CHAPTER 10
WHAT PEOPLE REALLY WANT
At this stage of history, one of two things is possible: Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others, or alternatively there will be no destiny to control.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Empire’s greatest tragedy is the denial and suppression of the higher-order possibilities of our human nature. The culture and institutions of the Wall Street economy cultivate and reward our capacity for individualistic greed, hubris, deceit, ruthless competition, and material excess.
They communicate the message in both subtle and unsubtle ways that this is our human nature and that it is all for the good because individualism, competition, and greed drive economic innovation and growth. Our capacities for sharing, honesty, service, compassion, cooperation, and material sufficiency are denied and discouraged, even punished.
The touts of Wall Street would have us believe “there is no alternative.” Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher gave it a name: TINA. To accept TINA is to give up all hope of a future for our children.
Like most imperial propaganda, TINA is a lie. We have the means to build a New Economy that cultivates the best rather than the worst of our nature and thus to realize a long-cherished human dream.
Wall Street propagandists have so successfully conditioned our minds that as a society we celebrate the “success” of an economy that is literally killing us. Here is the real story of our human nature.
OUR HUMAN NATURE
We humans are complex beings of many possibilities. Empire has demonstrated our capacity for psychopathology. By way of contrast, most people daily demonstrate, to one extent or another, our capacity for caring, sharing, peacemaking, and service. The former are the possibilities of our lower nature; the latter, the possibilities of our higher nature. Both possibilities are within our means.
Cultivating Our Possibilities Rather Than Our Pathologies
The human capacity to choose is perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of our nature. What we are depends in substantial measure on what we choose to be — not only by our individual choices but also by how we shape the collective cultures and institutions that in turn shape our individual behavior.
In previous chapters, we have seen the devastating consequences of a collective choice for cultures and institutions that for five thousand years have suppressed the full realization of our higher nature.
Given that this pattern has survived for so long even in the face of determined popular struggle, we might be forgiven for assuming that it is immutable and that we are incapable of living any other way. Such assumptions are in error. Cultures and institutions are collective human creations. We can change them through intentional collective action.
We have been trapped in Empire’s pernicious rule-or-be-ruled, kill-or-be-killed, play-or-die dynamic by geographic and cultural barriers that have kept us divided and unable to embrace our true nature and common interest. On those historic occasions when we succeeded in breaching these barriers to organize in rebellion, we too often saw the goal as being to gain control of the institutions of Empire’s power. Those who successfully claimed that power with the intention of transforming it all too often became its captives and, wearing a cloak of a different color, assumed the throne previously occupied by another.
The communication technologies of the Internet now in place create a potential for collective dialogue, organization, and action never before available. We have the means, as well as the need and the right, to bridge the geographic and cultural barriers that have for so long divided us and to bring forth cultures and institutions that cultivate and reward our higher nature. Do we have the will? I believe we do. It is being expressed by growing millions of people working largely outside the institutions of Empire.
The propagandists of Empire tell us that we are by nature a flawed species incapable of caring and cooperation, that we would destroy ourselves but for Empire’s controlling, organizing hand. Recent findings from science tell a different and more enabling story: a desire to cooperate and serve is hardwired into the human brain.1
Born to Care and Cooperate
Scientists who use advanced imaging technology to study brain function report that the healthy human brain is wired to reward caring, cooperation, and service. Merely thinking about another person experiencing harm triggers the same reaction in our brain as that of a mother who sees distress on her baby’s face.
Conversely, the act of cooperation and generosity triggers the brain’s pleasure center to release the same hormone that’s released when we eat chocolate or engage in good sex. In addition to producing a sense of bliss, it benefits our health by boosting our immune system, reducing our heart rate, and preparing us to approach and soothe. Positive emotions such as compassion produce similar benefits.
By contrast, negative emotions suppress our immune system, increase our heart rate, and prepare us to fight or flee.
These findings are consistent with the pleasure that most of us experience being a member of an effective team or extending an uncompensated helping hand to another being.
It is entirely logical. If our brains were not wired for life in community, our species would have expired long ago. We have an instinctual desire to protect the group, including its weakest and most vulnerable members — its children. Behavior contrary to this positive norm is an indicator of social and psychological dysfunction. Caring, cooperation, and service are both the healthy norm and wonderful tonics — and they are free.
Traversing the Path from “Me” to “We”
Psychologists who study the developmental pathways of the individual consciousness observe that, over a lifetime, those who enjoy the requisite emotional support traverse a pathway from the narcissistic, undifferentiated magical consciousness of the newborn to the fully mature, inclusive, and multidimensional spiritual consciousness of the wise elder. It is a journey from “me” to “we” that over a lifetime traverses from a my-group “we” to a human “we,” to a living Earth “we,” and ultimately to a cosmic “we.”
The lower, more narcissistic, orders of consciousness are perfectly normal for young children, but they become sociopathic in adults and are easily encouraged and manipulated by advertisers and demagogues. Even more tragic for humanity, people who have been thwarted on the path to maturity are those most likely to engage in the ruthless competition for positions of unaccountable power. Moreover, imperial institutions implicitly recognize that these psychologically damaged individuals come with an imperialistic drive and values that well serve their purpose. We have suffered enormous harm from the imperial culture’s celebration of the accomplishments of triumphant psychopaths and its promotion of them as the standard of human achievement.
The more mature consciousness recognizes that true liberty is not a license to act in disregard of others; rather, it necessarily comes with a responsibility to protect and serve the larger we. Doing the right thing comes naturally to the mature consciousness, which minimizes society’s need for coercive restraint to prevent antisocial behavior. This commitment to personal responsibility and capacity for self-restraint is an essential foundation of a mature democracy, a caring community, and a real-wealth economy. It is one of society’s most valuable real-wealth assets.
Strong, caring families and communities are not only essential to our physical health and happiness; their emotional support and stimulation facilitate the maturing of our emotional and moral consciousness and guide our children to mature, responsible adulthood. They are essential to the realization of our humanity and to the realization of true democracy, a real-wealth economy, and the world of our shared human dream.
THE WORLD OF OUR DREAMS
In 1992, I participated in the civil society portion of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where I was part of a gathering of some fifteen thousand people representing the vast variety of humanity’s races, religions, nationalities, and languages. It was at the time the largest and most diverse global gathering in human history. Our discussions centered on defining and committing ourselves to the vision of the world we would create together.
These discussions were chaotic and often contentious. But at one point it hit me like a bolt of lightning. Despite our differences, we all wanted the same thing: healthy, happy children, families, and communities living in peace and cooperation in healthy natural environments. Out of our conversations emerged an articulation of our shared dream of a world in which people and nature live in dynamic, creative, cooperative, and balanced relationships. The Earth Charter,2 which is the product of a continuation of this discussion, calls it Earth Community, a community of life.
The Vision We Share
I’ve lived in a lot of places with starkly different cultures: Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Indonesia, the Philippines, California, Massachusetts, Florida, Virginia, Washington State, and a New York City apartment on Union Square between Madison Avenue and Wall Street. The latter provided an inspirational setting for writing When Corporations Rule the World. As I reflect back on this experience, I realize that we humans are a lot more alike than we generally realize. Most of us want to breathe clean air and drink clean water. We want tasty, nutritious food uncontaminated with toxins. We want meaningful work, a living wage, and security in our old age. We want a say in the decisions our government makes. We want world peace.
As Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine, observes,
The great spiritual-religious wisdom traditions of the world have all taught some variant of this message: The deepest human pleasures come from living in a world based on justice, peace, love, generosity, kindness, and celebration of the universe and service to the ultimate moral law of the universe (whether learned through revelation or through reason).3
That should not be surprising. The knowledge is wired into our human brain. The amazing part of our current human situation is that the world we must now create is the world that all but the most psychologically deranged human beings want — and it is within our grasp.
This recognition of our common dream helps answer the question, What is real wealth? The deepest truths seem so obvious once we discover them. Real wealth is a healthy, fulfilling life; healthy, happy children; loving families; and a caring community within a beautiful, healthy natural environment. It is a fulfilling means of livelihood that affirms our inherent worth and service. It is a peaceful world. These are the things of real value, and their presence or absence is the only truly valid measure of economic performance.
Getting the Indicators Right
We intuitively recognize real wealth when we experience it, but because in its most precious forms it is not available for purchase or sale, its value cannot be readily reduced to a monetary equivalent. Economists largely ignore such issues and assess economic performance by growth in gross domestic product, a measure of the market value of economic output, which they treat as a proxy for human well-being. Since GDP tells us little or nothing about what is most essential to our happiness and well-being, this has led to a terrible distortion of human priorities.
Human health and well-being depend on a great many things that do have market value: food, housing, transportation, education, health care, and many other essentials of a healthy life. These, however, are but means to other ends. Their real value is a function of their contribution to improving human and natural health and vitality.
Note, for example, that the food component of the GDP makes no distinction between healthy and unhealthy food or between wholesome food consumed by a malnourished child and junk food consumed by a compulsive eater. An increase in the market value of food consumed, which increases the GDP, often coincides with a decline in well-being.
Or take transportation. An increase in expenditures on transportation, even adjusting for energy-price inflation, may simply mean people are spending more time stalled in traffic jams — hardly an improvement in well-being.
The GDP can be rising in the face of simultaneous epidemics of child obesity and starvation. It can be rising in the face of disintegrating families and a vanishing middle class, increasing prison populations, rising unemployment, the disruption of community, collapsing environmental systems, the hollowing out of domestic manufacturing capabilities, failing schools, growing trade deficits, and costly but senseless foreign wars.
You probably noticed that these are not hypothetical examples. Vision of Humanity compiles an annual Global Peace Index4 based on qualitative and quantitative indicators compiled from respected sources, covering both internal factors such as crime and prison populations and external factors such as the number of external conflicts fought. In 2009, the United States ranked 83 out of 144 countries.
Since the mid-twentieth century, most nations have been managing their economies to maximize the economic cost of whatever level of health and happiness — high or low — they enjoy. In the face of the current economic carnage, politicians point to a rising GDP and tell us with a straight face that the economic fundamentals are sound. Yet, as the examples demonstrate, the GDP is best treated as a measure of the cost, not the benefit, of economic activity.
Why in the world would we seek to maximize economic costs rather than the benefits we really want? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Wall Street corporations profit from almost all forms of economic activity, whether they’re harmful or not, and the Wall Street demand for interest on every dollar in circulation means that the market value of economic output must grow or the financial system will crash, as explained in chapter 7. It turns out that we do it all for Wall Street.
NAVIGATING THE TURNING
Think of the work at hand as navigating a great turning from a money-serving Wall Street phantom-wealth economy to a life-serving Main Street real-wealth economy. In the larger picture, it is a turn from Empire to Earth Community, from an era of domination to an era of partnership.
My wise friend and colleague Puanani Burgess tells the story of Nainoa Thompson, a Native Hawaiian navigator who learned and practiced the ancient Polynesian art of navigating to previously unvisited islands thousands of miles beyond the horizon. In the distant past, that ability guided the first Tahitian settlers to Hawaii.
Nainoa made his first solo voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976 using this ancient practice. As Puanani tells the story,
Nainoa Thompson was taught by the master navigator from the Satawal Island in Micronesia, Mau Pialug, to navigate without instruments, using his native wayfinding skills to guide the Hawaiian double-hulled canoe Hokule‘a on a Hawai‘i-Tahiti voyage of more than 2,200 miles.
As part of Nainoa’s training process, Mau would take him to a lookout on O‘ahu, where he could see the islands of Moloka‘i, Maui and Lana‘i. Mau would tell him, “Look beyond the horizon, so that you can see the island you are going to. Especially because you have never been there before, you have to see that island in your mind, or else you can never get there.”
That ability — no, courage — to see something you have never seen before is an important part of navigating to the Earth Community that we all long for. Our ability to see it, describe it, share that vision is critical to making it real.
Like the navigators of the Pacific Ocean, the navigators of the Great Turning will require the gifts of mind as well as the heart of someone with the qualities of humility, leadership, courage, and kindness. When we think the journey is hard and impossible, I remember that we made the journey then and now.5
Beyond our varied races, religions, nationalities, and languages, we humans share a collective dream of a world of healthy, happy children, families, communities, and natural environments joined in peace and cooperation. The greatest barrier to achieving this world is the fabricated belief that we are by nature incapable of cooperating in the common good.
The institutions of the Wall Street economy not only champion a perverse morality by celebrating and rewarding the qualities of individualism, materialism, greed, and violence characteristic of our lower nature but also actively suppress our realization of the qualities of caring and compassion of our higher nature. These institutions are a collective choice and creation of those whose life experience has thwarted the development of these higher-order capacities. They are not our collective destiny.
It is within the means of the more functional majority to make a conscious collective choice to bring forth a New Economy that champions a positive morality and that cultivates and rewards our distinctive human capacity for cooperation and reason in service to all.
Those who join in the work of navigating a great turning from a Wall Street phantom-wealth economy to a Main Street real-wealth economy embark on a bold and courageous journey to a destination beyond the horizon of our immediate experience.