Intro: A New Mindset and a New Story

The story we have relied on as the foundation of modern American life is starting to fray, leaving too many behind, too many questions unanswered, and too much uncertainty about our future.  Too many Americans are suffering from a persuasive futurelessness -- a sense that whatever hazy, uncertain future is coming isn’t for them -- that leads to both anger and despair.  The end of the industrial era is reaching its inevitable conclusion with the complete dehumanization of people (as labor, as an economic input) and the ultimate industrialization of meaning and value (as wealth, as an economic output) -- casting our humanity in terms of economic efficiency and growth, leaving people anxious and left out of a future they don't feel part of, and desperate for meaning.  But the mindset that is driving our culture toward catastrophe is older than this industrialization. 

When we embraced sedentary communities and began to experiment with complete agriculture (the strategy of putting as much land under cultivation as possible), we began to build surpluses that drove a population explosion we didn’t intend and could never hope to control. We accidentally invented the anxiety of not having enough.  To justify our changing demands and ameliorate our new-found anxiety, we were forced to adopt a mindset that humanity was the pinnacle, the goal of evolution and that nature was ours to exploit. The rules of the community of life no longer applied to us, and we would begin our inexorable march toward what we would eventually dub “civilization”.  Despite humanity’s entirely novel capacities for planning and story, we are still subject to the laws of ecology.  But we are the first species with the idea that those rules don't apply to us.  As we gradually separated ourselves from the community of life, we began to see nature as a collection of resources to exploit, of enemies to defeat, and forces to subdue, and we slowly became lonely.  And after generations of anxiety, loneliness, and the growth born of accidental surplus, humans began to experience crowding for the first time, and  resource conflicts arose that have steadily gotten worse over the course of the last several millennia.  As our systems have become more and more efficient and growth oriented, we have trapped ourselves in a growth-or-death straightjacket we feel we cannot escape and have slowly lost touch with the sources of wisdom and meaning we relied on for the hundreds of thousands of years prior.

Industrialization is the endpoint -- not the source -- of this mindset where we have traded meaning and progress for efficiency and growth.  No matter how productive we become, we will never work less because we have substituted accomplishment for meaning and growth for progress. Efficiency and growth have become moral goods.  Our entire concept of work and value has been redefined by an era consumed by the efficiency of wealth creation and the acceleration of technological innovation devoid of purpose or meaning.  The surpluses we discovered with agriculture introduced the pain of anxiety and worry about enoughness that has been accelerating ever since into the epidemic we now suffer.  This void and the anxiety it provokes is a form of tyranny that has left us not knowing what freedom feels like or makes possible.  But part of us remembers: the part that recoils from an economy we sense is exploitative but are nonetheless desperate to succeed in and our current conflict-centric, us-vs-them politics -- even as we find ourselves sliding neatly into our prescribed roles cheering on our hyperpolarized sides.

The most profoundly existential question we all grapple with, each in our own way: why are we here? It may seem better suited to a theological or spiritual discussion than a conversation about society and politics and economics, but as industrialization has given us a clean, easy-to-measure answer for this most fundamental question, we have lost the freedom to answer it for ourselves in human or spiritual terms -- and we must take it back so that  we can dictate to our socioeconomic systems how they work for us rather than how we work for them.  Answering this question in the “personal time” allotted to us by “the dignity of our work life” is not only insufficient but offensive.  It should be the question that animates our every breath, that gives shape to our time, and that prioritizes our effort -- not what is left over after we’ve expended our best hours creating enough wealth for someone else in order to survive. 

Freedom is the key to creativity, to imagination, to living lives of our own direction and calling.  And freedom requires a level of confidence and safety about both our present and our future that allow us a longer horizon and the ability to plan, to envision, and to play with the possibility of a world different than our own.  Reimagining our relationships to resources especially food and reexamining our definitions of meaning and progress is our path to that confidence and safety.  The necessary connection between security, certainty, and freedom is not new, merely lost.  Our public systems have freed private markets that were not designed to elevate everyone and are increasingly monopolistic engines of inequality (not security or freedom) rather than freeing the people.  Without real freedom, planning becomes a futile exercise in reinforcing our lack of agency and makes the ambition of long-term ideas and engaging with long-term challenges like our relationship to the earth seem naive or merely impossible. We must redeem ourselves with a new narrative that bridges our current efficiency-centric, economic-value based view of growth at all costs, that substitutes technological progress for human progress with real freedom, a renewed commitment to being part of the community of life rather than its enemy, and a true sense of meaning greater than our capacity to generate wealth.

Our story, the one that will carry us into the 22nd century, is one of both possibility and redemption.  A story where our base social contract ensures that all talent rises no matter where it comes from, that all possibility is realized, and that when we fall, that redemption is always one of those possibilities.  Where our country invests in all of us.  Where our policies and systems are generative.  Where we all belong to and believe in our collective striving rather than a zero-sum death match of self-centeredness.  We must reclaim our commitment to real progress and not an industrial lie that defines our progress in purely technological or economic terms.  We are community beings.  We are at our best when we are committed to each other's possibilities.  We revel in the success of our families.  The more of our neighbors we see as family, the more people for whom we can hold that same level of commitment, the stronger our communities will become.  If we are all part of a larger picture, then we must not harm others because we will be harming ourselves. We must not exploit because we will be exploiting ourselves.  We can transform our petty, anxious view of the future into a thriving excitement at what is possible, a future unleashed by generative competition and the boundless, joyous ambition of creative, free minds.  And in that transformation, we are free to answer for ourselves what our lives mean and how we choose to give them meaning, and together build a society where our economy is harnessed to drive human progress rather than our current systems that harness humanity to ‘drive economic growth.