Saturday, March 17, 2018

David Korten: If There Is To Be a Human Future

David Korten is courageous and wise writer and visionary who has long been among my many treasured teachers. May we all seek teachers who nourish and expand our minds, hearts, and souls and be mindful of choosing wisely. — Molly

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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