New Frontiers of Social Change
by Jacque Fresco
It has often been observed that common crises create common bonds. While people seek advantage during the times of prosperity, shared suffering tends to draw people closer together. We have seen this behavior repeated time and time again throughout the centuries, during times of flood, famine, fire, or other natural disasters. Once the threat is resolved, however, scarcity patterns once again begin to steer people back to their behaviors of seeking individual advantage. Sensationalist motion pictures such as Independence Day depict a world united for the purpose of repelling an invasion by a hostile alien culture. Indeed, it seems that the only force that would mobilize the world in a unified direction would be one that poses a common threat, such as a colossal meteor hurling towards the earth, or some other major catastrophic event. If such an event were to occur, all border disputes would become irrelevant in the face of impending disaster. While many would call upon divine intervention for salvation, all nations would surely combine their efforts and call upon science and technology to deal with this common threat. Bankers, lawyers, businessmen, and politicians would all be bypassed. Every resource would be harnessed and mobilized, without any concern for monetary cost or profit. Under this kind of threatening condition, most people realize where the key to their survival lies. For example, during the Second World War, it was the collective mobilization of both human and material resources that lead to a successful resolution for the U.S. and its allies.
As the amount of scientific information grows, nations and people are coming to realize that even in today’s divided world there are, in fact, many common threats that transcend national boundaries. These include overpopulation, energy shortages, pollution, water shortages, economic catastrophe, the spread of uncontrollable disease and so forth. However, faced even with threats of this magnitude, which are common to all nations, the direction of human action will not be altered so long as powerful nations are able to maintain control of the limited resources available.
Although many people, publications, and multi-media presentations portray various aspects of the future and paint spectacular pictures of the developments to come in such areas as transportation, housing, and medicine, they ignore the fact that in a monetary-based economy the full benefits of these developments continue to be available to a relative few. What is not touched upon is how these new technologies of the future can be used to organize societies and economies efficiently and equitably, without the necessity of uniformity, so that everyone would benefit from them. The few think tanks devoted to brainstorming newer approaches to bring social organization up to speed with today’s technological capabilities do not deal with social change as a global systems plan.
