Personal Journey

My life has been a journey of inquiry into how we humans, as a species, might actualize our unrealized possibilities. This inquiry is the source of my particular version of the epic human story I relate in The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth  Community. The journey began in the closed culture of a conservative small town in Washington State, USA, spanned the globe, and brought me back to another small town only 150 miles from my place of birth.

Searching Up Stream

Along the way, I held positions in a number of pre-eminent establishment institutions and resided in or near some of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. My insights into the source of the current human crisis and the path to a positive future are products of this experience.

    As I found myself traveling ever further upstream in search of the source of the human afflictions of poverty, violence, environmental devastation, and a path to a world that works for all, I have seen and experienced both the sorrows of Empire and the joys of Earth Community. I now look back on the journey with an understanding beyond my comprehension in my earlier years.

 An Unheroic Hero’s Journey

It fits the pattern of the classic hero’s journey, although nothing about it was particularly heroic. It started out as a bold quest to make my contribution to ending global poverty and became a grand journey of discover with Fran Korten, my life partner. After 42 years of wandering the world, the journey brought me to Bainbridge Island, Washington, a place little more than a hundred miles from the place of my birth, where Fran serves as executive director/publisher of YES! magazine..

    Once the journey began we simply selected among the choices life presented along the way with no over arching plan or strategy. Yet in hindsight, it is almost as though our lives were planned to prepare us for the work we now do.   

    It is humbling to realize how simple and obvious the most compelling insights of this journey are. None is particularly new or original. Each would seem almost mundane, but for the extent to which it contrasts with the conventional cultural wisdom taught in our formal educational institutions and constantly repeated by corporate media. That fabricated cultural fictions so thoroughly obscure these simple insights speaks volumes about the pervasive institutional dysfunction and cultural misdirection of our time.

Behavioral Systems Perspective

Although I give particular attention to economic institutions and have studied a good deal of economics, my perspective is wholly different from that of the economist who reduces economies to pricing systems and measures progress by financial indicators. I look at economies as organized systems of power and evaluate their performance by the extent to which they meet basic human needs and advance or suppress realization of the potentials that make us distinctively human.

The Story

If you chose to delve into the story of my journey, I suggest you start with the basic biography for an overview of the major stages of my professional career. People often ask me what was the turning point in my life. I briefly summarize several of these in Turning Points. Defining themes provides an overview of the defining ideas that have shaped my professional contribution. Eventually I hope that each item on this list will have a link to the larger story of what led me to each.