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Chris,
Many thanks for your post.
At the risk of taking the wind out of your sails, I think we're coming from a VERY fundamentally different place here.
I'm not about finger-pointing. I'm not saying that anything's wrong with the current system. I'm not saying it's anybody's fault that things are in the mess they're in.
What I AM saying is that there are some things missing that, if they were present, could make a big difference to the fostering of global abundance. Those things are:
1) A widespread belief that it's possible for a world without extreme poverty to exist.
2) Building on 1), an upsurge of activity on the part of ordinary people, when they realise:
a) it's not hopeless;
b) they have something to say about how things turn out;
c) there are organisations that, given some money, actually produce big results.
3) A global shift in mindset, from scarcity (competing for “resources”) to abundance (collaborating to create wealth)
Now, I'm not saying that there are no scarce resources in the world. Clearly there are finite resources on the planet, particularly including fossil fuels, fresh water and fertile land. However, if we can harness the creativity of not thousands but millions/billions, I firmly believe we can address the energy crisis, which in turn allows us to address all three of these issues.
The biggest tragedy of our current world is that so many talented lives are going to waste. HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and chronic persistent hunger are claiming 20,000 to 25,000 a day; who knows what talents are perishing among that number? The next Einstein? The next Mother Teresa? The next Ghandi? We really have no idea.
My mission for this pod is to unleash the solutions that are known, and have them spread like wildfire across the globe: The Hunger Project's Epicenter strategy; Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank; Practical Action's low-tech, high-impact farming techniques; the permaculture techniques that are greening the Western Sahara; Rick Nelson's Solaroof technology.
All these tools/techniques can make a huge impact, and we can spread them quickly and quietly, through our networks, because fundamentally they're about spreading knowledge (i.e. bits of information) rather than spreading stuff (i.e. atoms).
And the best news of all is this: none of them really threatens the status quo particularly. Perhaps a few of the more extreme despots will be discommoded by the new-found empowerment of some of the people they've been oppressing, but in general the “powers that be” will be fairly indifferent to this stuff, because it will happen very gradually.
I think one of the big challenges for the conscious capitalism community is choosing to spend more energy on creating solutions, and less energy on pointing the finger at the big, bad establishment, on to which it projects the ills of the world.
Maybe Shell, Monsanto, Esso, the US Government, Cargill, Wal-Mart, the Chinese Government, the World Bank et al have done nothing fundamentally wrong. Maybe it's all our doing that the world is in the state it's in, because we were too busy pointing the finger, rather than rolling up our sleeves and getting to work….
All the best,
Patrick
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