What If?
By Thomas Friedman, Jan. 20 2016 (LINK to article)
What if consumer capitalism is inherently unsustainable on our finite, vulnerable and overpopulated planet, which I and many others recognised it to be more than 40 years ago, before Ronald Reagan, Margret Thatcher and Helmut Schmitt led the world in putting it into turbo mode?
We (mine and previous generations of white men) have screwed up badly, with America now leading western civilisation, and the rest of the world following, towards the abyss.
Not that I'm blaming America. A big part of our problem is that we all try to blame others for what's gone wrong, rather than admitting our own part in it.
Nothing new has gone wrong. Ever since the first states and civilisations emerged from a tribal society, they have been subject to a continuous cycle of civilisational boom and bust, just not on the global scale or level of technological development that we are now experiencing, or with such a huge dependent human population that will suffer the consequences.
It doesn't have to be like this, but to put an end to this cycle of boom and bust, we need to view and understand our own species and civilisation from a human-evolutionary, i.e. Darwinian, perspective, which tragically, a previous generation of academics made a taboo of doing, in OVERREACTION to the Nazis having hijacked and abused the half-baked ideas of social Darwinism for their own evil purposes.
It is probably too late now to avoid bust entirely, but it is not too late to reduce the scale and death toll. Here is where to START.
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