Hi LA, good to see you again.
Sure, we're gonna see the end of raw Capitalism, but Conscious Capitalism is really what's on the rise. Yay!
I think that "Conscious Capitalism" will only rise so far as the government (or ruling authority of the day) allows it to, because Homo sapiens (like most organisms) display altruism in proportion to the amount of perceived reward, and are incapable of displaying the amount of empathy required to sustain the harmonious co-existence of large populations, hence the need for government.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests that our brains are incapable of comprehending (in a functional group) more than 150 people, see
Dunbar's Number. There has been a lot of research into this peculiar "cognitive limit", and I also think that this
peculiarity partially explains why the science of sociology is so ethereal - humans seem to be void of a biological mechanism that enables us to coexist within large populations.
We do have biological mechanisms that cause us to be altruistic to close relatives - J.B.S. Haldane said "
I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins" when he spoke of kin selection - yet this is a genetic link, and although theoretically we are all related, we've evolved to be so genetically diverse that we're effectively unrecognisable to each another, thus; little altruism. However, there is a backup, and it's a trait called 'Reciprocity'.
The science of 'Reciprocity' tells us that people will act altruistically, relative to the probability of reward and the value of such reward. Reciprocity is a trait that human beings (and other animals) possess, and differences in individuals vary wildly Eg. humanism to genocide - such varying degrees of reciprocal behaviour could arguably be explained by the individual's psychological interpretation of "reward". But in a group context, there exists a vacuum... which we attempt to fill with a mechanised version of altruism, perhaps you could call it culture, or foreign policy, or law... whatever, the point is; extrapolating the vectors of individual altruism into a large social context is rather an art than a science, evidenced by the astonishing variation of political systems and ideologies that have been implemented over the ages.
The idea of "Conscious Capitalism" is appealing, but if it emerges as a social framework, I think it will be initiated (and possibly maintained) by fear and/or self-interst, rather than altruism. And, as previously mentioned, it will require authoritarian management because human beings are cognitively ill-equipped, and biologically ill-suited to give a stuff about so many people at once.
In relation to what is happening at the moment in the global economy, I think we're going to see poignant changes in our culture, although i'm not entirely sure how it will play out... it could manifest as World War III (Sarah Palin comes to mind) in lieu of paying foreign debt, or it could be a time when free markets sober up and do the proverbial equivalent of an AA program.
And if we don't manage to nuke ourselves into a modern tragedy, I'd love to be around in another 100-200 years to see what happens. Personally, i'm optimistic that the next few generations will progress towards better social frameworks. And as retarded as i've made humans out to be in this (long-winded-over-worded) post, we're generally pretty good at learning from our mistakes... after exhausting every other possibility.
We live in interesting times
