IMAGINE the sepulchral Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come visited Bermuda during, say, the Festive Season of 1994. Then imagine the spectre descended on the offices of a Bermudian equivalent to the Victorian firm of Scrooge & Marley (take your pick ? any number of companies fit this particular bill). There the Ghost conjured up a vision of the sterile and almost soulless future the proprietors would create for themselves and Bermuda in the decade to come if they persisted with a strategic plan to retool the island's economy.

It would be heartening to think the businessmen in question would have undergone an instantaneous conversion, setting aside their lust for profits and embracing their civic responsibilities. Heartening, perhaps, but also highly unlikely.

Given a glimpse of the long-term effects on Bermuda of economic forces newly unleashed in the mid-1990s, any thinking man would have repented so completely that Ebenezer Scrooge's Christmas Eve atonement at the skeletal hand of the Ghost might have seemed a case study in denial by comparison.

But not all upper-echelon Bermudian businessmen are thinking men, pondering the consequences of their revenue-generating actions.

Given the ubiquitous Bermudian facility for placing short-term profitability ahead of the island's long-term viability, greed would probably have won out. Any compunctions generated by the Ghost's revelation of the utilitarian shape of things to come in Bermuda would likely have been dismissed as an expense that simply had to be absorbed ? the regrettable but unavoidable cost of doing international business.

The sad fact is that many of Bermuda's power players would doubtless have relished a quick look at a future in which the gleaming triple-chromed name plates of foreign-owned Bermuda-based insurance companies had all but replaced the hand-lettered cedar signs of elegant retailers in Hamilton; in which condominiums had spread across the face of the island like clusters of treatment-resistant concrete cancer cells; in which grotesquely exaggerated income differentials had reached levels normally only associated with Third World countries, notwithstanding the social fragmentation and tensions such vast disparities inevitably create.

There was, after all, money to be made. Lots of it.

The Ghost would doubtless have departed baffled and disappointed. The Bermudians he visited would have redoubled their efforts to create a future in which the island would effectively be re-engineered, ultimately transformed from a sophisticated vacation resort into what it is now ? a tony industrial park for the off-shore financial services industry.

Such trends were already apparent by 1994, the shift in economic direction away from tourism and towards high finance already decided upon.

then-Finance Minister had taken to calling the island "Bermuda Inc.", a reference to its new and growing utility as an off-shore international business jurisdiction. This attempt to impose from on high a corporate identity on the Bermuda community failed. The proposed new brand name for a Bermuda that was in the process of being re-branded never entered the vernacular.

By and large, Bermudians did not then ? and do not now ? feel they can subsume their collective identity into a "Bermuda, Inc." they do not believe they own a controlling interest in.

But the fact is the island had essentially operated as a communal, tourism-oriented business since the 1930s. Of course, during the of the tourism economy all Bermudians were encouraged to view themselves as stakeholders in the industry, not just the business and legal professionals who decided on a wholesale switch of economic emphasis in the 1990s.

Tourism acted as the social cement that held this otherwise fractured island together even during the otherwise fraught and divisive period of desegregation.

Bermudians might have attacked one another during the periodic running street battles that punctuated the 1960s and early '70s. They rarely, if ever, molested tourists or tourist-oriented businesses. It was implicitly understood that to take the front lines of this undeclared war to the tourism industry would result in the economic equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction. The old business interests so utterly despised by the newly enfranchised could certainly have been destroyed during this sometimes high-intensity conflict; but to do so would have also meant destroying the aspirations of Bermuda's angry young men and women.

Tourism was an industry that all Bermudians ? natural hosts ? could both find work in and take pride in; in the go-go, corporate "Bermuda, Inc." the feeling that "Bermudians need not apply" was subliminally included in every off-shore sector job advertisement was never far from Bermudians' minds. Then or now.

Despite the fact so very many Bermudians felt themselves divorced from the emerging, corporatised Bermuda, the sad fact of the matter is that a spectral vision of the Bermuda Yet To Come in the mid-'90s would have been greeted as a Best Case Scenario by many of the island's Scrooge & Marley outfits, not something to be feared or avoided.

island glimpsed in the Ghost's vision would have been seen as the ideal realisation of what was then an economic work in progress. A future Bermuda in which locals had become landlords and glorified support staff rather than entrepreneurs in their own island, in which the primary industry amounted to servicing other people's grafted-on industries.

This is the world many Bermudian bankers, accountants and lawyers were intent on creating. They would have been cheered rather than cowed by the fact they were in the process of doing just that.

Even if the Ghost had included foreshadowings of, for instance, the overcrowding, overdevelopment and permanently overwrought nature of life in 21st-century Bermuda, these warnings would likely have gone unheeded.

The cultural whiplash ? that pervasive sense of dislocation felt by so many Bermudians who have been fast-forwarded into a new economic reality nothing in their past experience had prepared them for ? would have been dismissed as the gripings of the surplus population.

The prospect of permanently gridlocked rush-hour traffic, a twice-a-day reminder that too many people are now shoehorned into too little space, would have been met with the same lack of environmental awareness that has resulted in even the greenbelts of golf courses being paved over to make way for yet more luxury accommodation for insurance executives.

THEpossibility of a delinquent, ethically compromised Government might even have been seen as acceptable in a cost-benefit analysis of the future Bermuda presented by the Ghost, particularly if corporate donations to party coffers could indirectly buy political acquiescence when it came to pursuing even the dodgiest off-shore ventures.

What's good for international business is not always what's good for Bermuda ? although you would not necessarily know that from Government's blanket hands-off policy regarding the off-shore sector. The Attorney General of New York State tells Bermudians about the corporate malfeasance talking place here, not Larry Mussenden.

There would have been no remorse. No guilt. No deviation from the inflexible form of Social Darwinism they adhere to, a cruel belief that Bermudians must either adapt to their rapidly changing economic circumstances or be left behind and ultimately die.

Rather the operators of the various Bermudian branches of Scrooge & Marley circa 1994 would have felt God had indeed blessed them everyone when the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come invoked the island's future, a future that is now our uncomfortable present.