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Introduction
Those
who should find interesting information
and ideas on this website will include:
• people who are already committed to
helping to change the direction of human progress for
the better - for example, as active supporters of social
and economic justice (including monetary and financial
justice), or peaceful, people-centred development, or
healthier societies, or human rights, or conserving energy
technologies and other aspects of environmental sustainability,
and so on;
• people
who sense that a change of direction is
needed and are wondering how they could help to
make it happen;
• people who are professionally interested in
possible future trends, but not necessarily themselves
committed to the need for change; and
• academics and students who are exploring
how perceptions of world political and economic development
have been changing in recent years, and some of the activities
and initiatives of some of the people involved.
Different
people will come to the website looking for different
things. For example, people who are interested in large
ideas such as changing worldviews and
the evolution of consciousness, or in personal lifestyle
changes such as growing more food or generating electricity
for our own households,may not be so interested in
the practicalities of changing the institutional structures
and processes of government, money, etc; and vice
versa.
However,
the institutional structures and processes of government,
money, etc must change to reflect change in dominant
ideas and to meet growing pressure for change in dominant
lifestyles. That many educated people are comparatively
uninterested in the connections between changes in
ideas, lifestyles and institutions is due to today's
pervasive tendency to specialise -
and, in particular, to keep ethical and spiritual
values in separate compartments from politics
and government, and economics and money.
To achieve a sane alternative future based on principles
of enabling and conserving, those gaps must be bridged. Questions that need to be asked include:
What
does "enable and conserve" mean
for the institutions that govern our ways of living?
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What
does "enable and conserve" mean for our work, our health,
our lifestyles, our values, our education,
our use of energy, our treatment of the environment,
our technologies, our economic system,
our view of history, and so on?
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And how
can we help to bring about necessary
changes in those and other fields?
So
the website aims to help people both to find the
points that interest them and also to place them
in a larger context.
Meeting those two aims is the purpose of the Subject Guide, which provides a list of topics, including Environment and Energy, Health, Money, Technology and Wealth, and suggests some resources for exploration.
You will find that many of the same subjects
are covered in different items on the website.
This
reflects the development
of ideas and
experience since the early 1970s. It also reflects
the need to present ideas and proposals in different
contexts on different occasions to different
readerships and audiences. Some users of the website
may be interested in these variations, others may find
them boring. I hope the website's contents are well
enough signposted to enable users to select how much
they want to look at.
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