Dedication
This writing is dedicated to the unique, precious and irreplaceable entity known as Humanity, who is the sum total of all that we are, have been and will be.
The body of Humanity is currently gravely ill of a potentially fatal autoimmune condition in which we are consuming ourselves from within and slowly dying of our own toxins.
The root cause is the profoundly dysfunctional dominant socio-economic paradigm operating in the world today, alongside similar socio-economic paradigms. It is not the cause of every ill, but it is the largest single driver of the most destructive and widespread ones.
Global warming and destruction of the environment, most wars, much despotism, poverty, global and national inequity, strife among races, religions, ethnic and other groups, and most of the ills that we are experiencing are, above all, its symptoms. A world population that is still growing, though more slowly each year, compounds them. Our other ills are minor in comparison, as a cold compared to metastatic cancer.
Yet our condition is treatable and our life expectancy need not be tragically cut short. This writing explores and explains the diagnosis and outlines a course of treatment that will most likely return us, as Humanity and as the individual humans who make it up, to a state of robust and thriving health in mind, body, heart and soul.
The time has come to implement a completely new paradigm which is neither Capitalism, Communism, nor Socialism but which benefits from experience gained from experiments in all three and more. In order to achieve human communities that foster the thriving of all of their members and form optimal norms and patterns of co-operation among individuals while honoring the sovereignty of each person in a win-win, rather than a win-lose, dynamic, we must be guided by a deeper understanding of history, science, and the inner workings and responses of the human heart and psyche.
The Transition from the current paradigms and systems to the new ones must be a complete change of paradigm, not a tweak or modification of the current one in any form. It will be gradual, voluntary, democratic and nonviolent, built from the ground up with profound respect for human life and dignity, and it will be firm: it will not yield to attempts to suppress it, and it will not settle for an oligarchy that is merely toned down. Its destination is a world in which no one may own or control what others need and use but they themselves do not. This will be above all a social, economic and cultural change, completed through democratic law. There are no “us” and “them,” no enemies, no “good guys” and “bad guys.” In its essence, it will flow from a decision to stop repeating dysfunctional patterns over and over while expecting different results, to replace an unworkable societal paradigm with a workable one that will evolve and adapt naturally in the direction of ever increasing human well-being, fulfillment, empowerment, and mutually-reinforcing-and-strengthening benefit.