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Our New, Happy Life? The Ideology of Development

May 24, 2018 by Charles Eisenstein 17 Comments

May 2018
French | Portuguese | German


This essay originally appeared in Tikkun.

 

In George Orwell’s 1984, there is a moment when the Party announces an “increase” in the chocolate ration – from thirty grams to twenty. No one except for the protagonist, Winston, seems to notice that the ration has gone down not up.

‘Comrades!’ cried an eager youthful voice. ‘Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 percent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.

The newscaster goes on to announce one statistic after another proving that everything is getting better. The phrase in vogue is “our new, happy life.” Of course, as with the chocolate ration, it is obvious that the statistics are phony.

Those words, “our new, happy life,” came to me as I read two recent articles, one by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times and the other by Stephen Pinker in the Wall Street Journal, both of which asserted, with ample statistics, that the overall state of humanity is better now than at any time in history. Fewer people die in wars, car crashes, airplane crashes, even from gun violence. Poverty rates are lower than ever recorded, life expectancy is higher, and more people than ever are literate, have access to electricity and running water, and live in democracies.

Like in 1984, these articles affirm and celebrate the basic direction of society. We are headed in the right direction. With smug assurance, they tell us that thanks to reason, science, and enlightened Western political thinking, we are making strides toward a better world.

Like in 1984, there is something deceptive in these arguments that so baldly serve the established order.

Unlike in 1984, the deception is not a product of phony statistics.

Before I describe the deception and what lies on the other side of it, I want to assure the reader that this essay will not try to prove that things are getting worse and worse. In fact, I share the fundamental optimism of Kristof and Pinker that humanity is walking a positive evolutionary path. For this evolution to proceed, however, it is necessary that we acknowledge and integrate the horror, the suffering, and the loss that the triumphalist narrative of civilizational progress skips over.

What hides behind the numbers

In other words, we need to come to grips with precisely the things that Stephen Pinker’s statistics leave out. Generally speaking, metrics-based evaluations, while seemingly objective, bear the covert biases of those who decide what to measure, how to measure it, and what not to measure. They also devalue those things which we cannot measure or that are intrinsically unmeasurable. Let me offer a few examples.

Nicholas Kristof celebrates a decline in the number of people living on less than two dollars a day. What might that statistic hide? Well, every time an indigenous hunter-gatherer or traditional villager is forced off the land and goes to work on a plantation or sweatshop, his or her cash income increases from zero to several dollars a day. The numbers look good. GDP goes up. And the accompanying degradation is invisible.

For the last several decades, multitudes have fled the countryside for burgeoning cities in the global South. Most had lived largely outside the money economy. In a small village in India or Africa, most people procured food, built dwellings, made clothes, and created entertainment in a subsistence or gift economy, without much need for money. When development policies and the global economy push entire nations to generate foreign exchange to meet debt obligations, urbanization invariably results. In a slum in Lagos or Kolkata, two dollars a day is misery, where in the traditional village it might be affluence. Taking for granted the trend of development and urbanization, yes, it is a good thing when those slum dwellers rise from two dollars a day to, say, five. But the focus on that metric obscures deeper processes.

Kristof asserts that 2017 was the best year ever for human health. If we measure the prevalence of infectious diseases, he is certainly right. Life expectancy also continues to rise globally (though it is leveling off and in some countries, such as the United States, beginning to fall). Again though, these metrics obscure disturbing trends. A host of new diseases such as autoimmunity, allergies, Lyme, and autism, compounded with unprecedented levels of addiction, depression, and obesity, contribute to declining physical vitality throughout the developed world, and increasingly in developing countries too. Vast social resources – one-fifth of GDP in the US – go toward sick care; society as a whole is unwell.

Both authors also mention literacy. What might the statistics hide here? For one, the transition into literacy has meant, in many places, the destruction of oral traditions and even the extinction of entire non-written languages. Literacy is part of a broader social repatterning, a transition into modernity, that accompanies cultural and linguistic homogenization. Tens of millions of children go to school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic; history, science, and Shakespeare, in places where, a generation before, they would have learned how to herd goats, grow barley, make bricks, weave cloth, conduct ceremonies, or bake bread. They would have learned the uses of a thousand plants and the songs of a hundred birds, the words of a thousand stories and the steps to a hundred dances. Acculturation to literate society is part of a much larger change. Reasonable people may differ on whether this change is good or bad, on whether we are better off relying on digital social networks than on place-based communities, better off recognizing more corporate logos than local plants and animals, better off manipulating symbols rather than handling soil. Only from a prejudiced mindset could we say, though, that this shift represents unequivocal progress.

My intention here is not to use written words to decry literacy, deliciously ironic though that would be. I am merely observing that our metrics for progress encode hidden biases and neglect what won’t fit comfortably into the worldview of those who devise them. Certainly, in a society that is already modernized, illiteracy is a terrible disadvantage, but outside that context, it is not clear that a literate society – or its extension, a digitized society – is a happy society.

The immeasurability of happiness

Biases or no, surely you can’t argue with the happiness metrics that are the lynchpin of Pinker’s argument that science, reason, and Western political ideals are working to create a better world. The more advanced the country, he says, the happier people are. Therefore the more the rest of the world develops along the path we blazed, the happier the world will be.

Unfortunately, happiness statistics encode as assumptions the very conclusions the developmentalist argument tries to prove. Generally speaking, happiness metrics comprise two approaches: objective measures of well-being, and subjective reports of happiness. Well-being metrics include such things as per-capita income, life expectancy, leisure time, educational level, access to health care, and many of the other accouterments of development.  In many cultures, for example, “leisure” was not a concept; leisure in contradistinction to work assumes that work itself is as it became in the Industrial Revolution: tedious, degrading, burdensome. A culture where work is not clearly separable from life is misjudged by this happiness metric; see Helena Norberg-Hodge’s marvelous film Ancient Futures for a depiction of such a culture, in which, as the film says, “work and leisure are one.”

Encoded in objective well-being metrics is a certain vision of development; specifically, the mode of development that dominates today. To say that developed countries are therefore happier is circular logic.

As for subjective reports of individual happiness, individual self-reporting necessarily references the surrounding culture. I rate my happiness in comparison to the normative level of happiness around me. A society of rampant anxiety and depression draws a very low baseline. A woman told me once, “I used to consider myself to be a reasonably happy person until I visited a village in Afghanistan near where I’d been deployed in the military. I wanted to see what it was like from a different perspective. This is a desperately poor village,” she said. “The huts didn’t even have floors, just dirt which frequently turned to mud. They barely even had enough food. But I have never seen happier people. They were so full of joy and generosity. These people, who had nothing, were happier than almost anyone I know.”

Whatever those Afghan villagers had to make them happy, I don’t think shows up in Stephen Pinker’s statistics purporting to prove that they should follow our path. The reader may have had similar experiences visiting Mexico, Brazil, Africa, or India, in whose backwaters one finds a level of joy rare amidst the suburban boxes of my country. This, despite centuries of imperialism, war, and colonialism. Imagine the happiness that would be possible in a just and peaceful world.

I’m sure my point here will be unpersuasive to anyone who has not had such an experience first-hand. You will think, perhaps, that maybe the locals were just putting on their best face for the visitor. Or maybe that I am seeing them through romanticizing “happy-natives” lenses. But I am not speaking here of superficial good cheer or the phony smile of a man making the best of things. People in older cultures, connected to community and place, held close in a lineage of ancestors, woven into a web of personal and cultural stories, radiate a kind of solidity and presence that I rarely find in any modern person. When I interact with one of them, I know that whatever the measurable gains of the Ascent of Humanity, we have lost something immeasurably precious. And I know that until we recognize it and turn toward its recovery, that no further progress in lifespan or GDP or educational attainment will bring us closer to any place worth going.

What other elements of deep well-being elude our measurements? Authenticity of communication? The intimacy and vitality of our relationships? Familiarity with local plants and animals? Aesthetic nourishment from the built environment? Participation in meaningful collective endeavors? Sense of community and social solidarity? What we have lost is hard to measure, even if we were to try. For the quantitative mind, the mind of money and data, it hardly exists. Yet the loss casts a shadow on the heart, a dim longing that no assurance of new, happy life can assuage.

While the fullness of this loss – and, by implication, the potential in its recovery – is beyond measure, there are nonetheless statistics, left out of Pinker’s analysis, that point to it. I am referring to the high levels of suicide, opioid addiction, meth addiction, pornography, gambling, anxiety, and depression that plague modern society and every modernizing society. These are not just random flies that have landed in the ointment of progress; they are symptoms of a profound crisis. When community disintegrates, when ties to nature and place are severed, when structures of meaning collapse, when the connections that make us whole wither, we grow hungry for addictive substitutes to numb the longing and fill the void.

The loss I speak of is inseparable from the very institutions – science, technology, industry, capitalism, and the political ideal of the rational individual – that Stephen Pinker says have delivered humanity from misery. We might be cautious, then, about attributing to these institutions certain incontestable improvements over Medieval times or the early Industrial Revolution. Could there be another explanation? Might they have come despite science, capitalism, rational individualism, etc., and not because of them?

The empathy hypothesis

One of the improvements Stephen Pinker emphasizes is a decline in violence. War casualties, homicide, and violent crime, in general, have fallen to a fraction of their levels a generation or two ago. The decline in violence is real, but should we attribute it, as Pinker does, to democracy, reason, rule of law, data-driven policing, and so forth? I don’t think so. Democracy is no insurance against war – in fact, the United States has perpetrated far more military actions than any other nation in the last half-century. And is the decline in violent crime simply because we are better able to punish and protect ourselves from each other, clamping down on our savage impulses with the technologies of deterrence?

I have another hypothesis. The decline in violence is not the result of perfecting the world of the separate, self-interested rational subject. To the contrary: it is the result of the breakdown of that story, and the rise of empathy in its stead.

In the mythology of the separate individual, the purpose of the state was to ensure a balance between individual freedom and the common good by putting limits on the pursuit of self-interest. In the emerging mythology of interconnection, ecology, and interbeing, we awaken to the understanding that the good of others, human and otherwise, is inseparable from our own well-being.

The defining question of empathy is, What is it like to be you? In contrast, the mindset of war is the othering, the dehumanization and demonization of people who become the enemy. That becomes more difficult the more accustomed we are to considering the experience of another human being. That is why war, torture, capital punishment, and violence have become less acceptable. It is not that they are “irrational.” To the contrary: establishment think tanks are quite adept at inventing highly rational justifications for all of these.

In a worldview in which competing self-interested actors is axiomatic, what is “rational” is to outcompete them, dominate them, and exploit them by any means necessary? It was not advances in science or reason that abolished the 14-hour workday, chattel slavery, or debtors’ prisons.

The worldview of ecology, interdependence, and interbeing offers different axioms on which to exercise our reason. Understanding that another person has an experience of being, and is subject to circumstances that condition their behavior, makes us less able to dehumanize them as a first step in harming them. Understanding that what happens to the world in some way happens to ourselves, reason no longer promotes war. Understanding that the health of soil, water, and ecosystems is inseparable from our own health, reason no longer urges their pillage.

In a perverse way, science & technology cheerleaders like Stephen Pinker are right: science has indeed ended the age of war. Not because we have grown so smart and so advanced over primitive impulses that we have transcended it. No, it is because science has brought us to such extremes of savagery that it has become impossible to maintain the myth of separation. The technological improvements in our capacity to murder and ruin make it increasingly clear that we cannot insulate ourselves from the harm we do to the other.

It was not primitive superstition that gave us the machine gun and the atomic bomb. Industry was not an evolutionary step beyond savagery; it applied savagery at an industrial scale. Rational administration of organizations did not elevate us beyond genocide; it enabled it to happen on an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented efficiency in the Holocaust. Science did not show us the irrationality of war; it brought us to the very extreme of irrationality, the Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War. In that insanity was the seed of a truly evolutive understanding – that what we do to the other, happens to ourselves as well. That is why, aside from a retrograde cadre of American politicians, no one seriously considers using nuclear weapons today.

The horror we feel at the prospect of, say, nuking Pyongyang or Tehran is not the dread of radioactive blowback or retributive terror. It arises, I claim, from our empathic identification with the victims. As the consciousness of interbeing grows, we can no longer easily wave off their suffering as the just deserts of their wickedness or the regrettable but necessary price of freedom. It as if, on some level, it would be happening to ourselves.

To be sure, there is no shortage of human rights abuses, death squads, torture, domestic violence, military violence, and violent crime still in the world today. To observe, in the midst of it, a rising tide of compassion is not a whitewash of the ugliness, but a call for fuller participation in a movement. On the personal level, it is a movement of kindness, compassion, empathy, taking ownership of one’s judgments and projections, and – not contradictorily – of bravely speaking uncomfortable truths, exposing what was hidden, bringing violence and injustice to light, telling the stories that need to be heard. Together, these two threads of compassion and truth might weave a politics in which we call out the iniquity without judging the perpetrator, but instead seek to understand and change the circumstances of the perpetration.

From empathy, we seek not to punish criminals but to understand the circumstances that breed crime. We seek not to fight terrorism but to understand and change the conditions that generate it. We seek not to wall out immigrants, but to understand why people are so desperate in the first place to leave their homes and lands, and how we might be contributing to their desperation.

Empathy suggests the opposite of the conclusion offered by Stephen Pinker. It says, rather than more efficient legal penalties and “data-driven policing,” we might study the approach of new Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who has directed prosecutors to stop seeking maximum sentences, stop prosecuting cannabis possession, steer offenders toward diversionary programs rather than penal programs, cutting inordinately long probation periods, and other reforms. Undergirding these measures is compassion: What is it like to be a criminal? An addict? A prostitute? Maybe we still want to stop you from continuing to do that, but we no longer desire to punish you. We want to offer you a realistic opportunity to live another way.

Similarly, the future of agriculture is not in more aggressive breeding, more powerful pesticides, or the further conversion of living soil into an industrial input. It is in knowing soil as a being and serving its living integrity, knowing that its health is inseparable from our own. In this way, the principle of empathy (What is it like to be you?) extends beyond criminal justice, foreign policy, and personal relationships. Agriculture, medicine, education, technology – no field is outside its bounds. Translating that principle into civilization’s institutions (rather than extending the reach of reason, control, and domination) is what will bring real progress to humanity.

This vision of progress is not contrary to technological development; neither will science, reason, or technology automatically bring it about. All human capacities can be put into service to a future embodying the understanding that the world’s wellbeing, human and otherwise, feeds our own.


Previous: Opposition to GMOs is Neither Unscientific nor Immoral
Next: Unser neues, glückliches Leben? 
Die Ideologie der Entwicklung

Filed Under: Money, Gift, & Economics, Political & Social Tagged With: control, Essay, Featured Essay, Featured Home, human nature, metrics, old story

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Bimal Shah says

    May 26, 2018 at 6:37 am

    Thank you for this. It’s a wonderful unraveling of a narrative that does not serve us – not anyone. As the (Turkish?) proverb says: no matter how far you have gone down the wrong road, turn back! We are starting to see the need to turn back, change course. And to do that we need to re-examine our assumptions, our baseline. Those existing assumptions are brilliantly exposed as faulty, as in not in step with reality, by you. With much peace and gratitude.

    Reply
    • Tom says

      March 25, 2019 at 4:04 pm

      The beautiful proverb I remind a lot is an ancient Greek one: “Society grows when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.”

      Reply
      • Kasper says

        August 1, 2019 at 5:17 am

        This was really beautiful, thank you!

        Reply
  2. Tito Linaje says

    July 10, 2018 at 2:04 pm

    Como todos buenos egos antropocenistas, ambos separan de la totalidad al ser humano dando un visión sesgada de la realidad. Quizás tendrían que salir del siglo 19 y empezar a mirar el mundo a través teoria de sistemas, del caos, física cuántica, Relatividad, la nueva biología… incluso con la mirada milenaria del el resto de culturas no occidentales, todas ellas, coinciden en que la separación es una ilusión. Si los análisis de Pinker y Kristof se hicieran desde la perspectiva de seres pertenecientes al resto de la vida quizás las conclusiones fueran muy diferentes. Nunca en la historia humana se había producido una extinción tan rápida y masiva de las especies, hasta el punto de que ya tiene un nombre… La sexta gran extinción. Si quieren datos pueden coger los de WWF del informe 2016/17. Quizás al ego humano en su soledad le pueda ir “bien”, a la vida y a la paz de los corazones nunca le fue peor. Gracias por tu Blog. Un abrazo muy grande

    Reply
  3. Newton Finn says

    August 7, 2018 at 10:37 am

    So dreary and discouraging for this child of the 60s to read the likes of Pinker & Co., whose intellectual predecessors we so easily saw through back then and joyfully rejected. On the other hand, so hopeful and heartening to read Charles, who breathes again the exhilarating air of existential freedom, social justice, and compassion we once took deep inside…….before so many of us, to my generation’s everlasting shame, sold out to what we had condemned as “The System” and “The Man.”

    Reply
  4. escort reviews says

    September 4, 2018 at 5:03 am

    thanks for sharing!! good post!!

    Reply
  5. Canary in the Coalmine says

    January 11, 2019 at 5:48 pm

    Gentle reminder that 14-hour workdays (see: public accounting, corporate law, medicine, Chinese factories); chattel slavery (see: human trafficking, nations in which it still exists, and the fact that many of us work ourselves literally to death to meet mere survival needs), and debtors prisons (see: recent Washington Post article about courts nationwide in America imprisoning the poor who cannot pay their fines) – these things have not been abolished. They still exist. I’ve lived (so far) to tell the tale. So this canary in the coal mine, agrees with everything you are saying. And I want to know: how do you propose we move forward? How may we, practically, actually, change this? What can we do? How will we live? Essays on this would be helpful and appreciated.

    Reply
    • Tom says

      March 25, 2019 at 3:30 pm

      Dear Canary, please see what Helena Norberg-Hodge says in her TEDx about the Economics of Happiness and in Ancient Futures. Re-localization is a way. Globalization is important for the exchange of ideas, not vast amounts of goods we don’t need and that destroy the Earth. The anonymity of production is a mayor problem. It makes us ignorant and uninterested. I think Karl Marx already said that ‘the hidden abode of production’ would become a huge problem of capitalism. Re-localization will also help us to become less ‘separated’.

      Reply
    • Will Stevensin says

      September 21, 2021 at 11:26 am

      I notice a lot of people dwell on this question when they talk to or read Charles Eisenstein (and others with a similar message): How will we do this transition? Give me your plan! And they are right to be doubtful, humans are not going to clever their way out of the old and into the new. This question still comes from the old worldview where we, as the humans—the lords and masters of nature—need to apply force to make this transition happen (and we better get it right or it may fail(!)). But this transition is not something we will make happen. If it is to happen, it will happen of itself. There is an Intent to the Universe—we don’t create this intent, we are embedded inside it. We participate in it, and in fact our task is to dust our link with intent, to align ourselves with it, to be in harmony with it. That is where our efforts should be applied—and on any scale, minuscule or grand. To ask the question is to continue to apply systems of control. Well, haven’t we learned we aren’t in control? As we try to control nature, we mess everything up?

      Also, this isn’t a movement backwards as people routinely fear—back to the Dark Ages. this transition will be on a fundamental level, on a different, underlying scale—we will have a larger perspective that embeds us in the cosmos and has learned the lessons of separation. We won’t forgot the pros and cons of separation (like teenagehood, it’s a developmental stage). It’s like the revolution of quantum mechanics—quantum mechanics did not annihilate Newtonian mechanics. No, Newtonian mechanics works just fine, on its scale of operation. It’s just that quantum mechanics explains things at a different and more fundamental scale. Newtonian mechanics are not wrong, it’s just that Quantum mechanics encompasses, is more true, than newtonian mechanics. Likewise the knowledge of separateness—yes, in fact in some ways we are independent of each other: you can’t actually read my mind for instance—won’t be untrue, its just that interbeing is more fundamental, more true, and it includes the facts of separation.

      Reply
  6. Tom says

    March 25, 2019 at 3:22 pm

    The other day I saw a documentary in The Netherlands, where i live. This is the link, but beneath I have quoted a what a felt as an eye-opening dialogue of the Dutch journalist with a Nigerian man. https://www.npostart.nl/sahara/09-12-2018/VPWON_1282213

    This is the dialogue, I have skipped passages that were less interesting:

    10:00 Children’s birth is very high in Niger.
    Journalist asks: “Many newspapers say that a catastrophe is coming. Is this true?” Interviewee answers: “No, this is not a catastrophe, for me this is the richness of Africa. Because you are from the West you see two things: you say there is a connection between population growth and economy. and to keep up the birth rate should slow down. But for us our children are our biggest wealth. You need to have a lot of children to be able to face natural disasters. Let’s say you have eight children, then you don’t even know if you will keep two…”
    Journalist: “Yes, I know, but how do you pay for their study and their house?”
    Man: “The Africans believe that the future is in God’s hands. Who knows what comes tomorrow? We look at today. You look forward, to the day of tomorrow, but we are only interested in today. Who knows if within ten years there won’t be a catastrophe that decimates our people? Who knows if not tomorrow will bring a civil war that kills all people?”
    14:00
    Journalist: “How do the Nigerian people look at the West giving them money to have less children?” Is it necessary to avoid a birth explosion here?”
    Man: “No, only in times of hardship. There is no hardship here, you people want us to believe that. We don’t have hardship, that is just in your heads.”
    Journalist: “But the Europeans think that within twenty, thirty years… there will be billions of Africans willing to emigrate to Europe.”
    Man: “the Europeans are afraid that the Africans will all come to Europe, and they will. It is because you keep on saying that life is so much better where you live. So, you learn us to like it where you live. In newspapers and on TV Europe is the promised land. There is richness and prosperity. Always this promotion for Europe. Here everything is bad and with you everything is good. If it is not OK to have many children, OK, then I stop having them. But then, I will come to you, because I have become like you.”
    “You want to impose globalisation to the world. You want the poor Africans to become like the Europeans, with the same mentality and the same vision. You must start to accept differences. Because differences make humanity, make man.”

    It is a very good example of how we Europeans have framed progress. It is rather scary how unwise we have become. We have a lot of knowledge but have unlearned to think.

    Reply
  7. MESSWAR says

    March 31, 2019 at 3:24 am

    thanks. i like your article, succes always

    Reply
  8. tita says

    February 12, 2020 at 6:54 am

    Thanks for sharing this post,
    is very helpful article.

    Reply
  9. lando says

    April 7, 2020 at 2:23 pm

    hello charles, first i want to say , thank you – for being, and putting in words all these things. they resonate a lot within me. (i’ve been reading and listening to you A LOT these days,, after a friend gave me a link to your website) – –
    just one thing, as i read this article, this sentence worries me: “Undergirding these measures is compassion: What is it like to be a criminal? An addict? A prostitute? Maybe we still want to stop you from continuing to do that, but we no longer desire to punish you. We want to offer you a realistic opportunity to live another way.” – – it worries me that you put sex worker in on line with criminals and addicts. why?
    i would be sincerely interested in an answer.
    lando

    Reply
  10. kamir bouchareb st says

    June 3, 2020 at 9:33 am

    good article thank you

    Reply
  11. kamir bouchareb st says

    July 6, 2020 at 5:26 pm

    very good

    Reply
  12. kamir bouchareb st says

    July 7, 2020 at 5:09 am

    nice topic

    Reply
  13. kamir bouchareb st says

    September 18, 2020 at 6:13 pm

    thanks

    Reply

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Bending Reality: But who is the Bender?

The Mysterious Paths by Which Intentions Bear Fruit

The Little Things that Get Under My Skin

A Restorative Response to MH17

Climate Change: The Bigger Picture

Development in the Ecological Age

The campaign against Drax aims to reveal the perverse effects of biofuels

Gateway drug, to what?

Concern about Overpopulation is a Red Herring; Consumption’s the Problem

Imperialism and Ceremony in Bali

Let’s be Honest: Real Sustainability may not make Business Sense

Vivienne Westwood is Right: We Need a Law against Ecocide

2013: Hope or Despair?

2013: A Year that Pierced Me

Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order

Fear of a Living Planet

Pyramid Schemes and the Monetization of Everything

The Next Step for Digital Currency

The Cycle of Terror

TED: A Choice Point

The Cynic and the Boatbuilder

Latent Healing

2013: The Space between Stories

We Are Unlimited Potential: A Talk with Joseph Chilton Pearce

Why Occupy’s plan to cancel consumer debts is money well spent

Genetically Modifying and Patenting Seeds isn’t the Answer

The Lovely Lady from Nestle

An Alien at the Tech Conference

We Can’t Grow Ourselves out of Debt

Money and the Divine Masculine

Naivete, and the Light in their Eyes

The Healing of Congo

Why Rio +20 Failed

Permaculture and the Myth of Scarcity

For Facebook, A Modest Proposal

A Coal Pile in the Ballroom

A Review of Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years

Gift Economics Resurgent

The Way up is Down

Sacred Economics: Money, the Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

Design and Strategy Principles for Local Currency

The Lost Marble

To Bear Witness and to Speak the Truth

Thrive: The Story is Wrong but the Spirit is Right

Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough

Elephants: Please Don’t Go

Why the Age of the Guru is Over

Gift Economics and Reunion in the Digital Age

A Circle of Gifts

The Three Seeds

Truth and Magic in the Third Dimension

Rituals for Lover Earth

Money and the Turning of the Age

A Gathering of the Tribe

The Sojourn of Science

Wood, Metal, and the Story of the World

A World-Creating Matrix of Truth

Waiting on the Big One

In the Miracle

Money and the Crisis of Civilization

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health

Invisible Paths

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health (Part 2)

Mutiny of the Soul

The Age of Water

Money: A New Beginning (Part 2)

Money: A New Beginning (Part 1)

The Original Religion

Pain: A Call for Attention

The Miracle of Self-Creation, Part 2

The Miracle of Self-Creation

The Deschooling Convivium

The Testicular Age

Who Will Collect the Garbage?

The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies

You’re Bad!

A 28-year Lie: The Wrong Lesson

The Ascent of Humanity

The Stars are Shining for Her

All Hallows’ Eve

Confessions of a Hypocrite

The New Epidemics

From Opinion to Belief to Knowing

Soul Families

For Whom was that Bird Singing?

The Multicellular Metahuman

Grades: A Gun to Your Head

Human Nature Denied

The Great Robbery

Humanity Grows Up

Don’t Should on US

A State of Belief is a State of Being

Ascension

Security and Fate

Old-Fashioned, Healthy, Lacto-Fermented Soft Drinks: The Real “Real Thing”

The Ethics of Eating Meat

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