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An article in the Guardian Unlimited titled "It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both" spawned conversation on The Oil Drum to which I responded. Here is my response: Capitalist, fascist, communist, etc., all share the modern pathologies identified [in comments] above: 1) extreme and growing wealth disparities, and 2) driving, indescriminate, unsustainable, exponential growth. We all will have to navigate future's bottleneck. In the U.S., with 300 million people and in this world of well more than 6 billion people, I invite change that must be a cumulative result of hundreds of millions, even billions, of value and goal-oriented decisions. Among these values and goals, I envision: - Millions of learners who embrace authentic (not rote) learning as individuals and in groups, and who value processes and embrace changes that support authentic learning;
- Millions of learners learning creatively, seeking one another out, and supporting one another across all traditional boundaries;
- Millions of enterprising people making enterprise decisions to grow down and grow better -- in other words, to discriminate in their energy and resource expenditures by (on the whole) seeking to reduce throughput and increase quality.
I think of this as "constructive creativity." There is insight in complexity theory that simple rule sets can generate unimaginably complex organization. We see in chaos theory how small events can trigger great non-linear changes. In the wisdom of crowds and in the synergy of wholeness (the whole is more than the sum of its parts) we see benefits of fruitful connection. If these insights are not reasons to be optimistic about society's long-term future, they are at least initial pretext for hopefulness, I think. Maybe others who participate here have ideas about organizing values or goals. {moscomment}
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