Doug's Blog
The New World
I have read a couple of books over the last few weeks that each claim that a new future for human kind is at hand. Ya, I know, it sounds pretty new-age, but they really weren't that off the wall. They each had their own and different opinions on how the manifestation would occur and what it would produce, but the interesting element about the two books was what, exactly, was at the root of the change. The change, they suggested, would be manifest by an evolution in human thinking and understanding. Now that notion caught my attention.
Lets assume that you believe in Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Of course the human body has evolved over the course of millions of years to be as it is today, but it isn't that much different than our Cro Magnon or Neanderthal forebearers. Our brains have evolved as well, but in reality, Neanderthal Man had a larger brain than we do today. The real evolution of human kind has been in the development of organized society. It is society's development, progress and evolution that has made human kind what it is today. It has allowed us to compound our independant thought processes to advance our collective knowledge and understanding, and therefore our collective success.
The challenge is that our brains capabilities and our minds understanding of the impact of the evolution of society has not necessarily kept pace with that very evolution. In short, you could say that we are operating the most current high tech software on a very old operating system . . . a high tech complex 2009 computer program on a 1990 DOS operation system. We are capable of keeping up, but often we feel tired, lost, grumpy, and as though the whole world is just moving too fast, and on occassion, the (our personal) entire system shuts down.
All well and good, Doug, you may say, but why does this warrant a blog from an Alberta politician. Thank you for reading this far and allow me to briefly explain.
I was reading a brilliant blog by a constituent of Battle River - Wainwright (you can read her blog here: .">http://newsights.wordpress.com/2009/04/04/the-future-of-libraries/ . . . who is also 'plind' on Twitter, and I suddenly found a connection, and what I believe is evidence of the evolution, or rather, the evolution to come.
We all still think about infrastructure and believe it to be critically important. We always say that our town will die without a hospital BUILDING, or a school BUILDING, or a town BUILDING, or a library BUILDING. Historically that was the case, and to much of an extent it is still true today. The evolution has only begun so our mindsets are still operating on yesterday's reality today, rather than tomorrow's potential today.
As for libraries we think about the building and books as a physical possession, and we don't think about the online world. Online, however, there is access to virtually every book every written, whether it is ordered in as a physical entity or download to some electronic device. We focus on the physical place. For schools we think about the physical school, and we demand a modern nice physical school with physical teachers in it. A place for a children to go. Slowly we have seen teachers teaching more and more online, via video conference and smartboards, but still it occurs within school divisions that focus on a central building, a place, that is still in close proximity. The same goes for healthcare. We need a physical hospital to go to that is complete in itself where all of our healthcare needs can be met. We can't see it otherwise, and have the notion, often, that if we don't have our own hospital building, we don't have healthcare.
We try to have the building so we can house as much of the physical books and teachers and medical staff that we can acquire. As time progresses, however, all that knowledge, education and wisdom we seek will be available in the ether, the non-physical world, still a place mind you, but not a place or building that we can see down the street in our town. I am not arguing that there is NO need for physical buildings anymore, I am simply suggesting that the physical asset located in our town, or right near where we live, is not going to be as important as it used to be. Granted, those minds we need to access will need some physical place to be, but physical place will not be as important as is, or should be, th access to the minds, ideas, and intelligencia within them in the future.
Why do we resist that progress now? We may think it is because we don't trust the etheric world, or that we think we can't survive as a community without the building because others won't move there unless we have the building, or it may be that we feel we possess something (it isn't transient or fleeting) if the building is there, but I suggest it is actually something more simple. Our minds are evolving, but haven't evolved to the point where we can see past the physical building and deeper into what is really important. Namely that we don't always need the building in order to have the contents of it.
Is the point of the school the building or the education? Is the point to the hospital the building or the healthcare? Is the point to the library the building and the books, or is it the learning and the reading? In every case we all know it is the latter, but historically we couldn't get the later without the former . . . now, and even more into the future, the former (the building) will have no bearing on the access to the later.
Just think of the benefits. Fewer government dollars would have to be spent on buildings, which means more money to hire more teachers and nurses and doctors, pay social services staff better, pay librarians better, and . . . well you get the picture of what could be done with the $7 billion being spent this year by the province on infrastructure. It also means fewer buildings to construct out of increasingly rare resources, it means less emissions and pollutants from heating, it means less drain on the competitive electricity market (which should drive prices down), it means less good land stripped and paved over, it means . . . well, you can think of hundreds of other examples I am sure.
So, we are entering a phase of evolution of the human mind, or psyche, or consciousness that will see an, albiet painful, transition from placing the highest of values on the shell of an entity, to the contents of the entity itself, to what the real meaning of the entity holds . . . which is what we meant to value all along. It is only because of the online world, the ether, the power to be everywhere from wherever you are, that truly allows us to focus our resources to what is rightfully important.
I can already tell you that I will get calls from those who say that I am obviously saying this so we don't have a hospital, or so we won't fund the library, or so our school won't be renovated. That's not at all true. I am just saying that our mindset should change, and will in the future, to understanding that what is most important is that we have access to the best doctor for our ailment, the best teacher for our class, the best book for our report, rather than access to the best building that may be empty because we spent all of your/our money on the building, instead of the issue. The new world of connectivity will allow that to happen, and will lead the evolution.
