Before you say no, take a moment to really ask yourself whether it’s the system that’s best suited to build our future society.

Jason Hickel and Martin Kirk: In February, college sophomore Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a clearer contrast to right-wing economics.

Pelosi was visibly taken aback. “I thank you for your question,” she said, “but I’m sorry to say we’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.”

The footage went viral. It was powerful because of the clear contrast it set up. Trevor Hill is no hardened left-winger. He’s just your average o—bright, informed, curious about the world, and eager to imagine a better one. But Pelosi, a figurehead of establishment politics, refused to–or was just unable to–entertain his challenge to the status quo.

Fifty-one percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

It’s not only young voters who feel this way.

A YouGov poll in 2015 found that 64% of Britons believe that capitalism is unfair, that it makes inequality worse. Even in the U.S., it’s as high as 55%. In Germany, a solid 77% are skeptical of capitalism. Meanwhile, a full three-quarters of people in major capitalist economies believe that big businesses are basically corrupt.Why do people feel this way? Probably not because they deny the abundant material benefits of modern life that many are able to enjoy. Or because they want to travel back in time and live in the U.S.S.R. It’s because they realize—either consciously or at some gut level—that there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital, and do it more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment we depend on.

Because let’s be clear: That’s what capitalism is, at its root. That is the sum total of the plan. We can see this embodied in the imperative to grow GDP, everywhere, year on year, at a compound rate, even though we know that GDP growth, on its own, does nothing to reduce poverty or to make people happier or healthier. Global GDP has grown 630% since 1980, and in that same time, by some measures, inequality, poverty, and hunger have all risen.

Gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

We also see this plan in the idea that corporations have a fiduciary duty to grow their stock value for the sake of shareholder returns, which prevents even well-meaning CEO’s from voluntarily doing anything good—like increasing wages or reducing pollution—that might compromise their bottom line. Just look at the recent case involving American Airlines. Earlier this year, CEO Doug Parker tried to raise his employees salaries to correct for “years of incredibly difficult times” suffered by his employees, only to be slapped down by Wall Street. The day he announced the raise, the company’s shares fell 5.8%. This is not a case of an industry on the brink, fighting for survival, and needing to make hard decisions. On the contrary, airlines have been raking in profits. But the gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. This is why JP Morgan criticized the wage increase as a “wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion” to workers. How dare they?What becomes clear here is that ours is a system that is programmed to subordinate life to the imperative of profit.

There’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

For a startling example of this, consider the horrifying idea to breed brainless chickens and grow them in huge vertical farms, Matrix-style, attached to tubes and electrodes and stacked one on top of the other, all for the sake of extracting profit out of their bodies as efficiently as possible. Or take the Grenfell Tower disaster in London, where dozens of people were incinerated because the building company chose to use flammable panels in order to save a paltry £5,000 (around $6,500). Over and over again, profit trumps life.It all proceeds from the same deep logic. It’s the same logic that sold lives for profit in the Atlantic slave trade, it’s the logic that gives us sweatshops and oil spills, and it’s the logic that is right now pushing us headlong toward ecological collapse and climate change.

Millennials can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

Once we realize this, we can start connecting the dots between our different struggles. There are people in the U.S. fighting against the Keystone pipeline. There are people in Britain fighting against the privatization of the National Health Service. There are people in India fighting against corporate land grabs. There are people in Brazil fighting against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. There are people in China fighting against poverty wages. These are all noble and important movements in their own right. But by focusing on all these symptoms we risk missing the underlying cause. And the cause is capitalism. It’s time to name the thing.What’s so exciting about our present moment is that people are starting to do exactly that. And they are hungry for something different. For some, this means socialism. That YouGov poll showed that Americans under the age of 30 tend to have a more favorable view of socialism than they do of capitalism, which is surprising given the sheer scale of the propaganda out there designed to convince people that socialism is evil. But millennials aren’t bogged down by these dusty old binaries. For them the matter is simple: They can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better.

What might a better world look like? There are a million ideas out there. We can start by changing how we understand and measure progress. As Robert Kennedy famously said, GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

We can change that. People want health care and education to be social goods, not market commodities, so we can choose to put public goods back in public hands. People want the fruits of production and the yields of our generous planet to benefit everyone, rather than being siphoned up by the super-rich, so we can change tax laws and introduce potentially transformative measures like a universal basic income. People want to live in balance with the environment on which we all depend for our survival; so we can adopt regenerative agricultural solutions and even choose, as Ecuador did in 2008, to recognize in law, at the level of the nation’s constitution, that nature has “the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles.”

Measures like these could dethrone capitalism’s prime directive and replace it with a more balanced logic, that recognizes the many factors required for a healthy and thriving civilization. If done systematically enough, they could consign one-dimensional capitalism to the dustbin of history.

None of this is actually radical. Our leaders will tell us that these ideas are not feasible, but what is not feasible is the assumption that we can carry on with the status quo. If we keep pounding on the wedge of inequality and chewing through our living planet, the whole thing is going to implode. The choice is stark, and it seems people are waking up to it in large numbers: Either we evolve into a future beyond capitalism, or we won’t have a future at all.

Dr. Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics who works on international development and global political economy, with an ethnographic focus on southern Africa.  He writes for the Guardian and Al Jazeera English. His most recent book, The Divide: A Brief History of Global Inequality and Its Solutions, is available now.

Martin Kirk is cofounder and director of strategy for The Rules, a global collective of writers, thinkers, and activists dedicated to challenging the root causes of global poverty and inequality. His work focuses on bringing insights from the cognitive and complexity sciences to bear on issues of public understanding of complex global challenges.

Originally published at Fast Company

Lead Photo by Ignotus the Mage

The post Are You Ready To Accept That Capitalism Is the Real Problem? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For example, I define baby boomers as those people who remember the Kennedy assassination, but not Pearl Harbor. Gen X as those people who remember the Challenger disaster but not Kennedy. Note that by the terms of this theory, people who are part of a given political nation, but not of a shared culture would never be part of the same “generation”. For example, recent immigrants will always have a unique enculturation compared to their peers, and, therefore, a different sensibility.

Generation Omega, then, would be that cohort of people who do not remember anything before September 11, 2001. These are kids who simply have no deep reference to what life was like before we decided as a culture to fully immerse ourselves in fear. Equally, of course, these are kids who have absolutely no recollection of the time before Google and Wikipedia, when the right answer was not simply a keystroke away. Interestingly, some of them will have vague recollections of life before smart phones, financial crises, gay marriage, and Minecraft; but these and many other cultural dynamics of the past decade and a half combine to form the general “adaptive landscape” that has given rise to their unique, shared generational sensibilities

Broadly speaking, we can suggest a number of characteristics that might be part of the generational flavor. For example, having been weaned in a highly interactive and responsive environment (think iTunes, YouTube and Minecraft), this is likely to be a generation of intuitive agency. They expect significant influence over and responsibility for their world. For example, unlike previous generations for whom media was an act of passive consumption (whatever is on NBC at 8 is what you are going to watch), their most fundamental assumption is the inverse: not only can you choose, but you must choose from a nearly unlimited selection. And the notion of being an active participant in “remix culture”? Millennials were the early adopters. For Generation Omega this is simply the water.

Additionally, of course, this is a generation for whom “to be networked” is an unconscious assumption. They are native collaborators and bricoleurs—assembling what they need from a cloud of people and materials “out there” on the network; and presenting it back without thinking twice. In a strong sense, precisely because it has been with them as long as walking and talking, they perceive the network as an extension of themselves. If Millennials are “digital natives”, Generation Omega is “network native”.

Finally, and less obviously, we might guess that this will be an extremely empathic and sensitive generation. Strauss and Howe refer to the children of a “crisis era” as the “Artist” archetype. Raised in a world characterized by a ubiquitous anxiety, these kids are over-protected during a time of adult sacrifice.

This has certainly been the case for Generation Omega. More than any time in history, this is a generation that has completely lost the right to roam. Where Boomers fondly remember hitch hiking across the country and walking miles alone to the local fishing hole, and Generation X recalls nomadic bike rides across the suburban landscape, the Omegas are rarely allowed to leave the house without an adult escort. Fear of school shootings, white vans, ebola, whatever, has left them always under the watchful gaze of adults (who might face jail time if they behave otherwise) and corralled into structured playdates in constructed environments. As a result, their physical environment is other people.

Hence their sensitivity. They started learning anti-bullying and empathy in kindergarten and their ability to navigate their world has been all about reading and dealing with other people. This is as true of their virtual lives as their physical lives. While Generation X was placated in front of television and the Millennials were plugged into video games, Generation Omega’s virtual experience is social. Grandma and Grandpa have always been a Skype call away. Every friend they’ve ever had is always within Instagram range. Virtually, they are always surrounded by a crowd.

We can go on and on, looking at the broad constants in the developmental landscape of these kids and sussing out guesses as to what this means for their long term generational character. But none of this is why I dub them Generation Omega.

The reason why they will be the last generation is not the world that produced them, but the world that they will produce for their children.

Over the next twenty years, Generation Omega (and their elders in Generation Y) will be faced by three fundamental questions. The resolution of these questions will, for good or for ill, describe a world that is so profoundly different from anything that humanity has yet experienced as to truly be the end of an era.

These questions are:

1. Humanity’s relationship to its environment
2. Humanity’s relationship to technology; and
3. Humanity’s relationship to itself

“We are as gods and we have to get good at it.”—Stewart Brand

 

HUMANITY + ENVIRONMENT

When Stewart Brand updated his 1968 Whole Earth Catalog slogan from “we are as gods and we might as well get good at it,” the message was clear: human beings have reached a degree of power and impact that, if we are to survive, we must learn how to take responsibility for our entire global environment.

From ocean acidification to soil depletion, from melting ice to dramatic changes in the chemical composition of our environment, the impact of humanity’s swelling population and power has been decisive. Every ecosystem. Every species. Every complex and subtle dynamic. This is a challenge that is unprecedented in the totality of global history—and it is a challenge that will fall firmly on the shoulders of Generation Omega.

The resolution of this challenge is going to require deep systemic change. For example, we are going to have to dispense with the extraordinary bullshit that we call dialogue these days and develop a collaborative truth-seeking function that is up to the task of getting eight billion super-empowered people to dance. This means more than just to come to a consensus on how the world works and how our actions impact it—it means to really coordinate in a way that we haven’t experienced as humans since we first began building the walls of Jericho. Amidst enormous uncertainty and subtle connections, we are going to have to engage in geo-engineering at the grand scale while pursuing intelligent, elegant and effective behaviours all the way down to the day to day lives of every individual.

It seems implausible. A utopian vision. Perhaps. But a Utopia built not of aspiration, but of necessity. As Stewart said, “We are as gods. We have to get good at it.”

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”—Albert Bartlett

HUMANITY + TECHNOLOGY

Perhaps the most astounding truth of the modern age is that certain kinds of technology advance not on linear, but on exponential curves. Moore’s famous law applies to batteries and bandwidth as much as to processors. Every year, more and more of our technical landscape is sucked into these exponential curves. In broad strokes, what this means is that every year sees more “innovation” than all of the years before combined.

More practically, what this implies is that the next twenty years will present technological changes so profound as to dwarf everything that has come before. The Science Fiction and “Transhumanist” communities have long toyed with the consequences of exponential technological growth. For Generation Omega these speculations will move firmly into the realm of reality.

Estimating these kinds of changes is notoriously hard for the human mind to grasp. Mathematically, if our technological ability continues to grow at the same rate that it has been growing, in twenty years we will be one million times more technologically capable than we are right now. One million times—in one generation. That is a bit like going from the invention of writing to the invention of the computer—in a single generation.

Human beings as we currently know them have absolutely no idea how to adapt to that rate and scope of change. Forget self-driving cars, 3D printers and autonomous drones. Those are the pong and slinky of Generation Omega. Certainly cybernetically-enhanced intelligence and detailed control over our children’s genetic material. Probably telepathy-like technologies and “swarm consciousness” where it becomes impossible to distinguish “your” thoughts from the thoughts of the people you are connected to. Possibly Matrix-like VR that is indistinguishable from reality.

And maybe digital super-intelligence, that favorite of “singularitarians.” Listen to Elon Musk, “[I] hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital super-intelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.” Is the Singularity near? Maybe, but it’s looking increasingly likely that Generation Omega will find out. And that if the Singularity does come to pass, it could be the single most important event in the history of life. It may still smell of science fiction, but for those who are paying the closest attention, it is becoming more salient every day.

Regardless, it is likely that Generation Omega will find itself wielding power over all the various aspects of life far greater than any so far touched by man. How we will navigate such power is anyone’s guess. But what comes out the other end might very well be farther from us than we are from our hominid ancestors.

“If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.”—Buckminster Fuller

HUMANITY + SELF

In the first question we examined the growing necessity over the next twenty years of humanity taking responsibility for the whole of life. Then we looked at how through the exponential growth of technology we will have the power and capability of doing so—if we learn to master that power. We now come to the final crucial question: how will humanity come to have the collective and individual wisdom to accept this responsibility and to wield this power?

For those who are students of history and the human condition, this question is the most daunting. For millennia, we have (at least ostensibly) aspired to a world characterized by inner and outer peace. Great teachers have walked among us, numerous great traditions have attempted to provide practices to bring us wisdom. And yet war, violence and hatred are still a dominant portion of our world. It seems a desperately foolish hope to think that in a mere twenty years we could bring a critical mass of humanity to a level of wisdom, compassion and integrity that is adequate to the task.

Nonetheless, this shall be the task for Generation Omega. And there are reasons for optimism. There does seem to be a trend over the long course of our becoming civilized towards peace and away from violence. Moreover, it appears that human nature is inherently peaceful and cooperativeconstructed culture and not our inherent nature that leads to systemic violence.

This is more than theoretical. Over the past few decades an increasing number of thinkers have realized that we are currently undergoing a massive transition from an economy founded in scarcity toward an economy anchored in abundance. With this comes more and more research that those individuals, organizations and societies that can cultivate a generative or abundance mentality will out-perform those who hold to older conflict and zero-sum ideologies. Thus, not only is “collective wisdom” possible, it seems increasingly likely that in the high technology future, it is the winning strategy.

And here is where one of Generation Omega’s most unique characteristics becomes catalytic. Hitherto, generations have been an overwhelmingly national phenomena. Remember that a generation is defined by a shared set of cultural sensibilities. It seems that for quite some time, we have been witnessing the slow birth of a truly global culture. Certainly, the Baby Boomer generation in America has deep differences from their British or German or Japanese peers. But equally certainly, they have much more in common than did their respective parents or grandparents. In the intervening seventy years, global media, global technology, global trade and an increasing synchronization of global crisis events has only served to intensify global culture.

This means that Generation Omega will not be merely the next American generation, they will be the next generation on the world stage. And, given the intrinsically global nature of their generational challenges, they are likely to be the first truly global generation. Uninhibited by dysfunctional tribal and national boundaries, they will connect with their peers based strictly on what works. Unlike every previous period in human history where the kind, the creative and the wise have been voices in the wilderness; over the next twenty years, these voices will be able to find each other and when they do they will be able to coordinate and cooperate in ways that let them rapidly take leaps ahead of everyone else. Those who can follow will quickly realize that it is in their best interests to focus on peace rather than war. Those who don’t will simply be left behind.

No doubt this is a daunting future facing Generation Omega. Win or lose, theirs will be a generational bridge to an uncertain future. And there is no guarantee that they will navigate these challenges successfully. In fact, in all fairness, the odds are stacked firmly against them. Where we sit right now, there are many reasons to fear and only a few reasons to hope. But there are reasons to hope. Foremost among these is that Generation Omega is not yet formed. The eldest among them are not yet adolescent and the youngest are not yet born. They are still in the process of becoming who they will be and, therefore, we have an opportunity to give them the best possible chance while we still hold the reins of power.

We know what they will face. What can we do now to help them?

Photo by 1elf12

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