Here’s an amazing fact: It’s 2016 and humanity is collectively moving toward a future that nobody wants. We are literally going somewhere that will hurt every single one of us.

Mass extinctions are terrible things. Impoverished societies create the conditions for radical extremism and violence. Depleting top soils create food insecurity and mass starvation. Debt-bloated economies become unstable and easily collapse. Extreme shifts in climate cause millions to become refugees. These kinds of things — all of which are becoming more likely with each passing day on our present course — are bad for business, harmful for parents raising their children, damaging to the psyches of people rich and poor, and downright devastating to non-human life.

Billionaires don’t fare well in a world where starving billions could storm the barricades to get food and shelter. Sick people create conditions for the spread of disease. You see what I’m painting here? It is all connected and the global crisis is arising because we have yet to realize this deep truth about the world we live in.

Then WHY IS IT that humanity is going in this very direction right now? Simply put, it is because the “powers that be” are disconnected so profoundly from reality that they have no idea what they are doing.

Elected officials in high office? These days they are bought and sold by the highest bidders. They only care about staying in power.

Corporate CEO’s at multinational companies? All they care about is playing financial incest on each others’ boards, enriching each other with golden parachutes and year-end bonuses.

Everyday people? They are just going about their lives, doing what their cultures tell them will lead to a good life. They just want to live and be free.

And yet, here we are. In late May of 2016 there are more greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere each year than ever before. The human population continues to grow at an exponential pace. And we are literally consuming the trees, rivers, and grassland meadows of the Earth.

What if it didn’t have to be this way?

The future isn’t written yet. We still have time to change it, but only if we know what we want.

Now imagine what kind of future most people do want. We would like to be healthy and happy, have time to pursue our passions, become skilled at doing things we love, and — of course — give abundance to our children who will inhabit the earth after we are long dead and gone.

It’s so simple in so many ways. Human beings enjoy leisure and human contact. We find pleasure in being seen and loved by others we care about. It is in our nature to be social, to make music and art, to make love and seek pleasure. Nowhere in our genetic code are we wired for destruction of all-things-sacred in the world.

And it is in this gap — between that which currently is and that which could possibly be — that I find deep hope for the future of humanity. My friends have written about the singular ideology that currently dictates core logics of the global economy. They describe how we are taught to believe in the rugged individual, a human island in the vast sea of self-reliant possibilities.

Yet no man (or woman) is an island. Each of us is born precariously fragile from a mother’s womb. We would quickly die in those first few years if caregivers were not ever-present to feed us, wipe away our excrement, and protect us from harm. Human beings are deeply social creatures. We arise from the natural world and are profoundly immersed in webs of dependency from the first drawn breathe to the last wavering exhale.

The sciences of human nature tell us much more than this. Not only are we social beings, we are also deeply moral in nature. A sure-fire way to piss us off is to be unfair, dominate or oppress us, or take more than your share. Which begs the question: Why is it that wealth and power inequality are the norm today? The answer can be found in the annals of research on hunter-gatherer societies. Our ancestors — once upon a time in the distant past — were strong males who ruled by physical domination (just as silverback gorillas do today).

But there came a time, several million years ago, when hunting technology combined with a good eye and agile shoulders. Some of our ancestors got together and ganged up on the dominator males. Throw rocks from multiple angles in an ambush attack and even the largest silverback can be taken down. Herein lies the great secret of democracies the world over. We use our ability to form collectives (and act as teams) to out-compete the lone bullies who would otherwise take more than their share.

Of course, a key difference between those ancestral times and today is that societies were much smaller then. Everyone knew everyone else. If someone was abusive or prone to cheating, word would get around quick. All of this changed with the advent of complex societies some 8,000 years ago. Empires were born around the settlements of agriculture. Strong men could organize wannabe strong men to form elite cabals and wreak havoc on the newly forming masses. They ganged up on the rest of us and have been dominating the game ever since.

Fast forward to today and you’ll see how our amazing ability to learn from each other and build upon what came before (called “cumulative” culture by the experts) made it possible for empire-builders to refine their craft. They invented things like corporations, accounting and bookkeeping, and the government control of property rights granted to those with existing wealth. This is what we call capitalism today.

For more on how capitalism actually works, see here…

And so it became possible to weave systems of dominance, wealth extraction and hoarding. Those who sought to have the most were able to invest in media institutions, marketing and advertising and make the greedy aspiration of the super-rich a run-of-the-mill aspiration for everyday working folk.

This is how it came to pass that we collectively began to serve power structures in the present that create the conditions for that future world no one wants. If we are to change course, we will need to understand how we got here. It will be necessary for us to pull back the veil and see how systems of wealth hoarding hide in our minds. We will have to understand how the stories that organize our lives are broken and begin to replace them with better alternatives.

And all of this is about healing. Capitalism is dying (can you feel it?) and it is our collective choice whether we die with it.

Now is the time to consciously introspect about what kind of future you want. If no one wants the one we are creating now, it might just be a good idea to start seeking common ground, explore shared intentions, and discover ways forward that the majority of us can agree on. We can cooperate together around these themes and overtake the would-be dominators at the helm today. Change the rules of politics and economies to serve all of humanity and life on Earth.

That will require a credible knowledge of human nature. And it will take some serious visionary thinking about how to get from here to there. I am up for the challenge!

How about you?

Onward, fellow humans.

Cross-posted from the Rules.org

The post Who is creating the future nobody wants? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The lack of economic opportunities is palpable. Major media outlets are owned and controlled by powerful financial interests. Elections in many parts of the world have been co-opted to such an extent that they offer a mere facade of democracy. And the systemic nature of political corruption has become undeniable for the majority of us, as I have written about here and here and others have written enough about to fill an entire library.

The world is changing quickly and there is great need for people everywhere to visualize how it is happening. If we can see our place in the process, we can consciously and intentionally help it happen faster. I would like to offer a mental image to help us do this:

Imagine the surface of a mountain lake in winter. The air has fallen below freezing and the water has not frozen over yet. Thousands of “tiny islands” of ice form as little nucleation spots — each floating separately and in isolation from the others. tweet

Surrounding these tiny islands is the turbulent mixing of water and air, some above freezing temperature and some below. It is this turbulence that keeps the water liquid even though the air is cold enough to congeal the surface. Then a quickening occurs… a number of the ice pockets bump into each other and begin to float in harmony with each other. tweet

And in a flash the thousands of tiny islands become woven together as the crinkle of ice spreads across the entire lake. tweet

This is called a phase transition. It is how liquid and gas perform a beautiful dance and move the water from fluid to crystal phase. It happens energetically as a mixing pattern that is distributed across the entire lake. It happens everywhere-all-at-once — self organizing in many places and achieving synchronicity as a globally emergent pattern.

Now imagine instead of a lake that we are seeing the physical process of social change in culture for an economic or political system. Instead of water molecules you’ll need to think about stories, social norms, and standard practices — how people think about, make sense of, and go about doing things.

In tiny pockets of humanity, there are individual people going about their lives. Early in the process there are only a few isolated people whose life story is broken and they can’t make sense of the world around them by simply listening to the common sense of others.

Work hard and you’ll get a job. Keep paying your bills and you’ll get out of debt. Study hard and you’ll get into a good school. Graduate and start your career. Buy a house and settle down to raise a family.

This has been the standard life story in our capitalist society for the last three generations. It worked for a lot of people fifty years ago (though success was isolated to mostly Western, white, male, privileged demographics at the time) and seemed to “make sense” for a while. Yet now this story is completely broken — it doesn’t match our daily lives and is useless for guiding how we plan and act in the world today.

As more of us feel the disconnect between how the world is “supposed to be” and how it actually is, we become a nucleation point for new stories. We become tiny islands of possibility for the new paradigm.

And as we experience the turbulence and chaos of uncertainty in this condition, we can easily become overwhelmed. Made worse is the fact that elite control of media is used to tell us that the world is made up of individuals, if you fail it is your own fault, and if you have debts (regardless of how ethically questionable the situations were that forced you into them) that you are morally responsible to pay them. In this way, we become slaves to the monetary systems of capitalism.

The disharmony we feel inside is what happens when a social system has broken down. Massive inequality pits us against each other in an unwinnable game where those who rigged the system (setting up tax havens, buying political outcomes, removing taxes from the super rich, gutting social programs, and more) are the only winners.

All the while, wars continue unabated that transfer wealth from populace to defense contractor and transfer nature’s bounty from local peoples to investor/owners of multinational corporations. We are told to blame ourselves. And the media uses the art of redirection and distraction to hide the Occupy Wall Streets, Arab Springs, anti-austerity political parties, and all other uprisings from being seen — the dots have not been connected and so we continue to feel alone.

And yet, just like the tiny ice crystal islands on that supercooled lake, we have become legion. There are now at least 200,000,000 of us awakened to the social values and organizing principles of a new world. We only continue to lose because the “powers that be” who share the ideology of debt enslavement and wealth hoarding keep us trapped in their stories.

They are well organized and coordinated in their actions. We remain decentralized and unaware that our numbers outrank them by several orders of magnitude. The task before us now is to find resonance in our lived experience and weave the tapestry of feelings, thoughts, and beliefs into coordinated actions. I am speaking here of healing, not warfare. We will win by reaching down deep into ourselves and connecting with our common humanity.

A brief survey of human history makes it seem like we are a warmongering species — but that is only the Story of Conquest from the imperial age for civilizations in the last 6,000 years. Go back farther and you will see that our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in egalitarian bands for a hundred thousand years or more. Note the recent studies of empathy in neuroscience, psychology, and sociology and you will see that we are wired for cooperation and capable of inspiring levels of compassion for our fellow humans and the rest of the natural world.

So I offer you this mental image. Be an island crystal of hope. Give structure to your story that speaks the truth of your lived experience. Through this healing process reach out to and engage your fellow men and women in struggle. Find your voice. Speak your truth. And be part of the waves of transformation that will follow.

Onward, fellow humans!

Cross-posted from the Rules.org and written by Joe Brewer.

Photo by AlicePopkorn2

The post How You Are Already Seeding Transformation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The shame people feel when they can’t find a job…

…or pay their bills.

…or go to the dentist.

…or that they have to move back in with their parents.

…or they can’t afford to have children.

We are supposed to pretend, in this stupendously individualist culture, that it is our fault. The buck stops here. I am responsible for my failings in life.

Of course this is demonstrably not true. We are merely living through late-stage capitalism and our parents lacked the foresight to warn us about it. When a population explodes — as the human one did throughout the last century — eventually all manner of social institutions become over-crowded. From there, it’s simply a numbers game.

Want that awesome job? Stack your resume next to the hundreds of other people applying for it. Hoping to get into college? You’ll have to pay out the nose in student loans (if, that is, you were fortunate enough to get through admissions). Thinking of buying a house? You’re too busy paying rent in a skyrocketing market of housing prices.

But yeah, be sure to blame yourself. It’s obviously your fault.

Seriously though, we should have seen this coming. Build an economic system based on wealth hoarding and presumed scarcity and you’ll get what was intended. The system is performing exactly as it was designed to. That is why wages have stagnated in the West for 30 years. It is why 62 people are able to have the same amount of wealth as 3.7 billion. It is why politicians are bought by the highest bidders and legislation systematically serves the already-rich at the expense of society.

A great irony of this deeply corrupt system of wealth hoarding is that the “weapon of choice” is how we feel about ourselves as we interact with our friends. The elites don’t have to silence us. We do that ourselves by refusing to talk about what is happening to us. Fake it until you make it. That’s the advice we are given by the already successful who have pigeon-holed themselves into the tiny number of real opportunities society had to offer. Hold yourself accountable for the crushing political system that was designed to divide us against ourselves.

The mental disease of late-stage capitalism is shame, the devastating feeling that we failed ourselves in the Land of Opportunity.

This great lie that we whisper to ourselves is how they control us. Our fear that other impoverished people (which is most of us now) will look down on us for being impoverished too. This is how we give them the power to keep humiliating us.

I say no more of this emotional racket. If I am going to be responsible for my fate in life, let it be because I chose to stand up and fight — that I helped dismantle the global architecture of wealth extraction that created this systemic corruption of our economic and political systems.

Now more than ever, we need spiritual healing. As this capitalist system destroys itself, we can step aside and find healing by living honestly and without fear. They don’t get to tell us how to live. We can share our pain with family and friends. We can post it on social media. Shout it from the rooftops if we feel like it. The pain we feel is capitalism dying. It hurts us because we are still in it.

But those billionaires who rigged the game don’t get to tell me what I should or shouldn’t say to my friends. If I am struggling financially it is because the financial system is morally corrupt. This truth is a mantric elixir — repeat it to yourself every time the habits of your mind whisper that it is your fault.

You are not to blame for the wealth hoarding of others. That is one burden you don’t have to carry any longer. Be healed. Find your strength. Speak your truth. And let the cascades of change unfurl across society.

We cannot begin the work of building new economic systems until we take off the mental shackles of the old ones. So let your shame fall away. Remember your pride in learning and growing as a person, loving life and other people, being with friends, and pursuing your dreams. Then hold tight to these feelings as you set clear intentions about how the future must be different from the past.

We can do better. We must do better. It might be true that capitalism as we know it is going the way of history. I say good riddance. Whatever good it might have done is in the past now. Moving forward will be a grieving process — and each of us needs to pay close attention to the feelings inside of ourselves. We are the capitalist system right now. But not for long.

The pain we feel is like that tugging of skin for the serpent as it sheds an outer layer. Deep inside ourselves we are human beings, which is about so much more than the money we have in the bank or the things we buy at the store. As we shed ourselves of the immoral economic ideology of insatiable greed (that has made the elites around the world very sick indeed!), let us remember our true nature and begin to heal.

Onward, fellow humans.

Cross-posted from The Rules.org and written by Joe Brewer.

The post The Mental Disease of Late-Stage Capitalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It is time to systematically dismantle this wealth hoarding system. Now that we know what it is and how it was built, we can tear it apart piece by piece and replace it with something better.

Don’t miss the extraordinary graphic visualization and timeline below!!

Joe Brewer explains how the extractive system today known as neoliberalism came into being starting with the enclosures and the destruction of the commons in the UK (16ty cy.):

“We intuitively get that the game has been rigged for some time. But most of us don’t know the details of how things came to be this way. As this graphic demonstrates, the architecture of wealth extraction had to be carefully built up in waves of creative destruction over the span of several hundred years.

In the earliest days, a suite of business innovations (double-entry accounting, the joint-stock company, etc.) were combined with a systematic policy of kicking people off commonly managed lands so that a system of “rent seeking” could be built up for wealthy people to extract money from the working poor. This was done in 16th and 17th Century Britain in what is known as the Enclosure Movement. And it laid the groundwork for a massive colonial empire to grow as the British and other imperial powers spread this logic of wealth extraction across the globe. The first wave of mass poverty in modern times was the British and French peasantry. When these societies overthrew corrupt leaders and established democracies, the elites had to find more subtle ways to keep syphoning off wealth (thus growing social inequality) that didn’t conclude with rolling heads at the guillotine. So they invaded foreign lands and did their rent-seeking there.

This was how the mass poverty of India and many African nations sprang into being. Accompanied by systems of racial inequality and other “social control” mechanisms at home, they pitted the working classes of their own nations against each other as they took their model of wealth hoarding to new levels in “developing markets” like those of the spice trade and later with oil, coal, and other natural resources.

Flash forward to the 20th Century and you see the high art of wealth hoarding in digital accounting systems, structural debt-repayment programs, “free trade” agreements that privatized public lands, the invention of personal lines of credit to keep people enslaved to mortgages and consumer purchases, and later the so-called austerity programs that gut public coffers to feed private financiers after they orchestrated the deregulation and collapse of financial markets.

Said another way, the seeming lack of choice among political parties has less to do with political ideology and much more to do with the economic ideology that forms the core logic of this planetary-scale system.

To really get a sense of just how big it is, consider this:

If we were to tax a mere 10% of the money hoarded away in tax havens, we would have at least $2,000,000,000,000 that could be used to fund

(1) universal basic income;

(2) universal healthcare for more than 7 billion people;

(3) free public and university education for everyone on Earth;

(4) fund basic scientific research for all major problems humanity must confront; and

(5) make the transition to ecologically-based energy systems and urban design that staves off the potential for collapse of our highly unsustainable civilization.

Think about that for a moment. Let it sink in

The architecture of wealth extraction is a cancer on this planet. It continually corrupts our governments, poisons the natural environment, and pits us against each other in a “race to the bottom” that has only one logical outcome — the wholesale destruction of life-giving capacities for the only home planet we’ll ever have. I have written elsewhere about systemic corruption, the cognitive science of how we fail to see it, how wealth is really created, and what we might do with that $2 trillion dollars that constitutes a small part of the money squirreled away by sociopaths and those who idolize them.

It is time to systematically dismantle this wealth hoarding system. Now that we know what it is and how it was built, we can tear it apart piece by piece and replace it with something better.”

Watch the graphic here:

The post A Timeline for the Global Architecture of Wealth Extraction appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Climate change cannot be addressed in isolation from the wealth-hoarding of capitalism that has made the world so unequal that a mere 62 individuals have the same aggregate wealth as 3.7 billion. Terrorism cannot be tackled in the absence of deep inquiries about what happens when money is treated as more sacred than life or spiritual tradition. Political corruption cannot be wrangled in without taking account of the commercialization of elections that treats each candidate like yet-another-product to be bought and sold in the marketplace of ideas.

And so on and so forth…

Mystics throughout the ages have told us that separation is an illusion. Western science has come to the same conclusion with the discoveries in quantum mechanics showing how the great diversity of distinct objects we perceive are, deep down, interwoven patterns of energy that cannot be fundamentally divided into pieces. Similarly, the findings of Darwinian evolution tell us that all life is connected in a woven tapestry of mothers birthing daughters in an unbroken thread for 3.6 billion years that gives us a web of life on Earth. Psychologists and sociologists remind us that there is no monolithic self (the Buddha was right!) as we observe how social norms shape and influence our behavior in profound and powerful ways. We are social networks functioning as tribal groups.

These truths—whether garnered from spiritual practice or the empiricism of scientific inquiry—are a reminder that all apparent differences arise from a prior unity that often remains hidden from view. Everything IS connected. And we must hold this truth in mind as we go about the business of transitioning our civilization away from its runaway growth curve of mass consumption. The Earth is finite and there are boundaries which we must not cross if we want to continue to be part of the cosmic dance that is life on this beautiful planet.

More specifically, the local struggles in different places around the world are also connected. Peasant farmers kicked off their land in India share a common plight with sex workers trafficked into the Netherlands alongside illicit flows of money, drugs, and guns. Rising food prices in Mexico are linked to the explosion of student loan debt in the United States. The Syrian refugee crisis in Europe is linked to chronic droughts in the Middle East over the last few decades which were shaped and influenced by factory pollution during Western industrialization. And these patterns of human displacement are meshed together with the empire-building of the United States in its unquenchable thirst for control of the world’s oil supply.

We could easily let this massive clockwork of complexity overwhelm us. If it’s all connected, where and how shall I intervene? Isn’t it all too big for me to do anything about? Again, this is the beauty of interdependence. Tug at the right piece of frayed string and the whole rug will unravel before you. In the case of the global economy, there happens to be a singular string that ties it all together—the central logic of growth at all costs that says the only measure of progress is rising GDP (Gross Domestic Product, the aggregate price of all goods bought and sold during a given period of time).

We have been told that the only way to end poverty is to grow our way out of it. That all boats will be lifted with the rising tide of consumer purchases. Yet this half-truth deceives in at least two ways—having to do with dots that are not connected by their arguments—the first being that many valuable human activities do not involve the exchange of money (mothering, for example). The second is the biological fact that some kinds of growth are good for an organism while others are not. Growing up to be healthy and strong is good. Runaway cancer in the bowels will probably kill you.

Humanity needs to think systemically. We need to act from a place of holistic insight. And we need to do so collectively, as the singular humanity of 7.4 billion souls living together with the rest of our biological kin here in Earth. A good place to start is by acknowledging prior unity and then immediately going about dismantling the logic of economic growth. Tug on this narrative string and the rest of the story gets weaker. Pull enough of it out and you can begin threading it into a different story, one that recognizes our common plight and holds up life as the sacred principle at the heart of it all.

But to do so, we’ll have to connect the dots.

Onward, fellow humans.

Written by Joe Brewer for therules.org

The post Connecting the Dots 5: What If It’s All Connected? Humanity and the Global Crisis appeared first on P2P Foundation.