Sustainability
The fundamental flaw of the incumbent Game A socioeconomic system is that is not sustainable. The way our debt-based financial system has been designed, it literally requires our global economy to grow by roughly 2% a year.
The cumulative effect of all those years of compounding growth have been catching up to the environment, and we can see the effects.
And those effects aren’t just ecological. The cumulative effect on our collective health and psychological well-being have been devastating. A large portion of the population operate in a perpetual state of partial PTSD.
We are rapidly approaching the limits of our environment, and changes are happening faster than people can adjust to them. If we continue moving forward on our current trajectory, civilization is heading for chaos and catastrophe.
A key to altering this course of events is to eliminate the requirement for constant growth. Perhaps we can even ease into a period of controlled contraction as we stabilize the appropriate level of growth to ensure the sustainability of our civilization.
Of course, this radical idea is bound to be met with resistance by those people with the largest stake in the status quo. A global economic slowdown would mean that profits will grind to a halt. Corporate losses would ensue. Stocks would fall. Debtors would begin to default on debts. There would be a considerable amount of pain, and people and companies would see their highly inflated net worths reduced dramatically.
These hardships suffered by the financial elites will certainly roll downstream to a certain extent to the employees, contractors, suppliers, and service providers within their ecosystems. The collateral damage from such a cataclysm would be devastating.
It is imperative that ISITAS be mature enough at this point to sustain people during this period of disruption and turmoil.
The idea is to establish a reliable source of all the essential goods and services people need to survive so we can sustain ourselves (and others) while we work through the transition to a more sustainable civilization.
The transition will be triggered by the collective focus on sharing and full utilization of existing assets by a critical mass of ISITAS members causing a slowdown in consumer spending.
When a large enough group of people simply decide that they don’t need to buy that new whatever because they can easily have one whenever they need it at a fraction of the cost, consumer spending will drop like a rock. Consumer spending is the driver of our economy, so it is entirely within the power of a coordinated group of consumers of a sufficient size to trigger such a controlled deceleration at will.
To be clear, the means of production, that is, the global infrastructure itself should remain generally intact during the course of this transition. There will likely be a high amount of ownership transfer of many assets as legacy organizations and systems collapse. This is not intended to be a highly kinetic event. It will simply be a sustained period of reduced economic activity, during which time those with large stakes in the status quo will see their positions diminished while the financial strength of Members of the ISITAS community increase.
This process will simultaneously restore balance to the wealth and income equality issue while dialing down our global production/consumption to a sustainable level.
The key is to accomplish this with the least amount of pain possible across the board for the shortest amount of time. Doing so will take greater minds than my own. It will take a coordinated Team.
