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3.7 Future TrendsVersion 1.3 June 2017                                  (Previous Version) These are the questions we ask in the introduction (Section 0.1.6 – paragraph 20): Where is the world heading? Has capitalism triumphed? Is materialism the best we can hope for? Is the world doomed? Will the global financial system totally collapse? Will we have World War III? Will there be a nuclear Armageddon? Will we be wiped out by a global pandemic? Will population and consumption growth destroy the environment? Will climate change destroy modern civilisation? The concerns raised and the trends discussed in this chapter will change over time, as some issues are resolved and new issues arise. But we can safely accept that the trends identified here will still be of concern for many decades to come. How we react to these will depend on the choices we make as individuals, as societies and as a species, in the personal and political spheres, as discussed in Parts 6 and 7. Based on a factual historical analysis, we can have no certainty that humanity will continue progress intellectually, spiritually and politically. But our historical analysis does give us grounds for hope: some open societies have survived existential crises, and though some nations of the world are still closed, and some powerful nations are still recalcitrant, the world as a whole is open: critical issues such as climate change are debated internationally. Further grounds for hope are that there are known strategies to address many of the crises we face, such as the population explosion, climate change, pollution, the risk of pandemics, and financial crises. There is of course disagreement about these, promoted by vested interests who fear a commercial loss if the proposed strategies are adopted. But greater education of the electorate It is these social aspects, finding and promoting the political will to take action, that is most uncertain. And predicting social change is notoriously foolhardy: who in the nineteen sixties would have predicted the conservatism that has spread around the world, in the West, Middle East and East, since the 1980s? Who would then have predicted the impact of the internet and social media? We look at how we know what we know under the following topic headings:
This is the current summary of our conclusions in this area: Now free market capitalism has triumphed over communism we have excessive consumption, nations struggling to control complex financial systems, population growth and increasing pollution per head threatening our environment, and a risk of a collapse of global society, unless we devise strategies to fix these issues.  more                                                             Statement 20 The global crises we face require concerted action, so we need to develop and promote globally accepted beliefs and values to provide the basis for addressing these issues.
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