Future Culture - alternativethinking

WhatHope For My Species ?

Iam very interested in lateral thinking and looking at things fromalternative angles and from outside. When I look at modern lifeit looks crazy .. people live like battery farmed human beings.

We call ourselves civilised , but 1000 years time will we be living the way we live now ?
IN little boxes not talking to people in the next little box ?
Maybe we are 20 % civilised we still have a long way to go

Already capitalism is changing from the standard of pricing something 10 % above what the retailer paid to the internet auction style of paying the maximum price that they are prepared to pay for something.Will we get away from straight line thinking and "dangerous" assumptions ?

All Problems are due to cultureAll my experience teaches me that most of societies ills, starvation, crime, corruption are due to culture. It's no use throwing money at a problem, if you can change the culture you can fix the problem.

- If you can get people to save food in the rich years, they won't starve in the poor ones.
- If people believe in obeying the law then the crime rates is low

(It seems to me in Contemporary British society there are well adjusted people who are willing to get on and respect other people, but at the same time there are disruptors who behave in a different way; they feel agrieved, have fun at other people expence they take more than their fair share etc. So much resources is used up in security measures and policing the disruptive people) (see the BBC2 TV Prog "The Experiment")

Maybe in the future there will be NO RETIREMENT and NO COMMUTING, we can design them out of our culture

Media : people areso passive in a world of information overload and fed bythoroughly professional yet unprofessional media
- professionalin technique
- unprofessional- in perpective and proportion - Self obsessed and London - centric , 10anonymous people die every day in car accidents , which surely wecan do something about , but this is not reported . One blondwoman in the London media circuit dies and the coverage indicatesit's the end of the world ... that newsreader or Princess Diana

Some FactsThese are the known drug-related deaths in the UK, 1990: tobacco, 110,000; alcohol, 30,000; volatile substances, 112; morphine, 91; methadone, 84; heroin, 62; barbiturate type, 7; anti-depressants, 4; cocaine, 4; pethidine, 3; MDMA (Ecstasy), 3; amphetamine type, 2; hallucinogens, 0; LSD, 0; psylocibin, 0; cannabis, 0.
source: The Observer 6 August 2000

Marketing - the tool of the Devil (Bill Hicks - American comedian)

As a child I saw that in the music sales charts - crap records make it to the top whilst good records are often locked out.
Sales do not reflect qualityThe marketing machine pushes the latest trashy novels. Whilst we are ignorant of the classic of literature.

Marketing gives us a distorted picure of reality; instead of the cream rising to the top "the crap rises to the top"
- OK marketing does sometimes bring some things of real value to our attention.

Alternativeviewpoints -linkBono

Unemployment is good,because it's the ultimate, 100% leisure time..like being retiredthe real problem is we don't know what to do with our leisuretime.

Famine Appeal for the rich - the developingworld should hold a famine appeal for the developed world,because it's eating itself to death by
• eating too much
• eating the wrong kind of food..sugar, alcohol, fat
• not eating a balance of vitamins..magnesium ..zinc etc
As a result food prices in the third world would drop because ofdecreased demand in the west.

Reading : There are some interesting books that also question the fundamentals of the way we live

Henry David Thoreau was saying that conventional society was crazy even 150 years ago in his book Walden (full analysis)
He is supposed to have got much of his ideas from Utopia by Thomas More written in 1516, which says Capitalist society is wrong "Get rid of Money, Property and Pride and we'll solve most of the world's problems straight away"
See My Review of Utopia, My detailed analysis of Utopia
The interesting thing is that, More advocates a completely communist society wheras Thoreau hates capitalism also, but advocates individualism saying cooperation never works.
Next I need to read through 1000 pages of The Republic by Plato 421 B.C. where both the above took many of their ideas from

Opinions :

If we can get people to : be honest, control capitalism so that things people are selling don't swamp things of real quality, so we get people to read classic books, not to blindly follow tradition, use logic, not be afraid to think different

Then we can move to a better culture and therefore better world

LINKS :

some links : One World Book Project
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&group=alt.peace
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&group=alt.society.futures
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&group=alt.history.future

U.S. Utopian Society: language, media, way of life

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