The Sustaining Society

Abstract

I have a lot of friends who have told me lately that they no longer read newspapers. This isn’t because they get their news on the internet now, but because they can’t stand to read news at all because the news is so grim. I haven’t gone that far, but I am sympathetic. It’s undeniable that reading the paper today is a fairly gruelling experience, because the news seems to be full of almost nothing but accounts of the various crises that afflict much of the planet. In particular, the global economic order most of us live under - so-called ‘free-market’ capitalism - seems to lurch from crisis to crisis and indeed often seems to be in a state of perpetual emergency.