Energy Crises - Essay

“Today´s food and energy crisis” is not new. We know and try to handle this problem for   decades, but we have not found a solution yet. On the contrary, it seems that a solution is more urgent than before. And it should be clear that to “improve society´s well-being” should not mean the increase of disparity between rich and poor.

So it is necessary to understand why society has not yet been able to solve the crisis, and to think about how to get over the reason for this.

As Sociology points out, the modern society is functionally differentiated. There is no more central power, but sub-systems as economy, law, politics, education, science and mass media.   Each sub-system fulfills functions for society in general, like economy helps to solve   problems of scarceness. The basic operations for these functions are constituted within each sub-system, by specially codes and media of communication.

As every sub-system operates with an own logic which hampers cooperation between the sub-systems, it is so difficult to solve the crisis. So economy works with the media “money”; but this does not work in the system of politics which communicates with the media “power”. This fact may explain why there is no solution yet: Each sub-system

can only devise its own solution but not a general one for the whole society. Even if there   is   a   consciousness   in   the   society   for   the   crisis,   this   happens   only   in   a dysfunctional way (criticism or protest), without a society-wide crisis-solving resonance.

But why can´t the sub-systems simply cooperate to find a solution?

Economy communicates by prices. So the crisis would have to be translated into prices for the actors to be able to react. Unfortunately, just those economical actions pay off which produce high prices. This means high costs for the buyers and disadvantages for the already poor population in the world. The consequences of a change of economy in general may be to complex to anticipate right now....