You see, market economy is not a designed, controlled pattern. It is what happens if you let the rules unfold. Therefore, humans will naturally tend to this kind of economy.
Your idea of controlling markets to reduce energy "production" may sound logical, but it raises some questions hard to answer:
1. Who determines what customers need and what they do not need?
2. Who will organize and coordinate the energy distribution around the world?
Both questions have the only possible answer: those who already have resourses to control and distribute. I believe for now it will be some originally economical institutions like giant corporations. They will have opportunity to take control and they will take it - because they are headed by humans, of course. And what will be after that is of great interest for me, but I don't think the free market ideology will make sense in this world.
This is one of the laws of nature our "gaseous fluid" have to deal with. Resources are limited.
Yes, but they can be limited in different way. We can spend everything in a fifty years - and we can stretch it for five hundred years.
In essence, you propose communism here. By reducing individual freedom and rights, you automatically set grounds for rebellion. It is not because humans are dumb, but because humans are humans.
It is bad when you deprive people of their luxuries in a moment. But you can do it gradually and with explanation of its necessity. Machiavellian methods vice versa.
(It happens already, by the way. No rebellions because of it.)
Yes. History tells us, that they all failed sooner or later. No human community lasted "forever". This is my opinion, of course, and it heavily depends on how I define the terms "civilisation", "society" and "fail". What I think is, that no ordered and well organized human community survived for longer than about 500 years in the past.
And that's the point. Of course everything fails at some moment. But when we have to chose between dying now and 'failing' during next few decades or even ages while being alive I'll pick 'failing'.
The point here is "heading". What is "heading" or "leading"? It implies that one person or a group of persons is stearing the community into a rationally deduced direction. But humans are individuals and as such have often vastly different opinions on what is "rationally deduced" and what is not. If the leaders are going into a direction that cause suffering for some or all of their community (reduce population growth, "forcing" energy demands), it will cause the community to uproar, eventually ending in rebellion.
Therefore, leaders tend to do what the majority of the community wants to do, and this is not necessarily what is the rational thing to do. It is mostly the exact opposite of what is the rational thing to do, because dealing with limited resources is dealing with reducing life-style, life-span and - of course - reducing the amount of kids you can have.
And you can bet that everyone is thinking he deserves to have as much kids and as much life-style and as much life-span as his/her neighbour has. And if this everyone has enough of it, he just wants a little more, to be better than his neighbour.
Yes, it is just as you've said. But I have to repeat: if the living standards will be lowering gradually and because of obvious reasons it will be no major riots. And there is always such thing as propaganda (and the total consumerism is just a result of it, and not the human nature)
By the way, I don't remember much of national leaders doing what the majority of their communities wants to do lately.
This is what we are, after all, and if we change that, we are not talking about future of mankind anymore, because we'd transmute into something like ants or borgs.
Is it better to have civilization destroyed?
---------- Post added at 12:54 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:51 AM ----------
Yeah, because once you are indoctrinated into losing your freedom, you won't know any better.
Aren't you indoctrinated to believe that your personal freedom is more important than the survival of human civilization?
---------- Post added at 12:58 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:54 AM ----------
I find a lot of the dystopian notions of the future here a bit funny... a good portion of the global population already lives that way, or worse.
In fact, the word 'worse' can be hardly implemented to the living style of people from dystopias I've mentioned. They were quite happy in general. And that's why I've said Orwell's world was too hardcore.
