In the early 1980's, I pursued graduate school academic training in planning.
One of the big reasons for our current catastrophic condition is the dismantling of the legitimacy and practice of government planning - which "sees" the future and provides democratic deliberative collective processes and pathways that show "another world is possible".
It is no accident that the late 1970's rise of Neoliberal political economy (privatization, deregulation, liberalization of global trade, financialization, deindustrialization, etc) and "free market utopianism" and individualism culture all corresponded with the rise of "public choice theory" and "law and economics". That ideology advanced a systematic attack on pre-existing New Deal government planning and regulation, as well as conceptions of solidarity, vision, public space, commons, public resources, and public policy.
None of this operated at the individual level - it's not irrational self destructive individuals that are the problem, it's systems of power and control, consciously imposed from without, and not randomly arrived at (or evolved into).
In the early 1980's, I pursued graduate school academic training in planning.
One of the big reasons for our current catastrophic condition is the dismantling of the legitimacy and practice of government planning - which "sees" the future and provides democratic deliberative collective processes and pathways that show "another world is possible".
It is no accident that the late 1970's rise of Neoliberal political economy (privatization, deregulation, liberalization of global trade, financialization, deindustrialization, etc) and "free market utopianism" and individualism culture all corresponded with the rise of "public choice theory" and "law and economics". That ideology advanced a systematic attack on pre-existing New Deal government planning and regulation, as well as conceptions of solidarity, vision, public space, commons, public resources, and public policy.
None of this operated at the individual level - it's not irrational self destructive individuals that are the problem, it's systems of power and control, consciously imposed from without, and not randomly arrived at (or evolved into).