In writing this month’s editorial for my newsletter, “The End of the Superhero: A Time for Collective Heroism,” another point needed to be made. So I will make it here on the blog and invite you to read this month’s newsletter as well.
It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the human species as we exist right now will not be around much longer. Now please don’t think I’m talking about unavoidable extinction or that we will cease to exist. I’m saying that we will either have transcended the conditions in which we find ourselves now and evolved to a higher order human or we will have devolved into a more primitive existence with unpredictable challenges to our survival. To be a bit over simplistic, we will either give birth to a new age of light, love and transcendence or will have brought forth a dark age in which today’s standards for living will be impossible. I don’t mean extinction but there could be drastic population reductions, huge shifts in where people live on this planet, and general degradation to total dystopia!
scene from Mad Max the movie
What will determine this collective choice point for humankind? I propose this tipping point will occur when our collective passion for our common welfare exceeds our individual passions for personal ideologies and ambitions. Said another way, when we care more for the commons we all share, when we care more for each other and future generations than we do for our own petty positions and private vested interests the tipping shall begin.
Does this mean everybody in the whole world is united in this collective passion? Hardly, that would be utopian thinking, and in any case, totally impossible. But there is a growing mass of people who are taking this stand to prevent the fall of modern civilization.
Sounds pretty black and white you say? A transcended reality and a super-evolved civilization versus the “Mad Max” dark ages? Normally I don’t think in such polarized terms but I fear we have painted ourselves into the metaphorical corner and the longer we continue coasting along the less “wiggle room” we’ll have to take corrective measures. There is a window of opportunity that’s been opening over the past several generations, a window that is making it easier and easier to make this kind of shift in consciousness to what I’m calling “the new human” in my next book, provided we have the political will. But, there is also another window that is rapidly closing and once it is closed life on earth for human beings will be at best challenging and at worst impossible.
The choice is ours, individually and collectively.
The crash of 2008 offers many lessons most of which we will probably miss. Hopefully, we will learn a few things so this deep and ongoing pain and suffering doesn’t have to be endured by those who follow us. For the purpose of this month’s blog, I wish to focus on just one lesson that I am not hearing much about.
When disasters occur we tend to seek out the culprit or culprits responsible for them and blame it all on them. Disasters can result when one person or one small group of people screw up really badly and act less than honorably.
A new book from the Collective Wisdom Initiative is being published later in the Fall. I have had the privilege to preview it knowing several of the authors. One of the subjects the book covers is “collective folly” pointing to the huge mistakes groups and societies can make when the consensus is wrong or misguided. Similar to “groupthink,” there develops a consensus reality that isn’t based in good sense even though the group agrees to it.
The lesson from the meltdown I’m addressing here is the collective folly that resulted from colossal numbers of people making mistakes, some more egregious than others, but almost everyone involved in capital markets had some role in this historic disaster: people who were eager to buy a home they couldn’t afford, the brokers who allowed false credit applications, every citizen who relied on credit instead of savings and was in debt over his/her head. It includes the legislators who passed bad laws or repealed good ones. Consumers who continued buying gas guzzlers contributed to this meltdown. The list includes the accountants and financial engineers who looked the other way trading their souls for job security. The “collective” includes the bean counters who worked for the rating agencies which, in turn, “followed orders” and understated the risk of complex securities and synthetic financial constructs no one really understood. And, yes, it certainly includes the greedy Wall Street shysters who are taking most of our blame, and rightly so. But not all the fault lies with them. Many of us contributed to this collective folly.
Just how many have been complicit is hard to say but it is safe to estimate it would number in the hundreds of millions, possibly billions, who had something to do with this “perfect storm” blowing up in our faces. Unfortunately, the people having the least to do with this disaster will most likely suffer the most. Billions of people at the lower end of the wealth ladder, making only pennies a day, are the true innocents in this global crisis.
When we look the other way while something wrong is happening, fail to challenge a decision we think is bad, condone others’ behavior with our silence, abandon rudimentary prudence to live beyond our means, misrepresent facts on a loan application, we are complicit in the outcome.When we rationalize our behavior even when we know it is contributing to an unsustainable way of life, we are out of integrity with ourselves.
A few months ago I asked two questions of the group I was addressing. “What part did you play in bringing about this crash?” After people pondered that for a while and I could see the expressions of recognition on their faces, I asked my second question. “What are you still doing that will prevent the system from changing?”
It is time for deep soul searching and lifestyle changes that start us along our way toward collective wisdom and it is time to abandon the path of collective folly.This is a crisis of collective conscience, a global integrity crisis, and as in all crises, we have an opportunity to learn and grow from it.
So here is the lesson we can all learn: Many people acting even slightly dishonorably can bring about just as horrendous an outcome as a few hard case evil doers.
According
to Wikipedia, “The word orthodoxy
is mainly associated with the Greek Orthodox Church…. Since this theological
aspect was established the church moved on to resolve the right way to worship
God or Orthodoxy.”
As I
read on about the “right way to worship God” I cannot help but see the
parallels in how so many devote capitalists attach themselves to “the perfect
way” to create wealth, to engage in commerce, to generate profits and dominate
markets. And it isn’t just religion and economics. This adherence to the “one
right way” pops up in all human systems.
The
fundamentalist approach to anything - be it religion, business, law, medicine, politics,
education or any other discipline – is a function of the mind seeking a structure
it can comprehend. This provides security for those who identify with their
beliefs. The mind likes certainty and predictability. The mind has difficulty
with things experiential – things that can be “messy” and unpredictable. So,
the right way is sought and, once found, strictly adhered to with great fervor.
In
religion it is the right way to worship, the right “sacred text” to believe
literally, the right clergy to obediently follow. In medicine, it could be
loyalty to tradition which prevents new learning. In education it could be the
conventional factory-style method of training our young in the Three Rs. In
business it shows up as the dominance of the financial bottom line.
When
this orthodoxy is prevalent, those who challenge this perfect way are seen as
heretics, such as advocates of the Triple Bottom Line in business, holistic
healthcare, alternative schooling and restorative justice. While religion gave
rise to the term, we see orthodoxy has found its way into all human endeavors,
helping to make our institutions stodgy and arthritic, resistant and slow to
change.Heterodoxy or “other teaching” which opposes
orthodoxy met with plenty of resistance over the centuries in the world of
religion. With the modern pandemic of this black and white way of thinking into
all areas of our lives, we are seeing mass polarization, schisms and divides
between neighbors, brothers and sisters, and friends similar to what was seen
in the Inquisition, Crusades and Jihad.
For the sake of future generations, let us call a halt to this capitulation so our sense of
spirituality, justice, education and health is allowed to remain experiential
and not be concretized for the convenience of the egoic mind. Let us resist the
temptation to reduce everything to what can be contained within the limited
capacity of the mind and allow for these powerful experiences to have full rein
within our hearts and souls.
As the world continues to shrink and threats to human life transcend regional commons, there is a greater need for more people to take greater responsibility than simple national citizenship. People are being called to stand for solutions that transcend national boundaries and include the entire planet Earth.
Until now there has been no venue for these people to gather since they are from disparate locations all over the world. What better gathering place than cyberspace.
At a time when a myriad of crises surround us - financial meltdowns, climate change, rainforest depletion, genocide and starvation - how can ordinary citizens rally to do anything meaningful?
Enter the social network created by a successful Internet entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist, The Neo Declaration of Earth Citizenship. Created for global citizens, the Declaration is a place where people can not only sign and agree to it’s tenets but they can add their own individual commitments or declarations for action as well. Then signers can support one another’s commitments, so there’s great potential collaboration potential. These personal declarations are expressions of people’s passions and serve to augment the master document’s scope of principles.
Still in its early stages, the Neo Declaration has already attracted leaders from civil society, the sustainability movement, human rights activists and authors whose focus is improving the state of the world. Early signers include social entrepreneurs, musicians, artists, executives, writers, academics, health workers and many other professions.Signers already represent all parts of the world from South America to Asia, Europe to Africa and Australia to the North America.
Leading edge international organizations such as The Hunger Project, Collective Wisdom Initiative, World Business Academy, United Religions Initiative, New Dimension Radio, represent early signers. And it is gaining attention of forward thinking academics as well. These include Dr. Srikumar Rao, London Business School, Dr. Ian Mitroff, Professor Emeritus Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, U.S. futurist Peter Bishop, Professor Prasad Kaipa, Indian School of Business and Bruce Lloyd, Professor of Strategic Management, London South Bank University.
Among authors who have signed are Fast Company magazine founder, Alan Webber, James Autry, author of Love and Profit and other books, David Schwerin, the author of Conscious Capitalism, Robert White, author of Living an Extraordinary Life, Sanjoy Mukherjeem, editor of Journal of Human Values, Dr. John Adams, author of Thinking Today as if Tomorrow Mattered, Debbe Kennedy, author of Putting Our Differences to Work, and a diverse roster of others from around the world. The creator and host of the U.S. television series “Thinking Allowed,” Jeffery Mishlove, is another early signer.
The Declaration’s theme of global citizenship is reminiscent of Thomas Paine’s words written over 250 years ago in Common Sense, a bestselling pamphlet that became a blueprint of modern democracy. Paine wrote, "My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind."
In the last month or so the number of signers has tripled as word is getting around the world. Check it out: go to www.neo.org. I signed it. Maybe you will too!
“How selfish soever man may be
supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him
in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though
he derives nothing from it,
except the pleasure of seeing it.” – Adam Smith (1723-1790), author, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s a group of us involved in the World
Business Academy were concerned about where capitalism was headed. WBA Founder Willis
Harman compared Wall Street with gambling casinos in his book Global
Mind Change(1988). We had many discussions comparing the growth of a
more speculative approach, demanding greater returns in shorter time frames, to
the days when people really invested for the long term and looked forward to
dividends. There were frequent comparisons to gambling casinos as growing numbers
of day traders and creative mechanisms appeared on the scene, all designed to “make
a killing” for those insiders who were skilled in manipulating the financial
system.
In 1993, Joel Kurtzman, then a business editor at The New York Times, published The
Death of Money: How the Electronic Economy Has Destabilized the World’s Markets
and Created Financial Chaos.Kurtzman’s
“electronic economy” is the vast volume of transactions made each day by unstaffed
computers, prompted by market fluctuations. Additionally he revealed the giant
share of transactions in the economy that have nothing whatsoever to do with
services or goods. They are entirely speculative, just like gambling. As he
writes, “…how can there be equilibrium when the size of the pool of money
changing hands globally every day dwarfs the actual value of the goods traded?”
Consciousness and Economics
Willis and I were excited about Kurtzman’s book and discussed compiling
original writings for a new anthology which Willis and Kurtzman would co-edit.
The working title was Conscious
Capitalism. For various reasons the book never happened but it did inspire
me to write about this new breed of capitalism, a system far closer to what
Adam Smith envisioned. In 1996, I published “A
Call for Conscious Capitalism” and incorporated this model into many of my
subsequent articles, including an entry into a contest co-sponsored by The Economist in 2000. But, alas, the
world continued its path toward more perverse and predatory ways of practicing
capitalism.
Around the same time I
met Bernard Lietaer, a Belgium banker who
seemed very informed and experienced in money matters, particularly the
consciousness around money, not merely the mechanisms involved. This ability of
Lietaer to know the way the system worked as well as appreciating the impact of
human consciousness on the system was very attractive to me. He also held a
systems perspective and was predicting large scale shifts in the global economy.
Last week, Lietaer shared some of his recent writings with me. In part, he wrote,
“we have now entered the long period of unprecedented financial
instability that was predicted in The
Future of Money[his 2001 book]. It is most likely that this will take
the form of the dance where one goes two or three steps backward for every step
forward. Every small step forward (i.e. any temporary improvement) will
predictably be hailed as the ‘end of the crisis.’ It is quite understandable
why governments, banks and regulators will make such statements, simply because
saying otherwise would only make the situation worse.”
Lietaer
sees this current breakdown as a symptom of system structure, not a cycle
as many are referring to it. Lietaer is currently working on two new books due
out this winter which will surely benefit from his additional insights from
this market meltdown.
Free Market, Ha!
A couple of years ago on a flight to Brazil, I was seated next to a
young man from India. He worked for the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank. As we exchanged
cards I noticed his title was “financial engineer,” a term I found curious.
Engineering seemed contrary to free markets. Upon further reflection, however,
I could see many manipulations that were contrary to the market being truly
free. I recognized the conflict between market fundamentalism and laissez faire capitalism, with their strong opposition to government
interference, and the manipulations and contrivances these same free market advocates
endorse such as lobbying, subsidies and tax advantages. In other words, don’t
do anything that hinders us but allow us to gain every advantage we can afford
to create for ourselves. So much for “free” markets!
So it wasn’t a total surprise
when the markets crashed and the meltdown started in recent days, rippling to
other economies like dominos in free fall. Any unsustainable system eventually
reaches its breakdown. Band Aid approaches to fix the system will likely be
attempted. If they are they will merely postpone the breakdown and possibly lead
to an even harder breakdown later.
The system is
broken. Even mainstream media are saying it today. It requires a rebuilding not
repair. While there have been plenty of warnings and predictions this could happen,
the leaders of the system - those with the most power to bring about change -
refused to listen. As Harlan Cleveland, former
U.S. ambassador to NATO, wrote in his book Nobody
in Charge, "Those with visible responsibility for leadership are
nearly always too visible to take responsibility for change…"
So the forecasts were correct and now some people in leadership
positions seem more likely to listen. Perhaps this had to happen for us all to
finally get it. This is more painful than it needed to be, and it will likely
get worse, but new listening may be available for the first time. The “system”
may have been jolted hard enough to shift its attention so we can reinvent the
system, not simply prop-up the old one.
The consciousness behind the system has fostered greed, parochial short-term
thinking, market manipulation and outmoded regulations. The new system has an opportunity to be based
upon our mutual interdependence, global citizenship, market transparency and 21st
Century regulations.
Where’s the Pony?
There’s an old story about two young brothers who come home from school
to find their room filled with horse manure. The pessimistic one gets very
upset and immediately starts crying and complaining about the mess. The more optimistic
brother starts jumping up and down, looking all around with great excitement screaming,
“Oh boy! With all this manure there’s got to be a pony here somewhere?”
As I read articles in the Financial
Times and The Wall Street Journal
reporting that capitalism is broken (at least the U.S. model) and how our
economy is the victim of the “anarchy of speculation,” part of me is elated,
not for the pain and suffering so many people are feeling right now but at the
prospects for a true transformation, which is sometimes only possible after the
system blows up. Then President Bush (friend of the fat cats) comes on television
and tells us the debacle in the markets is “the result of a speculative
economy.” The man whose policies exasperated the dysfunction and brought it to
a head is telling us indirectly his policies helped to bring us here. This must
have eaten him up, to admit his philosophy and policies were a major factor in
this disaster for which the American people will pay dearly in so many ways. And
he’ll probably go down in history best known for presiding over this devastating
bit of financial piracy.
Thank You Market Fundamentalists
The market fundamentalists everywhere have been the biggest
contributors to this debacle. A few greedy people and many clever financial
engineers did their part too. Time will tell whether or not this major upheaval
will be a major blip in our evolution to a better system or a complete failure requiring
us to effectively start all over again.
Like with all transformations, there is pain and chaos, uncertainty and
big changes. Transformations often include rough spots. So let us make the most
of this rough spot and not simply repair an outmoded system, restoring the same
mechanisms. Let us create a system that works for everyone and is truly sustainable.
Let us create a more compassionate capitalism, similar to that which Adam Smith – the so-called
“father of capitalism” - envisioned in his works about wealth and morality.
In
2002 I wrote about the “modern-day tyrants” suggesting they might be the master
manipulators of Wall Street. In part I stated:
These modern day tyrants value short-term
financial gratification more than anything else. Their actions are totally
inconsistent with a sustainable world in which people are valued and life is
affirmed. They create no real value in the world, certainly not in the way most
of us think about adding value, such as an exchange of something for something
else. Their sole purpose is to make a profit, and to do so with the least
amount of capital as possible.
Fast forward six years to this past week...
The
other evening I was watching a segment of the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean” starring
Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. In one scene Sparrow and a fellow pirate
make a toast, apparently one of the pirate codes - “Take what you can. Give
nothing back.” In light of the financial fiasco confronting the whole world
today, this seemed very timely for the consciousness (or lack of it) that has
been allowed to permeate our corporate environments in recent years.
We apparently learned nothing from the Enron, WorldCom, Arthur
Andersen debacle earlier this decade. Nor from the savings and loan scandals of
the 1980s. Or the many other indicators that predatory capitalism only works
for a very few at the expense of the vast majority. Americans are most probably going to pay for all this maleficence.
If markets were truly free and unfettered, the
market fundamentalists might have a valid point. But those who manipulate the
market to their advantage cannot honestly justify that position when they themselves tilt
the playing field in their favor. This is not a free market but a skewed market that required some restraints.
Those
who have mastered this game – those who made fortunes while leaving the rest of
the world in ruins – have no conscience. They leave others to clean up after
them and slink off into the darkness with
their loot. They truly do subscribe to the pirates code: Take what you can. Give nothing back. This makes these dubious characters
the modern-day pirates, far worse than mere tyrants.
If
you happen to know any of these modern-day pirates and are keeping quiet about them out of
some distorted sense of loyalty I suggest you blow the whistle and do it now! It may prevent another bunch of greedy SOBs
from pillaging the public trough in another few years.
[please forward to
anyone you know who works in the financial services industry]
Years ago I had the pleasure of
hearing R. Buckminster Fuller speak several times here in the Bay Area. It was
a year or so before the passing of his wife whom he soon followed. “Bucky” - as he was affectionately known by
his friends and fans – was a visionary inventor/engineer/architect who is
probably best known for his geodesic dome design. He was posthumously
recognized for his genius by having the C60 allotrope of carbon named
“buckminsterfullerene” since it was structured similarly to Fuller’s revolutionary
architecture for his dome.
Buckminsterfullerene molecule
Besides his many inventions and
theories, Bucky left us some wondrous literature – around thirty books! One of my
favorite Bucky quotes is: "If the success or failure of this planet, and
of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?"
These are not merely thought provoking
questions asked rhetorically. Bucky’s life was a living response to them. For
the most part, he lived as if the success or failure of the human race was
dependent on how he lived and what he did.
We live in a time when our world would
be better served if more of us lived our lives as if the future depended on us.
Quite often, people rationalize their failure to live responsibly – as if the
future depended upon their actions – telling themselves they are only one
person out of billions. This sort of rationalization serves two masters: the cynic
who is convinced nothing can be done to improve matters and the victim who is
equally convinced they are powerless to change anything. It reeks of
powerlessness.
One thing about Bucky which is less
well- known: he seriously contemplated suicide in mid-life. He had a series of
business failures, an experience known all too well by inventive types whose
ideas are a bit too far ahead of the crowd, had gone bankrupt and lost his
young daughter to polio. He reportedly had an epiphany which caused him to step
back from the brink of taking his own life and embark on what he
called "an experiment” - to discover what a single individual could
contribute to change the world and benefit all humanity. For the next half
century, he lived that experiment.
What if we lived
that experiment each day? What if we asked ourselves, “What can I do today to
benefit humanity?” Instead of wallowing in powerlessness what if we simply did
something every day that contributed to the success of the human species? I guarantee you the world would start looking
better.
Another of my
favorite Bucky quotes is, "I'm
not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except to dare
to think, and to dare to go with the truth, and to dare to really love
completely." I will add my own dare, no double dare!
You’ve heard of the “fatal flaw,” sometimes called the “tragic flaw?” It is the one thing people either ignored or forgot about when they set about to achieve something and failed. It is what the forensics people might determine as the primary “cause of death” of the ideal, the project, whatever. Aristotle might have called it hamartia which could connote a failure of morals, or character, or hubris. YourDictionary.com defines this flaw “as pride, in the character of the protagonist of a tragedy… leads to that protagonist's downfall.”
Fallacy on the other hand is “aptness to mislead…deceptive or delusive quality” as in “thefallacy of the senses.”It is a false or mistaken idea or opinion. YourDictionary.com defines is as “an error in reasoning; flaw or defect in argument; an argument which does not conform to the rules of logic, esp. one that appears to be sound.”
Now this seems so befitting to the paradigm of thought so widespread in our Western industrialized society, the misleading “fallacy of the senses” that tells us we are separate from one another, Nature’s resources are unlimited and conflict can be resolved with exacerbation rather than reconciliation. When we start examining this fallacy, it no longer becomes an interesting study of a fallen emperor’s chink, a Waterloo-like decision that brought an end to a regime or even a product launch that ruined a corporation. A fallacious worldview today can lead to extinctions like it does in Nature and collapses like what occurred to regionally isolated societies of the past.
There’s no such thing as “regionally isolated societies” any more, at least not any modern societies. It might be argued if Western society’s current worldview continues to serve as its basis for relating with one another, continues to “not conform to the rules of logic, especially one that appears to be sound,” who’s “false and mistaken idea or opinion” continues to go unchallenged, a social collapse of unprecedented proportions could result. This would be the fatal fallacy of thought, the flawed thinking that was left unchecked until the evidence was so overwhelming it was too late to do anything but cry.
What do we tell our children? Our grandchildren? Their children? “Sorry, kids, we were too busy to notice.” Or, “Oops, I hope your generation does better than we did.” Well, guess what? Those conversations are already happening! Did you catch the 12 year old girl admonishing a large conference in South America last year on TV? Have you heard of thousands of conversations between parents and their teenage children at dinner tables everywhere? Thank God some of these young men and women possess enough awareness to start thinking differently, at least about environmental matters.
It would be different if changing mindsets were a very expensive proposition. Unlike many of the world’s problems, this challenge is not financial. All it takes is a willingness to think differently, to venture into inquiries that could challenge our beliefs, challenge our assumptions, push against our stubborn attachments to the way things have to be. The price for this change is not monetary. It is not material. It is largely a matter of ego.
Why do we continue living and working within an outmoded paradigm when it has been demonstrated how outmoded our exiting paradigms of thought really are? What a mistake it is to continue operating from their premises. Unimaginable possibilities await us if we dare to embrace new paradigms. So why do we persist in this fallacious thinking? If you answer “because we don’t know any better” that would be a lie given we’ve had people telling us this for almost a century so we could “know better” if we were interested in learning anything.
If your answer is “because we’re set in our ways” then shame on us for continuing a practice knowing it could be leading us to extinction. Sounds completely stupid? So does smoking cigarettes when you know if isn’t good for you. What about “it is too hard”? If this has any merit we must admit to being so addicted to the way we think we won’t consider changing even when it appears life-threatening. Like the alcoholic who often wants to stop and can’t, this third explanation may be the most valid. If this is so, then I propose, we tell it like it is and admit it!
We are left with the truth: we’re simply hooked on our way of thinking and either aren’t willing or don’t want to change. If this is the end game for humanity then at least we can go out in a blaze of glory like Butch and Sundance. Doesn’t sound particularly mature to me but, hey…. Party! Party! Party!
I had the pleasure to host social activist and environmentalist Van Jones as my guest yesterday for the Howard Thurman Forum Series. The format is similar to “Inside Actors Studio” which airs on the Bravo TV Network in which host James Lipton interviews a well-known actor with an audience of students at New York’s Actors Studio.
A sizable group of young people, mostly students, were in the audience to hear Van. Their presence definitely influenced the tone of the interview and the comments which followed. By the end of the Forum, it was fairly clear to most of us that we have been a disengaged citizenry for a couple of generations and that for any meaningful change to occur in the U.S., the new generation has to get more involved in the political process. Left to the people in Washington, even with the anticipated changes in the White House with the upcoming elections, things will only get worse. The systems is broken and no heroic figure is going to make much difference unless the system changes. It is also clear where this scale of change is going to come from: we the people.
We the people have abdicated our responsibility as citizens. Our forefathers and mothers made great sacrifices to create a country that could function effectively with checks and balances to maintain order and freedom. Many made huge sacrifices for their country. Nowadays, if we vote every few years we consider ourselves good citizens (the half of us who do vote). The rest is rhetoric – discussing candidates or issues along the way toward voting. Very few of us do any service for the nation such as Peace Corps or the military or even connecting with our elected officials. Most of us are disengaged, busying ourselves with relatively trivial matters like television reality shows, tabloid TV or radio, and fascination with our technologies. Regarding engaged citizenship we have essentially quit. We act as if we are asleep, impervious to the fact that we have the governments we deserve.
Van helped us see yesterday that many of us have been sleepwalking through our lives when it comes to our role as citizens in a democracy. He made an excellent point for the benefit of the younger audience members that they have a sacred responsibility to engage in the politics if anything new is going to occur, no matters who is elected to the White House in November.
The question we have to ask ourselves: can we wake up? Are we merely somnambulating (sleepwalking) or has something died inside us making us zombies, the “living dead” who are beyond recessitating?
These are questions we of the older generations need to ask ourselves now, while there is still hope for real change to occur with the upcoming elections. As Van so eloquently pointed our yesterday, any new President will fail at making real changes without an engaged electorate standing behind them – an electorate determined to fix the system, reform the way politics is done, even reinventing government if that is what it takes.
Whether you are an American or live elsewhere in the world, we are the change we’ve been hoping for. Like the U.S., our world has become too complex for any one person to be a hero and fix things. It will require many of us to get things working again, and that includes me, Van, those young students and you…yes, you the person who is reading this. Yes, you.
In my newsletter this month, I wrote about liberating ourselves from the unwanted influences of all the systems in which we find ourselves - family, industry, schools, friends, work, location, race, nationality, religion, etc. Perhaps hundreds of systems find their way of influencing what we do and how we think and we are mostly unaware of theses forces.
New Dimensions Radio's Justine Toms emailed me after reading my editorial and asked:
You point out that emancipation "from insidious systems cannot take place until 1. we learn to recognize systems dysfunction and 2. we become more aware of the various systems affecting us. . . "
Good advice . . now, how do we do this? . . . after all, we are swimming in the sea of this dysfunction and, like fish in water, we are not aware of the very sea we are in. To begin to actually name the various dysfunctions, and then to hear many points of view as to how others are going about dismantling them in their business and in their lives would be of interest to me.
Prompted by Justine's question I thought this month's blog subject could be sharing experiences others have had in breaking free of multiple insidious system influences.
I invite you to share your experiences or yoru challenges.
