What If America Did A Complete Inventory Of Itself?

I mean a complete inventory of everything it knew about making, and process, and materials, and the natural world, as well as all of the productive capacity it had. All of the plants, factories, labs, machine shops, necessary services facilities (like water, power, roads, information circuits, as well as physical facilities to deliver things like prepared food, healthcare, or justice by the rule of law, etc). What if we could collect all of that and then step back to consider:

Wow! This is a lot of capability. I bet this is way more than any of us ever dreamed of. If for no other reason than we've never had a chance to step back and consider it all before. Or what we could do with it if it was ours, as a working nation, to actually make full use of in the first place.  But now, of course, we're talking about what our people could do if they were truly allowed to govern themselves; be the managers, and the maintainers, and the consumers, as the daily routine of working community life.

With all of this ability. With all of this knowledge, if we started with a clean slate... Maybe a whole world of possibilities might leap out because we wouldn't have to start from any one preconceived notion. We could just play around with all of the possibilities that might pop out of very creative minds; even the seemingly outlandish ones, and see if something interesting might surprise us.

The biggest thing, though, right now is only partly concerned with what we end up changing to. Right now the more important part is to recognize that major league change is coming. The kind that requires a major league response.

Change is always coming, certainly, but we're facing a lot of change that will happen because of actions set in motion from the past. Our technological change has had consequences. And now we must deal with those consequences.

One aspect of tech change is that we are in a completely new operating environment as concerns our current handle on instrumentality (the ability to make, communicate, and perceive); made all the more damaging by the pace of change now that electricity mutates a very old operating system.

Another aspect of tech change is the fact that so much of the full cost, of consuming all of the things that we've consumed so far as factory motivated consumers, has not been paid. So, after so much carbon put into the air, and so many other poisons all about as well, the planet, as you might imagine, is not very happy about this, and is letting us know this in no uncertain terms.

So I assure you. And let this be buttressed by over 25 years of looking at various complex systems. I assure you that change is coming. You have the choice of trying to best manage how we'll face that change, or just sitting back and let things play out as they will with the systems we have. I gain (or lose -- in the interests of full disclosure) nothing no matter which choice you make, so it makes little material difference to me. I can say, however, as a died in the wool dreamer, that it breaks my heart we wouldn't at least try to do something different. As long as it has meaning in the balanced sense that "thoughtful, loving structure" is supposed to imply, what we eventually end up with is irrelevant right now. The first step is to acknowledge the need for change in the first place.

We take that step and then we can start taking stock of not only what we're made of, but what kind of spirit and will we can muster to find common ground, and compromise. I think the grand compromise between Libertarians and Progressives that I have outlined (from the "I Had a Daydream" post) is a good place to start. Maybe you can come up with a better one. Either way, we simply have to try.