There is an old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times”. Well, it looks like we’re here, and, regardless of all the various and contradictory theories, the bottom line of what each of us can do is to keep a healthy immune system, stay out of fear and stress, and stay in our Loving for it all, Living here in Santa Barbara, things have been closed down for awhile. However, in seeing the closed businesses and empty streets, my mind goes to imaging what it could look like if we shifted out of this everyone-for-themselves (E-F-T) paradigm with money as the medium of exchange into creating a world that works for everyone with cooperation as the exchange medium. In a cooperative world we could eliminate 85% of the current jobs because those jobs only exist because of our E-F-T culture. Along with that, for many things that we do need, automation and AI can produce a lot of what we need with little effort. Even in our current wasteful paradigm, the inevitable automation is slated to replace 45% of current jobs — hashtag: humans need not apply.
While politicians keep saying that we need to create more jobs, that’s only true within our broken E-F-T system that is using up the planet’s resources so quickly that this current pandemic crisis pales in comparison to that reality. The current thinking for governments, corporations and mainstream media is economy first and the environment a distant second. With the current economic, political, and social systems broken beyond repair, what continues to be needed is for people to see that there is an alternative model that not only can show how life can be so much more abundant on all levels — healthier, happier, and with more access to almost anything one would want to do — but could also transform the planet to create a world that works for everyone, including the billions of people struggling to survive and living below the poverty line. If we are to preserve and take care of out planet, we need to redefine wealth as use and access rather than possession. In a cooperative society it’s just not necessary for all households to have one of everything, it’s just necessary to have easy and convenient access to what’s needed, and, as a consequence of that sharing, we can all have access — that we may not have been able to afford before — to a whole lot more than we do now.
Yet we’ve been so conditioned to the EFT paradigm as being the only way, that it’s hard to imagine creating a world that works for everyone and where decisions can be made by consensus rather than politicians so often owned by big money interests. However, this transformation can only be made by a group of people showing what life in a cooperative Community would be like. Then when others around the planet could see the advantages of such a model where people are happier, healthier, more abundant on all levels, with more time for play and creativity, and more connected within themselves, to others and to Nature, and a committment to restoring the planet, people will want to replicate that model all over the world. That model for building a demonstration Community has been described in detail by both the Community Planet Foundation and One Community, who both share the mission to create a world that works for everyone and for all life on the planet.
It’s so easy to be a critic of the many crises we face, yet more challenging to present real solutions. But, as Buckminster Fuller said: “In order to change something, don’t struggle to change the existing model, create a new one and make the old one obsolete.” And, that’s exactly what we need to do: demonstrate a model for living that would change everything. I have a quote that is based on the Community Planet vision “The solution for everything is the solution for anything”. During Q and A’s I love to have people ask about any issue because I can then demonstrate how our Community model would resolve whatever that issue is.
However, as a first step toward this transformation, I have another quote: “You can’t have a utopian society without utopian people”. So, in order to have create successful model Community, the residents need to be committed to and hold that consciousness of the Highest Good For All. There are more than enough people who now hold that consciousness to be residents in that first demonstration Community, and again, when other people see a quality of life that is so much better on all levels, they will start to elevate their consciousnesses so that they can be a part of these Communities as they replicate across the planet.
These are interesting times, and a good time to imagine how we can make the old model of separation obsolete.