The Great Turning: Epic Passage

Our time is a defining moment for the human species. We have a brief window of opportunity to navigate the passage from a 5,000 year Era of Empire characterized by violent domination to an Era of Earth Community characterized peaceful partnership. This passage to a new level of species maturity promises a more secure and fulfilling life for everyone. Its successful navigation requires that we free ourselves from the illusions of a cultural trance that blinds us to the higher order potentials of our human nature.

We now have an unprecedented opportunity to turn the human course. This opportunity is born of a convergence of the imperative created by a potentially terminal global crisis and the possibility created by a global communications revolution.

A Three-Fold Crisis

The cause of the crisis is three-fold.

• Excess Consumption: Growth in human consumption resulting from a combination of population growth and growth in consumption per capita is depleting the natural life support system of the planet, disrupting natural water cycles and climate systems, and threatening human survival.
• Inequality: Unconscionable and growing concentration of financial power in a world of ever more intense competition for a declining base of material wealth is eroding the social fabric to the point of widespread social breakdown.
• Institutional Pathology: The most powerful institutions on the planet, global financial markets and the transnational corporations that serve them, are institutions of Empire dedicated to growing consumption and inequality. They convert real capital into financial capital to increase the relative economic power of those who live by money, while depressing the wages of those who produce real value through their labor. These institutions respond to environmental and social crises with palliatives that side step the need to reduce overall consumption and reallocate resources from rich to poor. To do otherwise would be contrary to their legal and financial imperatives. We cannot expect the institutions that got us into the crisis to get us out of it.

We face the imperative to:

1. Reduce aggregate consumption, which means renouncing economic growth and obsessive over consumption as our defining economic priority in favor of meeting real human needs, including needs for dignity, community and meaningful work.
2. Eliminate extremes of inequality, which means renouncing domination as our defining mode of organization in favor of equity and deep democracy.
3. Transform our institutions and cultures to support the above.

Imperative as Opportunity

There is significant evidence that for all our apparent differences, most all the world's people want the same thing: happy healthy children, families, communities, and natural sytems. Properly understood, the imperative creates an unprecedented opportunity to unleash long suppressed potentials of the human consciousness to bring forth the world for which we humans have long shared a deep yearning. See "What will Earth Community look like?"

    The sacrifices are marginal relative to the potential gain. Mostly we must give up wasteful or actively destructive forms of consumption to free up resources for uses that actually increase our happiness and well-being. It involves, for example, reallocation from:

• Instruments of war to health care and environmental rejuvenation.
• Automobiles to public transportation.
• Suburban sprawl to compact communities and the reclamation of forest and agricultural land.
• Advertising to education.
• Financial speculation to local entrepreneurship.

Such a radical reallocation far beyond the realm of current political feasibility. The work of making it feasible begins with a conversation. Fortunately, that conversation is already underway in localities all over the world, spreading the good news that the world we must now create to secure the human future is the same as the world most all the world's people want.

    We face a race against time between the awakening of an Earth Community consciousness and the spread of social and environmental collapse. Our window of opportunity could slam shut at any time with chilling finality.

An Irrevocable Choice

Success depends on facing up to the extent to which the crisis is a consequence of deep social and institutional pathology. Although green technologies will have an essential role, there is no technological fix. The fate of our children turns on our current irrevocable choice between two contrasting ways of relating to one another and Earth.

    The Way of Empire features a pyramid of coercive power based on principles of domination and exclusionary private accumulation. It is the way of domination, greed, violence, wasted lives and environmental devastation. Left in place, it is destined to play out as a last man standing imperial competition for what remains of Earth’s natural bounty.

    The Way of Earth Community features self-organizing networks based on principles of parthership and a cooperative sharing of Earth's resources to create a world that works for all. It is the way of partnership, sharing, reconciliation, mutual responsibility, and respect for all life. 

    How we choose will determine whether those who follow us will refer to our time as the Great Turning or the Great Unraveling.

Competing Stories

Empire’s power depends on its ability to control the cultural stories and the language that shape our collective understanding of our world and of the choices available to as a species. Empire stories induce a kind of cultural trance that conditions us to accept the dominator relations of Empire as just and righteous and to dismiss talk of alternatives as naïve, dangerous, or even sinful. Once we recognize the truth that Empire stories deny, the trance is broken. To change the future, change the story.

 Global Awakening

The institutions of Empire will not act from within to voluntarily relinquish their power. Leadership for the turning must come from popular civic initiatives centered outside the institutions of Empire.

    Empire has always met resistance from those with a larger vision of human possibility. Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. were among the more visible examples. Mostly, this resistance was geographically isolated and the institutions of Empire contained or co-opted it. No longer. Modern communications technology has obliterated the barriers of geography and is linking ordinary people into a seamless global web of learning and sharing unfiltered by imperial agents and institutions. Millions of people of every race, religion, and nationality are are now using this technology to create a species capacity to choose and act as a whole in the service of life, as documented by Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest..

Earth Community Vision

Our collective future turns on the success of the efforts of ordinary people with an awakened consciousness to advance the three primary goals of an Earth Community vision.

1. Earth Balance: Bring human consumption into balance with Earth’s natural systems by eliminating unproductive consumption and by restoring and even enhancing Earth’s natural regenerative processes.
2. Fair Share: Bring our human relationships into balance with one another by sharing of resources and knowledge equitably and turning from a culture of competition and private accumulation to a culture of cooperation and sharing.
3. Living Democracy: Create a system of radically democratic life-serving governing institutions that support Earth Balance and Fair Share, give voice to every person, and nurture the higher order potentials of the human consciousness.

.We are engaged in the greatest and most creative adventure in all of the human experience.  It is a race against time. The window of opportunity is closing fast. Accelerating social and environmental collapse creates the imperative to act with deliberate speed to accelerate the awakening and focus the positive life energy it is unleashing.

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In these dangerous and often frightening times it is important to regularly remind ourselves that we are privileged to live at the most exciting moment of creative opportunity in the whole of the human experience. The time is now. We have the power. We are the ones we have been waiting for.