Two
years ago, I laid
out a set of requirements for what I called an "ideal
world," which in retrospect I could have called a "healthy
world." Much of my writing since then has dealt with many of the
same ideas, teasing out details, exploring the implications of my
evolving model
of global variables in the past and future, and sharing personal
experiences and expectations that appear to be echoes of each other.
Built
into all of it was the hope that some significant part of the
population would seize on those or similar ideas and, in the presence
of obvious danger, use them as the basis of a way to diminish or
escape that danger. The political climate at the time was cautiously
reasonable, inching toward awareness and agreement that something
major needed to be done to avoid global economic and ecological
collapse that was becoming
perilously imminent. There remained a chance that the world might
succeed in at least delaying that collapse by a few years.
I
spent a fair amount of creative energy trying to assess the
probability of success. As a trigger for some of that creativity, I
simulated people and environments in fictional writing – a tactic
that had coincided with previous bursts of insight (most notably in
the development of my
first novel). My most recent attempt followed a thought
experiment in one of my books, and yielded a model
of interaction between groups that made some interesting
predictions that could be tested; chief among them: that interaction
between groups is always destructive to the identity of at least one
of the groups through either assimilation or death.
The
last election here in the U.S. appears to have rejected global
collaboration for mutual survival, and in light of my research
suggests that the group most effectively in control of our politics
and economy has felt enough of a threat to its identity that it is
willing to threaten the survival of everyone in order to
ensure its dominance. Use of the word "dominance" is
deliberate: my group interaction model defines it as the total
control of all resources by one group. Though I haven't as closely
studied it, there appears to be a similar dynamic at work in much of
the rest of the world. In previous years, this threat might have been
dealt with by acquiring more resources and moving people away from
each other in order to safely establish group identity ("isolation");
but the world is running out of basic resources, and we don't yet
have the ability to settle other habitable worlds – if there are
any. Competition will therefore be the driving activity of our
future, and competition is the key to dominance.
I
brought up the "ideal world" concept again because since
the election I have come to a number
of realizations, among them that the ideal world I envisioned is
in fact what a healthy world would look like, as opposed to the dying
world we live in now; and that even if we are beginning the collapse
I've forecast and feared, the best we can do is to create pockets of
healthy community and environments wherever we can. In future Idea
Explorer posts I will dive into what systems engineers might call
"derived requirements" for specific situations, and in my
other writing (such as Twitter
and the Land
of Conscience blog) I will explore what implementation looks
like.
