 � What policies and behaviors, what underlying beliefs are good for all people, good for the environment, good for future generations?
 � What laws and values cultivate and support, in a sustainable way, justice and health, optimal living, maximal growth and education for all?
 � How do we build and maintain a culture of empathy, compassion and kindness, which protects people from predators-- sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists, oppressors-- in a way that protects all our humanity?
This work is under way. Economists like David Korten, Richard Wolff, and Gar Alperovitz and Thom Hartmann and Marjorie Kelly are writing and speaking about bottom-up economic models that support workers and the commons. YesMagazine explores such positive visions as their mission. We need to make this a bigger, stronger movement. We need t build a wave that creates a vision and which supports a whole culture, which includes political platforms, academic studies and grassroots movements.
I write a lot about bottom-up visions and values, including my book, The Bottom-up Revolution, citing the writings of E.F. Schumacher, the research of Primatologists and anthropologists who have made it clear that we humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years in more humane, more empathic, kinder cultures that were wiped out by civilization and industrialization. We need a future positive anthropological vision of what we can become, what we can return to-- smaller, more local, more caring, kind, empathic, connected, interdependent, cooperative, at harmony with nature.
There are a lot of problems we have to address-- big systemic problems-- extractive, predatory capitalism, the cimate crisis, imperialism, neoliberalism, corporate personhood, huge problems with election integrity, massive inequality injustices in economics, crime, prison, race, immigration, food safety, and more.
As I said at the beginning of this article, it is not enough to resist the system and address the problems that exist. It is absolutely inadequate to aim for repairing the symptoms of what is broken. We need big, positive visions which lift our sights, visions and goals higher, towards horizons where there are bright futures, not scotch tape and bubblegum fixes for the pathological system we currently inhabit.
Let's remember the advice of R. Buckminster Fuller,
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
Those visions will include positive visions and models for ecology, energy, food, healthcare, economics, education, politics, power, justice, freedom, democracy, media, entertainment, for starters.
There will be characteristics that will apply to all-- sustainability, justice and fairness, kindness and empathy, empowerment of agency and consciousness, basic rules and regulations.
These big visions and questions will set out possible futures with solutions that may or not be compatible with the existing system, the existing powers that be. We talk about exploring outer space and the bottoms of the deepest ocean trenches-- as unexplored territories. Well, we also need to explore new possibilities, the possible human, as Jean Houston described, and the positive future-- unexplored ways that we can ALL live together and survive healthily and happily on this one and only planet we call home.
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