Four Horsemen Page #8

Major new metal discoveries are

becoming increasingly rare

40% of the worlds agricultural land

is seriously degraded,

and ever more volatile yields

continue to be unevenly distributed

It may be that the looming environmental threat

is not global warming,

but the exhaustion of the worlds resources.

We are going to have struggles for

finding land sufficient to grow

the agricultural products

for what the UN says

is going to be a 9 billion earth population.

We are going to struggle over

non renewable fossil fuels as they run out

I think shell posit's about 2075 they'll be gone,

and we're going to struggle over things like water

and other precious resources

that are necessary to

our life and to our economy

This could be as shell says,

a blueprint affair with world leaders

working to share and share alike

or it could be a real mess,

and shell incidentally bets on the mess

Just like the babyboomers failure

to look to the next generation,

our outdated competitive mentallity

for a world of depleted resources

could have devastating consequences.

Our economic setup encourages

one up'nship competition

and comparison where as

the progress the humans have

made over millenia

has been largely based on cooperation.

In any species, almost any animal,

there is always the potential for huge conflict,

because within any species

all members of that species have

the same needs

so they might fight eachother for

food and shelter

and nestsites and territory and

sexual partners

and all that kind of things.

But human beings have always had

the other possibility

We have the possibility to be the

best source of support

and love and assistance and cooperation.

Much more so than any other animal

And so other people can be the best or the worst

You can be my worst rival or my best

source of support

In a progressive society

to meet our economic social and cultural needs

we must move from globalisation to localisation

The benefit's of a communal sense of fellowship,

responsibility and purpose in a life driven

by production,

not consumption would lead to

happiness and satisfaction.

Indeed we must ask;

Have our modern consumerism lifestyle

made us happy?

I think if one have been living in the 19'th century

and somebody told you that a 100 yers later

people we're going to be living in this

extraordinary wealth and comfort

with central heating,

being able to throw away such a

high proportion of our food as we do,

we'd imagine that we'd be living in

a state of extraordinary social harmony

and everything would be rosy.

It's really quite remarkable

the contrast between if you like

the material success of our societies

and the social failure.

The growth economy demands that

we make consumtion the way of life

He who dies with the most toys became

the ambition,

and retail replaced spiritual satisfaction

Unsurprisingly sales of antidepressants

skyrocketed.

The fact is that the world economy

over the last few years,

a good share of my life time has been

built either on

the military or on producing items

that most people don't need,

and really dont even want.

Consumerism is driven by a extraordinally

social nature

that we want to have the stuff

so that we look good in other peoples eyes.

It's because I experience myself

through other peoples eyes

the feelings of shame and embarrasment

or pride and maybe feeling envied all

those things.

The goods is just a way of mediating

the relationship

between yourself and others in this

extraordinarily alienated hierarchy

What has really suffered is human relationships,

family life, the things that really matter to us,

and in the end

the only thing that makes the

human being happy isn't money

it's very clear that passing a level

you only get marginal gains from wealth

What really makes us happy is other people,

it's our relationship with other people that

has really been damaged by the last 30 years

We trust them less,

we have less interraction with them,

we bond less than ever before,

we marry less and marriage is under

more threat than ever before

and all the associations that represents

sort of permanent unconditioned human affection

are being eroded or damaged.

And that's the real legacy of the last 30 years

in some sense we've got to

recover and rehumanise our lives

otherwise not only will we be nasty,

brutish and shout at, but we'll be lonely

The west is coming to the realisation

that it's human project is failing

the west was so convinced that

if you push people to achieve as individuals

the accumulated achievement over individuals

would make for a successfull society

And what the west is now begginning to realise

is that the individual achievement

without incorporating the voulnerable community

is a myth.

The idea was, make your own life,

be individually aspiring,

and then you'll be individually achieving,

and then you'll be individually prosperous,

and then you'll be individually happy.

You end up doing that in a glass jar

and the glass jar has a limited height

and it is incapsulating

and in the end you die of lack of oxygen

Human beings are alive because

they seek attachment

and because they are propelled by affection

so the isolated achieving individual in

the end implodes.

In order to find a purpose in life

it has to be outside yourself

It matters not how you're constructed

outside yourself

as long as it is a positive value

added to the society pursuit

But it has to be outside, it can't be yourself,

if you're pursuing yourself

you're pursuing the abyss as Nietzsche said

You're going to wind up in the abyss.

One of the most powerful and cultural

frameworks

that shapes the way we think today is the

hollywood film construction

and it follows a particular called compassion

in that there's a beginning,

there's a middle and there's an end

There is drama, tension, there's resolution,

there's usually a goodie and a baddie

and it's usually a story told for the

median of human beings

This Hollywoodisation of the way

that people communicate

and about the way they tell stories

about themselves

and view their recent history

has very much impacted how we look at

the financial crisis

in there to people look at the beginning

and the middle and the end,

they look at the drama around the

Lehman Brothers

and they want to see a resolution

and they want it that easy

they want sacrificial victims as well

so they focus on a few individuals

The idea that somehow it

wasn't just one or two individuals

who we're the root of the problem,

it was a systemic problem

that actually almost everyone

who participated

was in some way guilty

either of outright negligence or

simply failing to ask the right questions

or simply failing to ask

why money was so cheap for so many years

The idea that it was a systemic flaw

is something wich is very hard

for people to grasp

and even harder to depict of a good story

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