The Lost Decade on Our Global Challenges
2009 State of the World Forum > WorldSummit Movement 2019
Some of you will remember an organization called “State of the World Forum” that held annual events from 1995 until 2008. It was founded by the wise luminary and environmental leader Jim Garrison and involved prominent people such as Mikhail Gorbachev. Well over a decade ago, and for several years before that, they were striving to take on the big global challenge of the day — climate change. The last forum that was scheduled to take place in 2009 was going to be based on an integral, whole-systems framework to be as inclusive and comprehensive as possible to finally kick climate change in the ass. While their website offered much inspirational hope, something happened. I still don’t know what. But the 2009 State of the World Forum never occurred, and the organization went away quietly and just disappeared. This is no conspiracy theory. It’s just a story of failure in human creativity to rise to a global challenge.
I found an old event program on my hard drive for the 2009 forum that got me thinking and I will share snippets of it here.
I realize that ten years have gone by and we are no closer to addressing and solving climate change. A decade has passed and we must conclude that so-called “conscious capitalism” failed to rise to the challenge, not only in addressing climate change but in all of the sick sectors of our society. For over a decade since the global economic collapse our governmental leaders have fumbled around, incapable of solving our challenges.
We are lucky to be where we are…with still enough time, in my opinion, of reversing the worst effects of climate change, even though some people thought back then that we only had a few years left. But we absolutely don’t have another decade to fuck around. In my opinion, we have 2–3 years to halt the “sixth mass extinction” (which includes our own species) but it’s going to take a radical phase shift in our entire paradigm. For this to happen we must accept that our current systems are dying and let them go. We have to acknowledge that our current political and economic leaders cannot solve our challenges because they ARE the problem; they are part of the systems that are obsoleting themselves. We cannot solve our problems from the same consciousness and same systems that created them. It is time to think differently, be differently, and do differently to create an entirely new regenerative operating system to make the old one obsolete.
While there are many, many new global summits and forums being organized by NGO’s everywhere, I respectfully submit that most are merely annual events, designed to occur year after year, featuring different sets of talking heads discussing ad infinitum how to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic. Mostly they are trying to solve our problems with green new deals of conscious capitalism without addressing the underlying root cause — a failed economic system, however green, still based on infinite growth, inherently rivalrous win/lose dynamics of money and ownership, and an outdated labor-for-income model where there will simply never be enough jobs due to increasing automation. To hell with jobs anyway; let’s embrace automation. It is time for a revolution of the mind, to acknowledge that holding on to outdated notions of economics and politics is counter-productive to our survival.
The good news is that the WorldSummit movement is amalgamating amazing solutions to flip to an entirely new paradigm. We are facilitating this historic phase shift towards an open access economy and a new self-governance model.
The bad news is that we are doing what we are doing with very little support and exposure. For about two years now we have been relying on a small group of volunteers to help us get as far as we’ve gotten. Since our first mini-summit in Mexico in January of 2018 we set a tentative date for the main WorldSummit event to be on June 1, 2019. While we have always talked of having a dynamic timeline, it has been obvious for some time now that we will need to push back the event to an undetermined date in the future. But we are not deterred and will not give up. After all, the process is equally as important as the actual event. We still believe in our hearts that working to affect change at the root cause level, our socio-economic system, is a noble and just cause, however long it takes. We are on the right path and believe that we can create a more beautiful world that works for everyone. It’s a matter of how much we have to suffer before we get there.
And maybe we are just not that good yet at this thing called “Conscious Evolution” [subject of my next essay] that the amazing luminary Barbara Marx Hubbard, who recently passed away, tried to teach us about so that we may take control of our destiny and grow without the evolutionary driver of pain and suffering. Perhaps things still have to get worse before we open up to new possibilities. If that’s the case, then so be it. At the WorldSummit we have a plan, we have a process, and we have a whole-systems integral framework. When humanity is ready so are we.
But we can’t afford to lose another decade.
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Check out our latest 28-minute video explaining The New Story, the Phase Shift of Humanity:
http://bit.ly/worldsummit-video-humanitysphaseshift
