I remain optimistic we will see how to turn this round very soon. I agree with you we are on the decline for now though. To me as an Engineer, we peaked sometime in the seventies and eighties, when things like concorde, and the space shuttle still seemed to have bright, sparkling futures.
As you know, my thrust in Medium is to try to highlight what I see is the thing we have fundamentally wrong; our handling of energy. To me, it is clear this is the reason for our decline, and if we dig deep into this, we start to realise that all the progress we've made since around 1900, is actually not due to our capitalist economy at all, but actually in spite of it. If we are brutally honest about the way capitalism works, it isn't progressive at all, but oppressive. By capitalist I mean the apolitical greedy practice of using capital to maintain power over all things, practiced even by communist governments, as well as those overtly championing capitalism.
At the heart of it is human avarice, which by consuming every individual, is consuming the species. We are eating ourselves, living on on the energy of one another. I wrote a story trying to characterise this as "The Mice", a while ago.
On this "triumph of avarice", its origin seems to be around 1900, when a certain tapestry of the same name adorned someone's study, the study of one JP Morgan, where he no doubt spent many hours admiring its twisted genius.
JP is long gone, but the tapestry is still there, revered and celebrated still within JP's study, preserved now as a monument, an honor to the "Great man", and his achievements, part of the JP Morgan Foundation Museum.
But ask exactly what did it achieve for humanity, the answer, if we are honest, is not good.
Nikola Tesla's most famed effort was a very ambitious attempt to give humanity a system offering free, solar powered energy and internet-like connectivity, 120 years ago.
His only funder in that effort was JP Morgan, who defunded it, presumably after Morgan had analysed the likely effects of free money and free energy on his banking business.
Right there, he made a conscious decision to put the interests of his bank above the interests of humanity, and ironically that decision against the whole of humanity, turned out to be neither in his own interests, nor his banks.
Just think for a minute or two how different the world might have been, if Tesla had succeeded in his quest. The driver of profit, and the power of capital would have been removed. That would have united all of humanity as one. There would no longer have been any incentive to compete with one another over dwindling resources.
The only thing driving us, from that point on would have been progress of our species. With free energy there would have been no shortage of funds for any human enhancing project, all good ideas would have been funded.
Money generated in that world would have quickly propagated to all needing it, eliminating hunger and starvation around the world, including the hunger of the man who shot the elite Franz Ferdinand and wife, starting the first world war.
Solid anti-vaccine projects backed by all of humanity would have appeared against the virus onset of Spanish flu, which instead took out fifty million people.
Countless millions of human geniuses, in addition to the ones we know like Einstein, and Tesla, would have been born in the many starving war torn countries we've seen around the world since 1900.
We would have had no need for nuclear weapons or even nuclear power, except maybe for the very specialist application of spaceships and underwater exploratory vehicles.
Tesla, Einstein, and even JP himself, might have been flying to the stars right now with us, on those products of human ingenuity, given the unlimited power and propagation of knowledge which would have resulted from Tesla's project, had it been allowed to succeed.
From that point of view, I think we actually peaked in 1900, that was the identifiable point in history, when we can say for sure, the progress of humanity was first knee-capped, in the interests of profit for a few.
But I haven't lost hope that we will be back on the rails very soon. We have to learn from history, by knowing which parts best to learn from, to put things right, it seems to me.
I have faith this realisation is coming now, we can no longer maintain the stupid, fatal, system of capitalism which only rewards avarice.
The key is free energy. We have it now, in the form of solar farms pulling in tens of GigaJoules per socond of free energy in every developed country.
The only thing missing now is the free money which should be being issued on that free energy received.
The banks have the power now to correct that wrong that was done, 120 years ago derailing humanity from its natural destiny, to become a mature intelligent species, growing in harmony with nature on the free energy of its environment, the energy of the sun.
How much longer can they hold it off, against the inflation caused by ignoring what is still only a small fraction of the free energy available to us, by the technology of solar hydrogen?
That is the only question, it seems to me. All eyes will be on them soon, knowing this is where we are really at.