Sep 10, 2013 | Options/ New Paradigm
There are a lot of people who still believe and teach that anyone can be rich if they are willing to work hard enough. That if we have the right attitude, if we just do the right things, and that if we’re willing to do “what it takes,” and know how to game the system, that we, too, can have it all. But what many of us are beginning to wake up to is that the current monetary and economic paradigm only works with winners and losers. It creates scarcity and separation and it’s never been more obvious than it is today with more and more money and resources concentrated into fewer and fewer hands…leaving on the other side, more and more people struggling to live – survive, including children – on less and less. Winners and losers.
Sep 3, 2013 | Options/ New Paradigm
In America, the transition to this vision will involve a severe disruption of our present way of life. In other countries where people still practice small-scale farming akin to modern permaculture, the transition might be much smoother. They can leapfrog the 20th century directly into the 21st, without repeating our ecologically and socially devastating mistakes. People in other lands can adapt the principles of permaculture to their own specific environmental and social circumstances. This is not about clever white people inventing a new model and imposing it on someone else. (Indeed, many permaculture techniques have been adopted from indigenous farmers around the world.) It is about everyone learning from everyone else, all guided by the ideal of wedding agronomy to ecology and fostering bioregional food self-sufficiency.
Sep 1, 2013 | Options/ New Paradigm
Michael C. Ruppert, author, former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics investigator turned investigative journalist specializing in Peak Oil and Collapse, says, “Until we change the way money works, nothing changes.” The way we use money is part of a dying system that no longer serves mankind. It creates scarcity, fear, and separation and the system as it has existed for over 5,000 years creates a world of “haves” and “have nots,” that allows the accumulation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, leaving more and more people on the planet struggling for survival. But it’s not just the extreme wealthy that are at fault…It’s us, too, because we bought into the separation mode hook, line, and sinker!
Aug 27, 2013 | Options/ New Paradigm
Wherever I go and ask people what is missing from their lives, the most common answer (if they are not impoverished or seriously ill) is “community.” What happened to community, and why don’t we have it any more? There are many reasons – the layout of suburbia, the disappearance of public space, the automobile and the television, the high mobility of people and jobs – and, if you trace the “why’s” a few levels down, they all implicate the money system. More directly posed: community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own. That is because community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don’t depend on your neighbors – or indeed on any specific person – for anything. You can just pay someone to do it, or pay someone else to do it.
Mar 19, 2013 | Options/ New Paradigm
As modernity’s brief flight into the stratosphere of the industrial age begins its final descent, those who have not turned away from watching the inevitable hard landing will have few choices, but those who have chosen not to strap on the their oxygen masks and...
Feb 1, 2013 | Options/ New Paradigm
In the twenty-first century, industrial civilization is crumbling around us, and we are compelled to notice that a number of Enlightenment assumptions no longer apply or at the very least, have outlived their utility in a world unraveling. One of these is the notion that the universe is rational and orderly. The word that perhaps best describes the current era is chaos. So does this mean that reason is dead, and chaos reigns? Does it mean that we must choose which of the two is actually true, despite what our instincts tell us?
Jan 16, 2013 | Options/ New Paradigm
Since the Enlightenment, mystical knowledge has been minimized, even demeaned in the West as “unscientific.” Only knowledge gained intellectually through the scientific method was deemed valid by Enlightenment thinkers. However, Andrew Harvey argues that one likely outcome of the current collapse of industrial civilization and its glorification of the intellect is that yet another marriage, that of the rational with the sacred, is in process. Mystics and scientists need one another, he asserts, declaring that “It is time that Westerners realize that mystics are scientists of their domain.”
Jan 4, 2013 | Options/ New Paradigm
In a time of decline, demise, unraveling and what is very likely to be the collapse of industrial civilization and the paradigm on which it rests, it is crucial, in my opinion, to grasp and nourish the opposite of descent by attending to all that may facilitate an ascent to a rebirth of humanity. Descent, in fact, is only one half of the story of civilization that is now playing out its last act. From the ashes of that collapsed paradigm, another will emerge, and our work in current time is to forge a framework with which it can be constructed—a skeleton of sanity, sagacity, creativity, compassion, and vision to be enfleshed on the bare bones of what we modestly call “preparation,” knowing that today’s preparation is tomorrow’s next culture.
Dec 29, 2012 | Options/ New Paradigm
When a story nears its end it goes through death throes, an exaggerated semblance of life. So today we see domination, conquest, violence, and separation take on absurd extremes that hold a mirror up to what was once hidden and diffuse.
Sep 30, 2012 | Options/ New Paradigm
Those of us who have been following the unfolding global crisis – the converging, interlocked “wicked problems” of energy, the environment, economics and social justice – have become intimately familiar with the painful progression through the Five Stages of Grief described by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross.
