I have spent many posts recently emphasizing connectedness. The only people I have ever met who say they do not want to be connected are people who are angry and hateful at the negative aspects of the world as it is currently experienced by them. Loneliness is a modern disease created by a strange social isolation we have imposed on ourselves in recent decades, especially in the neighborhoods we live within. This isn’t true for everyone of course, but for many, friends are people they have met away from the neighborhood and meet up with regularly for entertainment, and not the people in the neighborhood anymore.
I do have optimism, however, that the newer generation of Millennials are changing this. In an earlier post (Spirituality 3 {March 20118}) I talk about students in my classes talking about what a perfect Saturday morning would look like for themselves. And, they talk about getting together with friends and just hanging out. Of course, this is also a college environment mindset where they all tend to live in close proximity, but I note that they like to keep up these close connections after they graduate. Another broad observation is that this generation seems split between those who do not seem as caught up in the mentality of living for work and making money and being caught up in consumerism, and those who are hyper-consumerist. It is the former that prefer hanging out with friends and family, and luxury is not the things in their life but more the people and time to spend with them.
What I am also observing is that the less-consumer minded youth seem more empathic and wanting to be community minded. Less self-focused and more unity focused. They seem If we are going to change the world, then perhaps it is the unity-millennials that may lead the way. The questions we need to be asking are ones that promotes unity, such as “How would the world change if instead of me trying to get what I want and think I need, I was there to be a resource and help for everyone else in what they thought they needed. And what If I responded with Love and Compassion instead of reacting to everything going on?”
The Golden and Platinum rules are a good base to stand on (e.g., see previous post Spiritual Crisis is the World’s Greatest Problem Part 1-2 {Sept 2019}) as we relearn to start living with each other in a way that helps and does not reduce anyone. We all want to be heard and recognized as unique sovereign individuals and that means we all have to be empathic. This is a natural skill for some and a learned skill for many, but a skill that we must cultivate if we are to thrive. Without empathy we can be easily manipulated into seeing others are less than human. Case in point are the observations of an Army psychologist, Captain G.M.Gilbert, worked with the defendants at the Nuremburg Nazi War-crime Trials. He was searching for the nature of evil and concluded that it was the absence of empathy that connected all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow humans that allowed them to create the holocaust. I would add, that lack of empathy is one of the reasons for the great polarization I see in the world at this time, where the negative side-effect of mass media and social media has been to separate us into old style ‘tribes’ of us and them.
In an earlier series of posts on this blog (Reconditioning Ourselves: Alternative Perspectives 1- 12 {Dec 2019-April 2020}) I often mention the need for community and what it looks like. In a nutshell it is about unity, which means practicing empathy and compassion. Do you envision humanity as a collective and enhance people or are you just dogmatic to your groups thinking? Consider, where is compassion, empathy, and Love to any outside your group? You can begin to remedy how you view the world by simply being the honest observer of your thoughts, beliefs and actions. Once you have that you can start having fruitful and open, transparent discussions and debates to solve local problems instead of waiting for some hierarchical group to tell you what to do.
It is about re-localizing our lives. It doesn’t mean we won’t have a governmental structure (local to global), but local thinking should dictate how people live within local ecosystems. Sometimes it is simply the have’s, from some hierarchical position, telling the have not’s what they need and how to do it.
At the local level, people tend know what they need, but in the last century the role of the hierarchical technocrat has dominated how people live. One of my late community development colleagues, Geoff Fagan, a potential technocrat by training, decided that communities knew better what they need and he decided to set up a foundation to assist communities and not dictate to them as is typically the case in a modern technocracy. He created and ran CADISPA (Community And Development In Sparsely Populated Areas) in northern Scotland. If you haven’t been to the northern Highlands, it is can be wonderfully wild and remote, with miles between villages, many being on isolated islands in the Hebrides. He didn’t approach any community but waited for a community to ask him for help (usually came via word-of-mouth recommendations from other villages). The first thing he did was empower the community to be the collective leadership of any change they created in their community using a steering group of Interested locals. He then had them determine what it was that they needed and that all the community was involved and heard. Geoff provided resources as needed for them to achieve their goals but ensured that he was not the central figure in any actions of the community – It was crucial to him that the community ran their community and not rely on any outside ‘expert’ to persuade them to adopt changes that might look good to an outsider but not be optimum to the needs of the community. When I visited Geoff one time, we travelled around to visit several villages so I could talk with the community development groups. What I found was that all were keen on independence from the main Scottish government with a pride in what they were doing interconnectedly within their village. And that was that the village be as locally self-sufficient as it could be without undue interference from a larger government. They wanted to do things in their own way in their own village, while being a part of the greater community of the highlands.
To Be Continued ………………….
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