This book was originally published in 1995, but a new edition was released in 2015.
Politicians and the press display little awareness of life beyond the façade and even less understanding of the root causes of poverty and unemployment, inequality, violent crime, family and community breakdowns, and environmental collapse. Our leaders seem unable to move beyond blaming their political opponents and promoting the same old ineffectual solutions––accelerating economic growth through deregulation, cutting taxes, removing trade barriers, giving industry more incentives and subsidies, forcing welfare recipients to work, hiring more police, and building more jails.
I find it is often the people who live ordinary lives far removed from the corridors of power who have the clearest perception of what is really happening. Yet they are often reluctant to speak openly what they believe in their hearts to be true, because it is too frightening and differs too dramatically from what those with more impressive credentials and access to the media are saying. They feel isolated and helpless.
The questions nag: Are things really as bad as they seem to me? Why don’t others see it? Am I stupid? Am I being intentionally misinformed? What can I do? What can anyone do?…
The more interesting part… has to do with my gradual awakening to a troubling truth: that conventional economic theory and practice is a leading cause of––no the solution to––poverty, exclusion and environmental system collapse.…
In 1961, a summer in Indonesia immersed me in the heroic struggle, spiritual grounding, and generosity of people who live in desperate poverty.…
[E]fforts by government, business, and voluntary agencies to improve the conditions of the urban and rural poor… often (carry) a disturbing message: Externally imposed “development” [is] seriously disrupting human relationships and community life––often causing severe hardship for the very people it [claims] to benefit.
By contrast, when people [find] the freedom and self-confidence to take control of their own economic lives, they generally [fare] far better.
[Real] development can be purchased with foreign aid. Development depends on people’s ability to gain control of, and effectively ue, the real resources of their localities––land, water, labor, technology, and human ingenuity and motivation––to meet their needs. Yet most development interventions transfer control of local resources to large centralized public bureaucracies that are unaccountable to local people and unresponsive to their needs. The more money that flows through these central institutions, the more dependent people become, the less control they have over their own lives and resources, and the more rapidly the gap grows between those who hold central power and the local people an communities seeking to make a living using local resources.
I came to see a yawning gap between actions that increase economic growth and those that result in better lives for people. This difference raised a basic question: What would development look like if, instead of being focused on growth and money, it were truly people centered––making people both its purpose and its primary instrument?…
[We need] a theory of sustainable societies that [will] apply to Northern and Southern countries alike. Second, the theory must go beyond the sterile formulations of mainstream economists and explain why human societies have chosen to so disrupt the natural self-organizing processes of living communities…
The Western scientific vision of a mechanical universe has created a philosophical alienation from our inherently spiritual nature. This is reinforced in our daily lives by the increasing alignment of our institutions with the monetary values of the marketplace.
The more dominant money becomes in our lives, the less sense we have of the spiritual bond that forms the foundation of vital human communities and binds us to the rest of Living Earth’s community of life. The pursuit of spiritual fulfillment has been increasingly displaced by an all-consuming and increasingly self-destructive pursuit of money––a human artifact without substance or intrinsic value.
It [seems] evident from our analysis that to reestablish a sustainable relationship to a living Earth, we must break free of the illusions of the world of money, rediscover spiritual meaning in our lives, and root our economic institutions in place and community.… the task of people-centered development in its fullest sense must be the creation of life-centered societies in which the economy is but one of hte instruments of good living––not the purpose of human existence. Because our leaders are trapped in the myths and the reward systems of the institutions they head, the leadership in this creative process of institutional and values re-creation must come from within civil society.…
Development as [understood] thirty years ago, and as it is to this day vigorously promoted by the World Bank, the IMF (International Monetary Fund),… and most of the world’s powerful economic institutions, isn’t working for the majority of humanity. And the roots of the problem are not found among the poor of the “underdeveloped” world. They are found in the countries that set global standards for wasteful extravagance and dominate the global policies that are leading our world to social and ecological self-destruction.…
[America’s] “success” is one of the world’s key problems. Indeed, the ultimate demonstration of this assertion is found in America itself.…
[The] same policies the United States has been advocating for the world have created a Third World within its own borders. This is revealed in its growing gap between rich and poor, dependence on foreign debt, deteriorating educational systems, rising infant mortality, economic dependence on the export of primary commodities––including the last remaining primary forests––indiscriminate dumping of toxic wastes and the breakdown of families and communities.…
[The powerful have consolidated the nation’s wealth in their own hands and absolved themselves of responsibility for their less fortunate neighbors. Labor unions have withered as American workers desperate to keep their jobs have been forced to compete with the even more desperate unemployed of Mexico, Bangladesh, and other Third World countries by negotiating for wage cuts with corporations that may still bear American names but honor no national allegiance.…
Only when we in the United States are prepared to assume responsibility for changing ourselves will others be able to fully reclaim the social and environmental spaces we have appropriated from them and recover their ability to meet their own needs within a just, democratic, and sustainable world of cooperative partnerships.…
[There is a] truth that the corporate PR machine sought to obscure with false promises of growth, jobs, and prosperity for all: far from advancing universal democracy and prosperity, the true intention of “free” trade agreements is to consolidate corporate control of the world’s resources, markets, labor, and technology for short-term profits.
Instantly, [after 9/11] the threat to freedom and democracy posed by trade agreements paled in comparative significance.
Outflanked, upstaged, and lacking a rallying focal point for public protests, the global resistance against the advance of corporate empire through deceptively labeled and surreptitiously negotiated free trade agreements lost its momentum, visibility, and focus. Contrary to appearance, however, the social energies it focused did not die; they scattered. As the scattered, they sparked countless new but less visible, less clearly connected initiatives, creating the foundation for a deep transformation of institutional power far beyond simply blocking the abuse of trade agreements that undermine democracy and deepen corporate rule.
Every successful social movement builds around a perceived gap between what is and what can be. Some participants focus on resisting and discrediting the stories and institutions that drive the status quo. Others focus on the stories and practices that build the new. Some address both. A key is to recognize that while resistance is essential to limit the damage, resistance alone is a losing strategy.
[A] viable human economy must organize the way the rest of nature organizes. Yet mainstream biologists [seem] to work only within the narrow “competition for survival” frame of Neo-Darwinism used by market fundamentalists to legitimate their life-destroying theories. They [seem] as out of touch with life’s deeper processes as the economists who embrace market fundamentalism.
[Mae-Wan Ho and Elisabet Sahtouris… advocates of the new biology… study living systems as self-organizing place-based cooperative communities. They observe that the evident competition within and between species is only one element of far more complex and fundamentally cooperative processes by which life organizes to maintain the conditions essential to its own existence. The underlying organizing principles of living communities in fact align to a remarkable extent with the principles of the community-based market economies…
[We] should stop trying to fix a phantom-wealth Wall Street economy dedicated to expropriating real wealth it had no role in creating. Instead, we should create real-wealth Main Street economies populated by businesses that provide good jobs producing beneficial goods and services in response to community needs.
In March 2012… [during the] Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development… corporatists (those who promote corporate rule) proposed that to save nature we must put a price on her.
[Indigenous leaders’] position was clear and unbending. Earth is our Sacred Mother and she is not for sale. Her care is our sacred responsibility. Her fruits must be equitably and responsibly shared by all. A number of nonindigenous environmental and economic justice groups embraced the Living Earth-mother theme and joined with the indigenous groups to promote a legal recognition of the rights of nature.
[For] Wall Street, Earth is simply a pool of salable commodities. To reduce its use, raise the price. They fail to mention that this limits its use to those best able to pay.
For indigenous people, Earth is a living being, a self-organizing community of life that maintains the conditions essential to life and provides sustained flows of nutrients, water, and energy that all its members––including humans––require. It is our sacred human duty to assure the health of her generative systems. Their health and productivity must never be compromised. The services these system (sic) provide are a common birthrights of all and their fruits are rightfully shared.
[These] two contrasting stories [define] the essential difference between a phantom-wealth economy and a real-wealth economy.
[What most economists peddle as settle science is grounded in moral bankruptcy and intellectual fraud. This is strong language, but our ability to navigate our way to a viable and prosperous human future requires that we confront uncomfortable truths with open eyes and truthful voices.
[The systemic forces nurturing the growth and dominance of global corporations are at the heart of the correct human dilemma [and] to avoid collective catastrophe we must radically transform the underlying system of business to restore power to the small and local.
[Each] person has access to an inner spiritual wisdom and that our collective salvation as a species depends, in part, on tapping into this wisdom.
[As] we reawaken to our true nature as living beings, born of and nurtured by a living Earth born of a living universe, we may achieve the creative balance between market and community, science and religion, and money and spirit that is essential to the creation and maintenance of healthy human societies.
[We] live in a complex world in which nearly every aspect of our lives is connected in some way with every other aspect. When we limit ourselves to fragmented approaches to dealing with systemic problems, our solutions are certain to prove inadequate. If our species is to survive the crisis we have created for ourselves, we must develop a capacity for whole-systems thought and action.
Whole-systems thinking calls us to be skeptical of simplistic solutions, to cultivate our ability to see connections between problems and events that conventional discourse ignores, and to find the courage to delve into subject matter outside our direct experience and expertise.
This book presents [the author’s] synthesis. [He claims to be] learning as you are learning. Exercise your own independent critical judgment. Construct your own synthesis. Always bear in mind that we are all participants in an act of creation. None of us can claim a monopoly on truth in our individual and collective search for an understanding of issues that in some instances are so complex they defy human understanding.
WHEN CORPORATIONS RULE THE WORLD
Prologue: A Personal Journey
David C. Korten
Copyright © 2015 by The Living Economies Forum
Synopsis by
Roger Willis Mills, II
By This Love: Part Two
rogerwillismills 