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| With David Korten, Seattle, Washington |
Our Defining Gift As
Humans
If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into
balanced relationship with one another and the Earth.
There are actually very few US politicians who have integrity
and vision.
Wall Street sees a social fabric or social contract as
inefficiencies, which need to be removed.
Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to
defeating democracy.
An active propaganda machinery controlled by the world's largest
corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness,
governmental restraint of market excess is the cause our distress, and economic
globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human
species.
As corporations gain in autonomous institutional power and
be-come more detached from people and place, the human interest and the
corporate interest increasingly diverge. It is almost as though we were being
invaded by alien beings intent on colonizing our planet, reducing us to serfs,
and then excluding as many of us as possible.
When the institutions of money rule the world, it is perhaps
inevitable that the interests of money will take precedence over the interests
of people. What we are experiencing might best be described as a case of money
colonizing life. To accept this absurd distortion of human institutions and
purpose should be considered nothing less than an act of collective, suicidal
insanity.
Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people
who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power, it is
about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands
using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way.
To create a world in which life can flourish and prosper we must
replace the values and institutions of capitalism with values and institutions
that honor life, serve life's needs, and restore money to its proper role as
servant. I believe we are in fact being called to take a step to a new level of
species consciousness and function.
The proper goal of an economic democracy agenda is to replace
the global suicide economy ruled by rapacious and unaccountable global
corporations with a planetary system of local living economies comprised of
human-scale enterprise rooted in the communities they serve and locally owned
by the people whose well-being depends on them.
Our defining gift as humans is our power to choose, including
our power to choose our collective future. It is a gift that comes with a
corresponding moral responsibility to use that power in ways that work to the
benefit of all people and the whole of life.
We will prosper in the pursuit of life, or we will perish in the
pursuit of money. The choice is ours.
— David Korten
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