We look back in amazement on the decade of the 2020s, when human beings, on top of plague, famine, and crashing climate, spent 2440 billion dollars a year on defending themselves against each other!
The succeeding years brought improvements, step by step.
One of the first was the trial of Putin by his own people, followed by the hasty retirements of other autocrats.
Poland became the first country to rule that laws relating to how women may use their bodies should be voted on by women only.
The World Refugee Fund enabled prosperous communities in Italy, Britain, and California that enriched their host nations and sent reconstruction funds back to, for instance, Syria and Ukraine.
In Britain, “brownfield” sites – abandoned urban and industrial areas – were revived by immigrants with building skills so as to provide over a million new homes – about half of them for immigrants – along with lively downtowns that, with their temples, theatres, museums, and ethnic restaurants, became tourist destinations.
India, because of its extreme inequality, was the first country to introduce sloped tax, calculated from a straight-line graph: from zero below the poverty line, to ninety percent at the top.
After the excruciating death of a celebrity-actor-turned-politician, caused by “medical” treatment with bile harvested from captive bears’ gall bladders, the jangalmantra – according to which all animals are gods and must be respected and free – spread rapidly to twelve Asian countries.
Sudan, when at last it recovered from the fighting between ethnic groups, warlords, and military factions, was the first to require that in peacetime all lethal munitions be in the custody of the civilian government, military exercises being conducted with dummy ammunition.
Chinese students led a political transformation that resulted in democracy and admiration for minorities. Tibet, Xinjiang, and Southern Mongolia became fully autonomous, then partner nations in the Eastasian Union – China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Uyghurstan, and United Mongolia.
A similar wave of student-inspired national rethinking led to the Anatolian Union: Turkey and Kurdistan. Another, the Caucasus Union: Georgia, Ossetia, Armenia, Artsakh (Nagorno-Karsabakh), Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Dagestan. Another, the Levantine Union: Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq. The Caucasian Union began to grow after a courageous Azeri celebrity declared: “Armenians and Azerbaijanis, we’re human beings, distant cousins.” These “rising sun” federations glory in their diversity of religion, language, culture, music, and costume.
Friendly coexistence of groups with long histories of grievance against each other happened with, and because of, acceptance that Compromise is the top political skill and principle.
In the Anatolian Union, the philosophy of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan came to be applied, with for instance equal numbers of women and men at all levels of government from local upward. Communes like the Israeli kibbutzim, and similar to traditional farming villages, became popular also in the Arab-majority parts of the Levantine Union. They typically have their archaeologists, hence the renewal of methodical excavation and fuller knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern societies.
The happiness achieved by Kerala persuaded other polities to found themselves on education and the empowerment of women.
The Chinese example of tolerance for minorities shamed the Czech Republic and then other European countries into starting the network of campgrounds designated for Roma and other migratory peoples, and designed in consultation with them. Fascination with the culture of the nomadic people inspired “Romaizing”, the habit of young people in many countries of getting themselves temporarily adopted and experiencing the wandering life.
The Jakarta All-Islam Conference resulted in agreement on a body of doctrines acceptable to all sects. Stoning and all other forms of execution, flogging, honor killing, and female genital mutilation were recognized as hateful to God.
African nations pioneered the replacement of punitive imprisonment by restitution and rehabilitation, the age limit on imprisonment, and the restoration of voting rights to prisoners.
Codes of regulation, improved in the European Union and coalescing into an international standard, put an end to the dumping of sewage into waterways, fire-prone and earthquake-prone buildings, exploitative labor, and all tax havens. It’s strange to remember that business used to be anti-regulation from fear of costs, so obvious is it now that healthy and longer-lived people are a better market.
Exploitation of ambiguities in legal documents led to the requirement that most be drafted also in the explicit language, Esperanto.
Legal and regulated drugs caused the collapse of organized crime.
The British situation in which a government, criticized from all sides on its announced package of policies on the environment, decided to admit it was wrong, and received credit for honesty and bravery, led to the spread of the “permanent coalition” model. As you know, parties continue, so as to give all shades of bias their spokespersons, and representatives are elected by Approval Voting to occupy seats assigned according to proportional repres
After the sea-level rise of the middle twenty-first century, during which all coastal cities and other settlements not on hilly sites had to be abandoned, no more buildings or roads were constructed in coastal habitats.
The spread of vertical farming, re-wilding, and cultured meat brought the disappearance of monoculture farming and animal slaughter, and the return of ninety percent of land surface to nature.
The stabilization of climate and population enabled removal of all remaining species from the endangered list, except for Homo sapiens, still capable of self-destructive actions.
Cars were largely replaced by the triplus: tricycle tandem with dynamo-charged battery for use by the disabled or assistance on hills, fairing for protection against weather, and tow-buggy for goods or children.
With most food grown locally, including on roofs and in street-side planters, there has come to be less heavy traffic between cities and countries.
The Ash Wednesday massacre, in which an eighteen-year-old gunman sent seven justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and three executives of the National Rifle Association to hospital, finally led to the banning of firearms possession except by members of well-regulated government forces.
The World Misery Index was enabled by advances in statistics and several other scientific fields. The percentages, and absolute numbers, of sentient beings, at an average moment, suffering inevitably or preventably – prisoners, victims of torture, displaced refugees sleeping on the ground, people trapped under collapsed buildings in earthquakes, animals in factory farms, lobsters and other animals in traps, victims of crime, people in terminal illness – and other categories, can now be estimated year by year and targets set for reduction.
And leathergrass, the tough turf first found growing wild in Iran and improved by crossing with seaside grasses used in Florida so as to be resistant to wheeled vehicles, has replaced all tarmac and most other outdoor hard surfaces. Now if you trip and fall, you now don’t hurt yourself.