Re-aligning the Future

What can we do in our one short life to create a sustainable, just, future?

First we need a 'level gaze' at the global situation as it is today - the wars, the marginalization of people, the economy, the gap between haves and have-nots, the environment, and all the other problems threatening this planet.

And then we need to look at how things work. How do movements begin and how do they affect change? Do they have to be funded by corporations and governments? Is it possible for grass roots values to emerge and challenge the status quo, staying true to the original cause?

Given the endless examples of corrupt power that began with good intentions, it would be easy to turn away from the world and entertain ourselves to death. Anyone who dares to utter ideals is likely to be laughed at or viewed with suspicion. That is the problem - we have lost faith in humanity's  ability to solve the big problem.

Imagine an alien nation visiting this planet after everything has been destroyed, scrambling through the ruins looking for clues to the final cause of our demise. The answer might be that we were smart enough to build rockets, write symphonies and create political systems, but couldn't work together for the sake of our survival.   Humanity showed signs of being experts on what was wrong, and what or who was to blame, but in the end, were unable to identify their own culpability.

Each age has its own allusions of grandeur and every nation its own conceits, and these are the blessings and threats to our survival - the tragic flaw.  It's not a solution or an invention that we need now, it's humility and compassion.  The way to the future cannot be mapped out onto a blueprint. 

It is, I believe, a spiritual quest where we learn how to honour the other equally with the self, to recognize when we are misguided, acknowledge mistakes and then recalibrate the journey.

We have the scientists, the healers, the visionaries, the artists and musicians, to guide and inspire. There will always be the optimists and pessimists, those who say too much and those who don't speak up, those who give and those who take.  And we have communities that work because of the focus and commitment of individual members.

We have the capacity for empathy and to read between lines. We have emotional intelligence and rational objectivity. We share the bond of one mother.  Our home provides enough air, food, water and shelter for us all.  So what is holding us back? What is muddling the discussion and obfuscating the goal?

The answer, I feel, can be rendered down to one simple flaw which possibly goes back before history, to the beginning of patriarchy, when men sought control over women and women sought protection from men.

The muscular male body appears fit for the hard labour of social construction, and the softer female for nurture, and so each has been socialized to fit into one gender or the other. Other primates with similar social systems remained close to earth, but we, with each century magnified power, worshipped it, extracted it from the life force and turned it into a god. Graded all elements into a  hierarchy through rituals that keep beings in their designated place.

What we need now is to align our sights, to see how ideology and socialization that breeds false illusions of superiority, is the cause of our inability to live together, to find a way through.

We need to understand that power belongs to all in strength and responsibility, and not be diverted by the attempts of the few to intimidate the masses. Or to hope that saints and saviours will rescue this global human project. Nurturing a place for the future is our task, our power.

What each one of us can do, in our one short life, is dis-invest in power-over and re-invest our goals and hopes in power-from-within in terms of influence and responsibility.

The Prevailing Epidemic

The trial of Anders Breivik, a man who believes he is saving Norway by bombing and gunning down innocent people, begins this week.

"Breivik is expected to deny terrorism charges at the start of his 10-week trial on Monday. His logic, according to his legal team, is that he carried out the attacks on 22 July last year in "self defence". He has said he intended his attacks as punishment of traitors whose pro-immigration policies were adulterating Norwegian blood." The Guardian.

He is clearly sick even if he is not found criminally insane. Thankfully, most of us could not carry out a mass killing of young people, let alone live with ourselves if we did. We have a conscience, an inner safety valve that keeps us from doing harm to others. Yet he boldly proclaims he is on the verge of making his manifesto, which I refuse to read, a new world order.

Such delusions are not new. There have been many killers who believe they have a ‘divine’ role to play in the world. But it’s not just that these people exist, it is the way we become fascinated with them. Or the way the media focuses exclusively on violence while ignoring the peaceful struggles and aspirations of a perceived normalcy.

This suggests a rupture in what we understand as reality in terms of the larger issues, and the reality of our local epistemic landscape. We know, through experience, that life is easier if we try to cooperate and get along with our family members, our neighbours, our co-workers. Yet the headlines upstage our knowing by framing the world in terms of winners (competing for the most of what each of them wants) and their victims.

Media enables us to believe we are ineffective in creating change or sustaining our values by becoming informed of critical issues, by doing what we believe is our duty as citizens. It implants in the psyche a larger, more distant tribe, and the message is one way – from them to us. So we in our individual and specific locations decide to increase or hold back our public selves according to how meaningful the commons appears to us.

I have heard over and over again "Oh I don’t take any notice of our politicians these days – they are all a bunch of liars". Or confessions that we live in a sick world. This is quite understandable when we listen, watch, read, a never-ending list of the bleeding that leads. So we replace the commons with the mall and trade community for gadgets, and in this way, by our own choice, we make trends more trendy, and things more worthy than life.

Through media and the market people become things—personalities, celebrities, intellectuals, leaders, political parties, ideologues. The more we invest in things, the more powerless we become in our own value system. The more powerless we feel the more sympathy we have with extreme views. "Lock 'em up and throw away the key!" "Send 'em back to where they came from!" "Let 'em starve – that'll teach 'em to get a job!"

The more we cut off our civic selves, the more we fill ourselves up with self-medicating slogans, and the more we look to the powers-that-be to fix what we cannot face. The more we look to power the more we fear love, and the more suspicious we become about our own experiential knowledge. The more we fear love, the more we look to punish the other to keep away the shadows of uncertainty. The more we look to punishment as a solution, the more we retreat from our own power to care for the world. The more we retreat from caring, the less informed we become, and the more contempt we feel for humanity.

As we watch governments cut funding for social programs in favour of sophisticated weapons, despair increases and depresses our problem solving capacities.

Guns, bombs, war, and punishment are the addictions of a species who have, generation after generation, been traumatized by the structural violence that teaches us to be suspicious and feel contempt for the natural power of love, nurture and the creativity that we possess, and to replace it with the prevailing propaganda that power must intimidate, destroy and rebuild.

This is the most contagious epidemic of our age, and this is how we shall die if we cannot heal. The good news is – the power to heal is within our minds, our words and our actions. The power to heal is ours to choose.

Power is stupid!

The first definition of power in Dictionary Dot Com, "the ability to do or act; a capability of doing or accomplishing something" suggests that power is essential to the survival of sentient beings. As long as it is a capacity used cautiously and mindfully by complex, intelligent beings, it's good. But when it is a value separate from life, worshipped for power's sake, then it becomes stupid! It is incapable of understanding what it does or what it destroys.

Yet we live in a post-Orwellian world where power is isolated as something over and above all else.


Mohammad Shaffia who was found guilty of killing his first wife and three daughters could have been motivated by that separation of power from life, and those who were not killed possibly lived in constant terror of that power. Any father, tormented by his own addiction to control, may end up by destroying the lives of all those he feels bound to protect.

The publicized response by other Canadians, in the safety of their own living rooms, was predictable - they called for the end of honour killings, for immigrants to adopt good Canadian values. Some blamed Islam saying it was a sign of the primitive nature of the religion, but I doubt these critics would blame Christianity for the crimes committed by Nazis who identified as Christian. And will these commentators hiding behind their online identities be engaged when there are discussions around supporting families at risk on a social level? Will they question our society at all, in terms of how it glorifies power for power's sake? The assumption of moral superiority, by association, without sacrifice or reflection, enables this superficial disembodied sense of power.


 A study, published in the journal Psychological Science, found lower intelligence scores in childhood were predictors of greater racism in adulthood, and the tendency to adopt the kind of unexamined right-wing ideologies that create illusions of power. This was given much media coverage a few months ago.


George Monbiot weighed in with his own applause for this story, quoting a former Republican ideologue, Mike Lofgren, who notes that the party, has inflamed an anti-intellectual hostility to science, appealing to the “low-information voter”. Lofgren doubts that the leaders believe in their propaganda but are happy to “feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base”.

There can be no doubt that powerful interests feel they are winning when they fund and support the dumbing down of Western societies, with lies, doublespeak and propaganda, but destroying the commons in this way, ultimately makes intelligence and life, redundant.


In the quest for power, our own federal government seems bent on destroying Canada and Canadians' sense of social justice by overwriting complex systems with new laws, that enable "low-information" citizens a fleeting sense of power by association. Feelings of spurious power for the masses replace the power invested in human rights and systems of justice.


No doubt, the young minds we are raising almost exclusively on violent entertainments in hostile communities, where heinous acts get front page and citizen's struggles to do the right thing are invisible, will grow up with little other than contempt for humanity.

But power doesn't mind at all. Power is not a living entity with a brain and nervous system, it is a tool for complex beings that must be handled cautiously to create a cooperative sustainable future. Otherwise, as we have seen, century after century, it destroys the living communities who worship it.

Love is powerful, but in its true sense it is based on nurture and care of and for other sentient beings. Love is hurt by what it harms. Love is moved by the power of love, whereas power alienated from life does not feel joy or grief.