Spirals of Powerlessness & Empowerment
admin August 29th, 2007
Right click here to download a Word.doc with images of both spirals.
The Spiral of Powerlessness & the Premise of Lack
Inside the front cover, please see what I call a Spiral of Powerlessness. It is the scary current of limiting beliefs and consequences in which I sense we’re trapped.
Its premise is “lack.”
There isn’t enough of anything, neither enough “goods”—whether jobs or jungles—nor enough “goodness” because human beings are, well, pretty bad. These ideas have been drilled into us for centuries, as world religions have dwelt on human frailty, and Western political ideologies have picked up similar themes.
“Homo homini lupus [we are to one another as wolves],” wrote the influential seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Repeating a Roman aphorism—long before we’d learned how social wolves really are—Hobbes reduced us to cutthroat animals.
Private interest…is the only immutable point in the human heart. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835
From that narrow premise, it follows that it’s best to mistrust deliberative problem-solving, distrust even democratic government, and grasp for an infallible law—the market!—driven by the only thing we can really count on, human selfishness. From there, wealth concentrates and suffering increases, confirming the dreary premises that set the spiral in motion in the first place.
What this downward spiral tells me is that we humans now suffer from what linguists call “hypocognition,” the lack of a critical concept we need to thrive. And it’s no trivial gap! Swept into the vortex of this destructive spiral, we’re missing an understanding of democracy vital and compelling enough to create the world we want.
The Spiral of Empowerment & the Premise of Plenty
In contrast to the premise of lack in the opening Spiral of Powerlessness, these five qualities generate a spiral of human growth and satisfaction I’ve striven to capture in the Spiral of Empowerment you’ll find inside the back cover.
Its premise is plenty—that as we come to appreciate and enjoy nature’s laws, learning to live within a self-renewing ecological home, we discover there’s more than enough for all to live well.
This realization I first experienced as a lightning bolt, when in my twenties I learned that there was more than enough food in the world to make us all chubby…and there still is, even considering staggering built-in waste.
I learned that we create the scarcity we fear.
Worldwide, for example, more than a third of all grain and 90 percent of soy gets fed to livestock.
I learned that this irrationality took off, even though inefficient and harmful to health, because one-rule economics leaves millions of people too poor to buy food and keeps grain so cheap that it’s profitable to feed vast amounts to animals.
Beyond food, the U.S. economy remains “astoundingly” wasteful, conclude the authors of Natural Capitalism, as “only 6 percent of its vast flows of materials actually end up in products.”
Imagine, then, the potential plenty, not to mention health benefits, as we shift toward equity and efficiency.
Similar plenty appears once we drop the scarcity lens surrounding energy. Our sun, wind, waves, water, and biomass offer us a “daily dose of energy” 15,000 times greater than in all the planet-harming fossil and nuclear power we now use, says German energy expert Hermann Scheer. Just one-fifth of the energy in wind alone would, if converted to electricity, meet the whole world’s energy demands, reports a Stanford-NASA study.
An awareness of plenty itself undermines a focus on raw, self-centered competition, leaving us able to refocus not on the goodness of human nature, which seems to deny human complexity, but on the undeniable goodness in human nature, including the deep positive needs and capacities just mentioned.
From there, the Spiral of Empowerment quickens. We gain confidence that we can learn to make sound decisions together about the rules that further healthy communities. Then, as we begin to succeed and ease the horrific oppression and conflict that now rob us of life, we reinforce positive expectations about our species. The destructive mental map loosens its hold. And as these capacities and needs—for fairness, connection, efficacy, and meaning—find avenues for expression, they redound, generating even more creative decision making and outcomes.
So “getting a grip” doesn’t have to mean a sober struggle. From this more complete view of our own nature and of what nature offers, could it instead become an exhilarating adventure?
