transcribed by Abbie Harris
Janaia Donaldson: Welcome to Peak Moment. I am Janaia Donaldson. We chose the name Peak Moment because our world is at a peak moment in energy use, population, in all kinds of things. My guest today calls this 'a defining moment in history.' He's a big picture thinker, David Korten, who is the President of the Board of Positive Futures Network which publishes Yes! A Magazine of Positive Futures. Thank you for joining me today.
David Korten: It's my pleasure.
JD: Tell us about a defining moment.
DK: Well, many of us have known for a long time that we are headed for a confrontation with the limits of the planet. It's no longer a future moment. It's here.
JD: Now.
DK: Now. It actually becomes a moment of a great opportunity. My own work has led me to an understanding that actually, for the last 5,000 years of human experience, we have been organizing ourselves in a dominator model for our relationships - everything from relationships among states to relationships among individuals, family members.
JD: So you have a dominant and a subordinate.
DK: Exactly. And what this means is that we have lived under a system in which the creative energy of the majority of people is systematically suppressed, preventing them from achieving their fullness of their human possibility. Now, we are finally coming up against the limits of an exploitative system. We are in a position where we are forced to change.
JD: So that exploitation has not only involved peoples, but you are talking about exploiting many of the resources on the planet. The planet is saying, "I'm running out."
DK: Yes, exactly. It's amazing. It's all so straightforward once you begin to get into it. If you are going to organize societies on a dominator system, you ultimately end up expropriating most of the resources, capacities of the society, to maintain the system of domination. That is what our military is about, most of our police forces, but also…
JD: Maintaining that power structure.
DK: Yes. Including the palaces and temples that are the symbols of authority that intimidate us, and make us feel small relative to the system, powerless…
JD: Yes, yes, yes. Just little nobodies, right.
DK: The rulers need to compensate the retainers to maintain loyalty and so forth. We begin to see just how much of society's resources become diverted away from meeting needs of people, meeting needs of nature to someplace supporting the system that fights nature. It is very self destructive.
JD: So, what do we have as an alternative, where do we go from here?
DK: Well, it's time to learn to live in cooperative relationships with one another and with the planet.
JD: You mentioned an imperative. The time is here. You speak about a perfect economic storm, and there is something pushing our backs to kind of force us in this direction, or hopefully move in this direction.
DK: Well yeah, what's happening in terms of the perfect economic storm is that it's a convergence of the consequences of peak oil, which is one of your defining topics, and climate change, which is greatly increasing the frequency of severe weather events all around the planet.
And then, in terms of our own national situation in the United States, we are seeing a growing gap between the amount of goods that we import from the rest of the world and what we export. Now that gap is basically a measure of the extent of our accelerating growth and our consumption beyond our own means. We are essentially living on credit, supplied by the consumer credit, credit card credit from the rest of the world, with no particular capacity to pay it back. Which means eventually the rest of the world is going to get a little tired of supporting us economic dead beats. And the dollar will crash, and it's already been declined for some years.
Now all of these forces coming together, we've created this corporate dominated, corporate led global economy.
JD: And that actually taps back, as we have two books I didn't even mention yet. Your earlier book, When Corporations Rule the World, you really dove into the negative effects of the corporate world. Tell us about that.
DK: Yeah. Well, actually it's kind of a long story, the lead up to that. Most of my adult life my wife and I lived in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We were part of the international development establishment, trying to end poverty in the rest of the world by stimulating economies and economic growth.
After about 30 years of working in that field, both working for domestically and overseas, we began to see that the patterns of what was happening were quite at odds with what we had hoped would happen, since more and more people were being excluded. You are getting a few very rich people. Most people were being forced into lines of greater desperation. We were seeing the collapsing of forest systems, coral reefs systems, and the pollution of rivers and air and so forth all around the world; but also seeing the breakdown of the social fabric, of many once vibrant cultures. I started getting increasingly concerned about why is this happening.
JD: There is this disconnect really.
DK: Yeah, and then I became really disturbed when I began to realize that it wasn't just in the places that we were working. It was every place, including in the United States, Europe, and Japan; the countries that we had considered to be sort of models of the positive outcomes of development.
JD: And the models that the rest of the world thought they wanted to go towards.
DK: Yeah, exactly. We were telling them, 'be more like us!' So, the more we got into trying to understand that at a deep level, it's about pursuing a development model that is grounded in financial values in which every decision is evaluated based on financial return rather than the returns to life, to living systems.
JD: Okay, so what were those values of the economic systems: economic return, the wealthy get weathier in that system…
DK: Exactly, that's a key thing if you are talking about returns to money and that's how decisions are made. It really means a returns to the people that have money which means the people who are already rich. Where it really began to come together was when I realized the extent to which the number of development projects, like a forestry project or a dam project, or you'd have golf course projects, or shopping centers or whatever, or seaside resorts; pretty much in every case you are ending up pushing poor people off the land from which they produce their subsistence, not making any money, they are just growing their food.
JD: Right. So they are not in the money system, but they are staying alive.
DK: So they are not contributing anything to the economy.
JD: Ohhh.
DK: So you see we need to use those resources for things that will contribute to the economy which means it will generate money which means it will generate returns.
JD: So you push them off the land.
DK: You end up with a few people who have control of more and more of the real resources and making more and more money which is the...
JD: Which is the primary value of that system.
DK: Yes. And then you have more and more people into desperation with no means of supporting themselves. That of course floods the economy with cheap labor, people desperate to work at whatever wages available, and that supports their sweatshops and pushes people into being migrant agricultural workers and so forth, working for whatever pittance is available.
JD: One of the points that you've made is that the dominator system has been based on slavery in one form or the other, and that's basically what we still have.
DK: Yeah, I would say that this is the other part of the story. When I began to put this together, I came to realize that what we were seeing around the world was the outcome of the system that values that way, and then coming to understand the institutional structure and how the major economic decisions are made by global financial markets and how that works. The global corporations are in a sense extensions of those financial markets and responding to their demand to generate ever increasing profits, financial profits. And as you begin to see it, essentially by expropriating or consuming life, living resources, the lives of people, the lives of community in order to make money for people who are already among the richest in the planet.
JD: And probably not living in that community.
DK: Yeah.
JD: Living in a far distant place, so not seeing the effects, not seeing the rivers being muddied, and…
DK: This is absolutely key. It's a system, an extreme system of absentee ownership. All the decisions are being made in the name of a set of owners who have no idea what they own and no idea what decisions are being made in their name, or the consequences of those decisions. So this is what local economies are about, really turning that thing on it's head so that the people who own those local resources are the ones who depend on those resources for their livelihood, and who live there and live with the consequences of how their resources are used.
JD: So, that fits the title of your new book, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. Tell us about those names.
DK: See that goes another step in terms of my story. When I came back and wrote When Corporations Rule the World, my wife and I had moved back from Manila to New York City, part of Manhattan in 1992. And that's when I wrote When Corporations Rule the World. We were living next to Union Square, between Madison Avenue and Wall Street, so it was a very inspiring setting.
JD: (Laugh) You were in the right place.
DK: I was in the right place and the book came out in 1995. It was the moment when people were beginning to sense that there was something going wrong here: all this corporate outsourcing of jobs, the CEO's are getting these astronomical compensation packages, and it seemed to be harder to get a decent job.
JD: And far less security in those jobs, we watched that happen at Xerox, what used to be a security was no more.
DK: Exactly. No more.
JD: Competition to survive.
DK: Not about the people or the communities or the families. It's just about the profits of the corporation and responding to the demands of the impersonal financial markets. So the book struck a chord, it helped people see that moment and what was happening. It got quite a major acceptance. And that was kind of a beginning of a growing global awareness of what was going on, what those trade agreements were really about, and was part of the birthing of this whole global movement. A global civil society was developing a resistance against corporate globalization.
Now, September 11, 2001, we had the terrorist attack in New York City. We had a new administration that responded in terms of 'we need to impose our order on the rest of the world'; our will to secure our US interest with massive overwhelming US military power. You had key people in administration who put out documents about a Pox Americana, a parallel, a very explicit connection between the Pox Romano of the Roman Empire. You have pundits talking very explicitly about the Empire. Empire is sort of an archaic term, we didn't…
JD: We've been talking in the last couple years about the American Empire.
DK: Yes, it came into the conversation from an archaic term, that's all behind us, those people of old times, and so forth. Some of us began trying to sort this out. Here we built this analysis around the economic institution, economic domination, but it doesn't incorporate the military dimension of it or just the raw naked use of power.
As soon as you start talking about empire, that throws the analysis back 5,000 years. That discussion triggered in my mind conversations about Rian Eisler, the classic book, The Chalice and the Blade, and her framing about how in many of the earlier human societies they tended to be more egalitarian, more gender balanced, and women in leadership roles. Then you had this kind of transition where male dominated tribes began to overwhelm the more agrarian societies and more egalitarian societies, and began to establish a rule by domination: sword, spear, and bow. And of course, out of that, you began the subjugation of women, and began to move into an era in which increasingly the economies were built on a foundation of slavery.
Now, as you begin to look at that as a pattern of organizing, you recognize that there are a number of inherent characteristics of that dominator system. It basically pits every human being in competition with every other human being for the few positions at the top. It becomes very convenient if you can classify whole groups of people as sort of less than human.
JD: Sure, sure. Them and other, which we continue to do.
DK: Yeah. They don't have a real soul or not…
JD: Not fully developed human.
DK: Not fully human, and of course that label was applied to women and generally of people of color, and ultimately anybody who was of a lower class. You had this characteristic pattern of white male property owners generally coming out on top with a great incentive to keep it that way through their cultural stories. It creates a play or die dynamic. You can't just sort of decide 'well I'm just not going to play that game' because if you are not in there competing then you are cast off into the bottom. It begins to develop a 'rule or be ruled', 'kill or be killed' kind of ethic. If your city-state is not ruling your neighboring city-state, then they are likely to end up ruling you.
JD: Which is what we've watched.
DK: Yes.
JD: I want to turn us to the turn, turn us towards that description of empire towards earth community. I mean is it even feasible to think about a different set of values, and what would they be?
DK: Well, they would be values of cooperation, values of community. Now, part of the way that empire holds us captive is by the stories in which we define ourselves and our possibilities. Of course, one of the stories is that whole classes of people are in fear so they are tuned out. That puts them in a subjugated position where they are not able to express their full creativity and humanity and so forth; they are stripped away from society. You've got all the resources of the society being used to maintain the system of domination. Now, of course part of the story is that by nature, as humans, we are competitive, violent, greedy, and that the only way to keep us under control is to maintain a dominator system of strong armies and police and so forth.
JD: Because otherwise we would fight each other ourselves.
DK: Yes, right. Ruled by this sort of elite class, which are the more cultured and educated and so forth.
JD: And their military.
DK: And their military, yes, right. So the key is changing our stories. Now, one of the things, one of the centerpieces of my book, is looking into the psychological literature of developmental psychology. What do we actually know about our human nature? And what you find is that from our birth to elderhood, there is steady progression, if we are in a situation with sufficiently supportive relationships so that our consciousness can grow and blossom.
We come into the world with a very undifferentiated view of the world; everything is defined in terms of my comfort or discomfort. [We have] very little ability to differentiate between self and other, but everything is self referential and [we have] very little differentiation to see the nuances that are happening.
Now over time, we develop a more differentiated consciousness for understanding how things work. If we develop in a healthy way, we come to recognize that our well being depends on the larger well being of the group, of the community, everyone. We move into an intermediate stage that we call socialized consciousness, which means we begin to accept and absorb the values of whatever the prevailing culture is in which we live.
That's kind of the foundation of maintaining basic order, that's more or less the model adult consciousness: a healthy, basic frame of good citizenship. But it is also very susceptible to manipulation by demagogues and advertisers. That's what political demagogy or advertising is about: to get control of the cultural symbols so you define the values by which people define themselves. You know a brand identity kind of thing. Or for a political demagogue, the culture of fear and mistrust, so you need a strong protector.
JD: A good father here to take care of you…
DK: And we need to spend more on the military to maintain order and so forth. So again, for 5,000 years, the rulers have been very adept at controlling all of their stories. What we've seen here in the United States is that we had this extraordinary experience after World War II of emerging with this egalitarian society and built a strong middle class and most of us grew up in a time when we took our democracy for granted.
JD: We were doing very well.
DK: Yeah, and we were the envy of the world. So hey, (laughs), this is it. Now, somewhere around the mid seventies and mid eighties, you had a group of people with a different kind of vision, a vision that ordinary people were getting too much power, and the position of the elite classes was threatened. That, to some religious groups, we were becoming too hedonistic, not yielding enough to the religious establishments. You got an alliance of what I call corporate plutocrats who believe in rule by the rich and religious theocrats, who believe in a theocratic state, essentially the state enforcing a certain set of religious beliefs and norms. They set about to fund think tanks, media, and so forth, to begin to redo the stories in ways that would strengthen, essentially, elitist control.
JD: This is where we find ourselves.
DK: So, they managed to take control over a major part of the political system, including kind of wholesale of the Republican Party and much of the Democratic Party.
JD: It seems to be pervasive in all different ways.
DK: Yes, pervasive everywhere.
JD: We have about four minutes, and I want to move towards the story to turn that story around, is it emerging?
DK: Okay. The key to understanding our potential is to understand the higher orders of consciousness. If we can break out of the socialized consciousness to the higher orders which is called the cultural consciousness. We are seeing an awakening of a consciousness of culture that comes through increasing cross-cultural exchange. Like in my own case, I grew up totally isolated, but I ended up living a life among the rich diversity of world cultures. I became conscious that culture is not a given it's a construct, a variable. And what that meant, as you see many different cultures, you begin to realize that different values have different consequences. Some are good and some are bad.
JD: Some are just different flavors.
DK: Some advantages, but in the end we are responsible for our own values. Culture being a variable is subject to choice. This is where the term cultural creatives comes in because it requires the cultural consciousness. Then we can get creative about creating cultures that actually support the realization of the highest expressions of our human possibility. This is the first breakthrough.
The ultimate stage of human consciousness is the spiritual consciousness, where we come back to a recognition of the unity of all being but with a highly differentiated sense of the wondrous complexities, all of reality and the living systems, and the material and non material, the spiritual, and the sense of the continued unfolding of creation and the human place within that unfolding.
Then we begin to ask much deeper questions about what does it mean to be human, and what is our place as service to the whole of creation as the human species. This kind of awakening is spreading throughout the world. Partly because of the increased cultural exchange, the communication; but also because we are seeing in so many ways the interdependence of living systems, and the interdependence of people. So we begin to experience that unity and the importance of each of us accepting a larger responsibility for the whole.
JD: And the picture of the planet that we got to see in the seventies is that wholeness.
DK: Yes.
JD: We are also seeing it as a smaller planet because of the weather effects and so on.
DK: Exactly, that was a defining moment, that iconic picture from space to see ourselves in a whole new way. It helps us begin to think, wow, we're living together on a living spaceship. Now that's fundamental to a whole new thinking about our economics and relationships. If you think about looking at a spaceship as a microcosm, you don't waste anything; everything has to be recycled. Your total well being depends on that, you can't live on a spaceship where few people are being in a dominant position and others are being excluded. You are not going to survive. You will destroy the systems of the planet.
JD: We have that vision, it feels to me like that could take hundreds of years to make that and yet we don't have hundreds of years in terms of the planet's resources to do that.
DK: No. We have to change the story.
JD: Change the story.
DK: Change the story; that is the key to the whole thing. Change our stories. Partly it's decoding, it's exposing the old stories for what they are: they are propaganda and they are falsified construction. Bring out the new stories: the one of possibility, community, the interdependence of being, the interdependence of life. The fact that it is our nature ultimately to choose.
JD: Thank you. May we choose that life, that choice. Thank you for sharing, this has been wonderful.
DK: Thank you.
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