It has been said that the holodeck will be the last thing humans ever invent. The "holodeck" was a device on Star Trek that generated a fully immersive, perfect simulation of whatever sort of reality the user desired. The argument is that once people had access to such an immersive form of virtual reality, they would never want to leave. The futuristic equivalents of World of Warcraft and Second Life would easily out compete mundane reality as the places people would want to spend their time.
While the claim may be a bit exaggerated, it is still true that we spend billions of dollars each year on temporary escapes from our daily lives. Entire industries--movies, novels, role-playing games, computer games--are built around meeting this need. Of course, it is quite possible to have exciting adventures in real life. The problem with this is that being in an "action scene" for real is usually more terrifying than fun. There is also no assurance that the adventurer will come out of it without some horrible injury, or not make it at all.
In fiction, we can vicariously experience the excitement and thrills in complete safety. Even if the protagonists die, the audience walks out of the theater unharmed. In a game, the player can always select "New Game" and go again. Most of the time, we can expect a happy ending for our protagonist. It's all great fun, but it has a major flaw: at some point, you reach the last page of the novel or the credits roll, and then it's back to the workaday world you were trying to get away from in the first place.
What if there was a way you could have all the benefits of a good fiction, but never reach a last page? What if you could import the elements of an exciting story into your daily life so that you could become a protagonist in an exciting drama, but without additional risk, and have the adventure hero's assurance of a happy ending?
You can: it's called religion.
With religion, you can engage in "spiritual warfare," joining the great cosmic struggle between Good and Evil. You can develop your psychic powers or help prepare the Earth for contact with the Galactic Federation. You can learn how to cast spells and invoke spiritual powers to aid you.
With some religions, the great climax of the story is always just ahead. Jesus is going to return any day now to rapture His faithful into everlasting bliss, in time to escape the part with all the explosions and death. The starships of the Galactic Federation will arrive when the moment is right and usher in a new age. Come 2012, the world will be completely transformed, to Utopia or Apocalypse, whichever you prefer.
Then, like some jerk talking in the theater, along comes some skeptic, some debunker, some atheist or freethinker to tell you that none of it is real. Booooooo!!! Right? Here at FreeThoughtAction, we offer a flier entitled "Get Real." It provides a concise set of principles you can use to become more attuned to reality and operate more successfully in it.
Perhaps I'm biased, but I happen to think it's a very nice flier, and the world would be a better place if people practiced the principles it offers. However, if you think of the injunction to 'Get real,' it's hard not to hear it coming out in a disparaging tone, crushing some pleasant fantasy or other. 'Reality' has some pretty negative connotations, when you think about it. We're all familiar with the phrase 'too good to be true.' There is no commonly used figure of speech equivalent to 'too bad to be true.'
When you get down to it, organizations like this one exist to promote adherence to reality. Reality is, in a sense, our product. How can we sell something people spend billions of dollars (not counting money spent on religion!) to get away from? This is one of the great challenges secularists like us face in confronting religion.
If we think about what aspects of reality we use things like fiction, religion, and intoxicants to escape from, we can pretty much boil it down to two things: misfortune, and boredom. Developed societies have done a pretty good job of dealing with the first. Unlike most of our ancestors throughout history, we have to worry about obesity, rather than starvation. One of the reasons that Europe is so much more secular than the United States could be the fact that European nations offer much more comprehensive social safety nets than can be found in the U.S.. There is less perceived need to turn to faith as a means of warding off misfortunes such as illness and injury, or for solace when the misfortune comes.
This leaves boredom. By 'boredom,' I am referring to non-interesting, non-meaningful times in our lives. For many of us, 'work' is a prime example. We spend about half of our waking time doing something we would never do if it weren't for the paychecks. If we have to commute long distances to get there, it swells beyond half, the additional time spent in traffic jams.
Is it possible for us to re-think our economic and social systems and our place in them as individuals? Can we find ways to transform our lives so as to fill them with real meaning and purpose, rather than finding those things within a fictional gloss of religion?
The Sun Economy
Buckminster Fuller used to promote the concept of the 'Sun Economy.' Imagine for a moment that we had a currency backed by energy. A dollar = 1 kilowatt-hour. Under such a system, money would literally shine down from the sky every day. All that would be necessary to have a continuing supply of free money--a 'Sun Income'--is the technology to collect the Sun's energy and turn it into useable electricity.
We have technologies that do this now, and we could certainly have far better technologies if we applied our economic resources and genius to the task of developing them. The United States currently spends as much money on military force as the entire rest of the planet combined. Unless we consider ourselves to be at war with the entire rest of the planet, is such expenditure really necessary?
Consider for a moment the amount of human ingenuity poured into projects like the F-22 Raptor, an incredibly advanced jet fighter craft being built by a nation that has not fought against an adversary with an air force in a generation and has no plans to do so in the foreseeable future. The countries with air forces capable of challenging ours also have nuclear weapons and ICBM's, making conventional war a no-win scenario for all.
If the United States decided to spend only half as much as the entire rest of the planet on weaponry, and put the other half into research and development of technologies designed to enhance the quality of our lives and those of the people with whom we share our planet, what might we be able to accomplish?
Take a moment to imagine an economy modeled on the natural world. A basic, guaranteed income for all would rain down from the sky each day, and blow in the wind. Using personal fabrication devices like '3-D printers,' or later in the century, nanotechnology to make the 'stuff' we need and want by using and re-using recycled materials. The goods themselves could be designed with recycling and reuse in mind, so-called 'cradle to cradle' manufacturing.
A forest is able to generate all sorts of 'goods and services' for the community of organisms that live there and the planet as a whole (e.g. oxygen, and carbon sequestration) and do so sustainably. Trees pay no energy bills. Squirrels don't pay rent on the trees or income taxes on the nuts. A 'Sun Economy' based on renewable energy and 'cradle to cradle' manufacturing could conceivably overturn the assumption of scarcity on which current economics is based.
Advancing automation could be cheered as a way of eliminating more and more 'work' for humans, freeing human time for more creative and meaningful tasks. Instead of the Protestant work ethic, our model could be the ancient Greek leisure class, a leisure class consisting of an entire society rather than a small elite.
Of course, I'm making this sound much simpler than it is. However, we have a planet packed with Intelligent Designers. Could we not do at least as well as natural selection's trial-and-error in creating the economic, political and social 'forest' we live in? Even without such a system in place, can we find ways to imbue our real lives with meaning, purpose, and value, so that we will not need a spray-on coating of religious fiction to make our lives worth living?
If we set that as our goal, the techniques we need to make it happen are right there in that aforementioned 'Get Real' flier:
Gather information
Entertain new ideas
Test assumptions
Require objective evidence
Employ logic and reason
Accept personal responsibility
Live for the here and now
