Making the Switch

In the near future, civilisation as we have known it will exist no more. Our capitalist system, with its compass permanently set to unending growth, is on the verge of giving up the ghost. The elite may hear the rumbles of discontent among the people but they view them with condescension, convinced of their own entitlement.

The time for waiting is over – too much time has already been wasted. We need to organise and identify a way out if we are to avoid living under an authoritarian, divisive, retrograde and suicidal government such as exists already in the United States, Brazil and elsewhere.

For these crises that we are living through in fact offer remarkable opportunities for us to invent a desirable future. We need to begin by questioning all of our certainties and then propose a new paradigm, even in such concrete domains as of our methods of accounting: it will be difficult to create a better world if we remain stuck in our current mindset which sees an oil slick on the ocean as beneficial because it generates GDP and growth. We also need to be more effective in the pressure that we exert on our leaders, governments and companies in order to make the switch to a new, radically different society based more on being than having, and more on human bonds than financial bonds.