Firing in unity?

There is always a tension between the old and new, what is good for individual and group, order and chaos, with order we can make rapid progress, we can make war or invest in great works, in chaos new ideas form, old inefficiencies can be removed, evolution and change can occur. Both are need in the long run but in the short term one must be on the rise and the other must decline, this is true for any lifetime whether human, company, country or world. The whole of politics is based on the interaction between stability and change, those who remember the good old days and the people who dream of a better future, it is a tension that affects people lives, there are winners and losers, change hurts people, there are coal miners who have lost their jobs and pride because of green energy, and we have left them on the scrap pile of our past.

It has not always been this way, for a thousand year between the Roman period and the age of invention with it's destructive gunpowder, naval and canon, that sparked an era of change, new ideas, progress and trade, that has led to our new world that still has not stablise and indeed has increased that rate of expanding knowledge (there are more patents, academic studies, books written, songs penned, each and every year than the one before and this has been true for each and every year for decades). This is normal for us, but for a millennium nothing really change in Britain, sure people invaded, plagues happened, kings got in a bad mood with their cousin for not marrying them, there was drama but for the average peasant it was a thousand years of farming, making babies and not much else, there was stability and certainty, you were born a pleasant or a noble and there was no changing that. The pleasant hoped for good kings and kings hoped for obedient peasants, they needed each other, there was a fixed amount of land and you could only get a set amount of food out of that ground and to do so you needed peace, the peasants gave the country food and the king gave peace.

This equation changed with technology, the spread of knowledge and increases in resources, the potatoes plant changed the food density of land (you could produce a lot more per acre) but that was only possible because of exploration that came from improvements in ships that was driven by the naval and war, trade changed from local to international, grain ships started travelling the globe. This increase in food production meant that towns and then cities were possible, which needed order to make them work, there was a loss of communities and traditional values (Romans use to complain about this and about how greed and vain the young folk were, familiar?), there was increases in crime and disease, it took a long time to make these human creation work in an orderly manner. We needed laws, police, manners, planning, licensing, hospitals, cleaners, sewers, waterworks, a whole monopoly board of institutions to keep people safe and free, order made from the chaos of creation.

However to breathe live into those cities, you need people to lead complicated and self-directed lives, they required hope, love, freedom to express themselves, to work, to have new ideas, and a city without those freedoms is just a prison. The cities needed nightlife, artistic quarters, universities, markets, personal services from a cup of coffee to cleaners, they worked best with and as hubs bringing the like minded together, though with each freedom came the risk of conspiracy and unexpected outcomes. We were dragged kicking and screaming from a world where everything you need to know and there was to know was in a single book, the bible, to world where there was a handful of people who knew everything, to now where even if you specialised you only have a surface level of understanding of even that one narrow subject and you have to live at ease with uncertainty, incomplete knowledge and trust in foundational knowledge that you have never confirmed for yourself.

This is not a happy place for most humans to be, we like order, we like to know that the milk in the fridge is cold and safe, you would not want to have to gamble on it's safety every time you had a bowl of porridge. We feel comforted by the familiar, we like to know what we have to do to get the results we want, we are happy to go to university for three unpaid years of learning if it means we have the certainty of a job, income and a house to share at the end of it, and that is why we get very unhappy when that deal is broken, when we do not have a route to improve ourselves and our lives, especially when we are use to having it. We do not like change and for good reason it hurts and harms our lives if it takes something away from us and we are more sensitive to loss than we are to gains, loss feels more important as it threats our survival.

That is what is so lacking in our current world is the predictability of the future, it is happening so quickly, I have gone in half a lifetime from an era of black and white television to having a mobile phone in my pocket where I can talk over video in colour to an Australian, that is science fiction levels of weirdness, it is no wonder people are finding it difficult to make sense of the world and what we should do plan for the future. It is impossible to ignore the pace of change when it happening in five year cycle rather than over centuries, and we know it is coming like a shark in the waters, whilst we are being given zero guidance as to how we should react and prepare for our future interests.

We know big technology is coming de-carbonisation is not only a supply issue of how we make the electricity, it is going to have unexpected consequences, new technology that will be adapted into our world, there is artificial intelligence, robots in all their forms (from vacuums to self-drive cars, bicycles and even rubbish bins), new materials and technologies that will change our relationship to the world. Whilst we are simultaneous being told about all the problems in the world that we are destroying it with heat, carbon, plastic and nuclear litter, that we are full of hate, micro-violence, that children are toxic by their nature, where we can be cancelled for any thought that is not pure. It is any wonder that we paralysed by inaction in the face of an uncertain future, guilt for the past and fear of the present.

There is only way one through the chaos and that is forwards, to act without fear and from love, and we can charge through the valley of death and emerge reborn on the other side. We all have the dream of a good world within us, we can all imagine it, where everyone is surrounded by family, friends and a good community, with stable resources to live a good life in a safe and secure world. It seems so close and the pieces are there to complete the jigsaw, it my hope that it is the darkest before the dawn but I am under no illusions that it is certain, but at least people think it is possible (medieval peasants could not even conceive the idea of fairness), and what is possible can become probable once we decide it is. What we need is a final push to a world of abundance, we have the technology, the knowledge and resources to give everyone a secure basis to live their lives, we do not have to live with the fear of scarcity, of destroying our world by carelessness, we can make our resources work for us, instead of making ourselves into resources to be exploited.

It is so close, and yet what we need more than anything else is unity, chaos has got us so far, freedom for the rich has been earnt on the backs of the workers with the promise that they might be rich too one day, and that retirement was a good second place where everyone lives like the rich with time freedom as the reward. However even those promises will be taken away as soon as robots replace those workers backs, the ultimate promise was that if we built the water well we would all get to drink from it, now people are trying to change the deal and make it into their private property. It is the mission that we need to return to, we need to create public wealth that benefits everyone, that we could all work towards, if cavemen could build Stonehenge, if the Victorians could build sewers, train lines, libraries, town halls that will last a thousand years, what are the great legacies that we are pasting onto future generations, what is mission that is driving us, what we people remember us for?

What we need is the mission that drives us forward together as a single world working towards a perpetual, self-sustaining and self-regulating community, where we are generating a legacy of wealth that supports us all in our basic needs as individuals and a society (basic income is best system for doing so I have heard of). We need people who can produce that wealth by their genius and invention, that are rewarded for their efforts, and that gives us all an inheritance of shared resources that improve our lives. It is the promise of building a well that we all can drink and benefit from delivered on a global scale, and given that mission I believe that we can succeed and even surprise ourselves at how easy it could be if we get the balance between order and chaos right. Especially if we could really internalise the idea that when we help others we help ourselves that we are all connected, and that when we work and fire together in unity we are stronger than any individual, and that we can change the world with a single thought if we could agree on it.