“Stupidity and unconscious bias often work more damage than venality. The point isn’t to get people to accept that they have biases, but to get them to see [for themselves] that those biases have negative consequences for others” Bertrand Russel.
A continuation of a fictional reflection by a hundred-year-old Espe from 2112 about the start and on-going movement of transformation to Sustainable Living. I add clarification links and quotes as needed.
In 2112, I live in a world that is equitable. That doesn’t mean we provide the same to everyone, but refers to how we practice fairness and justice in all our endeavors, recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must acknowledge and make adjustments to imbalances and biases. Yes, we still have biases, but we are taught to recognize them and not let them become burdens for others.
I remember my great grandmothers who grew up in the 1950s United States. They were among many that faced real systemic discrimination from a paternalistic system – In their case, simply because they were female. As young women in 1972, they lobbied to get the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) passed. It might have passed had not a group of religious women favoring male superiority lobbied otherwise. The ERA was not ratified by enough U.S. states to become law before the ratification deadline.
In 2021, the ERA was resurrected with a provision to remove the deadline. The problem, as we see it now, was the need to legitimize equity by making it a legalistic perspective. But a myriad of people everywhere faced discrimination for a multitude of reasons as well, simply because of their ethnic origins and/or pigmentation in their skin. Others simply because of their social-economic status. It was amazing how many reasons people had to create differential status in society. These separations were actively used by the elites to create discord and drive their control agendas.
As a young woman, I recall facing inadvertent sexual discrimination from older well-meaning men who sincerely believed in a paternalistic system in which they believed they knew best. My grandmothers used to tell me how that era was about men being dominant and women being submissive and mostly sexually viewed objects. While we had laws in most countries against discrimination in the 2020s and 2030s, the legal system could not eliminate innate bias from cultural and societal upbringing. I also recall being sexually harassed by some older male superiors who did not even realize how their sexual behaviors were construed as psychological damaging. What was worse was that despite laws to the contrary, discrimination of all kinds, were ignored by systems of power that turned a blind eye to the perpetrators inappropriate behaviors. The hierarchy even tried to use social credit scoring (indeed they did in China during the Covid era) to force people to behave as the hierarchy desired them to be good citizens in the hierarchy’s vision of a controlled future.
Before the Great Change, many behaviors had to be mandated through legislation, which is never a good way to resolve the complexities of human biases. That is why a just and sustainable world could not occur, despite growing technological, sociological, and ecological awareness, until we understood and dealt with our innate biases and lack of empathy for all other life. There were the various movements of the late twentieth century to bring about fairness, but they all seemed to work, for the most part, in isolation of each other. It seemed to be a culture of rebellion against institutionalized biases, but only about ‘peoples pet peeves’ as one of my grandmothers used to say, rather than a cohesive attempt to look at ourselves more closely amid the broad spectrum of biases from which we all suffered.
Our children all learn history with different perspectives to be sure they think critically. Unless identified, our biases can become overwhelming, with the mass and social media acting more as echo chambers of choice for those seeking refuge. After all, it is more comfortable to not have our beliefs challenged. The end result of pre-covid era societies, was a confused, divided, and polarized mass of people around the world that lived in a reality bubble of their particularly society, excluding other completely valid perspectives that were out there. And the governmental and global agencies like the United Nations (UN) bureaucrats, which thought of themselves as agencies of reform, were merely puppets of a corrupt hierarchy. For instance, the UN’s ‘sustainable development’ policies, did not promote ‘true sustainability’ as most conceive of it back them, but utilized the same “debt imperialism long used by the Anglo-American Empire to entrap nations in a new, equally predatory system of global financial governance” SSIR.
It was a lot like the European explorers of the renaissance exploring the world to bring newly found lands to their mindset and imperial consciousness. That consciousness works to make us feel powerless and subjugated to hierarchical power. Many of the biases that were used to keep us feeling separated and with many of the problems of distrust had their roots in this worldview. We needed to, and fortunately did, transform our consciousness. Conscious of what exactly? Our biases, their sources, and what we could do about it. Although I won’t get into this too much in this entry, overcoming the grips of bias is not just a cognitive process, but one built upon physical embodiment and spiritual curiosity.
We are here to live connected purposeful lives. A question we had to ask ourselves back in the 2020s was ‘How much do I have real control of my life? Once you look at your biases, you will see that they nearly all arise from conditioning. A few biases might arise from experiences of our own, but they are usually connected to the conditioning. We all desired fairness back then, but accepted the inequities because we had no vision of anything different, except in our dreams. When people were allowed to dream openly and express themselves that way, then the Great Change could occur. The path to a better society is by people who can hold this vision of a better world and convince others that the dream has validity. The hierarchy tried hard to squash the dream, but after everything they had done with their harsh policies, people were ready to try something different.
Locally we began using a vision of a ‘Well-Being Economy’ ‘We wanted fairness and started talking openly, honestly, and with transparency about our biases. We shifted how we understood ourselves to build societal health and prosperity, looking beyond economic growth to collective well-being and environmental sustainability. We didn’t sacrifice our personal sovereignty, which is what the hierarchy wanted. The hierarchy wanted a collectivist society where the individual was irrelevant – that has always been the goal of totalitarian states – we rejected that and became masters of our own destinies.
That kind of future was obviously uncertain, but when we could put our biases aside, we could talk about and start to develop systems of fairness, because we could talk openly about them. “If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity” Eckhart Tolle (Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose). In fear we lived lives of frustration, pain, injustice, and negative thinking and behaviors. This promotes biases with reasons for hate and beliefs in retribution for perceived wrongs. Retaliation as a response is indicative of lower consciousness thinking. Higher order consciousness uses innate wisdom and compassion to resolve differences and find ways to thrive together. That is how our world runs in 2112 and we accept it. But it is always a community building exercise with a fine balance of thinking of the group without denying individuality.
We accept that we thrive when we work together, but also accept that wherever we live, individualism is the core of our community strength. We all still have differing opinions and contrasting beliefs, but respect each other enough to sit down and discuss our differences for resolutions that benefit our communities. We don’t need all the legislation of the pre-Covid era on how to behave because we have that deep compassionate respect for everything – a deeper spirituality for life (see Spirituality, Service, and Connectedness – Parts 1-18 {Starting June 2021)}. We opened our hearts and saw the world differently, and the world changed for the better. We became sustainable – It’s all about choice! (e.g., Power of Choice {July 2020}). We were free to choose our technological direction. To not have made the conscious choice to live our own destinies would have been to submit to tyranny and slavery, resulting from the promises made by the global Cabal to save us from the myriad global catastrophes they themselves engineered. TBC …….
“It’s hard to keep an open mind if you don’t have an open heart. You don’t have to agree with what people think to learn from how they think. You don’t have to share their identity to be curious about what shaped it. Treating people with civility is a prerequisite for discovery” Adam Grant.
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