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These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
In a broad sense, modern humanity‘s great adventure is to … plumb the depths of the human soul … to open completely new dimensions.
We are confronted, at every new stage in the differentiation of consciousness to which civilization attains, with the task of finding a new interpretation appropriate to the stage, in order to connect the life of the past that still exists in us with the life of the present, which threatens to slip away from it.
There is no better ideological lubricant to grease our decline into a global corporate dystopia than a form of religiosity that denigrates the individual, promotes quiescence, and calls for a personal disappearance into some larger structure or process.
Authority is therefore a dynamic property of relationships wherein one party is granted unique responsibilities and allowances with regards to the other… Importantly, for authority to work this asymmetry must be recognized and agreed to by all parties. If you speak as an authority but are not recognized as one by your audience, you will not affect your audience as an authority might. Authority must be granted or given — one must arrange to be seen as an authority.
Today Americans are paradoxically the most religious and the most modern; the most spiritual and the most materialistic.
There is no Buddha-Nature, Christ Consciousness, or Aurobindian Supermind that will be coming to save us. There will be no Great World Teacher, no Great Prophet. There is no Great Prophesy, only the everyday prophecies of caregiving, cooperation, goodwill, and decency that make us capable of civilization. It is just we humans, warts and all, who must save the world.
There will be no viable future for humanity in space if we simply try to bring today's status quo models beyond Earth's atmosphere.
Alienated from our labor and each other and surrounded by technological systems we do not understand, we have become immature and irresponsible. We either fear that we cannot control ourselves, or we assume that self-control is not a problem. We have actually come to misunderstand the work of our own hands. We imagine ourselves to be like the sorcerer's apprentice, in possession of great powers we cannot control and that may destroy us. Or we see ourselves as masters of the universe, able to wield immense power unproblematically.
There are nearly 200 countries on the globe, each marking off a distinct piece of land within its borders. The Earth is thus etched with a complex system of imaginary lines. These lines do not exist in nature; they are only as real as the political stories we tell about them.
Ever since the French Revolution, every state has had "citizens" as opposed to "subjects." Citizens have rights. Citizens are equal participants in the political decision making of their state. Except that, ever since the concept was launched, virtually every state has tried hard to limit the applicability of the concept in reality. One of the ways this has been done is that the world-system has reified a whole series of binary distinctions and given them political importance to a degree unknown before: bourgeois/ middle class/ proletarian/ working class; man/ woman; White/ Black (or person of color); breadwinner/ housewife; productive worker/ unproductive person; sexually mainstream/ sexually aberrant; the educated/ the masses; honest citizen/ criminal; normal/ mentally abnormal; of legal age/ a minor; civilized/ uncivilized. And of course there are more. What one has to note about these binary distinctions, all elaborated theoretically in great detail in the 19th century, is that they build on ancient distinctions but give to them a salience, an interconnectedness, and a rigidity that they seldom had before. What we have also to note is that the consequence of each binary distinction that is made salient is the restriction of effective citizenship. Citizenship as a concept theoretically includes everyone. The binary distinctions reduce this "everyone" to a relatively small minority of the population. This can be easily measured by looking at suffrage rights and even more at the degree of acceptability of real political participation.
How can humanity, which is utterly dependent on the gifts of nature, ever aspire to become responsible for the existence of those very gifts? How can a single strand in the web of life ever expect to be responsible for the whole?
Many democracies around the world (but especially in the United States) have largely devolved into dysfunctional oligarchies.
What if the goal of society— as encoded in its very legal structures — was not endless accumulation of wealth but the endless actualization of human potential?
What stops humanity from living in a world of justice and abundance are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the rules we have made up that now govern our cooperation, and the legacies of illusion and dishonesty that continue to blind us to our actual situation as a species.
Only by seeing into the lived experiences of those most impacted by a measure can we get a sense of the degree to which its use engenders justice and beauty.
Our species is playing out an identity crisis on the world stage, and for the first time we are collectively facing the fact we do not know what it means to be human. In the postmodern West where lifestyle and worldview pluralism reign, you can pick any self-related measure (intelligence, money, credentials, fitness, etc.) and find a group that hypertrophies it.
… a false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.
Basic structures are social structures we enter into by virtue of entering into society at all.
Measures and standards impact nearly every aspect of our given life-world; they are a part of the daily feeling of taken-for-grantedness that underpins our psyches and relationships.
A measurement crisis occurs when society loses touch with reality because it has institutionalized a systematically distorted measurement infrastructure.
What a society chooses to measure is always tied into that society's shared narrative about the way the world works and what is valuable within it.
The rewarding of merit is, to adapt a Kantian distinction, a hypothetical imperative' that is dependent on the way we judge the success of a society; it does not involve a 'categorical imperative' on what should in any case be done.
… the concept of 'merit' is deeply contingent on our views of a good society. Indeed, the notion of merit is fundamentally derivative.... [it is dependent] on the concept of 'the good' in the relevant society. There is no natural order of 'merit' that is independent of our value system.
Beginning with the individual, it must be recognized that the reproduction of social realities is always accomplished through their transformation, specifically through the creative and autonomous actions of agents who are held responsible for what they say and do.
The continued unilateral design of the next generation by those currently in power is an unjust situation in which individuals are rendered incapable of taking responsibility for their own lives, denied the autonomous pursuit of a self-chosen conception of the good, and thus denied the freedom and self-respect typically given to responsible humans.
The darkest ideologies of our past must never be forgotten; they must be taken as lessons, with future generations scaffolded into deeper reflections on the significance of human mistakes.
I am haunted by an eco-fascist nightmare... The ecological catastrophe will deepen and political leaders across the political spectrum will no longer deny climate change. They will see the political advantages of proclaiming themselves ecological saviors and of speaking in global terms. They will know the benefits of maintaining an emergency, or disaster capitalism.... I am concerned about the potential for scientific-oriented environmentalism to flip into a dark force in our world. I foresee that great tragedies could be carried out under the technocratic ecological flag. To join politics with catastrophic environmentalism is dangerous. It will attract the most power hungry... and the most calculative. Their lifeboat mentality will be the pretext for genocide and enslavement. And yet, some kind of universal ecological politics is absolutely necessary for the survival of humanity.
We differentiate only so we can better reintegrate at a higher level of synthesis and insight. Society and nature are not two and yet they are not one, we need concepts that capture their interanimation and co-evolution.
When any complex system reaches its structural limits, an evolutionary crisis ensues and a fundamentally new kind of system must be painfully and violently born.
It appears the Earth Is being put in our hands and we are not prepared for the responsibility.
Civilizations are mortal.
… the human person is not a random event but the arrow of evolution.
Natural history tells us of a haphazard and casual transformation of species over hundreds of millions of years of devouring and being devoured. The biological and political history of men is an elaborate repetition of the same thing.
By virtue of his reflective faculties, man is raised out of the animal world, and by his mind he demonstrates that nature has put a high premium precisely upon the development of consciousness.
Man with all his external characteristics seems little suited to representing a god.
In the end, man is an event which cannot judge itself, but, for better or worse, is left to the judgment of others.
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