Ecological Civilization: Maps From Emergency to Emergence
In a new white paper, one of the founding advisors for An Economy of Our Own, David Korten, a ground-breaking economic philosopher and writer, shares his ideological and language map for getting from our current Ego-nomics to a badly needed Eco-nomics in tune with nature and our common humanity. They’re the real sources of any economy. This excerpt hints at the whole—which you can find here.
MASTER MAPMAKERS IN A COMPLEX AND CHANGING TERRITORY
Every living being, from microbes to humans, faces continuous life and death choices such as what to eat, drink, and with whom to ally and from whom to flee in the complex and ever-changing territory it inhabits. In making these choices, each being depends on the guidance of learned or genetically inherited maps of its territory. Because that territory is forever changing, successful living beings are forever updating their maps as they learn, evolve, and pass on their learning from generation to generation.
Humans are Earth’s most sophisticated mapmakers. Indeed, our drive to understand ourselves and our relationship to one another, Earth, and the cosmos is part of what makes us distinctively human. The maps that guide our choice-making as individuals, families, communities, and societies find expression in distinctive personalities, cultures, traditions, religions, ideologies, laws, and scientific disciplines. That diversity is essential to our resilience and creativity as we move forward together in a process much like a flowing creative dance.
Our human maps need continual correction, updating, and elaboration. Some are simply wrong and are best discarded. Because our maps are products of the human mind, we can quickly and easily correct or discard a map simply by changing our mind.
Changing our behavior, however, is more difficult once society has organized around a defective map and taught our children to rely on it. Furthermore, we will get the new maps right only if we view the relevant territory through a lens that allows us to see life in its complex interdependence and ourselves as distinctively self-aware, choice-making living beings with profound responsibilities to and for the whole.
Among our current mapping failures, one has had particularly devastating consequences. It is our misadventure with a perverse version of economics that has become a dominant, dehumanizing political ideology. I refer to the ego-nomics that celebrates and promotes the self-centric pursuit of rapid, individual financial gain to support needless dehumanizing consumption that strips Earth of its unique capacity to sustain life. It displaced the eco-nomics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Henry George, Thomas Malthus, and Karl Marx devoted to identifying the sources of the wellbeing of the human household.
Finding our way to the possible future we seek will require the lens and maps of an authentic, significantly updated eco-nomics grounded in a deep understanding of life and a vision of the Ecological Civilization now within our means to live into being. Before we turn to the challenge of producing the maps of a new eco-nomics, however, we must clean up and sharpen the lens by which we view our present and future territories to assure we are clear on the nature of humanity’s crisis, how and why we got into it, how healthy life organizes, and the essential characteristics of the future we seek.
EGO-NOMICS: MAPS FOR MAKING A KILLING ON A DYING EARTH
The corruption of the once respectable discipline of economics began in the mid-19th century. A group of influential economists suffering from a bad case of physics envy sought to achieve a stature for themselves within the social sciences comparable to that of physicists within the physical sciences. They concluded that the key was to reduce their discipline to mathematical models.
This required quantification. Money was a simple and readily available metric. So, they embraced money as their measure of economic performance. In so doing, they disconnected economics from the reality of living people dependent on a living Earth.
They abandoned the thoughtful and illuminating treatises of the founders of their discipline. Expelling social, institutional, and political analysis, they reduced economics to mathematical formulas with which they predicted with confidence without testing that: “If the world looks like x, then the outcome will look like y.” Money, not the wellbeing of people and nature, became their defining measure of value.
These ideas didn’t gain significant traction until after the disruptive events of the 1960’s. It was a chaotic decade of the Vietnam War; the civil rights movement; antiwar protests; the war on poverty; the political assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy; and the hippie counterculture of Woodstock, free love, and psychedelics. These events threatened the established order and spurred wealthy financial interests to mobilize in defense, in part through aggressive funding and promotion of academic and media proponents of the neoliberal ego-nomic ideology of economic growth backed by unregulated free markets.
Growing GDP became our defining societal priority. And the institutions of government became servants to the institutions of business.
We cannot eat, drink, or breathe money. It will not warm us on a cold night. Nor stabilize the climate. Money can buy only that which is for sale. It has no existence outside the human mind and will be worthless on a dead Earth.
The power of money resides in the fact that the more money an individual has, the more easily he or she can outbid others in the marketplace and game the financial system to inflate their own financial assets without the need to produce anything of value in return. Some control transnational banks that create money by issuing debt. Some create fictitious assets known as derivatives and crypto currencies. Others specialize in bidding up the prices of real and fictitious assets. None of this creates real value.
Creating more money only benefits humanity if it puts people to work producing beneficial and equitably distributed products in a balanced relationship with living Earth.
Ego-nomics focuses on growing income and financial assets in disregard of whether real value is created or destroyed in the process. Such a focus elevates sociopathy to a human ideal and exempts economic predators from moral responsibility for the harmful social and environmental consequences of their actions.
We have for too long succumbed to this intentional and well-funded subversion of moral responsibility. We can no longer ignore the growing gap between the promise of ego-nomics that growing GDP will bring prosperity for all and the reality of spreading despair as the economy excludes the many and destroys Earth’s capacity to sustain life.
ECO-NOMICS: MAPS FOR MAKING A LIVING ON A LIVING EARTH
The choice of the lens through which mapmakers view the territory determines what they see and thus, what they map. Different lenses result in very different maps that guide the users to very different choices with very different outcomes.
Through the money lens of ego-nomics, we see the world as a kind of winner-take-all computer game in which players compete to grow personal pools of financial assets. These assets in turn give the winners access to a seemingly limitless assortment of aggressively advertised products, including exotic vacations, elegant estates, ocean going yachts, and luxurious private airplanes. If you lose, there will surely be jobs tending the kitchens, gardens, and toilets of the winners.
Through the living lens of eco-nomics, we see a world of intelligent, interdependent, self-aware, choice-making beings interacting through their shared labor to create and maintain the conditions essential to their individual and mutual existence. The rewards, which feature material sufficiency and spiritual abundance for all, are of a fundamentally different nature.
In the Ecological Civilization of our future, money will surely have its place. But our primary lens will be one through which we see life in the fullness of its expression. Through that lens we can create maps to guide us to a world of healthy living people on a healthy living Earth.
In the Ecological Civilization of our future, money will surely have its place. But our primary lens will be one through which we see life in the fullness of its expression. Through that lens we can create maps to guide us to a world of healthy living people on a healthy living Earth.
WORKING TOGETHER FOR THE WELLBEING OF ALL
Hope and possibility depend on eliminating the imperial caste structure as we awaken to four foundational truths:
In a humanized world of mutual caring and sharing, the material needs of most individuals will be modest and readily accommodated. We will use the collective surplus labor of humans and nature to insure one another against special needs and circumstances that we cannot realistically plan and prepare for as individuals.
Strengthen non-monetized relationships between people and between people and the lands and waters that sustain them.
I might die tomorrow. Or I might live to 100. I may be able to care for myself to the end. Or not. Individually, I cannot adequately prepare for what I cannot know. Nor can I realistically acquire the surplus to cover possible eventualities for myself and the loved one’s who may depend on me.
As a caring community, however, we can estimate with reasonable accuracy how many among us will live to 100. How many of those will need special care. And how much of society’s surplus must be set aside in preparation. It’s called insurance. For most of us it requires a caring community.
Living Earth has limits. It still, however, produces sufficient surplus to secure material sufficiency and spiritual abundance for all — if we make that our common goal.
The surplus of life’s labor is not sufficient to continue bearing the burden of a caste system devoted to controlling the many so a few can indulge in egotistical displays of privilege on a dying Earth. The more of humanity’s labor we devote to maintaining the system of domination, the less that is available to secure life’s wellbeing and the more rapid the living system’s collapse. As individuals, we cannot transform the failed economic system. Together we can.
Meaningful and fulfilling labor is a natural part of our human expression as living beings. Human institutions are purely human creations. Their only legitimate purpose is to serve the people on whom their existence ultimately depends. If institutions fail to serve us, then it is our right to eliminate or transform them.
Civil society is the sector where the power of we the people ultimately and properly resides. Consequently, in the fully functioning Ecological Civilization, government and business sectors must be creations of and accountable to a civil society of people who embrace the rights and responsibilities of their citizenship at all system levels from the local to the global. We can be citizens of only one locality. But we are all citizens of Earth — and the many levels in between. This must be acknowledged by any truly democratic system of self-governance.
As the disruptions of COVID-19 remind us of our interdependence, they create an unprecedented opportunity to unite in common cause to address our current Emergency in ways that advance Emergence of the culture, institutions, technology, and infrastructure of the Ecological Civilization on which our viability and wellbeing depend.
Given the speed at which environmental and social collapse are playing out, we now have a decade — if that — to achieve a dramatic redirection of the human course as a now globally interdependent species. There was a time when change of such magnitude took centuries, even millennia. But the rate of human change is increasing geometrically, and we now have the common language and communications capabilities needed to navigate an essential change of course consciously and intentionally with previously unimaginable speed.
As we contemplate the seriousness of the crisis at hand and the opportunity within our reach, we might note that ultimately this is not just about Earth and the human species. The evolution of life is an ongoing process in which Earth appears to have a special place.
Science currently estimates the number of stars within the observable universe at 70 billion trillion. Nearly all known stars have planets, the total of which would be an even greater number. We have yet to identify any planet other than Earth that we have reason to believe has Earthlike surface conditions that can support life as we know it.
The consequences of our current choices bear not just on us. They bear on the continued evolutionary unfolding of life in the universe. This marks the scale of our current responsibility.
There is no easy path. Tragedy and challenge lie ahead. The longer we wait, the more difficult the transition becomes and the less likely our prospect for success. Our task is to recognize and act on the Emergency at hand, and to do so in ways that enable the Emergence of a civil civilization guided by the maps of an eco-nomics dedicated to the wellbeing of life.
The time is now. The choice is ours.
ABOUT DAVID
David C. Korten is an American writer, lecturer, engaged citizen, student of psychology and behavioral systems, a prominent critic of corporate globalization, and an advocate of Ecological Civilization. He is founder and president of the Living Economies Forum and an active member of the Club of Rome, a member of the International Advisory Council of the International Academy for Multicultural Cooperation, and an Ambassador of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. Co-founder and former board chair of YES! Magazine (now YES! Media), he is the author of numerous influential books, including the international best-selling When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. His other books include: Change the Story; Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth; Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth; and The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism. He holds earned MBA and PhD degrees from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, served on the facilities of the Harvard Business School and Harvard School of Public Health, and worked for thirty years in international development in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Find David on Facebook, Twitter and his website, davidkorten.org.
