to far greater technology than a simple aeroplane. To nanotechnology, biotechnology, chemical technology."

"So what's the book about? What could the worst possible act of terror be?" He reckons he's come up with it and, without giving the show away, it tells of a new breed of technologically sophisticated terrorists intent on absolute power.

The references from the spies is to back the plausibility of his scenario.

Nader's views were shaped by his experiences in Lebanon aged 10, when he found himself with a gun in his hand fighting in a war that made no sense beyond the need to defend oneself or be killed.

Born in Lebanon, he spent three years in Australia from the age of seven, returning to his country of birth in the mid-1980s, a time when an invasion by Israel pursuing the Palestinian Liberation Organisation added to the turmoil of a factionalised civil war.

He spent a year there before settling in Sydney where he lives with his parents. His experience of war left lasting questions as to why people could be so cruel to one another, and whether peace is ever possible.

"Why was the shop blown up of the nice shopkeeper down the road? What did that poor man do? I couldn't understand the injustice of it." Now he believes he does. The potential is in us all, in the human characteristics of greed, selfishness, envy, corruption, stupidity.

"As we speak, half the world is at war and kids are dying of hunger. The philosophy behind the book is: can we do something to force the world into peace? And my answer after thinking about this since I was 10 is, yes, but it requires a monumental act of terror.

"The sophisticated terrorists I talk about will want you to pay them $20 a month to fix your eyesight, $20 a month to fix your kidneys and if you oppose them they'll send gas through the air that will kill you because they know your DNA."

In this future world, he says, it's not unreasonable that there will be the technology to kill blue-eyed people or dark-haired people.

He disagrees we are in a period of dizzying scientific advance. It could be infinitely faster if we let the brakes off. As society has developed, technological advance has slowed. "We think we live in a technological age but actually we have slowed down immensely. Sometimes we do this with laws saying you are not allowed stem-cell research, not allowed to have genetically-engineered tomatoes.

"But what if there are countries who say to their scientists, we have no laws, and sure, use some humans as guinea pigs? In the future the power will shift to those who have perfected the engineering behind nanotech, biotech and chemical tech, which I have called the three pillars of wealth creation."

DOMINATING corporations will be those adept at oppressing and suppressing their clients. This is the fate of his generation "Z". Where X were the consumers, Y the copiers - think pirating, from Rolex watches to DVDs to technological know how - the next generation will grow from the drive by business to obsessively control clients.

The next step is exploring how this is used for evil and that, he says, involves understanding the mind of the terrorist, something he has charged our gatekeepers with failing to do.

Nader's thinking is disturbing - but what's the use of scaring us into the nearest cubicle?

To prompt us to think in a different way, to let go of destructive impulses, to "twist the desire", says Nader, towards living "a zestful and enchanting life".

"People don't live like that. How many are in court today arguing about fences and cars being scratched? They are wasting their lives away."

His own "zestful and enchanting life" revolves around writing and speaking. He makes less than in his corporate days but counts his riches. "These days I do not measure my wealth in dollars," he says on his website (www.bullyforce.com). "My mission is to live. To marvel at how my eyes work. To stare at a flower and go weak with admiration at the incomprehensible miracles of life and death."

He resists being pigeon-holded, disagreed with Penguin, which published an earlier book, when it wanted to tamper. So he mortgaged his house and published Z himself, in order that what you get is the unadulterated Nader vision of what the future may hold.

Crazy or prophetic? Time will tell.