Staring Down Dystopia: how do we create a better future

It’s not a big secret that things aren’t easy right now, the economy, the environment, and the state of geopolitics all seem like they’re teetering. Every day there’s a new story that makes you think we’re that much closer to falling into the abyss. That fear isn’t unfounded, we are living at an inflection point in our species relatively short time on this planet. This feels like the moment before we enter the Hunger Games timeline, or maybe the Brave New World one. Whatever it is, it feels dystopian. It’s critical that we stay aware of that, but we can’t wallow in it either. That accomplishes the same thing that ignoring these dangers does. It’s why I’m always on the lookout for pieces about why we can be optimistic and what we can do to create more. Vox Media just ran a series of pieces that does just this. Like the sentiment shared in those articles, I am optimistic about human’s abilities to overcome the challenges we face. Though I think there’s something missing from many of these pieces. Often times they point to technological progress and ideologies like affective altruism as what’s going to get us out of this mess. This is partly true, we will need new technology and people who are trying to do large amounts of good in society. What they don’t spend enough time looking at though is what needs to change outside of technology or the academic/tech sector bubbles where things like affective altruism are thrown around in casual conversation. Nor do they look at the past. It’s always about charging ahead and moving blindly forward. Now I’m not going to say the past was great, and we need to make it great again (obligatory fuck Donald Trump here), but I do think there are things we can learn and things we need to do so that we don’t end up right back here. (Side note here as I was writing this piece Vox actually did publish a piece of lessons we can learn from the Native Americans. I just wanted to be transparent that I was perhaps being a bit too broad with my assessment of this type of writing but I do still believe in my core argument that not enough attention is placed outside of technological solutions to these issues.)

So let’s start with the challenges ahead of us. As you’re aware, there’s a lot of shit going on. I won’t belabor it all to death, but I do want to sketch out our current dystopia to help better frame the solutions to these crises. The one looming over all our heads like an atmospheric river is climate change. We all knew it was coming, but because the effects were gradual, it was hard to understand how tangible a threat it was to the average person. Many people aren’t tapped into this kind of information or don't have access to it. They heard the talking points but they didn’t feel it. That was until the past few years. The 2020s have seen the first real seasons of climate change. Whether it’s fire season on the west coast, flash freezes in Texas, or temperature whiplashes on the east coast, we see and definitely feel the change now. The second crisis is wealth insecurity for millions if not billions of people. A large population of the planet has always faced insecurity but the difference between them and those at the top has never been greater. We have more than enough resources and calories for everyone, yet those resources are being hoarded by a select few. The zero-sum game of late-stage capitalism has created a class of people with unfathomable wealth, and they’ll do anything to preserve it. The stock market, the judiciary, and other institutions have become their tools for wealth and power accumulation. All the while the rest of us struggle to live our lives in the world they’ve built. The third danger is a loss of humanity which may be the most abstract but also might be the most dangerous. Social media is fragmenting society and somewhat paradoxically causing us to lose our connection to one another. The social cohesion and connectedness that got us here as a species is slowly being eroded. We can barely look each other in the eye let alone work together to solve a crisis like climate change. America is as polarized as it’s been since the civil war, and right-wing autocracy is on the rise across the globe. People are obsessed with their own self-interest. They’ve forgotten what it means to be part of a community. They’ve forgotten what it means to be human. These aren’t the only three crises we face but I think these are the three that are the main ingredients for dystopia.

An alternative recipe begins with a culture that never got a chance to have a say in the modern world, the Native Americans. First off I want to acknowledge that Native Americans were not a monolith. They had vastly different languages and cultures that spanned all of North and South America. With that being said though, there were common elements that can be found across these cultures. One such commonality was how they interacted with the environment. To them, nature wasn’t something that needed to be conquered or tamed. They worked with it so that both their culture and it thrived. One of the reasons we can’t say for certain how many Native Americans there were before Columbus’s arrival (obligatory fuck Columbus), is that many of these cultures had such low environmental footprints that there could be settlements we have no idea existed. These settlements didn’t scar the landscape like ours do, they were symbiotic to it. For them, it was about harmony with nature because they understood that they were part of nature. For us to survive climate change we’re going to have to do the same thing. We’re going to have to work with the environment. We’ll need to leverage our technology to be able to work with the new extreme weather. We’ll need to find ways to naturally harness energy so that we stop contributing greenhouse gasses. We’ll need to work with the land to create sustainable homes and ways of living that can support a population of 10 billion people. We’ll need to do all of this without killing the planet. The only way to do that is if we learn from those who came before and understand that our fate is intertwined with that of this ecosystem. 

Moving from one complex system to the next, the global economy is a complicated beast. No one solution will unwind the “market” and its nebulous rules that have governed our societies for centuries. I’m not an economist and can’t speak to all of the policies that we’d need to enact to make things better for the majority of people. I’d be hard-pressed though not to draw from the models that seem to have created the most “fairness” in this giant game of Monopoly.  These are of course the social democracies of Scandinavia. What they’ve done is make the intentional decision to create an economy that is more democratic in nature where they want the average life to be a decent one. They still have wealthy people but it’s not like those people have thousands of times the wealth of the poorest people. People have chosen to invest in the communal good rather than the corporate good. It’s not a zero-sum game, it’s understood that what’s good for my neighbor is also good for me. This is why despite paying higher taxes and having less disposable income than their counterparts in other “Western Nations”, these countries routinely score higher among the world’s happiest countries, in fact, they’re the happiest. The critique that’s most often brought up is that this could never work in a country the size of the US and that there are simply too many people to do something like this. It’s true that we have way more people than those countries, but our GDP is proportionally larger as well. I don’t understand how that’s not brought up every time a fiscal conservative tries to make that argument. The administration would be tough but it’s not like we don’t have a precedent for it. At one point in our history, we created a huge social net, the New Deal. The New Deal wasn’t perfect, a lot of people like Black Americans were left out of it, but the essential framework still worked. It helped pull us out of economic ruin, we’d just need to make it more equitable this time, which is easier said than done. Even in the 60s, we had social programs that were federally administered like the GI Bill and other education or housing subsidies. We also had extremely high marginal tax rates so that resources weren’t being hoarded. Like the Scandinavian economies of today, we made intentional choices that helped people get an education, find homes, and have economic security. Those decisions are what built the middle class. Once Regan and his acolytes started tearing them down, that’s when we saw the disparity rise again. If we recreated these programs with modern technology and resources, we could lift millions of people out of poverty. All it takes is a shift in idealogy where we choose the common good and the welfare of the people over the welfare of the biggest corporations and their shareholders. 

Those programs would help Americans, but what about global poverty? Well, it’s going to take a similar plan. The countries that built their empires at the expense of all these countries need to give back, just like we need to do domestically. When someone says something like that, the right instantly lose their minds because they’ve been indoctrinated in the zero-sum of philosophy. They think that if we help someone else live a better life that means that they’ll have to live a worse life. The thing is, we’re about to enter a new technological revolution. (Here I am going back on what I said about new technology, but like I said it is part of a solution.) Renewable energy is about to create more energy than we know what to do with. AI will create medicine and productivity breakthroughs. While some resources will be scarce we’ll find new ones in places like space or find alternative ways to make things. All of this is to say that if we do this right we’ll have all of the tools to create a world of abundance. Those tools are what we owe to these other countries. We can help them create abundance and better lives for their people. We should make this choice because they didn’t have one when we created abundance with their labor and resources. In the short term, it may make things more expensive for us, but that shift will force us all onto a level playing field. In the long term, it will do things like bring back domestic jobs and create economies that are more healthy and local. 

The hardest task in front of us may be finding solutions for our crisis of humanity. The environmental and inequality crises need lessons from the past, policies from the present, and technology on the horizon. While that’s a monumental task there are blueprints for what we need to do, we don’t have that for what ails our communities. The Native Americans had somewhat more harmonious relations within their own tribal units but still warred with outside groups. These social democracies are much happier because people are taken care of but they’re still not immune to the effects of social media and online radicalization. So what will it take to find our humanity? One route is that the shared disruption from these other crises will force us to work together in order to fight it. That fight very well may create a solidarity we’ve never had before. It will be the Independence Day effect. Though if Covid taught us anything this may be a long shot because of the way social media has rotted societal bonds. So somehow we need to find an antidote for that, and I’ll admit I don’t know what that is. It’d be easy to say that everyone should just do mushrooms and then we’d all have a sense of greater connection, but that’s happening. Neither is everyone dropping social media.

 A lot of times in my writing I will confidently offer my prescriptions not because I think I’m the only one with the answer but because I feel like I have something to offer that may resonate with people. Here though I’m not sure. What I do think though is that this issue starts with the kids. We need to teach kids empathy and forge humanity early on. We need to teach emotional intelligence and critical thinking. We need to create real places and spaces for the community to form. We need to find ways to break social media addiction, and break polarization. We have to start practicing the art of possibility. We made this dystopia but we can also make a utopia. I think that’s the most important thing we can pass on to the next generation, and maybe just maybe they’ll create a future that we all want to live in.