The Future Read Online Free

collecting, processing, and utilizing massive flows of information to allocate resources and balance supply with demand, the information in markets is of a particularly granularvariety. It is devoid of opinion, character, personality, feeling, love, or faith. It’s just numbers. Democracy, on the other hand, when it operates in a healthy pattern, produces from the interactions of people with different perspectives, predispositions, and life experiencesemergent wisdom and creativity that is on a completely different plane. It carries dreams and hopes for the future. By tolerating the routine use of wealth to distort, degrade, and corrupt the process of democracy, we are depriving ourselves of the opportunity to use the “last best hope” to find a sustainable path for humanity through the most disruptive and chaotic changes civilization has ever confronted.
    In the United States, many have cheered the withering of self-governance and have celebrated the notion that we should no longer even try to control our own destiny through democratic decision making. Some have recommended, only half in jest, that government should be diminished to the point where it can be “drowned in the bathtub.” They have enlisted politicians in the effort to paralyze the ability of government to serve any interests other than those of the global machine, recruited a fifth column in the Fourth Estate, and hired legions of lobbyists to block any collective decisions about the future that serve the public interest. They even seem to sincerely believe, as many have often written, that there is no such thing as “the public interest.”
    The new self-organized pattern of the Congress serves the special interests that are providing most of the campaign money with which candidates—incumbents and challengers alike—purchase television commercials. It no longer responds to any but the most emotional concerns of the American people. Its members are still “representatives,” but the vast majority of them now represent the people and corporations who donate money, not the people who actually vote in their congressional districts.
    The world’s need for intelligent, clear, values-based leadership from the United States is greater now than ever before—and the absence of any suitable alternative is clearer now than ever before. Unfortunately, the decline of U.S. democracy has degraded its capacity for clear collective thinking, led to a series of remarkably poor policy decisions on crucially significant issues, and left the global community rudderless as it faces the necessity of responding intelligently and quickly to the implications of the six emergent changes described in this book. The restorationof U.S. democracy, or the emergence of leadership elsewhere in the world, is essential to understanding and responding to these changes in order to shape the future.
    One of the six drivers of change described in this book—the emergence of a digital network connecting the thoughts and feelings of most people in every country of the world—offers the greatest source of hope that the healthy functioning of democratic deliberation and collective decision making can be restored in time to reclaim humanity’s capacity to reason together and chart a safe course into the future.
    Capitalism—if reformed and made sustainable—can serve the world better than any other economic system in making the difficult but necessary changes to the relationship between the human enterprise and the ecological and biological systems of the Earth. Together, sustainable capitalism and healthy democratic decision making can empower us to save the future. So we have to think clearly about how both of these essential tools can be repaired and reformed.
    The structure of these decision-making systems and the ways in which we measure progress—or the lack thereof—toward the goals we decide are important have a profound influence on the future we actually create. By making