>>521001127
You give people purpose, make them feel like they belong, and you don't give them the choice between the "easy short term gratification" and "long term goal" you make the long term goal the cultural purpose of the society and take it from there. I know media analogies are somewhat cliche, but the way that Mars is portrayed in "The Expanse" is a great representation of what I am talking about. Mars is depicted as more advanced than earth because they have a unified purpose of terraforming mars into a planet that they could live on without an enclosed environment. They therefore actively promote and give purpose to the smartest people so they can become scientists, they find a way to make sure they are using their talent and give that talent purpose and status. It is very National Socialist in nature and I believe this will be the future. We must work together to reach the stars so that we can continue to grow as a species.
There are alternatives to this. As you mentioned, Calhoun's experiment demonstrates one outcome where we do not leave our planet and instead we sit here and reproduce to the point where everyone just gives up and we have demographic collapse and we use up our resources to produce energy and now we live on a much lower population planet with more nature and a scarcity of oil, natural gas, uranium, etc. and we're just kind of stuck here unless some new exciting form of energy production is achieved. I guess the other alternative is we diverge from the faustian spirit worldview and go back to some kind of nature worship and find a way to balance human and natural life but this scenario is something out of a fantasy book.
The real difficulty is that the first scenario ends up requiring a huge amount of violence before you are left with a population that is capable of working together to advance the agenda of the species, or, even better, the agenda of life itself. Something like three quarters of the population are useless.