The Horizon
We live in groups of one to four thousand people. The lower bound of which is defined by the number of people required for a community to be able to provide all the necessary skills for a good life in the community. Forrest Landry has done extensive research on this. The upper bound is defined by the threshold at which social cohesion starts breaking down, as described and researched by Robin Dunbar.
Each group has the ability to support itself entirely, but prefers to engage in an economic exchange with other groups for some of the more complex products while building economic capacity in specialising on something other groups might want and need which serves as a method of keeping peace.
While each group has its own set of rules, its own culture and governance - each group also subscribes to globally shared values and principles to ensure the wellbeing for all life on the planet. To this end, all groups engage in the global governance, sense-, meaning- and choice- making processes as well as contribute to the greater good.
This greater good entails not only the global communication and logistics infrastructure and its maintenance, but also extending and building on a shared body of knowledge, but first and foremost the protection of life.
We live in a world, slower than the one in the beginning of the 21st century, We take time to observe, learn, think, create, re-create - we are conscious and deliberate in our actions, sometimes including the necessary destruction of things or ideas that are not serving or affirming life.
We live in a world which has found a way to keep a healthy balance between the intellectual and the instinctual, between technology and nature, between the local and the global, between giving and taking.
And we care for each other and for ourselves.
Some people experience strong negative reactions to such sketches of a world. If you experience such a reaction, feel free to sketch your own version. This is the version i choose to explore. In the coming seven weeks i will deepen aspects of this horizon and extract the most important challenges for each aspect:
How do we regeneratively and sustainably source, refine and distribute the supply required to provide the necessary conditions for every member of the human species to live a dignified life? This includes dealing with limitations, managing buffers and preparing for future generations and situations.
How do we ensure signaling capacity that represents needs and desires of individuals in a balanced way? This serves as a binding modality between organising supply (Questions 1) and societal decision making processes (Question 3).
How do we govern society? How do we make coherent decisions on a local, regional and global level? Who makes these decisions and on what grounds? How are they enforced?
How do we manage knowledge?
a) How do we create and identify knowledge? How do we agree and/or disagree on what becomes knowledge? How do we agree and/or disagree on processes of knowledge creation?
b) How do we agree on dimensions of knowledge?
c) How do we transfer knowledge across the planet and generations while broadening the capacity and maintaining integrity of knowledge?
How do we relate to people? How and why do we form groups? How do we cooperate at many scales? What kinds of groups are required for the cooperation? What are the social norms that drive our relationships and what kinds of groups are required to fulfil these norms?
How do we nurture the body? How do we grow healthy bodies? How do we keep them healthy and how do we reinstate health once and if it breaks down?
How do we cultivate conditions for individuals to develop a strong and evolving sense of coherence within themselves? This includes the capacity to make sense of the world, capacity to take action and a purpose beyond the individual.
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Photo by Jeffrey Czum from Pexels
when and more importantly where do we start prototyping?