Man's Future

John Berge

1991

Published in:

The Northwest Technocrat, 2nd quarter 1991, No. 323

A long look at human history, back down a long trail of evolution to the Earth's first ability to support life, gives one a more humble appreciation of our precarious situation here on this planet. Much is yet to be learned, but scientists have already uncovered a picture that is quite clear. It shows the interdependence of humans with the rest of the planet and the relentless pursuit, following a course toward the destruction of the very things mankind requires for survival. Man now deserves the epithet -- a scourge upon the Earth, and it will be a difficult task to reverse course and to achieve even a tenuous balance between our activities and the demands of Nature.

Mankind has organized societies with mere refinements of the tribalisms, nationalisms and brutishness of the past. But in a parallel development, humans have ideas of fairness, of appreciation of beauty and of order. The scientific method is an extension of those ideas, and we usually find that the "rightness" of things is coincident with the laws of nature. Ignorance is sometimes said to be bliss, but, instead, it is usually found that it is more satisfying to gain understanding.

Well then, what to do? How can we humans arrest our headlong plunge toward disaster? Is it possible? Maybe.

As with any problem, to find a solution one must have a place to begin, a point of attack. Sufficient facts are in, but now how to start?

Following World War II, the nations of the world met in San Francisco and drew up the specifications for the United Nations. At that time, Technocracy published an article, "The Vultures of the Peace", spelling out then that all that those nations had done was to have constructed a blueprint for more of the same old rape and pillage, and with provisions for only token efforts to stop it. War is profitable. Next, when nuclear war began to be a worry, Technocracy spelled out what it would take to have a world police for the control of weapons of war.

But weapons of war are not all that the people living on this planet must deal with. We must be concerned with our plundering of the Earth. This is more than a popular cause; it is the survival of our own species that we must try to assure. And, where to start -- the answer is right here with Canada and the United States.

Every economy in the world is a Price System, using money, a form of debt. A Price System is limited to the distribution of scarcity, and often doesn't do very well at it. And its main characteristic is not cooperation between people, but, instead, mostly adversarial relationships. The one land area and population that has the best opportunity to shed the concepts of the past is North America. We can have a society with cooperation as its hallmark.

Technocracy has always proposed an intelligent course of social action for North Americans, and now it is getting pretty late to begin trying to establish an intelligent stewardship of our planet -- Canadian and U.S. citizens had better "get with it" and Technocracy can show the way.