Three points:
1. according to Sanskrit Yugas written thousands of years ago predicted accurately the systemic collapse we are experiencing now. We are experiencing the tail end of the Ascending Kali Yuga and that along with the preceding Descending part it has been 12,000 years of erosion of human values of cooperation and the common good, replaced by greed, money as the top value, rising divisiveness. The official end of the latest Kali Yuga is 2025, but there is a cusp of buffer period of 300 years when the next Yuga takes place and people return to sanity and community again. I take solace in knowing this and use it as cognitive map to understand what is happening in a larger human context.
2. We are in a tipping point of about 180 years or so where no one knows definitively what is next. And there is rampant fear. There are those that look at fear and look towards future solutions. A good book with this future in mind is Factfulness - things are better than we think they are. Kiva - a nonprofit micro-lending program devoted to people who are in business or are starting a business to get small loans to connect to a world wise market place. They are de-facto rejected for small loans by banks in the poorest of countries and communities world wide.
The two responses are forward and backward. Those looking backward look to the past and the mythic past of the simplicity of life. Some leaders will present solutions that seem to answer fears with simplicity of the old ways that are currently impossible to fulfill based on a complex changed world. These people are a mix of highly educated and poorly educated with diminished reasoning who desire simplicity. These are the backward or hindsight group and they are vulnerable to autocratic dictatorial leaders who promise what they cannot deliverer.
3. Capitalism and technology are no longer monitored by government and are out of control. They are moving so fast that they are breaking face-to-face communities into tribes via alternate realities flimsy constructs on the internet. Many of the rich have lost their perspective regarding the functionality of the entire economy and so income inequality, lack of housing and the divide and conquer that began in the early 1980s of making most Americans into serfs and slaves to the capitalistic elite.
Given this I feel optimistic in face of these seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Perhaps a article is something I will write about this and explain why I feel so optomistic.
