An Evolving View of The World

Stories are central to our human experience. Not only do we use them as a form of entertainment, but we also use them to share a personal past and communicate a plan for the future. In addition, they increase learning because the different aspects of a storey, vocabulary, imagery, emotions and feelings engage different learning styles; visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic (or tactile).

Consider stories from a historical perspective. In ancient times, people learnt how to hunt and develop new skills around a campfire through stories. There was a time when people believed the Earth was flat. It is how it appears to us, and if people travelled too far in one direction, they were not seen again, a good reason to believe they fell off the edge of the Earth. While the theory that the Earth is not flat but rather a globe was first proposed by Pythagoras around 500 BCE, it was not until Ferdinand Magellan (1480 – 1521) circumnavigated and travelled around the world that people started to believe it.

Another example of change in people’s perception of the world is when Galileo proved Nicolaus Copernicus’s (1451 – 1543) theory that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe but rotated around the Sun. Each time a viewpoint, a belief changes, a new cosmology is adopted.

Dr David Korten, author of Change the Story, Change the Future, and When Corporations Rule the World, describes the narratives of different world views. There are perhaps four that we might describe as familiar and one emerging. The story or stories an individual would most identify with depends on their family, education, and social group. Con

1. The Indigenous World View

An Indigenous worldview is typically relational. It is holistic, so the whole is valued, and it is not possible to separate it into parts. People see themselves as deeply connected with everything and everyone around them. The Earth is seen as Mother from which they came, nurturing them and providing for them. Indeed, it varies from place to place for different Indigenous cultures and peoples, but most of them share these fundamentals.

2. Newtonian

Traditional, mainstream science’s worldview is often called “Newtonian” or “mechanistic”. It sees the cosmos as a grand machine, like a giant clock with everything moving as the spring winds down. It is based on reductionism, determinism, materialism, and a reflection-correspondence view of knowledge. Although simple, coherent and intuitive, it ignores human agency, values, creativity and evolution. It does not recognise the spirit or anything beyond this physical existence.

3. Religious

This story is of a distant patriarch, an all-knowing and omnipotent being. A person’s most important relationship is with him. The meaning of life is to figure out what he wants and conform to that, get on his good side, and get a good place in the afterlife. Agency, relationship and meaning are all present.

4. Commercial World-view

This description from Dr David Korten is what he calls “The Sacred Money and Market Story” and is the current dominant world view. Money is wealth, and making money creates wealth and is the defining purpose of people business in the economy. Maximising returns money maximises the wealth and prosperity of all. The rich are society’s wealth creators. Affluent lifestyles are their fair and just reward. Material consumption drives prosperity and is the path to happiness. Poverty is a consequence of laziness. The Earth belongs to us. It is our human nature to be individualistic, competitive and inquisitive, guided by the invisible hand of the free market and the creative power of humanity to grow the economy, create wealth and drive the technological innovation required to eliminate our human dependence on nature.

While most are not aware, David Korten describes society as a “robotic system”, by which he means it is a system that operates unmodified is ultimately controlled by financial markets that are mainly computerised. We see the financiers and corporate CEOs, and we think they’re in charge of the system. He suggests we better understand what’s going on if we recognise that they are compensated servants of the system. They do not control it, and they are powerless to change in a positive direction.

Korten suggests when a system that measures its purpose and its performance by the accumulation of financial assets, as this system does, and is governed by economics that says we make our decisions by evaluating every choice based on which will produce the highest returns of money. So the system provides an ever-growing concentration of money and wealth. This growing concentration of wealth has often been observed and described as the increasing wealth gap.

Korten notes in this narrative; community interest is unimportant. It is simply an aggregate of the individual’s private interests. Therefore, we all do best when we focus on maximising our own financial returns. He, David Korten, questions why this story is so widely accepted. Suggesting it is because seldom is an alternative presented.

He tells a story where demonstrates the contrast between The Sacred Money and Market story The Indigenous World View. Before the Rio Summit in 2012, Wall Street recognised it needs to protect nature and to do so, it needed to evaluate nature. That means we have to put a price on her. In direct contrast, Indigenous Leaders had a different story, one reflecting different values. They said it doesn’t make any difference how much money we could make from the destruction of nature; that is not wealth creation; that is the destruction of the foundations of our existence.

5. A New Cosmology

The final view is one that is emerging. In some aspects, it is very much the same as those described previously; in others, it is in direct contrast. For example, it has no resemblance to a clock winding down, something that is in motion but unchanging in nature. On the contrary, the Arrow of Creation is toward ever-greater complexity beauty awareness of the possibility.

He says: “What is emerging is a story that begins with some form of spirit unitary consciousness awareness the deep mystery beyond our understanding.” But, significantly, we are characterised by our drive to know.

He calls it “The Sacred Life and Living Story”. The counter to The Sacred Money and Market Story. “Essentially, it is almost the exact opposite of every point. So we start with an expression familiar to most people; “Time is Money”. Actually, time is not money but it is life, real wealth is living well – money is just a number, it’s useful is a medium of exchange in a well-regulated market, but that’s all. We, humans, are living beings; we are born out of and nurtured by a living Earth, itself or of a living Universal. Life exists only in a community, within which life self-organises to maintain the conditions essential to life. We are a part of nature, not apart from nature. Earth does not belong to us; we belong to Earth, a living superorganism that self-organises to maintain the conditions essential to the existence of all life. Our health and well being depend on her health and well being.”

Our human nature calls us to care and share for the benefit of all; serving the living community that sustains us is essential to community health on the source of our greatest happiness. Individualistic greed, ruthless competition and violence against life; are not our nature. On the contrary, these are indicators of severe psychological and societal dysfunction. They are, in fact, the characteristics of a psychopath. Poverty is most often the consequence of a lack of opportunity. The only legitimate purpose of any institution, whether business, government or civil society, is to support people as productive contributing sharing members of a vibrant and prosperous living Earth community. Corporations are engines of wealth concentration that have an inherent tendency to undermine democracy and essential feedback mechanisms (e.g. markets). The corporations that seek to monopolise the resources in the pursuit of purely financial ends have no place in a healthy human society.

We can see numerous examples of people living by this new story already. Communities are responding, reducing the influence that outsiders and larger organisations have over their lives, through taking ownership of enterprises serving them. Such business models known as social enterprises, co-operatives or community-owned and run businesses are not new, but they are being adopted more often to obtain what markets are not providing. They not only provide goods or services, but also a sense of community, job satisfaction and security. Examples can be found in pubs, retail, restaurant businesses, transport; almost any type of business activity could use this model.