Chapter 35: Growing Up and Living in the New Paradigm

Under the current modern feudalistic paradigm, all children not from families at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid face a potentially bleak prospect: the default denial of their right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or anything else, that will descend upon them the moment they become a legal adult. They will have to fight against that default denial for the rest of their life.

From a young age, kids must develop a survival strategy that will lead to enough income to ransom their existence every month. The older the child, the more intense the pressure. Think of this, a ten-year-old child having to make career decisions and figure out how to compete in a caustic, adversarial society where they will be automatically denied access and rights unless they can come up with a lot of money to pay for it. Survival, quality of life, and options depend upon making choices based on economics, rather than passions or dreams. If we fail to make the rent or mortgage payment, then we lose the right to even occupy space. This is an indefensible, unnecessary trauma upon each of us, which translates into immeasurable human tragedy and misery.

In a healthy society, a person develops fully, playing, socializing and absorbing knowledge as a child; individuating, experimenting, stretching their wings, and finding their stride as adolescents, and finally becoming empowered, highly engaged, fulfilled adults. Such a person would have a strong disadvantage in the dominant societies of today, in terms of economic survival.

Most academic, career and other counselors and advisors advise young people to pursue a career path with the best earning potential, not the greatest level of passion, satisfaction, or meaning for them. They would actively discourage the latter. They might exhort their clients to “face the hard cold facts” and focus on how best to make enough money to ransom their right to eat, drink, occupy space and function for the rest of their lives. That is the norm under the current feudalistic paradigm.

The damage from growing up in the current socioeconomic system is multidimensional. In families on the lower portions of the power and wealth pyramid, parents often work long hours, under unrelenting stress, for insufficient pay, with little time or energy to spend with their kids, and little money to spend on extracurricular activities or hobbies. Schools are most likely under-funded, providing an inferior education. Their children are more likely to have poor nutrition and medical care available. In many places, life is made more perilous by gangs, who incidentally are businesses, even if illegal ones, no less than are legal businesses, and operating under the same principles.

Such children are more likely than their affluent counterparts to be bullied, due to the psychology of socioeconomic stratification and the inter-group ethnic, religious and other enmities both engendered and encouraged by the paradigm itself and the feudal lords at the top.

Entering the job market as a newly-independent adult, aiming to become self-sustaining in such cultures is often traumatic. In such cultures, every person is an island in a stormy sea. If you don’t have a couch or guest room with friends or family in the meantime, then you start your job search in imminent danger of homelessness. One month without income is all it takes. You may already have student debt. Door after door closes. Employees are a dime a dozen. You have to prove to hiring managers why they should hire you instead any other out of hundreds or thousands of applicants. You are denied the right to effectively exist, unless you can convince a skeptical someone otherwise.

The psychological impact is a deep negation of one’s worth. It gets worse the longer one is unemployed. More than a very few months unemployed is treated as evidence of one’s unworthiness, often ending an applicant’s chances without ever getting an interview.

Without money, you won’t long survive, no matter how contributory you may be. Functionally and socially, rejecting you from a paying job is equivalent to declaring you unfit to live, effectively telling you to go waste away and die somewhere else, without actually taking your life. This is the pervasive reality under the paradigm, and its impact is devastating. Some hope to emulate “rags to riches” and other success stories; but for all but a very few, “financial independence” is forever in the future. Worse, the “anybody can make it” cultural myth causes people to judge themselves and each other harshly, assuming that not “making it” implies moral, mental or other deficiency, making one a “loser.”

Modern socioeconomic feudalism strongly supports and justifies the feudal lords at the top of the pyramid, while burdening, penalizing, judging and disempowering us peasants and serfs just for being in that position. We also see the damage from this in school shootings, gangs, high substance abuse, and burgeoning suicide rates among teens and young adults.

Pressure and reinforcement is to find any way to economically survive, with no consideration of whether it’s satisfying, contributes to the community, fulfilling, or even truly a necessary function.

Such environments are fertile grounds for employment and get rich quick scams to emerge. “Make six figures in your spare time, doing what you love.” Falling victim to such a scam only reinforces belief in the inevitability of being disempowered and struggling unsuccessfully, and that anything to the contrary must be a scam.

These cultures suffer from widespread alienation, disempowerment, cynicism, destructive competition, nihilism, stagnation, and exploitation. People are conditioned to focus their lives and efforts on entertainments, consumer goods, and status symbols. We’re also conditioned to believe that the status quo is natural, inevitable, the best possible world that cannot be changed. Cultural myths equate a person’s worth and respectworthiness to their position on the pyramid. Feudal lords are seen as being superior, while the rest of us are seen as inferior due to moral, mental, physical, or emotional defects.

For those who do “make it,” strong reinforcement selects for keeping it to one’s self and against sharing it or using it to benefit one’s fellows and community.

The socioeconomic paradigm is of course, only one among many factors in human development. Genetics, home and wider social environment, nutrition, and unforeseeable events, experiences and exposures all play a part, positive and/or negative. That is true under any paradigm. Yet the arbitrary stresses and pressures generated under this modern feudal paradigm, are shown to lead to radically higher levels of dysfunction in families than are see in more synergistic, non-hierarchical, symbiotic paradigms.

Post-Transition societies will be freed from such stresses and dysfunctions, and will thus will change dramatically for the better. Along the journey from birth to adulthood, children will be fully able to be children, to play and learn and grow. Adolescents will be free to develop and discover themselves and their passions, pursue them, and prepare for adulthood. They will enter adulthood empowered, highly engaged, and fulfilled while contributing to their communities. Growing people will be encouraged to play, learn, work, explore and discover their talents and passions and pursue them. The artificial line between work and play will blur, as work will no longer be a yoke and a burden to be borne in order to ransom one’s existence monthly. Work will become an extension of play. There’ll be no competition for survival or “success,” so social interactions will be far more open, honest, collaborative, cooperative and mutually beneficial than is common now.

Of course, schools will still teach math, science, language skills, history and such, but they’ll also teach effective communication, conflict resolution, collective and consensus decision-making, critical thinking and other essential soft skills.

The priorities and emphasis for educators will change in many ways. Currently, schools treat education as an assembly-line that molds students and prepares them to become disposable wage-slaves and consumers to keep the socioeconomic pyramid going. Post-Transition educators will be tasked with teaching, training, and mentoring students, supporting their development into fully-actualized and empowered adults who will naturally merge into their natural niche in the community. Survival will become more of a dance than a struggle.

There will still be classrooms, but education will be much more individualized, and not confined to classrooms. Students will be supported in pursuing chosen courses of study, which will often reach into the community, which will become much more engaged in the process.

When a student shows an aptitude and interest or passion for a field of endeavor, they will be able to attend advanced classes in universities or trade schools, learn directly from professionals in production environments, and develop at their own pace, which may be faster or slower than average, or faster in one area than another. When the student reaches adulthood, they will be far more prepared to enter their chosen field than is currently the case.

Students who change their areas of interest one or more times along the way will be supported in doing so, thus gaining valuable and broadening experience and become more rounded, balanced individuals. This is a common and natural part of human development.

Apprenticeship and mentorship models of education and training will become more prominent, thus engaging different generations with one another, leading to a more cohesive, connected, less alienated society. A person entering productive life in their chosen field will be far more prepared than is typical under the current paradigm, having both theoretical and practical experience. Under the current paradigm, a new doctor or architect has a fair amount of theoretical knowledge but little practical experience in a context where you need experience to get a job, but can’t get experience without getting a job.

Trade schools will change less, but they will be able to focus more on teaching skills and innovation, rather than on churning out human products for the labor market.

The current paradigm is fertile ground for the proliferation of predatory for-profit schools. In the new paradigm, these outfits will either reorient themselves to provide the same quality of free, open education and training as all other schools, or else they will be taken over by educators who will do so after those unwilling or unable will quickly leave in search of other pursuits.

With all artificial barriers to education gone, the prevailing level of education in the new paradigm will be much higher than at present. The level of skill, innovation, motivation and engagement in every sector will rise dramatically, as will the quality of goods and services that are produced. Job satisfaction will reach record highs; alienation, apathy, and job stress will plummet to new lows.

In the new paradigm the compulsive runaway self-devouring cycle will end. Production of the new high standard of quality goods and services will follow actual, authentic demand. Once equilibrium is reached, the typical work-week will most likely drop to thirty or even twenty hours. Work stress will be minimal or nonexistent. Since currency will be obsolete and unnecessary, reduced work hours will not impact survival or quality of life. There will be no negative trade-off.

The shift from hierarchical to peer-based social and functional structures will also greatly enhance social and individual empowerment and productive harmony. In large organizations, peer decision-making and discussions can be divided into smaller groups interacting, or mediated electronically in ways that we’ve seen used successfully during the COVID pandemic.

A distributed interface and database along the lines of social media will be an optimal medium for interaction. Teachers, parents, students, and others will be able to interact, discuss, and make collaborative decisions. Educational methods can be discussed, developed, tested, refined, and expanded upon or abandoned depending on results, in a way parallel to the development process in the Open Source phenomenon. In fact, we will benefit greatly if we learn from the development processes used in the Open Source world.

We’re focusing on schools here since we’re talking about growing up in the new paradigm, but this same Open Source mode of operation will be a widely useful starting point in the new paradigm. Educational, industrial, social, or other ideas, designs, processes or theories that work, will grow and be expanded and amplified; those that don’t, will be re-examined and either modified or abandoned. Thus will come a sustainable course of evolution, innovation, and development in every sector of society.

The dysfunctional hierarchical social structures dominant in the current paradigm will be absent. Boards of Education will have no power to impose their ideas, ideology, or methods upon teachers and students. The voices of teachers and students will not be suppressed. Teachers will no longer be expected to take a method that doesn’t work, and force it to work or make it look like it does.

Hierarchical social structures inherently reinforce and amplify our most dysfunctional potentials and suppress our most productive, positive potentials, leading to incalculable human unhappiness, stress, abuse and stagnation and inferior products when all is said and done. The new paradigm will clear away this antiquated, unworkable paradigm and replace it with the new one, specifically designed to reinforce and amplify our most positive, life-affirming, innovative and collaborative potentials while suppressing our most dysfunctional potentials via simple lack of reinforcement.

Schools at every level will evolve into institutions that nurture, empower, equip, support, train, mentor and guide our children not just to perform their chosen role or roles in the community, but to take their place as fully actualized, empowered, engaged members of their community, able to fulfill their own lives while contributing their best to the community.

The Transition will usher in a Renaissance in every sector of society, which will dwarf the European Renaissance and last potentially indefinitely.