Chapter I
1. Capitalism has been an appropriate tool for the advancement of human society over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
2. Just like every system before it, it had its strengths and its weaknesses, but it was right for its time.
3. It is very easy to point to the superficial focus and materialistic ideals it imbues its practitioners with and say this is not a good direction for society to be heading.
4. It is very easy to point to all of its other shortcomings, and on deep analysis, there appears to be little to recommend it.
5. For example, there is a school of thought that suggests that our advancement in the past two centuries has occurred because of capitalism; and this is correct to a certain degree.
6. There are few who could argue that capitalism has indeed accelerated our technological development, but in doing so our social development has lagged considerably.
7. At a time when we are moving into the realm of advanced technology, there is no greater danger to our continued existence as a thriving species than this lagging social development.
8. But that being said, it is these things that force us to adapt and grow.
9. Capitalism is a system we needed to go through in order to realize the direction we need to head in if we are to continue on as a peaceful and developing society.
10. Even someone who has been painted as an anti-capitalist for over a century, Karl Marx, suggested that capitalism is something we needed to go through in order to get to the other side; a better society.
11. In a world of advanced technology; in a world of communication; in a world that has just entered a new information age; in a world of increasing geo-political stability; for a species that is about to move out into the universe; capitalism is no longer an appropriate system.
12. It is something that twentieth century society cannot apprehend completely, but it is an enlightened stance that more people are coming to understand.
13. It is not something that will happen quickly,
14. The move away from capitalism, into a transitional system, and thence into whatever system will serve us well in the coming centuries;
15. But if we look around in the early twenty-first century, we can see the beginnings of it everywhere.
16. It may take a century or more even to get to a transitional stage,
17. But certain technological breakthroughs that almost certainly must happen within the first two decades of the twenty-first century are going to force our hand;
18. At this time, our alternatives will be, a depression, the likes of which has not been seen since the dark ages, or ,
19. The move into a transitional system.
20. The first half of the twenty-first century will be the most critical period in the history of the human race;
21. And those reading this chapter are here now to witness its magnificence, and to participate in it as best we can.
22. We all have the opportunity to make the generations of the twenty-first century the very best in history;
23. But it is equally possible that we could make them the worst.
24. Our move into advanced technology, that is about to take place, is going to be the most dangerous time for our species in its history;
25. And it is made all the more dangerous by our inability to recognize, as a society, that it is so.
26. A transitional system in the first half of the century, and an acceleration of our social development are two critically important elements of the twenty-first century.