The Great Turning: Epic Passage

Our time is a defining moment for the human species. We have a brief window of opportunity to navigate the passage from a 5,000 year Era of Empire characterized by violent domination to an Era of Earth Community characterized peaceful partnership. This passage to a new level of species maturity promises a more secure and fulfilling life for everyone. Its successful navigation requires that we free ourselves from the illusions of a cultural trance that blinds us to the higher order potentials of our human nature.

We now have an unprecedented opportunity to turn the human course. This opportunity is born of a convergence of the imperative created by a potentially terminal global crisis and the possibility created by a global communications revolution.

Three-Fold Crisis

The cause of the crisis is three-fold.

• Excess Consumption: Growth in human consumption resulting from a combination of population growth and growth in consumption per capita is depleting the natural life support system of the planet, disrupting natural water cycles and climate systems, and threatening human survival.
• Inequality: Unconscionable and growing concentration of financial power in a world of ever more intense competition for a declining base of material wealth is eroding the social fabric to the point of widespread social breakdown.
• Institutional Pathology: The most powerful institutions on the planet, global financial markets and the transnational corporations that serve them, are institutions of Empire dedicated to growing consumption and inequality. They convert real capital into financial capital to increase the relative economic power of those who live by money, while depressing the wages of those who produce real value through their labor. These institutions respond to environmental and social crises with palliatives that side step the need to reduce overall consumption and reallocate resources from rich to poor. To do otherwise would be contrary to their legal and financial imperatives. We cannot expect the institutions that got us into the crisis to get us out of it.

We face the imperative to:

1. Reduce aggregate consumption, which means renouncing economic growth and obsessive over consumption as our defining economic priority in favor of meeting real human needs, including needs for dignity, community and meaningful work.
2. Eliminate extremes of inequality, which means renouncing domination as our defining mode of organization in favor of equity and deep democracy.
3. Transform our institutions and cultures to support the above.

Imperative as Opportunity

There is significant evidence that for all our apparent differences, most all the world's people want the same thing: happy healthy children, families, communities, and natural sytems. Properly understood, the imperative creates an unprecedented opportunity to unleash long suppressed potentials of the human consciousness to bring forth the world for which we humans have long shared a deep yearning. See "What will Earth Community look like?"

    The sacrifices are marginal relative to the potential gain. Mostly we must give up wasteful or actively destructive forms of consumption to free up resources for uses that actually increase our happiness and well-being. It involves, for example, reallocation from:

• Instruments of war to health care and environmental rejuvenation.
• Automobiles to public transportation.
• Suburban sprawl to compact communities and the reclamation of forest and agricultural land.
• Advertising to education.
• Financial speculation to local entrepreneurship.

On its face, a serious Earth Community Agenda is far beyond the realm of political feasibility. Our challenge is to articlate a serious agenda and set about to make it politically feasible. It begins with a conversation, which fortunately is already underway in localities all over the world. We can accelerate that conversation by spreading the good news that the world we must now create to secure the human future is the same as the world most all the world's people want. 

    The economic conversion called for will require serious adjustments, particularly for those whose livelihoods depend on advancing harmful or wasteful forms of consumption. They too, however, stand to receive compensating gains in the form of more full-filling jobs and a better future for their children. The fear of loss of livelihood is a major barrier and the transition from brown jobs to green jobs must receive significant attention. The Green Jobs movement is an important start.

    We face a race against time between the awakening of an Earth Community consciousness and the spread of social and environmental collapse. Our window of opportunity could slam shut at any time with chilling finality.

An Irrevocable Choice

Success depends on facing up to the extent to which the crisis is a consequence of deep social and institutional pathology. Although green technologies will have an essential role, there is no technological fix. The fate of our children turns on our current irrevocable choice between two contrasting ways of relating to one another and Earth. One is the Way of Earth Community, the way of partnership, sharing, reconciliation, mutual responsibility, and respect for all life. The other is the Way of Empire, the way of domination, greed, violence, wasted lives and environmental devastation. The Way of Empire got us into this pickle and places our children’s future at serious risk.

    Earth Community features self-organizing networks based on principles of partnership and a cooperative sharing of Earth’s resources to create a world that works for all. Empire features a pyramid of coercive power based on principles of domination destined to play out as a last man standing imperial competition for what remains of Earth’s natural bounty. How we choose will determine whether those who follow us will refer to our time as the Great Turning or the Great Unraveling.

5000 Years is Enough

Some five thousand years ago, our ancestors turned away from Earth Community and embraced Empire, creating a win-lose competition for resources between individuals and nations that bestows great power and privilege on the winners, but with devastating social and environmental consequences for the larger society. Once Empire’s pyramid of domination is in place, the resulting rule or be ruled, kill or be killed competitive dynamic leaves little place for dissent. You play by Empire’s rules or suffer surfdom, exclusion, or death. 

    Empire’s power depends on its ability to control the cultural stories or theories of how things work, by which we understand our world. These stories frame the public discourse and set the boundaries on the choices on the table for consideration. Empire stories induce a kind of cultural trance that conditions us to accept the dominator relations of Empire as just and righteous and to dismiss talk of alternatives as naïve, dangerous, or even sinful. Once we recognize the truth that Empire stories deny, the trance is broken. To change the future, change the story.

 Global Awakening

Empire has always met resistance from those who saw the truth that violence and injustice are symptoms of deep cultural and institutional dysfunction destructive of our higher order human possibilities. Mostly, this resistance was geographically isolated and the institutions of Empire easily contained it. No longer. Modern communications technology has breached the barriers of geography to link ordinary people into a seamless global web of communication.

     As we awaken, one by one from the long dark night of Empire’s cultural trance we are learning to use this communication capability to function as a collective intelligence with a spiritual consciousness that is giving our species a capacity to choose and act as a whole in the service of life. Millions have already awakened. The greater our numbers, the faster the awakening spreads.

    The Internet and other new global communications capabilities obliterate geographical barriers and give the subjects of Empire, for the first time, the means to connect with one another in a process of mutual liberation by directly sharing ideas, experience, and information with one another unfiltered by imperial agents and institutions. Empire rules by keeping ordinary people divided. We now have the means to render Empire's divide and conquer tactics impotent. It is a breakthrough moment for humanity. Growing millions of citizens are making positive use of this capability to accelerate the awakening

The Work

The institutions of Empire that have led human societies to the brink of collapse in their insatiable quest for power will not act from within to voluntarily relinquish that power. Leadership for the turning must come from popular civic initiatives centered outside the institutions of Empire. This leadership is emerging every where and moves forward on three fronts:

• New Stories: Through dialogue, replace Empire stories with Earth Community stories. This work includes decoding the language of Empire and developing the necessary language to  communicate about Earth Community.

• New Rules: Through political action, replace rules favoring Empire with rules favoring Earth Community.
• New Institutions: Through local organizing, create caring, cooperative communities of place that direct their energy to growing the institutions of Earth Community from the bottom up to displace the institutions of Empire.

Our collective future turns on the success of this work of bringing forth new stories, rules, and institutions to advance a bold Earth Community Agenda. It is the greatest and most creative adventure in all of the human experience.  We are, however, in a race against time. The window of opportunity is closing fast. Accelerating social and environmental collapse creates the imperative to act with deliberate speed to accelerate the awakening and focus the positive life energy it is unleashing.

****

In these dangerous and often frightening times it is important to regularly remind ourselves that we are privileged to live at the moment exciting moment of creative opportunity in the whole of the human experience. The time is now. We have the power. We are the ones we have been waiting for.