The great turning from empire to earth community
May 16th, 2008 by Jim JustDavid Kortenin in a presentation in April at the Seattle Green Festival turned to Star Trek in laying out the task for our time:
“Remember those scenes in Star Trek. Scotty to Captain Kirk. Life support is failing. Kirk to Scotty. Shut down all nonessential systems and direct all available resources to life support. There it is — the order for our time. No resources for war or extravagance. Focus all attention on the health of the crew and the life support system.
“No more throwaway stuff. No more economic growth for the rich. Our priority must be to grow our well-being rather than our consumption. Invest in peace, education, and health care rather than war. Invest in compact communities rather than suburban sprawl. Invest in local economies and environmental rejuvenation rather than in shipping toys around the world and speculating in the global financial casino. Invest in sidewalks, bicycles, bicycle paths, and public transportation rather than cars and highways. Invest in education for living rather than advertising to get us to consume more.
“Here is the kicker. We must eliminate exactly those forms of non-essential production and consumption that our economic and political systems are designed to promote.
We need to redesign the way we live – but we can’t because our world, even our own nation, is not governed by democratically elected governments but rather by global financial institutions.
“We need to grow strong caring communities in which we get more of our human satisfaction from caring relationships and less from material goods. We will need to end war as a means of settling international disputes and dismantle our military establishment. We need to reclaim the American ideal of being a democratic middle class nation without extremes of wealth and poverty. And we need to encourage and support the rest of the world in doing the same. To do all this we will need to create democratically accountable governing institutions devoted to the well-being of people and nature.”
Our biggest problem is neither bad people nor bad institutions, but a bad story that keeps running on an endless loop in our heads – that competition rather than cooperation and compassion ultimately works to the benefit of everyone.
It is time to start filling our heads instead with the story that it is our nature to be caring and giving and that this is all for the good, and therefore we properly set our sights on perfecting our capacity for love and caring and create the world of our dreams. It isn’t a particularly new story. It’s the story of all the world’s great religions.