1) Military technology sufficiently advanced to allow for an easy conquest of Earth and the implementation of a stable global government.
2) Endlessly renewable energy, such as Zero Point energy, such that all of our energy problems are solved forever, with of course clean fuel.
3) Emotional “technology” such that we could all learn quickly to live in peace and harmony.
Which would you choose? To my mind, 3 is so self evidently the superior that there can be no serious debate. We can solve all our problems of consumption culturally. We face no existential threats which could not rapidly be eliminated through simple cooperation, civic mindedness, and emotional intelligence.
As a general rule, though, I think people who lack emotional intelligence do not value it, so I think whatever Council may exist–and I think this dream is certainly something which is possible, which I find hard to believe, but which seems to logically extend from claims made by people I would otherwise believe on nearly any topic, like Edgar Mitchell–would find itself debating endless between options 1 and 2.
Option 1, they would believe, offers “intelligence” to the human race, control. It allows the superior people to speak directly for inferior people who would otherwise plant and reap the seeds of their own destruction, on many levels, in many ways.
Option 2, of course, speaks to global warming directly, wars for oil indirectly, and would represent a huge advance. It would not solve the core problems of human overconsumption of the Earth’s resources, but it would also not be quite so violent and draconian. The sensitive among them would likely favor this option.
To my mind, a core problem we face is that elites really don’t like rubbing elbows with commoners. They don’t like how we look, how we smell, how we think, how we act. They need us in order to invoke Noblesse Oblige, itself a thin rationalization for really quite pedestrian ambitions of greed and power. But they don’t value us, or understand us.
What I would assert, though, is the extent even ordinary people have for calculation, for calibration. Ponder some terrible event, like 9/11: ordinary people are capable of the extraordinary, at least in this country. We can self organize. We can and do form complex orders.
What we need is a new Revelation, a new dispensation, a new organizing order outside of mind numbing, soul dimming Consumerism.