In this issue:
- Falling Down and Rising Up – Exploring assumptions and opportunities within the current economic crisis through a systems lens More...
- The New Facts of Life – Fritjof Capra explains how systems thinking helps us understand the interconnectedness of world problems, including fuel, climate, and food. More...
- Time for Creative Synergy – Change agents need skills in accessing the realm of possibility – together. More..
Falling Down and Rising Up
By Louise Diamond
Sometimes systems get so complex that they tip over the edge of chaos and break apart. The cascading economic crises gripping our nation and our world are shattering our financial system, both its structures and its underlying assumptions.
Painful as this is, it is also a powerful opportunity. Putting the same pieces together in a slightly different configuration will not suffice. The brokenness of our financial markets shows us that the time has come for something that will look and feel and smell profoundly new.
Systems emerge to satisfy needs, to serve a shared purpose, and to insure a better fit with their environment. Our failing financial system functioned as if its purpose were twofold: to guarantee continued growth and to make its owners/managers as rich as possible. In a world confronting the reality that there are natural limits to growth, and realizing the interdependence of all within a single whole, the present system is not sustainable and should be transformed.
It’s important that we name the basic values and assumptions that led our behemoth financial system to break down. These are all inter-related, and feed each other. They include:
- Greed – The game is to get as much for yourself as you can, without regard for how it may hurt others.
- Gambling – Risk is good; greater risk is even better (and more fun), especially if it’s with other people’s money and assets.
- Debt – Living beyond your means, whether at the individual level or nationally, drives the economy and should be encouraged, especially to fuel our materialistic and militaristic pursuits.
- Market as God – The ‘market’ knows best and should be left alone, regardless of how it is manipulated for the benefit of the few.
- Exploitation and Entitlement – The rich and powerful are entitled to operate as they see fit, using the resources of others for their own gain.
We can do better than this. In fact, the evolutionary arc of the human family impels us to do better than this. With discussions in Congress now about halting the slide into greater failure, we have the perfect opportunity to set in place new values and assumptions on which to build the structures of a fresh economic system. In systems terms we call these attractors. Attractors are like magnets; they draw energy to themselves and become the pivots around which new systems organize themselves.
While the administration seeks top-down fixes, the momentum for change is coming from the bottom up. People are speaking out, and their voice carries great wisdom. They are naming and demanding the new attractors for a re-born financial system, including:
- Stewardship – The assets of the people are to be understood as a sacred trust in the care of those who handle them. They should be managed for the good of the people, not the managers.
- Accountability – Those who mis-manage the assets of others should be held responsible, not rewarded.
- Balance – We live within a cycle of reciprocity, where receiving and giving back – with each other and with the natural world – are in harmonious relationship with one another.
- The Larger Good – The benefit of the few at the expense of the many is not only a moral issue; it is an inherently flawed pursuit, for when many suffer so a privileged handful can reap gain, the whole social/economic fabric is weakened. Looking to the well-being of the greater whole rather than its separate parts is the natural and logical approach in an interdependent world.
- Healing – To rebuild trust when it has been broken requires contrition, apology, and the making of amends to those who have been hurt. This facilitates forgiveness and lays the ground for moving forward together.
- Responsibility – Regulation and oversight are how systems can assure that the dynamics of freedom and structure, expansion and contraction, emergence and organization, can best be managed creatively and productively.
- Basic Human Needs – The strength of a nation lies not in the material wealth of a small elite group, but in satisfying the basic needs of all its citizens for food, water, safety, housing, health care, education, jobs, dignity, and opportunity.
Elements of a new economy built on these values already exist, through micro-financing, social entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, fair trade cooperatives, barter mechanisms, and socially-conscious investing. Now is the time to acknowledge and build on these successes.
This is a rich moment for reflection. Rarely do we get to stop and look deeply at how we have been operating, and to make conscious changes that truly transform the status quo. Even in pain, we need to be fully present to the moment, to give space for breakthrough ideas and innovative measures to emerge around the new attractors.
While Congress will have to enact temporary measures to slow further breakdown and alleviate suffering, it should resist the rush to a comprehensive fix that would only perpetuate the root causes responsible for this situation. What the administration can do now is to admit that we’re just beginning to craft a whole new story about our financial lives together, to listen to the people’s wisdom about what that story should entail, and to articulate a clear purpose for a rebuilt financial system – that it should truly serve the needs of the people in a world where we are, indeed, all in this together.
"You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something,
build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." ~Buckminster Fuller
The New Facts of Life, by Fritjof Capra
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Time for Creative Synergy
by Louise Diamond
In an environment of rapid change and complex challenges, change agents need the ability to access the creative realm for breakthrough ideas, and to do that in collaboration with others. The final section of the How to Change the World course, Cooperation, the Way of Creative Synergy, begins on October 10. There’s still time to register.
Starting with a four-day intensive workshop, followed by three months of distance learning, this course will cover five areas:
- Accessing Creativity, Imagination, and Intuition – in which we learn how to activate our genius mode and live/play in the realm of infinite possibility
- Actualizing the Potential for Change – in which we learn how to translate possibility into concrete action
- Synthesis: When We Put Our Minds Together – in which we learn the dynamics of cooperation, where differences are productive and one plus one equals something entirely different than two
- Network, Network, Network – in which we learn the dynamics of networks, and how to build effective alliances, revolutionary partnerships, coalitions, and multi-stakeholder collaborations
- Co-Intelligence and Co-Evolution – in which we learn how our collective thought and action creates our shared reality and impels us along our evolutionary path
Join a learning community of change agents from nine U.S. states and five countries who are looking at issues of climate change, waste management, elementary through higher education, diversity, rural poverty, community development, organizational transformation, children at risk, environmental sustainability, somatic education, peace, foreign policy, spiritual development, and more.
If you cannot attend the four-day intensive, you can still sign up for the Home Study option, covering the three months of distance learning through online readings, exercises, dialogue, and teleconferences with Guest Faculty. Guest Faculty this term include:
- Jill Wright
- Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson
- Barbara Marx Hubbard
- And others
Go to www.louisediamond.com/training.html to learn more and to register, or call 802-453-6985.
