Chapter 15: Science and Development
Those who promote and defend the dominant socio-economic paradigm like to say that the competition generated by profit motive drives greater innovation and productivity than can be achieved in more collaborative, symbiotic paradigms. Indeed there are situations in which competition does fuel innovation as people try to outdo each other.
There’s no denying that we humans have a competitive side to our makeup, as evidenced by the rich variety of games, sports and contests in which we invest a lot of our attention in most or all cultures. We also, however, have a cooperative, synergistic side to our makeup. Each is there because it in some way enriches our lives and survival, depending on the situation. It is up to us to determine how, where and when to invoke which sides of our nature in order to bring about the greatest degree of human happiness, well-being, health, empowerment and thriving of individuals as well as the community.
For example, an aggressive, even violent response may save our lives when confronted with a predator, terrorist, or other threat. That same response is utterly harmful when applied in any other situation. Compassion, solidarity and mutual nurturing are powerfully beneficial in most situations of normal life. Yet to respond to a psychopath or terrorist with an open, trusting heart is disastrous.
Let’s look at scientific research for example. Research is most productive when there are both a high degree of collaboration and a degree of competition. For best results there must be free, unimpeded sharing of information among researchers. In collaboration, the benefits of sharing information are obvious. In competition, competing researchers and developers can scarcely poke holes in each other’s work if they can’t freely read, analyze, and try to reproduce each other’s results.
When information sharing is blocked or restricted, research and development suffer; society and the people in it pay a steep price. It doesn’t matter whether such restriction comes from government, as happened to researchers in the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, or whether the restriction comes from nondisclosure agreements and restrictive business policies that ban developers at competing companies from sharing anything of their work. The inhibition and crippling of research and development is the same. Neither collaboration nor competition can proceed.
Imagine what would have been accomplished if Soviet and U.S. scientists had been encouraged and supported to share their work freely in the Space Race, medicine, agriculture, and more! Both countries would have benefited from their combined knowledge and expertise.
Now imagine what would happen if designers from all of the world’s auto manufacturers were to get together and design vehicles based on the combined strongest features of all brands! We would enjoy vehicles that have all of the best features of Ford, Toyota, Mercedes, Volkswagen and all the others combined in one. There is no down side. Collaboration would integrate knowledge, while competition would eliminate all but the best designs and features. The wasteful duplication of efforts under the fragmented dominant socio-economic paradigm is immensely destructive and utterly unnecessary. Imagine the benefit to both countries if the U.S. and the Soviet Union had examined, without bias, each other’s successes and failures socially and politically, then both countries would have benefited greatly. The U.S. had greater success implementing political freedom but has failed miserably in fostering the arts, sciences, and higher education for all of the population. The Soviets had a dismal record in terms of political freedom, but did a superb jobs of nurturing and amplifying science, the arts, and higher education. If only they had chosen to learn from each other.
In the Soviet Union, it was the government that restricted and censored artists, scientists and developers. In modern economic feudalism, it’s the employer who restricts and censors artists, scientists and developers. There is little difference in the results in both cases. If you doubt this, look to the U.S. during the McCarthy era, when much of the most talented people had to flee to Europe in order to escape the state sanctioned, life-ruining anti-communist frenzy. In the entertainment industry, performers, writers, composers and other artists have been blackballed, sued, and worse because they did or said something that major sponsors or the network didn’t like. Successful shows have been canceled because a sponsor or executive disagreed with anything about it. Story lines, story arcs, and character development are often dictated by arbitrary and capricious decisions that have nothing to do with the artistic integrity or quality of the content. For practical purposes, the power of the modern feudal lords overrides and nullifies our Constitutional rights if they decide to exercise it.
Any developers at competing companies who do share their “secrets,” will find themselves fired, sued into bankruptcy, and even imprisoned for “industrial espionage” or for violating nondisclosure agreements without signing which they would have no job. Under the dominant modern feudalistic paradigm, the employer, who is often an extension of one or more modern feudal lords, takes ownership of any developments the employee creates, just as the Medieval feudal lords laid claim to as much as they chose of peasants’ and serfs’ produce, labor and products.
This causes wasteful duplication of efforts. Each company must design and manufacture its products in a void. The illusion of abundance of choices belies the waste and inferiority of products thus created. Each brand has its own strong and weak points. Were all designers from all companies to be encouraged to pool their efforts, their products would combine the best of all designs and features into a solid line of products that would be the best that the state of the art allows.
Instead of multiple lines of similar competing products, each of which is inferior in different ways and all of which are designed to be short-lived, there would be one or two lines of durable, upgradeable, optimal products with high customizability. The depletion of natural resources, pollution and waste byproducts of manufacturing, and flow of broken or discarded products to landfills would be cut to a tiny fraction of accelerating rates.
Lest you worry that such a collaboration would end competition and thus stall innovation, consider the fact that under the current paradigm, competition is not over the quality of products and services; it is over marketing, advertising, business strategies, profits, stock prices and market share. In those priorities, the quality of products is a secondary or tertiary priority. If profits can be maximized by making inferior products and promoting them effectively, then that’s what companies will do.
In contrast, when the current feudalistic socio-economic paradigm is discontinued and replaced with a symbiotic, peer-based paradigm, true competition over the quality of products and services will truly drive innovation, hand in hand with cooperation. The best idea, design or product will survive, not the product with the most successful advertising backed by the most ruthless business practices. Pride of workmanship, actual rather than manufactured needs, and the quality of life of self and community will replace profit motive as the central driving force and motivation.
Fortunately we have many current real-world examples of products designed, developed, and distributed under a paradigm very like the democratic economy that will replace the current feudalistic one. One powerful living example is the Open Source movement in the field of computer software.
We’re all familiar with the operating systems Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X, as well as apps like Microsoft Word, Photoshop, QuickBooks and the plethora of other commercial software available for a price. When you buy a new computer, you get the hardware, an operating system, and a few minimal apps. You have to pay extra for a word processor, spreadsheet; a photo, video or audio editor, or any other app that you want or need. Some software houses are now moving to a subscription model, in which you have to keep paying them every month, or else the program will not only stop working, it will lock your own files and hold them for ransom until you pay. Imagine if your car or refrigerator were to stop working and lock you out unless you paid the manufacturer a fee every month! Yet people accept this with software.
Software developers at Apple, Microsoft and other competing companies are forbidden to share information. The companies are run hierarchically under strict control from the top down. The “business needs” of the company dictate development, even at the expense of the quality or even reliability. In fact, if the product is buggy, companies can make money from technical support. Contrast this reality with that of Open Source. Software development easily accommodates the open peer-based collaborative/competitive paradigm, since participants can work, share and interact from anywhere in the world and work using tools freely available. No industrial infrastructure is needed.
In the Open Source community of developers, there are no commercial enterprises, no profit, no corporations. Software designers and developers from around the world freely cooperate and compete to produce operating systems and apps that are the equal, and sometimes superior to their commercial counterparts. These products are legally available to everybody for free. Motivation is driven by pride of workmanship, the joy of collaborating and competing to create the best products possible and to equal or surpass their commercial equivalents. Their success is easily verifiable.
The main Open Source operating system is called Linux. There are many competing versions of Linux that compete purely on how happy users are with the products, i.e. their quality. You can look them up and download them at will at distrowatch.com if you want. There’s no advertising. Each “flavor” has a factual description of what it does and who its target audience is. There are versions meant for everybody, and specialized versions for artists, scientists, businesses of any size, automation, forensics, schools and universities, software development, gaming, for believers of just about every religion and more.
Windows, OS X, and Linux all do pretty much the same things. They give you an environment in which to run your apps. All three have a desktop with icons to click to run apps via a mouse and keyboard. Most people have a preference, and people can get very emotional over their operating systems. Each one has its quirks, advantages and disadvantages.
When you buy a computer installed with Windows or OS X, or if you build one and install the operating system yourself, you have a computer with an operating system and few useful apps. You have to pay for each app that you want or need, beyond the included browser, notepad, and media player. The cost of commercial apps can dwarf the cost of the computer.
When you install almost any version of Linux on a computer, you have a computer with an operating system as well as an office suite, video editor, browser, web page editor, and many other products, installed along with the operating system. If you want apps that aren’t installed by default, you can easily install them for free. The most successful “flavors” of Linux are compatible with the vast majority of PC and Mac hardware. In most cases, the same hardware runs faster and more reliably on Linux than on Windows or Mac.
When a “flavor” of Linux is buggy, flawed, or unreliable, then either its developers improve it, or it will fade away. When Microsoft had major problems with Windows Millennium, Windows Vista, and Windows 8 and 8.1, rather than resolve the flaws, the company marketed the products full steam ahead. Their dominance in the market kept them from losing dominance or profitability. In the case of Vista, Microsoft went so far as to inform PC manufacturers that they’d have to design their hardware to be compatible with Windows Vista. They had no reinforcement or incentive to fix Vista, so they foisted it upon the world until the next version came out.
Apple has also had multiple fiascoes, with results similar to those of Microsoft. El Capitan caused many users’ Macs to lose WiFi compatibility. Their iMovie video editor was a quite serviceable video editor until they sabotaged it by removing the timeline, which made it unusable for serious video editing. There was also the iOS upgrade that slowed iPhones down so much that customers were forced to buy new iPhones.
Windows out of the box is not compatible with most hardware. You need special files called drivers for it to work with your sound and video card, motherboard, monitor and all of your hardware. If you buy your computer from major company, they’ve taken care of that for you so you won’t notice any problem. If, however, you build your own computer, have to replace a crashed hard drive or malware-damaged boot partition and don’t have a Restore disk or image available, then after you buy Windows and install it, you’ll have to identify every part of your hardware and go look for drivers online, a lengthy process fraught with frustration.
Macintosh doesn’t have that problem, since Apple makes both the hardware and operating system. Everything is compatible by design, though only with Apple hardware.
The best Linux versions are compatible with most PC and Mac hardware. They automatically detect the hardware and install drivers automatically. You can download Linux and burn it to a DVD, then boot your PC from it and see if it’s compatible. If it isn’t, nothing is compromised on your computer. Just take the DVD out of the drive, reboot it, and your Windows or OS X is still there.
The source code that programmers write is off limits to the public for Apple and Microsoft (and other commercial) products. Open Source products explicitly require that the source code be freely accessible to all.
The Open Source movement and community produce more than just operating systems. Just about every software program available commercially for a price has a free Open Source counterpart that does the same things as well or better. Most Open Source apps are compatible with their leading commercial equivalents so files can be shared.
In terms of security, Windows is by far the weakest of the three operating systems. There are literally tens of thousands of viruses and other malware targeting Windows. Mac and Linux each have around 40 viruses in contrast. Linux is somewhat more secure by design than Mac.
Linux can routinely be downloaded and burned to a DVD or Flash drive which is bootable on any compatible computer. This lets you test compatibility with your hardware but is also useful if you need to use your computer right now when your hard drive has crashed or you got hit with serious malware. Windows and OS X can also be installed on a bootable Flash drive, though not a bootable DVD that can be used for anything but installation; but the process is more challenging. In the case of Windows, you will probably have to buy a license or go through a bureaucratic process to transfer a license from another computer.
If you haven’t heard of Linux or Open Source, it’s because there is no advertising, no marketing. At first Linux was mainly for computer enthusiasts and professionals so it got a reputation of being hard to use; but it’s evolved into a product every bit as user-friendly as its commercial competitors. It spreads by word of mouth. It is a slower process. That does not reflect its utility or user friendliness. It’s widely in use in schools, universities, the military, enterprises, government agencies and more. Your Android phone is running a Linux version.
Both OS X and Windows do have corporate technical support if you need it, though it often comes at a price. Linux has no corporate technical support; but it does have a global online support system of savvy people, some of whom are happy to advise and assist for free.
The True Nature of Competition under the Modern Feudal Paradigm:
Proponents of the dominant modern feudal socio-economic paradigm like to say that it stimulates competition, which in turn stimulates innovation which leads to higher quality of life with better products. But that’s more illusion than reality. Here’s why:
The main driving motives are profits, market share and stock prices. Innovation, product or service quality, and progress only tangentially drive decisions or policies, if at all. The behavior that’s reinforced is to reduce costs (including employee salary and benefits, as well the quality of materials used in manufacturing) and raise prices as much as possible. To accomplish this, salaries are depressed, the materials used are not the best but the cheapest, and emphasis is on marketing and advertising rather than on goods and services themselves. The real competition between companies is actually between marketing and advertising departments, not research and development teams. The company that successfully markets an inferior product will out-sell and out-earn one that does a poor job of marketing a superior product.
It gets worse. A company that makes a durable, upgradeable, easily serviceable product will not do as well as a company that makes an inferior product that doesn’t last long, can’t be serviced or upgraded, and therefore has to be replaced often. It’s called built-in obsolescence. It’s a choice that companies make because the behavior is reinforced. Make an inferior product with impressive packaging and presentation, hype it with skillful advertising, and convince people that they just have to have this month’s model anyway, and you will have a perpetual, self-renewing income stream. From the point of view of maximizing products, ensuring that products are likely to break just past expiration of the warranty further bolsters profitability.
Another tactic used by some manufacturers, most notably software houses, is the “subscription model.” Originally, for example, when you bought Microsoft Office, you could use it as long as you wanted. You only had to pay for an upgrade if at some point it stopped working, you changed operating system to one incompatible with the app, or you decided you wanted the latest functionality. In recent years, however, we see that Microsoft Office 365 doesn’t work that way. You can’t pay once for it and keep using it. You have to pay every month. If you don’t not only will it stop running, but it will lock up your own files that you created in Office and hold them hostage until you pay. This behavior is strongly reinforced in this socio-economic paradigm. Imagine if one day we have to keep paying our car dealership every month to keep our car running and if we don’t, it will lock us in and not release us until we pay. Would we tolerate that? Now we wouldn’t; but people could tolerate it in then end if it happens little by little.
All kinds of sleight-of hand are used in the “marketplace” to boost profits. Most of them are legal in a society that believes the paradigm is sacrosanct. Car makers spend a lot of money to make their car doors sound solid when they close – not be solid but sound solid. Restaurants display mouth-watering pictures of their wares that bear little resemblance to what comes on the plate. When telecom companies realized that more and more people hated their two-year contracts, they repackaged their offerings as “contract-free” while the reality changed little or none. Either way you end up paying about the same and either way, if you opt out earlier than a certain date, you owe them a big chunk of money. Non-Linux operating systems come pre-installed with useless demo versions of apps which makes them look more attractive.
Another example of companies sabotaging their own products began when Apple released their iPhones with batteries that can’t be replaced without destroying the phone. When your battery won’t hold a charge any more, you can’t buy a new battery on Amazon and put it in. Unless you’re a techie yourself, you have to either pay a techie a lot of money to replace the battery, or you have to buy a new iPhone. There is absolutely no technical reason or advantage to this. It’s as simple as Apple wants you to have to buy a new $700 phone when the battery dies, instead of a $40 battery. The ploy has since metastasized throughout the cellular industry. Good luck finding a current phone with a replaceable battery! Add that to the upgrade to iOS that slowed the devices down, and Apple cleans up at our expense. Advertising and marketing aren’t enough to maximize profits and stock prices. Forcing customers to frequently have to buy new products boosts the bottom line.
Every large corporation has a small army of top-notch attorneys who know exactly what they can get away with under the letter of the law. Loopholes abound, since corporate lobbyists directly influence lawmakers to make sure that they do – and every loophole is fully exploited.
The marketing and advertising budgets of most corporations are almost always bigger than the research and development budgets. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, are notorious for spending vastly more on marketing than on research and development, often profiting thousands of percentages on products they never even developed, by cornering the “rights” to the patents. They often profit dramatically without having created anything whatsoever of value. Drug prices have gotten so extreme that diabetics routinely risk their lives by rationing their insulin when they can’t afford the full amount that they need.
Of course, the companies don’t really pay the costs of advertising and marketing. That cost is borne by the customer. A large part of the prices of things is to cover advertising, the obnoxious visual and auditory pollution that’s always in our faces, mailboxes, screens and everywhere we look. We pay for that. The reason is that under the dominant paradigm, generous marketing and advertising spending is linked to higher profits and is thus strongly reinforced.
Behind the scenes, the typical employee is paid sub or barely living wages while the CEO of the same company makes in an hour or a day what the median employee makes in a year.
If true competition over best design and implementation were to occur in a free, democratic socio-economic paradigm, the inferior goods and services that now predominate would quickly fail and disappear.
Space exploration is a field, which has traditionally been free of the shackles of profit motive, since it’s been run by governments on behalf of their people. The technology developed to meet those challenges has led to many innovations that have benefited humanity. In spite of the fierce Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, his quote “One small step for man, one giant step for mankind” was an acknowledgement that space belongs to all of humanity along with any other sentient life that may exist.
Sadly, we now see the erosion of this ethic. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, two of the modern feudal lords who get richer by the moment while the rest of us get poorer, are working to privatize space exploration. They are offering trips to space for a fee that only a billionaire can afford, are already taking over the ferrying of astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and talking about colonizing Mars.
This absolutely must be prevented at all cost. The privatization of space would most certainly lead to billionaires and their corporations laying claim to Mars and any other celestial bodies that they reach, turning space into the exclusive province of the modern feudal lords while the rest of us will be stranded on the Earth, which is increasingly depleted, polluted and rapidly moving towards being uninhabitable. In the event that climate catastrophe or other calamity make earth not a good place to be, the feudal lords and their vassals will take refuge in space and other worlds, leaving the rest of us, the modern peasants and serfs, to scrabble for survival on Earth, serving as their labor force and consumers of their goods and services. This can never be allowed to happen. This is yet one more reason why the modern feudalistic socio-economic paradigm will have to be utterly scrapped if we are to have any chance at a truly democratic, empowered society of thriving, empowered individuals.
The paradigm strongly reinforces behaviors that lead to accumulation of wealth and power. Those who excel at those behaviors become the functional modern feudal lords of our societies. In order to achieve that kind of position, an individual must have a passion for, and dedication to. gaining wealth and power over others, similar to that of a religious zealot and similar also to the focus and single-mindedness of an addict. In fact, the dominant paradigm guarantees that the modern feudal lords are, indeed, addicts to wealth, opulence, privilege and power over others. Yet, instead of diagnosing their addiction and encouraging them to get treatment, our societies hold them up as shining success stories to be emulated as role models, thus setting in stone a fatally dysfunctional socio-economic dynamic. Imagine a society that lionizes whoever can drink the most alcohol and remain standing. Alcoholism would predominate. We will do best of we cease enabling these people’s addiction and confront them with the reality while offering them rehabilitation firmly but compassionately. Medicine is another field that is distorted and inhibited by the profit-motive of the dominant paradigm. Because the paradigm imposes compulsory profit motive upon every person, group, and endeavor just to survive, we see both research and clinical medicine driven first and foremost by “market forces” and profitability. The good of patients is at best a secondary, tertiary or even lower-level consideration.
The purpose of medicine is to keep us healthy and to heal us when we’re sick or injured. Doctors take an oath to “do no harm.” Yet medical schools, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, doctor’s offices and every other entity involved in medicine are businesses. Profits, stock prices, market share, and competitive advantage are the driving criteria.
The dominant paradigm operates on “supply and demand.” When demand is high, prices can be raised to the maximum that the market will bear. People’s health is naturally important to them. This creates a built-in demand. When you’re injured or sick, getting treatment isn’t “discretionary.” It’s vital. In the dominant paradigm, healthcare providers at every level are reinforced to raise their prices into the stratosphere, because they know that enough people will sell their homes, go into debt, and go to any lengths to pay just about any price they decide to charge. They don’t care about those who have no way to pay and can’t afford insurance. Prices are out of all proportion to production costs because they can get away with it. This is the utterly inevitable result of the conditions and reinforcers generated by the socio-economic paradigm. It can no more be regulated and tweaked into serving the good of all of the people, than a Bengal tiger can become a vegetarian or a deer can become a carnivore.
This applies to “alternative” medicine as well as mainstream medicine. All practitioners and providers are under the same constant pressure to come up with money to pay for literally everything, including just permission to occupy space.
The same is true for dentistry, veterinary medicine, legal professions, psychology and psychiatry, real estate, anything to do with transportation, and higher education in countries laboring under this paradigm. This is exacerbated by the fact that a freshly-licensed doctor, dentist or lawyer is arriving at the starting gate saddled with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of student loan debt, after being forced to work for free during at least part of their internship in many cases. They can’t afford to be affordable.
Some doctors in the United States have even gone so far as to charge patients a monthly fee, just to keep them as patients, over and above what they charge for actual medical services. These so-called “concierge” doctors charge hundreds of dollars a month just to keep you as a patient. This predatory, callous, heartless practice is perfectly legal and in alignment with the structure and principles of the operating socio-economic paradigm.
The out-of-reach cost of medical care has spawned parasitic insurance industries that take advantage of the situation. Unless you are one of the feudal lords, your only hope of being able to afford more than the most trivial medical care is to pay even more money for insurance. Insurance companies are businesses. Their prime imperatives are profit, stock price, market share, and business arrangements that maximize these. They are reinforced, incentivized to raise premiums and deductibles as high as they can get away with and pay out as little as possible. These companies have employees whose job it is to either deny claims by default, putting the burden on the patient to challenge the denial, or to find any viable legalistic way to justify denying claims. This parasitic entity further drives prices up. The clear trend over time is towards higher and higher costs to patients who receive less and less coverage for their trouble. It is an inseparable, fundamental feature of the paradigm. To compound the damage, hospitals take advantage of claims that insurance companies do pay, by charging extreme prices such as $8 for a box of tissues, $10 for a medicine cup, and $50 for a pair of gloves. Almost all of the profits from these practices are funneled into the hands of the billionaire feudal lords at the top of the wealth-and-power pyramid.
In contrast to the United States’ predatory healthcare system, much-maligned Cuba, which has had to make do with scant resources due to a decades-long U.S. embargo against the country, is acknowledged as having one of the best healthcare delivery systems in the world. Cuba does much with little. The United States does little with much. Cuba is no Utopia. It has its problems. Yet it’s important to learn from what works and what doesn’t work, regardless of where or when. The strange vendetta that has driven the United States’ ongoing harassment of Cuba has nothing to do with alleged human rights violations, the likes of which can also be found in the United States as well. It has everything to do with the fact that the dominant socio-economic paradigm, like a cancer or invasive species, does not tolerate or live in peace with any paradigm contrary to itself. Governments have been overthrown, people tortured and murdered, and whole populations displaced and decimated in order to protect corporate economic interests or open up new markets for exploitation.
Some believe that the dominant paradigm stimulates innovation which improves the lives of the people. Yet the net effect of the paradigm is actually to suppress and distort scientific research and development. Here’s how:
What’s reinforced is to maximize profits, stock prices, and market share. When “private” companies dominate research, they are strongly reinforced to pursue only research that looks likely to generate profits, the bigger the better, the sooner the better. Anything that doesn’t seem likely to do so will never be given the go-ahead. In fact, any research that looks like it might threaten a company’s profits will most certainly be suppressed. We always make choices about which lines of inquiry to follow. Countless lines of inquiry that could vastly expand our knowledge and understanding of the world and spin off unforeseen technologies to benefit us, either languish for lack of funds or are actively suppressed. If a technology is more profitable than a competing technology, then it will survive and the other perish, even if the other one was superior to the profitable one in every way.
Under this paradigm, there is an inexorable trend for the “private” (corporate) sector to steadily gain power and for representative government to cede that power to the private sector. There is always a relentless push to “privatize” literally everything possible, thus taking more and more resources and processes out of the hands of those responsible to the people and into the hands of those responsible to only the modern feudal lords, who answer to literally no one.
Another field in which millions of people have suffered as the direct result of the paradigm is energy and transportation. Since the ‘50’s and before, there are a plethora of energy and locomotive technologies available that are renewable, sustainable, non-polluting, and more efficient than fossil-fuel internal combustion engines. At present there are more such technologies than ever. Yet we are still globally locked into dependence on fossil fuels. This is the direct result of systematic, and successful, campaigns and manipulations on the part of petroleum, automotive and related corporations to stifle and suppress the mainstreaming of other technologies. Petroleum companies have known for generations that fossil fuel use globally will lead eventually to ecological collapse and a possible mass extinction; yet the feudal lords at their helm are so addicted to their accumulation of wealth and power that they chose that over long-term survival. They are no different from experimental rats who have electrodes implanted in the pleasure centers of their brains and activated by pressing a lever. The rats will keep pressing the lever, to the exclusion of eating, sleeping, or drinking, to the point of death. Addictions die hard.
At present, power generation is almost exclusively done in massive facilities controlled and operated by mega-corporations. This gives them a truly feudalistic degree of control over access to electricity and provides an endless “revenue stream” to ultimately further enrich the billionaires at the helm. Our degree of dependence on fossil fuels gives large producers, both corporations and countries, a huge degree of control over most of the world. There is no check or balance, no recourse, no way to hold them accountable. The modern feudal paradigm sets this pattern up to be inevitable and set in stone.
A grid based on huge centralized generation facilities is extremely vulnerable to a whole range of things that can go wrong, such as natural disasters, malfunctions, terrorist attacks, sabotage, and warfare. Anything that shuts down a few major generators can paralyze millions of people’s ability to function. Such a setup is inefficient, disruptive, and unstable.
A grid based on a distributed network of diverse small to mid-scale power sources would be much more robust. A coordinated national and regional system of home, production facility, farm, neighborhood, town and county windmills, solar panels, waterwheels (preferable to dams), geothermal, mechano-chemical and other generators will be far more robust, fault-tolerant, and far less vulnerable than the current model. A beneficial side-effect will be that we ourselves will learn, work together, and become empowered to maintain and be deciders for the grid, which we who depend on it will control and operate. This will contribute to a sense of empowerment, engagement and community connection. It will help counteract the current degree of alienation and lack of connection predominant in “every person is an island” culture that most of us live in, as well as the alienation between each of us and the sources of the electricity, food, and other goods and services upon which we depend. Naturally there will need to be changes to how the grid processes the energy generated, which will present technical challenges, all of which are resolvable. We can realistically expect to become almost entirely free from the need for gargantuan centralized facilities.
Such a social and technical environment will encourage and reinforce innovation. Inventors with novel energy generation technologies will be able to make their contribution and see their inventions prove themselves in the real world. They won’t have to worry about finding a venture capitalist willing to fund their invention or a company willing to buy it, possibly only to then bury it.
The human footprint will also fall a lot less heavily across the face of the earth and the environment in the new paradigm. The current paradigm strongly reinforces making money, period. There is no reinforcement, no incentive, for research and development that might lead to innovations that would hurt profits even as it benefits the people. There is no reinforcement for operating in ways that don’t pollute, create waste, deplete resources, or lead to a mass extinction. Unfortunately, making a profit is almost always directly incompatible with game-changing innovation, empowerment of employees and consumers, and environmental sustainability.
There are plenty of examples of catastrophes that have resulted from practices typical in multiple industries. Massive oil spills. Nuclear meltdowns and fallout. Preventable power outages followed by crippling price spikes during unforeseen weather. Birth defects. Cancer clusters. Global warming. With a distributed, diverse community-based, collaboratively operated power grid, these inhibitions on progress will subside.
The same principle can be applied to agriculture and animal husbandry. In place of the gigantic factory-farms run by mega-corporations that is increasingly the norm in most of the world, shifting the approach to food generation to diverse, widely distributed small-scale production at the individual home, neighborhood, factory, building, school, and park level will bring about increased abundance and quality of food while actively fostering greater community connections among neighbors and coworkers and increasing people’s sense of empowerment of people to new record levels. We will shift from large tracts of land devoted to single crops, to smaller-scale plots cultivated by permaculture in which multiple crops are planted and interspersed in a way that creates small symbiotic ecosystems. The yield in greater, higher quality and more diverse, and the quality of the soil is maintained. Most fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides can be eliminated or greatly reduced. This approach is far more efficient and less damaging than mega-farms run by mega agribusiness corporations, but it is inherently incompatible with their business model. There’s no way to make that approach profitable.
If you’re wondering how people will have time in their busy lives to participate in community gardening and maintaining their little corner of the grid, remember that with the end of the current socio-economic paradigm, the endless escalation of forced overconsumption and overproduction will cease. Supply of goods and services will adapt to supply real, authentic needs, not artificially-induced “needs” conditioned, programmed and drummed into us. Quality and durability of goods and services will go way up, so they’ll last longer and be easily serviced and upgraded. Therefore, the demands of the workplace will dramatically scale down. We can realistically look forward to societies where all members enjoy a superior quality of life in every way, where the typical work week is twenty or thirty hours. People will have a lot more free time for productive and fulfilling pursuits.
Another advantage of distributed small-scale power generation, food and other production is the magnitude of resources needed to get it up and running. In the time it takes to build a big dam, nuclear or fossil fuel generator, millions of small-scale installations can be built and brought on line, with far less negative impact on the environment and far fewer resources expended.
It is long past time to shut down this current dominant socio-economic paradigm, which is showing us every day, for a long time, that it is not viable. It is long past time to retire it and replace it with a well-thought-out paradigm that builds up and reinforces healthy, constructive interdependence and collaboration while empowering each of us and all of us together, a paradigm based on an understanding of what brings out the best in us and what brings out the worst in us. Our socio-economic paradigms are not forces of nature or laws of physics. For better and for worse, we create them. We maintain them and perpetuate them. It’s time for use to fully realize that we also have the power to change and replace them when we see the need to do so.