Why is it so hard to change the world?
I recently wrote a series of articles on how we create the future, including discussion of manifestation. When I looked back at them, I was amazed and awestruck by the immense power we humans have to create the future. Exciting as this power is, it’s also scary. We have the potential to create heaven on Earth, or a living hell. What a huge responsibility that places on our shoulders – individually and collectively – to use our power with wisdom, for the good of all people, all beings, and our planetary home. At present, the world seems to be balanced on a knife’s edge and could tip either way. Lots of good things are happening (including Shift in Action!), but other factors could set us sliding down the slippery slope to destruction of our civilization, and perhaps even to extinction of our species.
(I was intending to include links to various entries in my blog, but the html interpreter will only open last post. Apologies. I've listed relevant titles of blog entries at the end of this post)
I’m well aware of the dangers of exaggeration. A little adrenalin is a good thing to wake us up and stimulate action. But too much can paralyse us like rabbits caught in the headlights. So I don’t want to create yet another catalogue of doom and despair, but to look honestly and clearly at our situation, and to delve deeply into its causes and potential cures. In particular, I want to explore why change seems so slow and difficult to achieve, and how we can work more effectively towards a better future.
Challenges and opportunities
If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably very aware of the many interlinked challenges we face from climate change to loss of biodiversity, from peak oil to depletion of key forest and ocean resources, from urban pollution to new diseases, from poverty to exploitation and injustice, from crime to war and terrorism ... and so I could go on.
Many people deny that these challenges constitute a crisis, arguing either that their seriousness is exaggerated, or that we’ll find creative solutions to them just as we have when faced with other challenges in the past. But I think our situation is unique in at least two ways. First, civilizations have fallen in the past due to invasion, resource depletion and environmental destruction (eg in Mesopotamia and North Africa), but always there have been other lands where a new civilization could arise. Today, the destruction is global; we have nowhere else to go. Second, our challenges may not appear too daunting when we look at them one by one. But when taken collectively, and when we acknowledge the many links between them, the prospect becomes far less rosy.
When our situation threatens to become overwhelming, it’s good to remember that a crisis is also a time of opportunity for constructive change. And lots of positive changes are happening right now. They include growing global awareness and interconnection; the rising tide of NGOs campaigning on every conceivable issue; the mushrooming number of people and organisations seeking sustainable and more meaningful ways of life; increasing interest in personal development and new forms of spirituality; the rapid growth of socially responsible businesses; successes in nature conservation ....
Nevertheless, change seems frustratingly slow compared to the urgency of the situation. Why is this? Why are people and institutions so blinkered and resistant to change? What are the most effective strategies for a peaceful revolution and creation of a better future?
Taking responsibility
Before going further, it’s important to be clear about the prime cause of our predicament. To me, there is an unequivocal answer: we have only ourselves, humanity, to blame. To paraphrase Shakespeare (very inelegantly), the fault, dear friends, is not in our stars, with God, or in our planet, but in ourselves that we are endangered.
Gaia has looked after herself for billions of years. Over that time she has maintained conditions suitable for life and evolved ever more complex, intelligent and conscious organisms. True, she has been through large fluctuations in climate, asteroid impacts, periods of volcanism and rearrangement of the continents. And some of these events led to mass extinctions. But on a cosmic scale, Earth has been incredibly stable and an amazing womb of life and consciousness. I hold no fears for Gaia’s survival, but she may just shrug off humanity in the process.
Today, we are presenting Gaia with new challenges. One is our unwillingness to accept the natural and inevitable oscillations of a self-regulating planet. We look at the history of the last few hundred years, and expect future climate to be similar despite the evidence of longer-term fluctuations, and despite unlocking gases sequestered by Gaia over millions of years in her relentless quest for stability. Similarly, we turn normal planetary processes into natural disasters by building major cities on flood-plains and earthquake faults, and by deforesting watersheds. And rather than adapting flexibly to Gaia’s rhythms, we seek stability through human control, thus risking unexpected and violent side effects.
We have multiplied into a plague species that is monopolising the planet’s resources at the expense of basic life-support systems and other species. When coupled with the restless movement of people and goods around the world, this over-population creates ideal conditions for the evolution of pests and diseases, and the loss of valuable biodiversity. And in our emotional, psychological and spiritual immaturity, from our fear, anger and greed, we unleash violence and weapons of mass destruction upon the planet and other species as well as each other.
In short, we are grossly misusing our incredible ability to create the future. We have become clever almost beyond belief, but have failed to learn the wisdom to handle these explosive powers. In our hubris, we see ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution, masters of the Earth and of our own destiny. But we reap what our parents and grandparents sowed, and we leave our legacy for our children and grandchildren. Again, I don’t want to lay a heavy guilt trip on us all, but to be clear about cause and responsibility so that we may look in the right place for the solutions to our problems. They lie with us, each one of us individually and collectively.
Why do we seem so incapable of acting wisely? Why don’t we learn from history and our past mistakes? Why, so often, do we seem incapable of acting at all? Why can’t we create peace and harmony, relationship and family, community and cooperation, sufficiency and fulfilment, and a beautiful, clean and bountiful environment? Why, instead, do we so often create violence and conflict, social breakdown and competition, exploitation, pollution, ugliness, and a life without meaning?
The cause of human dysfunction
There are many answers to these questions, from many perspectives and at many levels. I’ll end this entry with a very brief outline of an overarching theory I’m developing.
Riane Eisler, in her classic book The Chalice and the Blade, argued that there are two fundamentally different forms of human society and relationships. These are the dominator and partnership models. The earliest human cultures in many places followed the partnership model, and were egalitarian, cooperative and peaceful. But about 5,000 years ago they were over-run by violent, hierarchical dominator peoples. Many of our problems arise from this dominator culture, its forms of organisation and ways of relating.
Most of Eisler’s work in the last 20 years has been devoted to elaborating the benefits of the partnership model, and encouraging a transition back towards it. But there are three key questions that, to my mind, she does not adequately address. Why did the dominator model arise in the first place? Why did it sweep aside partnership cultures that had been stable for millennia? And why is it so difficult to move back towards the partnership model?
My answer, in a word, is trauma - both individual and collective. Trauma causes emotional and behavioural responses to situations that are inappropriate and lead to more trauma for both the individual concerned and for those with whom they interact. There is thus a circular, reinforcing feedback loop that is hard to break in which trauma creates more trauma. Easily recognised examples include abuse in infancy which may lead the victims to traumatise their own children in adulthood; war-traumatised men who react with anger and violence to family stress; and collective memories of historical atrocities that often fuel modern conflicts. Other relevant traumas include famine and natural disasters, enslavement and exploitation, torture and imprisonment, rape, and accidents.
This theory provides a clear vision and goal: development of a partnership culture at all levels from the personal to the global. And it also provides clear strategies for achieving it. We need to campaign for changes in social, political and economic institutions that will move us towards a partnership culture and thus minimize the creation of fresh traumas. And we need to heal our own traumas, and those of our families, communities, nations and planet. Fortunately, we live in a time when effective ways to heal trauma and enter higher states of consciousness are becoming more and more available, as illustrated by the work of The Institute for the Study of Peak States, and others.
If you would like to follow these ideas in more detail and contribute to their development, I invite you to visit my blog and leave a comment. I will also be starting a discussion Pod on Zaadz soon where you will be able to discuss issues around Creating the Future in more depth.
Existing blog entries of particular relevance to this article are:
Dominator v partnership societies and relationships
Trauma and its effect on society
The rise and fall of partnership societies
Topics coming soon include:
Civilization and climate change
Is domination human nature?
Partnership childrearing
