This would mean health, happiness and increased satisfaction of our highest human needs.Ĭalifornia Senator Kamala Harris says that we’re at an “ inflection point” in our world, our nation, even ourselves. With less time scrambling to make useless things and manipulate people into buying them, we’d have more time for ourselves and for authentic and healthy growth. If managing the transition and not focusing on business as usual is our goal, we’ll be fine.Īs the economy shifts away from growth-fed accumulation to the next big economic trend, humane forms of service and quality of life will increase for everybody. It won’t be easy and there will be much disruption, but we can lubricate the transformation and mitigate economic displacement via a global reduction of the workweek, the forgiveness of global debt and a global guaranteed income. We have the administrative and productive technology (the education system, the communication networks, the logistics, the control systems, the legal systems), if we use them properly, the resources, if we use them wisely, and the money we need to get it all done. Reduced consumption of meat reflects the rejection of a system that causes people to consume without consideration of the consequences. In this scenario, we cope with civil unrest, food insecurity, famine and such with blocked borders, authoritarian regimes and disciplinary collars on our private security forces, just to make sure we can control them.Ĭhoice two is to get rid of the Regime of Accumulation and replace it with a sustainable utopia based on fair production, distribution and healthy, not addictive motivations. In any case, this choice allows suicidal economic growth and addictive accumulation to continue, but at the cost of ecological and psychological collapse, symbolized by the growing electronic waste stream. The way I see it, like Neo in the film The Matrix, we have two choices.Ĭhoice one is to follow the Trump gambit and try to keep going “business as usual,” but more and more people are rejecting the idea that this is possible. In the 1999 film ‘The Matrix,’ Morpheus offers the character Neo a choice of two pills: the blue pill allows him to continue in his existence as he knows it, but the red pill reveals the truth of the life he lives. The human race probably will not go extinct, but even the rich will suffer. If the addicts retain control, our children are facing a grim future of fire, flood drought, food insecurity, famine, growing civil unrest which makes “business as usual” impossible, authoritarian repression and outright global war. The problem is that players are addicted to cash and they will sacrifice even their own children just to get their next fix. You’d think growing realization of reality would galvanize even the most conservative elites who certainly see the future they’re leaving their children. There is only so much a small planet can take. Crisis of finite resourcesįantasy aside, eternal growth on a sphere of finite resources inevitably leads to global catastrophe. However, now a third ecological crises is throwing accelerant on the flames. Mass unemployment, shattered safety nets, financial meltdown of an already teetering global system and refugee crises will be the inevitable result. Unless something changes, the system will be unable to accommodate the disruption. Rapid workforce reductions of an estimated 35 to 49 per cent are expected in the next few years. Increasing automation, however, is fanning the flames. In the past, new products and services, market expansion, an adjustment here or there and a bit of illiberal hegemony, which is American domination through war and violence, rather than the export of liberal democracy, could have doused the flames. This rejection is causing a slow-burning growth crisis. The people of earth - the pawns on the chess board - have been using the internet to educate themselves for decades now and and they are increasingly rejecting the system and its associated careless consumption, of commodities such as meat, processed food, alcohol, cars and big malls. However this time, preservation is not possible because the system is facing at least three accelerating global crises that are going to bring it down. In the past, the players have been able to preserve this system of accumulation, which I expose in my free book Rocket Scientists’ Guide to Money and the Economy. Obviously, this is not the first challenge this ancien regime - an ancient system of private accumulation and forced inequality - has faced.
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