4. Preface
4.1 Term “Futurities”
I would like to show you in this book how societal systems could be organized differently. Because in the eyes of many, they face major problems: how taxes are collected and wealth is distributed, our education and healthcare systems, how our cities and state are organized, how media and politics function, and what values our society holds.
These are simultaneously the areas where, due to our pessimistic view of the present and the future, there is a lack of good ideas about how to improve more than just details. They are the areas where real change is only possible if many people are convinced. And it is precisely here that, as a society, we have so far left enormous potential untapped.
There is already a fitting term for the concept of new or newly designed societal systems: “utopia”. But utopias are often detached from reality, disregarding any preconditions.
In the last two chapters, I have written about the future of humanity and Earth, to define the framework within which the ideas I will present are intended to operate. In the next subchapter, I will therefore compile a list of requirements for these societal systems.
Therefore, I intend to use a different term in this book to describe utopias that meet certain conditions rather than simply sound appealing: “futurities”.16
The futurities I present—ideas for better societal systems—are not advice for individuals on how to change their own lives (there are already plenty of self-help books for that), but rather what we as a society could change.
If we as a society could agree on a certain structure, approach, and set of rules for organizing a sphere of our lives among ourselves, what consequences would that have? These are the futurities I want to paint with words in the following chapters.
An existing example to make this a bit more tangible are social welfare systems. In the past, they did not exist. Anyone who was not supported by their family when things went badly for them could only beg for alms. In 1883, Germany began a state-run health insurance system to protect the socially vulnerable and maintain peace within the country, which threatened to break apart amid industrialization (urbanization).[23]
Society agreed upon a new common framework (or rather, since Germany was not yet a democracy at the time—the Chancellor issued it as an order), and from these rules, a new future emerged.
These are the kinds of systems I want to design in this book. But it's not just laws—organizations, cultural norms, and everything else that holds societies together are legitimate targets as well.
Wherever such systems already exist today (e.g., the education system), I take no account whatsoever of how they are currently structured.
The futurities presented in this book are not lists of improvements to existing systems. Instead, my goal is to paint the best possible system I can imagine for a particular area, and that is feasible under realistic conditions.
So, if one were to start anew from a blank slate, without an already existing system.17
How such a futurity could actually become reality (for example, by transforming an existing system) is something I try to outline in Chapter 13, “How We Begin”.