| Subject: | [socialcredit] Fwd: David Korten: The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community | | Date: | Saturday, June 24, 2006 13:40:44 (+1200) | | From: | Rex Teague <elists234 @............nz>
|
Forwarded in an attempt to broaden the scope of the recursive
thread(s) in here lately?? Check Richard's details at the bottom for
more material.
Rex
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: David Korten: The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth
Community
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 09:28
From: Richard Moore <rkm@quaylargo.com>
To: cj@cyberjournal.org, renaissance-network@cyberjournal.org
Cc: newslog@cyberjournal.org
Original source URL:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1463
YES! Magazine Summer 2006 Issue: 5,000 Years of Empire
The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
by David Korten
By what name will future generations know our time?
[illustration]
Silenced by Empires: Delphi was inhabited since 1400 B.C. by
people who worshipped the Mother Earth deity. Early goddess
worship at Delphi gave way to the Greek worship of Apollo.
In 191 B.C. the sanctuary fell to the Roman Empire. Photo by
Ben van der Zee. Illustration by Tracy Loeffelholz Dunn
Will they speak in anger and frustration of the time of the Great
Unraveling, when profligate consumption exceeded Earth's capacity to
sustain and led to an accelerating wave of collapsing environmental
systems, violent competition for what remained of the planet's
resources, and a dramatic dieback of the human population? Or will
they look back in joyful celebration on the time of the Great
Turning, when their forebears embraced the higher-order potential of
their human nature, turned crisis into opportunity, and learned to
live in creative partnership with one another and Earth?
A defining choice
We face a defining choice between two contrasting models for
organizing human affairs. Give them the generic names Empire and
Earth Community. Absent an understanding of the history and
implications of this choice, we may squander valuable time and
resources on efforts to preserve or mend cultures and institutions
that cannot be fixed and must be replaced.
Empire organizes by domination at all levels, from relations among
nations to relations among family members. Empire brings fortune to
the few, condemns the majority to misery and servitude, suppresses
the creative potential of all, and appropriates much of the wealth of
human societies to maintain the institutions of domination.
Earth Community, by contrast, organizes by partnership, unleashes the
human potential for creative co-operation, and shares resources and
surpluses for the good of all. Supporting evidence for the
possibilities of Earth Community comes from the findings of quantum
physics, evolutionary biology, developmental psychology,
anthropology, archaeology, and religious mysticism. It was the human
way before Empire; we must make a choice to re-learn how to live by
its principles.
Developments distinctive to our time are telling us that Empire has
reached the limits of the exploitation that people and Earth will
sustain. A mounting perfect economic storm born of a convergence of
peak oil, climate change, and an imbalanced U.S. economy dependent on
debts it can never repay is poised to bring a dramatic restructuring
of every aspect of modern life. We have the power to choose, however,
whether the consequences play out as a terminal crisis or an epic
opportunity. The Great Turning is not a prophecy. It is a
possibility.
A turn from life
According to cultural historian Riane Eisler, early humans evolved
within a cultural and institutional frame of Earth Community. They
organized to meet their needs by cooperating with life rather than by
dominating it. Then some 5,000 years ago, beginning in Mesopotamia,
our ancestors made a tragic turn from Earth Community to Empire. They
turned away from a reverence for the generative power of
life-represented by female gods or nature spirits-to a reverence for
hierarchy and the power of the sword-represented by distant, usually
male, gods. The wisdom of the elder and the priestess gave way to the
arbitrary rule of the powerful, often ruthless, king.
Paying the price
The peoples of the dominant human societies lost their sense of
attachment to the living earth, and societies became divided between
the rulers and the ruled, exploiters and exploited. The brutal
competition for power created a relentless play-or-die,
rule-or-be-ruled dynamic of violence and oppression and served to
elevate the most ruthless to the highest positions of power. Since
the fateful turn, the major portion of the resources available to
human societies has been diverted from meeting the needs of life to
supporting the military forces, prisons, palaces, temples, and
patronage for retainers and propagandists on which the system of
domination in turn depends. Great civilizations built by ambitious
rulers fell to successive waves of corruption and conquest.
The primary institutional form of Empire has morphed from the
city-state to the nation-state to the global corporation, but the
underlying pattern of domination remains. It is axiomatic: for a few
to be on top, many must be on the bottom. The powerful control and
institutionalize the processes by which it will be decided who enjoys
the privilege and who pays the price, a choice that commonly results
in arbitrarily excluding from power whole groups of persons based on
race and gender.
Troubling truths
Herein lies a crucial insight. If we look for the source of the
social pathologies increasingly evident in our culture, we find they
have a common origin in the dominator relations of Empire that have
survived largely intact in spite of the democratic reforms of the
past two centuries. The sexism, racism, economic injustice, violence,
and environmental destruction that have plagued human societies for
5,000 years, and have now brought us to the brink of a potential
terminal crisis, all flow from this common source. Freeing ourselves
from these pathologies depends on a common solution-replacing the
underlying dominator cultures and institutions of Empire with the
partnership cultures and institutions of Earth Community.
Unfortunately, we cannot look to imperial powerholders to lead the
way.
Beyond denial
History shows that as empires crumble the ruling elites become ever
more corrupt and ruthless in their drive to secure their own power-a
dynamic now playing out in the United States. We Americans base our
identity in large measure on the myth that our nation has always
embodied the highest principles of democracy, and is devoted to
spreading peace and justice to the world.
But there has always been tension between America's high ideals and
its reality as a modern version of Empire. The freedom promised by
the Bill of Rights contrasts starkly with the enshrinement of slavery
elsewhere in the original articles of the Constitution. The
protection of property, an idea central to the American dream, stands
in contradiction to the fact that our nation was built on land taken
by force from Native Americans. Although we consider the vote to be
the hallmark of our democracy, it took nearly 200 years before that
right was extended to all citizens.
Americans acculturated to the ideals of America find it difficult to
comprehend what our rulers are doing, most of which is at odds with
notions of egalitarianism, justice, and democracy. Within the frame
of historical reality, it is perfectly clear: they are playing out
the endgame of Empire, seeking to consolidate power through
increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic policies.
Wise choices necessarily rest on a foundation of truth. The Great
Turning depends on awakening to deep truths long denied.
Cultural Turning
The Great Turning begins with a cultural and spiritual awakening-a
turning in cultural values from money and material excess to life and
spiritual fulfillment, from a belief in our limitations to a belief
in our possibilities, and from fearing our differences to rejoicing
in our diversity. It requires reframing the cultural stories by which
we define our human nature, purpose, and possibilities.
Economic Turning
The values shift of the cultural turning leads us to redefine
wealth-to measure it by the health of our families, communities, and
natural environment. It leads us from policies that raise those at
the top to policies that raise those at the bottom, from hoarding to
sharing, from concentrated to distributed ownership, and from the
rights of ownership to the responsibilities of stewardship.
Political Turning
The economic turning creates the necessary conditions for a turn from
a one-dollar, one-vote democracy to a one-person, one-vote democracy,
from passive to active citizenship, from competition for individual
advantage to cooperation for mutual advantage, from retributive
justice to restorative justice, and from social order by coercion to
social order by mutual responsibility and accountability.
Global awakening
Empire's true believers maintain that the inherent flaws in our human
nature lead to a natural propensity to greed, violence, and lust for
power. Social order and material progress depend, therefore, on
imposing elite rule and market discipline to channel these dark
tendencies to positive ends. Psychologists who study the
developmental pathways of the individual consciousness observe a more
complex reality. Just as we grow up in our physical capacities and
potential given proper physical nourishment and exercise, we also
grow up in the capacities and potential of our consciousness, given
proper social and emotional nourishment and exercise.
Over a lifetime, those who enjoy the requisite emotional support
traverse a pathway from the narcissistic, undifferentiated magical
consciousness of the newborn to the fully mature, inclusive, and
multidimensional spiritual consciousness of the wise elder. The
lower, more narcissistic, orders of consciousness are perfectly
normal for young children, but become sociopathic in adults and are
easily encouraged and manipulated by advertisers and demagogues. The
higher orders of consciousness are a necessary foundation of mature
democracy. Perhaps Empire's greatest tragedy is that its cultures and
institutions systematically suppress our progress to the higher
orders of consciousness.
Given that Empire has prevailed for 5,000 years, a turn from Empire
to Earth Community might seem a hopeless fantasy if not for the
evidence from values surveys that a global awakening to the higher
levels of human consciousness is already underway. This awakening is
driven in part by a communications revolution that defies elite
censorship and is breaking down the geographical barriers to
intercultural exchange.
The consequences of the awakening are manifest in the civil rights,
women's, environmental, peace, and other social movements. These
movements in turn gain energy from the growing leadership of women,
communities of color, and indigenous peoples, and from a shift in the
demographic balance in favor of older age groups more likely to have
achieved the higher-order consciousness of the wise elder.
It is fortuitous that we humans have achieved the means to make a
collective choice as a species to free ourselves from Empire's
seemingly inexorable compete-or-die logic at the precise moment we
face the imperative to do so. The speed at which institutional and
technological advances have created possibilities wholly new to the
human experience is stunning.
JUST OVER 60 YEARS AGO, we created the United Nations, which, for all
its imperfections, made it possible for the first time for
representatives of all the world's nations and people to meet in a
neutral space to resolve differences through dialogue rather than
force of arms.
LESS THAN 50 YEARS AGO, our species ventured into space to look back
and see ourselves as one people sharing a common destiny on a living
space ship.
IN LITTLE MORE THAN 10 YEARS our communications technologies have
given us the ability, should we choose to use it, to link every human
on the planet into a seamless web of nearly costless communication
and cooperation.
Already our new technological capability has made possible the
interconnection of the millions of people who are learning to work as
a dynamic, self--directing social organism that transcends boundaries
of race, class, religion, and nationality and functions as a shared
conscience of the species. We call this social or-ganism global civil
society. On February 15, 2003, it brought more than 10 million people
to the streets of the world's cities, towns, and villages to call for
peace in the face of the buildup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They
accomplished this monumental collective action without a central
organization, budget, or charismatic leader through social processes
never before possible on such a scale. This was but a foretaste of
the possibilities for radically new forms of partnership organization
now within our reach.
Break the silence, end the isolation, change the story
We humans live by stories. The key to making a choice for Earth
Community is recognizing that the foundation of Empire's power does
not lie in its instruments of physical violence. It lies in Empire's
ability to control the stories by which we define ourselves and our
possibilities in order to perpetuate the myths on which the
legitimacy of the dominator relations of Empire depend. To change the
human future, we must change our defining stories.
Story power
For 5,000 years, the ruling class has cultivated, rewarded, and
amplified the voices of those storytellers whose stories affirm the
righteousness of Empire and deny the higher-order potentials of our
nature that would allow us to live with one another in peace and
cooperation. There have always been those among us who sense the
possibilities of Earth Community, but their stories have been
marginalized or silenced by Empire's instruments of intimidation. The
stories endlessly repeated by the scribes of Empire become the
stories most believed. Stories of more hopeful possibilities go
unheard or unheeded and those who discern the truth are unable to
identify and support one another in the common cause of truth
telling. Fortunately, the new communications technologies are
breaking this pattern. As truth-tellers reach a wider audience, the
myths of Empire become harder to maintain.
The struggle to define the prevailing cultural stories largely
defines contemporary cultural politics in the United States. A
far-right alliance of elitist corporate plutocrats and religious
theocrats has gained control of the political discourse in the United
States not by force of their numbers, which are relatively small, but
by controlling the stories by which the prevailing culture defines
the pathway to prosperity, security, and meaning. In each instance,
the far right's favored versions of these stories affirm the
dominator relations of Empire.
THE IMPERIAL PROSPERITY STORY says that an eternally growing economy
benefits everyone. To grow the economy, we need wealthy people who
can invest in enterprises that create jobs. Thus, we must support the
wealthy by cutting their taxes and eliminating regulations that
create barriers to accumulating wealth. We must also eliminate
welfare programs in order to teach the poor the value of working hard
at whatever wages the market offers.
THE IMPERIAL SECURITY STORY tells of a dangerous world, filled with
criminals, terrorists, and enemies. The only way to insure our safety
is through major expenditures on the military and the police to
maintain order by physical force.
THE IMPERIAL MEANING STORY reinforces the other two, featuring a
God who rewards righteousness with wealth and power and mandates
that they rule over the poor who justly suffer divine punishment for
their sins.
These stories all serve to alienate us from the community of life and
deny the positive potentials of our nature, while affirming the
legitimacy of economic inequality, the use of physical force to
maintain imperial order, and the special righteousness of those in
power.
It is not enough, as many in the United States are doing, to debate
the details of tax and education policies, budgets, war, and trade
agreements in search of a positive political agenda. Nor is it enough
to craft slogans with broad mass appeal aimed at winning the next
election or policy debate. We must infuse the mainstream culture with
stories of Earth Community. As the stories of Empire nurture a
culture of domination, the stories of Earth Community nurture a
culture of partnership. They affirm the positive potentials of our
human nature and show that realizing true prosperity, security, and
meaning depends on creating vibrant, caring, interlinked communities
that support all persons in realizing their full humanity. Sharing
the joyful news of our human possibilities through word and action is
perhaps the most important aspect of the Great Work of our time.
For More Charts Click Here
Changing the prevailing stories in the United States may be easier to
accomplish than we might think. The apparent political divisions
notwithstanding, U.S. polling data reveal a startling degree of
consensus on key issues. Eighty-three percent of Americans believe
that as a society the United States is focused on the wrong
priorities. Supermajorities want to see greater priority given to
children, family, community, and a healthy environment. Americans
also want a world that puts people ahead of profits, spiritual values
ahead of financial values, and international cooperation ahead of
international domination. These Earth Community values are in fact
widely shared by both conservatives and liberals.
Our nation is on the wrong course not because Americans have the
wrong values. It is on the wrong course because of remnant imperial
institutions that give unaccountable power to a small alliance of
right-wing extremists who call themselves conservative and claim to
support family and community values, but whose preferred economic and
social policies constitute a ruthless war against children, families,
communities, and the environment.
The distinctive human capacity for reflection and intentional choice
carries a corresponding moral responsibility to care for one another
and the planet. Indeed, our deepest desire is to live in loving
relationships with one another. The hunger for loving families and
communities is a powerful, but latent, unifying force and the
potential foundation of a winning political coalition dedicated to
creating societies that support every person in actualizing his or
her highest potential.
In these turbulent and often frightening times, it is important to
remind ourselves that we are privileged to live at the most exciting
moment in the whole of the human experience. We have the opportunity
to turn away from Empire and to embrace Earth Community as a
conscious collective choice. We are the ones we have been waiting
for.
David Korten is co-founder and board chair of the Positive Futures
Network.
This article draws from his newly released book, The Great Turning:
From Empire to Earth Community. Go to
www.yesmagazine.org/greatturning for book
excerpts, related articles, David's talks, and resources for action.
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