| The Three Thresholds -- The Four Mistakes -- The Five Solutions The world is right now tottering atop three major thresholds: an environment that is so afire it may no longer be able to support human life; an economic system that has driven us to this point and is holding We The People (our representative democracies) hostage; and an explosion of human flesh on the planet that has turned our species into a global Petri dish just waiting for an infective agent to run amok.
Four things have brought us to this point, and the failure to recognize them at their deepest level will only push us faster toward total tipping points where we are thrown over the Three Thresholds into disaster. All four of these Mistakes are grounded in our culture, our way of thinking, our way of seeing the world, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and why we're here. Nationalism, reformation, balancing the power of labor and capital, clearly defining and defending the commons, and confronting the big questions and the big picture may seem daunting form where we stand, but these are the impulses that led to the creation of the United States of America and every other nation. Along with protecting the environment and creating an egalitarian culture, these five arenas hold the keys to solutions in which citizens can begin to think of themselves as responsibility-holders. It has become imperative that we strengthen our primary allegiances to the values we embrace, or we will rightly forfeit our right to the future they represent. |