The math of greed.

The paragraphs below come from a writing by David Korten responding to the current global economic crisis. There is a silver lining to this crisis....the transformation of our context for living…
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Speth quotes psychologist David Myers, whose essay "What Is the Good Life?" claims that Americans have:
big houses and broken homes, high incomes and low morale, secured rights and diminished civility. We were excelling at making a living but too often failing at making a life. We celebrated our prosperity but yearned for purpose. We cherished our freedoms but longed for connection. In an age of plenty, we were feeling spiritual hunger. These facts of life lead us to a startling conclusion: Our becoming better off materially has not made us better off psychologically.
This is consistent with studies finding that beyond a basic threshold level of about $10,000 per capita per year, equity and community are far more important determinants of health and happiness than income or possessions. Indeed, as Speth documents, economic growth tends to be associated with increases in individualism, social fragmentation, inequality, depression, and even impaired physical health.
Speth gives significant attention to social movements grounded in an awakening spiri-tual consciousness that are creating communities of the future from the bottom up, practicing participatory democracy, and demanding changes in the rules of the game:
Many of our deepest thinkers and many of those most familiar with the scale of the challenges we face have concluded that the transitions required can be achieved only in the context of what I will call the rise of a new consciousness. For some, it is a spiritual awakening-a transformation of the human heart. For others it is a more intellectual process of coming to see the world anew and deeply embracing the emerging ethic of the environment and the old ethic of what it means to love thy neighbor as thyself.

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The article can be found at:
http://www.tikkun.org/archive/backissues/tik0811/politics/economic/base_view

Welcome to the new year…

Love,

cw