Welcome to my first blog post on WakeyWakey.info! This is a project that has been in my mind for a while and given our frankly perilous direction of travel right now as a species, the time seems right.
So rarely do we find intelligent, coherent, holistic analyses of our malaise and so rarely do we come across progressive, achievable visions for the future of our species. Most of the organisations and movements you’ll find listed on these pages tick both those boxes or, at the very least, contribute productively to the debate.
It’s all about joining up the dots, seeing the bigger picture and recognizing that the single biggest cause of our problems is the system. It’s too far down the rabbit hole for the vast majority to stomach but, when you think about it, there can be no other culprit. It’s the context, the straight jacket and the single biggest barrier to us collectively achieving our true potential.
The current coronavirus pandemic could well provide us with the chance to reflect on our priorities as a common humanity and change direction. We need to have that debate and soon.
Since the crash of 2007/8 we’ve seen austerity, poverty and inequality become the direct catalysts for the Arab Spring, Syria, Libya, the refugee crisis, Brexit, Trump etc etc. When money gets tight we become tribes in trenches and pull up the drawbridge. So lamentably predictable. We can never learn from history with the current way of doing things.
Ideas such as Universal Basic Income (UBI), sovereign money creation and Resource Based Economy (RBE) models offer us hints and stepping stones towards a truly better world. No longer pie-in-the-sky utopian fantasies, these ideas and others represent a common sense approach to tackling the existential threats of climate change and inequality.
Anything else and it’s just whackamoley ad infiniteum.
We will be profiling truly inspirational individuals out there who put their head above the parapet and recognise the enormity of the issues we face.
It’s the approach, the motivations of our system and the in-built, baked in the cake suicidal direction of travel that are of concern to anyone that cares to investigate. Everyone knows the profit motive will never save the planet or tackle inequality. It simply cannot. It’s an impossibility.
There is hope. In the words of the great Buckminster Fuller…
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Those words echoing the sentiments of another genius in Albert Einstein
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.”
Looking at the state of the world today as I write this, it’s clear that the intractable and frankly impossible challenges we face will not be solved by more of the same. They won’t be solved by thinking inside the same box that created the problems in the first place.
We need radical new ideas and you’ll find plenty at wakeywakey.info!
