change society's evolutionary imperative

Historically, we have done this at least once before. Click here to jump to a brief overview of the last time we did this.

Instead of being compelled to be wealth creators, we could be compelled to create abundance, to live interesting lives and, as a society, become experts at nurturing love. Crime would be possible, but instead of being empowered by money, it would be disempowered by evolutionary solutions.

The following is a heartfelt explanation of the part of the brain and human experience that we believe is being deeply suppressed by our current evolutionary imperative. If empowered, we feel it has the potential to utterly transform the way we experience life.

The Second Step: Changing Reality

Changing society cannot take place without the participation of most people. However, for the purpose of demonstrating how change can take place, we are going to assume that people accept that global human society seeking life and love is desirable.

The most important first step is to choose an evolutionary imperative that will cause human society to drive towards that goal. One possibility is to establish wealth creation using renewable sources only.

Comparing the Two Imperatives

An Overview of a Different Imperative

Right now, wealth is creating anyway possible and at the expense of anything that gets in its way. The result is all the problems we see on the home page. If we were to drastically increase the cost of extracting non-renewables, the wealth creation mechanism would shift to seeking the best way to optimise renewable sources. The ecosystem would become our main energy resource. The healthier it is, the more energy and wealth there is to be had. In terms of the human self-organisational system, this is what would happen:

What Will Work

a)  The first and most important object is to help as many people as you can see beyond the reality dictated to us by the wealth creation imperative. Don't try to force this. If someone doesn't want to see, there is no good way to make them. Lead by example. Once you escape yourself, it is much easier to demonstrate the profound contentment and/or excitement that can result.
     Being rich is not 'evil' in itself: it is the means used to get rich that reveals the person. However, wealth is a closed system and wealth is relative. That means that if someone is richer, someone else must be poorer. Extreme wealth creates social dysfunctions, but people becoming rich through opportunity are not necessarily bad. The truth is, all of us allowed it, especially in the democracies. Tyrannies would not have military hardware to suppress people if poorer people did not make it for the profit of the wages received and rich countries didn't sell it to make even bigger profits. We are all involved.

b)  We can use the existing system to empower sustainable behaviour. One possible example is to directly charge for rubbish collection by quantity. This happened in the community I grew up in and rubbish collection dropped by 50% in one year. There was little change in illegal dumping. Some communities would have to deal with this last detail first.
     An even more effective solution (if we can people out of the current wealth creation mindset) would be to have all local communities deal with their own rubbish in their own area. Communities that have to live with their own rubbish soon learn how to keep their own house clean. Illegal dumping would be monitored by everyone because they would all know of be directly affected by their own local situation. This would have a knock-on effect on all aspects of consumption and the perception of waste and the tolerance for 'planned obsolescence'. Any innovation that lowers waste would be empowered by the wealth creation imperative.
     This is only one example. Can you think of more? It is only a matter of practice to see opportunity everywhere.

c) Changing the laws so that key parts of society are, once again, put outside the wealth creation machinery (see here for how this was done in reverse to create the current free-market economy). Global implementation would be best because if you universally remove something from an evolutionary system, evolutionary solutions are not invoked. If one community or one country does something that makes it less capable of generation wealth relative to its competition, the evolutionary system will apply its solutions and the pressure to change back will grow rapidly. However, there are still some laws that can be changed that would have a marginal affect on wealth creation (so the pressures will remain manageable) while empowering renewable systems. Details would have to be locally determined which is why helping people see this is more important than telling them what to do.

What Won't Work

a) Protesting the use of non-renewables will not work. That will simply invoke evolutionary solutions.

b) Asking people not to use non-renewables (or depleting renewables) will not work. That will simply invoke evolutionary solutions.

c) Paying people not to use non-renewables will not work. That would be a direct confrontation of our societal self-organisational system. You would lose, no matter how rich you are.

Global Change

At some point, this will have to go global if it is to work. If the global measuring stick of success remains wealth creation using everything in the world, our future collapse is assured. If only one country deviates from this race, it will be subjected to evolutionary forces and it will then have to once again become more 'efficient' and more 'productive' or lose all power and independence.

Again, there are many ways to do this, but the goal is to disempower the use of non-renewables without invoking evolutionary solutions from the current system.  While we have some ideas, this is something that would need to be discussed.

To those saying that this is impossible, going back to The First Step - Freeing Our free-will may help.

Here are some more questions you can ask yourself.

* How is it that 'primitive' people work only around 3 to 5 hours a day while most people on the rich West have to work a minimum of 8 hours most days just to remain solvent? [3]

* Why do labour saving devices never reduce the time we need to labour?

* If our society is the best ever created, why are we bringing death to most living creatures while setting up global circumstances that will likely end up destroying human society as we know it?

* Why is so much of life boring for so many people?

* Where is the love?

Once you get into the habit of asking yourself questions like these, you will begin to step out of the mind trap created by the evolutionary imperative.

Click here for how even the most obvious realities can disappear for us when they go against the wealth imperative.

Summary

England in the year of our Lord, 1500

The country was subject to laws designed to maintain the established society. Land laws, in particular, were very strict about not only how the land could be used, but also concerning where any excess harvest from that land could go. These were called the Feudal times. It is about this time that people began to vigorously re-organise society in order to make more economic wealth.

What happened next was the construction of an entirely new legal framework that gave powers to individuals to manage the land for their personal benefit even if it meant the houses and livelihoods of people were disappearing. It also allowed the state to create public capital such as canals and roads as well as new economic institutions such as the central Bank of England.  

Positively, one could say that the lawmakers saw a chance to lift all of society out of a mainly subsistence economy even though the initial pain was considerable. Negatively, one could say that it was the rich and powerful looking for more ways to become more rich and more powerful. The truth is probably a mixture.

The following graph shows the number of new laws passed in England during the years 1500 - 1900 [1]. 

If the laws of the 1500's had not been changed, the free-market economy could not have grown as it did.  Without this re-writing of the legal framework, the artificial evolutionary force would not have arisen has it has today. The new legal framework very neatly gives modern society the precise characteristics necessary to create the artificial evolutionary system that so competently created the economically richest society in history.

As Adam Smith noted, an 'invisible hand' caused selfish desire to serve the world's economy. However, we have a great deal more knowledge about the 'invisible hand' than was available in Smith's time. We can cause that 'hand' to push us in another direction if we so choose.