Scientists tell us that the universe is infinite and contains infinite matter and yet we are still faced with overwhelming poverty and suffering on a global scale. How can this happen?
The universe is a giant Lego set: everything is made of the same building blocks and we are rapidly learning how to create different materials from scratch by combining atomic structures in new ways. Equally we now know that the alchemist was correct: we can turn any form of matter into any other form by re-arranging the lego blocks. Eventually we may even be able to turn the lightest elements in the Periodic Table into the heaviest: hydrogen to gold or plutonium.
So there you have it: you can take hydrogen (the most common element in the universe) and turn it into a loaf of bread or a kidney dialysis machine. If the futurists are right, then at some stage in the hopefully not too distant future, we will have the ability to satisfy the hunger of every empty belly and cure every disease and ill.
But look what science and industry has so far achieved for us. Yes, there has been a trickle down effect but we have inequality on an obscene, epic scale.
The problem is that our economic and political systems have taken Darwinism as their model. Survival of the fittest; grab all you can for yourself. So every time a new paradigm opens up before us, it swallowed by sharks whose power, greed and ambition ensures that it will be patented and owned by a tiny minority.
The internet should have helped to spread peace and prosperity: instead it gave us Amazon and Facebook and a repressive bunch of clowns in countries like China who smothered it or perverted it for their own gain.
Blockchain was devised by a crew of idealists who assumed a distributed ledger would put the man in the Congo on a par with the man in Silicon Valley.
Instead Blockchain is being monopolised by the usual genre of greedy and venal “entreprenooooors” and “thought leaders” to line their own pockets.
And so it will continue until we grow a whole new ethos, a whole new economic and political model.
Weltanschauung 