CHAPTER 19
LEARNING TO LIVE, LIVING TO LEARN

Once an emergent phenomenon has appeared, it can’t be changed by working backwards, by changing the local parts that gave birth to it. You can only change an emergent phenomenon by creating a countervailing force of greater strength. This means that the work of change is to start over, to organize new local efforts, connect them to each other, and know that their values and practices can emerge as something even stronger.

MARGARET J. WHEATLEY

Midway in my international development career I had a defining learning experience. I was engaging the question of what makes the difference between development initiatives that achieve sustained positive changes in people’s lives and those that produce only fleeting, or even negative, changes. As I examined the experience of a number of successful interventions in different countries of Asia, the answer revealed itself.

In the unsuccessful initiatives, outside experts were brought in to prepare a detailed blueprint with clear rules, budgets, timelines, and benchmarks. A public or private bureaucracy then attempted to implement those plans through a top-down process of command and control. This was the practice for most official development projects, which have an impressive record of failure.

Successful initiatives, by contrast, arose from the bottom up through a thoughtful process of trial-and-error learning through doing, which gradually created a system of organized support through which the learning could be shared and others could be guided in replications. I learned later that others who had made similar discoveries called the process social learning: the process by which groups of people, and even whole societies, learn new ways of being and relating through a shared learning experience.

It all seemed so obvious once I saw it. Blueprints are useful for designing and constructing buildings and machines based on established mechanical principles in static settings. Social systems are living, complex, dynamic, and constantly evolving as they learn from shared experience. They self-organize around ideas and relationships. The organism, not the machine, provides the appropriate metaphor. The relevant knowledge resides not in the heads of outside experts but in the people who populate the system. The challenge is to help them recognize, organize, and use that knowledge in ever more effective ways.

A THREEFOLD SOCIAL LEARNING STRATEGY

Stories alone do not, of course, bring down the institutions of Empire or put in place the rules, relationships, and institutions of a New Economy. These must be lived into being from the bottom up through dynamic self-organizing social learning processes. Lessons from this experience then inform specific initiatives that demand changes in the rules that determine whose rights and interests the power of the state will protect and advance.

Through these social learning processes, people innovate, create, learn to relate in new ways, and share the lessons of their experience. Individual learning translates into community learning that translates into species learning.

The overall process has three primary elements. Through their varied initiatives, participants:

1. CHANGE THE DEFINING STORIES OF THE MAINSTREAM CULTURE. As was already discussed, every great transformational social movement begins with new ideas and conversations that challenge and ultimately change a prevailing cultural story. In the case of the New Economy, we must change the prevailing stories by which we understand the nature of wealth, the purpose of the economy, our relationship to a living Earth, and the possibilities of our human nature. Through public presentations, books, magazines, talk shows, and the Internet’s many communications tools, millions of people are spreading stories of New Economy possibilities, in part through action, which inspires further discussion and new personal choices.

2. CREATE A NEW ECONOMIC REALITY FROM THE BOTTOM UP. Many of those who have been inspired by some aspect of the New Economy story are already engaged in initiatives that are building the foundation of strong local living economies. They are establishing and supporting locally owned human-scale businesses and family farms that create regional self-reliance in food, energy, and other basic essentials. They are moving their money to local banks and credit unions, retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency, and changing land-use policies to favor compact communities, reduce auto dependence, and reclaim agricultural and forest lands.

3. CHANGE THE RULES TO SUPPORT THE VALUES AND INSTITUTIONS OF THE EMERGENT NEW REALITY. The rules put in place by Wall Street lobbyists put the economic rights of global financiers and corporations ahead of the economic rights of ordinary people, place-based communities, and even nations. As we change the story and build appropriate institutions from the bottom up, we gain the political traction needed to change the rules to support democratic self-determination at the lowest feasible level of systems organization.

Work on each of these elements is complementary and simultaneous. It necessarily begins with a story of unrealized possibility that serves as a guiding beacon for those who are working to create a new reality, which in turn creates practical new experience to guide those who are changing the rules.

Nothing communicates the new story as powerfully as successful on-the-ground demonstrations, particularly when they are on the scale of a town, city, or region. New stories and practical demonstrations build a political constituency to support rule changes that in turn accelerate the emergence of new demonstrations and further spread the story — leading ultimately to national- and global-scale change.

Recall that chapter 13 identified seven critical system interventions. Think of these as natural clusters of activity, each focused on a key system-change leverage point. In each instance, success requires the cooperative effort of many groups, some working on changing a defining story, others creating new on-the-ground realities, and others working to change relevant rules.

Take the Living Indicators cluster as an example. Change starts with changing the story about the purpose of the economy. Instead of growing GDP and inflating share prices, the economy’s proper purpose is to support the healthy development and function of people, families, communities, and nature. Economic performance is properly assessed against these outcomes.

Many groups are engaged in communicating the new story by promoting living-indicator projects in their communities or by carrying out studies that compare the performance of regional and national economies against a variety of living indicators. Others are mobilizing political support for rules that direct national statistical bureaus to develop and report on new indicators and that require other government agencies to use them as the basis for assessing program performance and policy options.

Successful social movements are emergent, evolving, radically self-organizing, and involve the dedicated efforts of many people, each finding the role that best uses his or her gifts and passions. Social movements grow and evolve around framing ideas and mutually supportive relationships instead of through top-down direction. New ideas gain traction or not depending on their inherent appeal and utility. As individual groups find one another, new alliances may emerge or not, depending on what works for those involved in the moment. Some alliance are fleeting; others endure.

As a social movement develops, multiple sources of leadership are essential. Any individual or group that presumes to be the leader of the whole or aspires to organize a central coordinating body to impose order on the chaos does not understand the process.

A SUPPORTIVE INSTITUTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Four professional fields bring specialized expertise to the work of defining and propagating the cultural stories by which we understand our nature and possibilities: the media, education, religion, and the arts. Call these the cultural worker professions. Collectively they shape and disseminate the framing cultural stories of the society, including those by which we collectively define the economy’s proper purpose and structure.

Each of these fields is subject to co-optation by Wall Street in the service of money. Each can choose to contribute to our collective liberation by helping to shape and communicate the new stories, encourage participation in initiatives that are creating the new reality, facilitate the sharing of lessons, and build political support for changing the rules.

In many instances, the institutions that employ the majority of the members of each of these professional fields are structured and managed in the service of money. Professionals thus encumbered who make the choice to serve life must decide whether to stay with their institutions and work for transformation from within or leave to join those on the outside who are creating the institutions of the future.

Here are some of the issues and possibilities.

Media

The profit-driven, advertising-dependent communications model of the corporate media is ideally suited to serving Wall Street interests. The consolidation of the mass print and broadcast media under the control of corporate conglomerates has reduced much of the mainstream news reporting to inane, politically slanted commentary limited to the market fundamentalist economic frame favorable to Wall Street interests.

The other end of the media spectrum is anchored by the service-driven communications model of nonprofit independent media outlets that democratize media control and create a vast potential to hasten a global embrace of the life-affirming cultural values of Earth Community.

YES! Magazine, a nonprofit independent communications organization for which I serve as board chair, is an example of the potential of this model. The fact that YES!is thriving even at this time when many conventional media outlets are failing suggests that this is a viable model responding to an important felt need.

We all live in the midst of a communications revolution that is linking the world in a seamless web of communication and information. This capability can be used to strengthen elite control or to provide an open-access information commons in support of the social learning processes that are building the New Economy.

Advancing a turning from the autocratic corporate media model to the democratic independent media model is an essential priority for citizen initiatives and policy advocacy. Many civil society initiatives are already demonstrating the possibilities in community newspapers and radio stations, independent media centers, blogs, and podcasts.

Other citizen initiatives are working to reverse corporate media concentration, reclaim the communications frequency spectrum, and maintain the Internet as an open-access resource. Some of these initiatives are opening political deliberation to diverse voices and lively debate. Others are exposing the bias and banality of corporate media and demanding accountability.

Education

As Wall Street has rewritten the tax laws to absolve corporations of their civic responsibility to pay their fair share of taxes, cash-strapped public schools and universities have turned to corporations for sponsorships, curriculum materials, and research grants. This has given corporations undue influence over the underlying academic culture to the detriment of the critical intellectual inquiry and teaching we so badly need.

This is one of the many reasons why reinstating a progressive tax system for both individuals and corporations is a high priority for a New Economy policy agenda. Corporations are properly required to support our educational institutions through taxes rather than through gifts that compromise the integrity of those institutions and their ability to produce creative, innovative citizens with critical minds.

The capacity and desire to learn are inherent in our human nature. Subjecting our children and young adults to test-driven regimentation isolated from the life of community suppresses this capacity and desire and is a poor substitute for real learning experience. We need education that prepares our young people for life and leadership in the vibrant human communities of the new human era that it falls to them to live into being.

The narrow discipline-oriented institutions of higher learning face a particular challenge. To become relevant they must take the following steps:

• Take down the walls that separate them from the community and engage in helping communities build local economies that function in harmony with their local ecosystems

• Organize faculty and students into interdisciplinary teams to engage in the study and design of critical institutional systems

• Teach history as an examination of the large forces that have shaped our past in search of insights into how large-scale social change happens and how it may be shaped by organized human intervention to put ourselves on a positive path

• Replace departments of economics with departments of applied ecology that incorporate economics as a sub-discipline and bring institutional and ecological frameworks to the fore

• Feature human developmental psychology courses that explore how cultural and institutional experiences shape or impede our individual progress to a fully mature human consciousness

• Replace the machine metaphor with the living-organism metaphor as the defining intellectual frame

• Assure that the perspective of the new biologists who strive to understand life on its own terms has a strong presence in biology departments

Such innovations are most likely to come one faculty member, one department, one school or university at a time at the beginning, but they will quickly grow to critical mass as the relevance of the New Economy system frame becomes more evident.

Religion

The New Economy must be built on the foundation of a moral and spiritual awakening. Faith institutions have an essential role to play in advancing this awakening, as well as in bridging the class, race, and religious divides easily exploited by political powers that want to keep us dependent on the centralized power of the Wall Street–Washington axis.

Sermons and adult education programs can raise the moral issues relating to human responsibility for one another and the living Earth. They might begin by examining Wall Street culture and institutions from the perspective of the table in chapter 9 contrasting the seven deadly sins with the seven life-serving virtues. They might encourage people to share and examine their personal beliefs regarding the potential and limitations of our human nature and the implications for our prospect of achieving each of the seven interventions of the New Economy policy agenda outlined in chapter 13.

They can form partnerships with faith institutions that follow different traditions and minister to people from other races, ethnicities, and classes to share perspective on the profound moral choices at hand.

I am privileged to count among my friends and colleagues the three Seattle-based “interfaith amigos” — Rabbi Ted Falcon, Pastor Don Mackenzie, and Sheikh Jamal Rahman — who are modeling interfaith inquiry and inviting fellow searchers from the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to join in their dialogue.¹

As with educational transformation, the transformation of our faith institutions begins one church, synagogue, temple, and mosque at a time, with the potential to build quickly toward critical mass as more faith institutions come to understand what is at stake and what transformational possibilities are at hand.

The Arts

Among the four groups of professionals named, artists are the most likely to self-identify as cultural workers. The best among them are truth tellers who have the ability to awaken our minds from the cultural trance that leads us to consume harmful products, play the mark in Wall Street con games, and support public policies contrary to our interests.

Talented artists can help us see beauty, meaning, and possibility in what we may otherwise experience only as mundane and fragmented. They can take us on a journey to a future no one has yet visited to experience possibilities we may not have imagined.

I came to a deep appreciation of the profound potential of this aspect of the artist’s craft through my friendship with Raffi Cavoukian. I met Raffi only as an adult but have been captivated by the magical quality of his music and its ability to awaken within both children and adults a profound yet playful appreciation of the beauty and possibilities of life. I see the evidence of his influence in the life of each of the many young people I meet from among the millions who grew up on his music.

In the middle of many of my public presentations on the New Economy, I play his “No Wall Too Tall,”² which he originally recorded for the launch of Agenda for a New Economy.It gets the whole auditorium dancing and unleashes an amazingly inspiring energy.³

Artists can use their craft to befuddle our minds, justify evil, and entice us into self-destructive behavior, as demonstrated by the many talented artists in the employ of Wall Street institutions. These corporate artists use their talents to cloud our ability to see the harmful side of Wall Street products, the deceits of its financial scams, and the real interests served by its favored public policies and political candidates. They earn high salaries, work with clear goals, and have impressive financial resources at their command.

Independent artists, by contrast, are commonly unorganized and simply trying to make a modest living producing works of grace and beauty.

Our movement needs the contribution of millions of artists who use their powers of perception and representation to liberate our consciousness, as articulated by Milenko Matanovic in the YES! Magazineissue on Art and Community:

The artist endeavors to perceive directly, without filters or notions.…In the process the artist becomes more aware of the assumptions and myths that govern the world and so gains the ability to discard the obsolete, empower the appropriate, and create the new.…Images of the future generated through the power of imagination are essential to the health of all cultures, for a society’s vitality is lost once its capacity to imagine is gone.…Artists can be a culture’s scouts, forging paths into the future.⁴

My Bainbridge Island friend and colleague Bill Cleveland is collecting and sharing stories of a growing group of independent artists who are engaging whole communities to discover their inner beauty and creative potential through artistic experience. These artists work with children and adults involved in programs of community beautification and cultural enrichment to stage public productions. People who never thought of themselves as actors express and explore stories of themselves and their community in ways that heal and inspire. This strengthens the community’s sense of itself and its readiness to engage together in community building and the creation of vibrant local living economies.⁵

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

For the many millions of us working to create a better world, it is easy to feel discouraged by the seeming insignificance of even major successes relative to the scale of the problems we face as a nation and a species. Consumed by the details and challenges of our daily engagements, we may easily lose sight of the big picture of the powerful social dynamic to which our work is contributing.

Step back from time to time; take a breath, look out beyond the immediate horizon to bring that big picture back into perspective.⁶ Reflect in awe and wonder at the power of the larger social dynamic to which your work contributes.

So how do you know whether your work is contributing to a big-picture outcome? If you can answer yes to any one of the following five questions, then be assured that it is.

• Does it help discredit a false cultural story fabricated to legitimize relationships of domination and exploitation and to replace it with a true story describing unrealized possibilities for growing the real wealth of healthy communities?

• Is it connecting others of the movement’s millions of leaders who didn’t previously know one another, helping them find common cause and build relationships of mutual trust that allow them to speak honestly from their hearts and to know that they can call on one another for support when needed?

• Is it creating and expanding liberated social spaces in which people experience the freedom and support to experiment with living the creative, cooperative, self-organizing relationships of the new story they seek to bring into the larger culture?

• Is it providing a public demonstration of the possibilities of a real-wealth economy?

• Is it mobilizing support for a rule change that will shift the balance of power from the people and institutions of the Wall Street phantom-wealth economy to the people and institutions of living-wealth Main Street economies?

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WHAT CAN YOU DO?

The first step in making a personal contribution to creating the New Economy is to take control of your life and declare your independence from Wall Street by joining the voluntary simplicity movement and cutting back on unnecessary consumption. Beyond that, shop at local independent stores where possible and purchase locally made goods when available. Make the same choices as to where you work and invest to the extent feasible.

Pay with cash at local merchants to save them the credit card fee. Pay your credit card balance when due and avoid using your credit card as an open line of credit. Do your banking with an independent local community bank or credit union that will invest your money back in your community. Green America provides an excellent free guide called Investing in Communities(greenamericatoday.org/PDF/GuideInvestCommunities.pdf).

The second step is to join with others in initiatives that contribute to any one or all of the five activities mentioned under “Making a Difference” on pages 269–272. Engage in conversations about our cultural stories. Facilitate new connections. Create liberated public spaces. Demonstrate new possibilities. Many specific possibilities are mentioned in chapter 16 under the heading “Two Epic Moments in the Great Democratic Experiment.” Link your local initiatives into national networks through groups like the American Independent Business Alliance (amiba.net), the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (livingeconomies. org), and Transition Towns (transitiontowns.org).

Above all, engage in conversations about the realities of Wall Street, the difference between phantom wealth and real wealth, and the nature and possibilities of the New Economy. Be aware that economic reporting and commentary in the corporate media usually reflect a Wall Street phantom-wealth perspective. Listen with a skeptical ear and practice identifying the under lying fallacies. Invite your friends and colleagues to do the same.

Join or form a Common Security Club for mutual education and support in dealing with the economic crisis (extremeinequality.org/?p=92). Consider inviting a group of friends or neighbors to discuss Agenda for a New Economy.You can find a group discussion guide at greatturning.org, along with links to other New Economy discussion resources.

For all of the above, plus a wealth of stories and resources helpful in tracking the larger movement to which your work contributes, subscribe to YES! Magazine and draw on the wealth of resources on its Web site, yesmagazine.org.

You can find other links to resources on the New Economy Working Group site, neweconomyworkinggroup.org.

These are useful guidelines for setting both individual and group priorities. Bear in mind that in a systems-change undertaking of this magnitude, there is no magic bullet and no one is going to make it happen on their own, so don’t be discouraged if the world looks much the same today despite your special and heroic effort yesterday. It took five thousand years to create the mess we are in today. It will take more than a few days to set it right.

We humans have made enormous progress in our technological mastery, but we fall far short in our mastery of ourselves and the potential of our human consciousness. Failing to identify the true sources of our happiness and well-being, we worship at the altar of money to the neglect of the altar of life. Failing to distinguish between money and real wealth, we embrace illusion as reality, and enslavement to the institutions of Wall Street as liberty.

The implosion of the Wall Street phantom-wealth economy exposes how effective we can be in creating cultures and institutions that cultivate and celebrate the most pathological possibilities of our human nature. Let the ugliness that the implosion has revealed serve as an inspiration to finally get it right.

Our defining gift as humans is our power to choose, including our power to choose our collective future. It is a gift that comes with a corresponding moral responsibility to use that power in ways that work to the benefit of all people and the whole of life. Using that gift to best effect requires constant learning. Life is is our curriculum, and our assignment of the moment is to learn to live by the rules of the biosphere — which itself continues to learn and evolve. Learning is so embedded in the fabric of life that I’ve come to believe that it is integral to life’s purpose.

We can, if we choose, replace cultures and institutions that celebrate and reward the pathologies of our lower human nature with cultures and institutions that celebrate and reward the capacities of our higher nature. We can turn as a species from perfecting our capacity for exclusionary competition to perfecting our capacity for inclusionary cooperation. We can share the good news that the healthy potential of our human nature yearns for liberation from cultural stories and institutional reward systems that have long suppressed it.

The liberation of this potential is the larger vision and goal of the New Economy agenda. It begins with clarifying our values and investing in growing the relationships of the caring communities that are the essential foundation of real wealth and security. As individuals and as a species, we can find our place of service to the larger community of life from which we separated during our species’ adolescence and to which we must now return as responsible adults.

In closing, I want to take you on a brief visit to the future to see how our children may be living in 2084 if we succeed in navigating the turning from a phantom-wealth to a real-wealth economy.