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INTRODUCTION
Building a Win-Win World: Life Beyond Global Economic Warfare is an effort to continue deconstruction of the economism/competition/conflict paradigm and construction of new platforms for action. We are all constructing new “quality-of-life” language together. The dysfunctional economism paradigm still controls the debate, however, and we must never forget it for an instant. The economists are still the “thought police,” and we are enmeshed every day in the old structures in hundreds of ways. There has been tremendous progress. It is slow-motion good news, but that is what I am out to communicate.
The war system in human societies is at least six thousand years old, but according to much new archeological and paleoanthropological evidence, humans lived in generally peaceful, small egalitarian groups in prehistory. Most of what we are taught as the history of human civilization chronicles the rise of human ego-centeredness, technological ingenuity, and territoriality (as populations and agriculture spread), and the inevitable rise of competition, conflict, and violence in general. This kind of history of the evolution of human societies is a biased account. The conventional history of conquests, military leaders, and the lives of the powerful has been largely indifferent to the experiences of the great majority of ordinary human beings. The work of broader historians, such as Fernand Braudel (1980, 1984) and Emmanuel Wallerstein (1991), the challenge of feminist historians, and new interpretations of archaeological records have enriched our understanding of our past. This is a vital prelude to changing our view of our potential and our future.
In the twentieth century, humans have clearly demonstrated the limits of their six-thousand-year experimentation with competition,
territoriality, expansionism, and military conflict. More scholars are at last studying humanity’s ancient war system and the roots of human violence—all the bad but important news in our biochemistry, brains, evolution, social conditioning, and hierarchical, patriarchal institutions. Increasing technological virtuosity linked to this war system has brought us to the brink of many annihilation scenarios—from nuclear and biological holocausts to slower, more insidious threats like toxic wastes, urban decay, desertification, and climate change. This book, however, will not dwell on this now-dysfunctional system and its post–Cold War expressions in civil and ethnic conflicts, as well as violence in city streets, in the media, and in our families. Instead, we will trace the emerging death rattles of this violent, competition/conflict paradigm and its dominance-submission, win-lose games. I will identify the flash points and crises that illustrate the dysfunctionality of the paradigm and force us—for our very survival—toward new approaches. As we examine these signs of human potential for personal and social learning, we see how breakdowns are often precursors and even necessary for breakthroughs.2
THE GOOD NEWS IN THE BAD NEWS
This book will focus on finding the good news in the bad news: where humans are encountering the endgames of the competition/conflict paradigm, where there are signs of transition and transmutation. The very globalization of the war system, of technology, and of industrialization brought the Cold War to a dead end. Since then, the global warfare paradigm has given ground to global economic warfare, which many economists, politicians, and business leaders have hailed as a victory of capitalism and competitive free markets. Yet this global economic warfare has proved little better than the military warfare it was advertised to replace. By the mid-1990s global economic warfare had already reached crisis points of its own.
Part I of this book, “Pathological Paradigms,” examines the nature of recent crises. Chapter 1, “Global Economic Warfare versus Sustainable Human Development,” zeros in on flash points from global to local levels. Chapter 2, “Juggernaut Globalism and the Bankruptcy of Economics,” surveys the global economy, financial markets, and the unleashed forces of free trade. Chapter 3, “The Technology Trap,” examines our love affair with technology and its perverse impacts on our lives and environment. Chapter 4, “The Jobless Productivity Trap,” looks at how the noxious new brew of free-market technological innovation driven by global economic warfare has led to jobless economic growth and further global commercial exploitation of the planet’s peoples and natural resources. Chapter 5, “Government by Mediocracy and the Attention Economy,” examines the rise of global mass media as a new form of governance now driving our politics and private lives—and its birthing of hybrid Attention Economies.3
Part II, “Slow-Motion Good News: Road Maps and Resources for Rebirth,” examines our human resources and potentials for rebalancing ourselves and our societies on new paths to more cooperative, equitable forms of ecologically sustainable development. Chapter 6 describes a new force in the world, “Grassroots Globalism,” as it shows itself in the emerging civil society and the traditionally cooperative, unpaid Love Economies bubbling up to challenge juggernaut globalism and competitive economism rooted in the old war system. Chapter 7, “Rethinking Human Development and the Time of Our Lives,” refocuses our attention on the importance of the time of our lives— our only real asset. Chapter 8, “Cultural DNA Codes and Biodiversity: The Real Wealth of Nations,” shows that the encoding of our collective experience, as it has coevolved with the biodiversity of all species, is our real source of wealth. Human resourcefulness, choices, and aspiration for personal development can create new societies. Our minds and spirits are powerful beyond our full awareness.
Part III, “Building a Win-Win World: Breakthroughs and Social Innovations,” examines how our human potentials are finding expression in new forms of enterprise, institutions, partnerships, and cooperative agreements that can lead to the building of a win-win world. Chapter 9, “Information: The World’s Real Currency Isn’t Scarce,” describes how money became mistaken for wealth and was cartelized in the global casino, and how the new, pure information currencies (which have always been the world’s real currency) are now emerging at the global and local levels. Chapter 10, “Redefining Wealth and Progress: The New Indicators,” takes a look behind the statistical veils of economics. It describes how old indicators of economic growth— for example, the gross national product (GNP)—are being overhauled, and how new indicators of quality of life are slowly replacing economic indicators as new scorecards of human development. Chapter 11, “Perfecting Democracy’s Tools,” describes the importance of the spread of democracies around the world and the urgent need to perfect this still imperfect system of collective decision making and governance, including social and technological innovations waiting in the wings. Chapter 12, “New Markets and New Commons: The Cooperative Advantage,” compares and contrasts the strategies of cooperation and competition, of markets and rules/agreements, of public, private, and civil sectors, and how they can all be rebalanced to build a win-win future. Chapter 13, “Agreeing on Rules and Social Innovations for Our Common Future,” reviews efforts during the 1990s to forge new international agreements and institutions to create a social architecture suitable for a truly human twenty-first century.4
THE ROLE OF OUR MENTAL TOOL BOXES
This book, like my earlier ones, is also about the mental tool boxes we carry in our heads: our belief systems, cultural conditioning, assumptions, worldviews, concepts, and habits of thought. On the societal level, I have termed these collective mental tool boxes paradigms—extending the scope of the term originally coined by Thomas Kuhn to describe such mental processes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Our mental tool boxes are lenses or spectacles by which we humans view and construct our responses to the world around us.
Each of us, whether we acknowledge these powerful mental tools or not, shapes our world through the use of such paradigms, which evolve in response to our experience, as I elaborated in Paradigms in Progress (1991, 1995). For me, two of the most useful of these mental tools are (1) my “zoom lens,” which I use to zero in on something that interests me and to keep going deeper with increasing magnification of the details until I have a more complete picture; and (2) my “wide shot,” which allows me to pull back and see the phenomenon as successively smaller and smaller pieces of a much larger jigsaw puzzle. All of us have this mental equipment, which can be honed and perfected as a high-quality camera for viewing our world. This can help us see the flow of events and understand the paradigms we and others are using to shape our perceptions.
Developing mental paradigm-spotting equipment is also a spiritual pursuit. Such mental exercises make us deeply aware of our essence—in fact, our souls—since when we look at our own mental functioning we see that it emerges from our brains but cannot be placed neatly in some set of neurons. We are brought to the oldest puzzle of our species: Who is the “I” that is studying and judging all this? Every great religious and spiritual tradition has posed this question—through meditation, as in Buddhism and Hinduism; through prayer, as in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism; through contemplation, as in many indigenous traditions; as well as through rituals, ceremonies, holy days, festivals, celebrations, music, dance, and art.5
Many traditions have sought to explain the marvelous paradoxes of human existence: that we possess this mental equipment and ever-expanding awareness on a shrinking planet, in an unremarkable solar system, somewhere in the arm of an equally undistinguished spiral galaxy. Simultaneously, we inhabit for a brief time a delicate and miraculous physical body, which will decompose into a few dollars worth of chemical elements and disperse again into the earth that gave us birth. This profoundly beautiful mystery evokes our questions, our imagination, and our many images of this great creation and its divinity—whether in the grand sweep of the known universe or within ourselves.
This book is my most recent album of the “snapshots” I have collected of this great unfolding human drama as I have traveled the world since I wrote Paradigms in Progress. How do we humans face new challenges resulting from the effects of our mental and technological ingenuity? I scan for signs of increasing levels of global awareness, responsibility, and wisdom that must emerge for our survival and development.
Indeed, I believe we humans are coming up to “graduation” time on this planet. We must now learn a great deal and grow in moral stature very rapidly. The ubiquitous goal of growth as measured by GNP must soon be redirected. We must grow up! Since I took up my pen to record this process thirty years ago, the global debate has been getting clearer. New paradigms are competing with dysfunctional belief systems and clarifying our situation and our future goals and choices. Since World War II we have been slowly leaving the industrial era behind. I summarized this process in the 1970s in Creating Alternative Futures (1978, 1996) and in the 1980s in The Politics of the Solar Age (1981, 1988).
Even so, these vast historical change processes are uneven. I view these uneven shifts in the industrialism paradigm in terms similar to those of many of my fellow futurists. I have been a card-carrying futurist for the past quarter century—belonging to many of the same professional societies as U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (with whom I now often disagree) and our mutual friends Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Most futurists associate in professional societies. These include the World Futures Studies Federation, a global group with a moving base currently in Australia; the U.S.-based World Future Society, which publishes The Futurist, Futures Research Quarterly, and Future Survey; Futuribles, based in Paris, France; the Futures Library in Salzburg, Austria; the World Association for Social Prospects, in Geneva and Benin, Africa; The African Future Society; the Chinese Futures Society, in Beijing; and many similar associations in Latin and Central America, Japan, Asia, Africa, and Europe.6
Futurists have almost been an underground in the academic world—often vilified by their colleagues in more established, traditional disciplines. Academe had no place for visionary futurist Buckminster Fuller, who became an author and entrepreneur in planetary design and was only fully recognized after his death. In 1995 he would have celebrated his hundredth birthday. Today’s universities still operate within the defined disciplinary boundaries and paradigms inherited from the underlying ideologies of the Industrial Revolution and the European Age of Enlightenment. I described these paradigms based on the reductionism engendered by René Descartes and the mechanistic “clockwork universe” of Isaac Newton in Creating Alternative Futures and The Politics of the Solar Age. Seamless reality was partitioned into separate disciplinary boxes housed in separate buildings on campuses, while fledgling interdisciplinary programs were deemed “not rigorous” and subject to the first budget cuts. Future studies became established largely outside traditional academia—with notable exceptions, including departments at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the University of Houston at Clear Lake City, Texas. The business sector embraced futures research as an integral part of its need to plan, to invest in research and development, and to innovate new products and services. Such corporate futures research includes the Trend Analysis Program of the U.S. insurance industry, the futures scenario building of Shell Oil in Europe, and the longer-term futures studies conducted by Mitsubishi Research Institute in Japan.
THE NARROW FRAMEWORK OF ECONOMICS
Often, the most resistant traditional discipline has been economics— for many good reasons. Economics became the primary discipline of industrial development, which became synonymous with economic development, i.e., GNP-measured economic growth and what I term “economism.” The economism paradigm sees economics as the primary focus of public policy as well as of individual and public choices. Thus economics became the most powerful discipline—even outranking physics and mathematics—bestriding the policy process since World War II in every country in the world. I researched the genesis of this in depth for my friend Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point (1981) and my own The Politics of the Solar Age. I found independent-minded economists—a few in every generation—who had questioned the ever-narrowing framework of economics. I saw how its assumptions were concealed in a language of false universalism and specious mathematics as well as a simplistic view of human nature.7
What I had stumbled on, as had those before me and others who came later, such as my friend Marilyn Waring in If Women Counted (1988), is that economics, far from a science, is simply politics in disguise. No wonder I defined myself as a futurist and was sometimes called an “anti-economist”—which is true. I want to dethrone economics as the predominant policy analysis tool of the global economic warfare system. Our global future is multidisciplinary, cooperative, and rainbow hued. Futures research is still pooh-poohed by economists, academics, and policymakers. The extended space/time horizons of futures research, its scope—global and covering decades and centuries—is an art not a science. Often futurists are proved wrong. Yet often they blindside more myopic political scientists, sociologists, and economists, who sometimes fail to get even their hindsight right.
Thus, futurist Daniel Bell of Harvard, who began as a sociologist, was one of the first in the 1960s to describe the passing of the economic era. In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) he described, in the broader tradition of earlier political economists such as Schumpeter, the passing of the industrial paradigm and the consequent change in the social structures it had created. Many futurists seized this image, even though it was one derived from “backing into the future looking through the rearview mirror.” In The Politics of the Solar Age, I envisioned the coming of a new era of enlightenment, a Solar Age based on light-wave and solar-energy technologies. In this Solar Age, we humans would engage in a bottom-to-top design revolution. The centralization of industrialism would give way to a new devolution: we would reshape our production, agriculture, architecture, academic disciplines, governments, and companies to align them with nature’s productive processes in a new search for equitable, humane, and ecologically sustainable societies.8
The Tofflers, in The Third Wave (1980), also saw the end of industrialism, which they termed the “Second Wave” succeeding the “First Wave” of agricultural societies. The Tofflers’ Third Wave is driven by knowledge and information technology. We agree on a coming devolution, which they described as de-massification and I described as decentralization. We have often debated, however, the relative importance of planetary ecosystems in human societies and technologies. While the Tofflers see ecosystems as malleable and continuing to respond to human criteria and goals, I see ecosystems as having inviolable principles and the biosphere as our basic life support. I believe that humans adapt and have the potential to grow and learn.
This debate runs through every conference of futurists: between the “technological optimists,” who think nature will keep adapting to human demands, and the “human-nature optimists,” who, like myself, think that human beings have the ability to continually learn and adapt to challenging environments. Both groups share common concerns for reshaping societies but see human progress in different terms. The former, technologically focused, are pessimistic about human nature. The latter join me in optimism about the possibilities of human learning and adaptation to reshape human nature, values, and lifestyles.
Building a Win-Win World scans the scenery and maps the collision between the externally focused, technologically driven economic growth paradigm, which has culminated in unsustainable global economic warfare, and the rise of grassroots global concerns in the emerging paradigm and movements for sustainable human development. In “mediocracies,” our new form of governance based on entertainment and event-driven media, longer-term processes are often unseen “slow-motion bad news” and “slow-motion good news.” My columns are unseen in the United States but are distributed from Rome by InterPress Service to some four hundred newspapers worldwide in twenty-seven languages. Hopefully, this overview will provide a more visible “wide shot” of the global paradigm clashes now creating tomorrow’s realities, and expand our capacities to respond creatively.
