Review of Open Lecture with Jeremy Rifkin
Link to ESMT Audiocast on right-hand side
 Jeremy Rifkin |
In this ESMT Open Lecture Jeremy Rifkin claimed that we are curently at a pivotal turning point for our species. If there is a way for our human race to decide the current ecological and industrial endgame in our favor, then we need to adjust our mind-frame to the demands of our time rather than follow thought patterns stemming from the enlightenment and/or the 18th Century.
Tracing our history - and thus our empathic potential - from familial, tribal to religious to national communities, Rifkin propagates that we come full circle, rediscover human ties and feelings of compassion soft-wired into our system and extend them on a global level. Given the soon to come shortage of energy supply, Rifkin urges us to hurry in order to reach the state of global empathy, based on the understanding that we are individually and collectively fragile and vulnerable. Given the worldwide channels of internet communications, we may use this era of distributive communication to derive a variety of distributive actions rather than the unilateral national ones of the past. As Rifkin suggests, why should we not start a "distributed" energy-revolution based on the model of the communication revolution which began a few decades ago. It would mean to produce energy worldwide, individually or per building, and sell its surplus to a grid. Vital in his concept, is the basic thought of peer to peer collaboration rather than the exploitation of energy resources by the most powerful group. What Rifkin calls for is the re-cultivation of the homo empathicus in us using the idea of compassionate distribution rather than egotistically motivated gain to make sure that the human race will survive.
About Jeremy Rifkin
One of the most popular social thinkers of our time, Jeremy Rifkin is the bestselling author of The European Dream, The Hydrogen Economy, The Age of Access, The Biotech Century, and The End of Work. These and his latest book The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness In a World In Crisis have been published in German by the Campus Verlag. A fellow at the Wharton School's Executive Education Program and an adviser to several European Union heads of state, he is the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Bethesda, Maryland.
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