Collaboratively Co-Creating the New Moral Compass of Civic Engagement in Prudent Stewardship of Paradigm Shifting Enterprise at the Invest In Peace Investors Conference

Evergreen Core
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read
Sustainable Brands

Sustainable Brands is one of many self-organizing enterprises that are bringing people together today to work on meeting the challenges of changing the values we value in society and the economy to be more fit to the existential realities of these times in which we now live.

In a July 5, 2017 blog post entitled Never So Relevant: Fritjof Capra on the Earth Charter Initiative, Simon Robinson shares with us an interview he conducted with Fritjof Capra on the Earth Charter Initiative. At the close of that interview, Mr. Capra is quoted as saying:

Many of these conflicts arise because our political and corporate leaders do not have a “moral compass,” in the memorable words of Václav Havel. If wealthy individuals and corporations paid fair taxes instead of hiding their wealth in off-shore tax shelters, we would not have any economic crises. If fossil fuel companies were more interested in the future wellbeing of humanity than in making exorbitant profits, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to safe levels would already have happened. These are questions of values, of ethics.

Not true. Political and corporate leaders do have a moral compass. That compass is the increasingly dominant Wall Street social structure for enterprise design through investment decision-making as speculation on movements in the price of securities derived from expectations for changes in the cash flows flowing through enterprise on Main Street that are traded as commodities in the markets for delivering a market-clearing price for the securities traded in those markets.

The philosophy of prosperity that underlies and informs this Wall Street social structure for investment decision-making through speculation is a philosophy of prosperity as growth in the scale of enterprise. In this philosophy, Growth is perceived to drive increases in the diversity and affordability of artifacts of industrial production that people can choose to live well, and pursue happiness.

Included in this philosophy is the often unstated assumption that if people are constantly being presented with more and cheaper choices of things they can acquire, everyone will live better and be happier, and the world will enjoy prosperity and peace.

In this way those portions of the global economy that are following the United States in the pursuit of Growth financed through Wall Street style speculation, authentically believe they are moving the global economy towards a new utopia of personal choice. This is their moral compass.

So, while it may appear that the problem is that government and business do not have a moral compass, a deeper truth might be that they are steering by a compass that is not fit to guide us to the place we are trying to reach. We cannot reach utopia through speculation.

We need to build a new moral compass — a new social structure of value recognizing frameworks, processes, places and people through which we, as a society, decide which paradigm shifting ideas for creating by design prosperous adpatation to life’s constant changes can, should and will be evolved through enterprise — to guide us more truly and correctly towards a new utopia of peace through prosperity that is shared in patterns that may be uneven, but will not be experienced by people as being unfair.

This is one of the tasks we hope to be beginning, especially through the fishbowl experience of CoalTown that is one of the main events at the Invest In Peace Investors Conference being held next week, July 13–15, 2017 at the Caux Conference Center on Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

The movement is beginning.

Evergreen Core

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organizing civic engagement in prudent stewardship

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