HOW TO CHANGE

When we look, i mean really look, at our world, we quickly see that very little of it actually works at anything near an optimal level. The vast majority of the solutions we have devised to make our lives better have been burdened with unintended consequences that decades after their inception threaten to undo any of the supposed gains we claimed.
Too often tradition is our guide, even as the concrete realities that undergirded those traditions have shifted, usually in radical ways.
Those who agitate for a return to the old ways embody most clearly this tension towards the notion of progress, but we must tread a fine line here between what is useful from the past and what is an impediment.
Progressives all too readily fall into the trap of dismissing aspects of our shared cultural heritage simply because they percieve them to have been superceeded by new and technologically superior methods. Afterall, no one listens to music on a grammaphone, or tunes in to the radio as their primary source of news and entertainment. And yet, in our rush to become modern we have recoiled with embarrasment from many of the concepts that we will have to revive if we are to successfully navigate the coming global storms.
We need to take stock of our past, and examine it thoroughly, sifting it for ideas and techniques that above all demonstrate their functionality. If we use our newly created values map, it will help us in determining what is useful and what is merely an artifact of a less enlightened time.
In some areas, such as agriculture, we will need a return to a more traditional structure, one that does not rely on massively energy-intensive monocultures, but instead incorporates smaller, local, organic and permaculture based solutions.
At the other end of the spectrum, we can and must take advantage of technical innovations in the field of manufacturing, by applying digital fabrication-on-demand methods to the creation of the physical objects we need.
In the most fundamental instance however, we have recourse neither to advanced technology nor tradition to guide our way. This of course is the series of questions directly at the heart of the human experience- what is the purpose and meaning of our lives? The choices presented us so far have been found severely wanting: either the denial of the self beneath blind obedience to religious dogma, or the dead-end selfish persuit of material pleasure and comfort at the expense of all else.
Both of these narratives are pathological, both of them extremely non-functional, and invariably stand as the root of all our current problems and struggles.
But the changes that will need to happen cannot be imposed from outside, by the state, for this is the road which leads to tyranny, paved as always with good intentions and broken bodies.
Quite frankly, human beings must evolve. The real revolution takes place within the awareness of each of us, as we learn how to be more. If this sounds trite it is only because we have become so corrupted within ourselves that anything presented to us as genuine seems like a cruel joke.
We have become debased, the currency of our humanness devalued to the point where the making of a profit can justify the sacrifice of millions of lives and the literal destruction of the natural world.
We are told constantly to consume more, buy more, do more, spend more, eat more, indulge more, travel more, relax more, watch tv more.
I say no.
Consume less, buy less, do less, spend less, eat less, indulge less, travel less, relax less, watch tv less, but...
BE MORE.
We are now at a point where for the first time in history we can consciously decide what the future will be like. This is our power- we need to use it wisely.