Now that the primary turn-of-the -year holidays are coming to an end – some observations that have repercussions for how we live and how we accept the insanity that we are living. We are approaching a time when we can build a better world with a ‘clean slate’ from what we have lived with for millennia. During the Christmas holidays, there is this platitude about ‘Peace on Earth and Goodwill to All People.’ It persists because it is a wish that arises deep from somewhere within us, even if we harbor doubts it will happen. The simple fact we keep saying it is a deep hope, as if it was a cultural memory of a time long ago when humans did live peacefully. It is a wish for a peaceful world that is in the heart of everyone – well maybe not the Cabal who long-ago socially engineered us to live in fear and hate under their rule.
This future is going to be what we want, not what the socio-psychopaths manipulate us to be. We have the chance to release those restrictive conditioned beliefs that have held us prisoner to a worldview that isn’t working and has never worked as a way to build human society. If we really want a worldview that works, now is the time to form it; a time for a worldview where WE are sovereign controllers of our lives and not as prisoners of an insane system of financial and resource limitations that harms everything on the planet.
“Peace is not a relationship of Nations; it is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people” Jawaharlal Nehru.
For over 30 years I have been studying how to get people to understand sustainability and global environmental-ecological problems. My solution to create a sustainable world is iconoclastic. Do we need more and better education to get people to mobilize? Well, we can always use better educational techniques and ways to understand systems at all levels. What I contend is that the educational process overall has been focused on the wrong primary problem. I think we have done a great job of educating people worldwide about our global socio-cultural, economic, ecological problems. I think you can go anywhere in the world and assess the level of knowledge about our global problems. I’m sure they will range over a continuum from general awareness to a deep understanding of systems, but everyone knows about them.
We all know the problems and we also all know the current solutions, but we are just not doing it globally. The current worldview – materialistic hyper-consumerism – is too seductive and hedonistic. But it is a shallow worldview that pampers to our base wants and fears – material security and desire for novelty – without addressing our deepest emotional needs. What our educational systems do not address is educating people specifically to understand their worldview with the potential of alternate worldviews. We talk about the need to change the worldview but not much on how to recognize one’s own worldview and how it conflicts with a better worldview that does resolve global problems.
I talked about this in a very early post about economics. Around the Holidays here in the U.S., there are always a batch of popular films shown because they hold a hopeful message that resonates with people on a deep level. One such film is Its A wonderful Life (1946). While the film is about an angel showing a suicidal man why he is important, the town in which this story is framed is what I want to talk about. The town is called Bedford Falls. It’s a sleepy kind of town where people go about their lives in a relatively harmonious and neighborly way. This is due to the main character running a ‘Savings and Loan’ that helps people succeed in elevating the quality of their lives. When the main character is no longer a part of the story (he is shown the town as it would have been had he not been born), the resulting town is Pottersville, named for the greedy and nasty town banker who runs everything in town with personal profit and control for himself and his bank. The people in Pottersville as a result are also distrusting and selfish since life is hard and uncompromising. Whenever I ask people which town they prefer, they always tell me Bedford Falls, because it is a much pleasanter town where people are neighborly and look out for each other. Curiously, a mainstream economic review I read that reviewed the film, touted Pottersville as a success because lots of money was generated – there you have it, success in this current worldview is profit at any cost. But, at what cost? The already rich banker just got richer while the townsfolk suffered in a dystopian dog-eat-dog type of community. Pottersville is a good view of what a ‘dispossessed’ type of heartless living looks like – much like modern life in a market economy. Bedford Falls is the supportive, even if imperfect, heartfelt community that people like and not this Pottersville, which was a hedonistic ‘sin-city’ where anything goes if it generates profit at the expense of people’s lives and well-being. Which town is more spiritual?
When I ran the Sustainability Degree Program at my university, I was required to have a guidance committee of interested faculty. There was this one individual who was so blinkered by past experiences in dealing with the university, that he was just a naysayer for almost everything I was doing. At one point I looked at him with annoyance and said, “I appreciate you have a vast wealth of negative experiences in dealing with the university administration, but I would greatly appreciate it is you could just stop for a second and see the possibilities and what is already being accomplished under all the financial restrictions imposed on me and this program.” I achieved what I did because I used my passion to make thing happen. Even when the administration called me in to tell me off for not doing things the right way (bureaucratic procedures), I showed them what I had already accomplished with my different ways of thinking and doing. For us all now, thinking differently from what we have always known is where we can ALL shine our light of creativity.
When I talked at conferences, as a guest speaker, or even just lecturing in my college classes, the most common question I got was, “Will we ever manage to become sustainable?” I always answered “Yes.” Then I would get the raised eyebrow stare as they waited for the next nugget of hope from me. I knew they wanted a ready-made system that they could simply step into from the current system. I would then continue, “But it is going to take work by us, and it won’t happen all at once – it will be an evolving new system.” That perhaps is our greatest hurdle – getting started and continuing the momentum with a vision of hope – hope as a verb with its sleeves rolled-up (see previous post).
In terms of how we will come to live, this hedonistic run we have been managing within has been interesting with all of its material benefits (at least for those in developed countries – about 20% of the human population) but in which we have also been told for more than 60 years by environmental scientists and ecological economists that it could not last – endless growth on a finite planet was never sustainable and never can be, no matter how much we tweak the system. Instead of a greed and corruption society, how about we give a caring, sharing society a chance – we do that through choices we make.
“And if you asked me what I wanted for the year ahead, I would tell you that I want people to feel known to whatever space I share with them. I want Kind Love rather than perfect love. Support rather than competition. Compliments rather than judgement. I want oxygen to feel like peace. So that every time I exhale, I spread a quiet gentleness. I want time for rest. Time for reflection. Time for Healing. And time with God [or humanities propensity for grace and goodness]. I want to be so wealthy in Grace that it pours out of everything that I do” Ullie-Kaye.
So let me roll up my sleeves and offer you some transformative actions that make for a hopeful vison of life to come (considering my five items) – and a way past our dystopian economy we can begin now that looks more like Bedford Falls and not Pottersville. To Be Continued……………
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