It’s January 1st, 2019, and we are just a year away from having 20/20 hindsight about what will have occurred and not occurred during the intervening year. We are no closer to starting the important conversations about the direction humanity should take regarding cost, quality, and availability of education, online verifiable and secure voting, universal basic income, protection of the environment, affordable healthcare open to all, a global initiative to secure food and water resources along with viable transportation of goods, and honest and truthful news that arrives at our fingertips.
Instead, we are distracted by geopolitical shenanigans orchestrated by the people in charge who play poker with our environment, healthcare, education, and participation in democracy. We allow these “leaders” to derail important conversations while instilling fear by portraying pandemic crime, war, immigration, and economic malaise as the major threats that face people’s well-being.
Leadership starts with a conversation, not a lecture or announcement that the boogeyman is hiding in the shadows. We need to discuss why doing well for all is bad to those who decry that we should even try. We are told that problems on a global scale are intractable and yet the individuals that make up this global population are able to feed, clothe, educate, treat, and comfort 7 billion fellow inhabitants. It is not the dictums from presidents, czars, kings, prime ministers, mayors, or senators that the organization of humanity relies on; it is the individual citizen cooperating with others in the community that gets the job done.
Too many people are rendered into feeling like parasites, ashamed that we need each other in a symbiotic relationship formerly known as community. We are given enough resources to survive and witness others losing everything in order to force our silence and buy acceptance that we have what we have. We are encouraged to be greedy because greed is flaunted as good all around us. We are shown what opulence looks like and what we should aspire to have it. The reality is that we cannot all live in gilded mansions, but we can have certain expectations.
I’m not cheering for communism or even socialism, nor am I suggesting a form of anarchy, but I am suggesting that our planet’s only possible direction is participatory culture. It’s going to require a much more enlightened population that can start to understand the logic of a system in balance instead of the blind march into disequilibrium. The whole must encourage the individual and find those people inspired enough to help themselves while real leadership supports them through mentoring and not burdening them with debt.
We have eviscerated the mind, which only sets the stage for revolution and the downfall of those who fostered the decline of the masses. When people are without purpose, and the individual is lacking the satisfaction of accomplishment, a festering boil of rot is brewing. Humans require the challenge of stepping into the unknown. We are biologically driven to explore and share what we’ve found.
In the moments of discovering conspiracy theories, fake news, memes, and other fringe banalities, we are driving ourselves over the cliff like lemmings falling to their death. In this sense, social media is, in fact, likely contributing to the dumbing-down of our population. Short of a rapid roll-out of artificial intelligence-driven real-time intervention when people encounter such nonsense, we are probably going to continue having to deal with large swaths of our fellow citizens being abused by their own infatuation with the absurd.
The fatal flaw in my hopes for a new Renaissance is likely the fact that chaos is at work, and it’s a lot more chaotic today than in 14th-century Europe. Back then, when the population of Italy was estimated to be about 12 million people, and the city of Florence, where the Renaissance was born was a mere 80,000 inhabitants, nobody could have guessed that they were about to influence all of humanity.
We no longer focus on a particular city for the progress they might be making. We tend to dismiss innovation, as demonstrated by our current hostility towards the likes of Amazon and Tesla. Nobody cares if a school is exceptional and setting new trends and standards. Instead, we are waging populist wars of nationalistic anger over immigration, gender identity, and espionage, along with tainted news and information that has gone awry due to faults in our emerging social media.
We cannot see the gilded lining of our age, and we probably will not be able to due in large part to our fear of change. Nearly 700 years ago, the people of Europe were ripe for a great leap forward following The Black Death, as it had become an even greater imperative to conquer ignorance. Today, on the verge of our own potential intellectual plagues, we cannot muster the wherewithal to act in our best interests. If we cannot rise to the occasion when the current reality portends horrible outcomes, then how will we place progress back onto the pedestal of human goals?
