> The rights we assume we have, to personal property, a job, a private > identity, education, healthcare, pensions, etc, are likely to be wiped > away. > > In many ways the Western way of life our governments have indulged us in > has been unsustainable all along and now we are waking up from our > comfortable sleep to realise the nightmare our lives really are. >
Simon, I can't fully agree with your assessment, as the reasons for which a job, education, healthcare, and pension WILL not be sustained are very different from the reasons private identity and personal property CANNOT be sustained. In the former case, this is specifically due to corporate greed siphoning capital ever upwards. If there's one thing we're capable of as a species, it's ensuring that everyone has the a complete education, optimal health, and a job. In industrial society, as more and more labor jobs go to machines, while there is not necessarily a greater need for educated workers (teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, etc), there is a greater surplus of them. In NYC, dentist techs currently make more money than most dentists in the area. As for privacy and personal property--beginning with *intellectual *property--it's the very motion of technological development that makes these concepts unsustainable. This can be thought of as evolutionary, human being now reproducing the patterns of organization that lead to the high-order multicellular organisms with technology. Evolution demands that our species fuse into a singular entity, and to do so requires the progressive abolition of secrets (both in terms of personal and intellectual). Our own bodies have multiple modalities of communication, the big ones being neurological and hormonal, and it is evident in our design that where communication breaks down is where problems arise, most notably psychosomatic illness and habitual deficiencies. I'd argue that the nightmare is precisely what we have right now, and while there is the potential for the dream to get much, much worse, our world and our species is fully capable of sustaining our current population (much as we'll need to enact a species-wide population cap), if only a great enough number of us demanded it.
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