Foundation
Imagi Nexus Global

Foundation

For the most part, I will let the text speak for itself.  Where it seems appropriate, I will comment from our current perspective.  These comments will appear in a different font and under the heading 2020 Vision.

Contents

Chapter                                                                            Page

1.   Foreword                                                                                                      2

2.   Introduction                                                                                                  4

Outer Journey

1.     Economics                                                                                       13

2.     Education                                                                                                   46

3.     Technology                                                                                                 57

4.     Energy                                                                                                         64

5.     Social Change Theory                                                                                66

Inner Journey

1.     Introduction                                                                                                   83

2.     Competition                                                                                                   84

3.     Back to the Future                                                                                         96

4.     From Darkness to Light                                                                                109

Conclusion

11. The way out…the way in                                                                              119

12. Action                                                                                                           127

13. Afterword                                                                                                     129

14. Nexus Global Proposal                                                                                130

15. Bibliography                                                                                                 133

Nexus  1.  connection, interconnection, tie, link

  2.  a connected group or series

(Webster’s Third New International Dictionary)

We have accumulated a great deal of wisdom over the period of time that our species has inhabited the earth.

For those of us interested in social change, this creates quite a dilemma.  To participate or not to participate.  We’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.  In this book, I would like to suggest a third alternative.  I believe we now have enough knowledge to begin to move towards the creation of an intentional society that would allow us to bypass the traditional route of social change which has consistently proven ineffective.  I believe we can describe this society in a more or less end state and then project backwards to outline the starting points from which this society will be born.  We already have all the information we need to move in this direction.  All that is required is intention and good will.  If these attributes do not exist in sufficient quantity, life on this planet as we know it is in danger of extinction.

 The framework for this society is like a giant jigsaw puzzle.  The challenge is to take all the pieces that we have already prepared and weave them into a whole.  Those who choose to work on the project are more than welcome, and those who choose to stay with the old society for the time being are also welcome to opt out.  There should be no need to become involved in win/lose dialogues about Nexus.  It either makes sense to you or it does not.  You are either ready or you are not. 

Society

We are led to believe that Society B, of which we are all presently a part, is constantly moving along the road of progress.  After all, on a certain level, our lives are easier, filled with progressively more labour saving devices, technology is offered as a panacea for whatever ails you, and from a certain perspective, western society is more affluent than it has ever been.

 It seems the broader the time span, the easier it is to identify areas where progress has been made.  Over time, diseases that once ravaged the landscape are eliminated, back breaking physical labour is replaced by clever machinery, people have more leisure time, live more comfortably, and live longer. 

 But are we really better off or just simply differently off?  Has our quality of life grown appreciably?  Are we a kinder, gentler planet than we were?  Does our picture of prosperity include most, many, some, or only relatively few people in the world?  Do we see the application of wisdom more evident in how we lead our lives than we did?  Are people happier, more hopeful, more content than they were? 

 As with most situations, the answers to these questions will depend on one’s perspective.  A white, middle class, university educated male living in North America, might answer differently than someone living in Nepal, Burma, Uganda, China, or East Germany.  If the focus is on health, we could expect different answers from someone living in a village that used to be ravaged by malaria (although even it is experiencing a comeback) to someone dealing with AIDS or breast cancer.

 In Nexus, the perspective attempted is one that is as inclusive as possible, that takes into account as many variables as possible before making a decision or choosing a course of action.  If we aspire to exemplify connection, our decisions will need to demonstrate our coming to terms with this concept. 

That aside, how are we doing in Society B?  What objective evidence do we have as indicators of our ongoing record as a society?

 We continue to experience depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer, which is essential to protect people and crops from solar ultraviolet radiation; carbon dioxide build-up, threatening a global greenhouse effect and world-wide climatic changes; acid rain; increasing levels of chemical, radioactive and other toxic pollutants in water, air, and soils, contributing to a rise in cancers and other environmentally-induced diseases, health problems, and genetic damage; the loss of topsoil and increasing desertification, contributing to hunger and starvation for millions; chemical and biological, as well as nuclear weapons; and the massive destruction of rainforests, with the loss of vital watersheds and the depletion of the earth's oxygen supply, further compounding the carbon-dioxide threat.  (Ecological Security in an Interdependent World, Patricia M. Mische, 1988)

 Since 1970, the world lost nearly 200 million hectares of tree cover, an area roughly the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River.  Deserts expanded by some 120 million hectares, claiming more land than is currently planted to crops in China.  Thousands of plant and animal species with which we shared the planet in 1970 no longer exist.  And the world's farmers lost an estimated 480 billion tons of topsoil, roughly equivalent to the amount of India's cropland. (State of the World, Lester R. Brown, 1991)

 Leading biologists estimate that one fifth of the species on earth may well disappear during this century's last two decades.  What they cannot estimate is how long such a rate of extinction can continue without leading to the wholesale collapse of ecosystems.  The earth is losing 100 species a day.

 1995 was the warmest year on record and the ten hottest years in recorded human history have all occurred in the 1980’s and 1990’s.  The earth has this century undergone the fastest warming since the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago.

 Emissions of carbon from fossil-fuel burning reached an all-time peak in 1995 at 6,056 million tons, compared with 5,172 million tons in 1980 and 4,006 million tons in 1970. As a result, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen steadily over the period - from 325 parts per million in 1970 to 361 parts per million in 1995, an 11 per cent increase.

 The world is expected to consume, during the last 30 years of the twentieth century, from three to four times the volume of minerals that has been consumed throughout the previous history of civilization.

 As consumers, we are the authors of some revealing statistics. A typical resident of the industrialized fourth of the world uses 15 times as much paper, 10 times as much steel, and 12 times as much fuel as a Third World resident.  Americans consume more soft drinks than water from the kitchen sink.  93% of American teenage girls surveyed in 1987 deemed shopping their favourite pastime. (Asking How Much is Enough, Alan Durning, 1991)

 The Pentagon uses enough energy in 12 months to run the entire U.S. urban mass transit system for almost 14 years.

 Australians and Bangladeshis both live in relatively warm climates, but Australians go through one hundred times more energy than Bangladeshis.

 The average Canadian goes through 100 times more trees than the average Indian. 

 The average US citizen produces 170 times more pollution from burning fossil fuels like oil and coal than the average citizen of Zaire. 

 There are three rungs on the ladder of the world's food consumption: at the bottom, 630 million people do not have enough to eat: in the middle, 3.4 billion grain eaters get most of their protein from plants: at the top, 1.25 billion meat eaters consume three times as much animal fat per person as the remaining four billion - and use 40% of the world’s grain to fatten the livestock they eat.  

 World population is growing by 92 million people annually, roughly equal to adding another Mexico each year; of this total, 88 million are being added in the developing world. Over two decades, some 1.6 billion people were added to the world's population - more than inhabited the planet in 1900. (Denial in the Decisive Decade, Sandra Postel, 1992)

 Today, 85% of the world's income goes to 23% of its people.  By contrast, more than 1 billion survive on less than $1.00 a day.

 According to the United Nations’ Human Development report 1996, the combined wealth of the world’s 358 billionaires now equals the total income of the poorest 44.5 percent of the world’s population, some 2.3 billion people.

 Estimates by the United Nations Development Programme suggest that additional investments equal to just over 2 percent of global military expenditures, or about $20 billion per year, would allow everyone in the world to receive primary education and health care, family planning services, safe drinking water, and adequate nutrition.

 While in the industrial world there are 3.3 soldiers for every doctor, in the developing world soldiers outnumber doctors by 8.4 to 1.

 In a world where 1.1 billion people do not have access to elementary health services, 950 million are chronically malnourished, and 570 million women are illiterate, current global military spending is estimated at US $1,000 billion.

 At present 1/4 of all money spent globally on research and development is for military-related Research and Development.  More is spent on military R & D than on research into energy, pollution control, health, and agriculture combined.  Twenty percent of the world's scientists and engineers are engaged in military research and development.

 At present, the developing world owes the developed world approximately $1,000 billion.  Arms imports account for 25% of the debt burden.  Moreover, a United Nations report noted that in at least four of the 20 countries with the largest foreign debt in 1983, the value of arms imports amounted to 39-40% of the debt increase between 1975 and 1980. (Missiles and Malnutrition, Esther Epp-Tiessen)

 In 1983, eleven million babies died before their first birthday.  Two billion people lived on incomes below five hundred dollars per year.  Four hundred fifty million suffered from hunger and severe malnutrition.  Two billion had no dependable supply of safe water to drink.  In the United States, one of the richest nations of the world, the national poverty rate was the highest in seventeen years, with thirty-four million people, about one-fifth of the population, classified as poor under official poverty standards. (World Military and Social Expenditures, Ruth Sivard)

2020 Vision

 Alright, so things may not be going all that well!  Can we be more specific?  We could spend the rest of the book being more specific.  There is enough information collected from the past, at the present, and continuing into the future to allow us to spend all of our time validating, supporting, and arguing our position.  The likely outcome of this debate would be that those who began on one side, would still be there, and the other perspective would likely be just as entrenched.

 I do not want to diminish the importance of our investigation so far as to the state of the world.  I could not make the statements that I am making without it.  We could not suggest moving on unless we had clearly established where we’ve been, and where we are presently. The question now becomes, what do I do with this information now that I know it be valid?  How can I best be effective?  Where does my power lie?  What strategies are available to me to make a difference in the overall scheme of things?   How far can I push?  How much am I prepared to risk?  This book is an attempt to apply my learning and observations to answer those questions for myself. 

It is normal in a society that a percentage of the population should want to walk away from any involvement whatsoever.  The freedom of that small minority not to participate is a sign of the society’s health.  But you know a society is in trouble when the virtual totality of the elite adopts public silence and private passivity on the professional level, then walks away from society to blow off accumulated steam on private pleasures.

 We are seeing a rapid rise of mean-spiritedness, fed by radio and television, the rhetoric of cynical politicians, and the embittered disillusionment of people whose hopes and dreams have been destroyed and whose lives feel threatened.  It is a mean-spiritedness that seems to feed upon itself, seeking everywhere someone to blame, someone who is the cause of this pain, this disappointment, this failure to succeed.  The airwaves are filled with rancour and anger, cynicism and accusation.  When  people are asked to describe the mood of the country, they respond, "depressed, angry, overwhelmed, feeling isolated and cut-off, mistrustful, mean, hurt, fearful."  To succeed, our organizing must address these feelings. 

 All of our strategies for social change will mean very little if we do not have access to that place inside us where generosity lives.  Much of our work has to be focused on nurturing the life of the spirit, on keeping the door to our better selves as wide open as possible.

These concepts in all their various forms have intrigued me for as long as I can remember

These concepts in all their various forms have intrigued me for as long as I can remember.  In high school, I was struck by the senseless context in which information was being conveyed to me.  The separation of knowledge into disjointed subjects never provided a context for understanding larger pictures.  And any issues that I wanted to deal with on a personal level as an adolescent were not on the curriculum.  There was no vehicle provided for personal expression, no rituals that were significant to the stage that we were passing through.

 University provided a forum for the pursuit of academic areas that were of personal interest but it was not until near the end of my undergraduate work that I discovered how the compartmentalization of information impacted one’s learning.  I was in a sociology course that was inter-disciplinarian.  For the first time in four years, I was in a class which cut across traditional subject strands.  In one room were represented students from the sciences, from business, from math as well as from the arts.  For the first time I became aware that information was never handed down without a message, without a value system.  I came to learn, for example, that business students had spent their four years learning how to be successful in a business setting while basing their success only on the bottom line.  If the company made a profit, this was good, if it did not, this was bad.  The more profit that was made, the better.  How one made this profit was irrelevant.  There were no ethics or morality involved.  It had all been simplified.  Here was a group of students who were possibly at the most ideal point in their life and the one quotation I remember from the experience was “I would screw a thousand people for a thousand bucks!” 

 I subsequently observed the world as a bartender, a businessperson, and as a traveller and was constantly surprised at how seldom our collective wisdom translated into concrete examples worth exemplifying.  I was surprised at how little contentment there was in the world.  For a time, I was unemployed and came to the belief that no one really chooses to not work, that there do not exist people who prefer to do nothing with their lives than to do something productive.

 It began to occur to me that what I had been interested in on an informal basis for quite some time was called social change and I began to wonder how this could effectively be brought about.  What are the theories?  What works?  What doesn’t work?  Why do we seem stuck in a pattern we are unable to break out of?  How does one do something about this situation while one is still vital and energetic?  What lessons can we identify that have or should have been passed down from one generation to the next?  What is preventing us from passing down these lessons?

 I began to examine how I could best participate in the social system as it was while still moving towards this goal of effecting constructive social change. Which social institutions were in a position to bring about fundamental changes in the way that we saw the world, in the way that we interact with the world and with each other?

 The one that I settled on (or that settled on me) was education.  To this day, I still believe the social change movement that trivializes the effectiveness with which education shapes our thinking, does so at its own peril.

 First of all, why would one want to bring about changes in education?  What’s going on there anyway?  What is being learned both consciously and subliminally?  What structures are in place to support this kind of learning?  What was formal education designed to do in its inception?  Are we in agreement that this is what we would like it to do?  If not, how could we effectively bring about change? 

 These are the kinds of questions that one could ask of any social institution. A generic model for inquiry can be developed and the same type of analysis applied to other institutions, whether it be law, politics, economics or any other example. The point is that every institution has beliefs, philosophies, inherent to their model and this shapes its process and outcome. 

 I have now been in public education for twenty years.  I spent the first five years in elementary education simply observing the system from a distance in order to gain some understanding of what mechanisms were at play, what were the messages being conveyed, how was power structured, how was the system organized, what was in the curriculum. 

 After this period, a small number of us came together in order to increase the awareness of social and environmental issues in the curriculum.  After a time of preparation, we took our proposals forward to the different echelons of power in the Board of Education.  We were received politely, (we were, after all, colleagues) but it became obvious from the outset that the issues that we were interested in were not part of the Board agenda at the time.  No matter how hard we worked, no matter how well the information was presented, we were to be shunted onto a side-track where we would wait forever to see our initiatives bear fruit.  So, the first observation on the social change learning curve was that organizations that were this large had checks and balances all the way through them which prevented change from taking place in a horizontal way.  Secondly, those who were in power had essentially been given those positions after agreeing to tout the party line or maintain the status quo.  Both of these situations made the structure impervious to any significant social change. 

 If significant change is not possible from the inside, what recourse does one have?  One option is to start again.  Develop a school system around a different set of principles, around a different process.  Go into a community and make a general statement about the aspirations of the school and invite community members to work through the philosophy and details of such a school.  You seemingly have solved the two previous roadblocks.  You are working with a group of people who have come together around similarly held philosophies, and secondly, you have set up a “flat process” whereby everyone has input into the decisions and all decisions are made through consensus.  This process did take place and after a two year period, the group took their model forward and made a formal presentation to the Board requesting that the school receive funding and be allowed to start the following September.  We were successful, and now came up with roadblock number three.  Although we had developed our model independently, we now were relying on the Board for the execution of the plan and for the hiring of the teachers for the school.  Because of the way the system works, we were told that we had to hire teachers from the Board.  If the best candidates were outside of the Board, they were not available to us.  It now occurred to us that there had not been a single teacher from the Board who had been part of the process of developing the school at any time.  What did that say about the possibilities of finding the best candidates?  As well, it soon became obvious that although the Trustees had approved the school as a three-year pilot project, the Board itself was less than enthusiastic about the sharing of power with the parents, and the different status of the students in the school.  This should have been no surprise to us as there are no historical precedents that I am aware of where power was voluntarily handed over from one group to another.  Ironically, this is one of the significant challenges of Nexus, a point that will be dealt with in more detail later. 

In Nexus, there are two journeys which are equally valued.

 In Nexus, there are two journeys which are equally valued.  One is the inner journey and the other is the outer journey.  The outer journey will occupy more pages in the book.  It will contain the concrete threads of the new social structures that we are creating and moving towards.  It will contain the analysis and critique of some of our current social structures as well as begin to lay the framework for a way out, a way forward.  The section on the inner journey will be shorter but the blank page at the end of the section will serve as a reminder that although it may be more subjective, less demonstrable, and more individualistic, it is no less important.  In fact, the success of Nexus hinges on there being a balance between the two.  The goal of Nexus is to provide a vision that is sufficiently encompassing to allow us to integrate all these different parts of ourselves into a whole.

 At this point in time, our social structures are controlling and manipulating us.  They do not reflect the place in time where we are now.  They are preventing us from leading the lives we are ready to live.  Being a part of Nexus is saying that we are ready to take on the responsibility of governing ourselves.  

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that economics has moved into the very centre of public concern and that economic performance, economic growth, economic expansion, and so forth have become the abiding interest, if not the obsession, of all modern societies.  Modern economics has come to be the dominant model upon which we build our reality.  The important conundrum for us is to understand how we have come to so forget our own history that we are now compliantly acting in a suicidal manner, believing that economics can lead - where in the past it has always failed to do so.

 Economics is not a science; it is merely politics in disguise.  Only when economists admit this will these social choices be revealed as embodying conflicts over goals and values that can be resolved only by political processes. Not only is economics a discipline embodying the value preferences of economists - for example, unwarranted assumptions regarding human motivations that are hotly contested by psychologists, and the feeling that more is necessarily better, which is challenged by ecologists, but as well largely ignores the role of power in altering economic outcomes.

 Economics, as we now see, has always been the most clearly value-based of the social sciences, since it was founded on such drastic re-evaluations of new human power to manipulate the natural world and human behaviour and the change of goals such powers engendered.  The earlier moral strictures were gradually buried or refuted and an entirely new body of theorizing began to develop around the new values, pursuits, behaviour patterns, and their societal institutions and consequences.

 By equating the economy with the business sector exclusively, business goals and needs take precedence over the supposedly non-economic goals and values of the rest of life.  Since, according to economism, the rest of life is dependent upon the business sector for its wealth and well-being, the institutions and activities of the rest of life have an obligation to support and nurture the business sector.  As a result, the needs and values of the business sector come to dominate the rest of society, our resources, and the realms of moral and political legitimacy.  Thus, in modern economies, the purpose of home and family is to enthusiastically consume the products of business, raise good future workers, and consumers, and help people recharge so they can go back to work the next day.  The purpose of our schools is to teach our children the skills they will need at work so that our businesses can remain competitive in the new global economy and so that we can invent new products and technologies that our businesses can sell.  The purpose of religion is to teach us to be honest, obedient, and respectful of authority, so we will be good workers.  The purpose of government is to promote policies that will help business (often at the expense of non-business realms).  The purpose of the creative arts is to help sell products.  The purpose of nonprofit and charitable organizations is to pick up the pieces by caring for those aberrant individuals who through some deficiency or emergency are not able to earn their living.  The purpose of Third-World nations is to provide cheap labour, raw materials, and new markets for the businesses of modern nations.  And the purpose of the natural environment is to provide resources that can be turned into more products to be sold by addictive businesses.

 Economics, which Lord Keynes had hoped would settle down as a modest occupation similar to dentistry, suddenly becomes the most important subject of all.  Almost the whole of foreign policy is dominated by a focus on economics.  Economic policies absorb almost the entire attention of government, and at the same time become ever more impotent.  The simplest things, which only fifty years ago one could do without difficulty, cannot get done any more.  The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.  The economic calculus, as applied by present-day economics, forces the industrialist to eliminate the human factor because machines do not make mistakes which people do.  Hence the enormous effort at automation and the drive for ever-larger units.  This means that those who have nothing to sell but their labour remain in the weakest possible bargaining position.  The conventional wisdom of what is now taught as economics by-passes the poor, the very people for whom development is really needed.  The economics of gigantism and automation is a left-over of nineteenth-century conditions and nineteenth-century thinking and it is totally incapable of solving any of the real problems of today.  An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods (the goods will look after themselves!).  It could be summed up in the phrase, “production by the masses, rather than mass production”.

In Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the work of scientists and philosophers such as Galileo, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes challenged the traditional veneration of nature and led to the radically new worldview of modern science.  Among its assumptions: the world is a machine, made up of isolated pieces of physical matter; human beings are separate from and superior to the rest of the natural world; and the purpose of human intelligence is to subdue and control nature.  In the following centuries, inspired by these principles, numerous new inventions not only enabled scientists to pierce the long-hidden secrets of nature but gave people the power to manipulate, alter, and destroy the natural world at a rate and scale never before possible.

Modern science broke the world up into myriads of distinct, numerically quantifiable characteristics.  If something could be counted, it could be measured and studied.  If it could not be turned into numbers, it did not exist.  This obsession with numbers led to the worship of quantity over quality, and to the belief that more is better.  It also led to the belief that even morality could be quantified, that values can be translated into dollars, and that monetary calculations can be used to determine individual or societal goals.  

 The modern economic paradigm developed slowly, starting about five hundred years ago, and became more fully established with the Industrial Revolution, which originated in England in the late 1700s.  It was made explicit by the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, who articulated the principles of modern market economies in his classic work, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776.

 In the late 1800’s, formal mathematical models were applied to Smith’s concepts in order to make his ideas more scientific, an approach called “neo-classical economics,” which still dominates the study of economics to this day.  Over the years, these theories and models have been used to explain and justify modern capitalist economies and the market system.  Meanwhile, the values of industrial countries have spread through the educational system and the media, shaping popular culture and people’s everyday beliefs and actions.

 The central assumption of the modern economic paradigm is the belief that money represents value.  According to this belief, the more money one has, the more things of value one can buy, leading to greater well-being.  This modern economic paradigm devalues women, nature, and caring activities, and we are increasingly suffering the impact of this devaluation in our daily lives.  In part, economic invisibility is the cause of this devaluation. It is one more expression of this devaluation. Economic invisibility is a problem that can no longer be ignored.

 As the example of women’s economic invisibility has demonstrated, hierarchical systems disempower individuals and divide communities on the basis of artificially created differences and illusory criteria of superiority and inferiority.  As a result, the destructive influences of such systems can extend far beyond the harm done to the group characterized as inferior.  A central challenge of the emerging economic paradigm is to acknowledge all forms of economic invisibility and to move beyond the unjust, destructive systems they maintain.

 Economic invisibility maintains the hierarchical values and existing distribution of wealth and power in modern economies.  By promoting the illusion that the business sector is the primary source of wealth production and distribution, the phenomenon of economic invisibility justifies why the largest business corporations have become so extraordinarily wealthy and powerful, and why the people who own, run, and receive the most money from these businesses deserve their privileges, prestige, and hefty rewards.  Meanwhile, by maintaining the prevailing gender, racial, class, and institutional hierarchies, economic invisibility also helps to justify the inferior wealth, power, and status of the inferior categories - women, poorer men, people of colour, local institutions, small businesses, and community organizations - and justifies the continued pollution and exploitation of communities and the natural environment.

 Most economists display a striking inability to adopt an ecological perspective. The study of economics is too narrow and too fragmentary to lead to valid insights.  This epidemic of addictions is related to the fragmentation of modern life.  Fragmentation is a key component of modernism, central to the intellectual visions of seventeenth-century philosopher-scientists.  Their conception of the world provided a philosophical foundation for the subsequent fragmentation of experience.  In the following centuries, industrialization and the spreading market economy tore apart the traditional connections of everyday life.  Skilled work was broken down into narrowly specialized operations.  Home and family were separated from production, men’s work from women’s work, industrial workers from knowledge and skills, thinking from doing, production from consumption, and women and children from the larger world.

 During the 1950’s and 1960’s, the consumption-based lifestyle that began in the United States during the 1920’s became a standard for imitation around the world, stimulating a new wave of global prosperity.  However, starting in the 1970’s the oil crisis, the environmental crisis, global competition, and other unanticipated developments have disrupted economies worldwide.

 Yet modern nations are not yet ready to give up the addictive illusion that they can consume their way to prosperity.  In the 1990’s, increasingly troubled modern economies are still trying to restore their economic health by expanding consumption - among their own populations and among customers in other nations, especially in the Third World.  And they are still choosing to ignore, and failing to resolve, the local and global imbalances and inequities that characterize the world today.  As a result, their addictive economic strategies are exacerbating the imbalances, leading to even more disastrous social, economic, and environmental consequences.

 Open any conventional economics textbook and you will find the cheerful assertion that because human wants and needs are limitless, the economy can keep growing infinitely.  The addictive economy is justified by the belief that more is better, that an economy constrained by limits will suffer reduced sales, layoffs, and eventually will slide into recession or depression.

 An addictive economy is a system in which people who already have enough - more than enough - are constantly increasing their consumption.  The growing production, sales, and steadily rising GDP of addictive economies supposedly indicate that their inhabitants are increasingly better off.  But as we have seen, when people reach their limits, then sales and consumption can only be expanded by increasing stress and ill health, disempowering individuals, eroding families and communities, destroying moral and ethical values, distorting public policy, degrading the environment, and in many other ways, diminishing the quality of life.  In addictive economies, consumption keeps rising largely because people are buying more goods and services that enable them to cope with - or to temporarily escape from - the mounting personal, social, economic, and environmental problems that have been caused by an addictive way of life.  So in an addictive economy, a rising GPD is actually an indication that stress and disease, waste and garbage, economic and social inequities, and environmental destruction are steadily getting worse.  And as the quality of life declines, people are driven to even more addictions, which further worsen their well-being.

 So long as we persist in defining well-being predominantly in economic terms and in relying on economic considerations to provide us with our primary frame of reference for personal and social policy decisions, we will remain unsatisfied.

 To the degree that we measure our lives in terms of social ties, openness to experience, and personal growth instead of in terms of production and accumulation, we are likely to be able to avoid a collision course with our environment without experiencing a sense of deprivation.

 The fact that we seem “really” to need more today is but one more reason why our emphasis on economic growth doesn’t work for us; the way the growth economy has been constructed, it creates more than it satisfies and leaves us feeling more deprived than when we had “less”.

 Realistically, affluence as we have tended to conceive of it is beyond the reach of most of the world.  To imagine a billion Chinese using resources and polluting the air and water at the rate we do, and in addition 700 million Indians, 400 million Latin Americans, 500 million Africans, and numerous other peoples as well, is to recognize that our present notions of what constitutes the good life absolutely require that most of the world be poor.  Only by changing the way we use resources and define our needs is there even a chance for all the world’s billions to prosper.

 We nurture a sense or illusion of freedom that overrides the daily reality.  Most days we do not “trade off” pollution and the risk of accident for a freer, experientially richer life; we trade these off for still another tradeoff, the daily grind on the expressway, another faulty compromise that mocks the supposed rationality of our decision-making.

 At the root of our present malaise is our tendency to try to use economics to solve what are really psychological problems.  Our present stress on growth and productivity is intimately related to the decline in rootedness.  Faced with the loneliness and vulnerability that come with deprivation of a securely encompassing community, we have sought to quell the vulnerability through our possessions.  When we can buy nice new things, when we look around and see our homes well stocked and well equipped, we feel strong and expansive rather than small and endangered.

 Psychological data from several nations confirm that the satisfaction derived from money does not come from simply having it.  It comes from having more of it than others do and from having more this year than last.  Thus, the bulk of survey data reveals that the upper classes in any society are more satisfied with their lives that the lower classes are, but they are no more satisfied than the upper classes of much poorer countries -- nor than the upper classes were in the less-affluent past. Above the poverty level, the relationship between income and happiness is remarkably small.  Yet when alternative measures of success are not available, the deep human need to be valued and respected by others is acted out through consumption.

 Modern economies focus us to value means above ends.  This situation destroys our freedom and power to choose the ends we really favour; the development of means, as it were, dictates the choice of ends.  Obvious examples are the pursuit of supersonic transport speeds and the immense efforts made to land men on the moon.  The conception of these aims was not the result of any insight into real human needs and aspiration, which technology is meant to serve, but solely of the fact that the necessary technical means appeared to be available.

 The ruling philosophy of economic development over the last twenty years has been: what is best for the rich must be best for the poor.  This belief has been carried to truly astonishing lengths, as can be seen by inspecting the list of developing countries in which the Americans and their allies and in some cases also the Russians have found it necessary and wise to establish “peaceful” nuclear reactors - Taiwan, South Korea, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Iran, Turkey, Portugal, Venezuela - all of them countries whose overwhelming problems are agriculture and the rejuvenation of rural life, since the great majority of their poverty-stricken peoples live in rural areas.

 Most of the world’s people are sustained by growing their own food, tending their own animals in rural areas, and living in small, cooperatively run villages and settlements or as nomads following herds, harvesting wild crops, fishing, and hunting in economies based on barter, reciprocity, and redistribution of surpluses according to customs such as feasts and potlatches.  One of the aspects of the crises of industrial development is consumption into the monetized economies, drawing populations into the cities, denuding rural agricultural areas, dissolving the cultural hue of village life and reciprocal community systems of food-sharing, care of the young and elderly, and folk medicine, and destroying inherited cultural wisdom learned in coping with diverse ecological conditions.

The strength of the idea of private enterprise lies in its simplicity.  It suggests that the totality of life can be reduced to one aspect - profits.  The businessman, as a private individual, may still be interested in other aspects of life - perhaps even in goodness, truth, and beauty - but as a businessman he concerns himself only with profits.  It fits perfectly into the modern trend towards total quantification at the expense of the appreciation of qualitative differences; for private enterprise is not concerned with what it produces but only with what it gains from production.

 The conventional model of corporate privilege allows addictive business corporations to direct the flow of resources to themselves and to dominate the rest of the economy. The conventional model also overemphasizes and overvalues corporate production of goods and services, while ignoring the other essential functions which together make up the whole economy.  Other equally essential activities of a healthy economy besides production include protecting resources, restoring damaged human, community, and environmental wealth, meeting the needs of dependent people who can’t pay, redistributing resources to increase equity and empowerment, and closing the loops to eliminate waste.

 Market systems can not meet the needs of people who do not have money, which means that they are systematically biased against poor people, people without jobs, dependents such as children, sick people, and frail elders, and those who care for them.  Nor can they take into account the long-term effects of economic activities, such as the damage they cause to the natural environment, unless such non-monetized “externalities” are consciously included in costs and prices.

 E. F. Schumacher felt that “the market is the institutionalization of individualism and non-responsibility.  We need not be surprised that it is highly popular among businessmen.  What causes us surprise is that it is considered virtuous to make the maximum use of this freedom from responsibility!”  He suggested that one of the most fateful errors in this system is its inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which it has been erected: it treats as income the irreplaceable “capital” of fossil fuels, the tolerance margins of nature, and the human substance.  The centrally planned socialist economies are founded on the same unsustainable basis.  It is clearly not just a problem of who owns the means of production but also a problem of those means themselves.  Both Marxian and market-oriented economists espouse labour theories of value (in their frequent labour-productivity maximizing), thus short-changing the role of natural resources and photosynthesis and other solar-energy-driven processes.  Marx stated that under capitalism “the reciprocity and universal dependence of individuals indifferent to one another forms that basis of their social connection”.

 Economics inappropriately creates models that have no relationship to the physical, social, or biological realms.  A good example of this can be found in the hypothetical model that economists have imposed on the real world: compounded interest.  Here, they have set up a positive feedback system (based on the value system of private property and its accumulation), in which the interest earned on a fixed quantity of money (capital) will be compounded and the next calculation of interest added on cumulatively.  But this accumulation process bears no relationship to the real world - only to the value system.  However, it has profound real-world effects if enough people believe it is legitimate and employ lawyers, courts, etc., to enforce it.  A similar model set up by economic theory is the real phenomenon of capital accumulation leading to more capital accumulation leading to larger corporations, more and more concentration of wealth, etc., until boundary conditions are encountered (e.g., revolution, ecological depletion, or the breakdown of human health or organization structure).  Thus economists believe in their own hypothetical runaway models but tend not to see all the real runaway situations in the physical world, so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and the same with rich and poor countries, until some real-world boundaries are encountered.

 There is irrefutable evidence that growth is not the solution but the core of the problem.  We know now that the Keynesian policies of pumping up consumer demand for cars, boats, refrigerators, and appliances, and giving tax cuts and credits to the middle class, who can afford to buy all these things, will not be able to keep the system going and all of us employed, at least not for very much longer.  First, there are not enough consumers in that system to keep all of us employed.  Secondly, the products themselves are pricing themselves out of the market.  The old way of baking that economic pie in order to share out the slices and keep everybody happy is never going to give us full employment. Thus it is now better strategy for workers and environmentalists to work together to help create the new job opportunities in the renewable-resources sector.

 Corporations are in the business of cutting jobs, not creating them.  We have data that shows that the top 500 companies in the U.S. cut their workforces by 4.4 million between 1980 and 1993; this at a time when corporate assets more than doubled and the salaries of corporate executives increased more than six-fold.  When telecommunications giant AT & T announced that it would cut 40,000 jobs over the next three years the company’s stock on the New York Exchange immediately rose $2.62 a share.

 Likewise, there is little evidence that economic growth alleviates poverty.  Since 1950 the world’s total economic output has increased five-fold while the number of people living in absolute deprivation has doubled.  That growth has pushed human demands on the ecosystem beyond what the planet is capable of sustaining.  And that does two things: it accelerates the rate of breakdown of the planet’s ability to regenerate its natural systems.  And it intensifies the competition between rich and poor for the resources that remain. The modern corporation is specifically designed to concentrate economic power and to protect the people who use that power from liability for the consequences of its uses.  Free-trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT are not really trade agreements at all.  They are economic integration agreements intended to guarantee the rights of global corporations to move both goods and investments wherever they wish - free from public interference or accountability.  Corporate power really lies in this ability to manipulate communities and markets in their own interest.

2020 Vision

Rich

It is clear that the “rich” are in the process of stripping the world of its "once and for all" endowment of relatively cheap and simple fuels.  It is their continuing economic growth which produces ever more exorbitant demands, with the result that the world’s cheap and simple fuels could easily become scarce long before the poor countries had acquired the wealth, education, industrial sophistication, and power of capital accumulation needed for the application of alternative fuels on any significant scale.

 Economic growth, which viewed from the point of view of economics, physics, chemistry and technology, has no discernible limit, must necessarily run into decisive bottlenecks when viewed from the point of view of the environmental sciences.  An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.

 The idea of conducting the entire economy on the basis of private greed has shown an extraordinary power to transform the world.  In Schumacher’s words,

 Economically, our wrong living consists primarily in systematically cultivating greed and envy and thus building up a vast array of totally unwarrantable wants.  It is the sin of greed that has delivered us over into the power of the machine. If greed were not the master of modern man - ably assisted by envy - how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher “standards of living” are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness?  How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies - whether organized along private enterprise or collectivist enterprise lines - to work towards the humanization of work?  It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the “standard of living”, and every debate is closed.  That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of “bread and circuses” can compensate for the damage done - these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence - because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.

 The “free market” is a hoax.  But, more that this, it is the single most important hoax, from which all others originate.  And in the struggle to rescue humankind from grayness, the ultimate objective must be to entirely transform the way we do business together. Jeremy Seabrook has put it, “If it had been the purpose of human activity on earth to bring the planet to the edge of ruin, no more efficient mechanism could have been invented than the market economy.”

Solution

is now essential to learn the larger lesson: that the world’s economy is another “commons” and the rules must be changed from those of zero-sum, winners and losers, to the win-win rules of co-operation - a new “Bretton Woods.”

 A new level of visioning of alternative futures is needed to catalyze the millions of people all over the world whose movements for peace, human rights and ecological sanity attest to their readiness for new leadership.  Such visions will be beyond the left and right categories of the old flat-earth politics based on economic modes.  The basic nature of the painful transition involves a necessary shift from economies based on maximizing labour productivity (and thereby continually increasing the capital and energy intensity of their industrial production), which heretofore has been based on non-renewable energy, to economies that must now conserve capital, energy, and materials and more fully employ their human resources.  This shift will require the development of a newly designed, more efficient production system based on renewable resources and managed for sustained-yield productivity.

 Meanwhile, the demands of tomorrow’s labour force for more opportunities for personal development and job satisfaction most often favour the small company, which can be more democratically managed and can release human potential and productivity through greater identification with enterprise and motivation.  Indeed, our greatest future productivity gains will come from learning to trust people to do a good job.

 All this is not to say that large corporations will fade away.  They will not.  We will still need to pour steel and aluminum and maintain telephone systems and electrical grids.  But some of these systems may already have reached an optimal size, and the growth of newer sectors of the economy may better satisfy new needs in wholly new ways for which the old corporations and their existing technological configurations may be quite unsuited.

 The issues surrounding the use of nuclear power or the use of solar power - and the implications of the choice between the two - are symbolic of the sharpest differences between the two directions lying before us: toward greater and greater capital, energy, and materials intensity, or toward greater labour intensity.  The current direction, which was historically sensible, overshot the mark.  Saving labour by making a system more capital-intensive is reasonable when you have very cheap resources and not much of a problem in putting those resources at the disposal of workers for increasing individual productivity, but this system has now collided with resource scarcities.

 Declining labour productivity is the wave of the future and, in fact, that is good news for workers, consumers, environmentalists, blacks, women, and all minorities, as well as for future generations.  In fact, the only groups likely to be upset about it are the investors, managers, and bankers trying to keep the old capital-intensive and energy-intensive industrial companies afloat - if necessary by even becoming parasitic on the economy and society as a whole.

 People can lead the world’s economies back to sanity and to the basic realities in which human wealth and well-being have always been rooted: the forms of production and consumption that come with good design and engineering, the more sophisticated technologies of doing more with less, the integrated management and conservation of non-renewable resources, responsible enhancement of agriculture and renewable resources, and the recognition that the daily solar flux is our real income.  These are some of the chief tasks ahead for humanity.

 The paradigm shift in economics is the end of economics as the predominant policy tool for industrial countries (or any country) and the recognition of its proper range of applicability (ie. for accounting purposes between firms and keeping cash records for individuals and small enterprises, etc.), all corrected by internalizing, to the fullest extent, socially and environmentally necessary regulatory costs within the enterprises’ accounts and reflected in the prices of products (full-cost pricing).  This formula could be applied to alternative businesses and cooperatives, collectives, etc., where the models of maximizing self-interest and competition are relaxed.

 The time has come for an interdisciplinary council of social advisers to look at the broad problems of society.  As is now clear, leaving that task solely to economic advisers, would be to continue emphasizing narrow economic goals at the expense of human and social goals and the general quality of life. 

 James Robertson points out in The Sane Alternative that a society’s currency will remain stable and noninflationary only when all its members have faith that the society is fair.  Money can function properly in this role only when it is viewed by all as honest and unmanipulated by powerful interest groups.  To prevent its inflation and distortion by such manipulation will require an end to profit maximization as a principle of business activity.  To this end, changes are needed in the tax system, and a series of other reforms in financial administration.  Corporations must be managed on a cash-flow basis, rather than one of profit maximizing, with money flows being directed to “stakeholders” rather than stockholders, by boards of directors with all such stakeholders - management, employees, stockholders, government, and customers - represented.  Capital could still be raised in  reconceptualized corporations by bond-type securities offering fair returns to stockholders.  A better hope might be worker ownership; a study, Workplace Democracy and Productivity, by Karl Frieden, found worker-owned companies were 1.5 times as profitable as conventional firms (World of Work Report, May 1980)

 Tax cuts should put the money in the hands of the people who need to spend it immediately on the most basic things in life, not give more breaks to rich people and corporations on the erroneous assumption of the new “supply-side” economists that they will invest it productively.  It has been said that “in America, we have welfare for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

 The gross national product must now be replaced by one of the more holistic, “quality-of-life” - type indicators, for example, Japan’s new net national welfare, Tobin and Nordhaus’s measure of economic welfare, the more recent PQLI (physical quality of life indicator), developed by the Overseas Development Council and other, similar efforts.  It may also demonstrate the ways in which the inadequacy of simple linear and equilibrium models that still drive much of traditional economics are now almost useless for mapping non-linear, rapidly changing systems such as late-stage industrial societies including those of Western Europe, Japan, and the U.S.A.  These societies are now so complex that they can be adequately understood only in multidisciplinary terms, rather than as abstractions referred to be economists as “economies”, using narrow, linear definitions of “productivity” measured as units of “output” related to given “inputs.”

 Under the present economic structures, “green growth” is really an oxymoron.  In a deregulated market economy global corporations are accountable to only one master, a rogue financial system with one incessant demand - keep your stock price as high as possible by maximizing short-term returns.  One way to do that is to shift as much of the cost of the corporation’s operations as possible onto the community.  The goal is to externalize costs and privatize gain. 

 A green corporation simply can’t last in our unregulated market where competing companies are not internalizing their costs.  If you do attempt to “green” your business you’ll soon be bought out by some corporate raiders who see an opportunity to externalize the costs and make a short-term killing.  It is fundamental to democracy and to a market economy that neither works effectively or fairly unless you have significant equality in economic power.  And that comes from having a stake in ownership.  The foundation of any alternative economy has to be based on worker-owned enterprises, co-operatives, small local businesses and so forth.  We need to break up large concentrations of economic power, re-establish the connection between investment returns and productive activity and root the ownership of capital in people and communities engaged primarily in local production to meet local needs.  We need a vision of a global system of localized economies that reduce the scale of economic activity and link economic decisions to their consequences.

 The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a person a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task: and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.  Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless.  To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.  Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure. It is not a question of choosing between “modern growth” and “traditional stagnation”.  It is a question of finding the right path of development, the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility, in short, of finding “Right Livelihood”.

 In Nexus, employment is a responsibility, rather than a privilege. To measure success in terms of output or income, without consideration of the number of jobs, is inappropriate for it implies a static approach to the problem of development.  The dynamic approach pays heed to the needs and reactions of people; their first need is to start work of some kind that brings some reward, however small; it is only when they experience that their time and labour is of value that they can become interested in making it more valuable.  It is therefore more important that everybody should produce something than that a few people should each produce a great deal, and this remains true even if in some exceptional cases the total output under the former arrangement should be smaller than it would be under the latter arrangement.  It will not remain smaller, because this is a dynamic situation capable of generating growth.

In Schumacher’s words, 

 If we can recover the sense that it is the most natural thing for every person born into this world to use his hands in a productive way and that it is not beyond the wit of man to make this possible, then I think the problem of unemployment will disappear and we shall soon be asking ourselves how we can get all the work done that needs to be done.

 The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organization.  Nobody really likes large-scale organization; nobody likes to take orders form a superior who takes orders from a superior who takes orders from a superior who takes orders ... Even if the rules devised by bureaucracy are outstandingly humane, nobody likes to be ruled by rules, that is to say, by people whose answer to every complaint is: ‘I did not make the rules; I am merely applying them.’

 Mao Tse-tung said go to the practical people, and learn from them: then synthesize the practical people and call upon them to put these principles and methods into practice so as to solve their problems and achieve freedom and happiness.

 This kind of win-win approach, which tries to solve an economic problem by treating the people involved with respect, as whole human beings with their own needs and abilities, not merely as mindless actors serving larger economic goals, typifies the emerging postmodern economic paradigm.

 Another source of the postmodern economic paradigm is a new scientific model of how the world works, based on such principles as individual integrity, mutuality and interdependence, and rhythmic cycles over time.  This postmodern worldview, coming out of the latest discoveries of the physical and biological sciences, stands in distinct contrast to modernism, which came out of a hierarchical, fragmented, mechanistic view of the world and of human nature. As we learn more about the emerging postmodern economic paradigm, we will discover that in many ways its structures and relationships resemble the patterns that characterize natural systems. The core is going from what is popularly called reductionism to what is popularly called holism. 

 Increasingly, people are choosing what to buy not just on the basis of price, but by taking into account the values and actions of the businesses they buy from.  And many people are no longer content to invest their money solely on the basis of where they can get the highest return, but are actively seeking to lend or invest with companies that adhere to those investors’ social, political, environmental, or other values.

 Many investment advisors, companies, and publications now assist socially responsible investors.  Through organizations such as the Social Investment forum, advocates of socially responsible investment inform and support each other and further promote socially responsible business and socially responsible investing.  Advocates of socially responsible investing have documented that by investing in environmentally clean, ethical, and employee-friendly companies, the investor not only promotes more just and sustainable values, but may make as much money, if not more, than by investing in greedy, exploitative companies.

 Rather than assuming that stockholders’ only desire is for constantly increasing financial returns, why not give stockholders the option of choosing?  Corporate officials could offer stockholders the opportunity to make decisions - for example whether they would be willing to take a percentage or two fewer profits in order that the company could install better health and safety measures for its employees, keep local jobs, and institute better environmental protection programs.  It may be that stockholders will welcome the opportunity to invest their potential returns in a healthier community or a restored environment that will enhance their quality of life directly.

To repeat, current economics is simply politics in disguise.  Every economic decision in Society B ultimately favours one group over another – right versus left, haves versus have nots, creditors versus debtors; all win-lose categories.  In Nexus, economic policy will start out by identifying these fallacies and seeking to find our common ground.

 In 1996, the Ontario Government in Canada introduced a tax reduction program.  As a result, a taxpayer with a $35,000 income received a break of $460, while a taxpayer earning $200,000 received an $11,200 break.  And the chairman of the Bank of Montreal, who last year had take-home pay of 1.9 million, received a tax break of roughly $100,000.

 In Nexus, it is not simply that we would legislate that these imbalances or injustices be redressed.  It is, more importantly, that members of Nexus would begin to identify when “enough is enough” and voluntarily distribute income wealth more equitably. 

2020 Vision

This concept of voluntary income distribution will be replaced with the global economic proposals as outlined at the end.

This step into voluntary re-adjustment would represent different objectives for different people.  What is important as a concept is that there would always be a given that everyone is doing their best.  Whatever decision someone has made in terms of changing their perspective, represents the best they can do at that point in time.  As such, we all need to be congratulated and never admonished. 

 This is much more complex than simply saying that everyone should be able to live on such and such, so why can’t those who make a great deal more simply reduce.  Let’s say, for example, someone in Nexus has a take home income of $1,000,000.  That person may decide to take a certain percentage of her income and contribute it to Nexus.  Another might criticize this person for not being able to do more. 

2020 Vision

With the current proposal it will be impossible, of course, for someone to have a take home income of $1,000,000.

Criticism under this circumstance is not acceptable.  We all have needs that we must deal with.  This is part of the inner journey for each of us.  Some of us will progress further on this journey of identifying our needs, analyzing where they come form, deciding whether we value certain needs more than others, and then setting out to either extinguish or highlight the needs that are more in keeping with who it is we see ourselves as.  We are all sufficiently capable and strong enough self-critics to do well in this endeavour without unsolicited criticism from others.

 Nexus does not celebrate poverty.  We are committed, among other ideals, to financial success.  This is a long process of change and one of the realities of life at the present time is that wealth is power.  We intend to pursue personal and collective wealth aggressively.  The difference between Nexus and Society B is what we will do with that power.

2020 Vision

We now intend to begin the process of dismantling the capitalist system through the proposal.

By analyzing economic policy of a specific governing body, we come to see the biases behind the decisions.  A focus on deficit reduction may turn out to be simply a smoke screen for the real agenda – a weakening of the network of social programs.  When the collective voices of the financial community and the commentators in the business press seem strangely unconcerned about maintaining a large deficit in order to deliver tax breaks, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that their real goal isn’t deficit reduction, and perhaps never was, but rather the reduction of the size and scope of our social welfare system.

 When we say we are in a conservative or right-wing period, the result is a less tolerant society, one where the interests of private corporations and individual wealth is advanced to the detriment of public institutions and the general populace.  Those who are succeeding in this environment are seen as worthy; those failing, at fault and unmotivated. 

 Is it productive for Nexus to chastise these government officials and corporate leaders responsible for these decisions as simply lacking in virtue and therefore easily dismissed or is there something more complex at play?  Do those in these positions of power really believe in the “trickle down” theory or do they find themselves without the possibilities of following their own consciences once ensconced in these structures?

 From another perspective, if they are drawn to protect the interests of the elite and to maintain their own positions in the establishment, how did they get this way?  If they believe that the world operates as a meritocracy, where did this belief system develop?  If envy, greed, fear, manipulation and loathing are at the heart of economic policy, is it a collection of individuals who are responsible, or is there something inherent in the structure that forces these perversions?

In Nexus, we believe that access to health care and education should be a right enjoyed by every member of society.  When we hear the statement “The debt problem has become so extreme that we have no choice but to cut social spending’, we don’t believe it.  When polls indicate that there is a considerable gap between the attitudes of Canadians in general and those in the elite, we believe our social structures are ultimately to blame for the discrepancies.  We understand what is at play when Moody’s gives Canada a good credit rating and says that the debt is not out of control, and then the story receives very little play in Canada.

 We are aware that the case has been developed that the deficit is not the result of increased social spending and we know that this information was stopped by the government. It is the recession that is driving up the deficit, and the most significant reason for the deficit is unemployment and underemployment.

 We understand that in Society B those with financial assets have a strong and well-founded desire to prevent inflation from eroding the value of their assets.  Those without financial assets are far more likely to be concerned that the economy keep growing, so that they could get a share of the action.  Although this second group generally doesn’t like inflation either, they consider it the lesser of two evils - less serious than unemployment.  By tilting towards a tight-money policy with high interest rates, the government is coming down on the side of those with financial assets.

 When a government actively pursues the goal of price stability it means that, in practical terms, the Bank is serving the interests of the financial elite.  Inflation is the nemesis of those with money, since it undermines the value of their saving over time.

 Creditors benefit from high interest rates because they get a bigger return on their money.  Debtors are hurt by them because they had to pay higher borrowing costs.  In a war on inflation, with inevitable higher interest rates, creditors stand to gain, while debtors are likely to become cannon fodder.

 High interest rates choke the economy and cause high levels of unemployment, which reduce tax revenues and add to social assistance costs.  And they also add directly to the deficit by increasing the government’s borrowing costs.  As long as real interest rates are higher than the real rate of our economic growth, our debt burden is growing faster than our ability to pay it.

 Since the early eighties, central banks throughout the developed world have adopted a much tougher stand against inflation.  This has shifted the power balance sharply in favour of creditors, who have enjoyed unusually high real rates of interest.  Debtors - the have-nots of society - have suffered considerably under the new power shift, losing access to credit and struggling to regain ground in the economic crunch and rising tide of unemployment.  Much of the high and persistent unemployment seen in the developed world over the last decade and a half can be attributed to the drive to eradicate inflation led by central banks beginning in the mid-1970s.

We have entered an era where we are led to believe that control of our economic destiny is now out of our hands. To an alarming extent, we have become convinced that we are collectively powerless in the face of international financial markets.  And, with the widespread acceptance of this view, the rich have proceeded to create a world in which the rights of capital have been given precedence over and protection against interference from the electorate.

 Not only is it out of hands as individuals, but sovereign countries have now been rendered powerless/impotent by the size and scope of multinational corporations. Governments have backed off from taking action to fight unemployment and provide well-funded social programs not because they lack the means but because they’ve chosen to render themselves impotent, powerless in the face of capital markets.  The technological imperative turns out to be mostly a failure of will on the part of governments.

 There are basically two key items being continually fought over – whether money will be tight or loose, and how much government will redistribute resources, through social spending and taxation.

 The first item, commonly referred to as  “monetary policy”, centres on how much a government will act to protect a nation’s currency from inflation.  If the central bank is primarily concerned with keeping inflation low, it will raise interest rates whenever it fears inflation.  This will kill inflation, but will also generally slow down the economy, throwing people out of work. With this increased unemployment, the deficit grows because tax revenues decline and social assistance costs rise.  The deficit also grows because the high interest rates add to the government’s borrowing costs. A “tight” or “sound” monetary policy is generally favoured by those keen to protect the value of their financial assets from being eroded by inflation.  (This is usually something of concern mostly to people with lots of financial assets – that is, rich people).  A “looser” money policy gives a higher priority to jobs, and therefore to keeping interest rates low.  (This is usually favoured by people who are more concerned about having a job than about protecting the value of their financial assets – that is, most ordinary people.)

 The second term, “fiscal policy”, refers to how much the government will provide in social programs and who will bear the tax burden of paying for these programs.  Since many social programs offer the largest benefits to those with the least resources and are financed by taxes paid by all, it is easy to see why high social spending is generally opposed by the well-to-do and favoured by the less well-to-do.  Indeed, it is easy to see how society divides into opposing camps on these two issues.  The rich generally benefit from tight money and low social spending. The non-rich or the rest of society – generally benefit from looser money and higher social spending.   The position favoured by the first camp has sometimes been identified as “right-wing”, the second as “left-wing” although we could just as easily call them the “market” position and the “popular” position.

 At this point in time in North America, there seems to be no debate.  The right wing position is presented as inevitable, as the only possible view of reality.  This now seems to be accepted even by traditional left wing governments who attain power. 

 In Society B, this debate has been going on forever, and will continue forever.  In Nexus, the society pivots around the idea that those who are rich do not have a different agenda from the poor, just different circumstances.  In Nexus, the rich will begin to consciously set out to create and adopt policies which will begin to close the gap between rich and poor.

Vision 2020

Closing the gap between rich and poor will be structurally embedded in the proposal and agreed upon by all who choose to participate.

Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him.  He then pointed out that it does not.                            - Alasdair MacIntyre

 Once certain assumptions are made about economic policy, the foundation is laid, and the framework will forever reflect these concepts.  The challenge becomes to identify what assumptions are inherent to the structure, decide if we find these assumptions to be true for us, and if not, identify belief systems that are compatible, and build new structures from these perspectives.

 An examination of our economic system reveals that it is built on certain beliefs.  Should these beliefs be questionable, the entire framework on which this structure is built is untenable.  It is one of the responsibilities of those in Nexus to decided if these beliefs and theories speak to them, represent them. 

 It would seem that the entire framework for policy in Society B rests on the premise that people are inherently lazy.  If you follow this logic to its predictable conclusions, all policies will be biased in a certain direction.  Rejecting this premise and adopting instead a stance that people naturally want to engage in meaningful activity, the end results will be completely different.

 At the heart of economic theory these days is an interesting interpretation of human behaviour.  It starts with the assumption that unemployment is largely a voluntary condition; if unemployment is high, it is because workers are choosing not to work at the low wages being offered in the marketplace.  So when government stimulates the economy – by either lowering interest rates or increasing government spending – workers would see the rising wages and decide it was worth their while to accept a job after all.  Thus, unemployment would drop as workers were attracted to the higher wages.

 There is a belief in mainstream economics that there is a natural rate of unemployment.  For three decades, we have been part of an economic theory that puts forth that the lower the level of unemployment, the higher would be the rate of inflation.  If unemployment is high, the theory indicates that workers will have little clout in demanding higher wages.  When the unemployed were able to find work, wages rose and prices soon followed.  As unemployment rose, wages and prices dropped.  Essentially, controlling inflation and maintaining low unemployment became incompatible goals.  Under this scheme, governments had to choose which one of the two positions to prioritize.  If they followed the “market” approach – tight money and low social spending – they would tip the balance towards controlling inflation.  If they followed the “popular” approach, they would tip the balance towards low unemployment.  The wealthy tend to benefit more from employment control while the rest of the population tends to benefit more from employment creation.

 By the mid 1960s, this natural rate of unemployment was widely accepted as the level of unemployment that was necessary to prevent an increase in the rate of inflation.  At this point, the relationship between inflation and unemployment was not simply a trade-off.  It only worked one way – unemployment could be adjusted to serve the goal of controlling inflation.

 Essentially this theory destroys the case for government stimulation of the economy for the purpose of reducing unemployment.  The theory purports that such government intervention was useless in the long run, and even harmful, since it created a situation where inflation would accelerate.  When it came to using the key levers of monetary and fiscal policy to help create employment, this theory held that governments were impotent and should remain that way.

 It followed, then, that if governments wanted to reduce unemployment, the way to do so was to remove social supports.  By making the worker feel more desperate, the government could bring down the natural rate of unemployment, which was believed to be the way to bring down the actual rate of unemployment.

 From this position, came the development of the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment , or NAIRU.  This provided the world with the guise of a quantifiable method of establishing the relationship between and the need for a certain level of unemployment in order to control inflation.  The economists supporting this system would calculate the NAIRU for a specific country at any given time.  The supposition is that the real level of unemployment would always be higher than the NAIRU.  As the two approached each other, the government would raise interest rates, choking off growth and driving up unemployment. 

 In this way, workers were in a no-win situation.  Their level of desperation was seen as critical to the smooth, efficient running of the system.  If workers were supported by too many social programs, the NAIRU would go up, followed by higher unemployment.  If workers were sufficiently desperate, they would work for limited wages and inflation would be averted.

 The NAIRU has provided the intellectual underpinning for the notion that government is powerless to use its key levers to attack the problem of unemployment.  The NAIRU must be seen for the sham that it is – a brilliant theory that has nothing to do with the laws of natural science and everything to do with the ideological preferences of those who have enthusiastically endorsed it.  Only by getting rid of the NAIRU can we redirect public policy towards reconciling a reasonable degree of inflation control with a maximum amount of employment growth.

We need to recognize the devastating results of our current propensity to move currency back and forth between countries in an attempt to maximize short-term personal gain.  Mexico in 1994 serves as a perfect example.  Linda McQuaig tells this story in “The Cult of Impotence”.

 …culminating in its massive default on international loans in 1982, Mexico had become a textbook model of free-market economics.  It had repudiated its deep-rooted protectionist, nationalistic traditions that had so irritated U.S. business interests.  Under Mexican leaders trained at Harvard’s business school, it had opened up its markets to foreigners, sold off many of its publicly owned enterprises, reduced its deficit to a modest 2 percent of GDP and raised interest rates relentlessly until inflation was reduced from 150 percent in the late 1980s to a mere 7 percent in 1994.  The reforms were wildly popular with foreign investors, who poured some $30 billion into Mexican stocks and bonds in 1993 alone. 

 For the vast majority of Mexicans, however, the reforms had actually made conditions worse.  By 1992, average real Mexican wages were about one-third lower than they had been a decade earlier, before the reforms.  And while Mexico had never offered much in the way of social services, its minimal programs to subsidize the price of tortillas, milk and school breakfasts were all but eliminated as part of the cutbacks apparently required to attract investment.  Public spending on health and education was cut in half.  Not surprisingly, parents faced with higher education costs and lower wages pulled their children from school, providing fresh recruits for the already-strong army of child street vendors.  During the decade of reforms, the top one-fifth of the population increased its share of national income by 13 percent; Mexico’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helu, was reported to have more money than all the 17 million people crowded at the bottom of the country’s income ladder put together.

The reforms not only made things worse for the Mexican people, they also seem to have contributed to the collapse of the peso.  The flood of foreign money into the country kept the value of the peso artificially inflated.  A high value for a nation’s currency can be a good thing, if it reflects a strong economy and growing wealth.  This was not the case with Mexico in the early 1990s.  Mexico’s overall economy was not stronger but weaker, with a large external trade deficit.  Although a few Mexicans were getting richer, the national income as a whole was not increasing.  But, with vast amounts of money pouring in to buy Mexican stocks and bonds, which were denominated in pesos, there was plenty of demand for pesos, keeping their value high. 

Thus Mexico ended up with a falsely high – or overvalued – currency, which created problems.  Once-cheap Mexican products were all of a sudden more expensive abroad, making them uncompetitive in foreign markets.  Similarly, imported goods suddenly become more affordable to Mexicans, making Mexican-produced goods less competitive in their own home market.

The result was rising unemployment and sluggish growth.  Faced with an election in 1994, the unpopular Mexican government knew it had to do something to help out the stalled economy.  But what to do?  The answer seemed to be to lower interest rates and let the value of the peso drop.  This action would stimulate exports and give a break to the local economy.  And yet it would be extremely unpopular with foreign investors in that it would cut the value of their investments.  If the peso were to be revalued to say, 85 percent of its existing value, investors would find their investments suddenly worth only 85 percent of what they had been.  Considering the large profits they had been making, this might not seem like an unreasonable concession to ask.  But investors were not in the habit of accepting such losses lightly. 

Terrified to do anything that would upset foreign investors, whose large cash injections into the Mexican stock market seemed to be one of the few bright spots in the alleged Mexican miracle, the government decided not to devalue the peso.  Instead, it tried to alleviate rising unemployment by pumping money directly into the economy with increased government spending.  As it turned out, this wasn’t any more acceptable to investors, who saw it as a sign that the Mexican government might lack the backbone to stick with its reforms.  As investors began to lose confidence in the government’s adherence to market orthodoxy, a vicious circle developed.  Nervous investors began to sell their Mexican financial assets.  Anxious to prevent a further sell-off, the Mexican central bank raised interest rates to make it attractive for investors to keep their money parked in Mexico.  The higher interest rates further paralysed the economy and drove up unemployment.  As the economy turned down, the high value of the peso became even more artificial, making investors more worried that there would be a devaluation.  And on and on.

The backdrop to all this was the stunning nineteenth-century-style peasant rebellion in the southern Mexican province of Chiapas that began in early 1994…For foreign investors – including managers of faraway pension and mutual funds, who often fail to appreciate the romantic appeal of peasant rebellions – it was simply another signal that Mexico was not a safe place to put billions of dollars. 

 By November 1994, investors, both foreign and local, were selling off their Mexican assets in earnest, creating a stampede to move money out of the country into safer currencies.  In mid-December, newly elected Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo finally devalued the peso by 15 percent – a move that seemed to create even more fear and uncertainty  and urgency to shed pesos.  Two days later, with money virtually hemorrhaging out of the country, Mexico dropped all pretence of being able to maintain a fake value for the peso and allowed it to float openly on currency markets so that private investors could determine its value.  With some $25 billion having fled the country over the previous few weeks, the peso promptly sank to about half its value.

The Mexican crisis sent shock waves through the financial world.  The collapse of the peso meant that the Mexican government’s enormous debts were suddenly that much more difficult for it to repay.  With hundreds of billions of dollars owed to creditors around the world, the prospect of Mexico defaulting on these loans suddenly loomed as a terrifying prospect to investors and promised to have a ripple effect throughout western economies.  To head off such major financial repercussions, the Clinton administration orchestrated a $50 billion international bail-out package, with $20 billion coming from the U.S. government and $30 billion from the IMF and a number of western countries, including $1 billion from Canada.  In exchange for this package enabling it to repay its creditors, Mexico was required to impose an even harsher version of market economics – a fierce austerity program that included even deeper government spending cuts and still higher interest rates.

While Mexico’s creditors around the world were thus spared a devastating blow, the “tequila effect” continued to rattle the world’s wealthy.  If Mexico, so well schooled in the market orthodoxy, could come crashing down, where was money safe any more.  The boom in Third World “emerging market” funds suddenly evaporated, as money came rushing home to the safety of strong, well-grounded currencies, such as German marks and Swiss francs.  Even countries like Canada felt the pinch.  Although Canada bore no real resemblance to Mexico, its relatively large debt made financial experts suddenly nervous and uneasy.  Moody’s Investors Services, one of the big international debt rating agencies in New York, decided to undertake a fresh assessment of Canada – along with several other advanced nations with big debts.  Although nothing had changed in Canada – the deep-slashing February 1995 budget was still a few weeks off – Moody’s announced that Canada was on credit watch, under consideration for a possible downgrade of its credit rating.  This news, as we’ve seen, helped the Finance department make its case that Ottawa had no choice but to undertake massive spending cuts.

The general commentary in the media and in official circles was that the Mexican crisis served as a perfect example of how deeply integrated the world financial system had become, and how powerless we were to escape its claws…So is Mexico just a cautionary tale from the trenches of the new global economy, showing us the need to placate international investors?  Was the peso crisis just an inevitable casualty of the new realities, a revelation of the ultimate powerlessness of the nation-state?  Or could a different set of rules have produced a different result?

It is difficult for nations to pursue full employment policies when investors can move large amounts of money effortlessly around the globe in search of quick returns.  If interest rates are higher in Mexico, then investors  borrow money at lower rates in New York and move the money into higher-rate Mexican bonds.  It therefore becomes necessary for countries to maintain high interest rates in order to compete for mobile capital.  But maintaining high interest rates is a sure way for a country to choke its domestic economy; it makes full employment policies, a crucial aspect of Nexus, virtually impossible.  While Mexico serves as a dramatic example of what happens in extreme circumstances, all countries are affected in that all have to compete, to some extent, for mobile capital.

With this situation in mind, the American economist, James Tobin, introduced the idea of a tax in order to hinder this easy movement of capital across currencies in search of the highest rate of return.  From “The Cult of Impotence”…

By taxing capital mobility, Tobin was trying not to stop it, but simply to run some interference, to slow it down.  To do this, he advocated imposing a small tax whenever money was exchanged from one currency to another.  What was ingenious about this idea was that it would have the effect of discouraging less desirable sorts of investments, while not really affecting desirable ones.  It would have virtually no impact, for instance, on long-term foreign investments or the one-time purchase of foreign goods – transactions that were necessary for the healthy functioning of an international economy.  Like the perfect cancer drug that leaves healthy tissue alone, the Tobin tax would not impinge on the healthy flow of capital involved in nations trading and investing in one another.  But the tax could be quite punitive towards the kind of quick-moving, in-and-out transactions across currencies that earn investors huge profits, such as in Mexico in the early 1990s.  For money constantly moving in and out of currencies in search of quick profits, the tax would have to be paid constantly and would become quite onerous. 

It’s easy to see how onerous. Let’s imagine a Tobin tax of 0.2 percent.  This sounds very small, but watch what happens in practice.  If $100,000 is exchanged into another currency, a tax of $200 would be owed – not overly punitive for someone wanting to make a $100,000 long-term investment in another country.  But the picture changes significantly if that $100,000 is simply parked for a short while in another currency, with the purpose of earning a quick profit, and then the money is exchanged back into the original currency.  Under this scenario, the Tobin tax would become a heavier burden, because it would have to be paid each time the $100,000 crosses into another currency.  So, for instance, if the money makes a round trip every month, the cost will be $400 a month, or $4,800 a year.  If the money makes a round trip every week, the $400 will have to be paid each week, amounting to a charge of more than $20,000 a year.  If the money makes a round trip every day, the yearly cost of the tax becomes staggering – more than $100,000.

Thus the Tobin tax would have significant power to slow capital movements.  Had the tax been in place in the early 1990s, there would probably have been less speculative capital flowing into Mexico.  As a result, the peso would not likely have become so overvalued and its crash might well have been avoided.  Even if the peso had become overvalued and the crash had happened, a Tobin-style tax could have prevented the situation from escalating into a massive hemorrhage of funds out of the country.  In such times of crisis, the Tobin tax could be raised on capital leaving the country, making its departure more costly.

Of course, there is also the issue of the vast amounts of money that could be raised through the tax.  Even if the tax were set at 0.2 percent or lower, the revenue potential is dramatic because of the sheer volume of money that is exchanged on world currency markets – some $1.2 trillion dollars a day.  Certainly, the revenue collected wouldn’t amount to 0.2 percent of $1.2 trillion a day, because the tax would have the effect of discouraging a lot of the short-term, speculative transactions -–which is exactly what the tax is supposed to do.  Either way, the world community benefits: either it collects a huge amount of tax that can be put to good purpose, or it collects a smaller amount of tax but succeeds in discouraging disruptive capital flows.

And what makes the prospect of a Tobin tax all the more compelling is that the vast majority of this money moving across currencies is doing so for questionable purposes – that is, for the kind of quick in-and-out transactions that can wreak havoc in an economy.  Indeed, only a small fraction of the daily world currency transactions are carried out for the purposes of trade or long-term investment.  This leaves hundreds of billions of dollars a day being traded for purposes that are potentially harmful to the world economy.

It is hard not to like the idea of the Tobin tax, particularly when one puts the whole issue in some kind of perspective.  Essentially it boils down to this: by scooping a small percentage of the enormous amount of money traded daily on foreign exchanges, the Tobin tax would help improve the functioning of the world economy and collect hundreds of billions of dollars, which could be handed over to a good cause.  And these are the side benefits!  Don’t forget the main benefit: giving countries greater freedom to pursue full-employment policies…

…In the first three decades after the Second World War, the world’s nations had participated in an international financial system, known as the Bretton Woods system, in which their currencies were set at fixed rates of exchange.  Although there were circumstances under which the rates could be adjusted, for the most part currencies remained stable.  After the breakdown of Bretton Woods in the early 1980s, international financial markets were very turbulent…By the mid-eighties, daily trading in foreign exchange markets around the world amounted to $150 billion; by 1992 that had risen to $880 billion, and by 1995 $1.2 trillion…Most of the transactions had nothing to do with this real world of goods and services moving across borders, or with investors making real long-term investments in a foreign country…in two-thirds of all the out-right forward and swap transaction the money moved into another currency for fewer than seven day.  In only 1 percent did the money stay for as long as one year…

…Since much of the market involved moving large sums of money (typically in the tens of millions of dollars) for very short periods of time (often less than a day), banks were perfectly positioned to participate.  Among swap transactions, which represented a major chunk of the foreign exchange market, 86 percent of the transactions were actually between banks.  In Canada, the private banks carried out some $30 billion a day in currency trades.  This was in fact part of the banks’ business.  International currency trading was, for instance, the major component of the fastest-growing part of the Bank of Montreal’s 1995 income. 

No one had watched more intently as the Mexican peso crisis unfolded than officials inside the government of Chile.  The peso crisis sent much of Latin America into a tailspin.  Foreign investors who had sunk billions of dollars into so-called emerging markets in Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World started pulling their funds out as rapidly as they had put them in.  Latin American markets lost almost 40 percent of their value in two months. 

 As fear and uncertainty spread through much of the continent, Chile had been able to watch the fiasco with a slight feeling of detachment.  Foreign investors who had put money into Chilean stocks and bonds weren’t just able to grab their money and run.  Chile had a law that required investors to keep their investments in the country for at least one year.  The Bank of Chile enforced this by requiring investors to make reserve deposits, which would be forfeited if their investments were withdrawn in less than a year.  The Chilean law was just a different way of addressing the problem that the Tobin tax tries to address.  By requiring capital coming into the country to stay there at least a year, the law prevented the sudden departure of capital from creating serious problems for a country’s domestic economy.  And the Chilean law had the added advantage that it didn’t rely on the co-operation of other countries.  Chile had put in place a form of capital controls entirely on its own.  As a result, Chileans had been able to watch in relief as the peso crisis swirled around their country but didn’t touch it.

And so what is the point of all of this?  The examination of economics as a “science”, of the manner in which economic policy drives local, national and international agendas?  The point is that we are capable of making this analysis.  We have the knowledge and the experience required to predict how one decision will affect another.

You only have to look at which countries have been the main beneficiaries of international investment in the last ten years of increasingly unregulated trade to see why the process of globalization is going to result in a world every more deeply divided between rich and poor.

We must now rethink the very nature of industrial society.  We need to contemplate ways of disengaging from a wasting, squandering, abusive industrialism. This means squarely facing up to the damage to the resource-base of the earth upon which all economic systems depend.  And at the same time we must hold fast to a commitment to social justice for all.

That other measures than gross national product (GNP) should be employed to assess well-being is already commonplace in the New Economics, in people’s movements and alternative forums all over the world.  Further, the invasion by the market economy of areas of activity from which it should be excluded - the traffic in women and children, for instance, the trade in illegal arms, the genetic manipulation of life-forms - demonstrates the necessity, not for ‘liberalization’, but for a more stringent, rigorous and popular control.  Market-free zones must be declared wherever people need protection, wherever the idolatry of profit rides roughshod over their lives. 

We need to reject any trade agreement that’s written by industry. We need a very different set of principles in our international agreements: one that honours and protects the rights of local people to decide who they want to trade with and on what terms, rather than protecting the rights of corporations to do whatever they want, irrespective of the wishes of local people.  We also need fiscal measures to help achieve a redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation - like very high rates of taxation on very short-term capital gains. 

If an investor has made gains over a period of five to ten years then they’ve likely been engaged in some kind of productive activity and there may be an argument to give a tax advantage as an incentive.  But gains made in the short term, from a few seconds to a few months, are not a productive contribution.  They’re pure extraction and they should be taxed away and the funds put to some public use.

Economics, and even more so applied economics, is not an exact science; it is in fact, or ought to be, something much greater: a branch of wisdom. On the day we can declare it so, we will have come a considerable distance.

Work

Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
Camus

 La meilleure façon de tuer un homme est de le mettre en chômage.
Felix Leclerc

An unemployed man is a desperate man and he is proactively forced into migration.  This is another justification for the assertion that the provision of work opportunities is the primary need and should be the primary objective of economic planning. Without it, the drift of people into the large cities cannot be mitigated, let alone halted.

The concept of more satisfactory levels of unemployment is truly amazing.  It turns on its head the view that unemployment is destructive to the human spirit and to society, and portrays unemployment as a desirable economic tool that we should see a lot more of.

This disciplining of labour has some important ramifications.  In the ongoing power struggle between employers and employees, it clearly strengthens the hand of employers.  This explains why many business people are supportive of the zero inflation goal, even though the accompanying higher interest rates mean higher costs for their businesses and even perhaps fewer sales in the resulting recession.  The upside, however, is that they will be able to count on a weak and docile labour force, which will be more flexible and willing to work for less than before.  This is very important, since labour costs account for the bulk of the operating expenses of most businesses.

Modern technology has deprived man of the kind of work that he enjoys most, creative, useful work with hands and brains, and given him plenty of work of a fragmented kind, most of which he does not enjoy at all.

Schumacher observed…

directly productive time in our society has already been reduced to about 3 percent of total social time, and the whole drift of modern technological development is to reduce it further.  Imagine we set ourselves a goal in the opposite direction - to increase it sixfold, to about twenty per cent, so that twenty per cent of total social time would be used for actually producing things, employing hands and brains and, naturally, excellent tools.  An incredible thought!  Even children would be allowed to make themselves useful, even old people.  At one-sixth of present-day productivity, we should be producing as much as at present.  There would be six times as much as at present.  There would be six times as much time for any piece of work we chose to undertake - enough to make a really good job of it, to enjoy oneself, to produce real quality, even to make things beautiful.  Think of the therapeutic value of real work; think of its educational value.  No-one would then want to raise the school-leaving age or to lower the retirement age, so as to keep people off the labour market.  Everybody would be welcome to lend a hand.  Everybody would be admitted to what is now the rarest privilege, the opportunity of working usefully, creatively, with his own hands and brains, in his own time, at his own pace - and with excellent tools.  Would this mean an enormous extension of working hours?  No, people who work in this way do not know the difference between work and leisure.

As Gandhi said, the poor of the world cannot be helped by mass production, only by production by the masses.  The system of mass production, based on sophisticated, highly capital-intensive, high energy-input dependent, and human labour-saving technology, presupposes that you are already rich, for a great deal of capital investment is needed to establish one single workplace.  The system of production by the masses mobilizes the priceless brains and skilful hands, and supports them with first-class tools.  The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person.  The technology of production by the masses, making use of the best of modern knowledge and experience, is conducive to decentralization, compatible with the laws of ecology, gentle in its use of scarce resources, and designed to serve the human person instead of making him the servant of machines.  Schumacher named it intermediate technology to signify that it is vastly superior to the primitive technology of bygone ages but at the same time much simpler, cheaper, and freer than the super-technology of the rich.  One can also call it self-help technology, or democratic or people’s technology - a technology to which everybody can gain admittance and which is not reserved to those already rich and powerful.

The real task may be formulated in four propositions:

First, that workplaces have to be created in the areas where the people are living now, and not primarily in metropolitan areas into which they tend to migrate.

Second, that these workplaces must be, on average, cheap enough so that they can be created in large numbers without this calling for an unattainable level of capital formation and imports.

Third, that the production methods employed must be relatively simple, so that the demands for high skills are minimized, not only in the production process itself but also in matters of organization, raw material supply, financing, marketing, and so forth.

Fourth, that production should be mainly from local materials and mainly for local use.

These four requirements can be met only if there is a ‘regional’ approach to development and, second, if there is a conscious effort to develop and apply what might be called an ‘intermediate technology’. 

There are unknown places, where so many of our daily necessities are now made: shoes, clothes, TV sets, plastic goods, toys, handbags, and jewellery, blue jeans.  Unnamed places, like the frightful slums of Tangerang and Bekasi in Jakarta, shielded from public scrutiny by guards with guns, protectors of the frontiers of poverty; the row-houses in Bangkok where young countrywomen, industrial captives, work 16 hours a day to make shirts, and eat and sleep in the workplace; where productivity-drives mean spiking the drinking water of workers with amphetamines; where half a million young women live in bamboo huts in Dhaka to furnish us with cheap garments, and receive 66 US cents a day for the privilege of doing so. 

The sub-contractors to the transnationals are mostly Korean, Singaporean, Taiwanese and they place a buffer of 'respectability' around the brutalities of the work-place.  In Jakarta workers meet and organize under a military prohibition that echoes the Combination Laws of Britain at the end of the eighteenth century.

The convergence between the fate of workers in both North and South, the rich countries and the poor, is becoming more and more plain, though the efforts at concealment by the global possessing classes are both ingenious and desperate.  All workers are migrants in the industrial system, in search of rootedness, stability and sufficiency but constantly evicted, uprooted and moved on, condemned to learn afresh the bitter lessons of the imperative of solidarity and resistance.  A working class that loses consciousness loses its most precious resource; regaining consciousness, not simply of its position in a national division of labour, but within the context of globalization, is the first requisite if we are to become effective once more. 

As producers and workers we can look to each other in a spirit of co-operation and solidarity, in place of competition, fear and hatred.  We can push forward the long, slow process of building links across international boundaries.  We can transform the function of work from the systematic destruction of human talent to the celebration of human dignity and ingenuity.  As citizens we can construct forms of government that express these needs rather than enforce the rule of free-market.

One of the belief systems that dominate Society B is that we are all part of a meritocracy. Those who embrace this ideology either consciously or unconsciously believe that in life you get what you deserve.  If you work hard, you will be successful.  If you are not successful, it is your own fault.  If you live in the African Sahara, and your life is difficult, it is because of a lack of initiative on your part.  This is one of the pivotal concepts in Society B that needs to be dismantled. 

One consequence of this is that the much-hyped 'equality of opportunity' in rich countries, the idea that all of us are free of the inequity of birth, inheritance and class still prevail.  This despite statistics such as the following; in Germany, you are 5.39 times more likely to stay in the top-earning 'salariat' - and avoid moving down into the working class - if you are born into it, compared with the reverse for someone born into the working class.  In Britain the figure is 5.48 times; in the US it is 3.72 times.  

Twenty years ago, the chief executive officers of large companies in the US were paid about 35 times more than the average worker they employed; today the ratio is 187 times as much. And its not just how much you earn, but what you own - the power and privilege that ownership conveys - that matters.  Wealth accumulates for the wealthy. 

The disparities of ownership are even greater than those of income:

In 1983, two-thirds of all individual wealth in the US was owned by the top 10% of the population.  By 1989 the richest 0.5% of US households (some 419,000 families) had increased their share of total private wealth in the US from 24% to 29% - they could have paid off the entire national debt in 1989 and still have been left with about 10% more net worth than they had in 1983.  Then, between 1989 and 1995, the valuation of the Dow Jones Industrial Average of shares doubled, and with it the value of the 80% of all US financial assets that are held by the top 10% of American households, hugely increasing the value of their assets. 

The gap between rich and poor is getting wider everywhere.  But it is wider in some areas of activity than in others.  The richest 20% of the world's people now have a virtual monopoly of access to commercial bank lending - an astonishing 485 times more than the poorest 20%, who in effect have no access at all.  The main reason for this is that the richest 20% own assets, which they can use as "collateral" for loans, whereas the poorest 20% own virtually nothing.

In Nexus, we believe that individual lives should be valued equally.  We are all the complex result of the circumstances of birthplace, birth order, race, sex, class, luck and fate.  We all have a purpose and a responsibility to determine that purpose in the great web of life.  When we discover what it is we are meant to do, where we fit in, it is our responsibility to do it well.  Traditionally, the value of each of our positions in the web is assigned a monetary figure.  The disparity that can exist between these figures has already been illustrated.

In Nexus, based on our convictions, we will actively pursue closing this gap.  If we truly believe that right livelihood is a personal responsibility, what should be an acceptable gap between the lowest and highest paid employee in an organization…7:1?…10:1?  Attempts have been made to address these discrepancies by certain notable companies, but in the large scheme of Society B, progress is severely impeded by an overall lack of collective will to move in this direction.  In Nexus, organizations aspiring to these principles will be favoured and supported over those who do not.

Education

When anything becomes more important to a society than the welfare of its children, it is a sure sign of spiritual disintegration.

The educational survival needs of our present time involves a journey into intimacy with the universe.  Our Western educational tradition has accomplished the polar opposite of intimacy.  In truth, our educational journey is a pilgrimage into estrangement.  Education is never chided for letting down the natural world. Rather, it is the scapegoat for letting down the exigencies of the plundering industrial order.  This was the gist of the recent back to the basics movement.  Here the basics do not reach back to the basics of the earth processes.  The basics are the core literacy subjects of reading, writing and mathematics seen necessary for the functioning of the industrial order.  The fractionalized nature of modern education fails to provide an understanding of the holistic nature of modern developmental and ecological problems. Coming into the twentieth century we see how progress through science, technology and the industrial order geared to the consumption of the Earth's resources becomes the major motif for the economic order.

Historical literature makes it clear that school systems were originally organized to increase national productivity by inculcating habits of obedience, loyalty and discipline.  The "restructuring" and "excellence" literature of the 1980's and 1990's continues to be permeated with a concern for the productivity and competitiveness of the national economy, and seeks to harness the abilities and dreams of the next generation to the goal of economic development.

In North America at the present time, there is a considerable shift taking place in education, both in philosophy and financial support.  As education budgets are reduced, there is a dramatic reduction in the delivery of programs to support exceptional students.  The only model of value is where an individual teacher is standing in front of an ever-increasing number of students.  As the number of students rise, the possibilities for individualizing program are diminished.  In this scenario, the application of standardized tests is facilitated. 

As budgets are reduced, it becomes more and more difficult to equip classrooms with books.  Solution to the problem?  Increase the level of technology in the class weakening the choices of what and how to teach, have information disseminated from a central dispatch, leaving government with a stranglehold on content as well as delivery.

We in Nexus want those in Society B to know that we understand the plan.  Rather than respond by saying “we aren’t going to take it any more” and take on these battles, we simply will no longer be part of the debate.  We will no longer play the game.   We will identify ourselves and begin to create our own structures.  We will withdraw our support from Society B.  Without this support, Society B will eventually implode.

These days, one of the standards for success in elementary education in Society B is that content is successfully mastered by progressively younger students.  For example, if the concept of fractions is introduced to 10 year olds at one point in time, and we subsequently prove to ourselves that the concept can be mastered by 9 or even better, 8 year olds, then this would rank as an unqualified success story.  This is “the earlier the better” version of education.  I would like to know what theory of child development this model is based upon?  Have we become so paralyzed in Society B that we don’t even question the basis of this movement? 

In secondary education an examination of the structure itself reveals the essential goals and beliefs at play in the system. A high school is organized by subjects.  In a sense, you are the subject you teach.  The teachers of one subject share space with teachers of the same subject.  The students identify each teacher by their subject.  It is in a teacher’s best interest to promote their subject as enrolment in a particular course to a certain extent is a student prerogative.  Very often, subjects in their ascendancy such as science and math, are found on the upper floors of the building.  With these structures in place, is a holistic approach to education likely?

One of the concepts that is highly valued in Society B is that of specialization.  From the time young people begin school, they learn to see the world as a series of compartments or categories.  Finding common threads that run through these compartments becomes progressively more difficult.  To know, that is to have knowledge, is to understand the relationship between what you know and what you do.  In the current trend towards specialization, the big picture and people are shielded from knowing by only having access to a small part of the picture and can therefore shield themselves from any responsibility since they have not been completely responsible for any particular consequence.  Keeping knowledge compartmentalized is partly what is happening in the educational system more and more today.  And by shielding people from the big picture or by denying them the skills necessary to make critical judgements, they become powerless. 

We are now venturing into education without a sense of history.  There is only one compulsory history credit in the Canadian secondary education system which means that the vast majority of young people in Canada never take another formal history course after the age of fourteen!  Can the possibilities for the future be entertained without knowledge and understanding of the past?

Communications technology is being introduced into schools as the new wave.  Be a part of it or flounder forever.  Essentially, a new, high-level course in typing is being presented as if it were fundamental education.  Basic technical training is, of course, useful.  But to treat it as anything more than that is to lock students into technology that will be obsolete by the time they graduate.  The time wasted will also deprive them of the basic training in knowledge and thinking that might help them adjust to the constant changes outside.

An increasing number of schools are spending large parts of their budgets on computers and computer programs.  Once in possession of enough equipment they can line up a classroom full of students behind machines where they can be educated in isolation by something less intelligent than a human.  This sacrifices one of the primary purposes of education, particularly in a democracy - to show individuals how they can function together in society.

In North America at the present time, there is an assault on the Arts, which includes the study of literature, music, drama, and the visual arts, and a subsequent elevation of science, math, and business.  There is a shift in the funding models for these areas as well as a reduction in the number of credits required in these areas to graduate from high school.

What part of education does the study of the Arts represent to us?  Is there not a good reason why they are often referred to as the Humanities?  Are they not the significant part of an education which allows us to concentrate on our humanity, to ask ourselves what does it mean to be human, what does it mean to share this experience with others, and what responsibilities do we have to others?  Is it not the Arts which provide us with the context for the learning of other subjects, which allow us to keep things in a perspective, which allow us to make moral and ethical judgements, to develop a sense of who we are and what our individual roles are in the great picture? 

On the other hand, if you wanted to minimize the personal empowerment implied by experiencing this part of the educational curriculum, then you might even set out intentionally to reduce its impact.  You would instead offer education under the guise of training programs that sought to simply transfer skills and knowledge without developing any filters through which individuals apply critical thinking.  You would seek to incorporate a system which sorted the society as early as possible into those who responded well to this model without questioning and those who didn’t. You would reward those who demonstrated these attributes by offering them opportunities in the power structure that were considered desirable.  Those not chosen by this model would experience a progressively declining selection of meaningful employment opportunities. 

You would continue this restructuring into tertiary education.  You would manipulate funding of colleges and universities so that institutions which were once seen to be the prerogative of the many would become the choice only of the few.  The few would be determined by their ability to pay at source or by their having been chosen for their successes in the refurbished elementary and secondary system. 

Indeed, with costs like this, universities would inevitably become much more the preserve of the wealthy, and would also likely become more strictly practical places, training grounds for high-priced jobs.  Students would be intent on ensuring that they emerged from university with degrees that generated large incomes, such as medicine, law, engineering or accounting.  This trend, which in itself is not new, would be far more pronounced under the proposed scheme, with so much more personal debt at stake.  Students motivated by a love of philosophy or literature or political science or history would have trouble justifying to themselves this kind of expenditure without some clear idea that it would pay off in a higher income later on.

Lost in all this is the notion of universities as performing some kind of useful social function, as being places encouraging creative and independent thought, and even social and cultural criticism.  The record of universities on this front has of course been spotty; often universities have simply regurgitated the prevailing wisdom of the day. In many cases, however, they have offered more, challenging students to analyze the fundamentals of their thought and of the dominant ideas of their time.  As we move into an era of media outlets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, it seems unfortunate, if not dangerous, to be veering away from the concept of the university as an active and open centre of independent, critical thinking.

Until you move away from the model as it was originally conceived, you will continue to meet the goals and objectives of the original structure.  There is a reason why current governments expend so much energy in the struggle to control education.  Any ideology that seeks to inhibit freedom of thought requires tight regulation of the educational system. Look at the eagerness with which liberal and social democratic governments are embracing the idea that general schooling should be restructured to act as a direct conduit to the managerial economy.  You will find this idea popping up throughout the West.  The new Italian centre-left coalition is the latest example.  They all say: ‘We must be practical.  We must produce citizens who can find jobs.’  But these changes will not help individuals in the work place.  They will, however, prepare the young to accept the structures of corporatism.

One of the best regulators of freedom of thought is the introduction of standardized tests.  The model for the standardized test is that every student should learn the same thing at the same time.  Does this picture really represent the view that we have of an individual?  Does this mean all the conclusions of the work done on learning styles were a hoax?  It is well known that in order to do well on these tests, educators will simply teach to the test. Not only does this force the teacher to teach the same content in the same way to every student, but also forces each teacher to treat their class in the same manner, whether that class be found in a multicultural inner city setting or an isolated rural community.  The earlier these tests can be introduced the more effective they are in reducing individual expression.  We see these tests being used as early as the third grade here for the first time.  There has been the expected outrage but that has not stopped their implementation.

Teachers are just as well intended as any segment of the society.  It is the structure of education itself which prevents the kinds of changes that are needed.  Most teachers aspire to doing the best jobs that they can with the students that they come into contact with.  Not all teachers would agree with all of the statements that I have made. However, all teachers are defined by the structure that they are part of.  For those who would choose to make a significant change, the structures prevent them from doing so.  The organization is extremely hierarchical so any input is diffused through the proper channels. 

The staff of any school comes together for a myriad of reasons. For some, it is proximity to a particular school, for others, they may have been invited because of an affinity to a particular philosophy, and for others, fate has been the overriding factor.  If you have, for example, a staff of 100, there will likely be general representation of various points of view across the spectrum.  On any issue, there will be opposing groups at either end, with a less committed group in the middle.  The result of this dialogue is usually that the two opposing sides cancel each other, leaving the most innovative proposals unsupported.  Significant change within this environment is impossible.  Couple this with the hierarchical nature of the institution with the government at the top, and any possibility of positive social change is eliminated.

In Nexus, this situation is addressed by attempting to create structures of like-minded people who voluntarily come together already sharing a core set of beliefs.  One of the current issues in education at the moment is the application of technology within the profession.  There is vast disagreement as to how much technology and in what applications.  On any given staff, there would be a group who would support the notion of a laptop for every student and the elimination of textbooks and another group who would find the very idea horrific.  In the middle, a group with mixed feelings.  The end result – stalemate, maintenance of the status quo.  Except, the notion that texts are expendable is in its ascendancy, being supported by government and business.  Schools then become neutral zones for the imposition of these ideals.  The same is true for any issue – from standardized testing to the relationship between education and business.  The school is rendered neutral by its structure and therefore open to the whims of the current power groups. If a group of people can be divided into specialized sub-groups, there is no one left in charge of the big picture. 

The existence of high-quality national public education school systems for the first dozen or so years of training is the key to a democracy where legitimacy lies with the citizen...we are slipping away from that simple principle of high-quality public education.  And in doing so, we are further undermining democracy.

Education needs to recognize itself as an earth process.  We need a new origin story that provides a detailed account from observed phenomena of how the universe, the earth, the living world and the human community emerged into being. 

Teaching children about the natural world should be treated as one of the most important events in their lives.  Children need a story that will bring personal meaning together with the grandeur and meaning of the universe.  The secular school as presently constituted cannot provide the mystique that should be associated with this story.  Nor can the religious-oriented school that has only superficially adopted this new story of the universe evoke this experience in the child.

Creative planetary education can play a fundamental role in our guidance into the next era.  It must firstly prepare learners at all levels on how to survive in our present terminally morbid educational and industrial system.  It must, secondly, help learners to critically resist the momentum of our present educational system.  It must also attempt to indicate the direction of the future so that planetary survival is secured. 

 Learning is no longer a prerequisite to living, it is its accompaniment.  Education should prepare an individual for entry into a fluid regenerating society rather than the perpetuation of existing conventions, roles and structures.  This is clearly an important concept since, for the first time in history, education is engaged in preparing humanity for a type of society that does not yet exist.  Under such conditions, societies and its schools must address some important questions as to what should be learnt and how schools should respond in this "turn-around decade" to the 21st Century.  We have to develop and maintain a positive image of how the world should be and move towards it.

 One of the preliminary stages that needs to be undertaken is to create a forum where these ideas can be discussed and developed.  This then allows those who have been able to move through the stage of denial to come together and work in an atmosphere of supportive cooperation.

The significant input for this re-structuring is not the exclusive domain of professional educators.  In fact, most educators have been attracted to the profession as a result of a positive experience as a student.  They were drawn to both the content as well as the process of learning in this environment.  They will have an innate tendency to perpetuate the same model as the one in which they achieved obvious success.  We must look to others inside our communities whose picture of education has been less defined by the ongoing demands of the public education systems and who have less invested in the maintenance of the status quo. 

 It was with these thoughts that I initiated a process in Wellington County to create a publicly funded community cooperative school.  Over a period of a year, the community was invited to participate in a process which sought to create a school that was an extension of their own conception of education.  In part it was a process of adult education with all participants defining what it was that they needed to learn in order to achieve this purpose.   All decisions were made by consensus.  In the end, a proposal was drafted which contained four main structural changes from a mainstream school. 

 Firstly, all decisions about the running of the school were to be made by a management team made up of parents, teachers and students in cooperation with a Board liaison.  Secondly, the school recognized that education is basically a cooperative process between teachers, parents, and students.  As a result, each group plays an integral part in the learning experience.  Parents’ participation is invited at all levels of the educational experience, including curriculum development and delivery.  Thirdly, the community is seen as a resource for learning.  The school expects to draw upon the knowledge and experiences of community members and resources.  The classroom is seen as being only one environment of many where learning can and does take place.  At the same time, the school recognized a commitment and responsibility to give back to the community through participation in projects that are in keeping with the philosophy of the school.

 Lastly, the school has defined a focus for curriculum which includes a strong commitment to the ongoing development of earth literacy, principles of global education, as well as an emphasis on relationship skills, such as listening skills, and conflict resolution skills.  The community also indicated through the proposal that education should foster positive social change.

We are capable of defining the goals of our educational systems to reflect our own beliefs and values.  Traditional governments are not capable of this role.  Their mandates are too short and it is inappropriate to subject educational policy to the fluctuations in political will that the system currently generates.  If western civilization is in a state of permanent crisis, it is not far-fetched to suggest that there may be something wrong with its education.  No civilization has ever devoted more energy and resources to organized education, and if we believe in nothing else, we certainly believe that education is, or should be, the key to everything.

The task of education should be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of value, of what to do with our lives.  There is no doubt that it is also needs to transmit know-how but this must take second place, for it is obviously somewhat foolhardy to put great powers into the hands of people without making sure that they have a reasonable idea of what to do with them.  At present, there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom.  More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom.

The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds.  If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty and chaotic.

When people ask for education they normally mean something more than mere training, something more than mere knowledge of facts, and something more than a mere diversion.  Maybe they cannot themselves formulate precisely what they are looking for; but I think what they are really looking for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them.

Never has science been more triumphant; never has our power over our environment been more complete nor our progress faster.  It cannot be a lack of know-how that causes the despair not only of religious thinkers like Kierkegaard but also of leading mathematicians and scientists like Russell and Hoyle.  We know how to do many things, but do we know what to do?  Ortega y Gasset put it succinctly: “We cannot live on the human level without ideas.  Upon them depends what we do.  Living is nothing more or less than doing one thing instead of another.”  What, then, is education?  Is it the transmission of ideas which enable us to choose between one thing and another, or, to quote Ortega again, is it a process which enables us “to live a life which is something above meaningless tragedy or inward disgrace”.

Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live.  Even the greatest ideas of science are nothing more than working hypotheses, useful for purposes of special research but completely inapplicable to the conduct of our lives or the interpretation of the world.  If, therefore, a man seeks education because he feels estranged and bewildered, because his life seems to him empty and meaningless, he cannot get what he is seeking by studying any of the natural sciences, i.e. by acquiring “know-how”.  That study has its own value which I am not inclined to belittle; it tells him a great deal about how things work in nature or in engineering: but it tells him nothing about the meaning of life and can in no way cure his estrangement and secret despair.

What is at fault is the lack of depth with which the subjects are usually presented, and the absence of metaphysical awareness.  The sciences are being taught without any awareness of the presuppositions of science, of the meaning and significance of scientific laws, and of the place occupied by the natural sciences within the whole cosmos of human thought.  The result is that the presuppositions of science are normally mistaken for its findings.  Economics is being taught without any awareness of the view of human nature that underlies present-day economic theory.  In fact, many economists are themselves unaware of the fact that such a view is implicit in their teaching and that nearly all their theories would have to change if that view changed.  How could there be a rational teaching of politics without pressing all questions back to their metaphysical roots?  Political thinking must necessarily become confused and end in “double-talk” if there is a continued refusal to admit the serious study of the metaphysical and ethical problems involved.  The confusion is already so great that it is legitimate to doubt the educational value of studying many of the so-called humanistic subjects.  I say “so-called” because a subject that does not make explicit its view of human nature can hardly be called humanistic.

The physical sciences and mathematics are concerned exclusively with convergent problems.  That is why they can progress cumulatively, and each new generation can begin just where their forbears left off.  The price, however, is a heavy one.  Dealing exclusively with convergent problems does not lead into life but away from it.

“Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it”, wrote Charles Darwin in his autobiography, “poetry of many kinds... gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays.  I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight.  But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry:  I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.  I have also lost almost any taste for pictures or music... My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive .... The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

This impoverishment, so movingly described by Darwin, will overwhelm our entire civilization if we permit the current tendencies to continue which have been called “the extension of positive science to social facts”.  All divergent problems can be turned into convergent problems by a process of “reduction”.  The result, however, is the loss of all higher forces to ennoble human life, and the degradation not only of the emotional part of our nature, but also, as Darwin sensed, of our intellect and moral character.  The signs are everywhere visible today. 

We are suffering from a metaphysical disease, and the cure must therefore be metaphysical.  Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence.  For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and, as long as the present anti-metaphysical temper persists, the disorder will grow worse.  Education, far from ranking as man’s greatest resource, will then be an agent of destruction.

If we apply our collective wisdom, what is the ideal educational model that we can come up with?  If we separate ourselves as much as possible from the system of education that we are familiar with and begin again, what would the new model look like?  What do we want our children to learn, to know?  What is the best environment to allow this learning to happen?  What is the relationship between the teacher and student?  What is the relationship between the school and the community that it serves?  What role should parents play in the educational process?  What are the fundamental beliefs upon which our educational system is based?  Are these assumptions appropriate?  If not, what should we replace them with?  What criteria should we use to determine success?

What changes would this new information bring about in the teaching of history, for example?  Let's say that you were studying, with a group of students, the early period of colonialism, and even more specifically, Christopher Columbus.  The value of this study would be in identifying not only the events of this period, but to extrapolate from these events the set of beliefs, assumptions and perspectives that must have been operating at that time.  The students would then formulate some kind of moral perspective, some form of value judgement.  Perhaps this would become the only reason to study history - to identify the events, to analyze how people were thinking at the time based on these events, to identify how you feel about how they were thinking, and to make a connection to the present.  The connections to the present would empower the student to see the choices available for the future.  By analyzing and taking apart our story, the students would be participating in an ongoing writing of the new myth.   

Our study of history needs to be seen as incomplete unless our pre-history receives equal weight in the curriculum. After all, it lasted almost 30,000 years compared to the 5,000 year period that we currently call Western Civilization.  We need to piece together our prehistory in a way that we can begin to tell the stories of that time.  The fairy tales that emerge from this period will reflect equality between the sexes, an inherent connection with nature, and a sense of beauty and dignity.  A deep awareness of this period will loosen the grasp of our present picture and enable students to see change and choices in new ways. Our traditional fairy tales need to be examined in light of the historical context from which they were created.  In this way, children can begin to identify the messages that pervade these stories, to decide why this might have been, to decide how they feel about these messages, and if applicable, to indicate more desirable themes.

From our prehistory will come myths that will serve as positive models for females.  Our present culture provides so few appropriate models. While there is value in females critically examining the available tales that we have, it is not enough for them to begin to write their own stories.  They need to be empowered to see that there was a time when cultures saw women as powerful givers of life.  They need to have the first hand experience of identifying with strong role models in literature. 

Our school systems have not traditionally been effective at making the connections between body, mind, and spirit and any attempt to redefine our educational processes in an holistic manner must address this issue. No matter what modifications are introduced, no matter how noble the intent, be it cooperative education or holistic education, they are evaluated on the grounds of supporting our drive to be competitive with other nations.  These modifications will be accepted as long as they can prove their effectiveness on standardized tests in science and maths and in literacy. 

In essence, what these changes are doing is strengthening the base of the educational system as it is.  It is facilitating our journey along the same path.  We are essentially looking to do what we do in a better way rather than asking what is it that we are doing, is that what we want to do, and if not, what are our goals and how can we best achieve them.  In our current Western thinking, it will mean giving something up.  We cannot begin to make connections with others and with nature and continue to live out this lifestyle.  We are going to have to let go and trust in the process.  It will take a great deal of courage, but the first stage is the dying.  It will necessarily have to begin in North America and Europe, with those that "have" and choose a different direction.  We cannot expect the oppressed countries of the world who are now experiencing a media blitz to sell them our concept of the good life to lead the way.  Models need to be created that reflect this fundamental shift from the overriding goal of public education - preparation of students to participate efficiently in the work force and maintain the social order.  This is diametrically opposed to education that deals with the inner life of the person, that seeks to nurture the child so that s/he can discover who s/he is and what s/he is meant to be doing.

We have the wisdom to create models of education which reflect our current place in time and space.  We can identify the questions that education should seek to ask and answer.  We can aspire to seek out and reach higher ideals.  We can do these things if we start again by asking ourselves what the role of education should be, who are the stakeholders, and what should be the process for making decisions.  One person stated it like this…..

I want to know why a child is sent to school at all.  Why at one age rather than another.  Why s/he is taught one subject now and another later on.  And I don't want to be told that it is to keep up with an enemy or that it is legally required or that it's what an expert recommends.  I want to know how it gets that way, in the enemy's or the law's or expert's mind.  I am not satisfied with opportunism or experiment as a rationale of curriculum.  I want to know what needs (whose needs) are being served by doing things one way rather than another, and what makes anybody think so.  I want to know what happens to the artist who lives naturally in a child's responsiveness to rhythm and tone and colour and story, what happens to the child in man.  I want to know why so many grown-ups who are smart in school blow their brains out in middle age, or rely on anxiety depressants.  I want the whole story from beginning to end.  There are answers to these questions.

Technology 

2020 Vision - Writing about technology and then expecting much of it to stand up in thirty years would be short-sighted and foolhardy.  At the time of the writing, personal computers were just appearing in schools and homes.  For all intents and purposes, there was no internet.  There were no smart phones or any “smart” devices.  Having said that, what can we learn from this view of the past?  Has everything changed?  What issues are different?  What issues are still the same? 

There is a sense in the writing of thirty years ago that computer technology was a ongoing choice rather than a given.  That moment seems to have passed without much debate.  So, what does the future hold for us in this realm?  In a world of our choosing, how would our relationship with technology change?  What aspects might remain the same?  Will be the masters or the servant of this aspect of our life?

Technology is one of the current concepts that renders us incompetent, mute, disorganized, disempowered.  We seem to have lost completely the notion of technology as a tool.  If we could only ask good questions before employing it!

What is the goal of the technology in each case that it is applied?  How does it improve the experience of those working with it?  How does it adhere to our common beliefs about human nature, scale, work and ecology?  Who decides when and where computers are used, which tasks they perform, and who programs them?  If workers are required to follow a computerized schedule and adhere to computerized standards (set, say, by a software company in another country); if they are subjected to electronic surveillance and fired for failing to register sufficient strokes on a keyboard, who - or what - is running the workplace?

In whose interest is it to eliminate human telephone operators? Too often, technological change bullies agenda, often fuelled by profit-hungry corporations, without adequate regard to the needs of real people. Should we be concerned about nurses in Ontario whose time is regulated by a computer program called Total Quality Management (TQM), fashioned after Japanese management philosophy, that stresses the "production process"?  The result is standardized care, performed in tightly timed segments, that eliminates the essential human aspect of care-giving, particularly when the computer program values certain types of work - surgery, for example - over bathing, hair combing and individualized attention. 

Our entire social structure is imploding under the influence of the information highway.  It's global information networks and the management information systems they support are lifting the corporate economy free of time and space, free of geography and of history with all the traditional restraints, values and social priorities.  Labour standards, meaningful jobs, a living wage, and a rooted sense of community are giving way to a two-tier world where class differences are exacerbated by computer know-how.  On the top tier: long hours of overtime by educated, experienced and relatively well-paid workers.  And on the bottom: a large group of low-paid, unskilled and part-time workers who can be treated as roughly interchangeable.  And then there are those who miss out altogether - the chronic jobless, the socially marginalized who form a permanent and troubling underclass.

Are computers becoming more like us, as the artificial-intelligence researchers claim, or are we becoming more like them?  Computers are impoverishing us in many ways without our even realizing that we are losing something.  In normal human intercourse the right to privacy is made possible by the mutual respect individuals feel for each other.  One human being perceives in another human being the need for privacy and intimacy and on that basis does not intrude into that person’s life and affairs.  On the Internet, the issue of privacy has been solved by a purely technological capability, not by human beings developing and acting according to their higher moral capacities, such as those of respect and intimacy. 

We cannot assume that this new-found ability to communicate will result in better understanding between people.  While third-world villages offer direct and unmediated access between people, this has failed to make those villages into utopias.  There is no certainty that a high school student with an electronic mail pen pal in Malaysia is, as a result of that connection, more likely to have a conversation with the student at the next locker.  Rather than our culture assimilating technology, technology is taking over culture. 

The computer that allows us to withdraw cash from an automatic teller, day or night, is the same technology that makes possible the international capital market.  Freed from the shackles of government regulation, corporate money managers now shift billions of dollars a day around the globe.  “Surfing the yield curve,” big money speculators can move funds at lightning speed, day and night - destabilizing national economies and sucking millions out of productive long-term investment. The global foreign exchange trade alone is now estimated at more than $1.3 billion a day.

When it comes to employment the computer is not working-class friendly.  Computers don’t create jobs; they eliminate the employment many young people would otherwise have. If we could delete computers from history tomorrow, there would be more jobs the next day than there are now.

Computer literacy is a commercial fashion, not a specific skill, let alone a subject matter.  If computer literacy does not include material on what computers can’t do and shouldn’t do, it is advertising, not education.  The main thing kids learn from computers is how to use computers.  And anything they learn today is apt to be obsolete in two years. Absolutely nothing kids learn about using a computer in the first grade today will make them more employable when they leave high school.  Employers should he left to teach what their employees need to know about the firm’s computer system after hiring them.

Here’s what Theodore Rozak has to say about computers in education in The Cult of Information: A New Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial Intelligence and the True Art of Thinking.

Playing computer games is not the same as learning.  Games are fun, nothing wrong with that.  Learning is another kind of fun, often related to long intervals of dogged attention, persistent questioning, strong doubt, memorizing things, looking things up, being bored, overcoming frustration.

All CD-ROM materials do more to fragment the attention span than to teach anything.

All freebies from the computer industry should be regarded as you would a free sample from your friendly neighbourhood crack dealer. 

The World Wide Web is primarily an advertising medium.  The main information kids will find on it is advertising.  All the search engines used to find anything are rigged with advertising.  Almost all information-bearing homepages are studded with advertising.  The main reason enthusiasts want it in the schools is to deliver advertising.  If you don’t believe me, try suggesting that all advertising be eliminated from computers used in schools.  Just try.  You will be told this is a technical impossibility.  It isn’t.

People who think education equals information have no idea what either information or education is.  Always ask computer enthusiasts to define what they mean by information.  If they tell you everything is information and information is everything: beware.  That’s a sales pitch, not a sensible idea.  A good working definition of information might be: it is an answer to a question that purports to be a fact.  At least a definition like that reminds us that the quality of the question is more important than the quantity of data that appears as an answer.  And how do we teach kids to ask good questions?

Kids don’t need much information anyway.  Not first of all.  Teaching them that they do is bad teaching.  They need ideas, values, taste and judgement without which information is worthless.  Take a simple example: the telephone book contains lots of information.  To use it at all kids need to know alphabetical order.  But alphabetical order is not information.  It is a very old idea about organizing information.

Ideas, values, taste and judgement are found in other human minds.  And most cheaply in the minds of authors of books and teachers in classrooms.  Kids need to learn about those other minds. Let them.  A good teacher equipped with enough cheap copies of Huckleberry Finn to go around can teach more that kids need to know than the same teacher forced to revamp all she knows to fit the limited skills of a roomful of expensive computers.

There are about as many kids born computer-proficient as poetry-proficient.  It is mere folklore that all children born since 1980 have mutated into brilliant computer-users.  Different kids have different talents.  Provide for as many as your budget allows.  A computer is an expensive way to spend a long time getting ready to do anything.  A kid with a pencil in her hand is ready to write.  A kid with a crayon in his hand is ready to draw.  A kid with a computer is ready to ... begin a learning curve that starts with booting up, virus-checking, configuring, re-booting if the machine hangs, searching for misplaced files, undeleting lost files, learning the interface, arranging the desktop, re-arranging the desktop, customizing icons, fussing with screen-savers, creating button-bars, resizing and positioning, mastering protocols, downloading, uploading, clicking on menus, choosing fonts, deciphering error messages and reviewing the documentation.  Unless, of course, the teacher does all that for the kids and creates the illusion of easy-to-do.

Or if all of this is too much to remember here is the abridged version:

1.  Find out what Bill Gates wants your school to do.  Don’t do that.

2. Keep a pre-computer image of education in mind at all times, remembering that education predates high tech.  Here’s one I like: Abraham Lincoln learning to write with a lump of coal on the back of a shovel and growing up to jot the Gettysburg Address on a crumpled envelope.

The Web is a creation of the entrepreneurial worldview.  There are now clear signs that the commercial development of the net and a take-over by corporate conglomerates is underway.  For example, few people know the Internet is now completely owned and operated by private enterprise.  Until 1995 the US Government and universities provided much of the funding for the operation of the net's "backbone" lines - the major transcontinental telephone lines that carry Internet traffic.  The Government paid a consortium of computer and telecommunication companies to operate the Internet.  Then the Government quietly pulled out and turned the operation over to a handful of communications giants and the long-distance companies.  In the US they include major players like AT&T, MCI and Sprint.  Internationally they include huge companies like British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and Japan's NTT.  Regional telephone companies and cable television companies are also beginning to offer Internet service.

The biggest obstacle to the survival of a "free and democratic" Internet is that the telecom companies own the infrastructure on which the Internet operates.  The Internet is already running out of room (complaints about busy signals and intolerably slow performance are common), and the telephone and cable companies are investing heavily to provide more capacity.  This new capacity will appear in the form of fibre-optic cable which offers much higher transmission capacity than standard copper telephone cable that exists in most neighbourhoods today. 

The cost of wiring the US is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars.  One way or another these companies intend to reap a return on their investment.  It is clear that most consumers are unwilling to pay large monthly access fees (surveys indicate that $35 per month is about the maximum) and therefore the telecoms will turn to advertisers.  Once advertising takes root on the Internet the democratic voices will be marginalized, much like progressive publications today are on the margins of the mainstream media.  Like most technologies, the Internet is primarily used in industrialized countries. In China PCs are priced close to $2000, about four times the average urban annual income of $480.

And for those who are drawn to the conspiracy theory…because the Internet is not structured and is not connected to the structures of power, could it be that it has been created in part to keep the masses occupied with meaningless activity?  Just a thought…

A study in May 1996 by the Georgia Institute of Technology confirmed that most net users are affluent North American males looking for entertainment. 

84% of users were from North America and Northern Europe

69% were male, average age 33 with an average household income of $59,000.

80% used the web daily mostly for browsing and entertainment

51% reported using the web for work and 14% for shopping

36% of users surf the web instead of watching TV

While there are no definitive figures on the male monopoly of the new technologies, the consensus is that men dominate in every area.  The only exception is that sometimes there are more women on the help desks.  Men own the cyberworld.  And the reason they're in charge is, like Bill Gates, they got there first.  Whether the mogul is Mr. Murdoch, Mr. Packer, Mr. Turner or Mr. Berlusconi, it's clear that it is not women's experience that is being used as the basis for prioritizing, planning and shaping the new information society. 

From now on, most learning in the arts and sciences will take place via computer.  And those who have no access, no expertise in the area, will be as severely limited as those who are illiterate in a print-based culture.  This is not to suggest that women cannot excel in information technology.  There are many wonderful women in science and technology.  And a number of talented, entrepreneurial, role-modelling women in the cyber-industry.  Their achievement and presence should be held up, admired, emulated and celebrated.  But this doesn't alter the statistics on women and technology - or on women and computers. 

That women should be "information poor" and have to embark on yet another campaign for equal representation in an area appropriated by men is only part of the problem.  The other part is that we have a medium in which only half of human experience and interest, half of all human values, are being drawn upon and given expression.  With a mainly male input into new technologies we end up with an emphasis on "toys for the boys" - at the expense of women's contribution which is more about relationships and consequences.

American Telephone and Telegraph (AT & T) along with the French company Alcatel Submarine Networks plans a $2.65 billion project to encircle the African continent with 39,000 km. of fibre-optic cables.  Dubbed "Africa One" by its corporate sponsors the scheme will connect 41 African states including all coastal countries and surrounding islands. AT&T Submarine Systems began laying the cable in 1997 and is hoping to have the system up and running by the year 2000.

Over the last 20 years computerization of the pulp and paper industry has sparked a 50 per cent boom in production with 25 percent fewer workers.  Our ability to produce more goods with less labour should spell progress and social benefits.  It hasn't.  Even the workers who still have jobs feel few benefits have flowed their way.  As a society, we need to do something about it - soon.

Here’s Kirkpatrick Sale’s perspective, in the role of Ned Ludd, in an edition of The New Internationalist.

Let's say 200,000 tons of poisonous wastes created every year by the manufacture of those computer chip things: the 25 million on-the-job injuries every year to those who use them: the five million jobs made more routinized and mindless by what you call "data processing"; the fears and insecurities created by widespread change so shattering that your Newsweek magazine says - I have it here - "It's outstripping our capacity to cope";

But since 1979 when your computer revolution really began, 47 million jobs have been lost in your American factories and offices.

Well that is what the computer does, what it is supposed to do, why they invented it and why the masters are using it.  It saves them money because they don't have to pay humans and put up with all the expenses humans cause.  That's why you've had this "computer revolution' - because the masters make money from it.

Oh, yes, it's true that some of them, 15 million I think it was, eventually got new jobs.  But generally the new ones weren't as good as the old, didn't pay as much, had no "benefits", no security.  They were what people sometimes call "disposable jobs".  I am talking about people's lives.

...It will only get worse.  Your Carnegie Institute, I will remind you, has predicted that six million more factory and 38 million office jobs will be eliminated by technology in the next decade or so.  That's 44 million more jobs, sir, 44 million lives. 

Five percent of your people own 90 per cent of your wealth, the top 20 per cent nearly half of all income.  And the disparity between rich and poor, shameful to begin with, has only got worse since the "computer revolution" began.  And gets worse each passing year.  The dark side of your employment is this: eight million people are officially unemployed, 36 million are said to be discouraged from looking for work, 46 million are in dead-end jobs without hope.  Add in 37 million people below what you call the "poverty line" and that is, by my figuring, sir, 126 million people.  And you only have 250 million or somesuch in your whole United States.  But for a nation as wealthy as yours to have produced misery, poverty, hopelessness, heartache and affliction on this scale seems to me to be a crime against humanity, compared to which there is only one crime more heinous.  And that, sir, is the crime that most people in your country are able somehow to sleepwalk through their lives humbled by shallow entertainments and ridiculous sporting events and other plentiful opiates, oblivious to it all.

Yet despite the well-documented effects that technology has on us, we continue to exhibit a belief in its almost magical power to solve the problems that now beset us.  However, the question needs to be asked:  Can technology liberate us from the problems it has created or helped to create?  So many people are held spellbound by the effects of technology because of its ability to separate cause and effect.  This explains how we can be so mesmerized by the beauty of our creation of computers capable of processing ten million calculations per second.  And why?   To increase the volume and the speed with which we move natural resources through the consumer economy to the junk pile or the waste heap.  As Paul Erlich observed, humanity will bring upon itself consequences depressingly similar to those expected from a nuclear winter and that to look to technology for a solution would be a lethal mistake.

Energy

In Nexus, we need to address the issue of energy.  Currently, the major oil-producing nations, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Nigeria, Indonesia, Burma are all ruled by dictatorships with appalling human rights records with only muted international criticism because the world needs their oil. A concentration of energy resources means a tremendous concentration of political power.  And the sudden wealth from petro-dollars only encourages corruption.

Worldwide more than $200 billion is spent on direct subsidies to fossil fuels to help keep the prices down.  Solar gets nothing! The US spent less on solar research in a year than it costs to buy just one fighter plane.

A quarter of the world's population - in the North - consumes more than 70 per cent of the world's commercial energy while the remaining three-quarters - in the South- consume less than 30 per cent.  Two billion people in the South have no access to electricity.  But a combination of industrialization and population growth in the South is set to increase global energy consumption by 60% by the year 2020.

A detailed analysis conducted for Greenpeace by independent analysts - the Boston Centre of the Stockholm Environment Institute and others - demonstrates both the technical and economic feasibility of phasing out fossil fuels in order to control climate change.  In the analysis, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use fall by more than 50 per cent within 40 years and a 100 percent by the years 2100.  The bulk of the early carbon dioxide reductions are in industrialized countries which are the largest current emitters.

The phase-out fossil fuels are made possible by the rapid implementation of energy efficiency, together with renewable sources such as solar, wind, biomass, small-scale hydro and geothermal power.  Renewable energy, currently delivering 14 per cent of global energy supply, would provide more that 60 per cent by 2030, and all the world’s energy needs by 2100.  Nuclear power would be phased out by 2010.  The study proves that to phase out fossil fuels and nuclear power is both technically and economically possible.  All it needs is political will.

One of the arguments against renewable energies is that they are uneconomic.  But this is wearing thin as the price of electricity generated from renewable sources comes down and the technology becomes more efficient.  In 1995, the cost of electricity generated from gas and coal was 3-4 cents, and from solar wind was 5-7 cents, and from solar photovoltaic was 25-40 cents.    But by 2030 wind, solar and biomass power may be cheaper than fossil fuels or nuclear.

Renewable energies have a tremendous potential which is barely being used. Wind: Land-based turbines could provide 20,000 terawatt-hours of electricity per year - or twice as much as the world consumed in 1987.  Biomass: More than 50 Third World countries would be able to produce as much energy from the residues generated by sugar production as they use now via imported oil.  Hydro: Less than 5% of the world's small scale hydro power potential has been exploited so far.

In Denmark, people get together in groups and buy a wind turbine or group of turbines which provides them with the electricity they need, and they sell off any surplus to the national grid.  About half of Denmark's wind turbines are owned and operated in this way.

The solar energy scheme is sometimes called the solar-hydrogen energy system.  Put simply, solar energy is converted to electricity; to get the electricity over long distances or for use at night the electricity is used to electrolyze water to produce hydrogen.  The hydrogen is sent through pipelines, just as natural gas is today, to cities and towns.

The benefit of this system is that by putting excess electricity to work by producing hydrogen, it is not wasted.  In addition it is cheaper and more efficient to transport through pipelines than to send the excess electricity over wires and through cables.  Finally, and most beneficial of all, hydrogen and solar energy do not pollute. When hydrogen is used to supply heat or energy, water is the by-product. 

Solar energy will be around for a few billion years - it is everlasting as far as we are concerned - and we would obtain hydrogen from water, and that won't run out either as water is the by-product of burning hydrogen.  Thus solar hydrogen is a clean and renewable system.

So many of the natural processes on our planet are self-sustaining - the circulatory systems of animals and humans, the respiratory system of animals, humans and plants, the food chain, and the earth's water cycle.  Doesn't it make sense that our energy should be derived from a renewable system too?

What needs to be done?  Firstly, develop renewables.  Fund properly their applied research.  Take research funding out of fossil fuels and nuclear and shift the money across to renewables.  Apply new renewable technological developments in the North and share them with the South.  Enter partnerships to make the best, cleanest, most modern renewable technology available everywhere. Secondly, look at the pricing of energy.  Remove subsidies from conventional sources that make them artificially cheap.  Count in environmental costs.  Impose a pollution tax on the every polluting system.  All of this will reveal the true economies of renewables.  And finally, we in the North especially, need to use less energy.

Social Change Theory

For those of us who aspire to changing the world for the better, there have been, up until now, very few models through which one could undertake this work. 

There was the social work route.  Social workers represent the humanist professions, those concerned with the less fortunate, the softer, more subjective side of a society.  As Society B shifts into a more conservative, right ring mode, with business and economic models taking over the workplace, the value of social work is diminished.

But, social work holds a very important partnership position in this balance.  Social programs are what allow the power elite to indicate to the broader society that the system as a whole is working.  In a sense, then, social work actually bears some responsibility for the prolongation of the system.

It is the part of the system that gives us hope, that tells us things are in balance, that convinces us that we can make a difference and that social change is possible inside this model.

But is that the case?  One of the most poignant testimonies I can remember was a group of social workers at the ends of their careers experiencing the disappointment of realizing that, despite their best efforts, the situation was essentially the same as when they had started.

This raises a number of very disturbing questions.  Are we providing a service or prolonging the agony by supporting corrupt systems with our social work?  Is this work providing us with change or simply the illusion of change?

These same issues were raised in the early development stages of the Green Party in Europe.  As the party gained in popularity and power, more and more attractive offers were made to form coalitions with other parties.  The leaders of the party at the time recognized the danger inherent in such a move.

You first of all provide legitimacy to the dominant organization by allowing them to demonstrate their broad base of support by your very presence.  In a sense, you fortify the dominant model and diminish your own.  Secondly, the energy and focus that you had as an organization is usurped, as more and more time and energy is expended attempting to create a “kinder, gentler” form of the status quo. 

Every individual will have to decide for themselves.  In terms of the goals that you set for yourself, are you making progress?  Will you be able to look back at your career/life and say that you were wise in the paths that you took?

The argument against such a concept of course is what would happen if social work, humanitarian aid etc. stopped tomorrow.  Think of all the people that would suffer and ultimately die.  This is true.  However, a significant number of people suffer and die every day despite our best efforts and as a result of preventable causes.  As long as there is a pretence of change, these patterns will never alter.  We will always hold the belief that we are doing everything we can, because up until now, there were no alternatives.

By attempting to make Society B more humanitarian, more equitable, you are throwing in your lot with this model.  You are actually prolonging its life.

Aside from social work, Society B provides us with involvement in the role of opposition to what it is that we disagree with.  If you were an elected government official, you might find yourself a member of the Opposition.  Your time would be spent discovering what it is that you disagree with in the policies of the ruling party.  As a lawyer in the criminal system, you would find yourself in an adversarial position with another lawyer.  Or you might be part of a protest group where your mandate is to keep watch over certain negotiations in a certain field of endeavour. 

In every sector of Society B there is a natural counterbalance.  We have the private sector against the public sector, management against the union, right versus left, Democrat versus Republican.  All of these positions force us to be biased as to how we see the other.  It reinforces the us versus them paradigm and leads to smaller and smaller groups mistrusting other groups. 

All of these positions are based on a belief that things work best when you put two opposing sides together in the same arena – a system of checks and balances.  This system needs to be challenged.  It essentially defines the roles of all the participants and forces them into a win/lose dialogue that is more about who wins than what is right, what is wrong; more about what separates us than what we share in common.  It allows lawyers to take on cases that they do not believe in.  It forces solutions which are unnecessarily compromised because of the entrenchment of the participants.  It forces us to see others of different opinion as opponents.

In Nexus, we will move away from this paradigm to one that is more conciliatory and inclusive.

We need to recognize the self-defeating nature of incremental reforms.  As pointed out in Green Business: Hope or Hoax, many would argue that incremental change - gradual greening - is succeeding in bringing about positive change and that, moreover, this is the only kind of change that is effective.  But the examples in part one of this book suggest otherwise.  They show, quite emphatically, that much of what is commonly viewed to be green business is a hoax.  The biodegradable plastic bags are not biodegradable.  The recycled paper is likely only marginally recycled.  The whole idea that we could possibly do without most of these goods is never mentioned, because no one stands to make additional profit from not producing things: that alternatives lie outside of the market and subsequently receives no attention.  In this age of highly sophisticated media manipulation, the public relations image that can be portrayed is far more important from a marketing point of view than the actual content. 

But even if everyone did it, green consuming is only a necessary, but not sufficient, step forward.  It simply doesn’t go far, or deep, enough to make the radical changes needed to reverse the course we’re on.  And that’s because most green business is, in essence superficial.  For the production of environmentally friendly goods doesn’t address the major structural and institutional obstacles in the way of an authentic greening of industrial society.  It doesn’t deal with the problem of infinite growth being the mainspring of industry on a finite planet.  It doesn’t deal with the problem that corporations are legally protected from having to be responsible to people or planet.  It doesn’t deal with the tremendous consolidation of power by transnational corporations and the governments in their service.  It doesn’t deal with the ownership of land or the means of production.  And it doesn’t deal with the enormous social inequities of this world, nor the increasing atomization of society and the commoditization of its cultures. 

We can agree with Sandy Irvine, Barry Commoner and Kirkpatrick Sale that, while green goodies are perhaps welcome, they are also mainly a diversion from the urgent deep structural task ahead.  We can hardly hope for societal transformation from recycled toilet paper.  In fact, the record shows that if everyone in the United states recycled 100 percent of what now constitutes their personal solid waste, 99 percent of the nation’s solid waste would remain.  Industry would still be dumping upwards of 4.6 million pounds of toxic chemicals a year into the air, water and soil; the military would still be producing more than 500,000 tons of hazardous waste a year; plants would still be emitting more than 281 million pounds of known carcinogens into the environment.  The solution does not lie with individual consumers changing their individual habits.

As Kirkpatrick Sale points out, ecological crisis is essentially beyond “our” control, as citizens or householders or consumers or even voters.  It is not something that can be halted by recycling or double-pane insulation.  It is the inevitable by-product of our modern industrial civilization, dominated by capitalist production and consumption and serviced and protected by various institutions of government, federal to local.  It cannot possibly be altered or reversed by simple individual actions, even by the actions of the millions who will take part in Earth Day - and even if they all went home and fixed their refrigerators and from then on walked to work.  Nothing less than a drastic overhaul of this civilization and an abandonment of its ingrained gods - progress, growth, exploitation, technology, materialism, humanism and power - will do anything substantial to halt our path to environmental destruction, and it’s hard to see how the life-style solutions offered by Earth Day will have an effect on that.  What is truly pernicious about such solutions is that they get people thinking they are actually making a difference and doing their part to halt the destruction of the Earth: “There, I’ve taken all the bottles to the recycling centre and used my string bag at the grocery store; I guess that’ll take care of global warming.”  It is the kind of thing that diverts people from the hard truths and hard choices and hard actions, from the recognition that they have to take on the larger forces of society - corporate and governmental - where true power, and true destructiveness, lie.  From coops that embrace all of life, through community-based currencies and the land trust movement, these examples of the more deep-rooted, bioregional “businesses” attempt to tackle the underlying structure or our relationships with one another and the natural world.

The role of green consuming in the fight to save the planet is destined to remain small and marginal.  As Friends of the Earth in the United Kingdom points out, green consuming “leaves totally unanswered the basic questions about global equality and the chronic poverty and suffering of the millions of people in the third World...There is a real danger that green consumerism will divert attention from the real need to change institutional structures.”  Green consuming labeling schemes, they conclude, “must complement, not become a substitute for, firm action.”

Green consuming is still consuming, which is the fundamental paradox.  The answer to the problem we face is not only to consume appropriately; it is primarily to consume less.  Green labeling schemes are similar in philosophy to the end-of-pipeline pollution control strategies that have failed to stem pollution.  They put a dent in the pollution problem but they do not solve it.  The key to protecting the planet is to prevent a problem at the source, rather than tinkering with it after it is already created.  In the consumer society, this means intervening early in the game in the decisions about what is produced and how it is produced.  A society in which consumption is conscious and restrained requires that new and different decisions be made in corporate boardrooms as well as in national capitals, decisions that put the needs of the planet ahead of the profits of the corporation.

Many of the worst offenders of the corporate world are multinational companies, which operate globally, beyond the laws of mere nation states, and with no loyalty to place anywhere on the planet.  Seeking cheap labour and lax environmental regulations, these behemoths of the business world frequently establish themselves in the poor nations of the Third World.  Aided - if not pushed - by First World governments, the “less-developed” nations are now in debt (mostly for things they never needed) to western banks and governments to the tune of billions of dollars.  The poor people of these nations were not the ones who took on this debt, nor were they the ones to benefit from it, and they never took part in the decisions to go into debt.  The debt belongs, properly speaking, to the capitalist bankers of the Third and first Worlds who assumed it on an undemocratic basis.

Enter, stage right, “corporate environmentalism” brandishing the solution of “debt-for-nature swaps”, an apparently green approach to both rainforest depletion and Third World debt which, at best, simply buys some time for the rainforests.  These companies are not out to heal the Earth - they are set up to cash in on the booming waste industry.  These companies, whether they are large or small, directly benefit from the production of wastes - so do their investors.  The more waste we generate - of any kind, in any place - the more profit these companies make.  We should be channeling our investment dollars into ways of minimizing the production of wastes at the source, rather than on ways of dealing with it after the fact.  We must become aware of waste as a valuable resource and treat it as such.  Think of it - if we are successful in reducing waste at the source we will put many of the companies currently profiting from the hazwaste (and other waste management) industry out of business.  Larry Martin, a consultant on waste issues, notes that the billions “spent annually on hazardous waste management, and all other pollution control costs, actually contributes to the GNP.”  He feels it is a conflict of interest to have this industry contributing to our so-called indicator of economic prosperity and favours the term “Gross National Waste Product” as the true indicator of our situation. 

Who is producing the poisons of the field, who is cutting down the rain forests, who is causing acid rain, and why?  But that would mean pointing fingers not only at conglomerate America but at the culture that sustains it.  Until the human understands itself as a species - “reapplies for membership in the biosphere,” as the eco-historian Thomas Berry has put it – “it will never stop treating the Earth and its treasures (resources) as the rightful food for its omnivorous maw, will never stop acting as if it owns the Earth and has the right of dominion over its species.  This is not a matter of simply passing laws; this is a deep reordering of values, a new (and very old) way of understanding the Earth and its species as sacred, an ecological consciousness that goes right to he heart of our lives.  Without it no profound changes will come, or last.”

Social change cannot effectively be carried out unless the structure of the system is altered as well as the content, the underlying assumptions and the perspectives that it holds.  In using the educational system as an example, the structure itself dictates the agenda and any attempts to change the components one at a time with the hope of affecting the whole are fruitless.  There will always be perceived change - that is, education will look somewhat different from decade to decade, but essentially, the same lessons are learned and the same messages are preached.  This should come as no surprise as the educational mandate has always been to reflect and serve the status quo, the way things are, and not the way things might or should be.  Social change, as a goal, is incongruent with the very essence of our educational system.

Society as a whole has not made substantial progress over the past five thousand years.  We have certainly changed, but these changes are essentially superficial.  We have made little progress in our understanding of what constitutes the good life.  We have been unable to positively resolve the conflict between various peoples.  The relationship between the quality of our life and others on this planet has essentially eluded us.  Our relationship with

nature and in nature is only now being "discovered" even though these connections were known, felt, and lived in the Neolithic Period, some twelve thousand years ago. 

We have attempted in the past to make changes in our social structures by looking at partial solutions with the hope that all these incremental changes would have a considerable impact on the whole.  This has not proven to be the case.  As well, many of our models of social change in the past have been developed from a Northern perspective and then applied to the South.  We can see this if we briefly trace the past 30 years of progress in the area of women in development as seen from a feminist perspective. 

The emphasis of the early WID (Women in Development) strategies was on equity - equality with men.  It placed considerable emphasis on economic independence as being synonymous with equity.  This approach reflected the preoccupation of Northern feminists with equality, and it met with much resistance from development agencies and Third World governments. 

In 1970 Ester Boserup, in a report entitled Women's Role in Economic Development, demonstrated that development was not only not helping women in the Third World, but that in many cases development projects were also contributing to a deterioration in women's status.  She attributed this negative impact to a lack of knowledge about the economic - and particularly the agricultural - roles of women in the Third World, the negative impact on women of colonialism and the penetration of capitalism, and Western male bias in development planning.

The greater emphasis in the second development decade - the 1970's - on the poor and especially the "poorest of the poor" led to an anti-poverty focus as the second WID approach.  Here, economic inequality between men and women was linked to poverty rather than subordination, and thus women's issues were separated from equity issues.  This shift also reflected a movement from equality towards development. 

The problem was that Boserup did not question the dominant development model itself.  That model - which encouraged export-oriented agriculture and industry, openness of the economy to foreign investment, and the transfer of financial and technical resources from North to South - was accepted as one that would promote economic growth. The problem for women, the WID school argued, was that they were left out of this development process.

WID fell prey to the fact that the development problem for the poor remains overseas while its solutions are imposed through the financial resources and skills of the Northern Institutions.  WID is about poor women in the Third World; it is not a force of those women themselves.  Any approach seeking to help poor Third World women must include those women themselves as architects and agents - not merely as beneficiaries.

Peggy Antrobus stated that while she had once argued that structural adjustment policies had failed to take gender roles into account, she later began to realize that these policies were actually grounded in a gender ideology which is deeply and fundamentally exploitative of women's time/work and sexuality.  As an example she notes that the emphasis on export-oriented production leads to a concentration of government resources in that sector and a neglect of the sectors that produce for the domestic market, such as food production and distribution, where women predominate.

But as feminists developed their theory and practice over the past two decades, it became clearer that oppressive gender relations were deeply imbedded in all major institutions.  By 1985 it was clear that there were serious weaknesses in the WID approach and in major projects specifically designed for women.  Projects for women had suffered from a top-down planning approach, inadequate funding and managerial support, and a lack of data about women's real situations.  The projects also tended to be small, scattered, and peripheral to the main thrust of agencies' country programs and plans.

The WID school focuses on unequal relationships between women and men, and ignores these complex interactions of social class, race and ethnicity, all of which combine to oppress women. The WID proponents give no coherent explanation of the root causes of women's oppression.  They propose economic solution without a structural economic analysis of the problems women face.  Thus, the approach assumes that women themselves - and not the relations between women and men - are the problem.  The structures perpetuating oppressive gender relations are not an element of the WID analysis.

Since the system is inherently exploitative of women, further incorporation into the system cannot be the solution.  Equality of opportunity can never occur within the current structure.

A radical transformation of capitalist patriarchal society is required for women to gain equality.

Even UNICEF, which has advocated adjustment with a human face, suggested that structural adjustment can promote efficient and effective social services through self-help. The central theme of the liberal branch of feminism is equality of opportunity and a strong belief in the role of the state in bringing about equal opportunity. The branch sees inequalities between men and women as the result of aberrations within an otherwise just and equitable social system.  Liberal feminists, therefore, do not see any need for a fundamental change of the economic and social order.  Their vision includes a redistribution of opportunity to give women the access to the power and opportunities of men.  The strategy concentrates on improving educational opportunities, changing socialization patterns, and removing legislation that discriminates against women.

When this view is transposed into the WID school, sexual inequality in the Third World is ascribed to traditional values and male ignorance.  Strategies include, as in the North, legislative reform and attitude changes. 

Just as liberal feminists have not questioned the underlying socio-economic model in their own countries, WID proponents have not questioned the underlying development model promoted by the bilateral and multilateral agencies.  The current overwhelming evidence demonstrated that poor men have not benefited from current approaches, and in fact have been  increasingly set aside on the margins of Third World economies and societies.  Thus it seems equally clear to the critics of the model that incorporating poor women into this same system will not benefit those women.

These strategies for economic integration have not worked in the North.  Women in Northern countries have gained a large measure of legislative equality and have participated in the paid labour force in unprecedented numbers.  But they still suffer from being shut off in job ghettos.  They suffer from sexual harassment, rape, and other kinds of violence.  They suffer from having to take full responsibility for domestic work and child rearing, and from lack of status.  It is not surprising, then, that WID policies in Northern development agencies have also ignored these critical elements of gender relations 

Third World feminists are also critical of WID and its liberal assumptions.  They maintain that Northern feminism has grown out of a particular historical and class context and is therefore not universally applicable.  A failure by many Northern feminists to recognize this context has led to criticisms of cultural imperialism and racist bias.

The freedom from oppression for women involves not only equity, but also the right of women to freedom of choice, and to power over our own lives within and outside the home.  The second goal of feminism is the removal of all forms of inequity and oppression through the creation of a more just social and economic order, nationally and internationally.

As a result of the dissatisfaction with the predominant WID focus on equity, an alternative approach to women's issues and their implications for development began to evolve.  It comes from the feminist writings and experience in grassroots organizations of Third World women and is based on empowerment of women through greater self-reliance and their own organizing activities. 

Structural adjustment policies designed to try to restore the international economic balance have had devastating effects on poor people.  Under structural adjustment programs women's employment may increase, but these increases come mainly in factories in free trade zones, on agribusiness plantations, and in the so-called informal sector.  The cutbacks in social services have serious implications for increasing women's unpaid work in the home and decreasing access for women to health and education services. 

Because poor Third World women are among the most economically and socially disadvantaged women in the world, any assessment of development's success must be measured by their improved standard of living, access to dignified employment, and reduction in societal and workload inequality.  The impact of development strategies on health care, sanitation, and provision of food, water, and fuel can best be assessed by starting with the views and experience of those Third World women who do the bulk of this work.

In theory, NGOs should therefore be more effective than government in responding to women's needs.  Analysis of NGO practice, however, reveals little to distinguish their approach from that of most Northern donor governments. 

A CIDA evaluation of Canadian NGO programs revealed a strong tendency for most of the projects directed to women to be in the field of social welfare, home economics, child care and nutrition, or in a narrow range of jobs stereotyped as being good for women only.  Most NGOs publicly consider women to be a priority, but few of them have policy statements relating to women or gender relations.  In a 1985 study undertaken by the Canadian Council for International Cooperation (CCIC), 70 percent of the NGOs said they support activities related to women, and 75 percent of these indicated they did not have guidelines for women's development either in project planning or evaluation. 

At the policy level an important exception has been the Women and Development Committee of the CCIC which has sponsored training workshops and joint NGO activities, including a study of the impact of NGO projects on women, a workshop on Women and Food production at the Nairobi conference, and a definitive policy paper, "Ensuring a Women's perspective is Present in NGO Development Programs," which was accepted by the CCIC in 1988.

The policy notes that development for women should be planned and implemented using the framework of women's practical and strategic needs.  Women's practical needs for food, shelter, clothing, and income for themselves and their families should not be separated from women's strategic needs to end their subordinate relationships with men and increase their power over their own lives.  Themes should be based on strategic gender issues, such as structural barriers to equality and full participation in development, rather than practical gender issues, such as improved access to clean water and training.

A gender and development approach centres on the relations between women and men as the focus of analysis, rather than on women alone.  It sees these relations as interdependent, rooted in different perspectives and experiences, and unequal.  Both men and women are bound by these relations, which are, in the main, socially constructed.  But because they are created by human beings, they can be recreated - transformed - by women and men.  A gender and development approach emphasizes the need to combine both strategic and practical considerations in development work.

The insights gained from a feminist critique of the nature of dominant/subordinate relationships between men and women enable us to analyze and challenge other dominant/subordinate relationships: class, race, North/South, East/West, human/nature.  A gender and development approach is rooted in feminism and reaches out to include class, race and environmental issues.  It seeks ways to redefine these relationships of "power-over" with non-hierarchical conceptions of power.

A gender and development approach is concerned about the process as well as the goal, the how as well as the what.  It sees poor Third World women and other oppressed groups not as instruments or target groups but as architects, agents and beneficiaries of development.  The approach is holistic, not segmented, which means that visions, strategies, and actions need to be examined from the perspective both of the world and the hearthstone; who scrubs the kitchen pots influences the world, and global policies influence the lives of women and men in remote corners of the world. The interactions of gender, class, race, and environmental issues are of concern in a gender and development approach. None is an independent variable, capable of being addressed without reference to or impact on the others.  We are only beginning to learn how to work while keeping the intricacy of these interrelationships in focus.

We have seen that integration into the present development paradigm is not an answer for women or, indeed, for many other groups.   A gender and development approach calls for an alternative paradigm, which seeks to transform radically rather than merely reform current social, political, economic, and gender relationships.  Feminism informs our critique of WID and the growth-oriented policies of which it forms a part.  From this perspective, we see that the present development paradigm is rooted in a particular view of the world that is linear, hierarchical, economistic, and male.  All problems, relationships, and actions are understood within the context of this worldview, and yet that worldview is largely outside the scope of analysis because it is all-pervasive.

The life of poor Third World women has only worsened in the last 30 years of so-called development.  Canadian feminist development workers have learned that individual, or even collective action, is not enough; we must work to change the organizations and structures we live and work in.   We know that the personal is political, and now, as development workers concerned about women, we are also learning that the organisational is political. 

To be effective in achieving our goals, we need to learn how to change organizations - from mission statements to hiring practice, from planning and implementation to organizational culture.  Collectively, we permit our organizations to act irresponsibly because our strategies for change do not include adequate tools for organizational change.

It is necessary to build on these experiences and formulate a vision of the kind of society women want - and then develop strategies to get there. If we conceive of them as social constructions, we can conceive of transforming them.

Aid

We can subject the concept of Aid to the same scrutiny as development theories.  For the past 15 years, both absolute and relative poverty (the gap between rich and poor) have been increasing everywhere, North and South.  Between 1965 and 1980, 200 million people saw their incomes fall.  In the years between 1980 and 1993 the figure rose to more than a billion.  The people of Ghana, Haiti, Liberia, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Sudan, Venezuela, Zaire and Zambia are poorer now than they were in 1960.  In sub-Sahara Africa enrolments in primary education have fallen by as much as half.  Diseases of poverty like tuberculosis and malaria, once thought 'conquered', are returning to haunt us with renewed vigour.

It might be supposed that the increase in poverty is a direct result of the drop in aid.  So, the argument goes, increase aid and poverty will decrease.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way.  Less than a quarter of the $59 billion ODA total every reaches poor people - equivalent to about eight US dollars per head per year.  Aid is siphoned off to remote development objectives and mega-projects, 'tied' to purchases from donor countries or paid in 'debt relief' straight to Northern banks.

The fatal flaw in Aid is that it has become prescriptive and actively antidemocratic.  The evidence suggests that the greatest 'impact' on poverty is made by poor people themselves confronting the 'deep structures', the inequities of ownership, economic power and human rights, that lie behind it.  This makes poverty a political issue.  And during the past 15 years one of the most positive things to have happened in the South is the flowering of popular movements everywhere to tackle these ‘deep structures'.

Aid is only truly effective where there is democracy.  This means real democracy in both donor and recipient country.  It also means a democratic relationship between donor and recipient - so that power does not always stick with the donor.  Donors must make frankness and openness the rule rather than the exception.  This also means proper evaluation of projects as the basis for the informed debate on which the future of aid depends.  First and foremost, aid must address poverty.  It cannot eradicate it on its own.  But, properly used, it can help poor people to fight back against the causes of their poverty. 

Aid is public money for use in the public interest and must be publicly accountable.  If free markets eradicated poverty then there would be no need for aid at all.  Compassion is the well-spring of aid.  It should not be disparaged.  But is must also be responsible.  What at first appear as obvious causes for compassion, like natural disasters, often turn out to have their roots in political, social or economic malpractice.

Disparities of power, wealth, class, gender and race offend against fundamental human rights, without which there can be no worthwhile purpose to aid at all.  Popular movements have grownup to reclaim these rights.  Foreign aid (usually from NGOs) has a small but crucial part to play in supporting them.  Responding to natural disaster, the need for peacekeeping and the aftermath of war - when requested - is a legitimate and inescapable humanitarian responsibility.

Brazil has one of the greatest concentrations of land ownership anywhere in the world: the richest 10 per cent of the population own 52% of the agricultural land.  According to surveys, there are 1,457 estates in Brazil larger than 10,000 hectares, totaling 65 million hectares in all - enough to accommodate more than 3 million families.  There are about 4.8 million landless families - 20 million people.  These are problems that aid cannot address.  In fact, in situations like these, aid can actually help to prolong a situation.

We do not want aid to be an accepted feature of North/South relationships into the indefinite future.  We would like a world where aid is limited to humanitarian crisis, conflict situations, rather than an integral aspect of development.  Because aid does breed dependency, it is always on the terms of the giver.  In Nexus, these basic guidelines would be used to determine aid policies.

You cannot change those who do not want to change.  You can only work with the converted. 

Let those who are asleep sleep,

Nourish those who are awakening,

and cherish those who are awake

for they are the gardeners of the earth.

The 100th Monkey and other happy stories

Once, there was a species of monkeys who lived on a tropical island.  Their main source of food was the sweet potato that they dug up from the beach.  For generations, all monkeys of the species followed the same ritual of digging in the sand for their food and eating it.  One day, one of the monkeys discovered that the meal was considerably improved by washing the potato in the ocean to get rid of the sand.  This story passed by word of mouth to other monkeys on the island until everyone got into the habit of washing the sand from their meal before ingesting it. 

At a certain moment in time, something phenomenal took place.  It was observed that all monkeys of this species on other islands all over the tropical world, began spontaneously washing their potatoes of sand before eating them.  There was no way that traditional communication could have taken place between monkeys of neighbouring islands.  How can this be explained?

The theory now unfolds that when a certain number of members of a species choose to follow a particular path, the possibility exists that others will spontaneously change their habits or direction whether they have been part of the process or not.  The mystery is, when does this phenomenon occur?  This is where the story receives its title. According to the story, as soon as the 100th monkey takes up this habit, the entire population is transformed and their lives improved without having gone through the process of self-discovery. 

For us, the implications are clear.  Massive social change does not depend upon everyone being part of the process.  It can take place when a certain level of participation occurs.  We don’t know how close we are to the 100th level in our species.  Am I symbolically the hundredth person to be having these thoughts? Are you? 

A variation on this theme is the theory of critical mass.  It has been shown in studies conducted on large corporations that significant change can and does take place in an organization when as few as 5% of the members choose to alter their behaviour or beliefs.   As in the previous example, it is observed that the other 95% begin to change their behaviour without necessarily having been part of the process.

Nexus represents a paradigm.  It is a way of seeing the world.  It is a set of beliefs, assumptions, about how the world works, what theories are at play in the world, and what the possibilities are.  Many of us are living in a different paradigm.  This is the paradigm of Society B, a different belief system.  On a certain level, dialogue between the two paradigms is not constructive unless there are contradictions that both sides can attest to.  Otherwise, both positions are independent of one another.  In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Paradigm Theory), by Thomas S. Kuhn, scientists say that such a worldview of paradigm remains valid and unanalysed in spite of internal contradictions until, at a critical point, there is a shift in the paradigm, and collectively people move into a new way of understanding the world, with different assumptions.

America the Hun – by Harold Pinter

For the fourth year running, the United Nations has passed a motion condemning the US embargo of Cuba, this time by 117 votes (including Great Britain) to 3.  The countries against the motion were the United States, Israel, and Uzbekistan.  The European Union is taking the United States to the World Trade Organization, arguing that the Helms/Burton Act is illegal.  Fourteen out of fifteen members of the UN Security Council (including Great Britain) voted against the US veto of Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

How can any country defend itself against a consensus of 117 to 3 and 14 to 1?  How can any country, in light of blanket condemnation of policies and actions, not subject itself to even the mildest and most tentative critical scrutiny?  The answer is quite simple:  if you believe you still call all the shots, you just don’t give a shit. 

So, there you have it.  So, what do we do now?  What do you do when you know that these things are going on day in and day out?  My answer is that you pull out of the system.  You cease to support it by withdrawing your support – by criticizing it, or attempting to improve it, you are actually prolonging its effectiveness.  Your energies are being usurped to bolster what is a corrupt structure without hope of improvement.  A significant hurdle for many Americans is to come to the knowledge that they are the problem rather than the solution.  They will have to give up this role of saviour of the planet in order to address the wrongs that have been carried out in its name.  Many Americans already know this to be true.  They will be able to disengage more easily than those who don’t or won’t admit it.  The beliefs that Americans hold dear in this regard have been carefully nurtured through their education system.  It will not be an easy task to recognize the fallacies of the so-called American Dream.

In the political arena, we vacillate between one political ideology and another as if this exercise will lead to an exposure of the truth, all the time seemingly unaware that the debate is essentially circuitous.  There was much rejoicing at the demise of the Soviet Union as if this indicated a moral victory for the capitalistic system of the West.  We are now aiding Russia in the process of economic conversion to a free market in exchange for the opportunities presented for a wider distribution of our merchandise and services.  The question that is not being asked is whether this planet can sustain the increased abuses that this movement to increased consumerism will necessarily entail.

 In North America and especially the United States, there is the celebration of the victory of capitalism over socialism that masks the major chronic problems that exist as a result of unbridled industrialism.  The victory of the free market should give no solace to peoples in our Western democracies.  Wild capitalism will breed a competitive jungle with the uncompensated inequalities and exploitation that we see here in our own Western hemisphere.  Looking at the demise of socialism only illustrates that modern societies cannot be run on a single principle, whether that of planning under the general will or that of free market allocations.

A parallel can be drawn to the coming down of the Berlin wall.  People spoke of this heralding a new era in East/West relations, of cooperation and partnerships.  What was not realized at the time was that the wall was simply symbolic of divisions which exist in our minds, ways that we think, and that these barriers do not simply disappear with the removal of a physical object.  The divisions that existed between the two Germanies continue into the present.  This is the legacy of a world defined politically by the nation state, and while these differences may be bridged at some point between East and West Germany, there are enough hostilities evident in the world to indicate that this mode of thinking has and continues to literally kill us.

Even the church has contributed to our demise.  The natural world is little mentioned in the official prayers of the church, even though the Psalms carry extensive references to the divine praise associated with the various natural phenomena.  The Christian world is the world of the city.  Its concerns are primarily supernatural.  The rural world is the world of the pagan.  The natural world is to be kept at a distance as a seductive mode of being.

Our legal system fosters a sense of the human as having rights over the rights of natural beings.  Our commerce, industry, and economics are based on the devastation of the earth.  Disengagement from such basic life commitments requires a certain daring.

Given the weight of the evidence to support the statement that our present conception of reality can no longer sustain us, how does one explain our tenacious hold to a ship that seems perilously close to sinking?  Our response to this situation has been likened to the shifting of the position of the deck chairs on the Titanic.  The answer to this may lie in the field of psychology in that what may be the significant stumbling block to our awareness of the seriousness of the present situation: denial.  Action depends on our overcoming this impediment. 

This kind of denial can be as dangerous to society and the natural environment as an alcoholic's denial is to his or her own health and family.  Because they fail to see their addiction as the principal threat to their well-being, alcoholics often end up destroying their lives.  Rather than face the truth, denial's victims choose slow suicide.  In a similar way, by pursuing life-styles and economic goals that ravage the environment, we sacrifice long-term health and well-being for immediate gratification - a trade-off that may have disastrous effects. 

David Suzuki tells this story.  If you place a frog in a pan of water and sit it on the stove the frog will sit quite placidly.  As you heat the water, the frog will continue to sit without movement.  The frog will continue to sit without movement until the water reaches the boiling point, at which time the frog dies, unable to mount a response to this situation.  Why?  The theory may be that the frog has had no previous occasion ever in nature to deal with this situation.  Nowhere in nature does the frog experience boiling water.  Therefore, it has never developed a response to this situation.  The same may be true of the human species.  We have never had to deal with a similar situation to the one that we find ourselves in.  Although it may be possible intellectually to discuss these issues and evoke an emotional response, it may be impossible for us to fully grasp the significance of failure to succeed in this instance, given that failure could mean our own extinction.  Denial is and will continue to be one of the stumbling blocks to action.  More work is needed in this area to provide insights into strategies for moving people through this stage. 

The situation that we find ourselves is not only serious but the time line which we have to make changes is short.  The strategies proposed must be uncompromising and must deal with the structures that keep our current story in place. What is needed is a profound alteration of the pattern itself, not some modification of the pattern.  To achieve this, the basic principle of every significant revolution needs to be asserted: rejection of partial solutions.  The tension of the existing situation must even be deliberately intensified so that the root cause of the destructive situation may become evident, for only when the cause becomes painfully clear will decisive change take place.  The pain to be endured from the change must be experienced as a lesser pain to that of continuing the present course. 

We don't have time for the traditional approach to education - training new generations of teachers to train new generations of students - because we don't have generations, we have years.  We are not now dealing with another historical change or cultural modification such as has been experienced in the past.  The changes we are dealing with are changes on a geological and biological order of magnitude.  The educational vision must be at this same order of magnitude. 

1. The "we should...but we don't” syndrome -- we have all this theory about how we "should" live.  We should live lightly on the earth, but we don't.  We shouldn't use the GNP as our only economic measure, but we do etc.  Because those with the power to make these changes are unable to.  Nexus is about those capable of making these changes developing the power to do so.

2. The "we can...so we do” syndrome.  The world seems destined to be driven by the technology that it created rather than being served by it.  We don't ask good questions of our technology.  What will its impact be?  How will it improve our lives?

Imagine the planet as a self-sustaining environment.  What does it look like?  What are people doing?  What basic assumptions have changed in order for us to get there?  What has become of our concept of work?  What kinds of things do we value in life?  What are the stages that we need to go through in order to get there?  What is the nation-state organization of the world replaced with?  How do we fill the void that is left by generation upon generation of environmental insensitivity?  It seems to me that questions of this nature have to be addressed and grappled with before pursuing implementation at any level. 

The basic obstacle or roadblock to all this is our will to change, our desire to give up what we have in material wealth for the promise of something more in less tangible terms.  In other words, how do we initiate the process of what has been called "emancipation from privilege”?   Many traditional schemes for change have failed due to a lack of input from the people.  The answer may lie in the development of a network of people's movements which circumvent government policy. 

 We must learn to live on the Earth with consciousness and intentionality, and not just surrender to custom.

 Inner Journey

 Introduction

 The starting point for the Inner Journey is the belief that there is an Inner Life, that beauty is more than skin deep, that what there is, is not just what you see, that you can’t know everything with rational thought.  The significant part of the puzzle lies in this section.  Without the inner work, the outer work lies essentially dormant.  The complex thing about the inner work is that everyone has to do their own, that there are as many ways to do it as there are individuals, and that the work is never done.

Inner work is the development of your own personal wisdom.  It is an exploration of how your mind works, of what your beliefs are, and what the patterns are in your thinking.  It is the constant examination of what for each of us is the meaning of life, of what aspects of our life seem to be more important, true, or more worthwhile than others.  It is our inner dialogue.  

In the Outward Journey, we examined different aspects of our society, our belief systems.  We attempted to show how they contribute to our current predicament and directions that can be taken to redirect ourselves.  It is vital that we have this information.  But it needs to be said that we had this information before this book was written.  On a certain level, we know what the problem is and we know where the solutions lie.  What then is preventing us from collectively taking the first steps? 

Could it be that we are thwarted by our own human nature which leaves us incapable of meeting these challenges?  We will look at this idea of human nature in more detail in this section, but for now the simple answer is “I don’t think so”.  There are reasons why we seldom live up to our potential in the world.

Competition

In Nexus, we are stating that our way of being is often the result of a faulty belief system.  An illustration of this would come from an examination of our beliefs and assumptions on the concept of competition.  Our culture has come to see it as inevitable, as a mechanism for us to be more productive, as a way to build character and as a concept which is just plain fun.  What if this were not the case?  What if none of these deeply held beliefs about competition were true?  How profoundly would this alter our behaviour?  What other beliefs do we hold which would not stand up under close scrutiny?

One of the cornerstones on which our societal beliefs is built is that competition is inevitable and/or desirable.  It is how a healthy society performs.  We have come to accept it as inevitable in our family relationships, between friends, at school, at work and at the national and international levels.  The concept of competition is one for the most part that we take for granted in this society.  It is inherent/integral to our education system.  Other societal structures are built on the same premise.  Our legal system is adversarial as is the structure of our government.

The argument of inevitability is promoted most often by advocates of competition. This position eliminates the need to develop any other opinions as all the other positions or models are necessarily dismissed or eliminated if this is true.  It is therefore a good place to start in critically evaluating our beliefs about competition.

One tactic used by researchers has been to deny the very possibility of acting non competitively and therefore “prove” its inevitably.  For example, Harvey Ruben wrote in his Competing, “Whether the child realizes it or not, learning to wait for a feeding while mother attends to another sibling is one of the first competitive lessons”.  And “people who seem the least competitive of all types actually have only adopted more circuitous strategies to get what the others strive for more obviously”.  It would indeed be difficult to provide empirical evidence that would refute these statements.  But do the statements ring true?

In response to claims of inevitability, educational psychologists David and Roger Johnson wrote: “The truth is that the vast majority of human interaction, in our society as well as in all other societies, is not competitive but cooperative interaction.”  Ashley Montagu states, “without the cooperation of its members, society cannot survive, and the society of man has survived because the cooperativeness of its members made survival possible.”  The concept of cooperation is inherent in the very idea of society.   What we now call “prosocial” behaviours - cooperating, helping, sharing - are evident in almost all members of the society, regardless of age. These observances of life tend to blur even more the possibility of competition as inevitable.  If we learn to be cooperative, is it possible we have also learned to become competitive?

Those who would support the idea that competition is inevitable often turn to the natural world to sustain their premise.  Visions of wild animals stalking each other endlessly are invoked as are the bloody conquests that we have seen so often on televised nature shows.  These are certainly real incidents and do occur in nature.  The danger is in assuming that these distinct views of nature represent the overall picture. 

Many would say that the concept of natural selection and competition are interwoven.  Stephen Jay Gould states that there is nothing about evolution that requires competition. 

The equation of competition with success in natural selection is merely a cultural prejudice....Success defined as leaving more offspring can ...be attained by a large variety of strategies - including mutualism and symbiosis - that we would call cooperative.  There is no a priori preference in the general statement of natural selection for either competitive or cooperative behaviour.

George Gaylord Simpson goes on to say that

struggle is sometimes involved, but it usually is not, and when it is, it may even work against rather than toward natural selection.  Advantage in differential reproduction is usually a peaceful process in which the concept of struggle is really irrelevant.  It more often involves such things as better integration into the ecological situation, maintenance of a balance of nature, more efficient utilization of available food, better care of the young, elimination of intragroup discords (struggles) that might hamper reproduction, exploitation of environmental possibilities that are not the objects of competition or are less effectively exploited by others.

Peter Kropotkin develops this idea in his book Mutual Aid that natural selection not only does not require competition, it discourages it. 

Competition...is limited among animals to exceptional periods...Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual support.... “Don’t Compete! - competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!”  That is the tendency of nature, not always realized in full, but always present.  That is the watchword which comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean.  Therefore combine - practice mutual aid...That is what Nature teaches us.

The animal world may actually teach us that our only hope for survival is to re-evaluate our belief in competition and replace old competitive models with cooperative ones.

Ashely Montagu:

In so far as man is concerned, if competition, in its aggressive, combative sense, ever had any adaptive value among men, which is greatly to be doubted, it is quite clear that it has no adaptive value whatever in the modern world....Perhaps, never before in the history of man has there been so high a premium upon the adaptive value of cooperative behaviour.

There is a great deal of evidence to support the contention that competition is learned.  Theoretically, of course, that which is learned, can be unlearned.  Thomas Tdutko and William Bruns, drawing from their experience working with athletes of all ages stated:

Competition is a learned phenomenon...people are not born with a motivation to win or to be competitive.  We inherit a potential for a degree of activity, and we all have the instinct to survive.  But the will to win comes through training and influences of one’s family and environment.

In a North American setting, learning to compete is part of the socialization process.  This is no more evident than in our school systems.  A comment from psychologist Elliot Aronson:

For two centuries our educational system has been based on competitiveness...if  you are a student who knows the correct answer and the teacher calls on one of the other kids, it is likely that you will sit there hoping and praying the kid will come up with the wrong answer so that you will have a chance to show the teacher how smart you are...Indeed, children’s peers are their enemies - to be beaten.

The lesson that many children take from our schools is that other people are not partners but opponents, not potential friends but rivals.  At one stage in my own teaching, I made it a personal habit to evaluate student work by anecdote, never giving it a grade, either letter or numerical.  Invariably, at the beginning of this process, many students had great difficulty accepting this mode.  Those who had the most difficulty were usually the most competitive and were often the most successful in the traditional comparative setting.

They would say to me, “How did I do (on this particular project)?”  and I would reply that I had written how you did.  They would come back “But I don’t know how I did unless I have a mark.”  I would ask them what is the first thing that happens when you get back a paper that has been conventionally graded?  The answer would come back that everyone rushes around comparing their papers, especially those that did well.  I would then say, “having a mark only allows you to compare yourself to others, to see if you have done better than others.  Anecdotal comments allow you to see how you’re doing without using others as your reference.”

Students who most rely on the conventional, competitive system for support had the most difficulty in giving it up.  Over time, I witnessed a great reduction in competition as this evaluation system became internalized. 

I think we have all had experiences in school where the concept of competition was at the forefront.  I can remember, for example, in one class, where report cards where given out in order, the last to the first.  The potential was there for everyone in the class to see themselves as a failure with the exception of the person to receive their report card the last.  A student who saw themselves as having the potential to be first would feel a failure coming in second place.

Much of the accepted psychological premise from which our theories of child development come and which subsequently find their way into educational practice are those of Jean Piaget.  He described the young person as basically egocentric, and believed that when children participated in games with others, they did so in a naturally competitive way.  He believed that children only played to win.  A conversation taken from his book The Moral Judgement of the Child is instructive.  Questioning a six-year-old - “Who has won?  We’ve both won.  But who has won most?”

The fundamental concepts developed by Piaget are now being challenged.  A professor that I studied with at Queen’s University, Mac Freeman, believes that the true nature of humans is not egocentric but “duocentric” beginning with the relationship between mother and infant.  Our natural state is to work in partners.  Imagine the changes that would take place in schools if they were guided by these principles!

The socialization process of learning to be competitive often does not stop in the schools but continues with the family.  Children learn to compete for love.  We grow up thinking of love as a scarce commodity.  There is only so much to go around and if you get more than your share, there won’t be enough for me. 

Can cooperation be taught?  For if so, then competition is surely not inevitable.  Evidence indicates that it can be.  In one experiment with first and third grade students, direct instruction and modelling were used to teach the students to cooperate in a series of cooperative games.  Significant retention of the cooperative approach was  noted after a lapse of seven weeks. 

Terry Orlick from the University of Ottawa has done extensive research with children and adults in cooperative settings.  He found that after leading children from pre-school to second grade in cooperative games, there was a three-fold to four-fold increase in the incidence of cooperative behaviour when the children were later left to play by themselves. 

Even the age at which children can learn to cooperate is disputed.  Traditionally, using the Piagetian model, children cannot learn to compete or cooperate until about six or seven years old, at what he called the “operational stage”.  However, many examples of cooperative behaviour have been exhibited well before this age.  Anna Freud observed 19-month-old toddlers cooperatively building a tower together.  Terry Orlick has found young children to be most receptive to cooperative activities.  He proposes this is true because the younger child has had less time to be in the competitive mainstream of the society.

We live in a very competitive culture.  One sometimes has the impression that because our lives are so competitive, it must be like this everywhere.  It is helpful to look comparatively at other cultures to gain a more global perspective.  If competition has lesser or no importance in other cultures, one can say that it is learned and certainly not inevitable.

Beginning with primitive cultures, anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, have meticulously documented numerous societies that are overwhelmingly cooperative in their nature.  In writing about the Zuni Indians, for example, she says “The orientations of all institutions, with little exception, to a basic principle of cooperative, non-individualistic behaviour is the pattern of Zuni culture.”  I found it particularly inspiring that their major recreation ritual is a ceremonial four-mile race and someone who has consistently won is prevented from running. 

Having studied a dozen different cultures, she writes that the most basic conclusion which comes out of this research is that competitive and cooperative behaviour on the part of individual members of a society is fundamentally conditioned by the total social emphasis of that society, that the goals for which individuals will work are culturally determined and are not the response of the organism to an external, culturally undefined situation.

Closer to home, the Inuit of Canada live with virtually no competitive structures.  Their recreation, like their economic system, is cooperative. In other studies where comparisons were made between Norwegian and American citizens or rural Mexican children and Mexican/Americans, the Americans invariably achieved less well on tasks requiring cooperation to be successful.  This information indicates that competition is a matter of social structure rather than human nature.

A further argument used to support inevitability concerns social comparison.  Some would argue that our sense of self comes from our comparison to others.  In the process of comparing, I will naturally want to be better than you.  While it is possible to find oneself in this competitive situation, it is certainly not inevitable.  It is also possible to compare one’s performance against a group standard, one’s own past performance, or some idealized past performance.  Psychologist Albert Bandura observed that “in competitive, individualistic societies...where one person’s success represents another person’s failure, social comparison figures prominently in self-appraisal.”

Jerome Kagan:

The seminal experiences of this era (the years just prior to puberty) are those that persuade youth that they can successfully gain the prizes they want.  A father in a cornfield teaching his eight-year-old son how to plant maize finds it easy to create a situation that will accomplish this goal.  It is more difficult when the child is with one teacher in a class of thirty children.  From the child’s perspective, the private evaluation of progress is based primarily on a comparison of one’s performance with that of one’s peers.

Let us now turn to the second argument on which advocates of competition rest their case; competition leads to grater productivity than does cooperation.  The question that one needs to ask is: Do we perform better when we are trying to beat others than when we are working with them or alone?  The answer for someone like myself who intuitively experiences competition as debilitating is an exciting one.  Evidence indicates overwhelmingly that almost never do we perform better when we are trying to beat others.

The most ambitious analysis of the evidence has been furnished by David and Roger Johnson.  They reviewed 122 studies from 1924 to 1980.  They looked at every North American study they could find which compared performance or achievement in competitive, cooperative and or individualistic structures.  The results?  65 studies found cooperation promotes higher achievement than competition, 8 found the reverse, and 36 no difference.  They looked at studies of cooperation versus independent work and the results are equally impressive.  Cooperation promoted higher achievement than independent work in 108 studies, 6 found the reverse, and 42 found no difference.  The results were common for all subject areas and all age groups.

Another finding was that the more complex the task, the more cooperation helps.  Currently there is no type of task on which cooperative efforts are less effective than are competitive or individualistic efforts, and on most tasks (and especially the more important learning tasks such as concept attainment, verbal problem solving, categorization, spatial problem solving, retention and memory, motor, guessing-judging-predicting) cooperative efforts are more effective in promoting achievement.

Even the question often asked about cooperative groups in a school setting as to whether students with lower ability are being helped at the expense of those with higher ability can be more than adequately responded to.  Knowledge is not a zero-sum product and a teacher or tutor often reinforces their own knowledge or comes away with a more sophisticated understanding of the material.  In a cooperative setting, both helper and helped gain from the experience.

There can be little doubt that the low and medium ability students especially benefit from working collaboratively with peers from the full range of ability differences.  There is also evidence that high ability students are better off academically when they collaborate with medium and low ability peers than when they work alone; at the worst...they are not hurt.

The research done in work settings other than classrooms is equally consistent and conclusive.  I will cite a number of studies.  In 1954, Peter Blau compared two groups of interviewers in an employment agency.  In one group, there was fierce competition to fill job openings.  The other group worked together sharing information and telling each other of vacancies.  The cooperative group ended up filling significantly more jobs.

Robert L. Helmreich conducted numerous studies with various groups including scientists, academic psychologists, airline pilots, airline reservation agents, and businessmen.  In all cases, there was a significant negative correlation between competitiveness and achievement.  The data refutes the stereotype that many of us have that the most successful business people are highly competitive.

How can we best explain competition’s failure to produce superior performance?  A good starting point is the recognition that trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things.  One can either attend to the task at hand or to the enterprise of triumphing over some one else - the latter is often at the expense of the former.

In competition, those who believe they will lose see little reason to try hard.  The same is true for those who feel sure of winning.  Regardless of which group one belongs to, the fact remains that focussing on winning takes away form one’s concentration on the task at hand resulting in a lessened performance.

We see the same phenomenon in sport. The pursuit of victory works to reduce the chance for excellence in the true performance of the sport.  It tends to distract our attention from excellence of performance by rendering it subservient to emerging victorious.  I suspect that our conventional mistake of presuming the opposite - presuming that the contest-for-prize framework and excellence of performance are somehow related as a unique cause and effect - may be one of the deepest-lying prejudices of civilized thought.

We need to question if our needs are best served by a legal system that is based on competition.  A comment by Marvin E. Frankel:

Employed by interested parties, the process often achieves truth only as a convenience, a by-product, or an accidental approximation.  The business of the advocate, simply stated, is to win if possible without violating the law...He or she is not primarily crusading after truth, but seeking to win...and these two are mutually incompatible for some considerable percentage of the attorneys trying cases at any given time.

For school systems, we know that we do best at the tasks we enjoy and that competition’s unpleasantness diminishes performance.  We know performance is enhanced when extrinsic motivation, such as beating someone else, has been minimized.

John Holt writes:

We destroy the...love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards - gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or ‘A’s on report cards, or honour rolls, or dean’s lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, - in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.

I have essentially looked at competition up to this point from an individual perspective, which is an essentially a North American perspective.  If I compete, my primary concern is my own welfare.  However, if my primary concern is a group of people, then cooperation follows naturally.  The more one’s perspective moves away from self to group, the more easily one will use cooperation as a strategy.

People are also more apt to cooperate when they are relatively likely to have to deal with each other again in the future.  This finding would also support the notion put forth by E.M. Schumacher in his book Small is Beautiful that there are optimum sizes for cities.  It seems that after reaching of population of about 500,000, there begins a repetition of services as well as a decline in the overall quality of life.  This is partly attributed to the fact that in larger cities people do not feel a sense of responsibility to one another based on the notion that they are unlikely to meet that person again. 

In economics, capitalism is at the heart of competition in our society.  There is a belief that open competitions lead to a maximizing of profits and that the benefits derived from these profits eventually trickle down to all strata of the society.  This has been shown to not be the case.  The gap between incomes of citizens in industrialized countries continues to widen over time.

Further examples of the inequalities created by open competition: de-regulation of the airline industry leads to lower fares on busy routes but service to smaller, less traveled cities is either more expensive or unavailable.  Bus company de-regulation leads to cutting out less profitable routes that historically the young, the elderly and poor depended on.  In Canada, the same perspective led to the withdrawal of train services to communities when business was “less competitive” but which represented links to other parts of the country.

Price wars lead to conglomerates driving small businesses out of the market.  Competition between book publishers often means large sums paid for desirable manuscripts with little left over for lesser known authors.  Competition between banks often means offering high-interest accounts for large investors.  To offset these costs, fees and minimum requirements on small accounts are increased, thereby penalizing poorer people.

The third myth - Is participating in competitive activities more enjoyable than other alternatives?  Let me begin with a personal anecdote.

There is an annual event held during the summer on a lake where our family has a cottage.  Scores of families on the lake come together at a designated site to enjoy each other’s company and to catch up on the events of the past year.  The main focus of the afternoon is a series of competitive events that children and adults alike participate in.  Our 4-year-old daughter participated for the first-time last summer.

She began the day with much enthusiasm and was keen to take part in all the races with children of her age.  After each race, the “winners” were rewarded with medals, the “losers” received nothing.  As the day progressed, the winners tended to repeat in their victories, adding to their collection of hardware, the losers continued to receive nothing.  My daughter couldn’t understand this, because for her participation was no longer fun.  After several events, she no longer wanted to take part.  As the afternoon continued, more and more children dropped out, leaving only the most successful.  Individuals in this group were unhappy unless they won every race, a feat which was more and more difficult to accomplish.  An adult actually told my daughter that someday she would win something, the implication being, that she would be successful one day as she learned to become more competitive.  I believe I will spare my children the experience next year.

Those that extol the virtues of competitive activities usually come equipped with a list of unique advantages over other forms of recreation.  The first has to do with exercise and the overall improvement in fitness level and condition of the participant.  Another is the promotion of teamwork that can only come about through the working toward a common end, such as defeating the opposing team.  A third quality is the increase in zest generated by competition - competition makes that activity more interesting, more worthwhile.  It is said that competitors push themselves to a greater extent if an opponent is involved.  Competition increases the use of strategy, forces one to think on one’s feet in order to defeat or counter the other’s moves.  Competitive activities are said to lead us to experience total involvement with the activity, to “taste perfection, assert one’s freedom and triumph over death.”  Finally, some would say that beating someone else is in itself an intrinsically satisfying experience.  Are any or all of these virtues the exclusive domain of competitive activities?  Let us briefly examine each of these claims.

Physical fitness is achieved readily in non-rule governed activities such as aerobics for example.  The idea of teamwork is much more enhanced in cooperative activities where working together is intrinsic to the activity.  No energy is dissipated in working against the other team.  The idea that competition increases the level of interest has become something of an addiction.  Many of us cannot imagine an activity being enjoyable unless there is competition involved.  Bertrand Russell wrote “It is not only work that is poisoned by the philosophy of competition, leisure is poisoned just as much.  The kind of leisure which is quiet and restoring to the nerves comes to be felt boring.”  Another analogy might be how books are seen by someone who has been brought up exclusively on television.

The idea that only competition provides a sense of accomplishment is also misplaced.  Beating someone can be replaced by beating one’s own personal record.  Cooperative games requiring skills and stamina are no less invigorating for the absence of a winner and a loser at the end.  Many of them are very strategic by nature.  The claim that competition reveals to us existential experiences that would otherwise by closed is also fallacious.  Those that do mention these experiences, Maslow (in Religion, Values, and Peak-Experiences), Lifton (in The Life of the Self; Toward a New Psychology) and Csikszentmihalyi (in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety), scarcely mention sports at all.  Finally, the claim that beating others is inherently satisfying bears examination.  While this may be true for some, the psychological implications need to be examined on a personal as well as societal level.  Perhaps this is a pleasure that should neither be nurtured nor encouraged as it contributes destructively to our relationships with others and tends to perpetrate our least admirable inclinations. 

Given this evidence, why then are sports so popular?  Perhaps this popularity is a myth unto itself.  Here are three contributions on this subject.
Terry Orlick:

For many children, competitive sports operate as a failure factory which not only effectively eliminates the ‘bad ones’ but also turns off many of the ‘good ones’.  In North America, it is not uncommon to lose from 80 to 90 percent of our registered organized sports participants by 15 years of age.

Research in non-recreational settings clearly shows that those who are not successful in initial competitions continue to perform poorly, thereby setting up a vicious cycle.  Other research indicates that these individuals drop out when given the chance.

For those who do enjoy such activities, the unavoidable implication is that we are socialized to believe that competition is an indispensable part of having a good time.  We are brought up on the win/lose model.  Some reformists have suggested modification to sports which often does not get to the heart of the problem.  Sports such as tennis are structured so that only one person can win in the end.  Modifying scoring rules, for example, only creates an illusion of changing the basic nature of the activity.

The presence of rules does not imply the presence of competition.  Cooperative games with rules can be at least as challenging as their competitive counterparts.  A traditional children’s party game is musical chairs. 
Described by Alfie Kohn:

In this game, a prototype of artificial scarcity, x players scramble for x-1 chairs when the music stops.  Each round eliminates one player and one chair until finally one triumphant winner emerges.  All of the other players have lost - and have been sitting on the sidelines for varying lengths of time, excluded from play.

Applying cooperative principles, the same activity is played cooperatively as created by Terry Orlick and described in his book The Cooperaative Sports and Games Book.  As each chair is removed, the same number of players try to find room on the chairs that remain.  The final result is a crowd of giggling children crowded onto a single chair.  The more enjoyable version seems clear.

Finally, I would like to look at the fourth rationale for competition.  Competition builds character.  First of all, what do we mean by character?  For the most part, we mean someone who has a sense of well-being from a psychological perspective.  We speak of someone who has confidence and who relates well to others.  And we speak of someone with positive self-esteem.  Self-esteem may be the most inclusive single term that we can use to indicate emotional well-being.  Abraham Maslow wrote that “satisfaction of the self esteem need leads to feelings of self-confidence, worth, strength, capability, and adequacy, of being useful and necessary.”  But thwarting these needs produces feelings of inferiority that in turn give rise to either basic discouragement or else compensatory or neurotic trends.

Those individuals who are highly competitive have a need to be best at whatever they do.  There is a sense that one is staving off a persistent and pronounced feeling that one is fundamentally no good.  The desire to be better than others feels quite different from the desire to do well.  There is something inherently compensatory about it.  If this is true, it follows that the healthier an individual the less the need to compete.  The more one’s sense of self is intact, the less one needs to prove oneself against others.  Comparisons become less important.  One is more accepting of differences between oneself and others.

If individuals compete in order to bolster a shaky self-esteem, does competition in reality fill this need?  All research indicates that competition undermines rather than bolsters self-esteem.  In one study with children, Carol Ames found that competition can cause people to believe they are not the source of - or in control of - what happens to them.  Control of their lives is external to them.

In the review of seventeen separate articles, David and Roger Johnson concluded that:

Cooperative learning situations, compared with competitive and individualistic situations, promote higher levels of self-esteem and healthier processes for deriving conclusions about one’s self worth.  Cooperativeness is positively related to numerous indexes of psychological health such as emotional maturity, well adjusted social relations, strong personal identity, and basic trust in and optimism about other people.

Why does competition seem to have a negative effect on self-esteem?  The simplest explanation is that most competitors lose most of the time.  Even in a one-on-one contest, the odds are 50-50 of losing.  But in most other contests there is one winner and many losers.  Losing, then, is the prevalent experience of a competitive culture.  Even after winning, here is no assurance that one will win again.  Victory is never permanent.  It is only a matter of time until one becomes a loser again.

This tends to set up a cycle where one has needs, one competes, there may be certain success which still does not address the deficit and so one competes again.  Stuart Walker identifies this cycle;

Winning doesn’t satisfy us - we need to do it again and again.  The taste of success seems merely to whet the appetite for more.  When we lose, the compulsion to seek future success is overpowering; the need to get out on the course the following weekend is irresistible.  We cannot quit when we are ahead, after we’ve won and we certainly cannot quit when we’re behind, after we’ve lost.  We are addicted.

It seems the more we compete, the more we need to compete and all the time detracting from a positive sense of self.

Competition, then, fails to fulfill any of it’s promises.  None of the arguments that would support it stand up.  It is not part of human nature, it doesn’t make us more productive, it certainly isn’t more fun and it contributes to a negative cycle of low self-esteem on the part of the competitor.  The question remains, why then does the concept so pervade every level of our society?  Why do we embrace it in such an outright fashion?

The answer for me is that we have learned over a long period of time to accept these principles.  We act competitively because we are taught to do so, because everyone around us does so, because it never occurs to us not to do so, and because success in our culture seems to demand that we do so.  The contribution by the school system has been instrumental in the continuation of these principles based on the value of competition.  These concepts are interwoven into the daily fabric of a child’s experience.  The role that schools will need to play in replacing this concept is equally as vital.

It is also the concept at the heart of many of our institutions – economics, sports, law, government.  It allows us to justify otherwise unacceptable behaviour.  If we can demystify the concept and come to terms with the role that it plays in our lives, the road to Nexus will be that much smoother.

We live in dangerous times.  Much of how we view individuals, other groups, countries or cultures has been shaped by a belief in competitive principles.  One does not have to be a current events expert to see where this attitude has taken us.

Anything that has been learned can be unlearned.  That which has been created can be replaced.  We know now intuitively that something is wrong with this manner of thinking, both from personal experience and through observation.  We need to begin to act on these and other intuitions.  Our future depends on it.

Back to the Future

One of the final hurdles against a concept like Nexus working would be to present the argument that our present reality is a manifestation of our human nature.  The world operates like it does because that is the way we are.  We can’t change it because this is our essential nature.  We are meant to be doing what we are doing.  The structures in place are natural extensions of our essence. 

What if our beliefs about human nature where all founded on a historical perspective that only represented part of the picture of human history?  What would the impact of this knowledge be on how we see ourselves, how we see our structures and what our relationship is to them and to each other?  What if we came to see our perspectives and beliefs as based on only one possible story or myth, and that we could easily choose another on which to shape our reality?

With the emergence of the book, The Chalice and the Blade, by Riane Eisler, and other recent books on this theme, we can now begin to examine our cultural heritage from a different perspective.  It now appears quite certain that there was a time in history when our culture lived peacefully for periods of thousands of years, a time when women and men lived and worked together harmoniously, a time when technology was used solely to improve the quality of life for all.  There was a time when all deities were women.

Eisler refers to this period of our history as the partnership society.  The seeds for this prevailing order were sown as early as 30,000 B.C. and it continued to prosper and flourish until approximately 4000 B.C.  At that point, a massive cultural upheaval took place resulting in the structures and perspectives that pervade the present society.  This she refers to as the dominator model. 

We appear to be entering a period when the forces necessary for cultural transformation are coming together again.  By examining this original period of chaos and readjustment, linked with what we now know of how change takes place in nature, we can begin not only to predict but also to facilitate these changes. There seems to be no doubt that the perspectives that we now hold to be true can no longer sustain us. An examination of perspectives that we once held can open up a whole new world of possibilities. 

With the support of archaeological findings, we can now examine societies that were thriving some twenty thousand years ago.  A major emphasis of this time seems to have been the association of woman with the giving and sustaining of life.  There is also the suggestion that our early ancestors recognized that we and our natural environment are integrally linked parts of the great mystery of life and death and that all nature must therefore be treated with respect.

Until recently, much of the interpretation of archaeological finds was the result of stereotypes rather than logical interpretation.  In the examination of the art on the walls of Palaeolithic caves, the traditional interpretation of the lines was as representations of diverse weapons such as arrows, spears, and harpoons.  A more viable interpretation, however, is that these sticks represent plants, trees, and branches.  Given that these societies were primarily agrarian, this would explain the lack of representation of the natural world in the former explanation.  Nor are these representations in any way primitive but rather demonstrate a deep psychic tradition that holds great value in any attempt on our part to understand ourselves. 

The Palaeolithic remains represent the early manifestations of what was to develop into a complex religion centred on the worship of the Mother Goddess.  In an excavation carried out in the towns of Catal Huyuk and Hacilar, in what is now called Turkey, female figurines and symbols occupy a central position in the arts.  What we find here are societies which were basically agrarian that evolved peacefully over thousands of years, all focusing on the worship of a female deity.

Why has the information gathered about these societies been for so long misinterpreted?  There seem to be two answers.  One is that the picture of these cultures did not coincide with our already pre-conceived notions of a prehistoric model of a male-centred and male-dominated form of social organization.  The second reason is that it is not until after the Second World War that some of the most important information has been made available.  It was only after this time that archaeology as a systematic inquiry into the life, thought, technology and social organization came into its own.  As well, advances in the technology, such as dating by means of radiocarbon, or C-14, have allowed us to much more accurately place events in history.  We can now say that the Neolithic or agricultural revolution began to appear as far back as 9000 to 8000 B.C.- that is, more than ten thousand years ago.

Archaeological evidence from an area in south-eastern Europe, called Old Europe is very revealing.  Marija Gimbutas writes in The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe:

During two millennia of agricultural stability their material welfare had been persistently improved by the increasingly efficient exploitation of the fertile river valleys.  Wheat, barley, vetch, peas, and other legumes were cultivated, and all the domesticated animals present in the Balkans today, except for the horse, were bred.  Pottery technology and bone and stone-working techniques had advanced, and copper metallurgy was introduced into east central Europe by 5500 B.C.  Trade and communications, which had expanded through the millennia, must have provided a tremendous cross-fertilizing impetus to cultural growth.  The use of sailing-boats is attested from the sixth millennia onwards by their incised depictions on ceramics.

Evidence also reveals that these societies were essentially peaceful.  None of the sites for towns were chosen for their ability to be defended.  Rather they were chosen for their good water and soil, and availability of animal pastures.  There is no sign of damage from war for a period of fifteen hundred years.  Male domination was not the norm and a division of labour between the sexes is indicated, but not a superiority of either.

As we examine Neolithic art, one notes a complete absence of imagery idealizing cruelty and violence.  Burial sites are lacking in the lavishness of the male dominated cultures as are evidence of human sacrifices of what was perceived to be human lives of lesser value.  There is also no evidence of caches of weaponry or other applications of technology for destructive purposes nor is there evidence of military fortifications.

What we find are life-sustaining elements of sun and water as well as serpents and butterflies, which were symbols of metamorphosis.  The theme of the unity of all things in nature, as personified by the Goddess seems to permeate Neolithic Art.  Often, we find the Goddess represented as both pregnant and giving birth.  As a further representation of this inherent belief in the unity of all life in nature, the Goddess is often portrayed as part human, part animal.  It appears that the primary purpose of art and of life was to cultivate the earth and to provide the natural and spiritual requirement for a satisfying life.  And the principle act was of giving.  Because the dominant religious image was a woman giving birth, one can infer that life and love of life dominated these societies. 

In all ancient agricultural societies, the Goddess was worshipped as the principle deity - Mother and Maid were symbols of the cyclical regeneration of nature.  There was no separation between the secular and the sacred.  The religion expressed the world view of the time.  The head of the holy family was a woman, referred to as the Great Mother, the Queen of Heaven, or the Goddess.  The male member, her consort, brother, and/or son were also divine.  Contrast this with the Christian holy family where the head is the all-powerful Father.  The second male, Jesus Christ, is also divine.   But Mary, the only woman in the family organization, is merely mortal and clearly of an inferior order.

Living in Society B, we have come to see the world as a series of dichotomies.  We often make the assumption that if a society is not a patriarchy, then it must be a matriarchy.  If one gender doesn't dominate, then the other must.  The evidence supports neither of these conclusions.  These societies were remarkably egalitarian.  There appears to be no glaring indications of social inequalities.  In religious ceremonies, there is evidence of both priestesses and priests.

Our conceptual framework forces us to use hierarchies as a means of comparing.  If we put this framework aside, it becomes possible to see that although women played a central and vigorous role in prehistoric religion and life, this does not mean that men were perceived and treated as subservient.  And while women were given a great deal of power, it was equated more with responsibility and love than with oppression, privilege and fear.  Rather that using the terms patriarchy or matriarchy, we can refer to it as a partnership society.

The discovery of the ancient culture of Crete has provided us with a rich source of information.  The society flourished as a partnership for four thousand years, from 6000 B.C. to 2000 B.C.  On the island of Crete, where the Goddess was still supreme, there are no signs of war.  This was a society in which, according to Nicolas Platon, in Crete, "the whole of life was pervaded by an ardent faith in the goddess Nature, the source of all creation and harmony".  There was a spirit of harmony between men and women.  There was an equitable sharing of wealth, and relatively high standard of living for all. 

The economy was basically agrarian.  The early society was socially structured around the clan, later to become more centralized.  But centralization did not bring with it autocratic rule.  Although there was an affluent ruling class, there is no indication it was backed up by a massive army.  Government revenues were used to improve living conditions.  There is evidence of large-scale irrigation works with canals to carry and distribute the water. 

Here was a society where peace endured for 1500 years despite the fact that societies all around it had degenerated into a dominator, oppressor-oppressed model centuries earlier.  Personal ambition was unknown.  Nowhere is there the name of an author attached to a work of art.  In Crete, power was equated with the responsibility of motherhood.

The entire relationship between the sexes, including attitudes towards sensuality and sex, was obviously very different from our own.  Eisler writes,

The bare-breasted style of dress for women and the skimpy clothes emphasizing the genitals for men demonstrate a frank appreciation of sexual differences and the pleasure made possible by theses differences.  From what we now know through modern humanistic psychology, this ‘pleasure bond’ would have strengthened a sense of mutuality between women and men as individuals.  Along with their enthusiasm for sports and dancing and their creativity and love of life, these liberated attitudes toward sex seem to have contributed to the generally peaceful and harmonious spirit predominant in Cretan life.  

Further to this, Jacquetta Hawkes writes in Dawn of the Gods: Minoan and Mycenaean Origins of Greece, "The Cretans seem to have reduced and diverted their aggressiveness through a free and well-balanced sexual life.”

The Palaeolithic age goes back over 30,000 years ago.  The Neolithic age marking the beginning of agriculture was over 10,000 years ago.  Catal Huyuk was founded 8500 years ago.  And the civilization of Crete fell only 3200 years ago.  During all of this time in history, the emphasis was on technologies that support and enhance the quality of life.  Great strides were made in the production of food through farming, as well as in hunting, fishing, and the domestication of animals.  Major advances were made in housing and clothing and the foundations for higher civilization were reflected in the arts. 

Contrary to popular belief, almost all of the technologies and social structures fundamental to civilization were developed before the imposition of the dominator model.  Eisler writes:

The principles of food growing, as well as of construction, container, and clothing technology were all already known by the Goddess-worshipping peoples of the Neolithic.  So were increasingly sophisticated uses of natural resources such as wood, fibres, leather and later, metals in manufacturing.  Our most important nonmaterial technologies, such as law, government, and religion, likewise date back to what, borrowing from Gimburas's term Old Europe, we may call the Old Society.  And so also do the related concepts of prayer, judgeship, and priesthood.  Dance, ritual drama, and oral or folk literature, as well as art, architecture, and town planning are likewise pre-dominator society.  Trade, by both land and sea, is another legacy of this earlier era.  So is administration, education, and even forecasting of the future.  For the first identification of oracular or prophetic power is with the priestesses of the Goddess.

Even our theories on the evolution of the human as a primate are being revised in light of these new discoveries.  The old model, based on man the hunter, is based on the coming together of men for the purpose of hunting.  Technology's first creative manifestation were thought to be the weapons necessary in this pursuit.  The alternative view is that erect posture was developed as a result of the shift from foraging (eating as one goes) to the gathering and storing of food.  The development of our larger, more complex brains was not predicated on the bonding of men for the purposes of killing but rather the bonding between mother and children that is required if human offspring are to survive.  Following this, the first human artefacts were not weapons but rather were tools to soften food for children and containers to carry and store food.  This is congruent with the findings that meat eating made up only a small part of the ancestral primate diet.  Most of these early tools, as witnessed in extensive studies of chimpanzees, were used by women.  It is now thought likely that the domestication of plants and animals was the invention of women.  The invention of pottery, weaving and spinning of cloth are now thought by many to originate from women. 

The feminine influence in these early societies is widespread.  Eisler writes:

There is also evidence from Egypt and Europe, as well as the Fertile Crescent, that the association of femininity with justice, wisdom, and intelligence dates back to very ancient times.  Maat is the Egyptian God-Goddess Isis and the Greek Goddess Demeter were both still known as lawgivers and sages dispensing righteous wisdom, counsel, and justice.  Archaeological records of the Middle Eastern city of Nimrud, where the already martial Ishtar was worshipped, show that even then some women still served as judges and magistrates in courts of law.  From the pre-Christian legends of Ireland, we also learn that the Celts worshipped Cerridwen as the Goddess of intelligence and knowledge.  The Greek Fates, the enforcers of laws, and the Greek Muses, who inspire all creative endeavour, are, of course, female.  And so is the image of Sophia, or Wisdom, which prevailed well into medieval Christian times, along with the image of the Goddess as the Madonna of Mercy.

It appears that the thinking of the Neolithic period was the product of a mind characterized by intuition and mystical consciousness.  But this is not to say that the thinking was exclusively right-brain.  As witnessed by such monuments as Stonehenge, their knowledge of mathematics, astronomy and engineering was already well-developed.  Crete stands as a testimony to an advanced logical mental development as seen in the paved roads, viaducts, complex palaces, indoor plumbing, and knowledge of navigation.  The level of technological advancement of Crete society surpassed many of today's developing societies.  In all cases, technology was used to make life more pleasurable rather than to dominate and destroy. 

One of the most notable qualities of the pre-dominator mind was its recognition of our oneness with all of nature.  This was a foreshadowing of current research by scientific ecologists who have come to the conclusion that the planet, its biosphere, and all living entities on it, are all interconnected and part of a living whole.  The theory has been put forth most eloquently by the chemist James Lovelock and the microbiologist Lynn Margulis who have fittingly called this the Gaia hypotheses - Gaia being one of the ancient Greek names of the Goddess.

It was about 4300 B.C. that the great change came, described by Eisler as "a change so great, indeed, that nothing else in all we know of human cultural evolution is comparable in magnitude." At this time, there were nomadic bands roaming the less desirable fringe areas of the globe seeking grass for their herds.  These bands swept down from the Asiatic and European northeast bringing with them gods of war.  The one thing that all these nomadic groups had in common was a dominator model as social organization.  They all shared a social system in which male dominance, male violence, and a generally hierarchic and authoritarian social structure was the norm.  As well, material wealth was characterized not by developing technologies of production, but rather by developing more effective technologies of destruction. 

One of the nomadic cultures that came from the north were the Kurgans.  The differences between their social system and that of the Old Europeans was remarkable, as Marija Gimbutas attests:

The Old European and Kurgan cultures were the antithesis of one another.  The Old European were sedentary horticulturalists prone to live in large well-planned townships.  The absence of fortifications and weapons attests the peaceful coexistence of this egalitarian civilization that was probably matrilineal and matrilocal.  The Kurgan system was composed of patrilineal, socially stratified, herding units which lived in small villages or seasonal settlements while grazing their animals over vast areas.  One economy based on farming. the other on stock breeding and grazing, produced two contrasting ideologies.  The Old European belief system focused on the agricultural cycle of birth, death, and regeneration, embodied in the feminine principle, a Mother Creatrix.  The Kurgan ideology, as known from comparative Indo-European mythology, exalted virile, heroic warrior gods of the shining and thunderous sky.  Weapons are nonexistent in Old European imagery, whereas the dagger and battle-axe are dominant symbols of the Kurgans, who like all historically known Indo-Europeans, glorified the lethal power of the sharp blade.

It was at this time in history that the slaughter of other human beings, the destruction and looting of their property, and the subjugation of others became the norm.  Slavery became a practice.  Women were reduced to the status of mere possessions.  Entire villages were levelled.  In Canaan, the Hebrew tribes began a series of wars and conquests.  The wars went on for hundreds of years and as told in the Bible, this period was meant to provide God's people with practice in warfare, to test and punish them.  In Deuteronomy 3:3-6, the practice of these "divinely inspired" invaders was of "utterly destroying the men, women, and children of every city."  As Eisler writes:

All over the ancient world, populations were now set against populations, as men were set against women and against other men.  Wandering over the width and breadth of this disintegrating world, masses of refugees were everywhere fleeing their homelands, desperately searching for a haven, for a safe place to go.

From this period of devastation would come the civilizations that we celebrate in our high schools and universities as marking the beginnings of Western civilization.

We can now begin to make links between this time in our history and Biblical renderings.  As we look at the legends of Mesopotamia, there are repeated references to a time of plenty and peace when both men and women lived cooperatively in an idyllic garden.  Biblical scholars now believe that the Old Testament myth of the Garden of Eden derives from this time.  The Garden is an allegory of the Neolithic period when men and women first cultivated the soil.  The story of Cain and Abel illustrates the confrontation of a pastoral people (symbolized by Abel's offering of a slaughtered sheep) and an agrarian people (symbolized by Cain's offering of the harvest, rejected by the pastoral god Jehovah).  The Fall from Paradise is in part a reflection of the cataclysmic changes that were taking place at this time.

How did an entire culture move from a partnership model based on a belief in the oneness of nature, to a dominator model, based on power, hierarchies, and violence?  The insights that we come away with from this upheaval in history are instructive in our own understanding of the times of which we are a part.  The development of what Eisler calls a Cultural Transformation theory is crucial in expediting our own cultural transformation.  We seem to be poised on that threshold.

A major contributor to this massive perspective transformation was the power of the pen.  An examination of the literature of the time illustrates how powerful and contradictory to the past were the messages that pervaded the cultures at this pivotal point.  The Greek drama, Oresteia, takes us back to this clash between matriarchal and patriarchal cultures.  This trilogy, written by the Greek playwright, Aeschylus, was shown to all the people of Athens on important ceremonial occasions and is still one on the most often performed Greek plays today. 

In the first play, Agamemnon tricks Clytemnestra into sending their daughter, Iphigenia, to him.  Agamemnon sacrifices her to the gods in order to get a fair wind for his fleet.  Clytemnestra avenges this murder by killing Agamemnon.  She makes it clear that she is not acting out of vengeance and hatred but rather in her role as head of the clan and therefore responsible for avenging the shedding of kindred blood.  This behaviour is within the norms of matrilineal society.  As queen, it is her duty to see that justice is done.  In the second play, Orestes, son to Clytemnestra, returns to the palace, takes on a disguise, and avenges his father's death by killing his mother.  The third play is the trial of Orestes.  He is acquitted on the grounds that he has not shed kindred blood, that is he is not related to his mother.  As Joan Rockwell writes in Fact in Fiction: The Use of Literature in the Systematic Study of Society: "If the first trial at the new Court of Homicide proves that matricide is not a blasphemous crime because no matrilineal relationship exists, what better argument for sole patrilineal descent?” So fundamental was the change that by this point it could be said that a mother was not related to her children.  Even today, many scientists and religious leaders have relegated women to the role of providing children for their husbands - and preferably sons.  The tradition of a child identifying only with the father's name continues.

This perspective transformation from a partnership model to a dominator took place over a period of two thousand years and continues today.  It was at times a subtle transformation but more often than not involved brutal coercion.  Those who did not conform to this new reality were persecuted as heretics.  But central to this shift was a re-writing of the sacred stories, a task largely undertaken by the priests, who were magically communicated the Word of God, and who were backed up by armies, courts of laws, and executioners.     

This process of re-mything, in the form of the Old Testament, took place a hundred years after Aeschylus wrote Oresteia in Greece.  The demise of the snake in the new story is a clear indication of the profound changes that had taken place in the head and the heart of these people.  What was once held as a symbol of maternal power and wisdom was now being systematically destroyed.  What once represented goodness now came to represent everything in the world that was evil.  The Old Testament contains numerous references to the destruction of the snake as an example of good triumphing over evil. 

The story of Adam and Eve rests as one of the central tenets of the Bible.  In it, Eve is tempted by the snake to eat of the Tree of Knowledge.  Because she succumbs to this temptation, she condemns all of humanity to eternal punishment.  As a woman, she eternally punishes all women to subservience under a vengeful God and oppressor man.  However, in the old order, it would have been the duty of the woman, of the Goddess, to take from this source of knowledge.  She would have had no choice but to directly disobey this edict from Jehovah.  The association of women with evil had become a means of discrediting the Goddess, a warning that this worship was no longer to be tolerated.

The process of discrediting the goddess had begun in earnest.  Stories began to appear from the Middle East where the Goddess is slain or humiliated and raped.  In others, the Goddess takes on the role of consort to a more powerful male god.  The scribes charged with this writing are now all male.  With the appearance of the Hebrew tribes, the process is accelerated.  For the first time, as witnessed in the Bible, the Goddess as a divine power is completely absent. 

From the Bible, we learn that it is God's will that women be ruled by men.  Women have become nothing more than their property.  Women of conquered states are customarily enslaved in accordance with Jehovah's commands.  Sexual freedom was completely curtailed, and women were bought and sold according to their supposed virtue.  Any woman who behaved in an economically or sexually free manner was seen as a threat to a male-dominated society.  In the Bible, the rape of women is viewed dispassionately.  In the Book of Judges, Chapter 19, a father offers up his daughter to a crowd to be gang raped and killed without a hint of moral indignation.  In a story regularly read to children attending Sunday school in Western Society, Genesis 19:8, Lot offers his two virgin daughters to a mob to be raped, and is subsequently saved as the sinful and immoral cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed.   

Knowledge as a virtue has been replaced by blind tolerance of authority.  The harshest punishments are reserved for those in opposition to authority.  Childbirth, as seen in Leviticus 12, is now an unclean act, and one from which a woman must be cleansed lest she contaminate others.  The symbols of religious fervour are no longer life giving or life sustaining.  They have been replaced by images of tormented martyrs.  The central images are no longer the celebration of nature and of life, but rather the glorification of pain, suffering, and death epitomized in the omnipresent theme of Christ dying on the cross.

As Jesus appears on the historical stage, the dominator model of society has already pervaded the societies of that time.  Yet, his message largely opposed this perspective.  He preached universal love, and equality between women and men.  He elevated feminine virtues from a secondary position to a central one.  With his guidance, women took leading roles in the first Christian communities. 

Much has been learned through the discovery of the Gnostic gospels in 1945 in Egypt. The books, written between 50 and 100 A.D. were banned and subsequently hidden away in a jar until their discovery 1600 years later.  In the writings, we learn of the belief that access to the deities could be achieved directly through divine knowledge.  One did not need go through the male dominated hierarchy of the church.  We learn that Mary Magdalene was the most beloved of all the disciples and that she actually challenged Peter for the leadership of the emerging religious hierarchy. 

These beliefs and other teachings of Jesus related to spiritual equality were considered heresy.  Those who openly professed these beliefs were tortured and executed.  The Church merged with the State, the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire.  Christian Bishops who were previously terrorized by the police now commanded them.  God was now explicitly male and virtually all of the feminine imagery for God had disappeared by the year 200.

If we take a broad, sweeping look at history from this time until the present, patterns begin to emerge.  At different points, there is an attraction of the dominator society to the partnership model.  We see this, for example, in twelfth-century southern France, where reverence for women emerged as the central theme of both poetry and life.  In Elizabethan England, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, there was a resurgence of feminine values.  As G. Rattray Taylor writes in Sex in History, there was

an awakening conscience of responsibility for others, expressed for instance, in the institution of the poor law.  There was a new love of free learning, finding expression in scholarship and the founding of colleges for students and a flood of creative energy, especially in poetry and the drama, England's preferred form of art, but also in painting, architecture, and music.

Every movement of the pendulum to more partnership model resulted eventually in a backlash from the dominator society.  In response to the Elizabethan age, there was the Puritan regression that followed, marked by violent repression of women including the "witch" burnings.  As a response to the liberation movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century we had the carnage of the First World War.  We find ourselves again in the midst of a resurgence of the ideals of the partnership society.  The current wave of feminism has altered the consciousness of the planet.  Another male-dominated assault on this movement would likely prove catastrophic.

The Age of Reason has failed us.  The belief that one half of humanity can dominate the other half has led us to the assumption that through our reasoning, we can dominate nature.  Our political systems, male dominated and hierarchical, have not offered us any alternatives.  Western philosophy, relying on reason for its sense of truth, is openly hostile to women.

 The philosopher Nietzsche, who is still much admired and often cited, declared that ‘just as men must rule over women’, a few ‘naturally selected’, ‘socially pure’ men must rule over the rest of mankind.  How this statement takes on new meaning in light of the work of Alice Miller as discussed in the next chapter!  For him, religion was a vile and despicable form of superstition, and he based his opposition to such ‘degenerate’ and ‘effeminate’ ideas as equality, democracy, socialism, women's emancipation, and humanitarianism on strictly ‘rational’ and nonreligious grounds.

 After five thousand years living in a dominator society it is indeed difficult to imagine any other way.  The task is now made somewhat easier knowing that our ideas, symbols, myths, and behaviours were altered in our prehistory. There are now, evident, themes of interconnectedness.  Jean Baker Miller calls it affiliation, Jessie Bernard calls it the "the female ethos of love/duty", and Jesus, Gandhi and other spiritual leaders have simply called it love.  Science for the first time in history is now focusing more on relationships than on hierarchies.

Our notions of conflict and power are being re-examined.  Although certain levels of conflict are inevitable, successful transformation will depend on our ability to make conflict productive rather than destructive.  As Gandhi stated, the aim is to transform conflict rather than to suppress it or explode it into violence.  At the same time, power is being re-defined with the use of such words as affiliation and linking.  Models are being developed where one is able to advance one's own development without restricting the development of others.

As we leave behind our conquest-oriented values traditionally associated with masculinity, a new set of governing values will emerge resulting in radical changes in our economic and political systems.  In a partnership society, the application of technology for destructive purposes would subside.  We would turn, as we did once, to the use of technological advances to improve the level of well-being for all.  As the contributions of women to the world economy globally become recognized, a politically and economically balanced system will emerge.  

An examination of our prehistory should in no way be misconstrued as a longing for the "good old days" when life was lead in some ideal state.  The cultures that we probed were fully human with all the attendant frailties that continue to provide us with all the incentive we need to remain humble.  Rejecting one model does not necessarily imply the inclusion of its opposite.  What this examination illustrates is that we lived lives based on a different set of beliefs and assumptions at one time and have the capability of doing so again.   

The insights gleaned from The Chalice and the Blade are both powerful and liberating.  It is not human nature to be warlike because there was a time when we were peaceful.  It is not our nature to dominate others because there was a time when we lived harmoniously.  The concept of our interconnected relationships with nature should not be remote to us as it was an inherent belief of our culture not so very long ago.  Our present focus on the individual can now be seen for what it is - a result of our socialization, from which the foundation for the present dominator society has been built. 

Knowing what we know, why do we continue to live as we do?  Why does the process of change seem to be so laborious?  The answer lies more in the nature of our structures than in human nature.  My own experience with our economic structures, the education system, the judicial system, our system of government, the medical model, is that they all have a life of their own that is separate from the individuals who occupy them.  Each one has its own personal mandate that it protects judiciously.  Each one is a reflection of a certain set of beliefs and assumptions.  Each one in its own way was created from the dominator model and by its very existence perpetuates the model.  It cannot do otherwise.  The concept of domination and hierarchy is at the core of its existence.   

These structures do allow change - but change on their own terms.  The shifts that we have seen in the past five thousand years are mostly illusions.  They have largely satisfied our need to feel that progress has been made but in the end, the essential framework remains static.  Our economic system perpetuates the belief in the dictum "survival of the fittest", the idea of the rugged individual, the belief that a value system and profit margin have no relationship.  It preaches disconnection from the rest of our human family and absolves us of blame for their plight.  We have a judicial system that is fundamentally adversarial, a forum where you have only winners and losers.  We have a government system where one group is in power and the other is in opposition.  We have a medical model whose cultural legacy is the witch hunts.

Our educational system continues to survive mainly on the transmission model - the passing on of information by those who know to those who don't.  It continues to express the belief that all solutions lie in the domain of rational thought.  It places a high value on specialization.  As young children, we see the world holistically and then spend the next twenty years of our life taking the image apart, never to be able to reconstruct it again, never again to be able to see the connections between the parts, to see that every action on this planet has a reaction.  It prepares us to participate in the world the way it is.  Progress is manifested in the ever increasing efficiency with which it carries out this enterprise. Quality is monitored through comparisons of standardized test results with other "industrialized" countries. 

Under the guise of a liberal education, we derive a certain satisfaction in the knowledge that we are providing a well-rounded, balanced education to our children.  And yet an examination of the compulsory high school curriculum does not reveal this balance. How can we hope to understand ourselves unless we understand our past, especially in the light of our whole cultural mosaic?  At the same time, presenting curriculum without the context of a value system, as was my school experience, serves only to perpetuate the sense of alienation that pervades our culture and times.

Our collective consciousness on this planet has altered significantly in a few short decades.  Our structures have not been able to keep pace.  I believe the answer lies in letting them go as they no longer serve us.  They are no longer a reflection of where we are in our own evolution.  When we participate in these structures we actually change our behaviours to suit them.  This explains the phenomenon whereby people express consistently humane points of view when they find themselves in a trusting environment with others and yet experience conflict when trying to apply these values or learnings in their work setting.  Our structures are dictating values that we no longer hold.  However, trying to change these structures without critically examining the belief systems on which they are founded is like trying to convert the game of tennis into a cooperative experience between two people without exploring the essence of the game.

The future holds great promise.  This statement is based on a belief that people are basically good and that given the opportunity, people will choose to make connections with one another.  This optimism is based on a renewed faith in our ability to choose a path that is radically different from the one that we are on.  It is also based on a belief in a universal set of values that in the end will point out that as much as we are all different, in the end, we are also all the same.

As we continue to broaden our perspectives, we will come to understand our connection not only to all other human beings on this planet but to all life in the cosmos.  The day will come when we will hold a holistic image of the planet as a permanent part of our consciousness.  The day will come when it will be impossible to talk about the good life for some without the knowledge that it is available to all.

From Darkness to Light

Where there is a will, there is a way!  We have considerable evidence of the way.  What seems to be missing is the will.  How do we resolve this dilemna?  Why do some of us (and admittedly, a relatively small group at times) aspire to live in a world where human rights are a given?  With the knowledge in place to carry out these changes, what obstacles lie in our way?  And what of those opposed to these alterations?  What of those who aspire to other paths, seemingly dark, destructive journeys, often affecting the destiny of others?

How many of us know what we should be doing in a rational, intellectual, way but find there is a barrier preventing us?  How many of us have habits that we know we would like to break were it not for the invisible force that prevents us?  How many of us feel flashes of negative behaviour that seem incongruous with our perceived inner selves and yet feel helpless to prevent?

I have often had the experience of having reactions or feelings in certain circumstances which seemed beyond my control.  These reactions could not be explained away through rational thought.   There was no way that I could choose to feel differently.  Seeking insight on these and other related issues, I came across the work of Alice Miller.  I believe her writing holds one of the keys to our collective success.

Alice Miller believes that all of the evil in our society, both in the present and in the past is due to the mistreatment and abuse that took place in a persons’s childhood.  She believes that there is a relationship between the degree to which negative child-rearing practices are inflicted upon the child, and the capacity for evil in the adult.  She has painstakingly recreated a psychological sketch of many of our most notorious villains.  In each sad case, the adult was abused as a child.  Sadly, most of us have incidents occur in our upbringing which will manifest themselves later in life.  For many of us, we will hold no conscious memory of these events but this fact will not dampen their effect.  There is a way that this cycle can be broken.  For each of us, this is part of our inner journey. 

The first psychological sketch is that of Stalin.  He, like Hitler, was born after the death of several siblings.  There was nothing but loneliness, the constant threat of beatings, the belief in his own ostensible worthlessness and guilt, and nowhere another human being to protect him from constant persecution and abuse, to tell or show him that he was not guilty.  There was no one of influence in his life who could avert his fate, just as there was no mercy later for the millions of prisoners in the Gulag Archipelago.  Without even being sentenced, they could be tormented, tortured, killed - or released - for no apparent cause.  Everything was determined by the arbitrary whim of a tyrant who suspected enemy attacks from all sides because he had experienced perpetual threats at an early age and because there had been no witness to teach him that the whole world was not like his father: wicked, dangerous, unpredictable, frightening.  When a child's boundless powerlessness never finds sheltering arms, it will be transformed into harshness and mercilessness; when, in addition, it is spurred by a mother's ambition, it can result in a great career that introduces all the elements of the child's repressed misery into world history.  Then millions of human beings are marched to Russian prisons or to Nazi gas chambers without knowing why, because once a little boy didn't know why he was being punished.  How long are we going to tolerated these senseless marches now that we finally are in a position to discover their underlying causes?

In the work of the philosopher Nietzsche, we find a deep-seated hatred of women.  Why?   Nietzsche’s life reflects  the unlived feelings, needs, and tragedy of his childhood. At the age of twelve he kept a diary, the kind an adult might have kept, written in a well-adjusted, reasonable, well-behaved way.  But in adolescence his once suppressed feelings burst forth, resulting in works that would deeply move other young people of later generations.  And then at age forty, when he could no longer bear his loneliness and, since he was not able to see that the route of his life history went back to his childhood, he lost his mind and everything became "clear".  Historians locate the cause of his tragic ending in a venereal disease he supposedly contracted as an adolescent.  The outcome is in keeping with our moral standards: the just, though delayed, punishment, in the form of a fatal disease, for having visited a prostitute.  This is similar to the present attitude toward AIDS.  Everything seems to turn out for the best, and hypocritical morality is restored.  But what those who raised and taught Nietzsche actually did to the boy did not happen so long ago that we can no longer find out about it.  Today, we can recognize that what Nietzsche wrote was his hopeless attempt, which he didn't abandon until his breakdown, to free himself from his prison by expressing his unconscious but present hatred for those who raised and mistreated him. 

Although Nietzsche's attacks derived their intensity from his repressed rage against figures from childhood, they did not display any weakness in logic that would reveal their real roots.  If he had been able to see the way the women in his childhood really were, then it would not have been necessary for him to generalize by making all women into witches and serpents and to hate them all.  As a result of having been treated brutally in childhood, fascists of whatever stamp will blindly accept their leader and treat those weaker than themselves brutally.  The fact that this behaviour can be accompanied by a longing for the release of creative powers that the methods of "poisonous pedagogy" suppress in every child is to be seen very plainly in Nietzsche and others.

Not only obedience and submissiveness were preached to him but also the so-called love of truth, which was pure hypocrisy, for the boy who was forbidden to say anything critical was also forced to lie repeatedly.  It is this perversion of values that continually aroused Nietzsche's ire and that he tried to make tangible by his paradoxical formulations in the hope that he would no longer have to be alone with his anger.

Nietzsche's loneliness was caused by his inner plight, for only the very few were receptive to what he said, and perhaps he wasn't aware of even these few.  Thus, he would rather have been alone than together with people who did not understand him.  In his solitude, he had new ideas and made new discoveries which were based on his most personal experiences.  They were difficult to share with others, and they only deepened his loneliness and the gulf between him and those around him. 

There was never an opportunity for Nietzsche to write of certain parts of his life since its potential content - which, as it was, he could express only symbolically - was not accessible to his conscious mind, or in any case was not available to him in a direct form.  Should our pedagogical system become more relaxed someday, however, should the commandment “Thou shalt not be aware of what was done to you as a child” lose its force, then our heretofore treasured “products of culture” will no doubt decline in number - from unnecessary, useless dissertations all the way to the most famous philosophical treatises.  But their place would be taken by many honest reports about what really happened to their authors.  These documents could give others the courage to see things as they actually are, to call a crime a crime, and to express what they themselves have gone through but have been unable, without any support, to put into words.  Reports of this nature would doubtlessly be preferable to complicated speculative writing, for they would serve the crucial purpose of revealing, rather than concealing, the reality of universal human experience. 

Most of Nietzsche’s writings owe their persuasiveness specifically to his ability to express the experiences he stored up at a very early age.  As in the case of Kafka and other great writers, the truth asserts itself so obviously that it is virtually impossible to deny it: the truth of a mistreated child who was not allowed to cry or defend himself.  The sudden flashes of insight that can come from reading certain passages in Nietzsche are not the result of the author’s power of suggestion but of the strength of experience (although repressed and unconscious) of someone who is telling about what he has suffered and perceived and whose perceptions relate to situations and conditions in which many other people have had to live - or still are living. Nietzsche has this to say about the sources a writer draws from:

When I seek my ultimate formula for Shakespeare, I always find only this; he conceived of the type of Caesar.  That sort of thing cannot be guessed: one either is it, or one is not.  The great poet dips only from his own reality - up to the point where afterward he cannot endure his work any longer.

When I have looked into my Zarathustra, I walk up and down in my room for half an hour, unable to master an unbearable fit of sobbing.

If Nietzsche had not been forced to learn as a child that one must master an “unbearable fit of sobbing,” if he had simply been allowed to sob, then humanity would have been one philosopher poorer, but in return the life of a human being named Nietzsche would have been richer.  And who knows what that vital Nietzsche would then have been able to give humanity?

What are we to think of the wisdom of older people who had to learn as children that good behaviour could be acquired only at the expense of genuine feelings and who were proud of having managed to accomplish this?  Since they were not allowed to feel, they became incapable of perceiving vital facts and learning from them.  What can these people have to tell us today?  They attempt to pass on to the younger generation the same principles their parents once transmitted to them, firmly convinced that they are doing something useful and good.  But these are the very principles that destroyed their ability to feel and perceive.  Of what use are instructions and moral sermons if one’s capacity for feeling and compassion has been lost?  The most that will be achieved is to inculcate the absurdest of attitudes, which won’t be perceived as such because they are shared by so many. 

Thus, politicians can profess to be peace-loving Christians and at the same time advocate the production of weapons five million times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.  These politicians can defend without a qualm, the necessity for an absurd arms race because they learned long ago not to feel.  It is therefore possible for those caught in this kind of mental system to plan multiple Hiroshima catastrophes and still to pray in church every Sunday for peace.

It is the ability to feel that enables us to establish the right connections, to notice what is going on around us, and to relinquish the illusion that age brings wisdom.  Someone who is not allowed to feel can’t learn from experience.  Again and again he will accept the so-called wisdom of the elders, which has proven to be unmistakably wrong in our generation - as, for example, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”  All his life he will avoid crucial experiences because he must protect himself from pain, and this means ultimately from the truth.  He must never doubt his father, must not confront him.  Even when his hair has turned white, he will still be his father’s obedient child. 

The cry of the child in Andersen’s fairy tale - “But (the emperor) doesn’t have anything on!” - awakens people from a mass hypnosis, restores their powers of perception, frees them from the confusion caused by the authorities, and mercilessly exposes the emptiness to which rulers as well as masses have fallen victim.

In Banished Knowledge, Alice Miller states her belief that every murder committed not directly in self-defence but on innocent surrogate objects, is the expression of an inner compulsion, a compulsion to avenge the gross abuse, neglect, and confusion suffered during childhood and to leave the accompanying feelings in a state of repression.

She told an American interviewer that it was possible to check out her thesis by talking to prison inmates and asking them about their childhood.  She was sure that they would all, without exception, report that their fathers were strict and often had to punish them, needless to say with beatings, but only because they had been bad and deserved it.  She was equally sure that they would describe their mothers as loving and would cite external circumstances, such as poverty, as reasons for the cruelties they suffered. Although the interviewer had difficulty accepting the mechanism of denial as an explanation for crime, she told her that the statistics confirmed her statements.  Those statistics showed that ninety percent of inmates in American prisons had been abused as children.  Alice Miller told her she was convinced that it was not ninety but a full one hundred percent.

It is absolutely unthinkable that a human being who, from the start, is given love, tenderness, closeness, orientation, respect, honesty, and protection by adults should later became a murderer.   Love and cruelty are mutually exclusive.  No one ever slaps a child out of love but rather because in similar situations, when one was defenseless, one was slapped and then compelled to interpret it as a sign of love. 

Freud originally discovered, in the treatments partially conducted under hypnosis, that all his patients, both female and male, had been abused children and recounted their histories in the language of symptoms.  After reporting his discovery in psychiatric circles, he found himself completely shunned because none of his fellow psychiatrists was prepared to share the findings with him.  Freud could not bear this isolation for long.

It took Robert Fleiss many decades to find out that, at the age of two, he had been sexually abused by his father and that this incident coincided with Freud's renunciation of the truth.  In his book, Robert Fliess stated that his father had deterred Freud from further developing the trauma theory. 

By going even further, by founding a school and dogmatizing his theses, he institutionalized the denial that endowed the lies of pedagogy with alleged scientific legitimacy.  For the Freudian dogmas correspond to the widespread notion that the child is by nature wicked and bad and must be trained by adults to be good.   A dogma lives on in its followers' fear of losing their group affiliation.  It is from this fear that the dogma derives its power.

A young person today is not likely to allow a ninety-year old great-grandfather to tell him what is progressive; but he will accept this from his analyst in Freud's name, without realizing that the ideas he is accepting are at least ninety years old and have never been modified, given that a dogma cannot be modified.  And through the influence of analysts on their patients, the effects of these dogmas are spread even beyond professional circles, preventing access to reality.

Psychoanalysis has held back and continues to hold back knowledge of child abuse.  This assumption is reinforced when we learn that some analysts have no recollection whatsoever of the first seventeen years of their lives and see nothing strange in that. Psychoanalysis does not distort the truth by accident.  It does so by necessity.  It is an effective system for the suppression of the truth about childhood, a truth feared by our entire society.

We would also have to wonder what options there are for a humiliated woman not to abuse her small child for her own needs; even in cultures in which a woman counts for nothing, society invests her with unlimited power over her young child.  The further question arises of how much responsibility an adult woman will assume for her child if as a little girl she was abused by her father and what she will inflict on her son if she keeps that former occurrence repressed.

The feminist movement will forfeit none of its strength if it finally admits that mothers also abuse their children.  When mothers are defended as pathetic victims, the female patient will not discover that with a loving, protective, perceptive, and courageous mother she could never have been abused by her father or brother.

It has already been proven that all destructive behaviour has its roots in the repressed traumas of childhood.  Every criminal was once a victim, but not every victim necessarily becomes a criminal.  The Jungian doctrine of the shadow and the notion that evil is the reverse of good are aimed at denying the reality of evil.  But evil is real.  It is not innate but acquired, and it is never the reverse of good but rather its destroyer.

Our knowledge cannot alter those who are evil.  They can change only if they sense, not merely intellectually but with their feelings, how they have been turned into evil people. It is not true that evil, destructiveness, and perversion inevitably form part of human existence, no matter how often this is maintained.  But it is true that we are daily producing more evil and, with it, an ocean of suffering for millions that is absolutely avoidable.  When one day the ignorance arising from childhood repression is eliminated and humanity has awakened, an end can be put to this production of evil.

Not until we begin to perceive this destruction with the sensory powers of a child, with the knowledge of a victim, can we rid ourselves of the unconscious identification with the destructive actions of parents and thus break the chain of repetition. Something will change in the very next generation if we cease to expose our children to the abuse known as discipline and childrearing.  People who from earliest childhood have been taken seriously, have been respected, loved, and protected, cannot but treat their own children in the same way because their bodies have absorbed and stored this lesson at an early age.  From the very beginning they learned that it is right to protect and respect the weaker, and it becomes something they take for granted.  They will need no psychology textbooks to raise their children.

The fact that parents often abuse or neglect their children in the same manner that they themselves were abused or neglected by their own parents, even if (and especially if!) they no longer have the slightest memory of those times, shows that they stored up their own traumas in their bodies.  Otherwise they could not possibly reproduce them, which they do with amazing accuracy, an accuracy that comes to light as soon as they are prepared to feel their own helplessness instead of working it off on their own children and misusing their power.

 One might expect that the millions of people who, thanks to television, watched the events of the Gulf War unfold would be eager to understand the causes of this urge to destroy.  Sadly, the opposite seems to be true, at least in the public domain.  Neither politicians, experts of various sorts, nor even the majority of journalists asked the essential question: What makes a person wish to destroy the world?

It is in no way exaggerated to say that every tyrant, without exception, prefers to see thousands and even millions of people killed and tortured rather than undo the repression of his childhood mistreatment and humiliation, to feel his rage and helplessness in the face of his parents, to call them to account and condemn their actions.  The results of any traumatic experience, such as abuse, can only be resolved by experiencing, articulating, and judging every facet of the original experience within a process of careful therapeutic disclosure.

One feminist sociologist disclosed the results of her study of youths serving prison terms for attacking and raping women on the street. As it transpired, the rape and debasement of anonymous women had nothing to do with sexuality, although these men are referred to as “sex offenders”.  Rather, they were motivated by revenge for the helplessness and defencelessness that they themselves had once suffered - a reality they had subsequently completely repressed, and continued to repress, to the detriment of others.  What became clear was that all these men had been sexually abused by their mothers in early childhood, by way of either direct sexual practices, the misuse of enemas, or both.  Various perverse practices were used to keep the child in check without its having the slightest chance of defending itself.

Almost all of us are victims of the mistreatment, open or disguised, referred to euphemistically as “childrearing”.  Every one of us could recount volumes if we ceased to tolerate the wall of silence in us and dared to feel.

Even Adolf Hitler never denied that he had been beaten.  What he denied was that these beatings were painful.  And by totally falsifying his feelings, he would become a mass murderer.  That would never have occurred had he been capable of feeling, and weeping about, his situation and had he not repressed his justifiable hatred of those responsible for his distress but consciously experienced and comprehended it.  Instead he perverted this hatred into ideology.  The same holds for Stalin, Ceausescu, and all the other beaten and humiliated children who later turn into tyrants and criminals.

The return of the truth only begins to announce itself in the moment that we turn the tables and the word “spanked” condemns itself as heartless testimony to the disrespect and humiliation inflicted on the child.  Only once we have become capable of empathizing with the feelings of the abused child we once were, and rejecting the mockery and cynicism of our adult selves, do we begin to open the gates to the truth.  Only then can we also stop being a danger to others.

In 1987 more than half of all parents in West Germany still registered their approval of beatings as an appropriate pedagogic means.  And this, despite the many years of educative work carried out by child protection agencies.  Where does this stubborn mindlessness come from?  Why don’t these parents know that physical violence and also psychic “beatings” mean mistreatment and humiliation of a child, which will sooner or later break through in open or concealed form?

In 1989, the French magazine Paris Match published the results of a poll in which 78 percent of the high-school students questioned stated that the beatings they had received as children were necessary and just. Contrary to the belief of many, public support for corporal punishment and other forms of physical abuse is not a thing of the past.

Our biological purpose is to maintain life, not destroy it.  A person is never born destructive and we are by nature neither good nor bad.  How we deploy our abilities depends on our character.  This is formed in the course of our lives and determined by our individual experiences, above all those in childhood and youth, and the decisions we make as adults. 

Unfortunately, children today are still punished and made to feel guilty about their natural, healthy impulses and reactions - sometimes with the rejoinder that this is God’s will. Any child who has, in its early years, been overloaded with fears and pains that have not been physiologically caused, has been driven into the damnation of guilt-fear.  Its feelings reflect what it has been taught: “If such things are inflicted on me, it must be my fault.  There must be something wrong with me.  I am the cause of my sufferings.”

No less than one hundred percent of all seriously abused children are unwanted. Mistreatment is a parent’s way of taking revenge on the children they never wanted. In the light of this information, we should see to it that the only children who are born are wanted, planned for, and loved.  If we did, then we could put an end to the creation and continuation of evil in our world.  To force the role of a mother on a woman who does not wish to be a mother is an offence not just against her, but against the whole human community, because the child she brings into the world is likely to take criminal revenge for its birth, as do the many (mis)leaders threatening our lives.  All wars we ever had were the deeds of unwanted, heinously mistreated children.  It is the right to live life that we must protect wherever and whenever it is threatened.  And it should never be sacrificed to an abstract idea. 

Martin Luther told those who listened to him that it was their duty to save their children from the devil and thereby turn them into good and God-fearing citizens.  They believed it.  What they didn’t know was that Martin Luther, whose mother raised him with pitiless strictness, was, by giving his sanction to this method of bringing up children, enabling himself to maintain the illusion of having had a good and loving mother.  She was if you like, invented with the aid of repression.  People believed Luther, and did not know that instead of driving the “devil” out of their innocent children, each blow they gave them was sowing the seeds of destruction in an innocent being.  The more severely, the more blindly, the more often they beat them, the more wicked their children became, and, as the seed ruptured in later life, the more destructive. 

Napoleon’s inner logic forced him to constantly try to prove, through victories, the worth that he had struggled, unsuccessfully, to gain as a child.  He promised the French “La Grande Nation,” and brought them eventually the misery and pain of the campaign in Russia.  Nevertheless, the French people are still proud of him.

Stalin banished millions of people ostensibly to free the Soviet Union of its “inner enemies.”  In reality it was his own drunken father, the father who had mercilessly beaten him as a child, from whom he vainly sought to free himself.  For a number of years, his persecution mania found a convenient alibi in the real political necessity of defending his country against Hitler’s invasion, but as soon as the war was over, the maniacal persecution of his supposed enemies began again.  No measure, though, could succeed in pacifying his panic-stricken fear, a fear that had its roots in his childhood.  As long as it remained at the level of unconsciousness, as long as it was not permitted to be experienced in its real context, this fear remained hermetically sealed and unresolvable, a motor continually driving the despot to ever new crimes. 

The same is true of Adolf Hitler, who was treated like a dog by his father and, like a dog, whipped by him from an early age.  Hitler was proud of the fact that he had been manly enough to even count the strokes he received and feel nothing in the process.  This total suppression of all feeling enabled him, with the help of repressions, to survive his childhood and to continue to hold his father in great esteem.  What he didn’t know was that, as he murdered millions of innocent people, he was in fact attempting to annihilate that father.  But nothing could finally relieve him of his rage and repressed pain.  In the will that he framed only days before his death, Hitler urged his followers on to further killing, because repressed hatred is by its nature insatiable.

Nicolae Ceausescu was deposed before he had time to send his nation to war in order to “save” them.  But he did reenact the scenario of his own childhood, by inflicting it on the Romanian people with a precision that only the unconscious is capable of.  For twenty years, the misery, hunger coldness, fear, and above all, the hypocrisy that he had repressed were inflicted on a whole nation.  And this, only because a single individual refused to confront his own personal history.

We need to develop laws which are accompanied by a desire to learn about the origins of tyranny.  We must see how accurately violence experienced in childhood is perpetuated in the political arena because ultimately this mechanism, supported by our ignorance, is the invisible capital that finances all tyranny’s ventures.  Crimes of tyrants are not natural disasters. We can and must avoid them.

Reflecting on the tyranny of others is an important part of the Inner Journey.  Reflecting on our own inner tyranny is another.  Each one of us has the responsibility of developing a personal awareness of the relationships between our childhood and our current place in the world.  Each one of us has the capacity to overcome those obstacles that prevent us from becoming fully human.  Only through our work as individuals on the personal, the sacred, can we hope to bring an end to global tyranny and the legacy that it has produced.

The way out…the way in

Nexus will prove that we are not simply a disparate group of voices crying in the wilderness.  Pieces of the solution puzzle are to be found everywhere.

The concept of bioregionalism provides us with a replacement model for the nation state.  Rather than arbitrarily dividing people by means of artificial political divisions, groups would find commonality along geographic lines.  Their lives, both personal and public would be tied together by the physical space that they share in common.  Nexus embraces this concept. 

New yardsticks have now been developed to measure good and bad effects of money turnover - what has been achieved in terms of human development and environmental sustainability.  Hazel Henderson has developed a system called Country Futures Indicators.  Because GNP doesn't differentiate between goods and bads and it all is added together as if the GNP is going up, most of our industries today are ameliorative; they're around to clean up the mess and to replace all those services that we destroyed in our careless way.  Country Futures Indicators (CFI), are geared toward being more predictive of how well a country is managed for the longer term.  Basically, it takes into account how well a country is investing in its own people, because they are the wealth of nations, just as the resource base is the wealth of nations.  If they're investing in their people then they're going to have healthy, responsible, educated, aware people.  And then the CFI enables you to see whether they're investing in the resource base.  Are they shifting toward a more sustainable way of doing things?   Are they properly accounting for their natural asset base and for their infrastructure?

The World Bank has developed an Index of Sustainable Welfare and the United Nations Development Programme a Human Development Index.  These new criteria give an ethical view of the development of an economy and they represent a paradigm shift in economic thought.  In the United States, for example, the GDP measurement suggests that the economy has steadily improved since the 1950s.  However an ethical indicator gives a different picture: it shows an improvement from 1950 to 1970 followed by a decline of approximately 45% since then.

We have all become so accustomed to assuming that national currencies are the norm and preferable.  In her book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs illustrates “how national currencies stifle the economies of regions.”  The dependency on national currencies actually deprives regions of a very useful self-regulation tool and results in the paradoxical creation of stagnant economic pockets in a seemingly prosperous nation. In many cities around the world, a local currency has been developed called, LETS - Local Exchange and Trading System.  This movement has the potential to buffer local economies from swings in the global economy.

In 1994, the Halifax EcoCity Project received the inaugural "Worlds Best EcoCity Project" award.  Features of the design include: biological treatment and recycling of grey water and sewage; close proximity to public transport; no through traffic (the development will have underground and peripheral parking); greenery on balconies, roof gardens and courtyards which will help cool the urban environment as well as attracting animals and birds; use of solar photovoltaic panels which will make the project a power station in  its own right; use of only non-toxic materials; financed in the main from ethical investment sources - a LETS system already operates; the labour-intensive development work will generate added employment opportunities.  The project is being designed through community participation.  Almost 700 people have registered an interest in living in the community and over 60 households are participating in a "Barefoot Architecture" programme where residents participate in the design of their dwellings while learning about the demands of construction, planning and ecology.  A unique aspect of the Halifax project is that development of the inner-city site is being accompanied by work on a 1,000 acre rural site where permaculture designs are being used to re-establish original vegetation to land which had been over-exploited by its previous owners.

The tradition of  Community Supported Agriculture goes back for over twenty-five years in western Europe and Japan.  The Seikatsu Club Consumers Cooperative (SCCC), founded in the Tokyo area in 1965 by 200 women interested in finding cheaper milk prices, has evolved to a 150,000 member-family buying cooperative, with social, economic, and political purposes.  In 1989, the SCCC was awarded The Right Livelihood Honourary Award by the School of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom: “The Jury honours in Seikatsu the most successful model of production and consumption in the industrialized world, aiming to change society by promoting self-managed and less wasteful lifestyles.”

We need to rethink the meaning of social change and learn how to include the long term work of transforming people as we work for social justice.  We must redefine "winning."  Our social change has to be more than amassing resources and shifting power from the hands of one group to another.  We must seek a true shift in consciousness, one that forges vision, goals, and strategies from belief, not just from expediency, and allows us to become a strong political force.

The definition of transformational politics is fairly simple: it is political work that changes the hearts and minds of people; supports personal and group growth in ways that create healthy, whole people, organizations, and communities; and is based on a vision of a society where people - across lines of race, gender, class and sexuality - are supported by institutions and communities to live their best lives.

All oppressions turn on an economic wheel;  they all, in the long run, serve to consolidate and keep wealth in the hands of the few, with the many fighting over crumbs.  Without work against economic injustice, against the dehumanizing excesses of capitalism, there can be no deep and lasting work on oppression.  Often we have no knowledge of a shared history.  We stand ready to be divided.  Our challenge is to learn how to use the experiences of our many identities to forge an inclusive social change politics.  The question that faces us is how to do multi-issue coalition-building from an identity base.  The hope for a multiracial, multi-issue movement rests in large part on the answer to this question.  When we grasp the value and interconnectedness of our liberation issues, then we will at last be able to make true coalition and begin building a common agenda that eliminates oppression and brings forth a vision of diversity that shares both power and resources.

Wealth, education, research, and many other things are needed for any civilization, but what is most needed today is a revision of the ends which these means are meant to serve.  And this implies, above all else, the development of a life-style which accords to material things their proper, legitimate place, which is secondary and not primary. 

The issue of scale is crucial.   It is obvious that persons organized in small units will take better care of their bit of land or other natural resources than anonymous companies or megalomanic governments which pretend to themselves that the whole universe is their legitimate quarry.

As Schumacher stated,

I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man.  Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.  To go for gigantism is to go for self-destruction.  And what is the cost of a reorientation?  We might remind ourselves that to calculate the cost of survival is perverse.  No doubt, a price has to be paid for anything worthwhile: to redirect technology so that it serves man instead of destroying him requires primarily an effort of the imagination and an abandonment of fear.

From the scientists and technologists we need methods and equipment which are cheap enough so that they are accessible to virtually everyone, suitable for small-scale application, and compatible with man’s need for creativity.

We know enough to set up investment for support, not exploit.  We have the information and wherewithal to address issues of transportation and retailing. In Vermont, the state’s citizens have seen how chain stores, shopping malls, and unchecked business development rip away at the fabric of local communities, destroy the natural beauty of the region, and suck wealth out of the state.  In response, Vermont has enacted laws that are firm in their protection of the natural environment and local communities.  It is the only state to offer much resistance to the advances of Wal-Mart, a chain of discount stores that has wiped out traditional shopping streets in thousands of small towns.  Developers who propose new housing developments or shopping malls must show that their projects won’t put a strain on neighbourhoods or ecosystems.

Rather  than demanding more day care and schooling to help families conform to the economy, we in Nexus will be supporting radical changes in the growth economy to make it work for families.  One practical approach would be to change the current tax laws - and corporate subsidy programs - which discriminate against parents who take care of their own children.  Many parents already get tax credits and subsidies to help pay for day care.  Why not give parents who forgo day care equivalent benefits?  In many cases, equal benefits would make it possible for parents to cut back their work hours and raise their children on their own.

It is reasonable to work until you produce what you want, then stop.  But, as a culture, we believe in creating demand for products that people don’t really want purely to create extra work for ourselves.  To put the economy back on a rational basis, to produce the goods and services that people actually want, we need to offer job seekers more flexible work hours.  One way would be to give employers tax incentives to create more part-time jobs and accommodate different work schedules without penalizing part-time workers with lower hourly pay, restricted benefits, or fewer promotion opportunities.

We can use the law to control growth if we learn to think about technology in human terms, rather than focusing on the abstractions that only “the experts” can work with.  As long as we think of transportation, land use, and pollution control as “urban problems”, we will surrender to the city planners and let them decide what kinds of neighbourhoods we live in.  But if we can focus on the human purpose of our cities - they are the places where we live - it will become obvious that the people themselves should make the political  and personal decisions that will shape the city’s design. 

Similarly, as long as we think of unemployment and inflation as “economic problems”, we will allow economists to decide what our standard of living should be.  But when we think about the human purpose of the economy - to produce things that we actually want - it becomes obvious that workers should get to choose their own work schedules and standard of living.  Planning is useful to control the business cycles and fine tune the economy, but this planning should be subordinate to the human question of what we want to consume, which individuals should decide for themselves.

Mohandas Gandhi’s Trusteeship Principles provide directions: Nature only produces enough to support our needs from day to day, but never more.  When we take more than we need, we are simply either taking from each other, borrowing from the future, or destroying the environment and other species.  His overarching meta-economic principle can be put in the following way, that

Everyone has a right to an honourable livelihood and to have her/his basic needs met, and no more.  (Basic needs include: a balanced diet, decent housing, the education of our children in service to the community, reasonable health care and a way to earn the above.) 

And from Gandhi’s other writings, we can find his primary economic principles as follows:

A. All other wealth above the provision of an honourable livelihood belongs to the community:

B. The community may grant more than that to individuals if it believes that doing so benefits the general welfare.

C. This wealth, however, is a privilege, not a right, and cannot be allowed to contravene the meta-economic principle. 

D. There is no “right” of private ownership, except as far as it is permitted by society for its own welfare.

Fritz Schumacher argued that from a truly economic point of view, the most rational way to produce is “from local resources, for local needs.”

Our entire notion of land and ownership needs to come into question.   As the white people moved west in North America, they brought with them the concept of owning the land.  With this basic notion came two attitudes, both unknown to the Native Americans: first, seeing land as a commodity to be bought and sold; and second, seeing humans as having the right to dominate development of the land without regard for the future health of the land or the other living forms inhabiting the land. 

This is Jeanette Armstrong’s perspective, called Sharing One Skin.

As a child of ten, I once sat on a hillside on the reservation with my father and his mother as they looked down into the town on the valley floor.  It was blackcap berry season and the sun was very warm, but there in the high country a cool breeze moved through the overshading pines.  Bluebirds and wild canaries darted and chirped in nearby bushes, while a meadowlark sang for rain from the hillside above.  Sage and wild roses sent their messages out to the humming bees and pale yellow butterflies.  Down in the valley, the heat waves danced, and dry dust rose in clouds from the dirt roads near town.  Shafts of searing glitter reflected off hundreds of windows, while smoke and grayish haze hung over the town itself.  The angry sounds of cars honking in a slow crawl along the black highway and the grind of large machinery from the sawmill next to the town rose in a steady buzzing overtone to the quiet of our hillside. 

Looking down to the valley, my grandmother said (translated from Okanagan), “The people down there are dangerous; they are all insane”.  My father agreed, commenting, “It’s because they are wild and scatter anywhere”.  I would like to explain what they meant when they said this.  I do not speak for the Okanagan people, but my knowledge comes from my Okanagan heritage.

The discord that we see around us, to my view form inside my Okanagan community, is at a level that is not endurable.  A suicidal coldness is seeping into all levels of interaction; there is a dispassion of energy that has become a way of life in illness and other forms of human pain.  I am not implying that we no longer suffer for each other as humans but rather that such suffering is felt deeply and continuously and cannot be withstood, so feeling must be shut off.  I think of the Okanagan word used by my father to describe this condition, and I understand it better.  Translation is difficult, but an interpretation in English might be “people without hearts” - people who have lost the capacity to experience the deep generational bond to other humans and to their surrounding.  It refers to collective disharmony and alienation from land.  It refers to those whose emotion is narrowly focused on their individual sense of well-being without regard to the well-being of others in the collective. 

The results of this dispassion are now being displayed as large nation-states continuously reconfiguring economic boundaries into a world economic disorder to cater to big business.  This is causing a tidal flow of refugees from environmental and social disasters, compounded by disease and famine as people are displaced in the rapidly expanding worldwide chaos.  War itself becomes continuous as dispossession, privatization of lands, exploitation of resources and a cheap labour force become the mission of “peacekeeping”.  The goal of finding new markets is the justification of the Westernization of  ‘undeveloped’ cultures.

Indigenous people, not long removed from our co-operative, self-sustaining lifestyles on our lands, do not survive well in this atmosphere of aggression and dispassion.  I know that we experience it as a destructive force, because I personally experience it so.  Without being whole in our community, on our land, with the protection it has as a reservation, I could not survive.  In knowing that, I know the depth of the despair and hopelessness of those who are not whole in a community or still on their own land.  In know the depth of the void, I fear for us all, as the indigenous people remaining connected to the land begin to succumb or surrender.  I fear this as the greatest fear for all humanity.  I fear this because I know that without my land and my people I am not alive.  I am simply flesh waiting to die.

Could it be that all people experience some form of this today?  If this is so, it seems to me that it is in the matter of the heart where we must reconstruct.  Perhaps it is most important to create communities with those who have the insight to fear, because they share strong convictions.  Perhaps together they might create working models for re-establishing what is human. Yet fear is not enough to bind together community, and I cannot help but be filled with pessimism, for I continue to see the breakdown of emotional ties between people. 

I see the thrust of technology into our daily lives, and I see the ways we subvert emotional ties to people by the use of communications that serve to depersonalize.  I see how television, radio, telephone and now computer networks create ways to promote depersonalized communication.  We can sit in our living rooms and be entertained by extreme violence and destruction and be detached from the suffering of the people.  We can call on the phone or send e-mail to someone we may never speak to in person. Through technology there is a constant deluge of people who surround us but with whom we have no real physical or personal link, so we feel nothing toward them. We can end up walking over a person starving or dying on the street and feeling nothing, except perhaps curiosity.  We can see land being destroyed and polluted and not worry as long as it’s not on our doorstep.  But when someone is linked to us personally, we make decisions differently.  We try harder to assist because we care about them.

In a healthy whole community, the people interact with each other in shared emotional response.  They move together emotionally to respond to crisis or celebration.  They ‘commune’ in the everyday act of living.  Being a part of such a communing is to be fully alive, fully human.  To be without community in this way is to be alive only in the flesh, to be alone, to be lost to being human.  It is then possible to violate and destroy others and their property without remorse. 

With these things in mind, I see how a market economy subverts community to where whole cities are made up of total strangers on the move from one job to another.  This is unimaginable  to us.  How can a person be a human while continuously living in isolation, fear and adversity?  How can people 20 yards away from each other be total strangers?  I do see that having to move continuously just to live is painful and that close emotional ties are best avoided in such an economy.  I do not see how one remains human, for community to me is feeling the warm security of familiar people like a blanket wrapped around you, keeping out the frost.

The Okanagan word we have for ‘extended family’ is translated as ‘sharing one skin’.  The concept refers to blood ties within community and the instinct to protect our individual selves extended to all who share the same skin.  I know how powerful the solidarity is of peoples bound together by land, blood and love.  This is the largest threat to those interests wanting to secure control of lands and resources that have been passed on in a healthy condition from generation to generation of families.

Land bonding is not possible in the kind of economy surrounding us, because land must be seen as real estate to be ‘used’ and parted with if necessary.  I see the separation is accelerated by the concept that ‘wilderness’ needs to be tamed by ‘development’ and that this is used to justify displacement of peoples and unwanted species.  I know what it feels like to be an endangered species on my land, to see the land dying with us.  It is my body that is being torn, deforested and poisoned by ‘development’.  Every fish, plant, insect, bird and animal that disappears is part of me dying.  I know all their names and I touch them with my spirit.  I feel it every day, as my grandmother and my father did.

I do know that people must come to community on the land.  The transience of people criss-crossing the land must halt, and people must commune together on the land to protect it and all our future generations.  Self-sustaining indigenous peoples still on the land are already doing this and are the only ones now standing between society and total self-destruction.  They present an opportunity to relearn and reinstitute the rights we all have as humans.  Indigenous rights must be protected, for we are the protectors of Earth. 

I know that being Okanagan helps me have the capacity to bond with everything and every person I encounter.  I do not stand silently by.  I stand with you against the disorder.

How can we translate these insights into effective land reform?  It is no easy task.  The lessons learned from our habits of dominating land are deeply ingrained and slow to pass away.  We face barriers every step of the way because so much of our economic structure is based on the speculative value of the land.  The land trust movement in North America has begun to make a small dent by putting land into legal forms other than traditional ownership.

Any society can afford to look after its land and keep it healthy and beautiful in perpetuity.  There are no technical difficulties and there is no lack of relevant knowledge.  There is no need to consult economic experts when the question is one of priorities.  We know too much about ecology today to have any excuse for the many abuses that are currently going on in the management of the land, in the management of animals, in food storage, food processing, and in heedless urbanization.  If we permit them, this is not due to poverty, as if we could not afford to stop them; it is due to the fact that, as a society, we have no firm basis of belief in any meta-economic values, and when there is no such belief the economic calculus takes over.

If we are the universe reflecting on itself, then let us do so with courage and imagination. No one can stop us from imagining another kind of future, one that departs from the terrible cataclysm of violent conflict, of hateful divisions, poverty and suffering.  Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands.

Let us move from criticism to construction.  We wish those well who choose not to join us.  We move forward without malice or bitterness.  Let us remember that we are blessed for the opportunities that now present themselves to us.

Action

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? 

Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other

people won’t feel insecure around you.

When we let our own light shine,

we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Marianne Williamson

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true.

You may have to work for it, however.

  Illusions, Richard Bach

The journey that we now seek to set out on is at once outrageous and achievable – to consciously transform an entire civilization through collective intent.

We will begin our work in our own local communities.  We will identify what are our needs in terms of goods and services.  We will look to meet as many of these needs locally as possible.  We will seek out individuals and organizations who see themselves as part of Nexus.  Each individual and organization will respond in writing as to why they believe their goods and services should be included in Nexus.  This information will then be organised by category (similar to the yellow pages) and available to the community both in published form and on the Internet.

At the same time, we will identify those goods and services which cannot be produced locally or which require a larger base to produce them efficiently, such as our power requirements, transportation systems, and the harvesting/extraction of raw materials such as lumber and minerals.  Again, participants at this level will be identified and afforded the opportunity to explain how they see themselves fitting into Nexus.

Further, we will begin to define and carry out policy around trade between each region as decided by each region.  We will continue to expand until there is a global network of connection based on the principles outlined in Nexus.  We will develop political organizations and social structures which are extensions of our current evolving state of consciousness.  We will develop policy and procedures around all the aspects of our lives.  We will develop and support a knowledge base of our collective wisdom.  We will watch from afar as society B drifts into extinction.

It is time!  We are ready!

You can reach Nexus at:

change@imaginexus.org

We’ve got your T-shirt in just your size and colour!! 

It comes with a lifetime guarantee not to fade.

Afterword

Of course, the proposal has changed over the thirty years.  The current proposal represents my feeling that our movement needs to immediately deal with the economic model at the heart of this old world and to reverse the damage that has been caused.  It needs to immediately reflect the belief that all solutions must be global as the challenges that we face are at this level.  And it immediately needs to force an end to the destruction and human misery caused by wars.

From this place and space, we will re-vision all the other aspects of our lives and implement the means to get us to this new setting.

Bibliography

The ideas found in this book represent themes from every book that I have ever read, every conversation that I have ever had.  I have been influenced by concepts which would be described as ancient and timeless, to those which are heralded as being cutting edge.  In the end, it is impossible to unravel what is mine and what belongs to someone else.  We are all linked together in this web of thought and analysis and we are all capable of making this analysis because of who we are currently and because of those who have come before us. 

There may be nothing original in this text.  Perhaps this is the way it should be.  We know and are capable of knowing all that we need to know in order to support this proposal.  There is nothing essentially missing that would prevent us from proceeding.  There is no significant piece that we are waiting for in order to move forward.  We have all the information we need. 

At the same time, I do want to acknowledge the work of authors that I have borrowed from extensively in this book.  To those of you who feel that you might have been missed in this declaration, I hope that the knowledge that all our contributions have allowed us to arrive at this place in time together, will provide sufficient reward for your work. 

Small Is Beautiful……………………………………        E. F. Schumacher

Shooting the Hippo………………………………….           Linda McQuaig

The Cult of Impotence………………………………           Linda McQuaig

The Unconscious Civilization………………………           John Ralston Saul

No Contest………………………………………….           Alfie Kohn

The Chalice and the Blade………………………….            Riane Eisler

The Untouched Key…………………………………           Alice Miller

Banished Knowledge……………………………….            Alice Miller

Breaking Down the Wall of Silence………………...           Alice Miller