Utopian Futures
I’ve been fascinated with “utopian” literature most of my life. I think the first thing I ever read that tilted that way was Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. He also wrote something called Island, that moved the idea even further along. Books that try to predict the future are a tad different. That would be things like Kurzweil’s Singularity. He is projecting the event when we manage to create an artificial intelligence brighter than we are. I have always been fascinated by science fiction as well - particularly when it is set in some distant future. It kinds of opens your mind to prospects and ideas you had not considered before. That is also why I particularly like the kind that has a totally different social structure in pace, besides the advanced science stuff. Authors like Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, Asimov, The Empire Trilogy, Banks with his whole “Culture” series, and Ken Macleod, The Star Faction. They all play around with social structures and government in creative ways.
My thought was that an author can put together a plausible picture of the way things might be, if only we could work on it. And that might persuade people to make some changes in how they view our problems. But . . . despite all of these fine works, and numerous other “self help” books - our movement forward as a society is agonizingly slow. It takes hundreds if not thousands of years to adjust a culture, a world view mindset. There oughta be a better way. So . . ..
What if we agree on some simple steps which address the primary problems faced by our society. If we put these things into our primary education, and set about measuring them as goals to achieve - might that work? We can, of course, have a whole debate on exactly WHAT the problems are - we will likely have a progressive and conservative slant on both of those - but perhaps not. I am continually amazed by how much we really do know, how much we really do understand about how humans work, and how little of that gets to the popular mentality. Oh, it will eventually get there - but it takes way too long to make a difference.
For what its worth - here is my list, based on a few years of education, and reading. It is only a start, and only a basis for discussion. What is your list? What would we as a society focus on to solve our REAL problems. I can cite references for all of these - but let’s not complicate things as yet.
Real Problems?
What are our real problems? It’s not poverty, and disease and hunger. Those are things that we really can address, and we even know how to fix. In my mind, the real problems are the things we carry about in our heads that keep us from working together to use the resources we have to solve problems like poverty, hunger, etc. If we could build our education curricula at all levels around our real goals, where might that take us?
Try these ideas on - see what you think. As is my custom, I give you just a short list, and then a longer one with more developed ideas later. I know most people only read the short one. That is simply how things work.
Educational steps to a brighter future for humankind - focus on our REAL problems
- How to Think.
We need to teach people how to think, how to collect information, how to make decisions that are complex. We are lousy at it - our evolutionary development has focused on gut decisions. We need to consciously set the balance to the rational side and away from our emotional, instant response. Daniel Kahnneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, has clearly proven this with his experiments. And it applies to all realms, but most importantly to economics and politics. Even if we just alert people to this fact, they might start actually thinking instead of just reacting! Imagine what might happen! - How to Work Together.
We need to teach people how to work together. I’m not talking “teamwork” - I am talking about advanced research on negotiation and consensus building and how to do it. When people invest a little bit of time in getting to know each other, the result is an enormous increase in trust, and that creates the basic ability to work together to resolve issues - not to kill each other, not to compete. We could make a major step forward if people were just aware that resources like the Harvard Negotiation Project exists. It’s like knowing that psychology exists, or chemistry. We can do this. Trust me on this. - How Basic Economics Works
We need to teach people at the basic level, what wealth is, where it comes from, and how we can create more of it. Most people have some confused idea that money equals wealth or some such. We create wealth by hard work, by ingenuity, by research, by education, by all manner of means. And creating wealth benefits ALL of us if we can figure out how to share it. BUT moving money around, competing geographically for the same things, influence, corruption, and the like, WASTES wealth. We seem to waste more than we create. We need to fix that. - What a Full Rich Life Looks Like
Most of us are raised to focus on the default values of our consumer society - get a job, make money, buy things, take a trip, etc. We count our GNP, our “products”, as though it were our whole goal in life. We make and consume things. We are way past the subsistence level and our goals have not changed, the things we count as a society have not moved up the need hierarchy. We need to educate our children and ourselves that life is so much more than acquiring or using things. We can develop ourselves, we can grow full lives of achievement and creation - every one of us can. We need a national measure of “betterness” - how are we improving as a nation, as a people, as human beings. That should be the goal of our work, of our expense, of our time. - We Are ALL In This Together Teach people how interconnected we are - not just in economics, but in natural resources, food, entertainment, etc. Give them the facts, and the proof as a regular, on going set of information. Start each news program with the latest understanding of how much that poor African kid is costing all of us because he or she can’t afford to go to school. Tell us again and again, how much it costs us as a nation if we allow a single corrupt politician to create a single “earmark” for a local project that has a narrow benefit. Remind us how we all benefit from infrastructure investments - like education, college degrees, research, highways, etc. We should be clamoring for our government to use our taxes to make more and better investments on behalf of all of us, not to reduce our taxes and eliminate our investments in ourselves. Your thoughts on this?
