Category Archives: The Great Turning

The Great Turning

We Are Hard-Wired to Care and Connect – Part IV

By David Korten | Website

Reprinted from  "Purple America," the Fall 2008 YES! Magazine
284 Madrona Way NE Ste 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110.  Subscriptions: 800/937-4451  

Read the first part of the article here.

=&0=&Getting out of our current mess begins with a conversation to change the shared cultural story about our essential nature. The women’s movement offers an instructive lesson.

In little more than a decade, a few
courageous women changed the cultural story that the key to a woman’s
happiness is to find the right man, marry him, and devote her life to
his service. As Cecile Andrews, author of Circles of Simplicity,

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The Great Turning

We Are Hard-Wired to Care and Connect – Part III

By David Korten | Website

Reprinted from  "Purple America," the Fall 2008 YES! Magazine
284 Madrona Way NE Ste 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110.  Subscriptions: 800/937-4451  

Read the first part of the article here.

Learning to be Human
If the properly functioning human brain is wired for caring, cooperation, and service, how do we account for the outrageous greed and violence that threaten our collective survival? Here we encounter our distinctive human

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The Great Turning

New Stories

By Jim Selman | Bio

David Korten does a great job of showing us how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer—how the ‘system’ is rigged to create more for the’ haves’ and less for the ‘have nots’. It makes sense. We can see it everywhere from the government’s disregard for regulation, to the now inevitable necessity for a ‘bailout’, to the way we measure the health of our society to the ‘either/or’ controversies that rage on while giving us more of what we resist. The saddest aspect of this whole financial meltdown is that we probably won’t learn our lessons. After all, wasn’t all of our current regulatory apparatus created after the 1930s so the Great Depression would never happen again?

David’s proposal—and I could not agree with him more—is that we must create new ‘stories’ that can move us from Empire to Earth Community and have a world that can work for everyone. In Alcoholics Anonymous, the second step is “came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”. A new story for mankind needs a idea of something beyond our own closed and self-referential worldview, although it need not be a deterministic deity that is

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The Great Turning

More, Better and Different

By Jim Selman | Bio

The engine that drives the world’s economy is a principle that is embedded in our worldview—“more, better and different”. It may seem obvious, but when we think about consumerism, materialism or alcoholism—or any ‘ism’ really—they are all based on the idea that if we like something, then ‘more’ is good (and conversely, if we don’t like it, then ‘less’ is good). Continuous improvement demands that things get better and better—and ‘more’ better

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The Great Turning

The Crisis

By Jim Selman | Bio

As
an elder, what do I have to say regarding the ‘crisis’ in the financial
system? To begin, I don’t know what to say about the crisis. But I do
know that this is not a time for ‘idle’ opinions or mouthing platitudes
and ideological dogma. I know the seemingly ‘sudden’ emergence of this
situation is mostly the fact that the media and government pays
attention only after something happens and doesn’t bother to listen to
thoughtful

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The Great Turning

We Are Hard-Wired to Care and Connect – Part II

By David Korten | Website

Reprinted from  "Purple America," the Fall 2008 YES! Magazine
284 Madrona Way NE Ste 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110.  Subscriptions: 800/937-4451  

Read the first part of the article here.

Wired to Connect

Scientists
who use advanced imaging technology to study brain function report that
the human brain is wired to reward caring, cooperation, and service.
According to this research, merely thinking about another person

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The Great Turning

We Are Hard-Wired to Care and Connect

By David Korten | Website

Reprinted from  "Purple America," the Fall 2008 YES! Magazine
284 Madrona Way NE Ste 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110.  Subscriptions: 800/937-4451 

The story of purple America is part of a
yet larger human story. For all the cultural differences reflected in
our richly varied customs, languages, religions, and political
ideologies, psychologically healthy humans share a number of core
values and aspirations. Although we

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The Great Turning

Future Shock

By Jim Selman | Bio

Since Alvin Toffler published Future Shock in the 1970s, futurists have been speculating what will happen in the coming decades. As with most attempts at long-range predictions, the proof is in the pudding. Most turn out to be somewhat accurate, along with lots of unpredictable ‘surprises’. No one, for example, anticipated the Internet, globalization, Google, global terrorism, cell phones or the unimaginable cost of energy. The future continues to be a fickle mistress and pretty much does what she wants to do, regardless of our prognostications.

Behind our fascination with future scenarios is our belief that if we know what will happen, it will inform our actions and choices and we will be more successful, happier or merely survive. In the Michigan Citizen last week, environmental leader Maynard Kaufman was quoted as having predicted that we are going to again become an agrarian society. In another piece in the same paper, Shae Howell is speculating on the future of globalization following the recent collapse

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The Great Turning

Gore’s Challenge

By Jim Selman | Bio

There is an inspiring 30-minute speech by Al Gore challenging all of us and our nation to commit to a 10-year program to move away completely from a carbon-based economy. The challenge echoes what a lot of us have been saying for years, but he has developed sufficient moral authority in some sectors that maybe more people will listen. Redesigning our energy infrastructure isn’t exactly the same as going to the moon as he suggests, but there are some powerful parallels.

For

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The Great Turning

The World We Want: It Begins with a Conversation

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

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