THE FIVE ELEMENTS: REMAKING OUR CULTURE TO CHANGE THE WORLD

To prevent this requires a fundamental change in our culture, in the prevalent behaviours that have defined us for thirty millennia. Culture change does not occur by revolution, it’s not something that can be imposed by law or persuasion or even a massive shift in public will. It is evolutionary , it is viral, it occurs viscerally, instinctively in response to an external threat or extraordinary opportunity. The profound changes that brought about, and were in turn wrought by, human agriculture, animal domestication, mass-production and antibiotics are examples of this.

Evolutionary doesn’t necessarily mean slow. As the indomitable Freeman Dyson has argued, where there is awareness, even by a small but empowered minority, of the need for change, evolutionary changes can be introduced quickly and effectively, even in the absence of popular consensus, or even in the face of popular opposition. The abandonment of three million years of hunter-gatherer culture by our ancestors a mere thirty thousand years ago, in favour of the incredibly interdependent, fragile and sedentary culture that replaced it, was certainly viewed as horrific, unnatural, wrong, to most of those ancestors. It succeeded not because if was popular, or even acceptable, to those that adopted it, but simply because it worked, and the old culture didn’t anymore .

That’s where we are now, again. We need the same degree of focused, subversive effort to build a new culture that works, and show this, as a scalable pilot, to the rest of the world. When the rest of the world sees that the old culture by contrast doesn’t work, or, in today’s language, is unsustainable, they will join the new culture. Build it and they will come. Don’t tear down the old culture, create a new one that supplants, undermines the old, replaces it from within.

The new culture this time around must have five features that are astonishingly different from those of today’s prevalent culture:

1. A New Business Driver: The driver for the new culture’s businesses, its economic enterprises, must be the well-being of its members, not growth and profit for its shareholders. The old business model has become completely dysfunctional, pitting us as citizens against us as shareholders. It’s now the tyrannical handmaiden of elite greed instead of the servant of common public interest, as it was originally intended.
2. A New Population Ethic: We are naturally programmed to want to have many children, so that a couple of them  will live long enough to propagate the species. With new medical and reproductive technologies, we have changed the world to the point that having no more than one child is the best way to ensure the healthy propagation of our species. In educated societies we are already there, but massive immigration between uneducated societies and educated ones is preventing this ethic from taking hold quickly and broadly enough. We need to have the courage to make having more than one child socially unacceptable. Not illegal, and not unaffordable (that just makes it unacceptable to the poor). Never underestimate the power of social norms (just talk to any smoker).
3. A New Energy Economy: The principles of the new energy economy will be renewability and self-sufficiency. Our present economy ties us to a power ‘grid’ and makes us utterly dependent on foreign energy supplies. The consequence of this has been excessive energy consumption and waste, military adventures strictly to protect oil ‘interests’, and massive political corruption in countries that rely utterly on other countries’ insatiable thirst for their energy. The pioneers of the new energy economy will innovate and use renewable wind and solar energy sources, capture the energy using new hydrogen-cell technologies, and demonstrate the political and economic liberation that comes from freeing your community from dependence on the ‘grid’.
4. A New Trade Economy: The myths of ‘free’ trade and globalization are quickly unraveling. Unregulated trade, and the extraterritorial laws that diminish local authority that come with it, lead to a host of dysfunctional results: massive local unemployment as jobs are exported to countries with low wages, non-existent labour laws and dreadful environmental laws, the importation, with wasteful and unnecessary transportation costs, of shoddy foreign products made without standards into countries that used to make these same products locally (and better), the forced dismantling of progressive labour and environmental codes, the replacement of overt production subsidies and protections with politically-motivated, politically-extracted hidden subsidies and protections, and the absurd dislocation of local agricultural and manufacturing production in favour of inferior foreign ‘coals-to-Newcastle, corn-to-Mexico’ imports that the dislocated local workers can no longer afford to buy. The governing principle of the new trade economy is simple: Import nothing that can reasonably be produced locally. If we all refuse to buy foreign goods that could be made domestically, everyone will win. 
5. A New Conservation Ethic: We currently make it hard for people to conserve. Recycling takes time and is awkward. Buying stuff in bulk is inconvenient. Bicycling to work in most of the world is not only uncomfortable, it’s dangerous, and logistically impossible. ‘Common’ property is neglected, to the point no one takes pride in it, so it becomes unusable, and everyone has to have their own private everything , even though they use most of these things rarely. A conservation ethic means making it easy to conserve, not making it illegal or expensive to waste. That means investing big time in public infrastructure — parks, transit, bicycle paths — to ensure it is high-quality, efficient, and a pleasure to use. It means making the reuse and recycling of materials easier than throwing stuff out — door-to-door pickup and delivery, reusable containers that are attractive, lightweight and convenient, hygienic, omnipresent ‘refilling’ stations that dispense products at a cost that is a fraction what over-packaged ‘disposable’ individual portions cost. And just as we need to make having many children socially unacceptable, we need to make unnecessary waste, excessive consumption and unwarranted private ownership socially unacceptable — greedy, thoughtless, and antisocial. We need to make disposable a dirty word.

All of these things are happening, to some extent, with varying degrees of success, and with almost as many steps backward as forward, today. But they aren’t happening in a cohesive manner.

We all live in several physical and virtual communities: the one we make our living in, our family, our neighbourhood, and our communities of interest. Because business is so pervasive today, I believe that what I call New Collaborative Enterprises (NCEs), which exemplify change #1, are absolutely essential to creating the new culture we need. If their business purpose is renewable energy production NCE’s can also contribute to change #3. They can espouse the principle of change #4 in their purchasing decisions and the principle of change #5 in their production activities.

In our families and neighbourhoods we can organize programs as citizens and consumers to advance change #3 (co-operative buying of renewable energy is now available to consumers in many areas), change #4 (by simply refusing to buy imported goods unless they’re absolutely essential and can’t possibly have cost local people their employment), and change #5 (by not only reusing and recycling, but agitating and lobbying and writing and talking to others about what needs to be done to improve public infrastructure and make conservation easier). And we can be a little more overt (not rude or confrontational) about expressing our view that large families, unnecessary waste, conspicuous consumption and extravagant private property are immoral in today’s world.

Each of these five changes will ultimately reach a Tipping Point . Our future depends on how quickly they get there. Each one of us, in how we make our living, how we raise our families, how we live our lives, and how we spread the word, can play an important role in getting us there faster. Together we can change the world.