Nicely put. Now explain that to someone who only has interest in what facilitates the lifestyle they want to live.
This is a good observation. It's one of, if not the toughest obstacle to change. The effects that our political/economic system has on our culture are so ingrained in our thinking. It guides our ambitions, and even the fact that we have ambitions in the modern sense (career, wealth, etc). I started asking people if they could imagine a world without money when I was 14, and the most common answer has always been "how would I buy things?"
So when people talk about needing a new core economic system, I think it's just trading one way people hoard for another.
But this is a statement still grounded in our current paradigm, along with all of the assumptions that fuel it.
If we're so evolved, then we need to start focusing on the real problem, which is human attitudes about wealth, sharing, cooperation, altruism and greed.
Such as the assumption that our motivations are completely independent of civilization's operating system. I think they form a feedback loop.
In the case of capitalism, it is explicitly designed to harness people's greed as a vehicle for progress, with the assumption that all people are greedy. I've had many long arguments about whether this is true or not. Regardless of that, it can't be denied that this creates mechanisms whereby the greedy are selected for success. Greed combined with luck and/or talent is rewarded with power. Generosity is punished. Luck and talent are very rarely rewarded without some amount of greed to go along with them. So we end up with a society dominated by the greedy. From their position of domination, they shape society to further reward the qualities that define them. The incentive to be greedy grows and grows. To be anything else becomes more and more a source of fear. All the while, culture evolves as necessary to normalize the amount of greed necessary for survival, and it's gone on for long enough that we're to the point where wiping it from the operating system becomes unthinkable.
In short, society is destined to be defined by the qualities it deliberately rewards.
I'm beginning to think that an uphill battle may not be necessary to change this. I've always thought, like most people, that to change the way our society functions would have to be all about resistance, struggle, and slowly converting people to your point of view. I thought that the structure of society needed to be slowly dismantled before it could be rebuilt another way.
I'm thinking less like this lately. Perhaps subverting the current paradigm would be easier than I've ever realized. In fact, I think it's already kind of happening. Look at what's happening on the internet as the formal economy abandons people. People are finding ways to use our new technology to organize help for each other. Informal economies and a general sort of mutualism are slowly becoming more normalized. We have things like Freecycle and Craigslist where people organize activities and give away, trade, or sell stuff. Information and media are becoming more freely available online. Large-scale leaderless organization is becoming more powerful through the memetic nature of online information. I'd love to point out more examples, but I just haven't gotten around to doing the research yet.
The thing is, it's out there. People's lifestyles are changing already. Our society is facing problems at the same time that we have new tools giving us tons of creative solutions for those problems. I just don't think anybody has made the right tools for this unspoken movement to begin truly subverting old societal structures yet. Most of the tools we have right now are designed for specific purposes, and very little scalability.
So what if someone designed a social media organizing tool for no specific purpose and infinite scalability? Where could it take us if such a thing made its debut in the near future? I have some rough ideas for such a thing. Imagine something like a cascading forum structure. People post something that they or their community wants or needs, or simply suggestions for things that could be done. This post is made viewable to people within the relevant geographic radius. So if somebody posts that they need some plumbing fixed, it might be viewable to people within 50 miles. Post something like "cure for cancer" and it posts globally. This is all so that you can see things that you might be motivated to go out and get involved in. Then this post is subject to votes structured something like modern consensus process. If somebody just has a personal need, this isn't too necessary. If it's something more like a community project, then there will be function for voting, blocks, etc. For actually organizing, each post would generate an appropriate communication system. Someone's personal need would get something like a small drop-down comment thread. A community project would get a small forum. Cure for cancer would get something much bigger.
These are very rough ideas. I've only been thinking about this for a relatively short time. The point is it's all about facilitating a system of sharing, which is something that internet culture is slowly normalizing and many people would be eager to take advantage of today when organizing their lives around money is becoming impossible. I'm not saying "replace society with this thing". I'm saying that we're already sort of heading in this direction, but it's badly in need of a major boost towards becoming something bigger. If we could do this, we could naturally evolve our lifestyle towards something more mutualistic instead of competitive.
I think online piracy is a great parallel to look at. Piracy took off less because it's free stuff and more because it just makes sense. Technology made information (i.e. anything that can be translated into bits) almost an infinite resource with the most efficient possible distribution. It's had a huge impact on old information and media industries, because they now have to compete with what people are going to naturally turn towards as most naturally and efficiently fitting into their lives. The only reason those old industries still exist is by pure brute force fueled by the clout they accumulated before things began to change, but everybody understands that they've become obsolete.
This is what needs to happen to society as a whole. Unfortunately, we're in a position where we have to fight existing powers just to survive. We need things like Occupy. However, we need to stop expecting resistance and conflict to lead to change. Instead, let's figure out how to make the tools to facilitate a different way of life that people will naturally gravitate to without so much need for conversion or conflict.
Gah... I hope this post is still comprehensible... I've been thinking about this the last couple weeks and thought it was finally time to put it in writing. Unfortunately, I got pulled away in the middle of writing this several times, which tends to make coherency difficult when writing something like this.