Part of the burden of trying to energize a collective vision is addressing the positive and negative aspects of behavior. Not only do I want to cast a compelling positive vision for change, I also want to describe the lay of the land and some potential consequences of not changing. The negative (what we will lose if we don't change) is less important than the positive (what we will gain by changing), but that doesn't mean the negative is unimportant. I assume that we all sense that civilization is getting backed into a corner and will be forced to make major changes, but not everyone seems to sense this. Here I'm going to try to explain the crisis briefly and explain the major visions for shifting our paradigm I've seen.
The Crisis = Scarcity
My argument here is logical, not based on evidence other than common sense. There is a dance between civilization and technology, such that technology leads and creates changes in civilizations. This dance, periodically, can be halted by ecological/economical factors. Sometimes necessity is not able to bear a technological invention to save civilization, sometimes it is. Civilizations have fallen because of this dance, and others have evolved overtime.
The ecological factor that is placing critical demand on our technology is scarcity. I'm not arguing in details, but we consume many goods faster than we can produce them. We mill lumber quicker than trees grow, for example. The logic is that we're going have to stop using lumber, and either technology will provide another good to serve the same function as lumber, or we're going to be forced to accept deprivation.
In this epoch, we arrived on a planet full of natural resources and we've been raiding the pantry without ever resupplying it. Some goods cannot be resupplied at any significant rate, ie. petroleum. Other goods are suffering the dual threat of consumption and degradation, ie. agriculture and soils.
Located particular cultures have dealt with scarcity throughout this epoch, but now we are confronting this en masse. What this means is that there is, perhaps, no distant land to exploit to resupply the pantry and continue our ways. Colonialism is coming to a halt, perhaps.
Things must change. Things cannot continue this way.
Our options, real or imagined:
1. Technology: materials or methods
We start mining goods off-planet. (The problem: we need petro and rare metals to mine, and the whole point is that we're running low on these. It would take a huge effort to convince people to give up the remaining reserves of certain crucial resources for this purpose. It would mean a political effort to convince people to suffer an immediate loss for a future gain; a political move that has rarely if ever been accomplished. Also, these missions would have to be extremely profitable from the beginning to offset the huge investment costs.)
We negate our consumption. We dissolve needs to consume resources by creating and enriching virtual worlds. This is the transhuman agenda, to create options for existence that do not depend on natural biology. (The problem: I'm not convinced this is possible to the extent that it would solve the problem. Can we upload our consciences into a cyberspace? If we could, would enough people prefer this reality as a choice or would it have to be forced? Hello, anybody seen The Matrix?)
Also, I should mention that there's the possibility that we could discover a technology that would disrupt the logic of this crisis of scarcity. We could discover a lost journal of Tesla that would help us harvest free energy. We might master cold fusion. We might master electromagnetism. (The problem: We might not. This is not a strategy, but just blind faith that the techno-God will provide at our moment of need. History has shown that this is not always the case. It may actually be that ancient civilizations had higher technologies than us and still suffered collapse.)
By objective economic transformation I refer to something like the change described by Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist Movement or Jacques Fresco's Venus Project. The proposition is a combination of central planning and technology: the whole planet will be analyzed by powerful computers to give an objective reality from which all economic decisions are made centrally via internet voting. This is an objective transformation because instead of the open question of the free market (What do you want?), the data gives us a multiple choice question (Do you want A or B?). The computer analysis doesn't allow individuals to escape the consequences of their choices. Often, only one choice will be scientifically plausible. Instead of people buying more SUV's to drive to the mall, we will all be confronted with the need to use all of our remaining petroleum to build self-sufficient smart cities. Some may protest, but they'll be revealed for the petulant children that they are. (The problem: Again, the problem is expecting a political movement to convince people to accept immediate deprivation for future provision. If people were ethical enough to push for this transformative change we wouldn't be in this crisis to begin with. And so, what we're really needing is a change of the individual consciousness subjectively.)
By subjective transformation I mean that we, as individuals, start making better choices, accepting present sacrifice for future gains. Part of this is accepting personal sacrifices for the good of others. This change must be initiated by an extrinsic force; let's call it God. This change may also be enacted with human cooperation; I call this church. This must incorporate new principles; something like permaculture. I'm not sure if this is necessarily a low-tech alternative to the objective alternative, but my intuition is that this will be a return to land based economics: living in reimagined communities functionally designed around local food production. I also think it will end up being organized as particular local collectives rather than a global government run by computer analysis. (The problem: Waiting for the lightning to strike. Either God is initiating a change in individuals that will spread or not. Can humans manipulate their own consciences consciously? mmmm, iono.)
So, again I invite your comments. What am I missing? What am I seeing that isn't really there? If we aren't all confronted by this question, we can't begin to be called out to form an answer.
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