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CONTRAST OF FOUR ALTERNATIVE FUTURES IN TWELVE DIMENSIONS
CONTRAST OF FOUR ALTERNATIVE FUTURES IN TWELVE DIMENSIONS
Pages 10-22
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From page 10... ...
NATURAL ENVIRONMENT Superindustrial: Rapid energy growth can provide wealth, the recycling, the cleaner industrial processes, and the improved pollution control necessary for protecting the environment. Moderate pollution is inevitable and worth the benefits of which it is a cost.
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From page 11... ...
The United States has long since exceeded the environmentally optimal range of energy use; as a result the environment must be increasingly "protected," at the cost of increased social control, large centralized government, and technocracy. SETTLEMENT PATTERNS Superindustrial: There will be an increasing movement to urban and suburban as opposed to rural areas; urban sprawls will grow as peak densities decrease in metropolitan areas.
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From page 12... ...
Plenitude: There must be a profound shift in the very conception of what work is; in a technologically advanced society, employment exists primarily for self-development and only secondarily for production itself, which can be handled with ease. The right to full and valued participation is a new fundamental political right, but the problem of "superflous" people grows more serious as society becomes more highly industrialized, substituting greater and greater energy consumption for human labor.
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From page 13... ...
Plenitude: Better education and greater material wealth are bringing a shift in emphasis from a materially extravagant society, bereft of a sense of direction, toward a materially frugal, human growth society in which realizing the fullest human potential of each person is the central project of American life. Only in the context of an inspiring sense of individual and cultural purpose can leisure be increased significantly without bad psychological and social effects.
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From page 14... ...
The "freedom" of frugality (freedom from the need to spend time earning a large income, the need to conform to a particular fashion, the need to "keep up with the Joneses," etc.) could be used to explore largely nonmaterial dimensions of human growth such as wide learning, bodily fitness and health, full human development and childrearing, personal honesty and responsibility in group relationships, and meditative and other practices for consciousness change and new "powers of mind." Small Is Beautiful: There is ultimately no resolution of our energy, environmental, and social problems as long as there is no idea of "enough" being good and "more than enough" being bad.
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From page 15... ...
In an upward direction, new covenants and management structures would provide increasing transnational coordination: a world food stockpile and distribution system, a world nuclear peace-keeping covenant, a world population covenant, an ocean management authority, multinational development boards, and multinational antitrust agreements (because multinational corporations will increase in importance)
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From page 16... ...
The resulting society could have a greater dispersion of political and economic power, a revitalized democratic process, and a new social contract for "humanistic capitalism." Multinational corporations have an important role to play in the transition, since they have a vested interest in the future wellbeing of the economy, have enormous economic power, have entree into national political institutions, and have the technical and financial resources to help in the process of learning and planning. Small Is Beautiful: If we really followed the principle of subsidiary function -- that a higher level should never do what a lower level can do and that the burden of proof always lies on those who want to deprive a lower level of its function -- then the opposition between centralizing and dispersing decision-making power would be far behind us.
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From page 17... ...
Background investigations, psychological testing, on-site personal searches, and other forms of security checks would be necessary for people who work at reactors, nuclear fuel processing plants, and other places where plutonium is stored and handled. Infiltration, mail covers, wiretapping, bugging, and other forms of covert surveillance would be necessary to keep track of terrorist groups, organized criminals, political dissidents, nuclear critics, and other groups that could be reasonably suspected of planning plutonium diversion or sabotage.
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From page 18... ...
Minimum Feasible: Industrial society is nearing a crisis point. Some of its elite are now vocally promulgating a limits-to-growth ideology, which is highly undesirable because it pushes people to accept limits to energy growth and industrial output without questioning the basic structure of modern society, so that the growth-optimizing bureaucrats may maintain their power.
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From page 19... ...
An unexpected alliance of younger social critics who have thought of themselves as radical and older critics who have thought of themselves as true conservatives is converging on a vision of society based on the most ancient values of human scale: simplicity, nonviolence, hard work, and restraint; space, sun, and trees, and beauty; human dignity and forthright means; and basic truths of human experience implicit in the teachings of the major world religions. Diversity is of value as long as it exists within this basic framework of agreement.
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From page 20... ...
Western-style industrialization in the poorer countries causes the formation of powerful elites living in small, ultramodern islands within a sea of poverty; destruction of the economic and social structure of the hinterland; mass migration into unmanageable urban slums; massive unemployment; destruction of the best features of traditional culture; debt; high dependence on, and control by, rich nations and multinational corporations; and many other problems. These problems can be avoided if the industrial nations aid the nonindustrial ones in developing an intermediate technology fitting between traditional immobility and materialistic modernization.
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From page 21... ...
The emphasis on new professional and paraprofessional roles, such as those of physicians' assistants and workers in self-help cooperatives, will require less formal training. Professional work will be judged increasingly by nonprofessional criteria: client satisfaction, social choices, and expectations defined in the political process and new and major shifts in societal values arising from outside the professions.
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From page 22... ...
1975. Plausibility of a Restricted Energy Growth Scenario.
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