When I met David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning, last fall, I recognized him as an exemplary elder who is making a difference. At 69, he is still giving hundreds of speeches, inspiring thousands of people to take responsibility for bringing about change in their communities and for working night and day to leave the world in better shape than they found it.
The Great Turning is a very insightful and powerful articulation of how the world’s economic structures and systems have created a vicious circle that perpetuates inequity, poverty and many of the self-destructive patterns that are threatening our way of life socially, environmentally and economically. If we don’t change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed. David challenges all of us to begin to create ‘new stories’ or interpretations that can become a vision for a world that can work for everyone. He suggests the alternative will be a “Great Unraveling” of our civilization as we know it.
David and I agree that we need to mobilize a lot of us to create new stories and visions for the future. The new stories he is calling for in The Great Turning have to do with transforming our relationship to what David distinguishes as “Empire”—the economic and social order based on traditional capitalism, short-term corporate thinking (combined with limited liability), and a kind of institutional blindness to the true costs of living in a have/have not world. The vision he has as an alternative to Empire is an ethic of “Earth Community”—a world which puts people first, embraces values that are other than just economic, and which creates mechanisms for all to share opportunities and for all to access all life has to offer.
My ‘new story’ shares some common ground with David’s, in that I envision people (specifically Baby Boomers) assuming personal responsibility for the world and participating in any way they can to clean up the messes before they die. Collaboration and committed action are key to both his vision and mine.
However, I don’t believe there are many bona fide villains and I don’t believe there are many bona fide victims. I think most of us are doing the best we can in a paradigm that is based on outdated and unworkable ideas of success, notions based on control rather than collaboration among equals.
In my vision, our day-to-day conversations connect us and offer the possibilities of either collaborating to create new visions and possibilities and coordinate our commitments OR limiting ourselves to endless commentary about the state of the world so we remain spectators in the Great Turning. For me, the Great Turning begins when we get out of the bleachers and get on the field of play, declare what we stand for and commit ourselves to whatever course of action will move us toward realizing our vision of a better world.
David is hosting a conference in Columbus, Ohio this weekend to pursue the question of what can each of us do to advance the Great Turning and create new stories. I regret I won’t be able to make it; however, one of my colleagues will be participating and reporting in after the event. I thank all the participants for caring enough to come and look forward to hearing more about what comes next….
