It's going to take a major shift in most people's worldview -- their beliefs, intentions, goals and actions -- to steward our crippled civilization to a safe landing, or even just to cope with the world that remains after its collapse. That major shift -- a Let-Self-Change by billions of people -- has four necessary preconditions:
- Awareness and Attention: to how the world really works, and what needs to be done to make it better
- Openness: to the possibility of better ways to live and make a living, and the possibility of making major personal changes
- Actionable information: about how to Let-Self-Change, what to do, how to do it effectively in collaboration with others, and how to persuade others of the need to Let-Self-Change as well
- Time and Energy: to do more than just worry about what's wrong -- to think through what we must do and act responsibly, appropriately and decisively
If you're not aware or really paying attention, you'll be able to convince yourself that someone else will solve the problems, or that there's time to wait and see. If you're not open, you'll be able to deny there is any problem, or at least deny that you have any personal responsibility to do something about it. If you're not informed, you won't know what to do, or who to most effectively do it with. And if you lack the time and energy, you'll just make yourself ill with knowledge you're unable to act upon.
These preconditions are like four sequential locked doors between the corpocratic world most of us live in, many of us uneasily and anxiously, and the Edge, the way out. As long as most of us are caught inside these doors, or between them, the whole world will be caught between the distant promise of saving our society and our world, and its realization.
The inertia of the corpocracy and the lure of corporatism are powerful: The corporatists control the media, and don't want us to know how things really are. It is not nature's way, or human nature, to change quickly and dramatically until there is unarguably no alternative. Peer pressure ostracizes those on the Edge from the hapless but comfortable guilty conformity of the civilized corpocracy. Actionable information is hard to come by: it threatens the status quo and is therefore suppressed as subversive. Meaningful, coordinated action requires the development of good working models of better ways to live and make a living, and these are even more threatening to the corpocracy, and obstructed by every means at its disposal.
And, by keeping us busy, exhausted, isolated and discouraged, the corpocracy prevents us from opening the fourth door even when we have made our way through the first three, and hence prevents those on the Edge from developing the momentum we need for world-changing.
How could we make it easier to get through these four doors, for ourselves and for others?
- We are increasing awareness and attention, through blogs and other alternative media. But rather than giving the legacy media a pass, we should be challenging them, shouting them down, working collaboratively to create and promote powerful, action-oriented alternative media, and undermining and obsolescing the legacy media until they go out of business. To do that, more than anything else, we need to make our message more accessible to the 80% of the world on the other side of the digital divide, who still rely on corporatist newspapers, radio and television stations for their perspective on what's going on in the world.
- We need to learn, practice and teach openness, in the way we engage others in conversation, in our school systems, and through millions of Open Space events that invite and empower others. Conversation and collaboration need to replace demonstration and rhetoric as our principal means of opening others to our messages and to the truths that are currently denied and repressed.
- As Bill Maher says, we need to do the job of the media by making what is important interesting. Even those of us on or near the Edge are hesitant to bring up the need and means for radical social change in 'pleasant company', for fear of being depressing, confrontational, or boring. We need, too, to learn and teach each other to eschew information that is not actionable, and to focus our attention on what we, ourselves, can and must do, rather than on rhetoric and what others should be doing.
- As for getting more time and energy, the only things we can do are (a) staying healthy, physically and emotionally, and (b) valuing our time more highly than the money and material goods that spending it brings us. Only by living more simply can we rediscover how precious time for reflection, activism and joyful activities is. This necessarily has to be the last of the four doors to open, since we will not quit jobs that exhaust, distract and demean us until we become aware, open and informed of the need to do so.
It's really as simple, and perhaps impossible, as that. |
MADE IN CANADA
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