It's Time to Kick Over the Traces.

It began in England around the year 1760 almost five thousand years after humans were first organized into civilizations in southwest Asia and northeast Africa. It, the Industrial Revolution, ushered in the greatest and most abrupt changes and advancements ever witnessed by mankind.

The Industrial Revolution was truly revolutionary and shaped virtually all our modes of organization - economic, industrial, political, social and geo-political. It was much more than new ways of making stuff. It was a revolution in energy, especially fossil fuels, that altered the ways we mass produced products, accessed resources and markets, the ways we lived and our relationship with governments, the way we waged war across the entire world. It was a revolution of everything.

And now it's run its course.

At the start of the Industrial Revolution the global population stood at some 770 million. Today we've swelled in numbers tenfold. China alone is nearly and soon will be double the entire world human population at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution just two and a half centuries ago.

770 million what? There seem to be no reliable data for per capita consumption in much of the world in 1770 but in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution was launched, average per capita GDP first hit 2,000 pounds sterling in GDP in the 1830s and has grown between 30 and 40 times that in the UK today.  Most of the world still trails Britain in per capita GDP but much of it is beginning on the road to catching up.

Let's say that, since 1760 we've increased our gross numbers tenfold while we've increased our individual consumption about twenty fold. That means humankind's burden on the Earth and every other lifeform that must share it with us has increased about 200 fold in 250 years. And, we're warned, we're on the cusp of another explosion in growth, both population and individual consumption. They've even coined a name for it, "The Great Acceleration."

The Revolution is fizzling and fast.

We've become nations run by fools and grifters. You can see the fear, even despair, in their eyes and hear it in their words. They don't have answers and they know it. A tale of two prime ministers, both named Trudeau.

The first held his head up. He looked forward to the future. He had vision and that came through in advancements such as our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  That Trudeau looked at people, friend or foe, in the eye and when he spoke it was with a confidence that usually disarmed his adversaries.

The second Trudeau reveals little that speaks of the first. He isn't confident. He stammers and looks to the ground. There is no grand vision. Duty to country is obscured by the drive to retain power in the next election. Party over country. Party over people. Don't take risks. Don't make waves. Leave the hard things for the next guy.

Bill Moyers hosted an excellent series many years ago on posterity. He explored what it was and the fundamental role it had played in building his country, America. He looked at how posterity had fallen out of fashion in the halls of power. Back then we didn't realize that posterity was to be one of the big losers in the age of neoliberalism. Moyers concluded by imagining how some fine day posterity might again claim its place in government planning and policy. That last bit is beginning to look like a pipe dream.

Posterity is preparing a foundation for the future. It's investing money and effort today to leave the land better for coming generations. It's also the equivalent of putting a new roof on the house or keeping the fence well maintained. It's about doing what all of us, at some level, know is right.

This "Everyday Low Taxes" mentality that has taken hold cannot and does not accommodate posterity. It's extremely dangerous thinking.

The prosperity, the ease and comfort we enjoy today, was paid for in good measure by the sacrifices and investments made by our grandparents and our parents. Do you imagine you paid for those highways and overpasses and bridges and docks? We balk at even paying to maintain that essential infrastructure and we watch it decay before our own eyes.

We're cannibalizing our societies - extracting every small vestige of value that was bequeathed to us by our predecessors while putting next to nothing back in for future generations. There is no "pay forward" in the era of Everyday Low Taxes. From the squats occupied by the homeless to the boardrooms of giant enterprise, society is starting to crumble.

I recall a couple of articles written for The Globalist by Chris Kutarna, academic, award winning writer, Oxford scholar and more.

In one essay, excerpted from "Age of Discovery," Kutarna addresses the paralyzing power of this age of uncertainty.

...uncertainty reigns supreme – so much so that the boardrooms of many Fortune 500 companies have decided to punt.

Instead of investing, which they are supposed to do in order to grow their businesses, they are collectively holding onto a record wad of cash. They simply lack the confidence to make bold investments.

Whether as citizens, policy makers or business leaders, going about our life in a tumultuous time without a reliable way to make sense of surprises is downright dangerous.

Why? First, because rapid change usually demands rapid responses, and — as the cash accounts of big companies show — when we lose all confidence in our judgments, we hesitate when instead we need to act.

Second, because — as present-day surges of anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain, anti-trade agendas in the United States and ultra-nationalism in India suggest — it’s when ugly surprises leave us grasping for the big picture that we are most likely to adopt the wrong picture for the wrong reasons.

...

The hollowed-out middle needs to find its collective voice, roll up its sleeves and reshape society’s distribution of unwarranted gains and blameless losses. Or wait for the times to shape it for them.

In another essay to mark the 500th anniversary of Luther's Reformation, Kutarna finds that faith in the prevailing dogmas of the Western world is again faltering, perhaps calling for another revolution or reformation.

Economists now realize that past a certain point, the social costs of rising inequality outweigh the incentive benefits of letting people hoard the wealth they create. Extreme inequality depresses economic growth.

The logic is that when the rich get richer, they don’t buy more stuff, because they already have everything; they just save and invest more.

However, if the poor get richer, they buy all the things they don’t yet have – including, most importantly, better health for themselves and better schooling for their kids.

The very rich can also tilt the economic playing field in socially harmful ways by using their outsized wealth to influence policymaking. They can fix the rules to favour themselves and to discourage would-be competitors from innovating.

That leads us to the second grave doubt that is gnawing away the faith/foundation of our society. Can democracy still deliver “rule by the people”?

In authoritarian states, the capture and corruption of public institutions by wealthy elites is plain to see.

Russia’s oligarchs won vast fortunes at taxpayers’ expense in the early 1990s when, under the guise of market reform, state-owned infrastructure and natural resources were sold off to friends of the regime for pennies on the dollar.

In China, more than one-third of all wealth is in the hands of the 1%. Corrupt officials, many now disgraced, have amassed private fortunes through their control of state assets and their authority to award licences and contracts without independent oversight.

In the United States, too, the top 1% hold more than one-third of all wealth. In the 2016 election cycle, U.S. presidential and congressional candidates raised and spent a total of over $7 billion.

...

Back in the 1990s-era Battle of Seattle, protestors still had faith in democracy to set things right. It was the lack of democratic scrutiny over trade deals that frustrated them.

But by the time they arrived in New York’s Zuccotti Park to Occupy Wall Street, ‘If Voting Made a Difference, It Would Already Have Made a Difference’ and ‘Error 404: Democracy not Found’ were top-trending #slogans.

As it was for Martin Luther, so it is for many today: The distinction between corrupt leaders and a corrupt system has eroded until the only way forward now is to reject the whole religion.

For them, through too many successive crises, no leader has convincingly demonstrated how our present politics and economics can accomplish anything, but to magnify the gains of the winners at the cost of the losers.

Our "religion" today is neoliberal capitalism and it is a corruption of our society. It is detrimental to our society, it is devastating to our environment and it lays waste to any hopes we may still have for our grandchildren. No neoliberal leader "has convincingly demonstrated how our present politics and economics can accomplish anything." That goes for Canada's leadership as for any of them. And, yes, we're painfully slow to realize it but "the only way forward now is to reject the whole, utterly foul religion."

As Kutarna argues it's up to us. We either reclaim power in our own hands and use it to reshape our society or wait for the times to shape it for us.