After three decades of post-cold war, post-history, post-physical reality, the western world is tumbling down into the dip of the slow economic debt cycle. Tumbling, fully loaded with a good bag of crises and tensions. The future may seem gloom, perhaps especially, to those who previously didn’t need to care about the future to begin with.
As someone who have been thinking, writing and talking endlessly about this for more or less the same time, it feels like I can finally just shut up and watch the show. But that, perhaps, is like letting the kids play at a mountain ridge once they just figure out that it is dangerous to fall down. The vision for how to navigate this danger takes time to develop, and foresight allows for maturation of ideas before they are really needed.
So, pandemics, societal division / rampant inequality, geopolitical shifts, economic restructuring, climate change, war, and our generation of opium for the people, social media, and over-distribution of misinformation, make it seem like we are facing a heady future?
The thing is, that this has happened to cultures many times before. While we think we are in control of factors such as climate change, that earlier were the providence of gods, we have still seen these types of crises accumulate earlier in history.
The first lesson is thus: We as a species, when viewed from space, requires resources that puts an external drain on the world around us, and we have the resultant effect of how well we translate these resources into action. At the most basic level, we consume food and water, survive, and if there’s surplus resources, we replicate, to consume the surplus. This is the classical predator-pray dynamics. The important thing is that there’s a time lag built into this, it takes time to incubate human babies, but it also takes time to replenish the consume resources, it may even have built-in shifts due to annual cycles of growth. At the most basic level, this if we as a species don’t respect the cycles of the resources we consume, will lead to volatility, tipping-points and at the very least what we can call destructive-superposition of the supply and the demand cycles.
A vision for the future
A few assumptions:
- Wishful thinking is not turning into reality, physics is truth.
- We are not capable of controlling all parameters in the universe, hence complexity and chaos will be the result of trying to affect the system we inhabit.
- We may as society strive to be better than our built-in nature, but we can’t assume that individuals will stop acting on their base psychology in a given perceived situation. If there’s scacarcity they will hoard, if there is reproductive pressure, they will try to reproduce, if they feel physically insecure they will turn to fight-or-flight etc.
- Resource-wise humanity is stil at stage 0, what’s on Earth (or beamed in from the Sun) is what we got. Until we progress to stage 1 where we can generate a surplus from expeditionary space travel, we must assume a zero-sum attitude towards nature. Akin to the predator-prey model above, where the prey is the entire planet.
- Existing power structures and resource accumulations will likely dictate how well this vision can be implemented, as the controllers of resources are the gate-keepers.
What we want:
Energy
Exploration
Living and well-being
Experience
Progress – not stagnation progress but measured in well-being and the other factors above
What it takes
Abolish perception-based power and decision making – democracy but only based on facts and rationales, not perception and feelings.
The mastering of double-edged knowledge:
- Nuclear energy
- Genomics, CRISPR and generally control of biological programming.
- Geoscale engineering
A new perception – we need values and beliefs that matches the reality we want, not animalistic superstitions of bygone ages where humanity didn’t directly affect nature as it does today.
A new set of goals and dreams to strive towards, as a whole – individuals may fulfill themselves within these, but individualistic endeavors should be beneficial for the totality of the culture at least if they prove fruitful. You can become a famous scientist, industrialist, win the game so to speak, but the spoils beyond fame, should be distributable.
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