New Consciousness Review Spring 2015 | Page 65

OUR WORLD UNDERSTANDING WHAT’S HAPPENING When I was studying anthropology, I learned that human beings live and work together in remarkably similar ways, with a wide variety of local variations within those similarities. We learned systems to track both the similarities and the differences. Then, when I worked as a futurist, my job was to track trends, identify potential “wild cards” that would radically affect those trends, and discover new possibilities as they emerged. To do so I scanned dozens of magazines and journals each week, watched a wide variety of media, attended conferences, listened in on casual conversations wherever people around me were talking, and kept a huge database of indicators of change. I could do so because I had a framework for thinking about all these different kinds of information, a way of dividing up our culture that made sense to me and helped be to track not only individual events, but relationships. 65 | NEW CONSCIOUSNESS REVIEW The essence of the framework that I, and many other futurists, use is based on the concept that any culture may be divided into half a dozen categories of structures and activities: • SOCIAL SYSTEMS – institutions, organizations, and activities that provide support for the raising of children, which is the primary purpose for all human society • TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEMS – the tools and techniques that are used to generate all of the things needed to maintain the social systems • ECONOMIC SYSTEMS – the means by which goods and services are produced and distributed • ENVIRONMENTAL PRESSURES – the natural processes and resources that affect the culture • POLITICAL SYSTEMS – the structures and processes by which collective decisions are made • VALUE SYSTEMS – the set of assumptions, beliefs, expectations, and ideals on which individual and collective decisions are made