By David Korten | Great Turning website
Read more posts in The World We Want series.
How does it happen? It starts with a conversation. A while back, Cecile Andrews, our local Seattle author of The Circle of Simplicity, explained to me how the women’s movement changed the story on gender and unleashed the long suppressed power of the feminine. It started with discussion circles in which women came together to share personal stories. As each woman spoke her truth, a larger truth was revealed for all to see. The prevailing story that the key to a woman’s happiness is to find the right man, marry him, and devote her life to his service was not true.
Absent the discussions that encouraged the sharing of their true stories, women whose experience failed to conform to the prevailing cultural story held themselves responsible for their failure. They assumed they were simply different, and thus in some way deficient. By breaking the silence to share their stories, they ended their isolation and rose above self-doubt as they came to realize that they were in the very good company of a great many other wonderful women. Many then lent their voices to a growing chorus of women engaged in changing the cultural stories by which society had long defined women and their roles.
Cecile noted to me that the same process is involved in the voluntary simplicity movement. Through sharing stories about what makes us truly happy, we come to see the fallacy of the advertising story that material consumption is our source of happiness. Once this fallacy is seen for what it is, we can enthusiastically share our stories of how we are improving the quality of our lives by reducing the quantity of our consumption and gaining control of our time to do more of the things that make us feel fully alive.
The power of authentic stories told and retold by millions and ultimately billions of people can trump the power of Empire. It begins with a conversation. There are now thousands of organizations involved in advancing the conversation that is challenging and changing the economic story that serves the predatory institutions of Empire. The economic story we are working to change rests on false representations about our human nature, the public interest, economic growth and money that promote false priorities and distract our attention from the possibility of creating the world we truly want and that we must now create to save our Earth Mother—and ourselves. In everything you do, share the story of our human possibility and of our right and responsibility to create for ourselves and for future generations, the world of our shared dream.
Our distinctive human capacity for reflection and intentional choice carries a corresponding moral responsibility to care for our Mother Earth and for one another. We must now test the limits of the individual and collective creative potential of our species as we strive to become the change we seek.
In these turbulent and frightening times, it is important to remind ourselves that we are privileged to live at the most exciting moment of creative opportunity in the whole of the human experience. The future is in our hands. Now is the hour. We have the power to turn this world around. We are the ones we have been waiting for.