Journey To The Future: A Better World Is Possible

by Guy Dauncey

God was a G.O.D.—a General Omnipresent Diaphany.

So the Creator is revealed by an essence that shines through every person, every leaf, every creature.

So who were the first pirates—the Somalis or the foreigners?

Everything they were to us—their joy, their laughter, their love, their parenting, their wisdom, their work, their nagging, their fussing, their hopes for our future—they ended right there, leaving nothing but memories.

I

craved a future that would reflect the hopes I carried in my heart, a vision that would give me something to work for, as well as being against the things that caused grief and pain.

“We know Vancouver has set a goal to become the greenest city in the world. What if we could somehow travel to that future and see what it looks like twenty years from

now, when it has actually become the greenest city? And not just the greenest. What if people had also discovered how to end poverty and homelessness? What if they had built a culture that was rich and fulfilling? We could learn how they did it, and use their knowledge to start building that future today.”

For sure, we need to say ‘NO’ to the many things that threaten us, but we also need to say ‘YES’ to a vision so positive that people will yearn for it, and spend their lives working to make it happen. If we want change, the power of our vision

must be so much stronger

than the power of o...

It’s about the way the future world is tackling the climate crisis. It’s about solutions to poverty, debt and homelessness—and a new economy that is no longer capitalist. The people I met talked to me about food, farming and our health; about transportation and street life; about community organizing and education. They also talked about protest—lots of protest, and about politics and democracy.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. – Khalil Gibran

In classical physics, a thing was always a thing. Space and time were absolutes, and matter had a comfortable solidity. And ever since the earliest days scientists have used math to unravel the secrets of the Universe. Okay? But math is digital: zero, one, two, three, four.

We use calculus to study the flow of change between the units, but calculus is still essentially digital.7 “Quantum physics developed because when you get down to the tiniest level of matter the digital approach fails. It turns out that reality is rather slippery. You can’t pin it down to a one or a two, on or off. Everything in life keeps oscillating between a digital reality and something else that can’t be pinned down. We call it a probability wave, and quantum math gives us incredible precision when we incorporate the uncertainty into the math.

“Essentially, reality isn’t digital. It’s analog. Continuous. Time doesn’t flow in bumpy discrete uni...

is a continuum, and in a continuum the space between two digits can have an infinite number of expressions. In a digital computer, a gigabyte of memory gives you a billion bytes to store your games and videos. Today’s fastest digital computer can do 5,000 qu...

“In the quantum world, we dive into the continuum where there are no points until an entity of some kind chooses to express itself as a discrete particle. The digital world emerges out of the continuum. Now imagine that you can take the space between two

digital units, containing an infinite number of possible quasi-positions, and build a computer that uses quantum math to calculate in the world of the continuum. Within every byte of digital information a quantum computer can find infinite possibilities, making it vastly faster. The trick is to pin the possibilities down to quantum bits, using the quantum properties of something fundamental like a photon. Our quantum computing is being used in the human neurome project to map the neurons of the human brain.9

The doubling has slowed to every five years, but

If we survive the climate crisis, and barring an unexpected massive meteorite strike, humans should be able to inhabit the planet for more than a billion years. After that, and counting, the Sun will grow too hot and we’ll need to migrate to a cooler planet. That’s what I mean by ‘deep.’ A billion years is a hundred thousand times longer than the history of civilization so far, and every year, our science, technology and understanding will improve. Hopefully our wisdom will too, and our relationship with nature. It’s

Stephen Hawking, who apparently said that God not only plays dice, but that he sometimes throws them where they can’t be seen.”

I’ve come to understand that despair is not a natural part of the human condition. It’s a choice that people only make when their primary choice—to be purposeful and optimistic—is taken away, torn away, or knocked out of them. As soon as people find something to believe in they generally grab it with both hands. The instinct to optimism is incredibly deep, irrationally so. Here, have an oatmeal and blackcurrant cookie.

To understand that you need to go back twenty years, when not so many people had a positive vision of the future. All the news was bad, and everything seemed to be getting worse. I’m talking the big issues now, things like climate change, financial collapse, and the collapse of ocean fishing. Most people felt powerless to make a difference. Even

There were leaders stepping up all over the place. It was like people slowly fell in love with the future. Slowly and beautifully.”

“We’re all part of a single living system, she says, from the furthest galaxies to the tiniest microbes, even the atoms and particles. At every level, the system is conscious and self-organizing, right down to the atoms and below. That’s how bacteria evolved into multi-cellular organisms, and then into humans. Within every unit, they both cooperate and compete as they juggle the pressures around them and seek to evolve to a higher level of order that gives them more freedom, more

ability to express their potential, and more cooperation

For most of human history we have lived in closely-knit villages where everyone knew each other. Even when we started building cities, the streets remained social places where people would talk, and then talk some more. It was only after 1920 that we surrendered them to traffic and some bureaucrat invented the crime of ‘jay-walking.’ But here was a future where the residents had reversed the flow of history and reclaimed their street.

public banking at the heart of all the changes he saw to be necessary. Whenever a bank creates money, he realized, the interest goes to the bank’s owners. When a bank is public, the interest

goes to the government where it can be used to pay for education and healthcare, things like that.

Father José María Arizmendi, had been searching for ways to put the church’s social doctrine into practice. He asked the question, ‘What is the Jesuit way to develop an economy?’ and that led him to the work of the 19th century British socialist Robert Owen, who pioneered the world’s first workers’ co-operatives. Father Arizmendi went on to found the world’s most successful cooperative economy, which employs some 100,000 people in 300 co-operative businesses. They have their own co-operatively owned bank, their own university and their own welfare system. Almost every worker is a member-owner and their wage differential is only 6.5 to 1, compared to as much as 1,000

Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, south of Venice, where he spent six months learning Italian and studying their cooperative economy, which has made their region the most successful in Italy. In a population of 4.5 million, two out of every three citizens belongs to a co-operative, and co-ops make up 30% of the economy. But even among the private businesses there is cooperation and self-organization that doesn’t happen elsewhere. The businesses and coops belong to various regional networking organizations, to which they pay a portion of their proceeds, and in return they get help with everything from training to product development.

Europe’s most successful local currency,

the Chiemgauer, named after the region. It’s pegged to the euro and can only be used locally. It loses two percent of its face value every three months, which gives people an incentive to use it. We use the same system with the Delta Dollars, our regional currency here in Vancouver.87 In

Margrit had calculated that in Germany, if you removed interest from the price of everyday goods and services the cost would fall by forty percent. That’s the power of interest when it compounds on itself, which it does whenever you miss a payment. That’s one reason

Basic Income Earth Network, in which people around the world were collaborating to develop the best models, in readiness for change. Canada adopted the Citizen’s Income

Entrepreneurial State, and Ha-Joon Chang, the Cambridge

23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Mariana Mazzucato persuaded him of the need for the state to play an active entrepreneurial role by investing in new ecologically sound developments, and Ha-Joon Chang persuaded him of the state’s importance in guiding and controlling trade and capital flows—the complete opposite of what the neo-liberal economists had been preaching.96

number of innovative projects, including the birthplace...

“To organize. His biggest concern was that there would be an old-fashioned social revolt, a repeat of the Occupy movement. It was important what they achieved first time round, he said, but it wasn’t enough. This time round we had to be really clear in our vision and strategy. Luckily he wasn’t the only one with this concern.

a new economy that would reflect the cooperative, caring side of our nature.

We can’t continue to mine Earth’s resources and harvest her creatures as if she were a cookie jar, there for the plunder. We need to join hands with the First Peoples of the Earth and rethink everything we know about the way we treat the Earth and her ecosystems. We need to craft a new way of living that is in harmony with nature, as well as with ourselves.

We need to build a new economy that will reflect our ability to be kind and cooperative as well as to compete and be entrepreneurial. An economy based only on competition and opportunism will always create misfortune and unhappiness, just as it does in our personal lives when we behave selfishly. We need to recreate the way we create money, the way we trade, the way we run our businesses, the way we bank, the way we own land and housing, and

They say we can’t do it, can’t fix it or grow it, Can’t change the world, kiddo, what makes you not know it? But we’ve got no ears for your know-nothing blow-it, We’ll change this world ten times before you can throw it. For this is our now time, not do the fuck-all time We’re done with your moaning and dying delays. We say live! Live again! For

change the world now-time So kiss me and celebrate, show me your ways. Kiss me and celebrate, change-the-world, elevate Elevate higher than dirt-streets and mire Elevate up where the highest hopes relevate Kiss me and celebrate, change the world now.

It pushes people into an us-versus-them mindset that encourages violence, which is what the state wants because it knows how to respond to violence. Unless

The real duality is between those who want community and harmony with nature, and those who want individualism and consumerism. That’s what

Be the solution, not the complaint.

work. It’s so important to celebrate the bonds you form when you work on something you believe in. But I’m getting distracted. You were asking about something else….”

“Sadness is not the absence of happiness, Dezzy. Sadness is the memory of past happiness that clings to the soul. It is something to celebrate and then gently let go of, however great the loss.”