This is why we are interested in “social miracles” that will catalyze both a transition beyond capitalism and the emergence of a society that is more enlightened. 14 So to conclude here we want to engage in some concrete utopian theorizing. 15 While the majority of speculation about the future focuses on great leaps in science and technology, the futures scenarios we are interested in instead focus on great leaps in human morality and political consciousness.

Our thinking departs from the dystopian techno-scientific futures that dominate public consciousness. From sci-fi movies to the nightly news it is techno-science-gone-wrong, zombie apocalypses, and malevolent Artificial Intelligence, images and narratives consumed by the youth in particular. Pop culture visions of positive futures usually also hinge on new breakthroughs in techno-science. Sometimes it appears that our future is one in which humanity is either destroyed by techno-science or saved by it. In either case, as a culture we are starved for visions of the future that involve radically different political and moral innovations. Humanity longs for visions of breakthroughs in consciousness and culture.

Futurists like Rameez Naam and others have often pointed out that the future of humanity is dependent on innovation. Indeed, it is only innovation that will move us from dystopian futures to utopian ones. Naam, however like many other thinkers of his ilk, thinks of innovation as taking place primarily in the realm of exteriors.16 The techno-optimists implicitly or explicitly claim that new technologies and even new systems of government – exterior changes in the social or technical structure of society – will being us to a new and great future. We call this sort of thinking the Epcot fallacy. Millions of people of all ages have visited the Epcot pavilion at Disney World. It is filled with exhibits of smiling families, ensconced in the delight of myriad future technologies, which Epcott was designed to exhibit. Why is everyone smiling? The pavilion suggests they are happy because of all the new technology. Epoctt does ever not raise the more basic question: does technology make people happy? By the Epcott fallacy we refer to the often-repeated assertion of the technooptimists, that innovation in the realm of exteriors can make us happy. It takes more than technology to truly change the course of the world-system.

The Renaissance, for example, which climaxed in the Western Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, was a catalyst for a worldsystem shift. The shift however was not merely one rooted in technological advance and the emergent scientific method, as much as that is a major part of the story. Rather the shift was sourced in dramatic innovation in consciousness, the emergence of a new story of Self and Cosmos. The root of the world-system shift was interior innovations, from which the scientific method emerged, and then flowed all of the technological breakthroughs.

It is important to understand that what stops humanity from living in a world of justice and abundance—a world in which collective enlightenment is common—is not a lack of necessary technology and science. The culture of late-capitalism would have us believe that only scientific miracles will save humanity, and preferably those that will turn a profit and help maintain economic growth (so-called “disaster capitalism’). But the truth is that new technological innovations without genuine social miracles will not save us. There is no saving of humanity without social miracles. What stops humanity from living in a world of justice and abundance are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the rules we have made up that now govern our cooperation, and the legacies of illusion and dishonesty that continue to blind us to our actual situation as

This is the simple concrete utopian vision we are offering here: educational abundance resulting from the repositioning of learning and human development as a dominant social value. To put it quite simply: most of our major social structures, such as labor markets and legal systems, are designed to promote economic growth, period. 17 We are asking: what if they were designed to promote human development and learning instead? What if the goal of society—as encoded in its very legal structures— was not endless accumulation of wealth but the endless actualization of human potential? What if we designed the basic structures of our social systems to catalyze collective enlightenment?