Reconditioning Ourselves: Alternative Perspectives 1 – A more nurturing society

“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come…”  Victor Hugo

We have just come through the Christmas Holiday, where in countries where Christianity is a primary religion, we at least, for one day a year espouse, “peace on Earth and good will to all people.”  We have lots of superfluous reasons to not espouse this for the other 364 days a year, but none of them really hold any validity.  If peace is what we truly and firmly believed we could have and wanted it would be a focus we worked on.  We need to be heart centered and act with heartfelt focus.  The ‘Christmas spirit’ is something that makes us feel good during the holiday, yet we continue to spend most of our year mired in the conditioning of its opposite.  And, remember, all our negative actions towards each other are merely conditioning – we learn to treat other people badly.  Whatever vision we hold for ourselves is what we become because this becomes our new reality and the focus of all our new beliefs and actions.  A world that recognizes the humanity in every one of us is a world that moves toward a utopia instead of the dystopia we are manipulated to accept.  A utopia doesn’t have to be perfect, just a world where everyone and everything thrives with integrity, respect, and Love.  (You might have noted that I always put Love with a capital L.  This means that I refer to universal Love and not the emotion of romantic attachment we think is love.) 

I have talked about how we manage current economics as being a source of all our problems.  One of the primary reasons is how we measure what economists consider important through the superfluous GDP and Standard of Living (SOL) focus.  A simple alternative paradigm is true Quality of Life (QOL) measures that focus on what is important.  I have also mentioned the great measures put in place by a poor country in the foothills of the Himalaya – Bhutan – but economists tend to scorn that as unrealistic.  I have never really read a good response from economists as to why that is so, but they are the experts in helping ruining the world we currently live in so their credentials seem suspect to me.  No one in power it seems is interested in measuring true QOL (see previous post Centralized versus Decentralized Living 2 – Economic Considerations for more explanation).  You might be thinking that I am on a fool’s errand by continuing to talk about this problem and that using QOL measures is never going to happen.   

Well, guess what, in the recent World Economic Forum: Davos 2019, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, gave a compelling argument for measuring what is important: ‘Kindness, Empathy, and Well-Being.’  New Zealand has a well-being budget. Ardern said compellingly: “We need to address the societal well-being of our nation, not just the economic well-being,” she said during a discussion on ‘More than GDP.’  “Despite a supposedly good economy, the rates of homelessness, suicide, and depression are epidemic.”  This means that from 2019, her government will present a ‘well-being budget’ to gauge the long-term impact of political policy on the quality of people’s lives.  As I have said before in this blog, “We have to stop measuring the economy by how well the rich people are doing.” 

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern isn’t the only world leader talking about QOL as a primary focus.  Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Iceland’s Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir have joined with Ardern and called for “an alternative future based on well-being and inclusive growth.” Don’t read too much into it yet, but I find it interesting that women seem to be the ones understanding and willing to bring new thinking to the political table.  When women are not trying to compete in a male dominated system, given the chance, they are able to use their more nurturing ideas to create change, and they really do tend think more communally overall.  A masculine perspective has created the world we now find ourselves within.  Maybe, we should allow the feminine perspective to have more voice.  Maybe taking aggressive Testosterone out of the picture might make a difference.  It’s not that women are not competitive, but they seem more predisposed to thinking about the community as a whole when it comes to the need to compromise on solutions.    

Note here that I said competitive. It is here that modern life creates most of our problems.  If we are not a ‘winner’ then we become conditioned to develop inferiority complexes of one kind or another.  As ‘losers’ we create deep beliefs that limit us as incapable, ineffectual, inadequate, inferiority, and even with self-loathing.  The opposite within a competitive system, however, is not success but anxiety and fear.  Being a ‘winner’ demands that we create conditions where we are compelled to exhibit superiority, judgment, condemnation, and as such we become fearful of toppling off of our precarious perch.  The lust of power and control has its roots here.  In collaborative systems, these competitive conditions are not emphasized.  It is about what ‘WE’ are getting that causes the focus to fall on what benefits everyone.  A look at our current male energy dominated political and business systems around the world, despite their noble intentions, shows how competition and fear seem to dominate. Look at people in a collaborative system and limitations are not things to be emphasized as aspects to be overcome with help from others.  Rather than thinking about, “what am  ‘I’ getting,” we can think about, “what are ‘WE’ getting.”  It’s about Ubuntu (see previous post New Ways of Living Together 6 – Community as the Glue of Humans Living Successfully). 

Of course, it is the competition combined with a focus on the minor differences we have that sets up the conflicts we see both within nations and internationally.  The differences exploited by the Cabal controllers to manipulate us.  We seem to relish spotlighting our their few basic differences, rather than emphasizing our many fundamental similarities? As spiritual guru Michael Roads points out:   

“Why is that people look for what is wrong in themselves, rather than for what is right?  I have no doubt that if people were to dwell on everything on which they approve in themselves, they would see these finer qualities in all people, regardless of cultures. We are One humanity.  Although cultural diversity is very apparent, and even human expressions, we still laugh and cry in the same language, we still experience pain and hunger in the same way, we bleed the same color blood, and we all feel the same inner hurt from hostility and intolerance. It all begins in your relationship with yourself.  Surely the answer for all peoples and cultures is to always consciously . . . choose Love!  Michael J. Roads

Further Alternate Perspectives – to be continued ………………