We live in a centrally planned political economy.

It may not always be the case, but the present global economic system is more the product of design than of an organic, unpredictable evolutionary process.

If you live in the United States, you live in the world's most explicitly planned society. This dates back to the Colonies and the early Republic, and has continued through every major wave of (largely and roughly) planned transformation, culminating in the post-WWII reorganization of society along consumerist lines and permanent cold war, which was conceived and implemented by no more than a few thousand establishment architects.

The founding of the Republic, post-Civil War industrialization, the post-Reconstruction alliance Northern elites with the Southern reaction, the 1890s decisions to go imperialist, the early 1900s urbanization and mass production and banking reforms and automotive society, the New Deal, the postwar new world order including the highway system and suburban sprawl, the neoliberal economic strategies adopted in the late 1970s, which we still live under -- again, all of these were plans originating from a consensus of no more than a few thousand establishment and government policy makers at each given time.

Each of these plans roughly met their goals for decades at a time. Did they also go wrong (or right, depending on your perspective) in various and unpredictable ways? You betcha!

Let’s grant that design always works from an existing starting point, and nothing evolves exactly as planners imagine, and many a planner comes to regret and reject the results of their own work. Nevertheless, nothing in the present economy is without its conscious architects, historic and present-day. They have competed and their ideas have conflicted, but at almost all times an establishment consensus has been forged and has prevailed. The system grew and has conditioned almost the entire population to conform to its needs roughly according to these long-term plans.

No social or economic system of the present scale and complexity could ever work without employing literally a few million planners and economic engineers around the world, who nevertheless make up a small fraction of the people. We live in a centralized system dominated by highly concentrated private capital that requires stability and predictability in its complex reproduction systems: i.e., planning, without which nothing would work. And it "works," though not always to the best ends.

Every colony in history was a utopian project with a plan. Presumably you live in the set of colonies that became the USA.

And watch out for the (transhumanist) engineers trying to make their own goldfish. They have plans, too.

I thought some colonies were about nothing more than generating resources and wealth for the parent nation

It refers to radical visions for establishing or transforming whole societies according to plan.

Second, while the official English colonies in the US were about enriching the crown and merchant classes, the colonies started in the North by religious non-conformists were not, originally. Regardless, all were utopian in that they pursued and successfully implemented long-term planning to completely transform the areas they took over (which included the genocide of the indigenous population).

:shrug:

Sure. Forgot. Thanks.

Supposedly we have more individual "choices" but those choices are carefully orchestrated and planned by a repressive oligarchy.

But if we are talking evolution, Mother Nature doesn't give a damn about humans. She sees only the circulation of energy and matter within populations of organisms, never the sometimes bizarre rationalizations we humans make in our twisty brains. She's not concerned with our thoughts any more than she is concerned with the thoughts of a cockroach or a colony of ants. We humans are nothing special, we are animals with animal impacts upon the environment.

Our current global economic system is unsustainable. Nature always smacks down species that overshoot the limits, no exceptions, not even for clever apes. The only thing unusual about us will be the peculiarity of the trash we leave behind in a very narrow band of earth's fossil record.

The customary diversity of life on earth will be restored with or without us. The only choice Nature gives us is to play by her rules or die. At the moment our political economy is following a trajectory toward death. Billions of humans will die prematurely as the earth's environment shifts beneath them. Apparently we humans are not intelligent life, no matter what we might claim.