Rethinking Societal Infrastructure

In response to my post Infinite Growth Impossible of a Planet of Finite Size, frequent commenter Glenn Doty provides this cautionary remark:

Greta Thunberg’s criticism (of the path our civilization is on) cannot be resolved by simply choosing a hybrid instead of a hummer. It’s a start… but that path still leads to devastation.  The industrializing world is growing at a rate that far outstrips the rate at which the industrialized world is improving… and that will be the case for the next two generations – at least. We’re on the same page, you and I… But the problem is we should be somewhere in the next chapter, and neither of us really knows what is in that chapter.. we just know that we aren’t far enough along right now.  I suspect that in the end we are going to have to fundamentally rethink societal infrastructure…..We are failing. Badly.

I believe Glenn is 100% correct here; barring technological miracles, we’re in for some very tough times. The problem is the “fundamentally rethinking societal infrastructure,” meaning making profound changes in world government, is simply not going to happen.  It’s hard to think of a cataclysm of sufficient magnitude to drive a change of that magnitude.

Imagine, for instance, what would happen if the Earth were attacked by hostile aliens.   What I’d recommend in that eventuality is that we find a way to elect a dozen of humankind’s culture’s top minds: a mixture of military people, scientists, diplomats and philosophers, get them to come up with a game plan, and then agree to do exactly what they prescribed. In particular, I would want the current world leaders (unless they’re chosen as our “top minds”) to have absolutely nothing to do with this decision-making and implementation process.  Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Duterte, Jinping, al-Assad, Maduro, the smug butcher photographed above whom I chose at random from the list of world dictators, and the rest are toxic enough even in the absence of this hypothetical attack.

My point is that this is unimaginable.  The planet would maintain its current structure right up to the moment it was turned into a piece of smoldering charcoal.  There are literally zero scenarios in which Donald Trump says, “I like Shields’ idea here.  Let’s roll with that.”