Woes
From Sustain
Before setting the world to rights, I think it is worth framing the macro problems facing humanity. There are four primary woes of the world that block the path to the ideal society:
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Ignorance
Ignorance is a pervasive affliction. Without first tackling ignorance, we will struggle to cope with the other three woes of the world.
We are designed to be wilfully ignorant of our individual limited capacities as a survival mechanism. We suffer a similar blind spot when taking reassurance from our collective power to govern, projecting illusory order and control over our earthly. We are blissfully ignorant in our complex world of how we can each contribute to sustainability. More worryingly, our collective efforts to address depletion of our resources are staggeringly impotent.
A core driver of these failings is the priority of the individual in the prevailing system. This undue pre-eminence of the singular allows fragmentation of understanding and purpose, shattering any prospect of attaining sustainability.
Fortunately, there are definite interventions into today's mode of existence that will go a long way to dispelling the ignorance that prevails.
Inequality
At the outset of global capitalism (the beginning of the 19th century), the most successful fifth of the world had three times the income of the bottom fifth.
Since that time, the traded wealth of the world has expanded rapidly. At the same time wealth distribution has diverged. In the early days, productivity advances of the West were bartered for the natural wealth of the rest of the world. As time passed, the West increasingly relied on financially outwitting the rest of the world for its labour and materials. The balance of this trade has been far from fair and proportional. It is emotive to suggest that the richer nations have raped and pillaged for centuries, bullying their weaker counterparts with superior bargaining power in brutal pursuit of self-interest. Emotive, but not far removed from reality.
Today’s outcome is that the top fifth takes 86% of world income, with the bottom fifth coping with just 1%. The gaps within countries are even starker. These divisions will only widen without more effective intervention.
Such jaw dropping inequality is clear evidence of how unsustainable our current system is. Not only will it breed deserved resentment, there will never be enough to go round while so much is consumed by so few. Inequality is a cancer that eats away at solidarity between and within countries. Addressing inequality should be our utmost priority, but requires a sizeable departure from the way the world is currently organised.
Depletion
We live in a world of abundant resource. Over the last two centuries we have become exponentially more efficient at consuming that resource, against a backdrop of exponential population growth.
The finite nature of our resource is becoming increasingly evident. You don’t need to be an environmental expert to foresee the oncoming resource crunch. Oil, fresh water, fish and trees become ever more scarce in the jaws of our unbridled, unsustainable consumption. On an evolutionary scale, the present anthropogenic extinction spike is more dramatic than a meteor strike, wiping out aeons of creeping biodiversity. And this is before factoring in the potential devastating impact of climate change.
Future generations will have no means of comprehending the value of what we will have forever destroyed. The sooner we start on a determined path towards sustainability, the more bountiful the equilibrium harvest will be.
Disease
From malaria to cancer, disease acts as a constraint upon our shared quality of life. The way in which we globally approach disease is ethically and economically moribund.
The combination of these four blights upon humanity represents a near insurmountable challenge for the stable future of the human race. Clearly there are other woes, but I believe the source of most can be traced back to these core, addressable problems; problems that have emerged quite naturally from the evolution of our species and society.
Onwards to The Natural System
