Where we are going
Reason cannot evaluate truth. Reason cannot apprehend beauty. Reason knows nothing of love. Living from the head brings us to the same place, whether as individuals or as a society. It brings us to a multiplicity of crises. The head tries to manage them through more of the same methods of control, and the crises eventually intensify. Eventually they become unmanageable and the illusion of control becomes transparent; the head surrenders and the heart can take over once again. We are now very close to this point.
Charles Eisenstein: Ascent of Humanity, ch. 6
The new will come from the margins:
- from the people and places that were excluded from full participation and that thus preserved some piece of the knowledge of how to live
- from the ideas and technologies that contradicted dominant paradigms: in agriculture, healing, energy, mind, production, ecological restoration, toxic waste remediation
- from near-forgotten social and political technologies: consensus-based decision making, non-hierarchical organization, direct democracy, restorative justice, nonviolent communication
- from the kinds of skills that our present system suppresses or fails to encourage
- from the suppressed gifts and passions in people who had to make a living
- from what was neglected in the rush and press of modern life: qualities of spontaneity, patience, slowness, sensuality, play
"The new emerging paradigm is premised on a fundamentally different
ethos, in which we see ourselves not as disconnected, competing units
fixated on maximising consumerist conquest over one another; but as
interdependent members of a single human family.
"Our economies, rather than being assumed to exist in a vacuum of
unlimited material expansion, are seen as embedded in wider society,
such that economic activity for its own sake is recognised as the
pathology that it is.
"Instead, economic enterprise becomes aligned with the deeper values
that make us human - values like meeting our basic needs, education
and discovery, arts and culture, sharing and giving: the values which
psychologists say contribute to well-being and happiness, far more
than mere money and things.
"And in turn, our societies are seen not as autonomous entities to
which the whole of the planet must be ruthlessly subjugated, but
rather as inherently embedded in the natural environment" (Nafeez
Ahmed in The Guardian).
Charles Eisenstein: The Ascent of Humanity
Charles Eisenstein: The More Beautitful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible