The Idealized Society
You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it.
- Tennessee Williams
As I watch the Indigenous people of this world fight, yet again, for their rights in Paris at the Climate talks – I find this scenario analogous to a county meeting I attended in Fairfield, Iowa back in October whereby the farmers came to fight for their right to grow healthy crops on healthy lands and live a healthy life. Not a life fighting the government and large industrial agriculture which seeks to push them out in the name of efficiency and at the expense of cruelty to all beings. Both these scenarios, at the highest level, are examples where time and again I am ashamed that I sit comfortably in my home, watching from afar, others fight for those things I feel entitled to. And I am reminded that when I don’t stand up against this oppression for all beings – then how else can I be defined as other than an entitled, selfish, cowardly representative of the egocentric society around me and for which my lack of action, my inaction, supports?
Carl Rogers writes of how society pushes us towards an idealized self, the one society needs us to conform to in order to fit in, yet dis-ease occurs when defenses and facades keep us distant from our real self. Rogers puts forth five attributes of a healthy person:
- Moving towards a more authentic expression of self, always aware of what one's thinking and feeling.
- Is open to one's experience, no defensiveness.
- Has trust in self, believing the answers to life's biggest questions lie within self.
- Possesses an internal locus of evaluation.
- Has a willingness to keep growing and becoming.
Unfortunately, many of our leaders today, be they political, social, or organizational, represent and defend a non-sustainable way of life built upon economic models of scarcity and limited supply to keep the consumer fearful of unavailability and play in to their ego to be the one of the few to have and ultimately buying far more than they need to survive. As this model and our appetites grew, there has become an entitled sense of righteousness that ignores the needs of other species, other nations, tribes, and races, and our own future generations, all of which are “values that do not reflect our deeper human nature” (Bill Plotkin).
Ayni is a Peruvian shamanistic term meaning “today for you, tomorrow for me” or alternatively said “so as I give, so shall I be provided for”. It is the ethical principal that guides us to live in sacred relationship with each other and the Earth. This Sacred Reciprocity is the essence of shamanism which is rooted in the understanding that we are all connected to each other, to the earth, to the stars, to the animals, to the plants, to the rocks, to the seen and unseen worlds (don Oscar Miro-Quesada).
The premise of my research is that only through connection and meaning with others and in nature can we build the capacity to be able to support the work necessary to achieve the attributes of a healthy person as outlined above. Annual goals, corporate memo’s, strategy initiatives or ill-fated attempts at objective, task list driven efforts to change behavior have not and will not change our ways. I desire to explore alternative ways of helping the leaders “Transcend the I” (Buber) and build organizations whereby the values of the community are based upon and measured by the demonstrated actions of its leaders. Leaders who value the experience of the whole, appeal to the group as a “guiding ideal” of interdependence and moral bonds between membership and leadership based on virtues of cooperation, and the obligations that attend to responsible decision making lie upon those that bear impact to the whole of society by asking questions such as:
- How do we cultivate and recognize people’s innate sense of concern for matters beyond themselves?
- How do we tap passion, energy, imagination, perseverance and willingness to truly grow as human beings, in ourselves and collectively?
- How do we connect this concern and willingness to creating products, processes, and business models that address the major issues of our time – food, water, energy, waste and toxicity.. and the widening gap between rich and poor.
We need to find the collective space for healing and restoring wholeness to the world, whether that world be an individual experience, a collective residence, a national (or religious) identity or cosmic calling. Wholeness is soul, is healing, and the act of healing is to make whole. To feel an integrated balanced, harmonious sense of participatory bliss with the entirety of the whole.
Thomas Berry writes of how “We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our instinctive resources…”. Society has stalled us in the adolescent phase of our life, that western shield of the four directions, which if you stay too long harbors narcissism, depression, and selfishness. We need to move through the North and into the East, rediscover the sage wisdom in our elders and indigenous ways of being in this world, not just doing, and bring back the one, and only one, differentiating factor of the human animal from all others – our imagination and ability to create a different future.
