Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close ---Episode 52

                         THE ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

                                             (continuation)

   Money is not an ordinary number after all. It is our ticket to the same things that people have wanted in other times and places. It is a measure of the life energies expended in its acquisition. It has become our  answer to the question "What am I worth?" and the measure of our collective worth and accomplishment as a nation. Professional charities have even made money the measure of our compassion. "Make a difference. Send us your check today." Defining ourselves in terms of money, we become trapped in a downward spiral of increasing alienation from living, from our own spiritual nature.  The cycle looks a little like this : 

QUEST FOR MONEY (widens the gap between ourselves, family, and community  = DEEPENING ALIENATION ( creates inner sense of social and spiritual emptiness) = ADVERTISERS ( assure us their products will make us whole) = BUYING THEIR PRODUCT ( requires more money) = QUEST FOR MONEY


   Rather than teaching us that the path to fulfillment is to experience living to the fullest through our relationships with family, community, nature, and the living cosmos, the corporate media continuously repeat a false promise : whatever our longings, the market is the path to their instant gratification. Our purpose is to consume---we are born to shop. Entranced by the siren song of the market, we consistently undervalue the life energy that we put into obtaining money and overvalue the expected life energy gains from spending it. The more we our life energies over to money, the more power we yield to the institutions that control our access to money, and to the things it will buy. Yielding such power serves the corporate interest well, because corporations are creatures of money but serves our human interest poorly, because we are creatures of nature and spirit. 
   Forced to reexamine who we are by the limits of the planet's ability to accommodate our greed, we find ourselves confronted with a beautiful truth. Whereas our pursuit of material abundance has created material scarcity, our pursuit of life may bring a new sense of social, spiritual, and even material abundance. 
   People who experience an abundance of love in their lives rarely seek solace in compulsive, exclusionary personal acquisition. For the emotionally deprived, no extreme of materialistic indulgence can ever be enough, and the material world becomes insufficient to our wants. A world starved of love becomes one of material scarcity. In contrast, a world of love is also one of material abundance. When we are spiritually whole and experience the caring support of community, thrift is a natural part of a full and disciplined life. That which is sufficient to one's needs brings a fulfilling sense of nature's abundance. 
   The implications are profound. Our seemingly insatiable quest for money and material consumption is in fact a quest to fill a void in our lives created by  lack of love. It is a consequence of dysfunctional societies in which money has displaced our sense of spiritual connection as the foundation of our cultural values and relationships. The result is a world of material scarcity, massive inequality, overtaxed environmental systems, and social disintegration. As long as we embrace money-making as our collective purpose and structure our institutions to give this goal precedence over all others, the void in our lives will grow and the human crisis will deepen. There is an obvious solution : create societies that give a higher value to nurturing love than to making money.
   Idealistic as this mat sound, it is entirely within our means.  The key is a shift in consciousness already being created through an emerging synthesis of scientific and religious knowledge that embraces the integral connection between reality's material and spiritual dimensions. Just as the Copernican Revolution ushered in the scientific industrial era by freeing us from misperceptions about ourselves and the nature of our reality, an Ecological Revolution, based on a more holistic integration of the spiritual and material, may usher in an ecological era that will open as yet unimagined opportunities for our social and spiritual development. However, to realize this goal, we must reclaim for people the power that we have yielded to money and a corporate-dominated global economy. 

          Localizing Economies, Globalizing Consciousness 

We humans have a distinctive ability to anticipate the consequences of our individual actions for our collective future and to change our behavior accordingly. We also have the capacity to discern repeating patterns in evolutionary processes and to distill from those patterns insights into how to maximize our own evolutionary potentials. One such regularly repeated pattern in the self-organizing growth and evolution of crystals, biological organisms, social organizations, and consciousness is a persistent advance toward higher orders of complexity. Systems with the highest evolutionary potential are those able to nurture a rich diversity within a coherent unifying structure. The greater the diversity, the greater the evolutionary potential ---if the unifying structure is maintained. 
   Arnold Toynbee found this pattern in his epic study of the growth and decline of the world's greatest civilizations. Civilizations in decline were consistently characterized by a "tendency toward standardization and uniformity." This pattern contrasted sharply with "the tendency toward differentiation and diversity" during the growth stage of civilizations. It appears to be a near-universal truth that diversity is the foundation of developmental progress in complex systems, and uniformity is the foundation of stagnation and decay. 
   Standardization and uniformity seem to be almost inevitable outcomes of a globalized economy dominated by massive globe-spanning corporations geared to mass production and marketing in a culturally homogenized world.  It is difficult to imagine a civilization moving more totally toward standardization and uniformity than one unified by Coca-Cola and MTV. The process of corporate globalization are not only spreading mass poverty, environmental devastation, and social disintegration, they are also weakening our capacity for constructive social and cultural innovation at a time when such innovation is needed as never 
before. Corporate globalization is leading us to an evolutionary dead end. 
   By contrast, economic systems composed of locally rooted, self-reliant economies create in each locality the political, economic, and cultural spaces within which people can find a path to the future consistent with their distinctive aspirations, history, culture, and ecosystems. A global system composed of local economies can accomplish what a single global economy cannot ---encourage the rich and flourishing diversity of robust local cultures and generate the variety of experience and learning that is essential to the enrichment of the whole.