On The High Probability Of Society Failing

When you consider what society has experienced in recent years, it can feel like we are spinning in circles – exhausting ourselves on a hamster wheel continuing to desperately do what we’ve always done and believe what we’ve always believed.

Some of our greatest challenges are those we are capable of overcoming, and yet within our current structures and systems, we find ourselves falling short. For example, in the richest nation on Earth, most people are able to accept that poverty is just an unfortunate reality of American life, or that the people living this way just didn’t take the right path, or they need to work harder, or maybe it’s just that advancements in technology and culture have left them behind. No one stands up and blames the system—at least beyond blaming politicians, usually in a wildly partisan manner, or blaming billionaires for somehow hoarding all the money, as if even the richest among us aren’t also doing all of this on debt. No one pauses to reflect on the true causes of this suffering.

Few people will look at the clearly systemic problems in this country, like the inconsistent education system, the bloated and imbalanced healthcare industry, the military industrial complex running wars all over the planet, or the political gridlock supposedly preventing any real change. Sure, they talk about these things, but all they do is point fingers. There are policies that could fix these things, they say, if only the other political party would see reason. But none of this has anything to do with politics. These imbalances and this mismanagement all derive from the way we think about money and from who controls that money.

Every year the cost of living seems to keep rising; every year it’s harder to make ends meet; far too many are in danger of not having enough money saved to retire on when the time comes; and the challenges we collectively face only continue to grow with no effective solutions immediately in play.

Everything about the economy we have wrought creates artificial shortages where shortages should not exist. So, when you introduce a deadly, global pandemic like COVID-19, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. What kind of economic system is totally unable to act in the face of global problems? The one we currently have. We aren’t talking about a shaky system with a few flaws here. We’re talking about a system that, when wounded slightly, prevents people from being able to meet their basic needs. If you have a system that can’t at least ensure that everyone on this overabundant planet has enough to eat, that’s no system at all.

It would be easy to assume that the probability of failure as a society was high considering all these factors. To a certain degree, we aren’t succeeding, but there is hope for a better future. We are in control of our economic system, and we have the power to change it for the better. Mere mortals created this economy; we can recreate it. We just need to take that first step; we have to accept that the economic system – the one we created – doesn’t need to be this way.