When I was learning to drive, I was afraid of hitting the curb. It made me a bad driver. My driver's ed guy told me the common sense advice of 'don't pay attention to the curb - watch the road'. When I internalized that, I drove much better.
It was so simple.
We cannot even conceive of a good future today. We have no vision of what the better future looks like. We need positive fiction to help paint the picture.
Paying attention to the negative just gives you more negative.
The hard question is why it is so hard to imagine a good future. Maybe because we no longer understand our own core problems deeply.
I took the Motorcycle Safety Foundations safety course before getting my motorcycle license. They have a similar mantra about avoiding something in the road (puddle, pot hole, car with no taillights).
Look where you want to go.
I don't know where I'm supposed to look right now.
You can consciously harness "target fixation" for good purposes, though. It would be more difficult to talk about that side the coin if it were referred to as "hazard fixation".
To me at least it's hard to imagine a good future because I understand climate change will ruin quality of life for most of humanity. I know what must be done to combat it will not be done due to the economic systems that dominate most countries. It's easier to envision the end of the world than it is to envision the end of capitalism.
Just knowing we do have the ability to slow things down, but actively choose not to in the name of profits and comfort is incredibly depressing and demotivating. The future looks bleak because it will be.
We don't even need this - we have a pretty good explanation for what's going on, it's just that people don't want to admit it. the reality is that "work grows to fill available space", but, up until a point. Slowing/declining populations, but high workforce productivity speak to the basic tenets of the population-led economic growth model starting to get a little suspect.
A very broad brush view might be that it took 60 years for automations in the workplace to finally match pace with demand, but increasing automation in knowledge work vs the potential for aggregate demand to fall means we'll have to come to terms with the "required" level of productivity, rather than assuming more growth is the objective.
If we can get this right, we might see the globe get more equal, more leisure time, and a shrinking of the investment sector since the pursuit of growth might get more nuanced. All of that would take a long time, though.
Anything written about "Ending Capitalism" will remain speculative fiction for the foreseeable future. Capitalism has become humanity's majority religion--people believe in it almost without question. Ending capitalism as about as likely as ending Christianity or ending Islam. I don't think it's possible to have enough utopian fiction to cause us even envision ending it.
I think we can't see past because we rely on it for how we live today. But if that reliance went away we would drop it in a heartbeat.
Like imagine if we suddenly got access to replicator technology. Why would we need to care about the stock market? No more factories or shipping, just throw in your old bike and get a new back. Not saying that this is a likely scenario, but there's a sliding scale of far-fetchedness between having replicators and having no difference from today that Sci-fi can explore.
If someone suddenly invented the Star Trek replicator, it would be instantly outlawed. The entirety of Corporate America would dump $ billions into lobbying for the harshest possible penalties for producing, selling, owning, or using one.
Everyone has access to the "copy / cp" commands, yet the USA to this day criminalizes its use on certain digital files, at the behest of the (relatively small) Copyright Industry. I have no doubt that a working "copy, but for physical stuff" would be criminalized in the same way, this time with massive physical goods industries pushing for legislation. Enforcement would be draconian.
If it was an almost-replicator big corps would mass produce it and sell it. If it was an actual replicator that can also make other replicators you'd only need a few of them before anyone can get one from their neighbour.
Not sure I understand what you're getting at here. The only country not dominated by market forces that I know of is China and it's barely the case even there.
> The only country not dominated by market forces that I know of is China and it's barely the case even there
There are diverse examples that are much better for this than China. E.g. Bhutan or North Korea. There are also non-national societies such as the Amish.
I'm saying: I can imagine ways of running a political economy other than capitalism, and I know of other people who have done more work than I have to imagine such things, but there just doesn't seem to be very much interest in an authentically post-capitalist system relative to the vast interest in taking some other political issue entirely (technology, the environment, race, gender, various national or inter-imperial rivalries, etc) and conflating it with capitalism to encourage pouring a lot of effort into it (the thing conflated with capitalism).
When I was learning to drive, I was afraid of hitting the curb. It made me a bad driver. My driver's ed guy told me the common sense advice of 'don't pay attention to the curb - watch the road'. When I internalized that, I drove much better.
It was so simple.
We cannot even conceive of a good future today. We have no vision of what the better future looks like. We need positive fiction to help paint the picture.
Paying attention to the negative just gives you more negative.
The hard question is why it is so hard to imagine a good future. Maybe because we no longer understand our own core problems deeply.
The world waits for the new story.