Heresies: Essays on the Future of Humanity - E-book - ePub

The world's inhabitants, a population of seven billion people and growing, are living on the hinge of history. Arising from a set of intuitive responses to unprecedented life-conditions - prior to and following the globalization of communications and trade - dilemmas now abound that need urgent resolution. Our prevailing attitude is to continue on the current course, doing what we are doing, or to ignore the issues, hoping they will go away.
But it is not that simple any more. The issues confronting us are dynamically complex. Orthodox problem-solving methods can actually make matters far worse. From the devastation being wreaked by climate change on the one hand and the industrial war machine on the other, to the anxiety and despair of those who simply cannot find sufficient water for their most urgent needs; and from the cancer people trafficking, to an international economy based upon compound debt; our world-system is imploding, and our species is faced with the need to approach societal design with far greater wisdom and cultural inclusion.
Tragically we are not set up for collaboration. In an age where we urgently need radical empathy and cooperation, our dominant mindset is one of competition - across all strata and sectors of society. This book by a philosopher-activist explores a few seminal ideas: critical propositions that, while heretical today, will need to be adopted and applied by successive generations as we consciously evolve the human story over the next one thousand years.