I get in a lot of conversations about potential futures. Not the future, but all kinds of possible futures. One thing that constantly strikes me is a widespread lack of imagination when it comes to this complex set of subjects.
“The future will contain technologies, realisations and social structures that we can not even fathom in the present.” — Peter Joseph
There are a lot of people who can’t imagine, for example, a world without money or a world without certain kinds of crime — not even for the sake of conversation. This bugs me primarily because it usually restricts the conversation to present conditions, and stops exploration of theory that could enable the creation of conditions in the present that produce desirable outcomes in the future.
It’s almost like most people’s vision of the future is nothing more than a higher-tech version of what already exists, with a few policy alterations here and there. It’s as if, even in their own most optimistic visions of the future, people are still working 40 hours a week, still being fucked over by politicians and others who are thought to “represent them,” the world is still at war and humanity is still full of anger, hatred, shallow materialism, delusion, and seemingly has no concept of cause-effect.
Certain types of questions rarely get asked, and so certain trains of thought rarely get explored. The old conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this has been done deliberately, with an Orwellian newspeak/doublethink-style language of thinking being imposed on people to prevent them exploring certain trains of thought. But I don’t believe my own thoughts when it comes to that. Instead, this generally strikes me as a natural consequence of the tendency to cling to ideological/belief-oriented languages of thinking — not a planned chain of events imposed on us by malicious forces.
So, let’s ask a few unusual questions, just for the sake of discussion and exploring new territory:
Will money and, therefore, scarcity, just exist forever in some form or another? What conditions could create a future where money has been outgrown, and, given what insight we’ve gained from human history, would it be both practical and beneficial to strive for such conditions?
How about asking the same question for other foundational aspects of our present societies; government itself, representation, democracy, national barriers, competition, etc.
How do we handle technological unemployment, where jobs become automated and digitised over time, displacing people from the workforce? This is bound only to increase with the more we learn and innovate, no matter what arbitrary limits and restrictions we try to place on it through policy. The fruits of our education and technological advancement are in direct competition with human beings for employment.
This creates a troublesome set of social conditions that could go many ways, but in a monetary system, there are two pre-defined possible outcomes; people get poorer or people get richer. And, given the self-imposed ideological and imaginative limits of people, I suspect we would likely tend towards people getting poorer due to wider society not being prepared for these emerging conditions as a consequence of its own shortcomings.
Questions like this are rarely asked on the more casual-serious level, and are usually immediately stonewalled or laughed off.
It might be sooner than we expect that we’re forced into a position where we need to think about and discuss new systems and social structures. If that conversation kicked off every time a new war began, a new recession occurred, or some politicians sold out the people they were supposed to represent, then it’d be more likely that the world would be ready to change with current understandings, rather than being held back by outdated ideology.
It’d also be less likely that the self-proclaimed ruling classes would get away with 10% of the bullshit they tend to get away with today purely through manipulation of words and having the monopoly on violence. And that would be a potential future I’d be interested in seeing, to say the least.
