Brightest at Our Darkest Hour?
The state of the world has had me lose a lot of sleep recently until those I am closest to reminded me that the real value any of us have is in the quality and strength of our relationships.
As obvious as that is, it’s ironic that we live in a world that still puts like souls in unlikely situations of largely invented perpetual competitions to acquire, consume and produce at the expense of the planet and each other.
While the worries over losing the value of institutions that guaranteed our current advancement and worth are legitimately founded, its’ also obvious that the old energy world order paradigms are inevitably coming to their logical conclusions.
Ideas and institutions like Wall Street and the debt based pyramid scheme of the Federal Reserve Bank version of global economics are now showing real cracks as the natural and political tragedies devastate us worldwide. The industrial economy relics like the once necessary capital-intensive centralized energy and resources production and distribution are now about to bear unmanageable costs. Unmanageable because the fossil fuel reserves that drive those practices of our modern world are getting finally and permanently depleted.
As the old energy world order that depended on oil and institutional guarantees start to erode, everything from mass production agriculture, medicine, materials and their manufacturing down to how we live and communicate is going to be challenged along with them. Why? Because, when consumption costs more than production while we continue to generate waste faster both, we have nothing short of a system fail. Yet…
I have hope.
The reason I, as I’m sure many of us also have hope is not just because human beings innately can project their future, but why we do it in the first place. The answer I believe lies in the first statement. We know that ultimately we have each other.
If the global tragedies of the last week has taught us anything, it’s that bravery and compassion are most boundless in times of crisis. People and even animals are more amazing than we give them credit for, and ingenuity, innovation and persistence are in all of us and not just the few who told us otherwise.
The old energy world order had sold us the perceptions that served their best interests. If you want people to consume finite resources at ever increasing paces, then propagating the behaviors that assume infinite growth regardless of consequences is the way to go.
That is what we have been doing and that’s what we are dealing with now. That meant that as long as we kept believing that resources are scarce and location specific things, rather than information specific ideas connecting unlikely dots, we were not in control of our destiny. Those who controlled our collective destiny had built a society controlled by fictitious man made rules like currency, country and competition, much like religion and royalty had done in the pre industrial age.
In the wake of current events some of us are starting to feel that maybe these assumptions are not right. The fact is that we’ve actually known it all along. For example, the myth and irony of modern competition is that the winners still are those who compete against no one other than the standards they’ve set for themselves, yet as a whole we still continue to believe in the idea that we are not entitled equal access to resources and the information marking them so we have fight each other for it. In our desperate attempts to control the outcome of things beyond our control we forget simple truths others have realized before us:
“Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit!” —Henry Adams
The habits born from a fossil fuel based economy felt good for a long time, but as we all know, all addictions have diminishing returns. Unfortunately this time the sequence of systemic glitches and failures over the coming months will be more than a hangover, not only for the unfortunate salt on the wound to Japan, but also on the global scale, it simply and mathematically cannot translate to business as usual afterwards. All of us had a hunch that our system of inequities was fragile and would eventually give way to the truth if geological devastation didn’t beat us to it. The sad part is that it’s all happening now, and not in some distant future we don’t have to deal with. We don’t yet know the full impact to our way of life with recent events unfolding but we can be sure of one thing:
We survive and thrive together, not apart.
“Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves”—Nagarjuna
There is no better time than right now to recognize those interdependencies. What matters now is what always mattered, our relationships. Reconnect with them, nourish them, and reach out to those who suffer from a scarcity of them.
The world is not going to end, we’ve survived worse and even the worse of our fears about it.
What will actually happen is rejuvenation for a better world whose time has come. There is no lack of ideas, insights and viable solutions ready to take the reins as the old drivers collapse. The only thing standing in how fast we can recover and get there is our openness to each other and the possibilities ahead:
“The powers in the universe are already ours. It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.” –Vivekananda
Let’s open our eyes and take in the beauty of our relationships. Relationships that make us feel good and even those that challenge our worldviews and assumptions. A better world awaits with more love and understanding not becasue its politically correct to say so, but becasue our future actually depends on it. I’ll continue to list the references I personally know of on Facebook, Twitter and in other media formats I’ve been working on to date. I urge all of you who took the time to read this to look for more of the same where you are and post and produce the most viable of solutions you know of. Many thanks in advance for your attention and contribution.
