Bringing life to humanity — revision 40416

''This is chapter 3 of [[SolSeed: The Book of Life#The "SolSeed Gospel" according to Ben|Ben's portion of SolSeed: The Book of Life]].'' === Redefining our priorities === : "Clearly, the highest loyalty we should have is not to our own country or our own religion or our hometown or even to ourselves. It should be to, number two, the family of man, and number one, the planet at large. This is our home, and this is all we've got." ::: ~ Scott Carpenter, Mecury 7 astronaut, quoted at http://spacequotations.com/earth.html Imagine a world where society measures its success not by abstract economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product, but by measures of people's happiness and fulfillment, ecosystem health, and so forth. A world where you ask not what you can do for your country, but what both you ''and'' your country can do in the service of people and ecosystems everywhere. A world where technology is neither idolized nor demonized, where every technology is studied carefully to weigh its costs and benefits to all living things. If your first reaction is to point out the enormous gulf separating this vision from present-day reality, I don't blame you. Ideals like this one have to be considered as either very long-term goals, or general "north star" guides for work toward building a world that more closely approximates the ideal but never reaches it. It's also useful to ask, if most aspects of a vision like this would be appealing to most people, why does our present-day world look so different? Can we explain the persistence of grave injustice, widespread destitution, and bloody wars, given the extreme unpopularity of these things? What has been blocking us from building a better world? Here's my best shot at an answer: first, as pointed out in chapter 1, our society is obsessed with material wealth. You can see it not only in people's individual desires for financial success, but in the measurement of nations' well-being through numbers like the Gross Domestic Product and the volume of trade with other countries. Second, we're particularly focused on one form of material wealth: advanced technology. In the 1950s, many wealthy and upper-middle-class Americans insisted on buying the latest and greatest car every year, replacing still-fully-functional vehicles merely because they were "out of date." Today, thankfully, we mostly focus that obsession on much smaller gadgets like computers and smartphones. "Disruptive innovation" is the buzzword of our time, implying that you can never have too high a rate of technological progress. Third, although we set up institutions like governments and corporations to provide benefits to people, we often end up subordinating ourselves and our needs to the needs of the institutions we live in or work for. Nationalism and employee loyalty, when deeply felt, can drive a syndrome where an organization starts to behave as if the continuation of its own existence is all that matters. Some of the worst symptoms of this disease in the private sector include huge corporate layoffs and disobeying or lobbying against laws designed to help people and ecosystems, just because they would damage the organization's profitability or force a major change in its operations. The consequences of excessive nationalism can be even worse: unnecessary and destructive wars, massive-scale surveillence, indefinite imprisonment and torture of people who supposedly pose a threat to "national security."