Obedience To Corporate-State Authority Makes Consumer Society Increasingly Dangerous, By Yosef Brody

Obedience To Corporate-State Authority Makes Consumer Society Increasingly Dangerous, By Yosef Brody

Fifty years ago this month, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram published a groundbreaking article describing a unique human behavior experiment. The study and its many variations, while ethically controversial, gave us new insight into human tendencies to obey authority, surprising the experts and everyone else on just how susceptible we are to doing the bidding of others. The original experiment revealed that a majority of participants would dutifully administer increasingly severe electric shocks to strangers – up to and including potentially lethal doses – because an authority told them that pulling the levers was necessary and required (the “shocks,” subjects found out later, were fake). People who obeyed all the way to the end did so even as they experienced tremendous moral conflict. Despite their distress, they never questioned the basic premise of the situation that was fed to them: the institution needed their compliance for the betterment of the common good.

Denial Of Nature's Limit Is The Problem, By Aaron G. Lehmer-Chang

Denial Of Nature's Limit Is The Problem, By Aaron G. Lehmer-Chang

Unfortunately, many of our world’s vital ecosystems are already on the brink of collapse. Despite incredible leaps in resource-use efficiency, ecological understanding, and technological know-how, our planet’s forests and sensitive habitats are being devastated far faster than they’re regenerating, arable lands are turning into deserts and soils are being mined of their critical nutrients, our oceans are being overfished and polluted with more toxins than can safely be absorbed, our freshwater aquifers and waterways are being depleted at rates several times faster than they’re being replenished, and our atmosphere is being flooded with so much carbon that our global climate is warming to extreme degrees. Moreover, the fossil fuels we rely on for transportation, agriculture, housing, manufacturing, and so much more are becoming harder and harder to find and extract, posing severe challenges to the very foundation of industrial civilization.

What Collapse Feels Like, Part 2 of 5: Anger: When Rage And Cynicism Aren't Enough, By Carolyn Baker

What Collapse Feels Like, Part 2 of 5: Anger: When Rage And Cynicism Aren't Enough, By Carolyn Baker

Questioning, distrust, skepticism, and remaining uncertain about a particular idea is a healthy, discerning response for refugees escaping the tyranny of industrial civilization. Yet at the same time we distrust, we need to inwardly explore the origins of our distrust—and what it feels like. What emotions does the new idea evoke? What incidents in our personal or family history may have served to engender the distrust in relation to this idea? And most importantly, what is the grief, underlying our skepticism? Ultimately, what is the most useful investment of one’s time and energy: attacking an idea and the person promoting it or investigating what dynamics within one’s own psyche are operating in reaction to the idea? Ah, but this, as Jack Weber names it is “Occupying Oneself,” and that, as you may have discovered, is the most formidable space on earth.

Radical Embrace: Breaking The Cycle Of An Unfertile Demise, By Jack Adam Weber

Radical Embrace: Breaking The Cycle Of An Unfertile Demise, By Jack Adam Weber

How do we occupy ourselves now, inwardly? How do we handle this emotionally and spiritually? The choice is each of ours. I handle the bad news the way I deal with all heartbreak; I feel the pain and let my heart break. I go into the dark, I let it all work on me, keep my eyes open down there, and let myself be transformed. The result? I emerge every time with more wisdom, more love, more care. Climate change reality is not different than embracing dying (if not our own then that of our children or grandchildren and others we care about). except that it is not only our own death but likely that of the majority of complex life forms and ecosystems as we know them. In other words, our hearts face breaking open as they never have before. Each of us is alive at the most unique time in all of human history because never have we imminently faced with such certainty the impending demise of so much at once. And this is poignant, any way you look at it. Poignancy is power. And the power we can all reap now is in our hearts, a passionately compassionate spiritual power made available by breaking…open.

Paradigm Shifts And Tipping Points, Part 2, By Gary Stamper And Michael Wolff

Paradigm Shifts And Tipping Points, Part 2, By Gary Stamper And Michael Wolff

In Part One of this essay, we looked at defining the terms “paradigm shift” and “tipping point” as they apply to the multiple-systems failure scenario we find ourselves in today. As we and others have pointed out for years, these failures are pandemic. They are everywhere: Education, economy, government, social systems, peak everything, and on and on the list goes. to the point where it’s difficult to find systems that are thriving. But nowhere are the failure of systems more critical, more in your face, and more threatening than Climate Change and Fukushima. Either one of these has the potential to sound the death knell of the entire human race. But before we move to the possibility of positive paradigm shifts and the tipping points needed to that might mitigate each, let’s touch on both.

All Dress Rehearsals Are Over, By Carolyn Baker

All Dress Rehearsals Are Over, By Carolyn Baker

Before writing another word I want to thank all of you who have reached out to me through my website, on Facebook, Twitter, and by email to check on my status during the horrific Colorado floods of last week. At this writing, over 12,000 people have been evacuated, nearly 18,000 homes destroyed or damaged, 5 confirmed dead, and hundreds more missing. I consider myself extraordinarily blessed not to have been harmed or have experienced any damage to my home; however, all around me in every direction is devastation—evacuated families, schools closed, and people who still cannot return to their workplaces.

Bombs, Bad Guys, And The Brink Of Peace, By Charles Eisenstein

Bombs, Bad Guys, And The Brink Of Peace, By Charles Eisenstein

In the transition from the mentality of the evil Other to the mentality of interconnectedness, we all face, from time to time, moments of doubtful hesitation: “Is it OK to trust? Is it OK to relax control? What if the Other doesn’t respond in kind? What if he just takes advantage of our ‘weakness’ (our trust)?” For warring factions with, in some cases, generations-long grudges, to take that step requires huge courage. For our own leaders it takes a bit of courage as well. What if they are called soft? What if Assad truly is a monster and he takes our declining to bomb him as license to commit horrors? What if he doesn’t want peace but only, like a James Bond villain, to dominate and destroy? What will happen to the United States if we can’t build a gas pipeline [4] through Syria controlled by U.S. interests? If I listen to my heart, will I be OK?

Never Stop Running Napalm Girl, By Ray Jason

Never Stop Running Napalm Girl, By Ray Jason

So listen carefully as the highly paid military and political analysts parade across your television screens, proclaiming the need for this latest “kinetic action.”  Observe how these shrewd distorters evade the three paramount characteristics of war that I have just discussed.  None of them will address what war really is.  Nor will they mention that those who benefit from war do not suffer its horrors.  And finally, they will not admit that war never brings good into the world and is actually a plague that sickens the human project.

What Collapse Feels Like, Part 1 of 5, Becoming A Student Of Fear, By Carolyn Baker

What Collapse Feels Like, Part 1 of 5, Becoming A Student Of Fear, By Carolyn Baker

Our fundamental premise when confronting any emotion, whether it feels positive or negative, should be one of viewing the emotion as instructive. Emotions are far more than random synapses firing in the brain, more than mere physiological phenomena. And whether or not one concurs with William Blake that “emotions are influxes of the divine,” at the very least, it behooves us to open to the possibility that not only are emotions aspects of our survival mechanism but may well serve an evolutionary function by perpetually inducing us to experience a higher quality of life.