Forget the old focus on competition and economic growth

Posted on by September 22, 2009 by Johan Olsson

The human kind has without understanding it reached a whole new stage in development. One where we no longer need to fight to survive. We no longer need to compete with other human beings to get roof over our heads or food on our tables. But we are so used to struggle for survival that we find it hard to change our way of living. We are stuck in the type of society that our explosion in material and economic development is based on and now we don´t know how to leave the routines we´ve created, and get off the treadmill.  Since the period of hunting and gathering to the more civilized society of agriculture and cattle and further on to the industrialism and early market economy, through all these phases we´ve been forced to focus on ourselves and our closest and compete with others to even survive. Even in modern times, while the prosperity has been great in many parts of the world, it hasn´t been successfully distributed to everyone.

The competition has of course changed a bit over the years, and gone from a direct competition between individuals or small groups of people to competition between nations, but it’s still been a kind of struggle for survival, where some nation has been victorious and increased their prosperity rapidly and other nations not. Somebody has to lose so that somebody else can win, which is the characteristic of a struggle for survival. But in reality we are no longer at that stage of development. Or at least we don’t have to be anymore. The problem is that our minds and habits don´t change as fast as technology, so in our minds we are still there, we still have to compete, to fight for survival.

In fact there are enough resources on our planet for everyone to lead a comfortable and safe life with a reasonably high material standard. And we have knowledge enough to use that possibility and spread the prosperity and the material standard to the whole world. We no longer need to compete, there´s enough for everyone´s needs. To be a profit maximizing society no longer adds so much when it comes to survival or when it comes to quality of life. The only thing it gives us is more things, more products.

So it´s time to forget the old focus on competition, economic growth and higher material standard and instead start focusing on what would make us feel better, enjoy life more and have fun together more often. We should celebrate that we no longer have to compete within the human race. Maybe one day aliens from another planet will challenge us and we have to compete again, but until then let´s pick the fruits of the society that our ancestors have created for us and stop focusing on competition.

We could move on from a profit based society with constant competition to a society based on needs and cooperation.  It´s not about going back to stone age or even lower our material standard, nor is it about changing to communism. It´s about realizing that a very important era in the history of mankind, the industrialism, now is over and that we are on the treshold of a new age, the next step in the development of mankind. The latest centuries we and our ancestors have worked hard to solve the so called production problem, that is trying to find a system which allows everybody to have a decent material standard and not having to worry about food supply or if to freeze to death in the winter or not. We have now solved that problem through new technology and much more efficient production methods. And with a slight redistribution of the worlds resources and knowledge the solution could within a very short time apply to the whole world.

With this solution to the production problem at hand it´s now time for human kind to enter the next phase in evolution and start looking for a new model for society that allows us to move on past the industrial phase and grow as human beings.

It is what nature and the environment demands to allow the human race to keep existing, but it is also in the interest of the human beings themselves, since we seem to have a basic need to keep on developing. The latest centuries we have developed the technical solutions surrounding us enormously, but as human beings we´ve hardly reached any more understanding at all. We have more or less stood still for a few hundred years. The knowledge we´ve achieved have almost exclusively been knowledge about technical or economic solutions.

So let us use the next few hundred years to start developing again, as human beings and human kind.

Johan Olsson

Former of the organization Medveten Konsumtion (Conscious Consumption) in Sweden
and now creating a worldwide organization for new global politics