By David C. Korten<\/em><\/p>\nHumans are distinctive among Earth\u2019s species. We organize around shared cultural stories of our origin, nature, and purpose. These stories become the lens through which we see our world. They help us define the values and institutions that mold our relationships with one another and the Earth. The societies we have imagined, dreamed, and built range from being characterized by loving cooperation to ones characterized by violent competition. These diverse results reveal the power of story. They explore the extraordinary range of human possibility and plumb our potential to choose our future.<\/p>\n
Get our story right, and we flourish together in the service of life. Get it wrong, and we become an existential threat to ourselves and to the Earth that graciously birthed and nurtures us. At present we live in the grip of a deeply flawed story. To change the situation, we must find our way to an authentic narrative. We need a story informed by traditional wisdom, the world\u2019s great religious traditions, and the leading edge of science.<\/p>\n
Humans have long dreamed of a thriving world filled with communities that offer ecologically balanced and spiritually fulfilling lives. Africans move within a spiritual heritage of Ubuntu<\/em>, often translated as \u201cI am because you are.\u201d The Quechua peoples of the Andes talk about it as sumac asway<\/em>. It translates into Spanish as vivir bien<\/em> and into English as \u201cgood living.\u201d Bolivia and Ecuador have etched this concept into their constitutions. China has written it into its constitution as a commitment to an ecological civilization. In 2015, the Parliament of the World\u2019s Religions issued a Declaration on Climate Change that closed with these words: \u201cThe future we embrace will be a new ecological civilization and a world of peace, justice, and sustainability, with the flourishing of the diversity of life. We will build this future as one human family within the greater Earth community.\u201d<\/p>\nFar from being a call to sacrifice, these challenging times call us to actualize the potential of our human nature and our deep inclination to love and to care for one another and the Earth.<\/p>\n
Together we can embrace the requirement to significantly reduce total human consumption. We<\/p>\n
can choose our current moment as an opportunity to relieve ourselves and the Earth from the enormous environmental and social burdens imposed by war, obsessive materialism, planned obsolescence, and auto dependent infrastructure that separates us from one another and nature.<\/p>\n
Even if GDP and corporate profits decline, this need not be our primary concern as long as we correct the institutional flaws. In a system designed to crash if money does not continuously flow from the poor to the rich, we must see our situation for what it is. We can refuse this hostage situation in which no one ultimately wins, where all remain captive to GDP. We can say no to these mechanisms of manipulation.<\/p>\n
Humanity\u2019s existential crisis traces \u2014 at least in part \u2014 to mainstream economics: a political ideology posing as an objective science, with generous financial support from the powerful institutions since the mid-20th century.<\/p>\n
Because this ideology has been presented in most of the world\u2019s universities as uncontested truth, generations of leaders have been taught to believe that financial assets are the measure of a society\u2019s worth. Therefore, supporting growth of these assets has become accepted as a defining responsibility of leaders of society\u2019s most powerful institutions. In the United States, we assess the health of the economy by how fast GDP and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are growing. We rarely ask how people or the Earth are doing.<\/p>\n
We are assured there is no need for concern about the resulting inequality because the invisible hand of the market will distribute benefits according to merit, and all will eventually enjoy limitless material abundance \u2014 if they have earned it. It is shocking that a story so obviously flawed could be allowed to harm so many for so long without having sparked rebellion and corrective action. It is all too rare, however, that we educate our young to question the stories that define our lives and our communities in this way. Such challenges only arise if people venture outside of their communities and engage with those who view the world through different stories.<\/p>\n
Successfully transforming our relationships with one another and the Earth requires a new economics grounded in an accurate and compelling story. That story must be one that focuses our attention on securing the well-being of all people and Earth, treats money as a tool rather than a purpose, and reminds us that most of the real wealth of the living Earth is the product of all of life\u2019s labor. Once we get our story right, we have a chance to get our future right.<\/p>\n
David C. Korten is a political activist, author, and former professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Business and the Harvard Graduate School of Public Health. He also is the founder and president of the Living Economics Forum. His books include <\/em>Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth and <\/em>When Corporations Rule the World.<\/em><\/p>\nThis story was originally published by Grist<\/a> with the headline It\u2019s time to reimagine our future. Here are 3 ways to begin.<\/a> on Jan 29, 2021.<\/p>\nThis post was originally published on Grist<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“The New Possible,” a new essay collection, explores how the turmoil of the past year provides unprecedented opportunities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":174,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[857,510,396,859,4702],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18629"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/174"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18630,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18629\/revisions\/18630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}