Posts in category: Social

~ Navigating the world of 21^st century Politics

Introduction

In terms of western internal politics, the 2010’s has seen an increasing trend of anti-establishment movements, nationalists and populists from the right and the left attacking “the establishment”, turning from marginalised outsiders into third and second-tier parties – becoming serious contenders for power. Often, the established parties of the centre, whether left or right, tend to galvanise together against the outsiders. These new political actors were generally characterised not only by the different thoughts they brought in to their respective national discourses, but also by the overt hostility of established political power-brokers and by the media. Despite being generally maligned and closely scrutinised, these movements nevertheless have grown – though seemingly unable to breach the threshold of 50% necessary to make a decisive impact…

Until 2016 that was.

It can be argued that the triumphs of the Eurosceptics in Britain’s June referendum, and Donald Trump’s equally surprising and populist win in the United States presidential election were outliers, and it remain to be seen whether or not Geert Wilders or Marine Le Pen can reach power in their countries. However, the establishment has been shaken and is seemingly at this point unable to put down the challenge from the populists.

The main questions we have to ask ourselves are:

• Who are the populists and what do they want?
• Who are the establishment, and what do they want?
• Why is all of this happening?

TL;DR Summary

• Our current financial system is dependent on economic growth.
• When prosperity increases, exponential growth decreases.
• This forces the system to increase its efficiency and engage in “creative destruction”.
• One form of creative destruction is to deregulate and remove economic barriers.
• This increases growth, but hurts groups that have won benefits from said barriers.
• A new political conflict zone is emerging, with the third world proletariat and the billionaires on one side, and the lower middle class of developed nations on the other.
• All this serves to hide the more serious issue of the global ecological crisis.
• We would need to seek a solution which emphasises a confederational global order and localised autonomy.

Legitimate and illegitimate faultlines

In most liberal democracies, there is a political spectrum, consisting of diverging opinions, generally centred around the issue of taxation levels and the form, size and direction of the welfare state. Usually, we see a moderate right – which desires to have low taxes and low public expenditures – locked in a debate with a moderate left, which desires roughly the opposite. Most of the major newspapers lean towards one bloc above the other, but seldom tries to indict, disqualify or delegitimise the political opposition.

Usually, however, both blocs tend to share political sentiments on a wide range of issues. Both blocs are usually supportive of free trade, of a foreign policy consensus regarding the country’s role within the European Union and/or NATO, as well as several free trade agreements. Both blocs tend to be supportive of status quo when it comes to the financial markets, and tend to share roughly the same ideas when it comes to the issue of climate change. Both blocs also tend to see the role of citizenship (as disconnected from ethnicity) and the nation-state (as transformed and reduced) in the 21^st century in a similar light.

Thus, there are issues which are seen as a legitimate arena for political debate – namely those which pertain the issue of the size of taxes and how to spend them. Other issues, like international entanglements, free trade and the role of the nation-state are viewed as far more sensitive, almost illegitimate to veer into. Then there are a few topics that are seen as absolutely toxic (criticising media, focusing too much on the banking system, and then – worst of all – ethnopolitics). The reason why some subjects are seen as legitimate and some as less legitimate is because the establishment has reached an equilibrium in the West, following the Second World War (which, by the way, is a prudent way of organising a society – judging by the instability of third world democracies lacking a national consensus). Upsetting the delicate balance and the status quo could risk destabilising society and create a situation where electoral democracy may be at risk. For many decades, the general population shared into these sentiments.

What would however happen when the political consensus achieved by the establishment is viewed – by large chunks of the general population – as unsettling to the status quo?

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s enter the age of Globalism.

The Politics of the Unipolar World and the nature of Growth

The spectre of globalisation became fully evident with the end of the Cold War on the 25^th of December 1991. It had however brewed for a while already, with the first wave of offshoring production, first to Japan and then to other Asian countries such as Taiwan, South Korea and Malaysia, which began already during the late 1960’s. This was made possible by two conditions – Pax Americana and the development of communications technologies, which allowed companies to distribute their investments to the locations with the lowest costs and the highest benefits.

Following the debt crisis of the 1980’s, dozens of third world countries were forced to open up their economies and sell out vital utilities to multinational corporations, which served to increase the flow of money in the system and to weaken the role of the state. During the 1990’s, this order was codified through the Washington Consensus and the formation of the WTO (World Trade Organization). While free trade agreements of the past tended to reduce and lower the amount of regulations, these new free trade treaties established during the past 25 years have served to introduce legislative measures (for example ISDS mechanisms which penalise countries for instituting laws which could damage the profitability of corporate operations within their borders, or anti-piracy laws), above and partially beside the scrutiny of the national legislative chambers. In short, these new agreements have a tendency to allow multinational corporations powers which are approaching those of state actors in their relationship with sovereign states.

Of course, the most far-reaching and deepest example of international cooperation and supranationalism during our era is and remains the European Union, though it is hampered by the problems of the European economy and by the fact that it is split between those who envision it as a future federal state, those who strive towards it becoming a template for global governance, those who wish to scale it back and those who desire to break it. The nation-state, we have heard, is growing increasingly obsolete due to technological development – and that is a good thing, for the sake of diversity, progress and growth.

And yes, economic globalisation is indeed a dynamic force, having a multiplying effect on trade and stock markets. It binds together the globe in linear networks, transforms entire bio-regions into landscapes intended for the production of goods, which then are brought around the globe to the vast supermarkets of the emergent super-cities. These cities join together tens of millions of people from all the continents of the Earth, forming vibrant, creative, multi-cultural hubs characterised by fashion, innovation and novelty – mobilising economic activity to never before seen heights.

There is however several shadow sides to this glitz of vitality – the one most apparent being that while the GDP economy has indeed grown – in several western countries it has more than doubled since 1980, automation, off-shoring and immigration has weakened the once dominant manufacturing sector. 25 years ago, it was still relatively easy for a high school dropout to apply for a manufacturing job. New positions within that sector demands higher skillsets, and are fewer in number – and still gradually shrinking in importance.

Instead, the new jobs which are created generally consist of fewer hours and a higher amount of insecurity. These jobs go into the service sector – the fast food industry, sales-by-phone, on-hour positions within the cleaning sector, and micro-jobs – popular as a solution in Britain and Germany. While older people are generally entrenched by laws protecting their employment, youths are more exposed for this new, emerging, hyper-competitive economy. Entire regions, once consisting of chimney-forests of industrial towns, have turned into basket-cases characterised by high unemployment and growing poverty.

While generally claiming that this process of creative destruction is “historically inevitable” (akin to Marxian historicism), the establishment in most western countries, from large multi-national corporations, to centrist political parties, mainstream media and academia, seems heavily invested into the furtherance of this mega-trend. That is hardly surprising, giving the positive net effects on economic growth.

As we previously have explained (https://eosprojects.com/what-is-money.html), our current monetary system has an in-built need to maximise growth and to never reach an equilibrium. States which have failed to open up their economies to the dynamic forces of globalisation – most notably Japan – has also stagnated economically. Stagnation breeds a risk for a loss of confidence in the system, and thereby a future financial crisis created by the mountains of debt owed by future generations.

One aspect of this trend has been immigration. The maximisation of growth necessitates the destruction of unproductive countryside regions and the expansion of urban cityscapes. In the context of cities, however, demographic growth tend to plummet. Opening up the cities for global immigration adds new workers and consumers into the mix, without the need for much extra investments into schools and universities. Even those who get stuck in perpetual unemployment are contributing to the profitability of businesses, because their existence as potential labour serves to depress wage increases and thus strengthen the employers in trade situations. If the immigrants are from impoverished or developing countries, they are usually willing to work for worse pay and under worse conditions than domestic labour would appreciate.

Enter the nationalists

I am well aware that the populist tide in the west is occurring both on the left and the right side of the spectrum. However, the strongest growing tide has occurred on the right, with nationalists rising nearly everywhere (except the Iberian Peninsula, if you discount regional separatists). There are several reasons for this, but the most logical one is that resistance against economic globalisation and for a return to 1960’s style Keynesianism is (what even Marx himself would have labelled) a reactionary stance.

The nationalist solution is simple, and is about strengthening the nation-state, introduce protectionism and decrease the growth of the labour pool by reducing immigration and utilising the tool of deportations. Of course, xenophobia and racism plays a role in this outlook – especially regarding the target of the ire – but the goal is economically linked to the fear of competition and of seeing increased risk in one’s own life. If the source with this risk is associated with what is viewed as an out-group (religious, ethnic, political or economic does not matter), then there will also be a heightened risk for inter-group conflicts.

The dilemma of the establishment has been the following: How to increase the competition between groups, without creating hate and animosity between them? The solutions have varied between countries, from trying to impose assimilation of ethnic minority groups, towards state-sanctioned individualism, the denial of the existence of ethnic groups and official anti-racism. Judging by the current nationalistic wave in the West, all these methodologies have failed in defusing the situation.

To some extent, the nationalist rage also represents the rebellion of the “economically unviable” regions against the metropolises, often characterised by the countryside and declining manufacturing towns joining together in an alliance against the capitols – against the rainbow coalition for globalization unifying capital and bare feet.

The venom of Ethnopolitics

While globalization represents a huge opportunity for economic growth to manifest itself, it also increases the risks and vulnerability. According to Ricardian principles, the implementation of free trade would necessarily increase the co-dependency between nations and between continents. The increasing reliance on linear transfer of resources, were raw materials are extracted, sublimated into assembly materials, assembled into products and finally consumed on – in order – four different parts of the world, is highly vulnerable even to regional disturbances. The social collapse in one region, or the disentanglement of one great nation from a number of treaties could affect a domino line of other factors in manners unpredictable even from the point of view of the most refined computer programmes available today.

Ethnopolitics – the basis of ethnicity as a separating identity – represents a dangerous powder-keg which, under the wrong circumstances, can blow up and create the conditions for crimes against humanity.

Nationalism is resented by the current establishment because the current establishment values the benefits of globalization, sees the process of globalization as not only necessary but as virtuous, and because it threatens to lead down into a slippery-slope where the normalisation of ethnically charged hatred can spiral out of control and lead to genocides. History has proven over and over again that there is a risk for such an occurrence.

Yet, as previously stated, the conditions for nationalism to arise are created by the effects of globalisation – which disconnects the countryside from the city and which is (partially) responsible for human beings being exposed to the stark reality that their existence may be economically unnecessary. Meanwhile, the establishment has largely embraced a globalistic ideology which welcomes and strives to transition their countries towards more of these rationalising forces.

Thus, a large share of the public has started to view the establishment as a radical force which threatens their traditional way of life and the values attached to it. Especially as the traditional conduit for communication between the elites and the people – mass media – have increasingly come to be seen as a medium for “pro-globalist propaganda” and for ignoring the sentiments of the traditional working class. Meanwhile, the nationalists represent a threat of the same magnitude against the professionals and classes which have come to rely on the dynamic aspects of the globalized economy. Thus, polarisation intensifies.

A dialectal process?

To some extent, the nationalist reaction is understandable. After all, interior, rural regions – no matter where they are located – are economically irrational in a world driven by the logic of linear systems and exponential growth, no matter their sense of their own values and importance. When agriculture and manufacturing soon would be completely automated, why then subsidise the existence of remote, rural towns dominated by retirees, public employees and the unemployed or underemployed? Just ask the people of the Dorotea and Asele municipalities, who saw their primary care gutted.

Yet, it must be said that the aggressive blame on entire ethnic migrant groups and the judgement on them as collectives is a scary trend which proves that humanity has not yet overcome the primal urges for tribal conflict, especially when said groups mostly are driven to the West by wars partially directly or indirectly initiated by actors based in the West, and for the sole purpose of creating a future for their children. These people cannot be blamed for being exploited as a wedge to liberalise the labour market. Moreover, this process is already underway, even in countries pursuing xenophobic policies – due to the destructive force of automation.

Thus, the alluring promise of a return to the early 1960’s remains a mirage, and the nationalist forces remain impotent to achieve that, though redistribution to declining regions and their tourist attractions may slow their demise.

If Karl Marx had been alive today, he would probably have hailed globalism as a progressive force which streamlined the productive capacities of the world, eliminated barriers of capital and moved the world closer to the foundation of two classes, the super-wealthy oligarchy and the teeming global proletariat. He would disdainfully have declared those forces opposing globalism as relics judged by the Darwinian forces of historical materialism to be flushed away and dissolved into the proletariat or into nothingness.

The endgame of globalism is a world with free movement for capital, goods, services and people and universal laws for the conduction of business. It would be a world of Ricardian divisions, where each region focuses only producing what it is least bad at producing, creating monocultures intended to feed the emerging Ecumenopolis the resources desired by its inhabitants.

The problem with this vision is not only that it is horrifying in its grandiosity as well as its shallowness, but that it is untenable.

Globalism and nationalism – a flawed narrative

Nationalism remains unable to achieve the harmonic stasis which it promises, because it is based on the backward technological paradigms of an age which was dying already by the 1960’s.

Globalism, however, also fails to meet the judgement of reality, and that in a much more chilling manner. It is not possible to entertain exponential economic growth for an eternity, because the more an economy grows, the less it will grow, simply because €1 of €50 may be 2%, but €1 of €50 000 000 is barely noticeable, because human beings have a limited ability to consume which gradually will lead to a flattening of their consumption curve no matter their income, and – most of all – because we are collectively as a species already annually using up 140% of the planet’s renewal capacity.

The logic of comparative benefits taken to an extreme leads to sterilised mono-cultures and to emphasising destructive surface usage practices which already have turned over a third of the Earth’s land surface to areas used to grow fodder for meat animals. The logic of emphasising exponential growth leads to the continuous rise of our exploitation of our home planet, and the very purpose of every WEF meeting at Davos is intended for the promulgation of the gospel of growth.

Maybe they believe that the environment is just an economic factor, but their policies are leading to deforestation in the tropics, to the destruction of soils and freshwater reservoirs, which have an importance for humanity which cannot be overstressed. If we are continuing down the current path, we will be on a good way towards accomplishing a Sixth Global Mass Extinction Event by the year 2100.

And to transition away from this, we will need a new kind of thinking. Even the UN knows (http://www.evergreenedigest.org/new-un-report-finds-almost-no-industry-profitable-if-environmental-costs-were-included). Nationalism can never achieve that kind of thinking, because it is based around the idea that what happens beyond the border does not exist.

The EOS Design and its relation to the struggle

To take a stand both against the destructive force of nationalism, and the if-not-more destructive force of thoughtless globalization requires far more than buzzwords. We need an alternative to the current model – and the Earth Organisation for Sustainability has created a blueprint, known as The Design. We do not yet however know whether it will work or not, it has to be tested, in thousands of simultaneous but slightly varying local experiments, and gradually grow up from the soil. We do not have much time at the moment.

What we do know, is that our future is dependent upon three criteria.

That we do not use more than 100% of the Earth’s annual renewal capacity.

That we aspire towards a circular economy.

That every human being on Earth has the right to life, which also means the right to have a guaranteed minimum income.

Ultimately, what this means is that we have to cooperate globally to create a confederation of autonomous regions, seeking to place power as closely to the human beings efficiently possible.

How we must make an impact

As chairperson, I envision the EOS as a movement for peace. We affirm that all human beings have a right to aspire to fulfilling their own life’s goals, as long as that does not entail the wilful injuring of the lives of other human beings, or of our planet.

The greatest physical and moral challenge of the 21^st century is how we can proceed to shift our food production away from destructive monocultures towards more sustainable systems, without causing mass starvation or suffering amongst the peoples of the Earth.

To transit towards a sustainable future requires that communities are directly involved in the transition, and for that to occur, it must mean that communities should be empowered. This is, to a large extent, the opposite of the current trend of hyper-centralisation of power into the hands of financial institutes, multi-national corporations and the treaties intended to empower these actors. Humans deprived of the means to control their own destinies would increasingly become irrational and eventually act like cornered rats.

Instead of railing against groups or proposing simple solutions, we must organise locally and regionally, and seek to unify human beings on the micro-level. The election of Trump has proven that no Paris Agreement is strong enough to withstand the power of an angry people. The elites are powerless to curb the excesses of their own system, but a people who is enlightened, who can understand their own interests and who have the tools at their disposal is the most powerful in the world.

It is time to build a future where humans can live, can love, can be fully human!

Introduction

This article is primarily directed towards people who either have experience volunteering in local sustainability projects or people who take an interest in doing so in the future. The most usual result, when a mixed group of friends and strangers convene to discuss the ramifications for a practical project which will make an impact upon the real world, is failure.

There are of course hundreds of successful local sustainability projects around the globe. But for each one of them, there are at least a hundred failed projects. Thousands of young idealists try to improve their communities, only to be frustrated by collapsing projects and friendships ended due to misunderstandings and conflicts.

From observing countless such attempts at creating sustainability projects, both in my own hometown of Umea, which – despite its remoteness – is a thriving university town with tens of thousands of students, and in other parts of the world, I have started to see patterns emerge in terms of why projects fail.

There are several behaviours which affect the outcome of projects, which we can see as emergent tendencies towards collapse. If we compare projects which fail with projects that succeed, we can see that the longer time a projects is planned to last, the higher the risk for failure – especially if the participants are between 20 and 30 years old. Most projects which fail at an early or middle stage simply wither away because half to two thirds of the original participants have moved to other cities or continents.

That particular characteristic of project failures is unfortunately difficult to amend, but it wouldn’t need to have such damning consequences if it wasn’t for other problems which tend to plague sustainability projects relying on volunteers.

These problems are, in no particular order:

• A division between well-motivated activists and semi-motivated hang-arounds, with somewhat blurred delineations between the groups.
• That participants switch behind both groups, with more moving from the first group to the second group during the course of a project’s lifetime.
• That some participants in enthusiasm over the project or a desire to make the rest of the group happy volunteer to take responsibility of tasks within the project, and then fail to deliver, either because of drug abuse issues, a low attention span or a failure to access their available time in relation with the time consumption of what they promised to achieve.
• A tendency of most participants to passively observe the project rather than to take an active part in it.
• Active and enthusiastic participants becoming increasingly disillusioned with the project due to influence from the more passive partakers.
• Many participants expect instantaneous success and quickly become disappointed and disassociate themselves from the project when it faces its first setbacks or when certain aspects of it drag out in time.

What does these six factors have in common? They are all mostly coming down to the human factor. None of these problems represent financial constraints, deadline challenges, structural or even organisational inadequacies. You can have the best organisation on paper in the world, but if these six factors are prevalent in your team, you will not be able to succeed with your objectives – because the participants will not be able to successfully keep themselves to their organisational structure.

Then, the natural question is why so many movements with idealistic goals are failing in establishing working teams. I would, in this article, argue that it is partially a consequence of contemporary western culture. I would also argue that it is one of the dominant characteristics of the transformative challenge which we are facing today.

TL;DR summary

• Humans are naturally cooperative and evolved to work together in small, collectivistic tribal-based units.
• Culture and civilisation arose as a way to cope with societies too complex to work organically.
• Following the Great Depression and the Second World War, Western Civilization transformed itself into a hyper-individualistic culture which – unlike any previous culture – preached the virtues of self-indulgement and hyper-individualism.
• This culture of super-consumerism is one of the engines of exponential economic growth, and thus bears a great deal of responsibility for the destruction of the planet’s biosphere.
• We need to move away from this destructive and unsustainable culture, and embrace a culture of enlightened collectivism, for the sake of the biosphere and of our own sanity.

“Human nature”

Anatomically modern humans arose around 150 000 years ago on the African savannah. It took our ancestors roughly 135 000 years to spread out over most of the planet’s land surface (bar New Zealand, which was colonised by the Maoris around the time when Frederick Barbarossa fought his Italian wars). During most of this time, humanity lived as sedentary hunter-gatherers, moving around within limited areas. For thousands of years, generations lived, loved, ate and died in the same places. There are for example caves in Greece where the same lineages have been buried for thousands of years.

Often, we hear the argument – even from otherwise educated individuals sometimes – that contemporary capitalism is an ingrained aspect of “human nature”, and that the current western civilization is the natural result of the uninhibited self-expression of the human being. Thus, our current society is not seen as an anomaly, but rather as the predetermined end-result of human biology.

Most scholars agree that the basis of capitalism is founded on the advent of the Industrial Revolution, which began around two hundred years ago in North-western Europe. In short, for 99,87% of the time that human beings have existed on this planet have they not lived in a capitalistic society. Then the question that arises is, what is human nature?

Human behaviour

The issue of what constitutes human being, is unsurprisingly not only a scientific but also unfortunately a political issue. While those who desire to conserve power hierarchies and inequalities have tended to favour biological determinism, many progressives have embraced not only their own particularist interpretations of research data, but also established political dogmas amongst themselves which seek to downplay if not reject any notion that there are biological foundations for human behaviour. I would argue that science should not be treated as a normative foundation for human society, and would wholeheartedly agree with the esteemed Darwinian Richard Dawkins that a society built around Darwinian principles would be quite horrible.

Nevertheless, knowledge of human behaviour in the natural condition is a valuable tool to better understand ourselves as a social species. The human being is an animal, equipped with the same instincts and motivators as other animals. We desire safety, food, sleep, sex and companionship. Humans also inhabit the same material world as all other organisms, and must act in accordance with the sustenance interests of their bodies.

However, it is impossible to state unequivocally that there is a human ‘nature’. We are not living on a “Planet of Hats”, and humans are evidently capable of a wide spectrum of possible behavioural patterns, judging by our knowledge of history and the observations we can make throughout the world. In some regions of the world, some behaviours are so ingrained that they almost have become a second nature to those espousing these cultures. In other areas of the world, the same behaviours would be unthinkable.

The same can apply between generations as well, even relatively recently. For example, in contemporary Sweden, pub fights between men are rarer than pub fights during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Also, amongst certain segments of the ethnic Swedish male population, violent expressions of homophobia were seen as natural and healthy, whereas today such behaviour is more or less relegated to the most extreme sub-groups. If we go further back in time, to the 970’s and 980’s, it was seen as completely natural for a Swedish man to abduct a woman in a foreign land, take her as a concubine and raise her children as second-class citizens. Instead of talking about nature, which is singular and unchangeable, we should instead talk about behaviour. I know it is not in the interest of those desiring to preserve the status quo, but we need to be truthful and see that while what we are has not changed for 150 000 years, who we are has undergone tremendous transformations in the past.

What, then, is the natural type of human behaviour?

In order to approach an answer for that question, we need to look at the entire period during which our species have existed. The challenge from that point of view is that we cannot possibly know what happened before written records started to appear, around 5000 years ago. For the 145 000 first years of the existence of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, we do not have any certain methods to estimate what characterised human behaviour.

Luckily, there is a way to approximate primordial human behaviour – and that is through studying these societies which still exist in an undisturbed hunter-gatherer state. For the truth is that the Stone Age never ended, but rather still exists in remote and unforgivable areas of the planet. Millions of our kind are currently living in such communities, and many of them are oblivious to the fact that a Space Age Civilization has ascended around them. For them, aeroplane contrails, satellite launches and wasted products finding their way into their hands must surely be a sign of the divine…

For the societies which have been studied by anthropologists, a staggering diversity of beliefs, cultural traits, conflict-resolving behaviours and social codes have been observed. If we were to generalise however, we could say that these early human societies display a number of common denominators:

• They generally consist of smaller units than 50 individuals.
• They are either completely egalitarian or semi-egalitarian.
• They generally aspire to a communal lifestyle.
• They have not developed any concept of private property rights.

While I do not claim that human beings generally were happier or healthier in the primordial state, or that we should aspire to return to the period before we – allegorically – ate the fruit and developed civilization due to the fact that we for the longest time of our existence did not experience anything else, truth remains that life in the natural state neither can be said to be Hobbesian or Lockean. Thus, human nature – if there is one – is one of a communal species living in close-knit egalitarian communities without the concept of private property.

Traditional Individualism

Far more damning for those who claim that the current social order corresponds to a mythical “human nature” is the fact that most of the proponents of that narrative not only have little clue on human history or anthropology, but also fail to properly understand what contemporary western society is.

Often, these proponents imagine that western society is characterised by enlightenment-era values of free trade, capitalism, rationalism, parliamentary democracy, a Judaeo-Christian heritage and Weberian protestant work ethics. While free trade, capitalism and parliamentary democracy are still espoused, the last two tenets have been increasingly substituted by new moral codes, which in some aspects are the polar opposites of the previous ideals. This substitution – though incomplete – has been so thorough that it could be argued that the Western Civilization which arose from the ashes of 1945 is as new a civilization in comparison to the 1789-1945 early industrial civilization, as the post-Iconoclasm Byzantine Empire was in relation to the Eastern Roman Empire prior to the Crisis of the Eight Century.

It can be argued that Western cultures have always – to some extent – been more individualistic than most other cultures. The first literary masterpieces from the precursor of western civilization, The Iliad and the Odyssey, focused to a great degree not only on individual characters, but also on their inner worlds and their aspirations. The Histories of Herodotus are painting the ancient world in a colourful and vivid tone, where the reader can be able to empathise with the historical figures from both sides of the Graeco-Persian Wars.

The same could be said of the cultures fostered by Germanic warrior societies, such as the Anglo-Saxons (Beowulf) and the Vikings (Njal’s Saga), which emphasised individual heroism, often with a tragic focus. The medieval age was imbued with Romances, from the fictionalised tales of King Arthur to the beautiful El Cid chronicle.

With this, I do not claim that other cultures have been incapable of producing great Epics. To a large extent, the medieval chivalry concept came to Europe from Sassanid Persia via the Byzantine Empire, as were the Romance novels which preceded modern European literature. Truth is, however, that – for better or worse – it was adventurers from Europe who finally connected the two hemispheres, and sparked the second phase of globalization which established trade routes and a global state system which still today is the foundation of the world (the first phase was the formation of the Silk Road, the original one – not the Bitcoin one).

The seeds of Western Civilization may have been born on the Pontic steppe, when Proto-Indo-European-speaking chariot-driving tribes first crossed the Dnieper, the Dniester and the Danube and established patriarchal kingdoms in Central Europe. True sedentary civilizations, like Ancient Egypt and Imperial China, glorified the careful, risk-aversive gradual accumulation of status and wealth throughout the generations, and idealised a static existence characterised by harmony and social cohesion. Steppe Warriors – or as called by the Assyrians, the “Umman Manda” – whether they were Scythian, Turkic or Mongolian, were forced by nature to attain and uphold other ideals, often centred around a celebration of individual skill and character. Traces of this heritage may have survived throughout generations of European aristocracy, and eventually inspired the population at large to attain certain individualistic ideals.

Enough written about that, for it has little bearing on the current Western Civilization (apart from vestigial traces like the concept of action films and fantasy literature)… 

In 1914, Western civilization was at its peak. Most of the world was controlled either by European Empires or by western off-shoots of European Empires. Cities in Europe and North America bathed in electric glow. Radioactivity had been discovered, and peace had reigned in Western Europe for forty years. Thirty years later, everything was in ruins – a collapse as stunning as the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

The crisis had been political, financial and cultural. The system of a balance of power between European monarchies lied in tatters. The increased technological productivity had caused an over-production crisis which had led to the collapse of the global financial system in 1929. The “warrior individualism” espoused as one of several ethos of Western Culture had contributed to the subsequent rise of Fascism and the absolute denigration of the human being. While genocides were nothing new, they had not been perpetrated on such a scale on European soil, against Europeans. Thus, aristocracy, protestant work ethics and warrior individualism were all more or less seen as confuted as a new world order was being erected on the still smouldering ruins of the old world.

Consumeristic individualism

Traditionally, the economic ethos of westerners before the advent of the 1929 crash had been to eschew impulsive consumption. The ideal was to work hard and accumulate wealth which could be used as a safety net in old age and also help the children to support themselves before they too would build their own wealth. Thus, people in general balanced their consumption with considerable amounts of savings if they had income. It was not unusual that retirees – if they ceased to work – lived entirely on the capital a life-time of work had afforded them.

This kind of behaviour had its roots in the Reformation (which transmitted itself into the Catholic world through the Counter-reformation), which was built around a zeitgeist where material splendour and fanciness was seen not only as tasteless, but also borderline sinful. It is no coincidence that the first capitalists in Britain were connected to the Calvinist sect. This outlook was individualistic in terms that spirituality and responsibility was wholly a personal matter – and that the individual was responsible for her own well-being and the perception which others had on her. Others had no duty to look after an adult individual. People were responsible for their own welfare and the welfare of their children, and those who failed to accumulate their own buffer had themselves to blame, in accordance with the Calvinist ideal of the presupposed Elect (the secular variation of which is Social-Darwinism).

The kind of individualism which appeared after 1945 is however starkly different. To understand in what way it differs, we need to understand the lessons learned from the Interwar period.

In the 1920’s, when production costs had decreased, agriculture and industry was able to meet the demands, leading to overproduction which caused deflation. Common wisdom had been to answer to crises with austerity, but in 1929 it had backfired and led to even less consumption which wiped out a lot of businesses.

So, during the period of 1945-1955, the foundations of a new culture were laid, and it’s most clear-cut characteristics were:

• The increased reliance on debt, both in form of public investments (until the 1980’s), and later on cheap access to credit.
• Establishment of generous welfare states, with safety needs which would not only make life easier but also encourage people to spend rather than to save.
• The gradual transformation of the western consumption patterns away from “consumption as a means to improve life” and towards “consumption as a means to acquire and express identity”.

While subcultures had existed before, they became far more widespread during the 1950’s, and it became standard that youths should strive to own not only cars, but certain brands of them. Record player collections started to become average household items, and everyone should have the latest Elvis album as fast as possible. This was followed by more and more subcultures appearing, throughout the decades, and eventually diverging, in terms of adding more aspects than music taste, different subcultures forming in relationship to different socio-economic, academic and ethnic subsets and age brackets. Nowadays, there are for example subcultures for people in their 30’s and 40’s.

For the first time ever, the working class was included in the pursuit of trendiness, of showing that they mattered in terms of status by being able to purchase the latest fads. This behaviour, I argue, represent a novel type of human culture, which is vastly different from previous cultures. It could be called a culture of consumeristic individualism.

The foundation of this culture can be traced back into the 1920’s, with the blending of psycho-analysis and marketing undertaken by pioneers such as Eduard Bernays and Walter Lippmann. While the postulates of Economics derive from a theory-construction stating that the human being is a rational agent, the truth is that we to a large degree are socially irrational beings. The Bernaysian form of advertising is directed towards the subconscious, towards our desire to be attractive, well-liked and to acquire sexual intimacy. This is why for example cars during the 1980’s were photographed while being washed by scantily dressed models, even though there is no logical relationship between automobiles and prostitution.

In order to form a culture where this kind of constant subliminal messaging could be accepted, the values of ordinary citizens must be realigned. The process towards this particular realignment has partially been emergent/organic and partially planned. What the core of it means, is however to create human beings who have few inhibitors which would prevent them from fulfilling their desires. Human behaviour had to be transformed to a more impulsive and urge-driven state.

However, there are several kinds of urges, both those which are natural (needs for sleep, food, empathy and sex) and those which are learned by stimuli (substance abuse, paraphiliae, adulation, status, money, etc…). Many “needs” are not at all natural and are instead stimulating the centres in our brains which send out signals that feel rewarding. One such example is online games, such as World of Warcraft or Pokémon Go. To argue that such needs are equal to human needs in the natural state can be claimed to be demeaning towards human natural needs.

Modern-day capitalism is directed towards fulfilling these artificially constructed needs and stimulate them to the point where individuals start to engage in self-destructive abuse behaviour. Millions of people today are themselves knowing that their consumption patterns are hurting them, but are nevertheless unable to put a break on these behaviours. It is a testament to the strength of human will-power why not even more people have fallen into this trap, when the entire society engineered around them strives to stimulate them to engage in such activities.

What individualism means in the context of today’s western culture, is that it is something that you acquire through consumption. While profession and socio-economic status still is mattering much, character as a way to judge a person’s role in society has largely been replaced by consumption patterns. A pair of Adidas shoes are not only a pair of shoes, but a part of a lifestyle, and they are a discreet but substantive declaration of what lifestyle you intend to aspire towards and show towards your peers.

In this society, role models are no longer parents or professionals in the local community, but rather fictional characters in films and TV shows which signal what kind of lifestyle and behaviour that is appropriate to aspire to for a certain age. This has led to a sliding and gradual Americanisation of youth globally. At a certain age, you are expected to have a car – even if you can’t afford it. Credit is always so attainable. You are expected to travel abroad at another age. You are also expected to lose your virginity at lower and lower ages.  When you reach adulthood, you are expected to own a house at a certain age as well. You are expected to take interest in physical exercise, in diet routines, in certain forms of cooking, in attaining fashionable furniture and to see to it that your pet eat the latest fads in terms of dog food and vitamins.

If you are working class, you are expected to take interest in tattoos, partying, sports and cheap travels to Thailand and the Canaries.

It is no wonder that the western population generally does not have the time to really understand what a serious situation we are in today, since we all for the sake of our social status and our relationships within our peer groups are driven to learn the valuable skills of celebrity gossip, what music is “in” and what kinds of dietary regime that your peer group are engaging in. Given that human beings tend to strive for homogeneity, both friend clusters and workplaces more and more tend to frequent people with identical experiences, interests, tastes and values – creating self-referring echo chambers. Some of these environments have the capability to produce sect-like outcomes, where the participants look for aberrations in relationship to one another to establish a pecking order.

Even though the current Western Civilization is a hyper-individualistic culture, it strives to create an individuality that is manufactured outside of the individual and then implemented through peer pressure and the need to fit into a group. The individual as a concept also tends to become atomised – becoming the sum of all their social, economic and sexual attributes rather than a unique human being with a personality. The individual is basically reduced to their urges and their need for social acceptance within a peer group.

Sometimes, cultures emerge very rapidly.

One example is the ascent of so-called “cargo cults” in the South Pacific, where the population largely – incidentally following the Second World War – started to worship household items like porcelain toilets, televisions, telephone sets, electric ovens and toothbrushes as divine magical artefacts known under the name “cargo”. If these applications are treated with worship, the theory goes, then the possession of them would be multiplied.

Even though these cargo cults appear as eccentric oddities which exist to amuse western readers of expensive magazines such as National Geographic, they share a peculiar similarity with our own culture in their reverence of consumer items, and provide a mirror image to the West, which might be a cause for continuing western fascination with them.

Enlightened Collectivism

I would argue that the form of culture described under the preceding segment is inherently destructive, and hasn’t really done much to advance humanity. The values of the western world which have undoubtedly had a positive impact on the advancement of humanity – the Rule of Law, Parliamentary Democracy, the Scientific Method, Egalitarianism and Negative and Positive Rights – have all either been developed before or independent of Rabid Consumerism.

While superfluous, I would argue that these are the toxic components of Consumeristic Individualism:

• The tendency to manufacture needs and urges within human beings.
• The tendency to attempt to ensnare and make human beings dependent on these manufactured needs.
• The dishonest manner in which commercial propaganda invades our subconscious without our explicit consent.
• Reduced attention spans due to “information overload”.
• The tendency to seek out comfort and avoid emotionally sensitive topics.
• The accelerating aim to separate ourselves further and further away from nature.
• The reduction of the individual human being to an atomised creature of categories and fads.
• Self-objectification by the individual.
• A clear and evident role in the destruction of the planet’s biosphere.

For these reasons, we need to make a conscious agenda to move away from it, preferably now.

The problem, of course, is that not only most westerners, but most educated urban elites in the planet are either trapped in this Matrix or aspiring to be trapped by it. It is, unlike cultures built on honourable violence, quite desirable at first glance, especially as it grants unprecedented personal liberty. We also need to understand that we cannot move back towards patriarchal traditionalism, nor look at the failed alternative value systems of Fascism and Marxism-Leninism for guidance on how human cultures should work.

Moreover, a culture can – unlike for example a monetary mechanism, a sewage system or a software programme – not be designed. The reason why is that culture is not a matter only of clothes, cuisine, music, festivals and traditions, but much, much more. Foremost however, culture is about human interrelationships, how the family is structured, whether relations are hierarchical or egalitarian, and what we expect from our fellow human beings. Culture is in short the expectations we have of ourselves and of other individuals in a community. It also tend to emerge organically, and it can also collapse through a social meltdown which can freeze in a permanent state of anarchy – see Lebanon and Papua New Guinea as two examples of collapsed societies, one frozen in a perpetual stand-off, the other descended into the abyss of rage.

Nevertheless, we cannot hope to triumph and save the biosphere if the dominant culture on our planet is implicitly hostile to such an aim. Therefore, it is imperative that we form a new culture, or at least form the seeds of that new culture. Then the question is how that culture should be structured. If we are taking the broadest possible stroke with the brush, we must seek to emulate the following scheme:

• The Culture must not work against human nature, but with it.
• It should not disregard the progressive and enlightened features of western culture.
• It must underpin socially and ecologically sustainable attainments.
• It must be adapted to the challenges of the third millennium.

What are these challenges then?

The main challenge is the challenge of Transition. We need to transit from an emerging form of unsustainable global economy characterised by monocultures, linear relationships between resources, factories and consumers, dependency on non-renewable resources and über-urbanisation. Goods should be produced to be durable and replaceable in a modular manner. Every region should have as much capability to sustain itself as ecologically and effectively as possible. Monocultures need to be scaled back and the amount of trees on the planet should be increased with 75-100%. Meanwhile, we need to ensure that the peoples of Earth can feed themselves. While 9 billion people hardly are a sustainable number for a world population, their needs must be accommodated, and no human being deserves to starve or to live homeless.

In order to conduct a transition, humanity – or at least a significant portion of it – must be hyper-aware of the graveness of the current ecological situation. An aspect of the current consumeristic civilization which is destructive is the implied striving to separate the human being from nature. We acquire or food in supermarkets, and we release our waste into sewage systems. The entire process is structured so that most consumers would be totally separated from nature – which provides the goods.

A new culture must emphasise the deep material connection that we have with nature, and instigate a healthy respect for it and the food it provides. Our bodies are not isolated atolls, but are an integral part of nature since we are dependent on sunlight, water and food. This profound and self-evident truth should be a cornerstone of the new society. In practical terms, it can be expressed through a positive form of survivalism, where practical survival skills in nature would be ritualised as a part both of upbringing and of life itself.

There must also be an understanding that when we eat, it means that we either eat someone else, or that someone else is deprived of food because of our needs. This should not be interpreted as a call for breatharianism, but rather as a respectful and mature relationship with nature and with other species. As a society, we must learn to appreciate other species as individual beings, and understand that they too should be treated with dignity and respect. One practical example is that if a community allows hunting, animals should primarily be hunted for food – not for sport – and that a moment of silence should be held for killed wildlife following a successful hunt, to affirm that a life was taken.

In terms of survivalism, we should not strive towards a competitive culture where people are valued after their survival skills, but rather towards a cooperative culture, where those who are skilled at certain activities – be it survival skills in nature or within technical and theoretical fields – pride themselves on how well they manage to disseminate their knowledge through the community. Instead of tearing other people down, people should build each-other up and pride themselves on these skills.

In terms of social organisation, it is absolutely essential that the trend towards social atomism is broken. Managerial and therapeutic states, centralised utilities and supermarket systems as well as the culture of Consumeristic Individualism are creating individuals who feel more and more disempowered. Communities need to have the final say over their food production, their utilities, their heating, their power supply, their production capabilities and their natural resources, and decisions should be made on the lowest possible effective level regarding these things. For this to work, however, requires that communities exist.

A neighbourhood is not necessarily per definition a community, especially as the recent decades have seen humans transform from pack-living animals to colony-dwelling animals. In a society where utilities, power and food are managed far away from the local neighbourhood, the need for cooperation is reduced and even close neighbours turn into strangers.

If we are to regain our autonomy from centralised, linear systems, we must sacrifice the luxury of not knowing one another. What I am writing about here is the need to rediscover and strengthen the basic social collectivism of the human species – which means that if someone needs her apartment refurbished, if someone needs to build a house or to make a garden, it will become a communitarian undertaking, that people spontaneously gravitate towards aiding one another. Instead of linking up linearly with huge central structures through artificial umbilical cords, we need to realise that the age of super-consumerism is moving towards an end – must move towards an end – and we need to learn to build and cooperate locally.

We should not strive for this type of collectivism to deteriorate into xenophobic neo-tribalism, which we humans seem so apt to adopt. Instead, what we should move forwards to is a balanced, civic collectivism which sees the community as an extension of the individual. The individual human body and personality should however be considered beyond touch, and a person may only be forcefully constrained to the point of physical pain if the person has violated basic rights and then physically resisted attempts to stop that, or if the individual is assaulting another individual. Communities may not either inflict arbitrary rules or prevent people from seeking to move, seeking to attain knowledge or to enter a consensual relationship with another human being who has reached the age of majority.

In short, most individual rights which we today enjoy would still be enjoyed. It is not a matter of constricting us that we urge a move towards civic collectivism, but a desire to form a better and saner form of culture.

A third very important aspect of the future culture, above survivalism and collectivism, is enlightenment. The civilisation which we build around us must celebrate the scientific method and rational forms of argumentation. On the other hand, it must not fetishize science as some form of magic, or stimulate a kind of divergence between scientists and ordinary citizens (the ultimate stereotype being Dr Membrane from The Invader Zim series). Instead, we must realise that all of us have at least one time employed the scientific method, and be made aware that it is the least bad method which we got in order to reach solutions to problems.

From an early age, citizens should be made aware of the fundaments of logical reasoning, of detecting argumentative errors and identifying logical fallacies. The main emphasis of our self-understanding should be not to repress our urges, or satisfy them, but to understand them and what is happening inside of ourselves. In short, we must learn ourselves who we are, and why we experience emotions and needs inside ourselves. Most human beings are today semi-blind in relation to their inner workings, and therefore repeat the same mistakes over and over again, like repeat offenders being unable to break the cycle of criminality, like alcoholics struggling against their addiction, or like abuse victims who move into new relationships equally destructive like the older ones. In our culture, we must aspire to and celebrate mastery over ourselves, rather than to deny who we are, or give in to the currents of our whims.

This does not mean that we should strive towards ascetism or a monk-like lifestyle. It does not mean a call to frugality or self-denial, but on the contrary that we must move towards self-understanding.

The last aspect of the new culture is that it must be emergent – i.e., voluntarily and organically transmitted. It cannot be imposed through force or through the destruction of previous cultures. We do not either believe it is necessary to do anything like that, since what we should be doing is not to try to insert new, alien values onto the human species, but work to build traits which already are ingrained into basic human biology, to work with our basic sense of altruism, with our curiosity, with our need for companionship and camaraderie. It is not a matter about propaganda campaigns, it is not a matter about advertising, preaching or creating NewSpeak. It is a matter of a horizontal memetic impact, and of helping to build one another as EOS members.

A brief summarisation of what we should strive towards

• Survivalism – We need to focus on attaining basic survival skills, technical skills and the abilities to manage small-scale and medium-scale communities. Instead of possession, we should value knowledge.
• Civic Collectivism – We need to organise our society on a communitarian basis, built around reciprocal altruism. Everyone will help everyone with what they need if they need it within the community. The community will be an expanded family.
• Enlightenment values – we need to strengthen the foundation of these within the people as a whole. Rational dissemination, empiricism and self-awareness should be the fundament of the culture.

 Conclusion – and a few practical tips

The reason why volunteer organisations aiming at complex tasks often fail is due to a lack of devotion, discipline, clear outlined visions and an inability of the participants to understand their own level of engagement and their own ability to engage. If you desire the success of your project, you should first and foremost ensure that you have a core of dedicated and serious activists around you.

 Sadly, we live in an age when many people are engaged in such civic activities not because of the visions, but because of what they believe these activities will say about them as individuals, both for career reasons and – often more tragically – lifestylist issues. Careerists try to reach the goals, for the wrong reasons but nevertheless, while lifestylists couldn’t care less if the project succeeded or failed.

The first step for a successful project should be to ensure that those occupying key positions in the project are motivated to fulfil their aims, and able to do so as well.

What we should aim for, however, is not only to form good and durable teams, but also to cultivate the participants and create routines on how to build strong teams. And perhaps we have thought about local projects the wrong way around?

Instead of beginning with projects and forming groups around them, the best way would maybe be to form the groups first and then let them gradually evolve until they reach the state when they are more than capable of navigating projects to their conclusion?

In any way, launching projects is not only about fulfilling project goals, but to improve our skills and form new relationships. We are not static, and we are not isolated, we are creating ourselves, creating one another and being created by nature during every moment of breath – and we are an integral part of the living biosphere of our planet.

It is about time we realised that as a civilization. 

Introduction

The first time I learnt about Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project was back in 2005, when the embryo of what would later become the EOS was originally born. The Venus Project back then did not have the notability it later would attain, and already back in 2006, the precursor to the EOS – the NET – arranged showings of William Gazecki’s documentary about Fresco, Future by Design, with the explicit permission from The Venus Project.

In 2008, The Venus Project gained a lot of publicity within a segment of the youth population through the popularization of The Zeitgeist Movement. The crowning achievement of the collaboration between TVP and TZM was the Jacque Fresco world tour of 2010, where one of his most successful lectures was in the Clarion Hotel in Stockholm that summer. It was a lecture which I myself was a part of organizing, as a part of the EOS. We were tasked with organizing the ticket sales.

Apart from giving me valuable experiences, this extended stay in Stockholm gave me the opportunity to talk with and interact with Fresco, which in itself was an interesting and thought-challenging experience. 

Now, Jacque Fresco is soon to celebrate his hundredth birthday. This centennial celebration is an important event for TVP and their followers, since he plays an important role, not only as a leader and inspirer, but also fundamentally a symbol. To his young followers, he can be said to be a “Cool Old Guy”, much like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders are to their respective admirers. Since time immemorial, there has been a certain captivating quality of sage-like old men who have inspired a following. 

I was contacted by my predecessor and former mentor, Dr Andrew Wallace, regarding writing an article about Jacque Fresco’s heritage in relationship to his hundredth birthday, and regarding the collaboration we once had. That is actually a far more difficult task than what you would naturally expect, given that the EOS and TVP have several major differences. 

When writing an article like this, it is difficult to not write a eulogy on one hand, or a critique on the other. While mean criticism of Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project is rare (and often more reserved for TZM, justifiably so), it is far more usual to witness the variant where Fresco is described as a universal genius, who single-handedly had designed and created a thematic model for a future civilization – in short, a super-being who can lead humanity away from the current dark age.

Pondering in what context I would frame this article, I came up with the idea of seeing Jacque Fresco as a part of a wider contextual setting rather than as an isolated phenomenon. This can improve our appreciation of his true heritage as well as connect him to the actual cultural and structural development we’ve seen taking place within American and world culture. 

The transition from Modernism to Post-modernism

Modernism can be described as the dominant approach to reality during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It is ultimately a linear understanding of human history, which is seen as “progress”, visually exemplified by the classical Darwinian image “From Ape to Man”. In the context of Modernism, human existence is seen through an optimistic lens as a journey from darkness to light. This journey should be understood in a purely material and scientific manner, as humanity learning to master its surrounding environment, developing society towards and beyond an industrial state and during this process also get rid of old superstitious habits and prejudices. The meaning of life is seen as advancing towards a post-scarcity society ruled by science and reason.

From the second half of the 20^th century and onward, post-modernistic tendencies have been dominating the western cultural and social narrative. Post-modernism stresses that reality is heterogeneous and fail to live up to grand narratives in themselves. Post-modernism also questions the narrative of progress, instead stressing how technology in itself can be dehumanising, reduce the human being conceptually and de-facto into a biological machine, as well as destructive to culture and myths seen as enriching to the human experience. Post-modernism is also stressing a critique of norms and puts an emphasis on relativism in order to include other experiences previously excluded by the dominant choruses during the modernistic era.

The reason of the ascent of post-modernism (which started to emerge during the middle of the second decade of the 20^th century) has been the experience of the world wars, the world-wide depression, the industrial genocides and the birth of nuclear weapons. All of this led to an emerging pessimistic view on technological progress which has been more and more prevalent amongst – ironically enough – the most progressive elements of western societies. If anything, this undercurrent had its political breakthrough during the Flower Power movement of the 1960’s. Films such as Wizards (1978) and Star Wars (1977) also more or less stressed the perceived inherent conflict between technology and spirituality. 

The Venus alternative

Paradoxically, the birth of Jacque Fresco as a public figure coincided with the transition from late modernism into post-modernism. Originally, The Venus Project was known as Sociocyberneering and consisted of a small group of students, engineers and others where Jacque Fresco was a dominant force. It remains unclear and exist many conflicting recounts of how Sociocyberneering came to transform into The Venus Project, an exhibition village on the future which for many years only had two team members, Jacque Fresco himself and Roxanne Meadows. 

Ultimately, The Venus Project is a movement that wants to usher in a radically different future, a post-scarcity economy characterised by high technology and a transition from hierarchic and force-based systems of conduct towards egalitarian and libertarian forms of social organisation. The Venus Project is claiming that the basis of their legitimacy lies in science. Their claims can be summoned up into three parts.

• There is truly an abundance of resources on the Earth, or if resources are managed intelligently, there is a functional abundance of them and human beings should be able to utilize them without artificial constraints, i.e the “demand curves” created by financial limits.
• Our technology is sufficiently advanced to manage these resources intelligently, with a minimum of human intervention, meaning that humans can be freed from labour and instead devote more of their time to the pursuit for happiness and excellence. The model in question is a cybernated planned economy run by A.I computers (with one central computer per city), much like Iain M Banks’ envisioned Cultureverse.
• Human behaviour, as well as the behaviour of most other animals, is mostly or wholly regulated by environmental stimuli and experiences of previous environmental stimuli. This means for example that given the right conditioning, “any child can become a scientist or a composer” (Fresco, Future by Design).

I should also not omit to state that Fresco believes all of that is feasible now, with a transition period of less than ten years (Stockholm lecture, 2010). 

In summary, what The Venus Project is offering is a very optimistic and positive vision of the futureof humanity. In Future by design, Fresco is often remarking about what we will see in the future, though in later appearances (post-TZM-upsurge) it is made clear that TVP intends to not only describe the wonderful future of tomorrow, but also actively work to make it a reality, by gathering the resources necessary to build an actual model city.

What the Venus project is offering is a radically modernistic vision, in an era where we thought we had grown disillusioned with the idea of progress. 

A just critique

The steadfast optimism of The Venus Project is encouraging, but when it starts to entail practical measurable issues, the positive statements of Fresco and other proponents can have the effect that it either encourages the followers to the point of lethargy (“we don’t need to do anything because technology will solve all problems”), or creates the idea that we already have a working, established alternative to the current system, that the transition is a relatively simple affair (for a world with seven billion people, five world religions, several thousand cultures existing on all levels from hunter-gatherer, through feudal and tribal towards super-urban). 

On the other hand, in terms of actual numbers, The Venus Project has offered sweeping statements, through actual data of the feasibility of a Venus-style RBE or how they define the global abundance they claim we have is fuzzy at best and more or less non-existent at worst. A lot of what The Venus Project states is contradicted by the data from respected groups such as The Club of Rome, Global Footprint Network and other environmental organisations. 

Which brings us to the next point of critique, namely the lack of a discussion on environmental challenges during the next century. For The Venus Project, there seems to be a focus on the idea that we should transition towards a new system because the current system is inadequate and that it primarily is an issue of human well-being. The focus is – as already mentioned – directed towards the visualisation of the positive future. Maybe it is a good strategy since it encourages people in a positive and inclusive manner, instead of offering doomsday scenarios which often can tend to disempower people and make them feel scared and powerless.

However, a lot of people are invested, emotionally and materially, in the furtherance of this incumbent system which we are living under. They have real, tangible things to lose if a transition instead inadvertently leads to a situation which they perceive as worse. Maybe that is one of the reasons why youths tend to be more susceptible to the message of hope offered by The Venus Project?

The heritage of Jacque Fresco

It could be argued that Jacque Fresco is a continuation of late modernists such as H.G Wells, Buckminster Fuller and Gene Roddenberry. The same belief in human potential, linear progress and the supremacy of science is evident in Fresco’s vision, as in the works of these inspired individuals. 

To a large extent, the rise of The Venus Project as a concept within radical progressive circles in North America also has coincided with the ascent of the Neo-modernistic and radically optimistic transhumanist and singularitarian movements, which in most regards are far more radical in their visions than The Venus Project. 

Even if The Venus Project fails to materialise a tangible Venus City which can serve as an inspiration for a transition, they have managed to make a significant cultural impact on the emerging intelligentsia, to inspire youths to think outside the established boundaries and to energise a positive vision for the future. And that is not a small achievement given what we are witnessing daily around the world.

Happy birthday, Jacque!

The Rubik’s Cube is not just a forgotten toy from the 80’s. The fact is that it’s even more popular than ever before.

Social sustainability, the basics

The Earth Organization for Sustainability is formed around the aspiration for ecological, economic and social sustainability. These are not buzzwords deprived of meaning and context, but are aimed to delineate objectives which achieve concrete, tangible results in the sphere of reality. Our three criteria are defining, in the broadest possible manner of wording, how we intend to achieve global sustainability which covers these three areas.

The third criterion establishes that all human beings have the right to life. This means not only guaranteeing housing, healthcare, education and access to resources, but goes deeper. In order so that human beings can thrive, it is not enough that they are being fed, clothed, educated, or that they possess material wealth. What we must discuss is freedom.

Granted, there are several different types of freedom, and at least since the days of John Locke, there has been a concerted effort to define what freedom is. For the sake of simplicity and historicity, let us say that within the modern sphere of western philosophy, there have been two dominant schools of definitions of freedom (or liberty) as it is alternately known.

• Liberalism: There are negative and positive rights. Negative rights mean the right from unprovoked interference, that no citizen might be subjected to abuse, theft, deprivation of mobility or other actions imposed on said citizen against their will. Positive rights of course mean that the citizen also has rights to things, such as voting rights and access to a public welfare system encompassing education and – depending on what country you live in – education, retirement and minimum labour hours. Conservatives, neoliberals and economic libertarians tend to de-emphasise or outright deny the existence of positive rights.
• Socialism: There are social rights, which are defined as the right to housing, education, clothing and partaking in the political process. In terms of negative rights, socialists tend to emphasise discrimination based on class, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation, rather than individual rights. Social democrats (of the classical variety) tend to combine this with the liberal negative freedoms, whereas marxists tend to dismiss the heritage of liberalism wholly or partially.

We can immediately see that both Liberalism and Socialism engages the subject of freedom through the concept of human rights, though they have divergent definitions of what constitute human rights.

Oh, Rights?

What constitute rights in the most basic aspect, is that they are not given to human beings, rather human beings are seen as being endowed with them (now we are talking about the currently hegemonic liberalist interpretation). Thus, they should not be held subject to political bargain, or granted arbitrarily to specific individuals or groups, or be tied to the kindness or political calculations of a particular political regime. 

The problem is that just because we agree that we all are endowed with human rights (no matter what these human rights constitute), that does not make impossible the violation of human rights. Conversely, if human rights violations were impossible (if we say that we for example had extremely strong biological inhibitors against violating human life), there wouldn’t even be the need of such a concept.

Some of the first states which enshrined what they called “rights” in their constitutions were the “enlightened despotisms” of 18th century Russia, Prussia and Austria – all three absolute monarchies relying on centralised bureaucracies and professional standing armies on a permanent war footing. The idea of human rights was very popular during the latter half of the enlightenment age, and was basically utilised as a fad amongst despots. The “rights” they guaranteed can most aptly be described as “privileges”, reliant on the interests of the state in the best case and in the worst case on the whims of a single individual.

Another example is how Stalinist states have continuously abused the language, defining themselves as “multi-party democracies” which enshrine “social rights” – rights which are entirely conditioned by whether the state has defined you as an ideological loyalist or not. 

Even in western democracies, human rights are continuously being violated, either because of the relative weakness of certain individuals or groups, cases of corruption or the existence of “deep states” – authoritarian institutions operating partially outside of the constitutional and cultural framework (one example is the IB affair in Sweden).

In summary, in order to guarantee freedom for human beings, we must establish and uphold human rights. The problem of course is that the monopoly of force can choose to ignore these established rights, rendering them into privileges. Some Marxists are on the basis of that arguing that human rights are merely a façade and that ultimately everything boils down to class oppression and the monopoly of force. The solution in that context is to replace the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” with the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (which de-facto most often has led to authoritarian or totalitarian one-party regimes). Not so few militiamen, survivalists and conservatives in the United States argue similarly, but instead see the solution in arming the entire citizenry to the teeth. Experience however shows that there are both relatively well-functioning democracies and authoritarian dictatorships where automatic rifles are readily available for the general population. 

The case for Democracy: Human autonomy and agency

When I was taught civics in the fifth grade, the teacher told us that in democracies, people vote for their leaders, that democracies do not have death penalty or torture and that democracies are making “nice laws”, unlike dictatorships, which are making “mean laws”. I am still unsure whether this very simplified definition of democratic governance served us well.

My argument for Democracy is related to the concept of establishing and defending human rights – a concept which, like democracy, solidarity and equality, very much has become a “buzzword”. In order for rights to be substantial and thus credible, there must be institutions established to safeguard these rights. However, institutions which are limited in scope and are only actively involving a minority of the people, will gradually alienate themselves from the majority and become tools for power.

Even if rights could theoretically be guaranteed by a “perfect despot” (a Venus Project A.I or a Culture Mind for example), there would still be the issue of participation and autonomy, and the rights in questions would de-facto be mere privileges, and the population would have no say in the future of their own fate. In fact, “the perfect utopian dictatorship” would be even more depriving of human autonomy than the glorified role-playing game that is “government by man”. To not mention the real and practical implications of computer viruses attacking the AI ruler (a good foundation for a dystopian sci-fi novel would be Salafi hackers hijacking the central grid of a Venus city).

Human autonomy is meaning not only that human beings are endowed with human rights, but that they have a substantial part of the power over the context in which these human rights are operating. Democracy, in the form of voting rights, is to a large extent guaranteeing influence over the issues pertaining human rights and human dignity to all adult human beings.

The right to the democratic vote is one of the absolutely essential rights for people, no matter how imperfect society otherwise is (corruption, political machines, cheating). The observation that the voting process in the real world often is abused, that legislators often ignore the promises to their constituents, and that the process is often influenced by lobbyists, banks, corporations and corrupt unions, is not a repudiation of electoral practices in themselves. Neither is the fact that voters are often undereducated, misinformed and voting based on preferences for certain policies or (worse!) certain individuals an argument against democracy, because even the most misinformed, undereducated and disinterested voter have the right to be an agent for their own interests. It should be noted that voters who are having these characteristics are most often those who are found in the lower income percentile of any given society, and often suffer from decaying housing, worse health and more uncertainty, abuse and crime. They are precisely the people who need agency, even if they rarely use it and often even vote against their own interests.

If a village suffers from contaminated water, the thing that should be done is to find a way to decontaminate the wells, not ending the need of drinking water.

A critique of contemporary Democracies

Firstly, I would want to object to the idea that a state can be defined as simply a “democracy”. A typical western state is governed through the mixture of an assembly of elected officials, a bureaucracy and the input of powerful interests. Only the first aspect is partially democratic, and regards what parties and persons should be representing the electorate. This arrangement is however troublesome, since the elected officials can renege on their promises, parties are often holding strong opinions over a multitude of issues where almost no voter upon closer study can agree with all of these positions and new contested issues can arise between election cycles which the parties have not addressed prior to the previous election.

In short, democratic voting in the context of parliamentary or semi-parliamentary systems is basically a delegation of democratic power to a small number of individuals who during a fixed term – usually three to six years – have total liberty in how they manage the interests of their constituents.

If there is a culture of strong civic service throughout society, as well as a high level of political participation amongst the general public, then the imperfect parliamentarian system can approach the democratic ideals of the enlightenment. I would argue that the Nordic countries had largely achieved such a society during the 1960’s, with a high degree of political participation and mobilisation within the populace. Political participation, as well as the institutional culture within the elected bodies, later on deteriorated for reasons that I perhaps will explore in a future article.

Ultimately, it would be more democratic if the constituents – rather than electing representatives – were continuously granted more rights to vote on policies, in short a gradual transformation from representative to direct and participatory democracy.There is also a quantitative problem with contemporary democracies, namely that the larger the population is, the less a single vote is worth and conversely the power exerted by the individual citizen shrinks. A third problem is the relationship – within the context of liberalism – between democratic rights and property rights. Originally, the 17th century embryo which later turned into liberalism, was formed in order to protect wealthy land-owners against politically-based property confiscations on behalf of the state. The problem which herein lies is the fact that the rights of corporations – which often reside in either the capitol region of their respective countries or even on the other side of the planet – often infringe upon the autonomy of local communities, by virtue of control of their natural resources and their infrastructure, meaning that they hold control over the factors that affect human livelihood without being affected by their own decisions equally much.

The EOS position on Democracy

The EOS position is that Democracy is an integral aspect of social sustainability, and that all human beings have the right to agency and representation. We must work to continuously strengthen and defend democratic rights, as a core aspect of human rights and as an extension of the Ideology of the Third Millennium.

This is what we should strive for:

• Strengthening the participation of communities in existing democratic processes with a special focus on communities that are weak, through establishing contact networks, arranging courses and strengthen the self-confidence of citizens.
• Supporting the human rights and the legal rights of citizens to agency, representation and human rights.
• Strengthening communities by making them more self-reliant in terms of food, energy, infrastructure, water, recycling and production, thus increasing the participation of the local citizenry.
• Advocating the integration of new social and cybernetic technologies into the democratic process in order to transcend parliamentarianism and move towards direct and participatory democracy.
• Advocating de-centralisation and subsidiarity, that decisions should be made as close to those affected by them as possible, and if possible by those affected 
• Strengthening the local communities by educating the electorate in understanding the scientific method, logic, deductive reasoning, human rights, intersectional theories and to be able to identify and combat logical fallacies. 
• From these foundations, we will be able to object against actions aimed at depriving people from their democratic agency, as well as supporting initiatives aimed at strengthening democracy.

TL;DR

The EOS views Democracy as a positive concept because it helps provide people with agency to protect their rights, but we are noting that there are problems in which how it is implemented, regarding that people are seldom empowered to vote for issues directly, instead relying on elected representatives, that decisions are often made far from the people affected by them, that voters are misinformed or uninformed and that big economic actors often are able to reduce the autonomy and agency of communities.

We should as a movement strive to strengthen democracy and help to transcend towards more direct democratic and localised systems while making the intellectual and organisational tools available in order to strengthen the civic culture of the people.