It makes sense to paraphrase Einstein’s famous dictum in regard to consciousness. Our problem is the unsustainability of the world we have created, and we should be clear that we can’t solve this problem with the same kind of consciousness that gave rise to it.
But many people try to do just that, even the leaders of the world’s twenty richest and most powerful nations. The November 2010 meeting of the G20 in Seoul gave indisputable proof of it. Not only did the meeting fail to achieve its main objectives (among them rebalancing international trade and reaching an accommodation between the U.S. and South Korea), the objectives themselves proved to be out-of-date. They centered on re-stabilizing the same moribund economic and financial system that made the world unsustainable in the first place.
But why is the G20’s failure due to wrong consciousness? Because consciousness in the social, political, and cultural context is sum total of our view of the world, with its values, aspirations, and background assumptions. It’s the “paradigm” that underlies the way we think and the way we set our priorities. The consciousness of the G20 gives rise to an obsolete view of the world, with faulty values and outdated aspirations. The leaders view the world as the arena for a Darwinian struggle for survival, seen as a competition for growth in the economies of nations. Since assured growth cannot be achieved even by the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world by itself, the leaders recognize the need for some level and form of cooperation—as a means to an end. The end is for the rich nations to make sure that they remain rich.
If the GDP grows and the trade balance is positive, all is well, nothing more is needed. It appears that the leaders are convinced that all that any person or nation in the world could reasonably ask for is to make money, preferably more money than its neighbor. That the world in which this competition takes place is perilously balanced at the edge of climatic and resource-disasters—and that at the same time it’s thoroughly equipped with nuclear and other hi-tech weapons to make the worst of any crisis coming its way—seems to have escaped their attention.
Consciousness is like a light shining on the objects in which we are interested. It can be a spotlight, narrowly focused, or a floodlight, illuminating a wide range of things together with their surroundings. The G20’s light is a spotlight, focused on their own national economy in the short-term perspective. It doesn’t illuminate anything around it, or beyond it.
But this is not the only kind of consciousness people can have, nor is it the only kind that many already have. A new consciousness is evolving in society, enabling people to look beyond the narrow horizons espoused by their leaders. The new consciousness tells them that we live on a planet where we exploit and exhaust our finite storehouses of energy and matter, where we pollute the environment and destroy the systems of nature that support our life. And where continued growth in the world’s economy fails to trickle down to more than half of the human population. It tells them that ours is a totally unsustainable situation.
It’s time for the consciousness evolving in wide strata of the population to penetrate to the leadership. It’s time for concerned and responsible people to speak up. You don’t need to have power and wealth to be effective. The Internet and the new media in civil society—among them the Network of IONS and the WorldShift Community of the Club of Budapest—are here to enable you to speak up. And to be heard. It’s up to each and every one of us to make good use of the means at our disposal—before it’s too late. Because the hour is later than most people seem to think. Certainly, later than the leaders of the G20 think.
