Vision 2020 by Ervin Laszlo

Author:Ervin Laszlo [Laszlo, Ervin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language and Literature, Arts
Published: 2011-02-16T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Vision 2020: Imaging a Post-Critical World

Consider the following task. You are to design a “third strategy” that goes beyond the classical and now obsolete political doctrines of liberal laissez-faire and communist centralism to create a humanistic evolutionary scenario. The target date is the year 2020. You can assume that bifurcations in the 1990s have created an opening for fundamental change; by the first decades of the twenty-first century new ideas have a realistic chance of translating into social reality. What are the essential elements of the new strategy? What are its principal goals and objectives? To start the flow of ideas, here is one candidate for a humanistic evolutionary scenario—one “vision 2020.”

The objective of the third strategy is to launch humanity on the path toward a global holarchy where human beings can co-evolve with their societies. This calls for maintaining mastery over the complex and interdependent world we have created.

The globally extended interconnections that have evolved in the Modern Age are, and will remain, necessary components of the post-modern world. But they must serve rather than dominate humanity. They must become the instruments for effectively managing ourselves in harmony with each other, and in harmony with all other systems of life on this planet.

In view of this basic consideration, the evolutionary “third strategy” has two sets of objectives, distinct but interrelated.

The first set is essentially defensive: it is to avert the evolution of the structures of society at the expense of the individual.

The second set is pro-active: it is to build up, and make 68 ERVIN LASZLO

effective use of, the connections that link people all over the world with each other, with their environment, and with the biosphere as a whole. The former is to safeguard the development of the individual: this requires that we restrain and control the evolution of hierarchically oriented political and economic systems and processes. The latter is to create a global-level holarchy: a network of cooperative relations in fields and areas where worldwide coordination is useful, and indeed imperative.

OBJECTIVES TO SAFEGUARD THE

INDIVIDUAL

Objective Number One: Restrain the Power of Nation-States

The development of individuals cannot and need not be planned: it need only be permitted. The first requirement of a humanistic evolutionary strategy is that it create space for personal growth and creativity. This means a strategy of restraints in areas where the evolution of hierarchic structures and institutions poses a threat to the freedom and autonomy of the individual. One of these areas is political by nature but is in fact more than political in everyday reality. It is the myth of the modern nationstate, with all its entailments including its controls, its structures, and its claims of sovereignty.

In the contemporary world national sovereignty has become almost sacred. In the USSR and in Yugoslavia, the governments of national states were pushed to the very brink of chaos before they relinquished their sovereign powers.

Every where on the five continents national states would rather call out the army than relinquish a part of their powers to their own subnational entities such as cantons, provinces, regions, republics, and states.

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