Plan
S, Sustainable Living for the Long Term, Phase One, Executive
Summary |
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Original Creation Date: May 18, 2007
Henry Fiddler, E-mail: henry@htfiddler.net
I have spent forty
years studying the problems we face as a human species. My work as a generalist
has allowed me to step back to see the big picture of how our civilization
has failed, why it has failed, and what we must now do to succeed. I am
working on Plan S: a detailed, written plan to create a major paradigm
shift that will put humanity on a successful and sustainable course for
the long term. I need your help in completing this plan. –Henry Fiddler |

The last two centuries have been characterized
by the most massive changes in human history. We have experienced an industrial
revolution, huge advances in scientific understanding, development of instantaneous
communication, a population explosion, the highest level of material wealth
in history and major advances in personal freedom for many. However, much
of this has been fueled by the huge energy leverage provided by fossil
fuels. Just as many of our world citizens are growing accustomed to these
benefits, just as we can imagine the day when we can feed and provide basic
necessities for every person on the planet, we see the threats of global
warming, ecological destruction, overpopulation, species extinction and
resource depletion, threatening our civilization. Is humanity doomed to
a never ending cycle of failed civilizations? Plan S is the story of how
humanity can finally break out of this vicious cycle, and live sustainably
for our remaining time on planet earth.
The three brain-mind disciplines of
Evolutionary Psychology, Personal Development, and Neuroscience, reveal
a path to success. Their integration reveals why as a species, we behave
as we do, how this has caused our failure, and what we can do to move towards
success. Our evolutionary quantum leap from the animal world is our ability
to form images and stories in our minds and to manifest them in the material
world. Since we are uninformed regarding how our minds work, we have been
unintentionally and naively programming them for failure (i.e. collapse),
rather than success (i.e. sustainability). Everything that Personal Development
(the success industry) teaches can be applied not only to individual success,
but also to species success. This is the key insight at the core of Plan
S, which can lead humanity to live sustainably. Plan S is unique in the
sense that it integrates all three brain-mind disciplines, along with hundreds
of others, to move us into the realm of generalist thinking and problem
solving (i.e. outside the box thinking). The result is paradigm shift.
Plan
S, Sustainable Living for the Long Term, Phase One, Concept
Paper |
Original Creation Date: May 18, 2007
Henry Fiddler, E-mail: henry@htfiddler.net
Overview

References:
1918: The Decline of
the West, Oswald Spengler
1961: A Study of History,
Arnold Toynbee
1988: The Collapse of
Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter
2004: Collapse: How Societies
Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond |
Over the past 10,000 years ~25 complex
civilizations have gone through a cycle of birth à
growth à
decay, or in Toynbee's words, challenge
à
response à
collapse. Western Civilization is in the
early stages of collapse now. Plan S provides for a paradigm shift that
leads humanity out of this cycle into sustainability over the remainder
of our projected species-span, estimated around 10 million years.
Problem
If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where
we are headed. –Chinese Proverb
Matt Savinar, an attorney from Santa Rosa,
California, has created an extensive website, www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net.
It provides the best analysis available regarding the current state of
affairs, faced by Western Civilization. Mr. Savinar explains in his opinion
why we're doomed. He provides detailed and extensive metrics and references
to support his opinion. He provides no solution other than the age old
"head for the hills". There is now a rather large supply of similar books
and websites that end by admonishing, "If we had only
started building sustainable alternatives 30 to 50 years ago, we wouldn't
be in this situation!" They point
out that we knew about our problems decades ago, but failed to act. Why
is this so, and why do we appear to be repeating the well documented cycle
that has occurred so many times throughout history?
In the short term, can humanity avoid
the complete collapse of Western Civilization? And in the long term, can
humanity figure out how to live sustainably, and get out of this heretofore
unending cycle of rise and fall of complex civilizations?
Solution
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when
we created them. –Albert Einstein
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change
something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
–R. Buckminster Fuller
There has been much talk for decades about
an upcoming paradigm shift, however not much has shifted and there hasn't
been much action towards creating it. Plan S is about creating the paradigm
shift, but first we need to study and understand our problems and potential
solutions in depth. Henry Fiddler has been doing just that for the past
four decades. In order to get out of this vicious collapse cycle, let's
look at what we've learned lately that might help us avoid repeating past
mistakes.
-
Natural Laws, Users Manuals
For millions of years we've had bodies,
minds, and a planet, but unfortunately, the users manuals were missing!
It's no wonder that so many civilizations have collapsed, lacking any idea
of how things worked. Now, thanks to the scientific method and cheap energy,
we've figured out many of the natural laws of our universe. We now have
some users manuals that we might be able to use as a guide. This is helpful,
but we're still witnessing the collapse of Western Civilization. Why?
-
Brain-Mind, Users Manuals: Personal Development, Evolutionary
Psychology, Neuroscience
For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one
striking at the root. –Henry David Thoreau
The root of our problems is to
be found in our instinct based human nature. The key to enacting the long
awaited paradigm shift lies in our brains. But this information is very
new. Evolutionary Psychology only arrived on the scene ~3 decades ago (1975).
And Evolutionary Psychology and Personal Development are virtually unaware
of each other. We need to integrate these 3 brain-mind disciplines. We
must move away from trying to treat hundreds of effects independently,
and get to the root cause of our problem: our brains and how we use them.
Then we may design and install a well integrated sustainable civilization
for the long term. Result: paradigm shift!
Solution, Detail
Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.
–Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
Our minds are the most powerful
asset we have, and we highly underutilize them. Humanity does have the
ability to understand and solve its problems. We need to learn how and
why our brains function and malfunction. The best book on this from Personal
Development is Think and Grow Rich, © 1937, by Napoleon
Hill. Evolutionary Psychology is the newest brain-mind discipline. It explains
that our innate human nature is largely governed by instinct and is under
genetic control. This is best described in Dr. Timothy Miller's book, How
to Want What You Have, © 1996, Chapter 3: Human Nature.
In order to understand how our brains malfunction, read Jay Hanson's webpage
on the Maximum Power Principle: http://www.dieoff.org/page193.htm.
It contains many valuable insights from Evolutionary Psychology. Also,
Neuroscience is providing insights into the workings of our emotional and
spiritual centers in our brains.
There is a great deal of doom and gloom
thinking these days. Since solutions have not been forthcoming, many people
ignore problems and live in denial. We need to move past this kind of thinking
and into our power center. We can do this by changing our frame of reference
from our normal narrow frame (5 generations, ~160 years), out to our projected
species-span (~10 million years). From this vantage point, we can see the
"big picture" and act rationally.
We must stop talking about our problems,
without proposing solutions! This kind of talk results in "negative mind
programming", and leaves readers feeling demoralized. We need to be careful
how we use language and ideas, since everything we put into our minds ends
up programming them. Due to our ignorance of how our minds work, we have
been programming them for failure (i.e. collapse), rather than success
(i.e. sustainability).
To reverse this trend, we can find
times when people have met great and so called "impossible" challenges
and succeeded. How did these people use their minds? We can focus on their
strategies for success, study them, and model them. For example:
-
Wright Brothers, controlled flight
-
Apollo 11, moon landing, "by
the end of the decade" –JFK
-
Apollo 13, safe return, "Failure
Is Not an Option" –Gene Kranz
-
Ernest Shackleton, saved all 28 shipwrecked
crew members
-
Sir Edmund Hillary, first Mount Everest
summit
-
Roger Bannister, first under four minute
mile
We must build plans that take the
above into account. We must then act to implement those plans.
-
Generalist Knowledge Base
Due to the information explosion,
Western Civilization has become the most specialized civilization in history.
As a result, we tend to approach our problem solving from a narrow, insular,
specialist perspective. The list of our ills runs into the hundreds, with
some of the top offenders being: global warming, ecological destruction,
overpopulation, species extinction and resource depletion. All these ills
are inter-related and inter-dependent. Planning for a paradigm shift requires
generalist, interdisciplinary, outside the box thinking. This is just the
opposite of our insular, specialist thinking.
According to Matt Savinar and Jay Hanson
(mentioned above), there is no way out of this grand collapse and dieoff,
and they leave their readers in a doomy gloomy state. These well meaning
authors fail to bring the Personal Development brain-mind discipline into
the picture. Everything that Personal Development (the success industry)
teaches can be applied not only to individual success, but also to species
success.
The key to creating our species' plan
for a successful and sustainable future, is to move from specialized short
term thinking, to generalized long term thinking. We must also integrate
Personal Development at the species level. By doing this, a variety of
workable solutions will naturally appear. Plan S builds a knowledge base
that supports specialists to unite, and integrate their thinking and planning
processes. Then, we can all cooperate as generalists, and plan for our
species’ sustainable future.
Plan S considers hundreds of specialties
in the generalist knowledge base, which integrates the three brain-mind
disciplines. A specific plan has emerged called S-Day. A specific date
will be set (S-Day), on which a worldwide paradigm shift occurs. On this
date, humanity will move in a whole new direction with respect to attitudes,
laws, currencies, religion, science, material and energy use, etc. In other
words, a sustainable civilization for the long term will be born. Initially,
the infrastructure will appear the same, but humanity will enter a transition
period away from our present collapsing unsustainable Western Civilization,
and towards the new sustainable one.
Here are some obstacles that have
been identified and how they might be overcome.
-
People are resistant to change.
S-Day mitigates this resistance. It will also be handled through education,
legislation and normal attrition of older generations, with replacements
from younger generations that embrace the new policies.
-
"slow boiled frog" vs. "fast boiled frog". If collapse is very slow, powerful
policy makers may not feel sufficient pain to implement S-Day. Given our
increasing rate of resource depletion, this scenario is unlikely. However
if it does occur, Plan S will still leave future generations with a rich
generalist knowledge base. It will be invaluable in designing future sustainable
civilizations.
-
What if the S-Day concept doesn't work or isn't approved? Then the generalist
knowledge base will still exist, and policy makers will have the option
of using it to design better alternative plans. This might be in the near
future, or the far distant future. One of the major tenets of Personal
Development is to never give up. We keep improving the knowledge base,
taking into account what didn't work, and then building and implementing
better plans.
-
Personal Development Industry corruption. The success industry itself has
fallen on hard times. Success Magazine stopped publishing in 2001 after
100 years. This is because the industry became mired down under the same
obstacles as the larger society. In the process the industry has gotten
a bad name. An industry association needs to be formed. Then Personal Development
can reinvent itself, given the energy constraints in the new paradigm.
-
Religion-Science Conundrum. These 2 have been at each others' throats for
centuries. New information from both Evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience
reveals that our species evolved for spirituality and religion. So our
scientists are now confirming the importance and value of religion. This
new information should help to end this age old conflict and replace it
with a spirit of cooperation and understanding.
-
How can a global paradigm shift get funding, given our conservative funding
sources? We have identified a list of over 200 alternative funding sources
that are likely to respond enthusiastically to a well defined set of written
plans for paradigm shift. Some more well known sources are: John Templeton,
George Soros, Jeffrey Skoll, Pierre Omidyar, Paul Allen and Ed Begley,
Jr. These people and their foundations are actively seeking dramatic new
plans for humanity.
Appendix: Some Items Needing Archiving and
Interpretation



