The emerging world view for 2022
Our emerging world view embraces complexity, inclusion, justice, and love. For all - all humans, all creatures, all the world.
My dear friends: This is scheduled to post on the second day of our new year, 2022. (As a child of the 1960s, a year with that many 2s seems to me to belong in a science fiction novel.) Welcome to our next chapter.
While reading through the ideas shared in this newsletter in the year just ended, I saw one theme emerge over and over: the shift we are experiencing in world views, an old view cracking and fighting to hang on, a new view emerging, ready to take its place, sparking both resistance and hope.
The old view is built on categorizing some humans as inherently more valuable than others. It expresses itself in hereditary hierarchies, ideas of racial and gender supremacy, and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. It looks to the past, revealing its backward-orientation in narratives of “restoring greatness.”
The generation that went to fight World War II, the war against fascism in Europe and Asia and its potential spread around the world, is sometimes referred to as “the greatest generation.” Given that this is both hyperbole (every generation reinvents the world) and glosses over massive failures, I still began to wonder about the use of that term, “greatness.”
It seems to me that it is assigned to the generation that fought WWII because of its association with the idea of sacrifice. They gave up their regular home and family lives, put careers and school on hold, and left their country to fight in Europe, Africa, and Asia. If the generation called to war against fascism had focused on their freedom instead of their obligations, it is absolutely chilling to think where we might be now.
But the current demand to make our country “great again” holds no ideal of sacrifice for the good of others. It is, instead, a demand to be pandered to: give me what I want, now, with no accountability as to how my “freedom” impacts others in my community or the world as a whole. Ironically, the fetishization of the military and law enforcement in some far-right parts of the power establishment also focuses on their willingness to “sacrifice.” And yet, those who espouse this ideal rarely call on their followers to emulate it. No sacrifice from you, they promise, only freedom.
In sharp contrast, the emerging world view is astonishingly non-binary. It resists all-or-nothing categorizations. It does not call for sacrifice, or for freedom, in simplistic ways. The emerging world view calls upon us to make our decisions from the deep awareness of connection, likeness, affinity, and mutual interdependence.
And this is why it shakes power structures to their core, and brings such intense backlash. It does not offer comforting platitudes about greatness, sacrifice, or freedom; it is not a single, controllable narrative.
Our emerging world view embraces complexity, inclusion, justice, and love. For all - all humans, all creatures, all the world.
I’m all in for supporting the emergence of this new view, and helping to create a world aligned with it. And I’m grateful for your company as we explore these ideas for another year, together.