"You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." (Morpheus’ quote from “The Matrix”)
“Every day, millions of choices are made by individuals, businesses and governments. Our common future lies in all those choices. Because of the array of overlapping challenges the world faces, it is more urgent than ever that we take action to embrace the principles of the sustainable development agenda. It is time that genuine global action is taken to enable people, markets and governments to make sustainable choices.” (The Report of The United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability – 12 Jan 2012, 23 pages) www.un.org/gsp/report
This refreshing overview report shows that the UN does understand the real causes of our current global problems (eg that GDP alone cannot be used as a measure of progress). They make many well-thought-through recommendations, but I fear that the timeframe between what they recommend governments ‘should’ do, and any concerted global actions may be longer than our current lifespans. I am reminded of a joke from the last days of communism - “Comrades we’re at the edge of a cliff and we’ve just taken a giant step forward!”
The U.N. report left me seriously contemplating what I can do as an individual to contribute positively to a situation that becomes more urgent every day, when my skills mostly centre on understanding what makes people tick. My conclusion is that I can point out the matrix – how the very fabric of our collective reality has been consciously constructed and is actually working exactly as it was designed – not in our collective best interests, but the interests of the few. But even putting the ethics of that aside, we are rapidly reaching the logical conclusion of an illogical system. I’m not big on conspiracy theories – though if there is a conspiracy then we are all unconsciously willing conspirators!
VitallyMe and its big sister Q12 focus on the interior aspects of our reality – how to manage and develop personal traits and qualities in the pursuit of happiness. We often make the mistake of trying to change our external reality to suit our internal comfort. But there are times when we do need to turn our focus outwards and take specific actions to change the external aspects of our reality.
In that light I intend to point out aspects of the matrix in this series of blogs – and you may not like what I point out – aimed at generating robust discussion, growing awareness of how we are all part of the problem, and hopefully leading to solutions that we can all apply in a multitude of everyday choices.
The core premise here is that our current reality simply cannot continue, economically or environmentally. Environmentally we chew through resources like they were inexhaustible and free. We stubbornly argue for our own vested interests – even on relatively simple issues like water management in the Murray-Darling system or a carbon tax – not only ignoring science but unable to hold any kind of bigger picture or see any future consequences of continuing current actions.
Economically we do exactly the same. The world has far outspent its capacity to pay. China has now lent $3.3 trillion to the US and Japan so they can buy cheap goods from China! There is no-one else to borrow from – as a planet we have mortgaged our future to have a lifestyle now, that collectively we cannot actually afford. The illogical system is the debt-based economy and the totally false belief that the growth it appears to produce is real. It’s a balloon that can either burst – which means world-wide depression, or it can be let down slowly – which means austerity measures for the next decade at least.
As Woody Allen once said, “We face a choice between hopelessness and despair and total extinction – and may we choose wisely!”
A serious depression is a horrific option (Google “great depression” and imagine how you would cope in such circumstances) that none of us has experienced in this lifetime. I see the best chance we’ve got is to let the balloon down as quickly as we can while the world struggles to enter a new but inevitable paradigm – prosperity without growth. But that is not a bad thing for developed nations. Almost all living things grow rapidly to a particular stage – then growth virtually stops and they move into maturity and to more sophisticated experiences. (The only organism to maintain continuous linear growth is cancer!)
“Prosperity without growth” will certainly be a brave new world – so let’s choose to bring it on, rather be dragged screaming into it. But understand just what that means – it is necessarily the end of the consumer society into which we were born and which is all most of us have known all our lives – it is in fact the matrix!
So my blog series will be about how to take down the consumer society before it takes us down. I invite your comments and thoughts – hey, we might just come up with enough micro-solutions make the difference…
Here are some of the topics I’ll be blogging…
· How to disable the marketing and advertising industry
· Life without financial institutions
· The illusion of superannuation
· Accounting for the planet
· Making a mark in the market
· The no-insurance policy
· The real value in your life
Should be thought provoking at the very least! I hope you’ll join in and invite everyone you know to do so as well…
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