“The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology, but because of an expanded concept of what it means to be human” John Naisbitt.
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid” Albert Einstein (?). The metaphor implies that people should be evaluated based on their own strengths and natural abilities, not by rigid, externally imposed standards. So what are you brilliant at? How has that been recognized, or not? The sustainable future we long for requires that we all show up with our skills and talents and start working collaborative to create new ways of living together.
The old way of expecting some hierarchical leadership to take charge and show the way is gone. The new world we seek is already here. But the habitual belief that our political and social leaders will somehow save us all from a destructive worldview is holding us back from creating a sustainable world. The hierarchy, the Cabal, won’t change, can’t change, and wouldn’t change even if they could. They set up this dysfunctional world we currently live in – the control and power are what drives them, and it works for them.
If you are an old boomer fart like me, you know what the world was like before the incredible mass movements and changes of the 1960s. A large portion of the boomer generation set in motion the consciousness that we see rising today as the real sustainability movement; not to be confused with the corporate greenwashed one. Around the world at that time, we saw a rise in the many social activist movements and a major feminist movement. Sadly, many countries where women had a lot more autonomy than they do today were savagely constricted by threatened patriarchies. But for many other developed countries, the rise of feminine energy was notable. I purposely say feminine energy and not feminism per se. Women have made great gains in liberating themselves from the patriarchal system but they are far from having equity at this time as antiquated beliefs about gender roles still dominate global thinking. Yet, both male and feminine energies bring something unique to the table so to speak. And both genders have both energies, but for millennia, those energies have been constrained to each specific gender.
Male energy is about making things happen, solving technical problems, thinking things through and projecting power. It’s what builds things like the technical aspects of civilization. That’s why the patriarchal empire building so many millennia ago took off so well. It also gave us more violence and war as a way to control that need for power. It also had a somewhat chaotic nature about it as it rushed forward with little regard for long-term consequences. Even powerful women, historically and contemporarily, primarily exhibited male energy traits. Feminine energy is more subtle; it embodies balance, tolerance, love, respect, sharing, caring, kindness, and collaboration – all part of a more harmonic framework of longer-term thinking; the things that make society function well. Those feminine qualities can be seen in men when stimulated even in the most dire of conditions, e.g., compassion during war. But, as a generality, the patriarchal system through history has traditionally kept these energies separated into gender expectations.
Since the 1960s, women have been finding their long-subdued voices in expressing their energies into the world. Men on the other hand have been left confused as their traditional roles slowly evaporate while still having social expectations to maintain those roles. The world is changing ever faster and the emergence of androgynous people expressing their male and female energy becomes not only the norm, but desired. As usual I have talked about this earlier (e.g, see link). Many indigenous peoples have always maintained a balance of male and female energies. Men were men and women were women (i.e., men went off and hunted while women stayed closer to the home with the children), but the balance of decision making and direction of societal action was shared so that more sociocultural harmony ensued.
Why is this important? I observe that androgynous people tend to have more integrity and different leadership skills that empower people without being controlling or hegemonic. Indeed, these kinds of leaders express more spiritual ideals without necessarily promulgating spirituality per se. Often asked questions by intellectual’s is, “If humans are so smart, why are we so stupid when it comes to living in a way that promotes the good things in life? And how can a few control so many in behaving destructively? How and why did women give up their sovereignty so long ago? Simply: Conditioning – we believed whatever we were told by the hierarchical scumbags who wanted to control us – we gave away our power to insecure men who craved power and we believed their lies. We stopped questioning, because if we did publicly, we were punished. Such has been the way of the world for millennia. We are now going through a transition that is upending all of that.
To look at this occurring in real time, and almost nobody is talking about this, the debacle occurring in the Straits of Hormuz will soon be impacting all of us sooner rather than later. Indeed, Cuba and the DRC in Africa are already severely experiencing the energy supply problem created by the restrictions of oil and artificial fertilizer (indirectly created from oil) transportation. Wherever you are in the developed world, we will be all be feeling this soon. Notice how fuel prices and supply lines are already more expensive and shortages becoming normal, especially in countries without their own oil reserves. Literally, centuries of an imbalanced technological rush to modernity with little regard for long terms consequences has brought us to the ecological abyss – a result of unconstrained male energy in action.
The globalized systems we take for granted that have worked OK for several decades are now showing severe signs of unravelling. One consequence of Strawberries at Christmas and Banana’s all year round because of international supply lines, happen not just because of extensive fossil fuel use, but also because people found they had choices for food and international goods at their fingertips, so to speak. But that created a disconnect from the system. Being detached from how systems function is a consequence of hedonistic detachment – we enjoy the benefits without questioning the processes that allow them. In localized systems, you know where your foods and goods come from, you think about the system and how it impacts you and your community.
Swedish blogger (The Arctic Wanderer) Martina H, uses her home country as an example of modern supply systems. In 2024, Sweden brought in around SEK 225.3 billion (about $25 billion) worth of food and farm products from global suppliers. Everyday things like coffee, tea, cocoa, fruit, and vegetables all travel through a long, refrigerated relay of ports, trucks, warehouses, and paperwork before they finally reach a grocery market shelf. But when the produce is cold and the label is clean, you do not feel that distance. She comments, “A few years ago, I started noticing how detached food had become from weather in my own mind. Winter strawberries stopped feeling strange. Avocados stopped feeling seasonal. Coffee stopped feeling agricultural. Everything became permanent through repetition. Availability replaced ecology – I do not think most people are naive. I think they are insulated. There is a difference.”
This mindset is a truly modern phenomenon. “Most people in wealthy countries no longer experience nature directly through dependence. They experience logistics. Seasons still exist materially aesthetically, but are overridden through imports, refrigeration, fertilizers, fuel, storage, financial hedging, and transportation networks stretched across continents” Martina H.
Because you can just walk in to a store and buy want almost anything you want at any time of the year, the illusion of robust systems perpetuates itself. Martina H continues, “You stop asking where food comes from because the answer no longer changes your relationship with it. The shelves remain full regardless of droughts, floods, algae blooms, heat domes, or crop failures happening elsewhere. Insulation delays emotional contact with reality. It stretches the distance between cause and consequence across oceans, supply chains, and labor markets until the connection becomes difficult to feel in the body.”
We are in essence, living both dishonestly with the natural world and out of balance with it. Invisible and fickle supply chains are extraordinarily good at protecting us from understanding what sustains them. Our increasing grocery and fuel bills are so much more than variabilities of the global economic system stimulated by strange foreign policies, they are poignant pointers to the fragility of the whole system.
In the UK, there is a saying about boat-pushers – men who pushed boats away from the dock when rowing a boat on a lake was a popular past-time; when you do not keep your balance, you will overreach and fall in. A simple enough analogy, but now pertinent as the imbalances created by humanity are now revealing how we have overreached and that we haven’t recognized the need to learn how to swim. Boat-pushers who didn’t swim risked drowning. As a comment on our supply chains, we failed to think about learning to adapt to long-term consequences if the stability of the systems we rely upon were indeed illusionary. We are boat-pushers falling in, and the people in the boats don’t care if we drown.
To Be Continued ……………….
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