Newsletter / March 23, 2026
by David Korten
Efforts to advance progressive taxation are gaining renewed visibility in response to accelerating wealth concentration, even as political resistance remains strong. In the United States, proposals such as a 5% annual tax on billionaires’ wealth—targeting roughly 900 individuals—aim to directly address the extreme concentration of assets at the top and generate revenue for public needs like healthcare and housing. Complementary proposals include restoring higher top marginal income tax rates, imposing surtaxes on millionaires, and strengthening estate or inheritance taxes to limit the perpetuation of large wealth dynasties. At the state level, momentum is also building: several states are exploring new taxes on high-income earners or investment income, with even traditionally tax-averse states like Washington passing a measure on millionaire income.
Globally, similar conversations are unfolding, with increasing attention to coordinated approaches. Proposals discussed among G20 countries include a minimum global wealth tax on billionaires, potentially raising hundreds of billions annually to address inequality and climate challenges. These efforts represent early but still tentative steps toward reasserting taxation as a primary tool for restoring economic balance and democratic legitimacy. Power and privilege are inseparably linked. And no matter who holds them, they are incompatible with a livable future on a finite living Earth. A viable human future on a now more than full Earth requires radical sharing. Our crisis as a species is not only a crisis of oppression. Its source runs far deeper to a long-standing and deeply flawed belief that some must rise above others for society to remain stable.
For millennia, this belief has shaped our institutions, our stories of success, and even our moral frameworks. Today, this belief is no longer simply a cost to the many to serve the interests of the few. It now threatens our survival as a species and blocks our transition to the Ecological Civilization on which a viable human future depends.
Privilege as a Symptom of Systemic Failure
Contemporary human societies commonly treat power and privilege as a matter of moral choice grounded in a story assuring us that those who have it are more deserving than those who don’t. Our democratic choice-making, constrained by inherited institutional structures, often centers on choosing who will have it and who must relinquish it.
In healthy living systems, a concentration of power and privilege is evidence of systemic pathology in need of correction—and the system responds accordingly. Take the example of a healthy forest system experiencing a seemingly catastrophic Bark Beetle outbreak. The living system contains within it a network of corrective responses—the Bark Beetle’s predators multiply, trees mobilize defenses, species diversity buffers the damage, and new growth follows disturbance to repopulate the forest. What looks like pathology becomes a catalyst for renewal.
Human society is no exception. The extraordinary privileges enjoyed today by a small minority—privileges of wealth, safety, mobility, and political influence—systematically deprive others of the same advantages. Economic insecurity, ecological breakdown, political fragmentation, and rising despair are not accidental outcomes of this maldistribution of privilege. They are the predictable results of societies organized to concentrate advantage for the few at the expense of the many. What our culture celebrates as success for the few increasingly reveals itself as a malfunction for the whole.
Consider the human body. Each of us depends on a collaboration among tens of trillions of self-organizing living cells, working together to create and sustain our individual human body—the vessel of our personal consciousness and the instrument of our personal agency. When any class of cells attempts to seize disproportionate control of the body’s resources and decision-making, we do not celebrate its success. We recognize it as cancer—and mobilize to eradicate it.
Empathy—the capacity to recognize and care about the experience of others—is one of the defining qualities of a healthy human being. Yet systems of concentrated privilege and power often work against empathy at the societal level. When individuals or groups become insulated by wealth or status, they are shielded from – or simply ignore – the lived realities of those whom their decisions affect. It matters not that some people are casualties of war or victims of crime and corruption and others live in extreme poverty.
This social distance weakens the natural feedback that empathy should provide and allows harmful practices to persist. In this way, extreme privilege becomes a systemic pathology that dulls the empathic capacities that normally guide human communities toward fairness, balance, and mutual care.
The Double Letting Go
Much of the contemporary discussion of justice focuses on redistributing privilege by redistributing income. But simply redistributing income leaves the underlying dysfunctional structures of human society intact. It does nothing to reassign responsibilities for sharing the workload and the resources essential to the healthy functioning of living communities. A healthy human society requires something more comprehensive—and far more radical—than simply redistributing income.
Those who currently benefit from excessive privilege must gradually lose that privilege through changes in culture and policy. For some of the previously privileged, it will feel like a significant personal loss that they will resist with every means available. Those of a healthier mental predisposition will recognize and ultimately embrace the larger systemic benefits.
Culture holds the ultimate key. Our culture must let go of the stories that justify the entitlement. We must spread stories that accept shared limits, shared responsibility and accountability, and shared vulnerability as ultimately beneficial to all, including those previously temporarily favored by the failed system currently headed for collapse.
Less often acknowledged—yet no less essential—is the parallel reckoning required of those long denied power and privilege. They must be willing to relinquish their aspirations of someday enjoying the exceptional privilege that only a small minority currently hold.
For generations, marginalized people have been told—explicitly or implicitly—that liberation means gaining what the powerful have: wealth, status, control, insulation from consequences. Endure long enough, struggle hard enough, and someday you may also rise above the fray. That promise is part of the trap that lures so many of us.
True liberation does not lie in ascending into the structures that currently threaten human survival. It lies in dismantling the systems that create privilege. This is not a call to accept injustice. It is a call to reject the false promise offered by unjust systems.
A Defining Challenge of an Ecological Civilization
Living systems are not free of conflict or competition. Nature includes rivalry, predation, and fierce self-defense. But over time, living systems persist not by maximizing extraction or domination, but by maintaining the conditions essential to their own existence. Life’s competition is bounded by its interdependence. Organisms that destroy their habitat undermine themselves.
Human societies are now exceeding these boundaries and bearing the consequences. A viable human future must be organized around meeting essential needs within Earth’s limits—through mutual care, shared responsibility, and institutions designed to prevent the accumulation of unchecked power. In such a world, privilege is not redistributed. Rather, it becomes obsolete.
This presents an extraordinary challenge in societies presently organized around systems of privilege. The transition will not be sudden or pure. There will be no clean break, no universal awakening, no single moment of moral clarity. Civilizations do not transform that way.
For a long time, we will live in mixed systems. Old extractive institutions will persist even as new life-serving ones emerge. Some harms will end quickly; others will unwind slowly. Some people will gain security before others. There will be progress, regression, confusion, and contradiction. These are not signs of failure. They are how real change happens in living systems and societies.
This perspective on privilege reframes the sensitive issue of reparations. Demands for reparations arise from a framework of debt and compensation—an attempt to settle historical harm within systems that largely remain intact. While morally understandable, a focus on reparations risks trapping us in endlessly accounting for past wrongs rather than building institutions that both eliminate those wrongs and prevent their recurrence.
The danger lies not in the difficulty of the transition, but in assuming it should be fast or morally pristine. When we demand purity in a structurally imperfect world, disappointment turns into blame. When partial progress is treated as betrayal, learning gives way to fracture.
In a long transition, success is measured not by purity, but by direction. Are fewer people left without life’s essentials? Are fewer communities sacrificed to concentrated wealth and power? Are fewer ecosystems pushed beyond recovery? Are more decisions made with long-term consequences in mind? If, over time, the answer is yes, then the transition—however uneven—is real.
A viable human future remains possible. But it must be grounded in sharing, mutual care, and institutions designed to meet essential needs while honoring Earth’s limits. This is not utopian. It is the quiet logic of life’s survival and continuing evolution aligned with the emerging vision of an Ecological Civilization.
The work before us is not to win, replace the elites in our now failing system, or settle accounts once and for all. It is to keep moving—imperfectly but persistently—away from systems that require winners and losers, and toward systems that allow life to flourish in its inherent complexity, beauty, awareness, and possibility.
That steady choice, renewed day by day, person by person, community by community, institution by institution, and story by story, is how a truly civilized civilization will be born.
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Noteworthy…
Privilege as a Pathology in Participatory Systems.
In his recent paper, The Living Universe Story, David addresses privilege in the larger frame of the cosmological and spiritual foundations of an Ecological Civilization.
“The integral spirit cosmology offers a lens through which to evaluate [our] choices,” regarding education, eco-nomics, governance/politics, and technology/AI.
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Economic Growth at Any Cost Fails Us All (TIME, Jan 27, 2026), a brief article by Oliver De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
While world leaders at Davos support growing economies “a little faster” as the solution to most global issues, a new paradigm is emerging from behind the scenes. A growing alliance of institutions and imaginative thinkers is working to demand and create a new roadmap and development model.
“…this may sound radical. But it is far less reckless than continuing to defend an economic system whose rules are written by and for billionaires and multinational corporations—and then acting surprised when it fails everyone else.”
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