Chapter 1: The Finale

As already noted knowledge creation, storage and use has led us to an era where knowledge is now the main value generator. We believe knowledge generates value supplanting any need for exclusivity in territory, land or property.

At one time, like other animals, we relied on the planet’s bounty for survival. We protected our territory but did not war over it. Respect for the space of other’s and one’s own lives created fluid boundaries, territory, similar to that of other species.

With farming, land becomes the key resource. This needs more than respect for territory. It requires active protection. To support our independence from the planet’s bounty we had to develop the institution of a state to support our position as landowners. The state defended us against those seeking to take our property.

Efficient farming requires stability and social harmony so such states were based on communally induced stability. The masters of this were the Han Chinese guided by Confucian and Taoist philosophy. It was we believe no accident that communal China was the richest country in the world well into the 18^th Century.

However disruptive individual creativity overturned the social evolutionary advantages of this communality. The chaos generated in the West by the pursuit of individual self-interest embracing private exclusivity in property did spawn conflict but also the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism.

In the 19th Century the UK became the First Industrial Nation. In 1800 over 95% of its population earned their livelihood from agriculture by 1900 less than 6% did. By then most earned their living using machinery, i.e. capital. It should be noted that farmers did not become poorer only less powerful.

Knowledge not capital now generates more and more of North American and European wealth. We would suggest capitalistic production in the 21^st Century is in a similar position to agriculture in the 19^th it will slowly become less significant as knowledge creation and distribution on the Internet becomes more so.

This book addresses the processes driving to this. These create then intensify the patterns of human connectivity that represent an evolving brain for Gaia, our living planet. Fortunately as we hope to demonstrate the development of the collective human consciousness to effect this does not depend on well meaning admonitions for humans to do so. While historically, rational or emotionally derived pleas as to what we should, or ought not to, do have had an impact they have not been the principal means by which real big change in human affairs has been brought about. What does bring about real big change is creative adaptive evolution driven by people’s perception of their interest.