I was ready to disagree vehemently with this article but I should have known that Rebecca Solnit would have a nuanced and useful take.
“Look closely, and you can see that by measures other than goods and money, we are impoverished. Even the affluent live in a world where confidence in the future, and in the society and institutions around us, is fading — and where a sense of security, social connectedness, mental and physical health, and other measures of well-being are often dismal.”
And the change in perspective:
“What if we imagined “wealth” consisting not of the money we stuff into banks or the fossil fuel-derived goods we pile up, but of joy, beauty, friendship, community, closeness to flourishing nature, to good food produced without abuse of labor? What if we were to think of wealth as security in our environments and societies, and as confidence in a viable future?”
This would be a significant change in our perspective on human nature as inherently collaborative more than competitive and will require social systems that support and reward collective effort.
Even in nature symbiosis preceded competition by billions of years. We sell ourselves short assuming that we are merely self-interested creatures. We cannot compete and self-maximize our way through this bottleneck.
The good news is that material thriving for 10 billion is a solvable problem. We are closer than we think. The real challenge is what to do with that freedom and security once we get there.
Thanks Rebecca for these insights.
