Preparing for after the collapse of the World Economy: Pushing Culture
Profound changes in the world following the collapse of the world economy would be a chance for a complete reset of human societies. This period would be the most uncomfortable for the rich few percent of the world whose way of life was to take a dramatic turn away from their materialism, but would result otherwise in a great improvement in the human condition for the vast majority of the earth’s inhabitants. It was almost universally agreed after the fact that such a profound reset of the whole societal model would not have been possible without the prior collapse of the economy. One thing seemed universal: people would always want fulfilled lives. Childless couples would often compensate the lack of progeny in other ways, and that was often in the form of materialism. That point could not be underplayed, there would need to be a substitute to allow fulfillment of that complex blob of gray matter between our ears.
One thing was certain: after the collapse of the world economy, reorganizing the world as it was planned would have been called by Trotski himself a communist abomination, and many would have ranked the Marxist ideals on par with those of American tycoons compared to the type of reshuffling that would soon be enacted. A rather heavy change of mindset was required in a new world without a functional economy by 2025 standards. The SSB would really have to pull off its own box of magic tricks to get people to swallow that pill!
There would be working groups set up to discuss the reorganizing of the world in terms of currency, consumer goods production, employment, private property, communication and media, trade and transport, education and essential services. One thing was certain, the void left by the low progeny allowance would need to be filled with something else than the materialism which would have been the outlet of choice for many. That double whammy was a huge problem!
The big magic trick that would need to be brought to the table to cement the Gaia Roadmap deal once the initials pushers were removed was to promote a cultural agenda. That was the trick that would allow people to flourish and to leave a legacy beyond the meager genetic quota that was now dictated by the cruelty of a finite world.
There had been working groups set up within every country of the United Nations, called the Culture Revival Units (CRU). Setting up those units had been pushed by the UN and presented to the Davos Boys as future opportunities for commercial developments, a deliberate ploy to pull wool over their eyes. After the fad of superfoods, the next quantum leap for consumerism would be the micro-cultural niches. If Amazon tribe elders could push the virtues of Icelandic mud facemasks whilst listening to giant pigmy drum beats from Botswana, there would be a coin or two to be made somewhere in the concept! So of course, presented in that light, the Davos Boys were all for those CRUs. Yep, count us on board Ann!
Members of each country’s CRUs had been chosen carefully, there needed to be local knowledge of the collective psyche of the population, of the real psyche of the local populations, and it would have to be deciphered long before toppling the Davos Boys. Those working groups had to look deep, way beyond all the strata the modern world had laid down, to examine what mattered to people deep down, what could become a suitably filling endeavour and a substitute for what people were about to lose: the possibility to accumulate possessions and to have large families.
The Gaia Roadmap had not taken into account any cultural element in the drafting of its aims and objectives, it was a purely science-based account of the state of the world and of the actions required to allow humanity to survive past a looming crisis. Integrating cultural elements into the roadmap would have only muddled the debate and led to compromise. The Gaia Roadmap was not a compromise, it was a dichotomy imposed by the fact that either you were sustainable or you weren’t. It was also uncompromising in its scope, it stuck to science.
The work of those CRUs could however never be understated in the new path along which humanity would now embark. Without the work of the CRU, no matter how much the Gaia Roadmap made sense and was unassailable from a logic point of view, humanity would have no doubt promptly descended into chaos after the toppling of the Davos Boys.
The work of the CRU had needed to start as soon as the world had adopted the roadmap. It was essential that humans had a fallback when the Davos Boys and their well oiled crowd control machinery would crumble overnight. It would be absolutely crucial to capitalize on the culture aspect and to discover what could make people tick again to maintain momentum for the roadmap once the guiding hand of the rich was cut off.
People for whom the sole long term prospect in life was to stop reproducing, stop consuming, and basically make as little fuss as possible until death, would understandably become very disillusioned. That had been true in that first year of the implementation of the roadmap, yet humanity had not risen to denounce the pointless life that now lay ahead. That grace period was a period of great dissonance indeed, when leaders were now pushing for what had been their main gripe just the day before. But the Davos machinery and its pillars of dominion, its political horsemen of the apocalypse, its repressive army of crowd control and its mind-numbing pipe-smoking professors had held their ranks and they were winning this remarkable battle against their own mirror image of a few months ago.
Left unchecked once the defenses of the modern world had been breached, there was always a risk humanity would lose its bearings and would once again get back to the only cycle anyone knew, that of dominance by the more powerful.
Culture would have to become the new weapon that would avoid falling back into more familiar territory.
You had to grant that to the economic machinery of the Davos Boys, the thermo industrial world had always used a lot of lubricant to get its message of bliss in perpetual growth across, and had developed over the years, centuries even, a very elaborate defense mechanism indeed. The first message and first line of defense of the thermo industrial civilization was simple but it worked a treat: you too can enjoy playing Golf in Scotland in the morning, have lobster for lunch in the Bahamas, and relax in a Jacuzzi in a Swiss Alps resort in the evening. If you are good enough, you can do that non-stop every day; you might even run out of novelties and have to wait until you can sip your champagne in space. How that was not already possible beggared belief for a few privileged who would get their specifically-appointed secretaries to hound the SpaceWhy secretaries for the first available spot. This message was of course aimed at only a few people, the ones who had realistic chances of achieving the Nirvana such depicted. Those few individuals were however the repository of most of the power; they were the smallest of slivers, the most unrepresentative of the human world, and yet held all the power that would be needed to ensure both perpetuation of the message and its reinforcement.
Some countries had introduced nuances to that theme; patriotism in lieu of personal enrichment. You would work for the glory of your country and die at work rather than let your country down, a selfless soldier sacrificed to grander national goals which would see your children inherit a better future where they too could proudly die in the race to the whole nation being at the top of the economic game.
For the lower rungs of society, the ones who were lucid about their meager chances of success, there would always be the second row of defense, the safety net of the soul where priests, vicars or monks would catch you in their arms before you could start to question your place on this planet, and your place as dominated in a dominating system.
The third row of