On Making Earthian Life Fairer and Sustainable

Here is a passage embarking on page 618 of my book Business Voyages (http://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810), a business bible, written in 2004:

“The long-term solution is for all people aboard Spaceship Earth to get rich, free, and friendly, but to reach that happy state of affairs much patience and sacrifice will be required of billions of poverty-stricken people around the globe—social heroes and martyrs who peacefully live their lives knowing they inherited a relatively mean, short, brutish and unfair fate (Hobbes, 1651).

“Although some biological constructivists think humanity is involved in a meaningless drift in the infinity of time and space, it’s possible most people aboard Spaceship Earth could achieve satisfying lives devoid of economic insecurity and threat of terrorism and military attack within one hundred years. It seems to me this is possible with current rates of progress using free enterprise market systems and democratic political processes, coupled with the ongoing evolutionary bottom-up discovery and application of scientific knowledge (Stapleton & Stapleton, 1998), assuming humans do not blow themselves up with weapons of mass destruction or render themselves extinct with environmental pollution in the meantime. On the other hand, it’s possible new economic, social, and political alternatives can be tried that might accelerate the current rate of progress; assuming human beings are intelligent enough and creative enough to co-construct them.

“Being a good entrepreneur, or any other kind of good human being, is not easy these days. Despite the gathering storm clouds clearly visible ahead and the wind, heat, and choppy water we are now experiencing caused by religious fanaticism, terrorism, overpopulation, energy depletion, and global warming, the entrepreneur remains the captain of his or her ship.”

It now appears poverty-stricken people around Earth are less willing to passively accept their lots in life, as various uprisings and revolutions in the last several years demonstrate, recent examples being Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Venezuela, and Ukraine.

It seems to me the main reason Earthian life is unfair is that the process has never been well managed. It evolved from day to day over eons as various species did what they had to do to survive given the luck of time and place causing them to be born on various geographic spots on Earth, some hot, some cold, some wet, some dry, some near oceans or rivers, some not, at various latitudes and longitudes, as they gradually developed in isolation, with at least one species Homo sapiens developing their own languages, belief systems, knowledge systems and skills, and their own tribes, ethnic groups, religions, nations, economic systems, systems of government, even their own races, caused by adapting to different climates and conditions on different spots of Earthian terra firma. What exists today is the inevitable result of this accidental/inevitable cause-effect process.

Whether Earth can ever be brought under decent management remains to be seen. Herbert W. Titus in his book Biblical Principles of Law (http://www.lonang.com/curriculum/2/s23.htm) gives a good summary of how some Homo sapiens attempted to manage their affairs from what is now the Middle East to the UK to the US based on writings in the Jewish/Christian bible and secular common laws of the UK and the US. According to the Old Testament, to start with a god owned everything on Earth, having created Earth and all species on it from nothing by himself in seven days about six thousand years ago. He then gave the land of Earth away to the descendants of Adam and Eve, two humans he created to start the procreation of the human species. According to the Old Testament, some years later Moses gave property conquered in the Promised Land away to Jewish families based on lots, after leading them out of Egypt. Some families got better or worse land to live on and farm than others, their lot in life, based on drawing lots, gambling with Moses.

Most people today do not draw lots to receive free land, as in Moses’s day; they buy a lot in a subdivision if they want one, which may or may not meet their expectations.

For millennia wealth, including necessities of life, one enjoyed or wished one had often depended on land inherited from one’s father, or land one could buy or expropriate somehow from others, perhaps by conquest, as in the case of Europeans conquering, swindling, or taking land with treaties from Natives in what is now the US. Rather than draw lots for free land in what is now the US, once it was taken from Natives, settlers and pioneers often received free land through grants, staking claims, homesteading, and the like. Today one’s lot in life probably depends more on inheriting money, bonds and common stock in corporations than it does land, but one’s lot in life for most people still largely depends on where one was accidentally or inevitably born.

Poor people born in rich countries living on welfare are rich relative to most people born in the poorest countries on Earth who work long and hard every day; and children born in families of the rich upper 1 percent around Earth will never have to work for a living, assuming the current Earthian economic system is perpetuated.

The Earthian economic lottery has never been fair. On the other hand, some of the poorest nations on Earth have become somewhat better off economically in recent decades in terms of per capita disposable income; but the gap between rich and poor individuals around Earth has widened, and Earthian life appears to be getting exponentially more unfair year after year in terms of income inequality, thanks to what capitalism has become in recent decades, a dog eat dog economic system in which the rich get richer, the middle class gets poorer, and the lower class improves a little in some countries, thanks to jobs from rich countries being outsourced to poor countries to exploit surplus workers, who are willing to work for a pittance compared to wages in rich countries, to enrich the rich in rich countries.

Unfortunately it is now the lot of all contemporary Earthians to breathe in a polluted atmosphere, now possibly including nuclear radiation from Fukushima, which is getting warmer through time because of Homo sapiens burning many billions of tons of fossil fuel since 1850 or so, to power steam engines and such, so they no longer had to do as much physical work to produce more and more goods, which put many billions of tons of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere, causing global warming and climate change, causing polar ice to melt, causing sea levels to rise, which within this century, only the 21st Century, if unabated shall possibly cause coastlines around Earth to flood, displacing millions, or billions, of Earthians of all species from land it was their lot in life to inherit, causing them to flee to higher ground when they have to move, when there is no more “promised land” to move to, where any new land occupied will have to be shared or fought for, possibly causing conflict and misery heretofore not experienced on Earth.

It seems to me all Homo sapiens need to develop business plans as entrepreneurs and implement new management systems to stop global warming, if they wish to increase Homo sapiens’ chances of populating Spaceship Earth indefinitely, however unfair this shall be for Homo sapiens who never had a chance to experience what life is like in rich countries for middle and upper classes benefiting from contemporary technology.

Here is my best take on how to manage Earthian affairs in my article “Toward the Creation of Spaceship Earth Incorporated” at http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/31023-spaceship-earth-incorporated.html.

Buckminster Fuller invented the word Earthian in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in 1969. I like the word, as should any imaginary considerate Martian sightseeing around Earth. The noun Earthling, used occasionally by some Homo sapiens, seems demeaning when used by imaginary inter-planetary or inter-galactic travelers hovering and flitting around Earth in flying saucers, having no desire to conquer, enslave or exploit Homo sapiens, just observing Earthian species of flora and fauna.

Richard John Stapleton is an emeritus professor of business policy, ethics and entrepreneurship who writes on business and politics at www.effectivelearning.net.