A random collection of scraps, yet to be sorted out, that together could outline a Sustainable Future.
Now that we know we are alive,
how shall we organise ourselves?
What shall we do with great project of ours?
One thing is clear; we need to change the way we do it now.
If we wanted to make a great society, we would not come up with this.
And
Work Can Be Done For Free.
The whole money idea is what both makes us so poor, and destructive and seems to keep us in slavery.
I can see us changing it fundamentaly, or even dropping it. Our relationship with money is messed up.
I believe in utopia but to get there we need to get rid of all forms of slavery.
And to do that we need to get rid of money, or at least the way we use it.
It is a very useful way to move energy around but that basic function has been masivly corrupted by a small group of highly motivated, self interested people who, over time , have now pursuaded most of us that there is no other way to arange a world. The truth is that there are many ways to run a world. The way we do it now is just one and it is a very bad one. It needs everyone to work hard makeing stuff we dont need which is wrecking the planet and locking us into a work ethic which is no better than slavery. Lets do things differently.
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Should people be forced to contribute to society?
Its a distraction from the point but;
and in the interests of a great society Just ask yourselves, "What would make a great society?"
It Dawned on me yesterday during a conversation about wether people should be forced to contribute to society, that we should not preclude the idea that if we could manage to arrange things so, just so perfectly so, that if we chose a life of total indolence,,, we could be allowed to; and it would be fine to do that if thats what we, as adults, chose to do.
And that that being an excellent goal that we should always strive to achieve it.
In other words in great society it would be ok to drop out and we can do it tif we want.
There are so many of us that dont actually do anything real, we just float around in the haze of energy created by those tiny few w who actually do real work. I am talking of those builders, nurses, miners and farmers and those who do essential manufacturing. The whole cluster represents a very small percentage of society. Handled well the need to work is actually very small.
I used to live in a house that was 700 years old, if all the things we did make were made as well we would not have to work so dam hard. Imagine going to your draw and getting out your tin opener and imagine that it is 400 years old.
Think not having had to buy a new one every year.
Think of the mining, the transport, the smelting, the fashioning, the drawing the melding and moulding. The teams of people getting it from manufacture to shop, to your home, landfill. Then those involved in taking away the broken one, the transport the dust man and the lorrys & barges of it all just to get it to the landfill site, and the years it will lay in the ground polluting the soil for years until nature eventually does its work.
And imagine the CO2 footprint, shere wasted energy and man hours of it all.
And then imagine if the tin opener was well made and did last 400 years and we saved all that work all that digging and pressing and selling we didn't have to do, and imagine that that applies to everything we make, all those man hours saved, all that energy not wasted;
Yes I can imagine a society arranged just so well, one in which the work needed was so small the it would be fine, if one chose, to not have to work.
Having said all that the work thing is a distraction from the point which is that we should always strive to create a society based on freedoms not limitations, on liberties and not the versions of slavery we seem at present to be strangely ignorant of, even though it runs right through ever fiber of our society.
Of course its a daft proporsition because very few humans can cope with indolance, mos cant help themsalves. Humans have from the beginning of of our time we have been defined by tha fact that we cant sit still, we are allways up to something. Indolance is not really a massive human trait.
I guess the real answer is we could create a society so much better that what we have and that any time now is is a good time. Now is always a good time to do things.
Just a thought.
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I have gotten so fed up with the myopic stupidity of our political leadership that I have decided to try to make it better by giving some constructive ideas a view.I have a few suggestions, observations and explorations, so it’s not all negative.
FIRSTLY it is clear that any society that destroys its environment will not last. It has happened before Mayans with water and Easter Islanders with wood, both times the cultures colapsed
We are destroying the environment, not just for us, but also for everything alive on this planet..
Let's not mess about, in truth we are fucked and unless we really change things very pro-actively.
I have read this subject extensively for over 30 years and it is my conclusion that there will be death throughout nature and we will suffer. This is not definite, but very likely.
To prevent catastrophy we need to challenge too many of the accepted truths that we certainly wont be able to do it in time.
Some of the power games stopping us address urgent problems are: Politicians, This democratic model, 8000 years pluss of pro capital ideology, probably all buisnesses, No tryed and tested alternatives,
Politicians
Politicians skew politics.
Most politicians and companies simply wont have the vision or will. Put another way, Ecology means lower profits, and companies can destroy politicians. So even though we are talking about the only world where life is, politicians, while skewing most things toward the vested's interests, still do too little, too late, (and that with bad grace while crowing about how much they do do). That is why business, like religion, should have no place in politics. They are vested interests that look after their own interests before anything else and thus skew politics. Their interests are not those of people or the planet. Buisness has pursuaded politicians the economy is is most important, it is not our boss, we are its boss.
Ideologys
We are killing our planet so we dont have to chalange our ideology; our idology is more important than my long term survival.
The world is at risk and we don’t stop destroying it because we can’t see a way to make a profit out of it. Or more specifically, any thing that includes the price to the planet is prohibitively expensive. Our "profit is the motivation" ideology is stopping genuine alternatives. We are killing our planet so we dont have to chalange our ideologys.
Look at it this way; our boat is sinking because the people who are breaking it, (are making vast profits out of it). Are we really going to wait for the market to create a "profit stream" allowing you to profit from preserving nature? - Or maybe- we could just stop breaking the boat, stop destroying nature. Hu? Guys?,,,, Guys?
What do I mean?
No amount of money can replace a single Dodo let alone a whole ecosystem. When its gone, its gone forever.
During WWII we changed our whole economy. We put people on the land to farm, had rationing, blackouts and all the rest.
But for some reason the Earths ecology is not as important.
Some of the letters here will let you see how out of touch our MPs and systems are. And how the powers that be are actually preventing us from protecting ourselves and Earth.
Having said that all is not lost now but we have about 5 or 10 years to act.
We will need very concerted effort and vision from the biggest organizing body we have,,, The Government!
The Government is living in a mental bubble and cannot conceive how serious it will be to us humans let alone how it and we will effect all other life on this planet as a result.
The methods and systems we have at present, are not and maybe cannot, deal with the enormous task ahead. Unfortunately this is at a moment when we really need visionary leadership not the mediocre "telephone Hygienists" and pathetic excuses we have now, tedious bank managers all.
OUR PRESENT SYSTEM IS NOT DEMOCRACY.
THE TRUTH IS WE HAVE BUY-OCRACY. WHEREIN WHAT YOU BUY DIRECTS THE WORLDS DIRECTION.
Apart from it being startalingly un- democratic, this has very obvious problems that all corporations and polititions gloss over;
You then need to have:
1. Very knowlagble public
2. Highly motivated buying public.
3. This highly educated and motivated public has to be making educated decisions (covering agriculture, chemistry, genetics, packaging, CO2 production, air miles, carbon foot prints, child workers, water supplies, local politics and corruption across the world,) for every single item we buy!!!
4. For any of this to work the information has to be redilly available, which it is not.
This is clearly is a bad way to do things. It has disempowered people, made them into consumers, and given vast power to people who's best interests are not our own.
Now they are in competition with each other and squeezing people into becoming nothing more that, consumers, commited by mortgages etc to work for the rest of their lives.
Bank Managers
Example, It's no good government saying (Via MP Keith Hill) "Why should I stop polluting if others still do it". Just change some words to see how silly that is. "Why should I stop Abusing Children if others still Abuse Children". Hmm it doesn’t sound so good now. My reply is of course that child abuse is still child abuse, regardless. This "why should I when others don't", attitude is most governments answer to many things, i.e. Investment in road building, airport expansion, nuclear fuels, all supported yet the one truly good, un-critisizable thing, Rail Support, got shuffled to the back, nothing was done. Unfortunately the list goes on.
If we don’t substantially change almost all the things we do now, not only will we experience terrible hardship, but all the species on this planet will also suffer terrible reduction and as the cycle speeds up, sadly most of them will become extinct.
A NEW MORALITY.
THIS MIGHT BE A GOOD TIME TO EVALUATE OUR MORALITIES AND WHY WE HAVE THEM.
What is a Morality? I think it is something nature is developing in humans brains and is still in a developmental stage, will take a long time before it coalesces.
So why do we have morals?
Crudely,
Its purpose is to create a sustainable philosophy in the relatively new, in evolutionary terms, big brain we have.
Our personal moralities are systems developed by people and societys to enhance there chances of survival.
Given that survival is the underlying drive in our moralitys, we can now evaluate each moralities ability to carry out that task and devise new, more sucessful ones. This should be fun.
Here Ecology becomes primary because
without Nature, there is nothing. Everything is dead.
So build that into a morality desinged to help us survive.
I guess that tells us that what we can and cant do and why it has to have, underpinning everything, an understanding of its impact on nature. If we ignore this, we act as if the world is infinite. It is not.
Obviously the more we damage nature the less able it will be to support us. This is a really good reason to start right now. We are at a bow wave of a huge increase in human expansion and resorce useage. If we dont change the reasons we do things then in 150 years the planet will be so seriously damaged that few humans will survive and times will be hard.
So to damage nature is "Bad" and to nurture nature is "Good". Thats your simplistic starting point for any viable morality (one that intends to survive a long term).
But because we can see that its only a matter of the underpinning morality being out of kilter we can do something about it. I am always in favour of good, creative things whos intention is to allow us to live happyer more satisfiying, safer, healther and longer lives. It is the best way to go. Without that we might as well not bother.
There will always be those who want a bad system, many did well out of facism, power is seductive; but If we are going to change anything, we might as well make it better and have good reasoning even a joi-d-vivre, behind the change. I am not religious but I can see that we do indeed live in Eden. We have just made a bit of a mess of it but we can change and tidy it up and all live wonderful lives.
We designed our world so we can design a different one.
But how? What drives our decision making? Well long term survival in the best quality of life possible. So
We are killing our planet so we dont have to chalange our ideology; In other words our ideology is more important than our long term survival
SCALES of things, Inc Time, and relative moralitys.
If we had in infinate world then our morality could be different to a finite world.
Populations Increase
Inevitably as human populations increase and pressure on the earth’s systems increases, as meanwhile, global warming makes droughts that will reduce farmable areas and then starvation will set in. Then people will try to move (This is happening in Somalia right now 2009). As more people move and become refugees the pressure on neighboring states will be extreme, they might even be suffering the same problems, this can destabilise governments and then people die in millions. But this time it wont just stay over there. Countries, faced with total wipe out will not go easy. I suspect many wars over water and farming land. World wide all the natural spaces that can support farming will be doing just that. Any species that doesn’t fit into that or that doesn’t taste nice will go, hunted to extinction or most probably extinction through habitat destruction.
People, when starving, will kill and eat everything, and move to richer environments. Thus speeding up the process.
Quick Maths
Do the math’s: Less Land + More people + Over fishing + Short term farming + Greed motive + Climate Change+ diminishing resources = A Vicious Cycle and a Bloody Dangerous Situation!
There will come a time
when you will have to kill starving people
just to protect ones food supplies.
Can we afford to put armed guards on fields of crops? That will mean even greater hardship, leading to total or near total disintegration of society, as we know it. That is assuming there are any humans left to carry on. (I suppose humans are incredible resourceful and if life is possible at all, some humans will survive). but society could decend to the stone age.
I think we are in for a severe shock.
We will destroy nature
because we cant deal with our own idea,
that of money.
This sounds really dire and I am sorry but having studied ecology and politics for 30 years I think we are in for a severe shock.
Our politicians are worse than useless and, though we vote them into power, they are actualy owned by business.
Political parties actually destroy politics and should be banned along with any "packaged politics" Political parties main concerns are to continue to exist. So naturally they don’t want to speak any hard truths. This is our only political representative, not dealing with the most important subjects of our time.
The parties become more important than the politics they present. Enormous jugganaughts that claim power whether usefull or not. existing to give polititions jobs but not a voice for people.
To be fair, politicians are, to a degree created by the system we have which is clumsy, open to manipulation and altogether rather crude.
So the way we do politics needs to change, Good grief, is this even possible?
We need massive vision and leadership at this moment in time but instead our idiot credo is "the market will prevail".
We will destroy nature because we cant deal with our own idea, that of money.
POLITICAL REFORM.
Clearley this is central.
No Parties.
Jury system parliament.
No Lobbying.
No buisness or religions
Starting at the same level as the Neibourhood watch local groups 1 to 150ish . next level would be the entyre street, then 4 blocks or so. Each time taking good ideas up and down the structure.
Any individual can get there "Bill" before our house of equals.
How can you make nature justify itself in terms of capitalism?
Nature is over if we apply the rules of the business market place to it. If we apply the rules of buisness to nature we will destroy nature. How can you make nature justify itself in terms of capitalism? Applying the business ideology of "survival of the fittest" to nature would produce a single vicious predatorily monster who after consuming everything would die of starvation. Which funnily enough is exactly what is happening.
It just shows how out of touch our invented world is with the actual world.
In our world we work to make stuff that breaks and we throw it away and we have to work again to make more disposable rubbish. This parasitic cycle goes on endlessly and nobody asks why are we alive and "If I am alive, what shall I do?" Or "Now that I am alive what do I want to do with my life?" and the very important question, "Why are we doing this?”
Now that we are alive, how shall we organise ourselves?
If we asked that, we would not create what we have. But to change, it’s a bit like that Irish reply to a lost driver "Well I wouldn’t start from here."
So it becomes clear that so many things, and the way we do things, need to change in so short a time.... The only thing I can do is this, BUT I CAN come up with some ideas.
The cash system itself keeps us in wage slavery
Our collective wealth is greater than it’s ever been. We are wealthier and more productive than the human race has ever been and yet we are all working as hard as ever. It now needs both parents to work in order to have a family, that’s worse than in the 1950s.
But this system is killing us all!
Power Pyramids, Politicians and Business’s really cannot see any way to do things without top-down manipulation and the total and uncritical acceptance of the cash system which keeps us in wage slavery and by the way, is eating up our planet. Their problem is that they stay rich and powerful by insisting that there is no viable alternative system. To which we must reply "But this system is killing us all". Also they insist that the economy is so important that we must work hard to keep it a-float (??). Again shout loud and clear, "We invented it, it should be working for us, not us working for it"!
We really lack leadership and vision.
Actually very small bunch have taken control and built power pyramids for themselves, this allows them to direct how we actually live. In the last 1000 years we have progressed from the Feudal system only slightly. The shape and names have changed and also the routes to power have changed. But the actual pyramid hasn't changed much at all and I don’t think its helping.
I don’t think we will ever really be weaned off cash but we have to do other stuff fast because the greed motive is so destructive.
Power Pyramids
Everywhere I look I can see money apparently doing good, driving economies etc but as one investigates it deeper things look very different. Trouble is we have spent 8,000 plus years building tribe shaped pyramid shaped structures (deriving from ape family structures,) and spent at least 3,000 years working out how to use money to wield power over each other. It’s very difficult to work out a persuasive alternative. Especially as we regard the use of money as one of the immutable true cornerstones of life. We never question it, and thus it is treated like a religion, where we are the believers. When so many people really believe in something and put so much investment into it, it is very difficult to present any argument that sounds sensible; they all sound mad to those who have no idea that there are alternatives.
The Greed Motive.
We have been given a society in which many things a set up before we get here and we rarely question them. Cash and the way we use it. A system developed over maybe 8,000 years is a very difficult one to trash but it is so integrated in the way we act that it does now need to be questioned.
In part it is a way of measuring work.
It is a powerful way of controlling people.
It has become the only reason to do anything.
Anything that does not make money is not followed up or pursued.
Survival of the Fittest vs. Co-Operation and Integration.
Utter rot. If that were true we would not have the banking system we do now. It is only a part of the system: More accurately it is "Dubious survival for the weakest".
It misses out the really true picture of co-operation and integration throughout nature, which gives a much greater chance of survival that just plain competitive aggression.
It works in the business world and produces vast monopolies, which governments have to tame and split up etc but nature simply just does not work that way.
We can outwit the Cod in the sea and if we continue to do it we will kill all the cod.
Not to mention that the idea that "cod only exist as a human resource" is horrifying anthropomorphic arrogance. Why is it wrong? Hmm well if you destroy your food supply, you die.
We are not so unique as we like to think. Yes we do have very clever brains but in all other things we are a mere hairs breadth from most mammals. We love nurture our children that implies many things. In Emotions such as Empathy, Love, Loss, Anxiety, Jealousy, anger, Fear, and so many more subtle signs that we recognise in ourselves
I did like Gandhi’s idea that "As long as we have slaughter houses, we will have war".
Power Pyramids:
Bullies, for the benefit of bullies, designed our system.
It’s quite simple really. They don’t want any change that might make them less powerful.
"They" include Banks; all large companies especially Multinationals, Any organisation or institution with an investment in the things, which need change. Not surprisingly they resist the change. It would strange if a company head got up one day and seeing the ecological destruction being wrought by his firm, told his workers to stop, down tools, who would get less strong if people et al.
As long as we all think we need to work so hard we give them larger parts our real lives than is necessary to produce all we need.
The reason you buy crap products is so that you can buy another one when it breaks, thus you get "addicted" to their crap product. Its not by accident the thing is crap. It is meant to break so that you buy another and that is why the maker does not want to make a good one. Why sell a good one for £1 when you can sell 20 crap ones for 50p each; Insane stupidity, criminal waste, self imposed wage slavery. We have given up power over our own lives by giving that choice to a body whose interests conflict with our own.
Politicians strut about telling others how things should be done and these same puffed up incompetents haven’t any idea how the world actually works.
This next piece of "evidence" is a good example.
IE 50 years after the scientists started saying we are doing terrible damage to the world Our UK government has finally been forced by the EEC to make a 50% reduction in CO2 over 40 years sounds good but look at it another way; 40 years after it was obvious change was needed and in an environment when we need a Carbon Negative Economy politicians decided to reduce the CO2 output to 50%,,,, over 2 generations!
These incompetent Telephone Hygienists have wrested power from the common people and are so biased, twisted, corrupt and lacking in any fore-site or vision or statesmanship allow a disasterous situation because to do otherwise would be to question our ideologys. They have let us down badly.
The “Party” system people wont step out of line or tell the truth in case they rock the boat or upset business. Meanwhile that very business which is destroying the planet is also promoting worsening personal economic dependentcy and unsustainably ecologicaly destructive lifestyles.
Politicians Are Telephone Hygienists. Sodding disingenuous bunch of useless, out of touch and ineffectual ladder climbers. Ask yourself if life here has actualy improved compared to what you imagen it could be.
For the last 50 years scientists have been saying there is a serious problem and here we are saying that we will reduce our CO2 emissions by 80% in another 40 years. It is rising at time of writing and this at a moment when if we totally stopped there would still be a serious problem and breakdown of societies.
If we provided ourselves with the essentials on a 2-day week, we would just loose interest in working quite so hard. It threatens manufacturers because you wont be rushing out to work quite so readily, but the Planet will love it. You might even have much more fun.
Sensible Politics
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