Avoiding the Apocalypse

The silent majority is the problem.  Because we are a majority, we are only forced to accept those conditions that we choose to accept.  Thus, the real question isn’t “why do the bad guys act badly?”  The exploiters will be with us so long as we tolerate them -- seeking advantage, power, leverage, and dominance at our expense.  The better question is – why do we so willingly accept political and economic conditions that are arguably much worse in many aspects than that which compelled our exalted ancestors to throw off the tyranny of kings?   

The silent majority in the U.S. is comprised of the law abiding, taxpaying, rules following, courteous, decent people who rise each day hoping for a better world.  The majority is continuously chumped by unbounded moneyed interests -- and the two political parties that theoretically do our bidding in a competitive farce redolent of professional wrestling.  These two elements and the remainder of the wealthiest 10% of Americans form an elite class whose interests are not aligned with – and in most cases are diametrically opposed to -- the interests and needs of the majority.    

The American silent majority has acquiesced to the elite for the last 50+ years, enabling a global meta-crisis in which the U.S. domestic political crisis is but one of a series of dynamics that collectively constitute a vicious cycle.  Unless we stop being silent and assert ourselves, domestically, globally, and immediately, the vicious cycle will become irreversible, and humanity will be forced to live in some type of dystopia.  

The path forward is collective action.  Black Livers Matter, March for Our Lives, the LGBTQ and Abortion Rights Movements, and long-standing rights organizations such as the ACLU show us the pathway domestically, and the majority needs to join and support one or more, because the focus and subject matter expertise these organizations bring to the table are absolutely critical to generating meaningful societal change.

But while these organizations align tactically at times, they must also come together into an over-arching, strategic movement powerful enough to overcome the elites who benefit from the vicious cycle.  And this U.S domestic effort must be linked into an international analog because we face systemic issues than can only be solved through global collective action that works in concert with regional, national, and local structures and mechanisms.    

This movement does not, simply by its existence, solve our problems.  Rather, its purpose is twofold: 1. To righteously wield the natural rights and power of current and future residents of earth; To create a framework in which the optimal resolution of our problems is made possible before dystopia precludes our options for doing so.  In serving this purpose, the movement focuses hope, vectors collective energy, and lowers the courage threshold constraining collective action.  As its power grows and the bad guys are vanquished, we reverse the vicious cycle and replace it with a virtuous cycle in which individual self-actualization and collective human flourishing usher in a new renaissance.        

Admittedly, terms like frameworks, dynamics, vicious cycles, and elites can seem abstract, academic, or polemical -- and therefore easy to dismiss as irrelevant to our daily lives.  We use them to be accurate, to honor your intelligence, and to distinguish our collective efforts going forward from those of our enemies. 

What the preceding means, in plain language, is that nothing we are now doing – righteous and important as it may be – is making much of a difference.  We must vote, we must continue to pay our taxes, and we must continue to be decent – but by themselves these won’t bring us victory.  This is what it means to be stuck in a vicious cycle.  The force sucking us down into the drain must be countered by a stronger force.       

Getting From here to there. 

The majority must encourage into existence, then join and support, an emergent “Human Aspirations Movement.”  In the meantime, individuals must join and support existing rights organizations and encourage them to collectivize. 

Existing rights organizations must subordinate some of their long term aims to provide the leadership and operational resources for the fledgling Human Aspirations Movement.

Americans must get educated in the concepts of Participative Democracy and enroll politicians in support of its precepts.  

Americans must stop supporting laws, policies, politicians, organizations, and mechanisms that are deliberately worsening the vicious cycle.  The Human Aspirations movement will identify these entities and develop courses of action that most rapidly enfeeble them -- or force them to change. 

Why do we assert this?  At Revelatur we conduct a rigorous, structured, continuous, probabilistic meta-analysis of trends, forecasts, and models – which reveals that we face a complex systems challenge, thatwe are in the midst of a vicious cycle, and that there are currently no vectors, movements, trends, interventions, policies and/or technologies in place – individually or in combination – powerful enough to arrest, much less reverse, the cycle.  Thus, hope not linked to commensurate action at this point is an irrational – and counter-productive -- course of action.   The majority is thus irrational, and we are paying the price. 

What is the price we pay? Global warming and widening inequality everywhere. In the U.S., the highest legal and illicit drug use in the world, increasing violence, reduced life expectancy, decreasing social mobility, a politics of fear rather than hope, the highest military spending in the world buying us a force on the verge of implosion, Law Enforcement more concerned with “keeping brown people in line” than solving and preventing crime.  The price we pay is a direct result of cognitive dissonance – which is the difference between what we know to be actionable and the fact that we don’t do anything about it.

The reason we are losing to the elite is that it is hyper-rational and dogged in its pursuit of its objectives of power, control, and wealth.  Of course its rationality is inhumane, shortsighted, and self-limiting in the long term – but it optimizes outcomes for itself in the only time horizon that matters to it.  It is the responsibility of the majority to replace this rationality with one which optimizes for everyone over all time horizons.  An elite is never going to adopt such a rationality and, indeed, will fight it on all battlefronts.       

Our analysis indicates that a global collective Human Aspirations movement has the highest probability of avoiding dystopia – in fact it is the only course of action with a probability of success above 50%.  If we’re paying such a painful price just to fool ourselves and bring about dystopia, why don’t we instead pay for what we do want?