There Is Another Way...

Well, there's more than one way to live better than we currently are doing under capitalism...

Here's just one set of ideas.... 

It's not all fantasy either...

From Wikipedia's entry on Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983):

"Buckminster Fuller was one of the first to propagate a systemic worldview, and he explored principles of energy and material efficiency in the fields of architecture, engineering and design.

 

He cited François de Chardenedes' opinion that petroleum, from the standpoint of its replacement cost out of our current energy "budget" (essentially, the net incoming solar flux), had cost nature "over a million dollars" per U.S. gallon (US$300,000 per litre) to produce. From this point of view, its use as a transportation fuel by people commuting to work represents a huge net loss compared to their earnings.   An encapsulating quotation of his views might be: "There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance."

 
Fuller was concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet remained optimistic about humanity's future. 

 

Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the "technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life," his analysis of the condition of "Spaceship Earth" caused him to conclude that at a certain time during the 1970s, humanity had attained an unprecedented state. 

 

He was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of major recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had attained a critical level, such that competition for necessities was not necessary anymore.    Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. "Selfishness," he declared, "is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable.... War is obsolete."

 

He criticized previous utopian schemes as too exclusive, and thought this was a major source of their failure. To work, he thought that a utopia needed to include everyone."

And Robert Theobald, (1929-1999), also saw another way out of the capitalist trap.   

 

Robert was a private consulting economist and futurist author.   In economics, he was best known for his writings on the economics of abundance and his advocacy of a Basic Income Guarantee.

 

He was a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution in 1964, and later listed in the top 10 most influential living futurists in The Encyclopedia of the Future.

 

Robert said: "My goal is to create a situation of full unemployment--a world in which people do not have to hold a job. And I believe that this kind of world can actually be achieved."

Can you say the current paradigm is working well for you, all the other humans with whom we share this world, and the planet herself? 

If we're not one of the comparative handful of people holding all the power and control currently, what have we got to lose in trying something different?

Its Been a While...

Well... its been nearly a month since I last posted... something to do with it being summer, birthdays (mine and my son's), daughter visiting on her way back to Australia from Istanbul, personal stuff, public education/school district activism and focusing on growing my business/practice - there's still the rent to pay, groceries to buy, utilities to keep from getting cut off, petrol for the car blah, blah, blah...

Why aren't we at the point described in one of the Star Trek movies where everyone's basic needs are provided for because we have the resources and technology to do that?   Buckminster Fuller talked about that in the 60s and Robert Theobald proposed a full unemployment society a decade or more ago.  

An NPR report today focused on the possibility of teleportation: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128910996&sc=fb&cc=fp

Don't get me wrong - I was so excited to see the report.   I thought - "wow, its about time" - because I've always thought that anything we can imagine already exists in some other place/time and if its all about frequencies, we only need to resonate at the same frequency to bring it into our here and now... Shamans and mystics have been doing that for eons.

But I also thought: if we're working on that, why can't we be working on a new socio-economic system that solves the problems we face in the world - population issues, health, education, housing, clean water, the environment, conflict, poverty, debt, sustainability, not enough work to go around, failure to treasure the arts and anything which doesn't contribute to GDP/GNP...

Its so depressing to think that until capitalism has completely sucked the lifeblood out of this planet, our mother, and all of her living inhabitants, until the skies are grey and the seas are black and the land is dry, devoid of trees and infertile - we will not find the will to live differently....

Would it be such a loss if our species went extinct?  Really, we're just fleas on an elephant's back.   The day we finally step irreversibly, irretrievably over the line, Gaia would maybe just do a huge shrug and throw us off.   Gaia would survive, repair herself and thrive, as James Lovelock thinks http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8594000/8594561.stm 

And because energy can only be transmuted, not created or destroyed, the individual and collective 'energy' that is each of us and all of us would surely manifest in another form somewhere else in this awesome creation called LIFE...