Book Review and Summary | Four Futures by Peter Frase
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- Опубликовано: 17 сен 2024
- Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a stark reminder of how unpredictable the future is and how essential it is to think about the future in terms of various different plausible scenarios. Peter Frase's book, Four Futures, is a nice example of this kind of way of envisioning the range of possible futures and thereby to reflect on how our decisions today can influence which of these future scenarios is more or less likely to happen. So, this video is a brief review of Frase's book to highlight the value of this kind of thinking.
▬▬ Links to the book ▬▬
On the publisher's site, Verso:
www.versobooks...
On Goodreads:
/ four-futures
▬▬ Audio visual source materials ▬▬
Music:
Song: Valence - Infinite [NCS Release]
Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds
Free Download/Stream: ncs.io/infinite
Watch: • Valence - Infinite | F...
I chose not to focus on polar opposites when I attempted a similar scenario of ‘Four Futures’. Instead I used two ends of a spectrum of competing ‘interests’, which happened to be collectivism and individualism. This was on the X axis and another spectrum on the Y, which happened to be the ‘potential’ or unfolding of ‘interests’. In this sense, competing and unfolding interests were eventually understood via a 3rd axis. The notion that guided my eventual balancing of the 4 quadrants was that the ultimate end state would be decided via a ‘common’ understanding or acceptance of the eventual disclosure of each four extremes. Assuming they can be known beforehand. In my case, they were. :)
Sounds interesting. I'm not sure I fully understand the Y axis you've described. My suspicion is that we have to look for political economic systems that allow us to live together without us having reached a point where we've all converged on a similar understanding about things. Indeed, I'd go further and suggest that it's neither possible, nor desirable for us to reach such a converged state, there's just too much evidence that suggests our understanding of the world is always going to be incomplete. Therefore our best option is to maintain a healthy, respectful diversity of opinions so that we can sort of 'hedge' against the likely mistakes in our perspectives. I refer to this meta-perspective as 'portfolism': ruclips.net/video/ytSz4uH_Kn8/видео.html
Oli, you point to the links for your other videos, but they’re not there
Another great vid
Hey Giles, thanks for letting me know, but I think it must have been a RUclips glitch. I've just double checked the end screen settings and seen it work one time, so hopefully it will work most of the time. But it's certainly annoying if those end video links are not appearing and I'm pointing to nothing! 😂
This book was quite provocative and I'm glad that I found it I believe through The Economist. My only wish was that it was more analytical in terms of which future we may or may not be most likely to head down.
Yeah, it's interesting to think about what appears to be the most likely outcome at the moment, but I'm also very keen to keep discussion away from any false sense of inevitability that demoralises people into inaction. What happens depends on what we collectively choose to do.
But my current hunch is that, without political effort to change course, our current trajectory is heading towards what Frase calls 'rentism' where, as the World Economic Forum famously suggested, we regular folk will own nothing and be happy! : ruclips.net/video/4zUjsEaKbkM/видео.html
@@Go-Meta I agree that the main take away is to actually start thinking outside the box and if anything I am happy this book forced me to do so. Previous to this, I feel like I envisioned to futures, one similar to our current political/economic system just further advanced and slightly "evolved", and the other as a post-apocalyptic type future (not that I place a high probability on this, save for maybe at the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine).
Standing back, I realize now that our way of life will change due to the major forces at play, and I too thought that Rentism was the most likely trajectory. However, I hope that somethign similar to what was described in the Socialism trajectory would be attainable. The buildling cohesive effort to do something about climate change bodes well, whether it is too little too late remains to be seen however
You’ve peaked my interest, so I’ll check out the book. I do have a question. How does the author define equality? It’s an easy word to throw around, but when you think about it it’s nearly impossible to achieve. Heck, you don’t always find equality among children reared by the same parents. Are all groups allowed to exist equally regardless of beliefs? Or are there preexisting guidelines which determine equality?
Hi, it's taken me a while to respond as I wanted to revisit the book to make sure that my recollection was accurate (and it's been a busy week!).
The author, Peter Frase, doesn't provide a stand alone definition of what he means by equality, but, in effect, talks about it as the opposite of inequality. He's certainly not talking about any kind of imposed homogeneity, but rather talking about a spectrum of possible societies where on the one hand you have the material wealth and power accumulating among a small elite (hierarchy) and on the other end of the spectrum you have wealth and power more equally distributed (equality).
I hope that's useful and hope you enjoy the book!
Cheers,
Oli