CHAPTER 4
The Opportunity

The light-skinned race will be given a choice between two roads. If they choose the right road, the seventh fire will light the eighth and final (eternal) fire of peace, love, and brotherhood. If they make the wrong choice, the destruction they brought with them will come back to them, causing much suffering, death and destruction.¹

Seven Fires Prophecy of the Ojibwe people

We are now experiencing a moment of significance far beyond what any of us can imagine.… The distorted dream of an industrial technological paradise is being replaced by the more viable dream of a mutually enhancing human presence within an ever-renewing organic-based Earth community.²

Thomas Berry

Perhaps nature’s most powerful metaphor for the Great Turning is the story of the metamorphosis of the monarch caterpillar to the monarch butterfly, popularized by evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris. The caterpillar is a voracious consumer that devotes its life to gorging itself on nature’s bounty. When it has had its fill, it fastens itself to a convenient twig and encloses itself in a chrysalis. Once snug inside, it undergoes a crisis as the structures of its cellular tissue begin to dissolve into an organic soup.

Yet guided by some deep inner wisdom, a number of organizer cells begin to rush around gathering other cells to form imaginal buds, initially independent multicellular structures that begin to give form to the organs of a new creature.³ Correctly perceiving a threat to the old order, but misdiagnosing the source, the caterpillar’s still intact immune system attributes the threat to the imaginal buds and attacks them as alien intruders.

The imaginal buds prevail by linking up with one another in a cooperative effort that brings forth a new being of great beauty, wondrous possibilities, and little identifiable resemblance to its progenitor. In its rebirth, the monarch butterfly lives lightly on Earth, serves the regeneration of75 life as a pollinator, and migrates thousands of miles to experience life’s possibilities in ways the earthbound caterpillar could not imagine.

As the familiar cultural and institutional guideposts of Empire disintegrate around us, we humans stand on the threshold of a rebirth no less dramatic than that of the monarch caterpillar. The caterpillar’s transformation is physical; the human transformation is institutional and cultural. Whereas the caterpillar faces a preordained outcome experienced by countless generations before it, we humans are path-breaking pioneers in uncharted territory. The rebirth is no wishful fantasy. It is already under way, motivated by a convergence of the imperatives described in the previous chapter and a spreading cultural and spiritual awakening of the higher orders of human consciousness.

The conditions of the human rebirth are likely to be traumatic and filled with a sense of loss, particularly for those of us who have enjoyed the indulgences of Empire’s excess. Our pain, however, pales by comparison with the needless, unconscionable suffering endured for five millennia by those whose humanity and right to life Empire has cruelly denied. If we the privileged embrace the moment, rather than fight it, we can turn the tragedy into an opportunity to claim our humanity and the true prosperity, security, and meaning of community.

The cultural and spiritual awakening underlying the prospective human metamorphosis is driven by two encounters: one with the cultural diversity of humanity and the other with the limits of the planet’s ecosystem. A rapid increase in the frequency and depth of cross-cultural exchange is awakening the species to culture as a human construct subject to intentional choice. The spreading failure of natural systems is creating an awareness of the interconnectedness of all life.

These encounters are bringing forth the higher and more democratic orders of human consciousness, expanding our sense of human possibility, and supporting the formation of powerful global social movements dedicated to birthing a new era of Earth Community. To understand the nature and significance of this awakening, we must first understand the nature and function of culture.

CULTURAL CONSCIOUSNESS

One of the brain’s most important functions is to translate vast quantities of sensory data into information meaningful to the organism’s survival, for example, alerting the organism to the presence of food, 76danger, or a prospective sexual partner. The human brain must sort and translate the data of our senses not only into information useful to our survival, but as well into the complex abstractions of ideas, values, and spiritual understanding essential to our creativity, social coherence, and sense of meaning.

In translating sensory data into meaningful information the brain necessarily sorts out the relevant from the irrelevant to draw the attention of the conscious mind to the data the brain’s filtering mechanisms deem most important. Thus, information presented to the conscious mind is determined partly by the raw sensory data and partly by the brain’s filtering mechanisms, which in turn are shaped by a combination of genetics, individual learning, and group culture.

Culture is the system of customary beliefs, values, perceptions, and social relations that encodes the shared learning of a particular human group essential to its orderly social function. The greater the individual and cultural learning components of the brain’s interpretive mechanism, as contrasted to the genetic component, the greater the capacity of the species to adapt rapidly to new circumstances.

In the case of humans, the individual and cultural learning components are substantial, which gives us an unequaled capacity to adapt and innovate through individual and shared learning. The greater our conscious awareness of culture as a social construct subject to critical examination and intentional choice and the greater our capacity to communicate with one another, the greater our capacity to choose our future.

Social Construction

Culture shapes our perceptions mostly at the unconscious level. It rarely occurs to us to ask whether the reality we perceive through the lens of the culture within which we grow up is the “true” reality. As evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris observes,

Until the last half century before the new millennium, it did not occur to people that they could have anything to do with creating their worldview. All through history, people thought the way they saw the world was the way the world really was —in other words, they saw their worldview as the true worldview and all others as mistaken and therefore false.⁴

In our first encounters with people from different cultures, we are likely 77to experience them as weird, difficult to understand, and possibly dangerous. Through extended intercultural experience, however, we come to see the deeper truth of culture as an organizing construct that defines a shared worldview essential to social coherence. Coming to understand the nature of culture is the essence of the critical transition from Socialized Consciousness to Cultural Consciousness described in chapter 2.

The spreading awakening of Cultural Consciousness is of particular importance to us in this time of rapid change in the human circumstance. It is essential to our ability to live on a small planet in peaceful and mutually beneficial relationship with peoples of cultures different from our own; to identify and change those aspects of human culture that are actively self-destructive; and to consciously bring forth a new culture of Earth Community.

For five thousand years, successful imperial rulers have intuitively recognized that their power rests on their ability to fabricate a falsified culture that evokes fear, alienation, learned helplessness, and the dependence of the individual on the imperial power of a great ruler. The falsified culture induces a kind of cultural trance in which we are conditioned to deny the inherent human capacity for responsible self-direction, sharing, and cooperation that is an essential foundation of democratic self-rule. The trance creates an emotional bond with the leader, alienates us from one another and the living Earth, erodes relations of mutual self-help, and reduces us to a state of resigned dependence much like the one Ricardo encountered among the sabaneros and peones of the Hacienda Santa Teresa when he first took over its management.

Cultural Awakening

In the United States, an important step in the awakening to the role of culture as a social construct came with the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s. Participation in that movement awakened many people to the truth that relations between races are defined by cultural codes that have little to do with reality. Once people learned to recognize the difference between reality and an unexamined belief system in reference to race relations, it became easier to see similar distortions in the cultural codes that define the relations between men and women, people and the environment, heterosexuals and homosexuals, and people and corporations.⁵ The civil rights movement thus prepared the way for the social movements that followed.

Globally, a rapid increase in international travel, exchange, and communication has exposed millions of people to sometimes unsettling but usually enriching encounters with cultures not their own. That experience has opened many to viewing their own culture and the larger world in a new light. The experience of cultural awakening has become a contagious, liberating process of global scale that involves hundreds of millions of people and transcends the barriers of race, class, and religion.

Each of the world’s many cultures captures some elements of a deeper truth, yet represents only one of many possible ways of interpreting the data generated by the human senses. Sustained cross-cultural experience can break the cultural trance and awaken a new consciousness of and appreciation for the varieties of the human experience and potential of the species. My life story, as outlined in the prologue, of moving from the cultural island of my childhood to the life of an itinerant global citizen offers an example of how the communications revolution of the last half of the twentieth century created conditions conducive to an accelerated liberation of the human consciousness.

An awakened Cultural Consciousness is relatively immune to the distorted cultural conditioning promoted by the corporate media, advertising, and political demagogues. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and consumerism are more easily seen for what they are—a justification for domination, exploitation, and violence against life—and a barrier to realizing the possibilities of Earth Community. An implicit underlying cultural premise of all the great progressive movements of our time is that a partnership world is possible.

SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The same shrinking of geographic space that is accelerating the awakening of Cultural Consciousness is also accelerating the step to Spiritual Consciousness. Those who travel the world to engage in the life of the peoples and places they visit experience both the vitality of the world’s cultural diversity and the beauty of the planetary web of life. The iconic image of planet Earth taken from space gives visual expression to the profound reality that the world’s people are one people sharing a common destiny on a solitary living spaceship alone in the vast darkness of space. From a recognition of the interconnectedness of life it is only a short step to an encounter with the yet deeper truth that all life flows forth 79from the same spiritual source and that Empire’s war against life is a war against ourselves. This awakening of a spiritual consciousness has profound practical implications, as it is the foundation of the cultural turning:

• From a belief that Earth belongs to humans and is ours to consume as suits our fancy to an understanding that Earth is our sacred home and that it is our responsibility to be respectful partners.
• From a belief that we humans are by nature incapable of responsible self-governance to an understanding that our nature embodies many possibilities, including the potential for responsible self-governance and democratic citizenship.
• From a belief that those who differ from us pose a threat to our security and way of life to an understanding that all persons are born of the same sacred sprit with an equal right to respect and the pursuit of happiness and that cultural and racial diversity is a source of learning and creative potential.
• From a self-justifying belief that those who align with us are the champions of good and those who oppose us are evil enemies to an understanding that we are all both victims and perpetrators of the violence inherent in the structures of Empire.

A GLOBAL PHENOMENON

Evidence of a spreading awakening of Cultural and Spiritual Consciousness comes from a variety of sources, including the work of values researcher Paul Ray and feminist author Sherry Anderson. They report data from U.S. values surveys showing that a growing segment of the U.S. adult population is embracing a new culture that values social inclusion, environmental stewardship, and spiritual practice. They call the holders of the new culture Cultural Creatives and estimate that in the late 1990s there were 50 million Cultural Creatives in the United States, roughly 26 percent of adult Americans—compared with less than 5 percent in the early 1960s. They further estimate there are another 80 to 90 million Cultural Creatives in the European Union.⁶ Essentially those whom Ray and Anderson are calling Cultural Creatives are people who from their survey responses appear to have attained a Cultural Consciousness; many have achieved a Spiritual Consciousness. 80In subsequent chapters, I will from time to time use the term Cultural Creatives to refer to people who have achieved a Cultural Consciousness.

International polling data suggest that hundreds of millions more Cultural Creatives are spread throughout the world. A 1993 Gallup International “Health of the Planet Survey” covering twenty-four nations found a substantial concern for the environment among people of both industrial and developing nations, with majorities agreeing that protecting the environment is more important than economic growth.⁷

The World Values Survey, which gathered longitudinal data from forty-three countries from 1970 to 1994, found that residents of countries that achieve significant economic security show a strong inclination to challenge traditional sources of authority, including government, science, and organized religion, in favor of greater freedom of self-expression and personally examined values. The World Values Survey data reveal a growing acceptance of equal rights for women, a greater interest in the quality of life relative to pursuit of material gain, and an increasing sense of the importance of family life to individual and community well-being. Although the survey reports that church attendance is generally falling, it found an increase in the percentage of people who report that they often think about the purpose and meaning of life.⁸ These findings are all consistent with a spreading awakening of Cultural and Spiritual Consciousness.

Ray and Anderson estimate that roughly half of all Cultural Creatives combine a deep commitment to social and environmental values with some form of spiritual practice—embracing an integral spirituality that connects them with the whole of Creation in both its inner and outer manifestations. By the framework of chapter 2 these are the Spiritual Creatives, who have achieved a Spiritual Consciousness. Ray and Anderson call them Core Cultural Creatives. Affirming the importance of a spiritual awakening to the Great Turning, they conclude from their research that virtually all the leaders of progressive social movements in the United States are Core Cultural Creatives. My own experience with many hundreds of movement leaders suggests that this assessment is largely valid both domestically and internationally.

According to Ray and Anderson, Cultural Creatives come from all races, religions, classes, and political parties. The only clear demographic predictor is gender. Sixty percent of all Cultural Creatives are women. Sixty-seven percent of Spiritual Creatives are women.

Spiritual Creatives are not only leading the growing resistance against the global violence and economic injustice of Empire. They are also leading the proactive work of growing the imaginal buds of Earth Community. Leadership in the prodemocracy, peace, environmental, human and civil rights, economic justice, gender equality, holistic health, gay rights, organic agriculture, and voluntary simplicity movements comes from within the Spiritual Creative ranks. Together they are creating a new politics of partnership centered on a spiritually grounded affirmation of peace, justice, democracy, and life. Although many of these leaders have no formal religious affiliation and few speak openly of their spiritual orientation, a substantial proportion are deeply spiritual and approach their work as a form of spiritual practice.

INSTITUTIONAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL MEANS

At the same time as the species is experiencing the cultural and spiritual awakening necessary to the cultural turning, it is acquiring the institutional and technological means to translate that advance into the economic and political turnings that the cultural turning makes possible. To appreciate the epic nature of these developments, we must place them in historical perspective.

International Institutions

The very first international organization aimed at advancing cooperation among nations, the International Telegraph Union, was established only in 1865. The Universal Postal Union followed it in 1874. It seems noteworthy that both these pioneering institutions dealt with expanding the capacities for international communication.

Shortly thereafter, the International Peace Conference held in The Hague in 1899 made an initial effort to abolish the use of war as an instrument of national policy. It adopted the Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, which established the Permanent Court of Arbitration to provide a means for peacefully settling international disputes. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 created the International Labor Organization and the short-lived League of Nations.

It was only in 1945, just sixty years ago as of this writing, that the United Nations was founded as the first international organization to 82bring together all the world’s nations to sit in permanent assembly to address the range of global human needs. Of even more recent origin is the electronic communications capability that has virtually eliminated the geographic barriers to human communication for a substantial portion of the population and is moving the species toward a capacity to make informed collective choices.

Communications Technology

Much of Empire’s power has come from the ability of ruling elites to control the flow and content of the information by which subject peoples define themselves and their circumstances. Until quite recent times, ordinary people had virtually no means of communicating with one another other than through the unassisted spoken word. It was rare for people to have contact with anyone beyond their immediate village.

Modern humans, Homo sapiens, have been around for about two hundred thousand years. Public mail service became accessible to ordinary people only about two hundred years ago. Telephones did not come into general use until the mid-1900s, and the cost of a long distance call made it a luxury item until the 1980s. The first commercial airline service across the Atlantic was established in the 1930s. The explosive growth in international travel began only with the first transatlantic commercial jet service in 1958. It was not until the 1990s that the capability for interactive, instantaneous, multiparty global conversations became available via satellite-linked Internet, teleconferencing, and videoconferencing technologies. Development of the World Wide Web began in 1990. The first Web browser for popular use, Mosaic, was released in March 1993.

Although a serious digital divide remains, these technologies are connecting the world’s people into an interactive communications web. Millions are now using them to create a dynamic, self-directing social organism that transcends the boundaries of race, class, religion, and nationality to function as a shared conscience of the species. The computer communications revolution has happened within the space of little more than ten years. It is so new that even most of its participants are scarcely aware of the profound significance of the transformation in which they are participating.

The computer communications revolution is transforming the very nature of news and opinion media through an unprecedented 83process of democratization. Public interest groups are rightly concerned that a handful of publicly traded corporations have monopolized conventional print, radio, and television media outlets to serve purely commercial interests. The revolution in computer communications technology, however, is producing an end run around corporate efforts to monopolize and centralize access to the public mind. Every person in the world with a computer and an Internet connection has access to virtually all of the world’s consequential print, audio, and video news sources and the capability to create an electronic newsletter or radio or television station of their own free from any licensing requirements or monopoly controls. Bloggers (short for Web loggers) are regularly scooping the professional newscasts on major stories, and many are posting audio versions of their news and opinion pieces for instant download to portable playback devices.

The expansion of Internet access is creating the possibility of a democratic media network in which every voice has its potential outlet and people have near infinite variety in their choice of sources for news and opinion—blurring the distinction between mass and individual communication. Through a process of self-organization, a system is evolving in which stories and opinion pieces enter the communications web from millions of independent sources to be sorted and aggregated by Web sites that serve as trusted portals for specific constituencies. This radical democratization of media makes it increasingly difficult for any individual or group to monopolize the venues of cultural regeneration in order to control a society through the falsification of culture.

Quality and reliability will be continuing issues resolved through the same dynamics of user feedback and evaluation now used to assess the integrity and reliability of individual commercial Web vendors. With a virtually unlimited number of broadcast and publication channels, media monopolization and the suppression of news or opinion are becoming impossible.

FROM CONSCIOUSNESS TO ACTION

The conditions are now in place for the species to take an essential step beyond the self-limiting cultural beliefs and stories that divide us to an appreciation of the deeper values and spiritual origins of life that unite us.

You’re Not Crazy—You’re Human

Educator Parker Palmer has outlined the process by which the individual experience of awakening to a Cultural Consciousness translates into individual commitment and ultimately into an irresistible force for transformation.⁹ It begins when an individual functioning at the level of the Socialized Consciousness awakens from the trance induced by the prevailing culture. This awakening commonly leads to a deep disconnect between the realities of family, work, and community life grounded in the previously unexamined values and the examined, authentic values of a maturing consciousness. This disconnect confronts the individual with the often painful choice between conformity and authenticity.

Palmer notes that those who make the choice to align their lives with their authentic values experience a sense of isolation from family members, friends, and associates whose views are defined by the codes of the old culture. The individuals undergoing this transition may at times feel like creatures from outer space in the midst of a family gathering or class reunion. With time, however, they find others, even among their immediate family, friends, and associates, who are feeling a similar sense of tension and isolation and join with them to create what Palmer calls a community of congruence. It may begin with only two or three others with whom they share an occasional conversation or meal. Together they help one another discover that the craziness is not in themselves, but in what many institutions decree as “normal.”

Once the nucleus of such a community forms, it attracts others and may become regularized in the form of a book club, study group, spiritual retreat, conversation café, or quilting party, where people who share the struggle of reconciling their lives with an awakened consciousness gather for mutual support. In the civil rights movement, these communities of congruence commonly formed within African American churches.

Such communities are forming by the millions all around the world. To draw on the butterfly metaphor, we might think of them as the imaginal buds of the new culture. With time, individual communities of congruence reach out to form alliances with others to create larger cultural spaces, such as a farmers’ market or food co-op; these create the imaginal buds of a new economy and allow participants to live more authentic and fulfilling lives. Gradually they build the power to transform or displace the institutions of the dominant culture.

Such communities and alliances formed in significant numbers during the latter half of the twentieth century to bring forth great social movements for national independence, human and civil rights, women’s rights, peace, environmental protection, and economic justice. During a period of only fifty years these movements dismantled the prevailing system of European colonial empires, codified human rights in international law, rewrote the legal codes of nations, and redefined the prevailing cultural codes regarding relationships among men and women, races, nations, and species. These alliances are now linking into the most powerful and truly global social movement in the whole of the human experience.

Birthing Global Civil Society

The alliance-building processes that gave birth to this global meta-movement became visible only in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro during the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), at which the world’s heads of state gathered for an Earth Summit. The conference proved to be a landmark event in the human experience.

Its significance came not from the accomplishments of the official meetings. Their effectiveness was limited by the organized intervention of global corporations working under the banner of the Business Council on Sustainable Development and the International Chamber of Commerce to make certain the official meetings did not produce conclusions contrary to corporate interests. On the other side of town, however, a gathering of eighteen thousand private citizens of every race, religion, social class, and nationality was making history as participants drafted informal citizen treaties setting forth agendas for cooperative voluntary action.

I had the privilege of being a participant in the citizen forum. It was a life-transforming experience. It was here that many thousands of leaders of what would only later come to be known as global civil society discovered that underlying our differences there is a common dream of a world that works for the whole of life. We committed ourselves to bring it into being.

The citizen deliberations, which called for a sweeping transformation of human cultures and institutions, demonstrated that the peoples of the world share a common vision of the world in which they want to live. Key elements of the consensus were summarized in the People’s 86Earth Declaration: A Proactive Agenda for the Future. It ends with the following commitment:

We, the people of the world, will mobilize the forces of transnational civil society behind a widely shared agenda that bonds our many social movements in pursuit of just, sustainable, and participatory human societies. In so doing, we are forging our own instruments and processes for redefining the nature and meaning of human progress and for transforming those institutions that no longer respond to our needs. We welcome to our cause all people who share our commitment to peaceful and democratic change in the interest of our living planet and the human societies it sustains.¹⁰

From this modest beginning, global civil society has grown significantly in strength and sophistication to become an increasingly influential moral force for global transformation.

The process of documenting an emerging global consensus continued after the Earth Summit with the drafting of the Earth Charter. Often referred to as a Declaration of Interdependence, the Earth Charter reflects a global consensus reached through a decade-long worldwide cross-cultural conversation about common goals and shared values that began in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Drafting it involved thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations from all regions of the world in an open and participatory consultation process.¹¹

As a charter of people, rather than governments, it has no legal force. Rather than present a list of prescriptions or demands, it outlines the values of the emergent era, articulating an integral vision of a world dedicated to respect and caring for all life, deep democracy, human rights, economic justice, and peace. It affirms that once “basic needs have been met, human development is primarily about being more, not having more.” The charter recognizes that far from being at odds, individual liberty, strong communities, and respect for Earth are inseparable one from the other. Its moral principles align with the wisdom underlying the teachings of all the world’s great religions.

The Second Superpower

Global civil society first established its identity as a significant political force in 1999, when fifty thousand demonstrators from around the 87world gathered in Seattle and staged a massive protest that successfully disrupted the Third Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization. The demonstration brought an end to the myth of the invincibility of the forces of corporate rule. From that time forward, whenever the corporate elites gathered in major closed-door conferences to advance the interests of corporate Empire, massive international protests, some involving hundreds of thousands of persons, presented them with a powerful message: The people of the world are watching and will no longer acquiesce in silence to your assault on democracy, justice, and the planet.

In 2001, global civil society began organizing its own massive forums under the banner of the World Social Forum and the theme “Another World Is Possible.” The 2001 forum drew 20,000 participants to Porto Alegre, Brazil. By the third year, it drew upwards of 100,000 people. The fourth World Social Forum, held in Mumbai, India, drew 80,000 people from 132 countries, with especially strong representation and leadership from India’s Dalit community—once known as the “Untouchables.” In its fifth year, 2005, the forum returned to Porto Alegre and drew 150,000 participants.

The World Social Forum process has inspired the creation of regional and national social forums around the world. The call went forth from the November 2002 European Social Forum and then the January 2003 World Social Forum, which brought more than ten million people to the streets of the world’s cities, towns, and villages on February 15, 2003, to demonstrate for peace in the face of the buildup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.¹² Commenting on the demonstrations and their impact, the New York Times observed that “there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”¹³

It is a perceptive observation. This, however, is a superpower struggle like no other in human history. Rather than a classic contest for dominion between states, it is a struggle between two globalizations grounded in sharply contrasting visions of human possibility—one imperial and the other democratic. It pits an alliance of state and corporate power devoted to a vision of global Empire against an alliance of people power devoted to a vision of Earth Community. Empire holds the edge in institutional power; Earth Community holds the edge in the moral power of the authentic cultural values of a mature consciousness.

Rather than mobilize around an ideology or charismatic leader, the people-power alliance of global civil society has mobilized around an emergent values consensus. Far from being leaderless, however, it is a 88leader-full movement self-organized by hundreds of thousands of leaders linked in a seamless web of electronic communication. It manifests the qualities of an emergent social organism with a capacity for democratic self-governance grounded in authentic life-affirming human values transcending race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, and religion wholly new to the human experience. Its rapidly expanding capacity for mutual learning, consensus convergence, and global coherence hints at the human possibilities that lie ahead.

Less dramatic, and therefore less visible, are the millions of participants who are forming local alliances devoted to rebuilding community institutions and democratic participation from the bottom up. This, however, is the most important work of all —the work of living the cultures and institutions of the new era into being.

The institutions of imperial power have responded to this challenge in the manner of the disintegrating caterpillar’s immune system: with a well-organized effort to reassert their dominion even as global civil society grows stronger. Whether the organized violence of Empire will be succeeded by the peace and justice of a new era of Earth Community or by the chaotic violence of social breakdown and warring feudal fiefdoms remains to be determined. Either way, the established pattern of global imperial power has reached its limit and cannot endure. An exhausted planet and politically conscious peoples will no longer support it.

A new human era is in gestation. The choices we humans make over the next few decades will determine whether the birthing is successful. To paraphrase civil rights activist Miles Horton, “We make our road by walking.”

Modern humans have been around for some two hundred thousand years. It is only during the most recent five thousand years that a drive for dominator power brought forth the era of Empire and its reckless squandering of lives, resources, and human possibility to support the privilege and extravagance of the few.¹⁴

Humans have always suffered hardship and deprivation from acts of nature over which they have no control. Slavery and poverty are not, 89however, acts of nature. They are social constructs that create an intentional and pervasive condition of exclusion. No ruling class in five thousand years has delivered on a promise to eliminate either poverty or slavery and its equivalents, because to do so would mean the elimination of elite privilege. There is no elite class without a servant class. The maintenance of a dominator system depends on violence or the threat of violence to maintain the extreme class division.

Now, through a global awakening of Cultural and Spiritual Consciousness, ordinary people are coming forward by the millions to say five thousand years is enough. Empire’s power brokers will not readily relinquish their power. An understanding of Empire’s deep roots and the lessons of its history illuminates the nature and magnitude of the challenge at hand as we set about putting Empire’s addictions behind us.