A healthy society would prioritize food, shelter and physical and mental health. It would also prioritize training people to better serve the needs of the group, not just themselves or those in power.
Common sense tells you that if ten out of hundred people are hungry, if the elderly are being ignored and forgotten, and a large portion of the people are suffering mental health problems in isolation, that resources should go to these areas first before funneling them to those who aren't suffering as much. Somehow, even though we live in a society where the public has paid for the roads, the police, the infrastructure, the educational systems, and more, we've developed a culture that tells people to use that system entirely for yourself with no concern about those who are left behind. Every spiritual tradition has a name for this, it's called greed. Every spiritual tradition recognizes that to leave behind those who need our help, or are suffering as a human, is to be inhumane. And we can see this inhumanity everywhere in our society if we open our eyes. We normalize the "seven deadly sins" calling them expressions of personal freedom without considering the impact that it has on our society.
Are experts suggesting we can put rovers on Mars, create a logistical system where anything in the world can be shipped to your door most of the time in less than 24 hours, but we can't create pipelines of food to hungry mouths, or build shelters for those without? It is obviously a problem of the heart rather than a problem of resources and technological advancement. Why are there always billions or trillions of dollars for real estate and private property, but not for shelters, food and healthcare? The money is there, just not the humanity.
Many will say that it's more complicated than this. Within this system, of course it's always more complicated. The complexity is exactly what creates the inhumanity and blindness to the disease. When you remove the complexity and the elaborate machinations, we can simply see that there is an abundance of technology and resources, but how they are used is merely for the profit of the few.
If we lived within a simple tribe within nature and the suffering of so many was so obvious while only a small few were enriched, it would be so egregious that it couldn't be tolerated by anyone. Only in a technological "advanced" society like ours, where we hide behind complexity, can such an obvious problem of inhumanity be ignored.
Money is a construction. Private property is a construction. Our species made it 250,000 years before money, laws, or private property existed. If we made it all that time without either when we weren't technologically advanced, then why couldn't we make it today without those constructions? We have the additional benefit of all this technology so why couldn't we? Of course, this answer is simple. It's only in a system as sick and corrupt and confused as ours that there is any doubt. The system has created the sickness of inhumanity and then uses the existence of inhumanity to justify why it must continue. What would be required is for those wealthy and powerful to give up both and let us live in small groups of relatively equal people who exist solely to support one another. We would have to be willing to love each other unconditionally again knowing that each person's existence is vital to the success of the group. Until we are willing to love this way again, deeply, unconditionally, we will stay trapped in a sick society with all of the problems of today only getting worse. We will continue to look at problems as complex when they are anything but. We will send people to universities to become specialists and technologists who cannot solve the spiritual problems that ail us. We will continue to stay inhumane and ignore that it was our humanity that got us here and that a return to that is the only thing that will save us.
Perhaps it is too late. Perhaps we have all been so conditioned by this illness that is the globalized, political economy, that were we to become free of it now, we would become something even worse, something as seen on The Walking Dead. But it wasn't that way before. We never would have survived 250,000 years if human nature is as sick and cruel as the dystopian depictions we are threatened with should this system ever break down.
So, what would a healthy society look like? It would be far more equal. It would exist within nature not as its conqueror. It would be technological only as much as it could be sustained locally. It would require the acceptance and love of everyone in the group with banishment an option only for the most heinous or murderous betrayals. I realize that this society likely will never exist, but if we can't even identify it, or conceptualize it, then we are truly doomed to the sick society that has crept across the planet. Enriching few, destroying much--the worst of which is our very humanity.
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