The U.S. votes in the mid-term elections this week on the devil versus the deep blue sea, and yet regardless of the voting the status quo will continue unabated. Who benefits from the status quo? Around the world, tens of thousands march in protest. Recently, over half a million people in France took to the streets. Unrest is everywhere. Governments are being demanded to make changes. Therein lies the problem. They can’t or they won’t – same conclusion. Instead, they get us fixated on the mudslinging and vitriol to distract us from the realities they don’t want us to look at. The narrative is to blame someone, everyone, but ourselves. We vote these ineffectual politicians into office, without really recognizing the system they manage. Sadly, most of them are beholden to the Hierarchies that control us all. A hedonism lifestyle usually manifests as selfish and competitive and sounds good until you have to pay for it financially/ecologically; and both those systems are collapsing. Who do you rely on when it all goes away? Unless WE work together, we get whatever passes as a solution from ‘Them.’
A material consumer worldview is a continued road to perdition. A spiritual worldview is the crucial catalyst to a better and sustainable future. Think about it. “Like begets like. Lead with love and you are more likely to be met with love. Lead with a mentality of fear and lack and you are more likely to be met with the same. The more positive choices you make, the more positive choices you will find ahead of you. Contrast and compare your journey on the lower road versus your journey on the higher road. ‘They’ have no power over you, unless you give it to them. ‘They’ have no compunctions about lying. ‘They’ will use all manner of trickery. For them, the ends always justify the means. You know it. You see it. But you do not get emotionally involved. You keep a healthy boundary… Your continued involvement with the dystopian system lends power to the exact thing which you abhor. No matter what is happening in your world, keep your gaze on the bright horizon, where the promise of Earthtopia awaits. And keep putting one foot in front of the other, moving in that direction” Earthtopia.
If you are reading this you are already onboard with wanting a new and better world. I know how frustrating it is to be caught up in this chaotic crapola we currently find ourselves within. Technology will be there to help us live well. But we also have to simplify and localize our lives before we can collectively rebuild a global structure that works for all of us and the natural world – one that is founded on wisdom and harmony, not power, greed and corruption. And yet the actual getting there is so elusive. A main crux of why this seems so hard is something I have covered in various ways throughout this blog. I don’t dwell on what we need to do as much as how we need to think differently. We are living an overstory narrative that tells us how to live. Our dominant narrative is an overstory, which promotes the main theme or dominant thread that runs through how we talk to ourselves. In a movie for instance it is a narrative, often shaping the overall plot of the film’s story.
Our current global overstory is about Hyper-Consumerism driven by a restrictive scientific-material mindset that has humans justified as the apex predator of the natural world. This major overstory keeps us trapped in a mindset of extraction and destruction controlled by ‘leaders’ that cannot function outside that story.
All life exists because of the requirement of energy to power our biological processes. That energy derives from the highly organized and harmonic interface of ecological systems beginning with the biological producers – mostly photosynthetic, with minor chemosynthetic, organisms. Our current overstory has turned the world into a human build and human dominated imbalance of human mono-cultures supported by human driven technologies with no regard for the essential biodiversity required for life to exist. The only ending to this overstory is the extinction of humanity and many other organisms. The Earth will recover, but we will not be there.
Sorry if that sounds blunt. I would like to see humanity and all life on earth flourish. We have to change our overstory. We have to think of humanity as a part of the natural system, not the dominant user of the global system. The easy and simple solution to ‘Saving the World’ is flipping with that simple new overstory to create the cascade of ideas to build the sustainable world. Many years ago, I came to realize that we cannot change the dominant overstory while we are living within it. It’s too controlled by the powers-that-be. We can only change it by living a different overstory starting at the local level. YES, it is that simple.
The advent of the internet is a double-edged sword that allows the powers-that-be to dominate and manipulate our thinking; but it is also our salvation in that it allows us to communicate with each other around the world. You begin change when you can drag yourself away from the unconscious mass media programming and consciously start looking for ideas outside the mass media. I humbly believe that this blog, along with myriad other independent sources around the world, are a way to change our overstory.
A recent article from common dreams about The Degrowth Movement is an example of how we start to change our story. It also shows how pervasive our collective desire for change is from around the world. So on top of changing our overstory we have to change our mind in simplifying how we live. The simplification movement has been an ongoing idea for many decades, but it always runs up against the dominant overstory. When you consider your own thinking, you will understand just why voluntary simplification can seem so difficult. “The people who make decisions about a system are not necessarily the people who benefit most from changing it. Those with wealth, property, political influence, and established economic interests have much invested in the continuation of existing arrangements. Growth tends to increase property values, create business opportunities, and expand the institutions through which influence is exercised. A community organized around these interests will tend to treat [their hyper-consumer lifestyle] continuation as a public good” Elisabeth Robson.
The people with the most ‘influence’ are locked into the dominant overstory. They literally see all the incentives of endless growth while ignoring all the ecological ramifications. While the upper echelons exhibit extreme corruption, greed, selfishness and short-sighted goals, the lower echelons of the current overstory perceive themselves more often than not as social benefactors – they just can’t think outside the dominant overstory. Currently, most “elected officials are judged on the services they maintain, the development they attract, and the immediate problems they solve. They are less likely to be rewarded for questioning whether a service is necessary in the first place, whether a development will create costs that outlast its benefits, or whether the community would be better off pursuing a different trajectory” Robson. They will change their thinking only if WE change our thinking first.
Sticking with the dominant overstory keeps us locked into the status quo that favors only the hierarchies. We get fixated on thinking we have choice with the political left versus right not recognizing that the status quo for us was always broken. When we change the narrative to address our focus away from the hierarchical controlling narrative, we will break through the failed system.
Instead of a narrative of suffering and survival in a world of scarcity set up by the powers-that-be, we focus on a new overstory of unity where we recognize how we all share the same problems and that the political system favors only those in power. A narrative of unity that exemplifies what we all desire – Joy, Hope, Love, and Peace – gives us the base to create the world we want. Politically we are currently forced by a hierarchically controlled overstory into highly competitive polarized camps of ‘Us versus Them.’
We are not each other’s enemies. When we tell a story that promotes us as allies that collaborate, we will find we share much more in common that we disagree upon. When we focus on an overstory of unity with each other and the natural world, we can focus on all the attributes that create a sustainable world of abundance driven by our innate wisdom.
The stories we tell ourselves are derived from our social and cultural conditioning. They become the unconscious driving programs of our subconscious. Once we wake up to that reality, we can live using ‘mindful consciousness.’ If you must be angry than channel it into energy for unity, not more separation, distrust, derision, and hatred. A unity overstory is about equity with ‘We and Us’ of shared values, hopes and dreams. It about personal and collective sovereignty, not controlling others. We can disagree, and we should; it’s how we find the best solutions using active listening and discussion. We can agree to disagree and build new systems locally where our voices are truly listened to. That will become the base of a new global system. A new overstory that describes all that, is as simple a solution as we need to create transformation for humanity. Literally, all we need is a new overstory to live by – our story, not ‘Theirs.’
To Be Continued ………………….
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