great series, watching group identity form, like a flower out of the mud, or a mushroom lifting many times its weight of cement, indeed cracking through it.

i find what you are articulating to be reminiscent of a 70's movement called 'voluntary simplicity' centred round stewart brand and kevin kelly's 'co-evolution quarterly', periodical offshoot of the epic 'whole earth catalog'. there were many articles by bateson, shumacher pointing forward to what we are discussing here and now.

i totally share your conviction, cyrille, that there is enough for everyone, it is a distribution problem, more than one of pure resource limits, and some would have one believe for their own agendas.

the other memory this evokes is that of zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, pirsig's 'metaphysics of quality', maybe chris will chime in and flesh this out a bit.

the bete noir is 'consumerism', per se. as long as we keep trying to float whole economies on the dubious seas of 'consumer confidence', 'xmas retail surges' and the like we are doomed to repeat the same arch=follies we have become so emaoured of and addicted to. and worse, we are modeling this unsustainable, obsolete paradigm to thousands of millions of 'new consumers' (barf).

the worst enemies to progress, apart from the financial hijinx we all belabour here so thoroughly, are the concepts of 'planned obsolescence', slave labour, and the calvinist worship of work for work's sake.

work may and should be as ennobling as love or art, but to deify it above all other gods is as foolish as deifying its chief symbol, money.

yes this must be communicated as both a pragmatic as well as a -merely- :)) moral issue. only then will people whose faculties have not acquired such luxuriously rigorous levels of self-examination can see that even the most myopic, self-centred agendas depend upon such givens as drinkable water, fit air, and balanced lives.

seeing as peeps only see what they are paid to take on board, the answer probably consists in creating new ways to grab their atomised attention span, and ride a message in on the back of something they already let through their filters.

discussing goals is creative use of time and candlepower, uniting around themes and messages and spinning them in a good way, since spin is inevitably part of messaging.

studying the moral hinges creaking in the series 'madmen' is illuminating, i find, as we are all still swimming in the gluey amber of those attitudes, they are our roots, and heavily infested ones they are too!

reverse engineering society's moral codices is not for the faint of heart, we can use all the help we can get.  

tibetan philosophy holds that the way up is the same one we came down, another reason that people won't listen to some new idea unless they're being entertained at the same time...

like who listens to the air hostess explaining how the safety equipment works before take-off?

portugese peasants... that's the endgame, but networked this time around.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty