Things Will Change!
We are now an overpopulated and over-consuming
society that is pressing the carrying capacity of the global ecosystem.
We know that continued economic growth in developed countries will be at the expense of those who really need an increase in material well-being, the underprivileged in the Third World.
There is no connection between increased living standards (beyond sufficiency) and happiness/contentment. There can be now doubt that material living standards in Australia have increased since 1960. However consider the rate of murder and other violent crime, the increase in drug and alcohol abuse and suicide. It would appear that we live in a less happy society in 2014 than in 1960. It is difficult to draw a line between sufficiency and extravagance, however it is certain that in Australia we are dying of the stresses of abundance rather than the stresses of scarcity.
Political parties invariably, if understandably, have difficulty in adapting themselves to conditions other than those which gave them birth. By clinging with growing desperation to the industrial paradigm, by supposing that the politics of plenty is still the only way to achieve progress, they condemn both themselves and us. To them will fall the increasingly thankless task of dividing up an ever diminishing economic pie that they have promised should be getting larger; to us will fall the sordid consequences of so profound a failure collectively to get a grip on reality.
It is when the norms and institutions cease to satisfy the individuals identity needs that he feels alienated and is convinced that the institutions are imposed on him.
The longer we resist the inevitability of change, the less chance is there that we will achieve it democratically; the sooner we commit ourselves to change the easier such a process will be.
When personal alienation feeds on ecological breakdown then all we have to look forward to is a veritable technocracy of ruins.
We know that continued economic growth in developed countries will be at the expense of those who really need an increase in material well-being, the underprivileged in the Third World.
There is no connection between increased living standards (beyond sufficiency) and happiness/contentment. There can be now doubt that material living standards in Australia have increased since 1960. However consider the rate of murder and other violent crime, the increase in drug and alcohol abuse and suicide. It would appear that we live in a less happy society in 2014 than in 1960. It is difficult to draw a line between sufficiency and extravagance, however it is certain that in Australia we are dying of the stresses of abundance rather than the stresses of scarcity.
Political parties invariably, if understandably, have difficulty in adapting themselves to conditions other than those which gave them birth. By clinging with growing desperation to the industrial paradigm, by supposing that the politics of plenty is still the only way to achieve progress, they condemn both themselves and us. To them will fall the increasingly thankless task of dividing up an ever diminishing economic pie that they have promised should be getting larger; to us will fall the sordid consequences of so profound a failure collectively to get a grip on reality.
It is when the norms and institutions cease to satisfy the individuals identity needs that he feels alienated and is convinced that the institutions are imposed on him.
The longer we resist the inevitability of change, the less chance is there that we will achieve it democratically; the sooner we commit ourselves to change the easier such a process will be.
When personal alienation feeds on ecological breakdown then all we have to look forward to is a veritable technocracy of ruins.