Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. It is a long-standing political art to sow the seeds of mistrust between those you would rule over: as Machiavelli said, tyrants do not care if they are hated, so long as those under them do not love one another. Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular culture, but, in reality, cynicism in average people is the attitude exactly most likely to conform to the desires of the powerful – cynicism is obedience.

Optimism, by contrast, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary. Where no one believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe. Where no one believes in the possibility of action, apathy becomes an insurmountable obstacle to reform. But introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better solutions are available, and that a better future can be built, and you unleash the power of people to act out of their highest principles. Shared belief in a better future is the strongest glue there is: it creates the opportunity for us to love one another, and love is an explosive force in politics. Great movements for social change always begin with statements of great optimism.

More from Alex in his post titled, The Apocalypse Makes Us Dumb:

Courtesy of fear-mongering=money Hollywood, we have the following largely false precepts:

1) The Apocalypse is coming. There is a tendency to believe that big, catastrophic and singular events are going to come and destroy everything: that the Bird Flu or whatever is going to suddenly happen and immediately life will be hell. (The funniest example of this is climate change in The Day After Tomorrow, where sea level rise is so sudden that water rushes down the streets of New York in great rolling waves.)

2) The Apocalypse is forever. In disaster movies and such, people seem to lack the ability to regroup and rebuild.

3) The Apocalypse is everywhere. In the movies, collapse makes the whole world a wasteland. Everything crashes and burns; everyone dies; knowledge and law are driven entirely from the planet, or at very least confined to some very distant semi-mythical outpost paradise for which the survivors year

But reality is quite different from this. In reality, even the worst large-scale disasters come in variable speeds; in even the worst disasters, effects are uneven, with some places devastated and others left only mildly scathed; and in almost all disasters, rebuilding begins almost immediately (even the Black Death killing a third to half of the population didn't put much of dent in Europe's evolution -- indeed some argue it accelerated trade and innovation).

In reality, in a disaster those with the largest stable group and the highest degree of cooperation come out on top, and, in fact, it is often those places which are best governed and most socially coherent that assist other places in the rebuilding... and those hard-hit places are generally quite receptive to good ideas for putting the pieces back together.

Because the intelligent response to looming crisis is a mix of all-out efforts toward prevention and widespread societal preparation. It's foresight, planning and cooperation, good investments and strong public service capacities. The smart move, when you're worried about the end of the world end, is to change it.

Alex then makes some insightful comments in his post Lazy Dystopia's, which echoes much of what I've been saying for years:

Jason Stoddard proclaims the need for speculative fiction that is strange and happy:

The world is changing at an increasingly rapid pace. Just in the last few weeks, I’ve read about active corneal overlays for augmented reality and Russian chatbots good enough to pass simple Turing tests (and immediately being used for sex chat.) Where we live is getting strange. But this doesn’t mean it’s a dystopia, or that we’ll be bowing to evil corporate overlords whose only mission statement is to rape the planet, or that we’ll have mind control installed against our will, or that we’ll all die because of climate change or slowing economic growth or whatever the cause du jour is. So why can’t we be strange–and happy?

As I commented to Alex Steffan today:

I believe the current and extended dark spell got it's start in the early Rea years of 1981-82, with movies like Blade Runner and Mad Max, and was further exacerbated by the works of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling who cemented us into Legacy Futures (courtesy Jamais Cascio) of dystopian cyberpunk and steampunk dead ends. This dystopian way of thinking became so pervasive, that even Star Trek started it's irreversible decline toward bleak dystopianism with the advent of Deep Space Nine shortly after Roddenberry died.

Alex adds to this sentiment and says

The fault lies with a few other people as well, including Ridley Scott, Alan Moore, William Gibson, Katsuhiro Otomo, and Masamune Shirow. Scott brought us "Blade Runner," and pioneered a vision of the future that used postmodern pastiche not as a clever device (as in Nouvelle Vogue films like "Week-end"), but as a worldbuilding tool. In the same year "Blade Runner" was released, Moore published "V for Vendetta," and followed it up with "Watchmen" four years later. Both stories feature totalitarian regimes infecting previously-democratic societies and exacerbating systemic poverty and oppression. The result is a bricolage aesthetic of mingled opulence and detritus. But you could say the same about Gibson's novels from the same decade, as well as Otomo's and Shirow's manga -- "Blade Runner," "V for Vendetta," and the "Akira" manga all came out in the same year, and since then, anyone dealing with dystopian futures has struggled with the glorious burden of that heritage. 

Alex made a point of talking to Syd Mead, the designer who did much of the worldbuilding for the movie Bladerunner.

I asked him this very question: what would it take to make a movie of Bladerunner's imaginative power, set in a positive future? He paused for a second and said he thought it'd be very difficult, that catharsis is so important to people, and people are so terrified of the future, that you'd need some completely new vision of what the future will look like to even set the scene for a new narrative... and that is obviously no mean feat.

Most science fiction sucks, as Norman Spinrad said, precisely because it's too lazy to imagine let alone devise workable solutions to how these futures can either be diverted or ameliorated should we find ourselves in them. This pessimistic malaise that afflicts so many otherwise intelligent thinkers continues to motivate me today to keep writing, inspiring and working towards better solutions.  As Spinrad says,

''What's wrong with science fiction is part of the same damn crisis, and I'm not kidding. What's wrong with science fiction ultimately is an aspect of what's wrong with conglomerate corporate capitalism, the publishing part, because in terms of how many good books are being written every year, there's nothing wrong. The last ten years, there are 20 or 30 good-to-great novels every year, and you really can't complain. The problem is, they're buried in an avalanche of cynical commercial crap. That's a dysfunction of the publishing industry, and it affects what writers write.

''There's another thing wrong with science fiction, and I think it comes from the culture too. How much science fiction is being published now that's set in worlds that are better than ours? Not that have bigger shopping malls or faster space ships, but where the characters are morally superior, where the society works better, is more just? Not many. It becomes difficult to do it, and that's a feedback relationship with what's happening in the culture, with science fiction being the minor note. People don't credit it anymore! Not just better gizmos and more virtual reality gear, but better societies. People don't believe the future will be a better place. And that is very scary.

"There is a lot of talk among politicians that we need a massive jobs program to pull the economy out of the current recession," Jacobson said. "Well, putting people to work building wind turbines, solar plants, geothermal plants, electric vehicles and transmission lines would not only create jobs but would also reduce costs due to health care, crop damage and climate damage from current vehicle and electric power pollution, as well as provide the world with a truly unlimited supply of clean power."

Jacobson's research is particularly timely in light of the growing push to develop biofuels, which he calculated to be the worst of the available alternatives. In their effort to obtain a federal bailout, the Big Three Detroit automakers are increasingly touting their efforts and programs in the biofuels realm, and federal research dollars have been supporting a growing number of biofuel-research efforts.

"That is exactly the wrong place to be spending our money. Biofuels are the most damaging choice we could make in our efforts to move away from using fossil fuels," Jacobson said. "We should be spending to promote energy technologies that cause significant reductions in carbon emissions and air-pollution mortality, not technologies that have either marginal benefits or no benefits at all".

A network of above ground and underground systems “fulfill infrastructural needs for the movement of people, water, hover-cars, and energy throughout the city”. Taking cues from nature, a giant super system resembling seaweed and chantrelle mushroom will hold together this network to collect water, power and distribute it across the city.

The biggest challenge in creating a regenerative economy is converting waste back into useful materials.  This includes all of our waste such as water, petroleum based plastics, and precious metals.  One solution to having abundant clean water will be the widespread adoption of cheap nanofilters, which have already proven effective in treating waste water. Biodegradable and recyclable plastics exist, and only require infusions of capital investment to become cheap enough to compete head on with traditional plastics.  Saltwater agriculture + plant based plastics = win-win regeneration.   Add in the growing potential of nanotechnology and microbe-based reclamation tools, and we could clean up and eliminate ALL of the toxic materials we've ever created, while simultaneously restoring damaged ecosystems. Human civilization finally becomes a deeply organic and fully integrated part of the biosphere.
 
All of this effort toward creating a sustainable and regenerative economy would simultaneously solve many, if not most of the world problems.  It would create hundreds of millions of new jobs.  It would allow developing and third-world nations the opportunity to leap-frog entirely the polluting and wasteful industrializing phase right into a clean, green, regenerative economy.  This would result in a radical reduction of world-wide poverty and hunger, while bringing them the benefits the best of the 21st Century has to offer.

So this brings me to two other pressing problems - population growth and political tyranny.  As I mentioned previously, all the worlds problems are interrelated.  The rapid rise in pollution, industrial waste, and environmental destruction can be directly linked to population growth.   Population growth in turn means more competition over dwindling resources, which means more wars, genocides, and politically oppressive regimes run by brutal dictators and junta's, supported by first-world industrialists.  BUT, if the means to health, wealth and economic prosperity can be had without further resource depletion, then the incentive for war is significantly reduced.  The same goes for political oppression and culturally based genocide wars, which are the result of desperate, ignorant people caught in the web of poverty, disease and lack of education.  Economic prosperity and education go hand-in-hand.  If developing nations are able to access the world's knowledge through the internet, this opens them up to the rest of the world. Freedom is a tantalizing thing, and once people have it they will do everything they can to keep it and expand it.  I found out just yesterday, Saudi Arabia now has it's own all-girl rock band called Accolade.  Their hit song Pinocchio is getting massive airplay throughout the middle east.  They still can't perform live, and must wear their black shawls while in public, but the influence of downloadable music and ipods is having a cultural influence on the young in oppressive regimes.

When people are well off economically several things happen - they are less likely to commit crimes, less likely to commit acts of terrorism, and less likely to have children, and less likely to put up with assaults on their freedom.  The net population growth in the First World is zero.  All population growth is happening in Second and Third World countries and their immigration into First World countries.  Improve the economic conditions of the world's poor, and population growth stops.

All this will take is willingness to make it happen.   Most people don't even know their are solutions, or think it is way more difficult than it seams.  So it's about informing and inspiring as many people as possible.  This is why I'm cautiously optimistic with an Obama Presidency and the shift in consciousness that is happening because of it.

Yes we can!

Coming soon:

Part 2 - Living Forever