If we see everybody as ‘same to me’ or ‘other than me’ we find that this creates either compassion or fear respectively. What separates communities that work and have resilience is that they bond together for the benefit of the whole. Community expert Mark Nepo uses the analogy of Aspen trees. Above the ground all the trees have individual characteristics, but below ground their root systems are connected. As I have said many times in this blog, our future exists in the re-establishment of true community. As long as we continue in living the hyper-consumer lifestyle we will continue to slip further and further away from who we truly are as humans and how humans have lived forever, until relatively recently. I’m not going to rehash what I’ve already said (see earlier post Relocalization and Community). Another problem we face is that of simple communication. I recently attended an appreciation dinner for my local city mayor. When I talked with her after the dinner I talked about the city council that she headed up and was not surprised to hear of how uncivil many of her fellow council people were towards her. She is a small-business person but has positive perspectives about moving the city towards renewable energy. She recommended that I review a videotaped council meeting on a specific date. When I looked it up, I was somewhat shocked to see five of the eight other council members literally screaming for over 40 minutes at her for even suggesting renewable energy options be discussed. Needless to say, these five specific council members were all great proponents of oil and gas exploration and have significant investments in that industry. It really highlighted the main problems we face in trying to create a sustainable world – outdated worldviews that do not, and cannot, move forward in adapting to the changing world in which we find ourselves immersed.
Sadly, the story of my mayor is echoed throughout politics all around the globalized world. This will just continue as long as we force goals that simply have money and power as the prime outcomes of an elite hierarchy that negate the needs of the rest of the people. Indeed, what we see is not only a screwed-up worldview creating utter social chaos across the globe but a majority of the people supporting this insanity based on the ‘other than me’ mentality. American Social commentator, Fran Lebowitz, is quoted as saying: “[The hierarchy] allows people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they love [the hierarchy] for that. It’s a shocking thing to realize people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives.” The elites don’t have to do much to keep amassing more money and power, they have the mindlessness of so many people doing it willingly for them.
The good news is that a good many people are also waking up and want change – real change, not just lip-service and mindless promises from corrupt or totally misguided leaders. Open dialogue seems to be almost impossible as public talking points focus completely on discord and fear – the way people can be controlled. While the global chaos is a point of danger for humanity, community theory shows that it is also the starting point for the greatest chance of change. It is from global extremes, creating social chaos, that ‘in times of need‘ people start reaching out to one another and naturally, instinctively, obey a higher calling and come together. It is curious that in African cultures that can still trace themselves back to pre-colonial times, like indigenous communities, there is no word for ‘orphan.’ The community takes care of everybody equitably regardless of their circumstances – that is what real communities do. Think about the game kids play ‘Kind of the Hill.’ This is a competitive game where the kid on top of the mound (hill) actively defends their position as the top person to stay on top of the mound. Not too different from real life today. Yet, collaboration is central to who we know we are if we sit down and think about what we want. Collaboration has been shown from educational research to be the strongest form of problem solving, yet we still teach individualism and discourage group work in so many schools and colleges. I was always amused when some of my university colleagues would observe my classes and criticize me for having my students work in groups instead of me just throwing information at them lecture style.
One recurring theme of this competitive mindset is that many people have been brainwashed into thinking that ‘self-interest’ is what will protect them and their immediate family. Yet, that also just promotes suffering when things do not go well and what was once a monetarily wealthy family finds themselves close to the breadline or even homeless through no fault of their own. When people find themselves suffering together they naturally connect and almost instinctively become a community (even if only for a short time). Once such a ‘crisis’ passes, these people will often simply return to business-as-usual and join the rat-race again. That is because they still retain the die-hard belief that our current technology can solve all the problems. In this time of extremes, both ecological and social, people have unfortunately come to also believe that all these extreme events are simply ‘the new normal.’
I’m sorry, there is nothing normal about them – there are multiple ‘tipping points’ we have crossed, or are currently crossing, where we have to adapt to the new conditions through transformation, not simply regulate our way through them via reformation. The conditions are so different that very soon, we will all realize that we cannot live the way we once did. Chaotic change has already come and requires of us different perspectives to live in the new world that we now face. We can flourish or we can fail. There really isn’t a middle ground anymore. I always smile wistfully at our world leaders who tell us that we can meet the challenges if we make goals to do so by 2050, or worse 2100. This post is not meant to be a negative one, but a simple statement of my belief that easy options disappeared years ago. We now have only the option of transformation, and we can do that only if we wake up to the realities that face us. The system is deeply flawed and cannot change to meet the challenges. We have everything we need to solve all our problems and to flourish, but we cannot do so while we go around in circles with the current global economy and its inherent inability to care for the common person. So is it a lost cause or is their real hope. YES, there is transformation already trying to occur all around the planet. You won’t hear much about it from the mass media, but let me give you some examples…TBC…….
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