For All Of Us
We can imagine a better future for our shared way of life together. Here’s how we cross the bridge to tomorrow’s culture…
Step 1 Discover The Manufactured Nature of Our World
In our manufactured world, the roles we play are as consumers to be persuaded to purchase on the one hand and as producers to be used as corporate resources on the other. Our prime encouragements are to work more efficiently, produce more, and accumulate greater wealth. Our culture surrenders the creation of good lives through a meaningful place in a strong community, trading it in for the shaping of lives through consumerism.
We’re told to survive on our own, leaving us sealed off and separated from one another, as if in saran premium plastic wrap. Alone, we live without the life-enhancing resource of shared connection.
Everything becomes a commodity to be bought and sold. Everything has a price, yet nothing has value, because the consumer culture turns everything into an object to be assimilated, used, and thrown away.
Step 2: Where we Realize “The Only Way” is Just Another Way
Human history shares the very good news that humankind is extraordinary in our ability to live in different cultural structures at both small and large sizes. Human nature is our capacity not be held hostage by any set of cultural norms but instead to adapt to such an extent that we are free to try on different ways of living. Humanity has shown, time and again, an openness to creating and exploring entirely new ways of life together, building entirely new cultures.
We can shape, and even recreate, our culture, in turn shaping our very experience of the world — our sense of what is normal, what is natural, and what is possible. What we often assume is human nature (who we are) is frequently culture masquerading as nature (the consumer culture telling us who we should be).
What is instead human nature is our ability to create our own culture, and adaptively continue this creative process until we experience the best of ourselves as social creatures who thrive on belonging and connectivity. History tells us this is not only possible, but well within our grasp.
In The Matrix, when Neo’s mentor explains that a view of life beyond this manufactured worldview is readily available in the form of a red pill, Neo ingests the red tablet. We’ll ingest the same red pill, view our world freed from fabrication, and envision a new way of living together, allowing us to discover…
Step 3: Discovering A New Hope
Spiritual and religious traditions have been broadcasting the promise of a world beyond consumerism’s manufactured reality for millennium. Christian mystics, Buddhist practitioners, Indigenous cultures, Hindu gurus, and Taoist philosophers have all lit the way to a liberated world.
“You arrive here,” they collectively tell us, “by practicing a set of inner methods, which you couple with underlying guiding philosophies. Together, these practices lead you to overcome the self-involved desires exploited by your consumer-driven societies. You instead cultivate self-and-other-oriented qualities of compassion, empathy, and belonging. As you do this, you inevitably develop a growing understanding of the interdependence of all beings, and the purpose of life becomes to live for the sake of all of us.
“These inner methods help you identify less with your ego-defined self (you are not who you think you are) and more with a shared transcendent consciousness that lives behind the physical realm (you realize the essential unity of all existence). This returns you to a natural spontaneity in which life becomes lived with a profound freedom. The artificial needs that once consumed you now dissolve, and a genuine desire for community takes its place.
“Next, your inner methods take you to the outside world in search of others like you, others in their pursuit of authentic freedom, freedom from a fabricated desire fulfillment system. As you begin, you find a few kindred spirits and you transition cooperatively from the ‘one’ into the ‘few’ (or the ‘many’). Together, initially as a small group, you reclaim a genuine social identity (I know myself through my sincere relationship with you), and the social fabric of a true community is resurrected, first on this small scale.”
Step 4: Learning How the Games We Play Keep Everyone Losing
In the consumer culture, games begin at a very young age. All of us are taught early on to play the game where the points that count are class grades. We were told these were very important points, and that our future safety and survival might one day depend on these points.
On the one hand, there was something very alluring about all this when we were young children. Our culture gave us crisp, clear measures of our value, and it was easy to get hooked on this.
But what did we trade in to get this?
As we spent more and more of our young lives playing games in point-scoring environments, the games changed us in unseen ways.
We’ve surrendered establishing life on our own terms. It became all about gathering points such as letter grades and no longer about our care to deeply understand our world, our care to learn ways to help one another, or our care to cultivate our natural curiosity and virtue and humility.
We’ve been taught to surrender what is most important, trading it in for points and getting shortchanged in the process. This is how we began to live in the consumer culture’s imagined reality, a game of its own making.
It’s time we liberate ourselves from these games and the manufactured reality they create.
Step 5: Taming the Consumer Culture Fundamentalist in Our Heads
Surprisingly, the consumer culture found its way in to our lives at a very (very) early age. When we still just infants and toddlers, it planted consumer culture fundamentalists in our developing brains. (To learn how this happened, give the manuscript a read. [clickable])
These inner fundamentalists stay with us, incessantly demanding things of us. They tell us, rather harshly, that winning in the corporate culture is our only way to live.
“Forget about connection, belonging, and togetherness.”
“Forget about those things that are impossible to measure.”“Go back to work.”
“You’re only safe when you’re gathering points playing the culture’s games.
”Our work is liberating ourselves from the marketplace fundamentalists in our minds. Our work is breaking free from the consumer culture first on the inside, so we can then liberate ourselves on the outside. No one can do this for us, so we’ll learn to do this on our own.
Step 6: Where We Learn to Stop Distracting Ourselves From Our Lives
It’s little wonder that we all find ourselves exhausted and isolated. We’re trapped in an unending quest to accumulate points, a quest forced upon us by our inner fundamentalists and our consumer culture.
Our fundamentalists then offer us escapes from the exhaustion of point gathering. We’re told to escape into distractions that offer temporary relief. These are culturally-sanctioned distractions that continue our absence from ourselves.
Our fundamentalists offer up distractions ranging from apps on our smartphone to alcohol on our grocery store shelves.
Our dictators encourage us to get hooked on these diversions, diversions that are psychologically and physiologically addictive. This augments the duration and number of distractions we engage in each day, making these our go to whenever we feel exhausted.We’re ready to go for something better than a lifetime of endless distraction.
We’re ready to reclaim the time of our lives so we can come together, creating a new way to live that works for all of us. We’re ready to find the time to truly make a difference.
Step 7: Believing a Bright Future is Waiting For Us
We’re ready to move beyond the marketplace and its demand that we work tirelessly. It’s time to build a new way, a new culture freeing us from lives we no longer align with.
We’re confronted with the daunting task of letting go of our consumer culture, the culture we’ve called home, and the only culture we’ve ever known.
At various times throughout human history, our ancestors found themselves just where we are today: in a relationally lacking culture, one that promised to point the way to a good life, but instead only led them astray. Time and again, some of our ancestors gathered together and left behind the life they’d carved out for themselves, moving away to create a new way to live that made room for connection and care. Departing together, they birthed new, relationally-rich cultures.
To build each new culture, our ancestors first needed a belief.
Our ancestors needed a belief we’ll also need if we’re going to leave the world we’ve known behind and create a new way to live together. The belief at the heart of cultural creativity, in both the past and present day, is the belief that in moving away we’ll find ourselves welcomed, cared for, and valued in some new place. Our efforts will be rewarded, proving worthwhile.
Once we grab hold of this belief, the culture we live in, and the leaders who guide it, will hold no power over us.
Our work now is birthing and nurturing the belief that we can come together, whether as a few or as many of us; leave this marketplace behind, breaking free from the exhaustion and isolation that accompanies it; and find ourselves welcomed into a new life with room for all of us.
To arrive here, I explore (in the manuscript) what happened to the people who, in the last two hundred years, embarked together on a journey out of the consumer culture, believing something better awaited them. What we discover is remarkably encouraging.
Step 8: Building The World We Most Want to Live In
All that’s left is learning how we cross our bridges. These are the bridges taking us away from a consumer culture we no longer align with and delivering us into a cooperative culture satisfying our longing for togetherness. These are the bridges taking us away from a world where security lies in our individual collections of wealth and delivering us into a world where we experience genuine security through our relationships with one another.
We will cross this bridge through a series of small, incremental steps, each one little, but each one inching us forward. As much as we might wish for it, there is no giant leap breaking us in to the new world. What others may one day believe was our overnight success will have been, instead, a multitude of steps, some feeling insignificant at the time, all building up to herald a major transformation.
In the manuscript, I articulate these steps by looking back, imagining we’re living in a new, cooperative culture, sometime in the near future, and reflecting back on how we arrived here.
