Always alternatives

Some people say that there is no alternative to the way things now are. They thus defend the status quo. But those people are lacking in imagination and creativity. It is self evidently true that the only constant thing is change and that the rate of change is increasing.

For the vast majority of our ancestral time we were foraging communalists. Being speechless we were slow to develop new ways of thinking. But, about 100,000 year ago, language evolved and the creativity and entrepreneurship of human groups flourished by creating and choosing between alternatives.

Archaeology recognises three stone ages – palaeolithic, mesolithic and neolithic. Then there was the bronze and  iron ages where a wide range of metal tools increased agricultural productivity and allowed for increasingly sophisticated division of labour (eg them v us within and between groups).

Foraging communalism was the human way for most of our time on the planet. Then came the domestication of plants and animals and settled agriculture. Then it was villages, towns, city states, and empires And in these modern times we have transnational corporations (TNC), the United Nations, and a wide range of nation states interacting and giving rise to globalisation.

Different human groups have different world views and associated points of view. They have concocted a fascinating collection of myths and magic. But now, since the European Enlightenment, there has been a gradual shift to a science-based set of facts and logic which, at its best, reckons that it does not deal with 'truth' but rather with the best working hypotheses given the evidence presently available.

Politics and economics are soft social sciences rather than hard physical ones like physics and chemistry. The soft stuff is dramatically more subjective than the hard stuff. The soft crew tries to present itself as hard but this is illusion. So there is bluster and spin. For example:

The present (2015) status quo view is that the collapse of communism marked the end of history because it is now obvious (?) that fundamentalist, free-market, invisible-hand capitalism is the only 'reasonable' way of running a corporation, a country or the planet. The single bottom line is profit. And the rich get richer because they are worth it.

In the early 1970s those who touted such right-wing free market thinking were dismissed as nutters.  The status quo at the time was for that brand of socialism called social democracy which had the triple bottom line of environment, society, and economics sitting on the foundation of justice and caring for the vulnerable. At present, 45 years later, it is the left wing supporters who are viewed as dangerous nutters because they challenge the right wing line of theoretical thought.

The only constant thing is change. There are always alternatives!