Love one another or die

I finished Johann Hari's book 'Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention and How To Think Deeply Again' awhile back...  I haven't written much about it because... well... there's a LOT to say about it. And, mostly I am still fixated on the first part of the tag line and am having trouble with the "how to think deeply again" part.

Anyway, there is this part at the end that I keep coming back to. On pp.278-280 he leaves us with what seems to be at least a large crux of the issue if not the entire thing. In referring to a conversation with Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a professor of social anthropology, he says...

"Ever since the Industrial Revolution, he said, our economies have been built around a new and radical idea - economic growth. This is the belief that every year, the economy - and each individual company in it - should get bigger and bigger. That's how we now define success...

...this need for economic growth seemed to be the underlying force that was driving so many of the causes of poor attention that I had learned about - our increasing stress, our swelling work hours, our more invasive technologies, our lack of sleep, our bad diets...

[then, in conversations with Dr. Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist]... "...he explained that we need to move beyond the idea of growth, to something called a 'steady-state economy.' We would abandon economic growth as the driving principle of the economy and instead choose a different set of goals. At the moment we think we're prosperous if we are working ourselves ragged to buy things - most of which don't even make us happy. He said we could redefine prosperity to mean having time to spend with our children, or to be in nature, or to sleep, or to dream, or to have secure work. Most people don't want a fast life - they want a good life. Nobody lies on their deathbed and thinks about all that they contributed to economic growth. A steady-state economy can allow us to choose goals that don't raid our attention, and don't raid the planet's resources."

I don't know about you, but that paints a pretty grim picture to me. Why? Because who among us has the balls to say WE NEED TO GET OFF THIS MERRY-GO-ROUND?!? Our American political system is not going to do it.

Hari ends the book with this:

"At the start of the Second World War, the English poet W.H. Auden - when he looked out over the new technologies of destruction that had been created by humans - warned: 'We must love one another, or die.' I believe that now we must focus together - or face the fires alone."

I find it interesting that this is not a Christian book at all. Yet, it seems if we are to have any hope for a future, it's going to be dependent on a higher power than us. 

So, what should we do?