Toward a Society of the Future
The necessary ingredients for personal and cultural evolution
Teódulo López Meléndez is a Venezuelan author. Based in Caracas, he has written numerous books and countless articles exploring universal themes of identity, communication, and possibility. Here is another sample, translated into English and shared on Medium…
As has been observed, not only do ethnic, national, and ideological divisions exist, but divisions of position over time. Only a very small portion of the world’s population already lives in the future. Millions of people instead live in the past, seeing no need to prepare for what lies ahead. Many of them are organized into societies that live by old paradigms and obsolete norms. In terms of political organization, they cling to principles that can only be taken as obvious, while a perished ruling class clings to them to keep the masses living in yesterday. These are what we call the Societies of the Past.
The objective of political institutions is to attain the greatest possible level of happiness for their citizens. Within the quiet mediocrity of small souls, no room exists for openness towards new forms of social organization and political forms. In terms of sociopolitical evolution, these are like small tribes frozen in time. For those tribes restricting access to the future, the road to the greatest possible happiness is through the maintenance of obsolete structures, and decayed thinking.
To counteract such inertia, Societies of the Future must build what has been called “an enabling environment.” Such an ecosystem involves the creation of cultural, economic, social, and political conditions that encourage the full development of each human.
The determining factor to successfully mobilize these processes is knowledge. In other words, the construction of knowledge is foundational to the very conception of development. That demands the redefinition of vision, paradigms, technical, methodological and financial capabilities. Evolution in this direction is toward what has been called Knowledge Societies.
Some authors have spoken of “knowledge consumption” as a characteristic of such a new social organization. Rich countries generate knowledge, creating a metric that distances them from poor countries, revealing a delta much greater than that between their income levels. Such an evolution to a Knowledge Society is not easy, since it involves everything from solving information transfer problems and the breaking of monopolies on intellectual property, to the rational and necessary questioning of science itself. At its core, so-called local knowledge must be passed through to create the foundation of emerging knowledge.
What has become evident is that the old paradigm of objectivity must be replaced by the new paradigm of reflexivity. Over-simplification must also succumb to an understanding of complexity, as the Society of the Future moves away from simple diagnoses to embrace the creation of all possibilities, through all our possible senses.
Here’s the original in Spanish…
Read more translations of Teódulo López Meléndez…
Visit his blog for a compendium of his writing…
