problems with society

I've been feeling rather disillusioned lately. I can't put my finger on the cause nor solution to this dilemma. Perhaps it's the economy and how we seem to be faced with a rather different problem than previously in history. We already shifted from agriculture to manufacturing, then from manufacturing to the service industry. So where do we go next? To go to an almost fully automated workforce would be require radical changes from people. On the other hand, are we to stop automating things in order for people to remain employed? Given the historical record of resistance to change and what it takes to overcome said resistance, I have a feeling that's part of why I've been feelings more dismal than usual.

It's easy to say that one person can't make any difference in a matter so large, but that mentality is a large part of what causes stagnation. We need progress, and that can't happen if nobody participates. We're not going to get the kind of change required from any politician, not matter how good their intentions or how charismatic they may be. As much power as politicians may have, they don't really solve problems anyway; they merely pass laws and declare war. So we shouldn't really expect them to solve all our problems. The mainstream media may not be educating people on the possibilities of the current technology, but with the Internet, it's not that hard to get informed. With things like twitter and RSS feeds on bloggers' sites, the content can even be pushed to people so that once they find sources they know and trust, they don't have to continuously go out searching in order to stay up to date.

In a dark kind of way, the unemployment actually is good for change. For if one has no job, they'll be happy to try something new. If there's 300 million people in the US, and about a 10% unemployment rate, that'd mean that there are roughly 30 million people unemployed right now. If these people decided they were going to abandon the monetary system, that'd be an incredible labor force. As long as they were given food/water, a home, and electricity, I think many of them would take the offer at least as a short term solution if nothing else. Even if you figure only 10% of the unemployed would be interested, that'd be enough people to form a quite large city. It seems that the first step of the Venus project (http://www.thevenusproject.com) isn't such a far stretch of the imagination after all.

Why not give it a try? If all the naysayers are correct and it doesn't work out, we can either solve those problems, change out the problematic parts so it does work or find something that does work, or go in another different direction. One thing seems obvious, if what we have now isn't working, then we should stop doing it. It's like the old saying goes... if you're stuck in a ditch, the first thing you should do is STOP DIGGING!