PROLOGUE In Search of the Possible

Man, when he entered life, the Father gave the seeds of every kind and every way of life possible. Whatever seeds each man sows and cultivates will grow and bear him their proper fruit.

 

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1486)

 

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.

 

Mohandas K. Gandhi

In 1995, I observed in the prologue to When Corporations Rule the World that everywhere I went I found an almost universal sense among ordinary people that the institutions on which they depended were failing them. Rising poverty and unemployment, inequality, violent crime, broken families, and environmental deterioration all contributed to a growing fear of what the future might hold.

Now it turns out that those were the good days. The financial shock that subsequently swept through Asia, Russia, and Latin America in the late 1990s, the bursting of the stock market bubble in the opening days of the twenty-first century, and a continuing wave of corporate financial scandals have drawn attention to a corruption of the institutions of the global economy well beyond what I documented in 1995.

Pundits continue to speak optimistically about economic growth, gains in jobs, and a rising stock market, yet working families, even with two incomes, find it increasingly difficult to make ends meet and fall ever deeper into debt as health care and housing costs soar out of reach. We are told that as a nation we can no longer afford basics we once took for granted, such as living-wage jobs with benefits, a quality education for our children, health care and safety nets for the poor, protection for the environment, parks, public funding for the arts and public broadcasting, and pensions for the elderly. Economists tell us we are getting richer, yet everyday experience tells a different story. Meanwhile we face global terrorism, rapid increases in oil prices, increasingly violent weather events, a skyrocketing U.S. trade deficit, and a falling U.S. dollar.

Talk of end times is in the air. Books on biblical Armageddon and the imminent return of Christ to lift believers to heaven are selling in the tens of millions in the United States. Leading business magazines carry cover stories about the end of oil. The Pentagon has joined environmentalists in issuing warnings about the potential apocalyptic consequences of climate change.

One of the most common reactions I received from readers of When Corporations Rule the World was that it gave them a sense of hope. I was at first surprised, because documenting the systemic causes of increasing inequality, environmental destruction, and the disintegrating social fabric had been for me a decidedly depressing experience. Yet, reader after reader responded that, by providing an analysis that explained the cause of the difficulties they were experiencing and by demonstrating that it is possible for human societies to take another course, When Corporations Rule the World had given them hope that things could be different.

As the crisis has continued to intensify, I have come to see that the issues I addressed in When Corporations Rule the World are a contemporary manifestation of much deeper historical patterns and that changing course will require far more than holding global corporations accountable for the social and environmental consequences of their operations. This book, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, examines these deeper patterns. It offers no simple answers to five thousand years of human misdirection, but it does make clear that the misdirection is not inevitable and that a practical pathway to a positive human future is now within our means as a species to choose. Consequently, I expect that on balance readers will find The Great Turning to be an even more hopeful book than When Corporations Rule the World.

As I have done in my previous books, I want to introduce the issues we will be exploring together by sharing with you the outlines of the journey I have taken from the innocence of my growing up to my current understanding of the epic opportunity now before us as a species.

GROWING UP ON A SHRINKING PLANET

I am a member of a transitional generation that has experienced the profound cultural, economic, and political consequences of a communications revolution that has shrunk the planet and wiped away the barriers of geography long separating humans into islands of cultural isolation. This revolution is bringing forth a new consciousness of the reality that we humans are one people sharing one destiny on one small planet. The story of my personal awakening is far from unique among the members of my generation.

Transitional Generation

Born in 1937, I grew up white, middle class, and quintessentially conservative in a small town in the northwest corner of the United States, surrounded by an extended family of uncles, aunts, and grandparents. I rarely saw a person of a different race and never met a Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist. I assumed, as did my family, that on completing college I would return to the town of my birth to spend my life running the family retail business. I had little interest in travel beyond visiting the nearby mountains and seashore and, until just before graduation from college, found it a bit odd that anyone blessed with U.S. citizenship would want to venture beyond our national borders. Never, even in a fleeting fantasy, did I imagine that as an adult I would reside and work for over twenty years in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

The difference between my experience growing up and that of my daughters illustrates the dramatic shrinking of the planet and the transformation of human experience that occurred over a period of less than forty years. By the time my daughters graduated from high school, they had lived in Nicaragua, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the United States and had attended International Schools with classmates of richly varied racial, cultural, and religious backgrounds from more than sixty countries. They grew up as itinerants far removed from blood relatives other than their mother and father. During their high school years they thought nothing of traveling on their own between Indonesia and the United States with a stopover in South Korea, a country in which few people spoke English, to do some shopping. Even before graduating from high school, they had a global consciousness and skills in dealing with cultural differences wholly beyond my comprehension growing up in a day when international travel was slow, prohibitively costly, and uncommon.

Large-scale international student exchanges, voluntary service programs, and international careers in transnational governmental, nongovernmental, and business organizations now provide millions of people with sustained in-depth cross-cultural encounters. Since the early 1990s, Internet technologies have made international communications instantaneous and nearly costless and thus open possibilities for still more varied forms of international exchange and cooperation.

By the scale of evolutionary time, this has been a virtually instantaneous break with the previous human condition. It creates new challenges even as it expands by orders of magnitude our species’ possibilities. Here is the story of how I experienced this break.

From Hometown to Global Village

In 1959, as a psychology major in my senior year of college, I faced a requirement to take a colloquium taught by a professor outside my major field of study. I was attracted to an offering on modern revolutions taught by Robert North, a distinguished professor of political science. It seemed a useful opportunity to learn something about the Communist revolutions that to my conservative mind posed a threat to my American way of life. In the course of the seminar, I learned that Communist revolutions grew out of the desperation of the poor. As I absorbed the implications, I made a life-changing decision: I would devote my life to sharing the secrets of America’s economic and political success so that the world’s poor might become free and prosperous like Americans and thus abandon ideas of revolution.

The subsequent experience of working for some thirty years as a member of the international development establishment profoundly changed my worldview. I had gone abroad to teach. Far more consequential than what I taught was what I learned—about myself, my country, and the human tragedy of unrealized possibility. Ultimately, I realized I must return to the land of my birth to share with my people the lessons of my encounter with the world.

In 1992, Fran, my wife and life partner, and I moved to New York City. Fran continued her work as a program officer at the Ford Foundation’s headquarters, and I began the research that led to publication in 1995 of When Corporations Rule the World.

To this day, I retain my conservative suspicion of big government. I am now, however, equally suspicious of big business and big finance. I remain critical of the shortcomings of unions and public welfare programs, but have a far greater appreciation of their positive and essential role in protecting the rights and well-being of otherwise defenseless working people in the hard-knocks world of big business and global finance.

Although my love for my own country and its possibilities remains firm, I no longer view the United States through the eyes of innocence. I have seen firsthand the devastating negative impact that the economic and military policies of the U.S. government have had on democracy, economic justice, and environmental sustainability, both at home and abroad. That experience has also brought me to an understanding that the leadership to create a world that works for all can and must come from the bottom up through the creative work and political activism of ordinary people who know from their own experience the consequences of these policies.

Therefore, in most respects, I continue to align with what I grew up believing to be conservative values. Yet I find I have nothing in common with extremists of the far right who advance an agenda of class warfare, fiscal irresponsibility, government intrusions on personal liberty, and reckless international military adventurism as conservative causes.

THE TRAGEDY OF UNREALIZED POTENTIAL

Much of my professional life has been devoted to an inquiry into the tragedy of unrealized human potential. In setting after setting, I experienced a persistent tendency in formal organizations—whether business or government—to centralize control in the interest of order and predictability. It is so pervasive that most of us take it for granted as inevitable.

The costs in lost opportunity came into focus for me when Fran and I became involved in the early 1970s in an effort to improve the management of clinic-based family-planning programs in Central America. Procedures and organizational structures were dictated by foreign advisers employed by aid agencies or by professionals at national headquarters—none of whom had contact with the women the program was intended to serve. The result was abysmally poor program performance as measured by the number of women served, staff morale, and client satisfaction.

By contrast, the best performing clinic we identified had a courageous and innovative nurse who ignored the formal procedures and focused on organizing the services to be convenient for clients and responsive to their needs. The staff and the program flourished. Unfortunately, such cases were actively discouraged by program officials.

Fran and I subsequently observed the same devastating consequences of rigid central control play out in programs throughout South and Southeast Asia in health care, agricultural extension, irrigation, forestry, land reform, education, and community development. Programs intended to serve the poor consumed substantial human and material resources to no useful end. Even more alarming was the frequent disruption of the ability of villagers and their communities to control and manage their own resources to meet their needs.

For example, small family farmers throughout Asia have for many centuries joined together to build and manage their own irrigation systems, some of which are marvels of engineering ingenuity and operating efficiency. Yet when government programs inventoried irrigation capacity, they counted only irrigation systems built by the government. They then proceeded to replace the village-built and village-managed systems with more costly, less-efficient centrally managed systems. Commonly the new systems were financed by multimillion-dollar loans from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, which the children of the farmers would one day be taxed to repay.

In an effort to demonstrate the possibilities of an approach that strengthened local control, Fran and I became involved in a ten-year intervention to transform the Philippine National Irrigation Administration (NIA) from a top-down engineering bureaucracy to a service organization responsive to the technical and organizational needs of community irrigation associations. The process involved transforming the structures, procedures, purpose, staffing, and capabilities of the NIA in order to shift its focus from implementing agency procedures to working with farmers as partners in solving problems. The results unleashed the creative potential of both farmers and agency staff, improved irrigation performance, increased staff morale, strengthened local control and democracy, and resulted in a more efficient use of public resources. The intervention strategy became a model for subsequent Ford Foundation initiatives throughout the world.

During the fifteen years we lived in Asia, Fran and I saw the same lesson repeated time after time. When power resides with people and communities, life and innovation flourish. When power is centralized in distant government agencies or corporations, the life is sucked out of the community, and services are organized to serve the needs and convenience of the providers. Those who make the decisions prosper, and the local people bear the consequences. We began to see what we witnessed as part of a recurring pattern. We also saw that whether power and authority are centralized or decentralized is a question of choice.

The centralization of authority was rarely the consequence of malicious intent. More often people were simply trying to do their jobs, unaware of the consequences of their actions. If things were going badly, the problem was assumed to be local, likely a failure to follow prescribed procedures. Training and tighter controls to assure compliance were the standard solutions—thus affirming the expertise and authority of the central power holders and the incapacity of those at the bottom.

I later came to see how this pattern plays out at all system levels. I saw that the system of foreign aid itself shifts control to global bureaucracies headquartered half a world away from the needs of the people they presume to serve, that institutions of the global economy shift the power of decision from people and communities to corporations and financiers who have no knowledge of the social and environmental consequences of their decisions. Eventually I saw the pattern playing out everywhere on the planet at every level of organization.

In the late 1980s, with the help of astute colleagues from a number of Asian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), I began to see the bigger picture of the ways in which official aid agencies actively, if unintentionally, undermine local control and capacity. Even most NGO leaders, however, were not attuned to these larger issues.

In 1990, then living in Manila, I joined with a few close Filipino colleagues to found the People-Centered Development Forum to serve as a mutual support network for a scattered, often beleaguered band of activists engaged in raising public awareness of the destructive consequences of official aid policies. The further we took our analysis, the more evident it became that, far from being the global benefactor I had once assumed it to be, the United States was the major impetus behind what I had come to recognize as a deeply destructive and antidemocratic development model.

A conversation with a colleague from India, Smitu Kothari, brought it together. He politely suggested that I would best serve the cause of improving conditions for the poor of Asia by returning to the United States and devoting myself to educating my own people about the consequences for the world of the misguided policies of our government. On reflection and consultation with other Asian colleagues, I realized he was right. It was another major turning point in my life.

RESISTING CORPORATE-LED ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION

When Fran and I moved to New York City in 1992, I turned my attention to sharing the lessons of my experience with my fellow Americans. By this time, I was becoming increasingly aware of the extent to which otherwise perverse economic policies were serving corporate interests. Living in an apartment just off Union Square between Madison Avenue and Wall Street proved to be an ideal location for focusing my attention on the corporate connection. It was there I wrote When Corporations Rule the World.

In 1994, I accepted an invitation to participate in an international gathering of activists concerned with issues of global trade and investment. We subsequently formed ourselves into the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), an alliance dedicated to raising global awareness that “trade” agreements promoted by global corporations had less to do with freeing trade than with freeing corporations from public accountability. These agreements systematically stripped away the ability of communities, and even nations, to determine their own economic and social priorities and left those decisions to global financiers, corporate CEOs, and trade lawyers.

When Corporations Rule the World appeared in October 1995 at an auspicious moment. There was a growing sense in the United States that things were not right with the world. Stories were fresh in the public mind of corporate CEOs taking home multimillion-dollar bonuses for laying off thousands of workers and outsourcing their jobs to sweatshops in Mexico, Indonesia, and other low-wage countries. When Corporations Rule the World connected the dots and provided the analysis for which many people were looking. Suddenly I found myself a figure in an emergent global resistance movement.

The fifty thousand people who took to the streets of Seattle in November 1999 to protest the World Trade Organization and disrupt its secret negotiating processes gave the movement public prominence and sent out a message that ordinary citizens are not so powerless in the face of the corporate juggernaut as they might seem. From that point forward, most every time the corporate elites and their legal minions met to circumvent democracy through international trade agreements, they were confronted by massive street protests. The often violent response of police battalions awakened many minds to the historical reality that, the rhetoric of democracy notwithstanding, when the rights of property conflict with the rights of people, the police powers of government usually align with the rights of property.

My belief in the power of an awakened human consciousness comes from my participation in building a global resistance movement, one that—in the space of little more than ten years—grew from fleeting exchanges among a few dedicated but marginal activists to a movement able to challenge some of the world’s most powerful institutions. This experience is a major source of my hope for the human future and my belief that change, if it comes, will emerge through the leadership of millions of people creating a new cultural and institutional reality from the bottom up.

FOR EVERY NO THERE MUST BE A YES

I had realized even in the early 1980s that critiques of conventional growth-driven development models of the previous decade had influenced the rhetoric of development, but not the practice. Practitioners almost inevitably fell back on the frame of a discredited theory because they had no other theory to guide them.

In its simplest terms, the theory underlying corporate-led economic globalization posits that human progress is best advanced by deregulating markets and eliminating economic borders to let unrestrained market forces determine economic priorities, allocate resources, and drive economic growth. It sounds like decentralization, but the reality is quite different. A market without rules and borders increases the freedom of the biggest and most economically powerful players to become even bigger and more powerful at the expense of the freedom and right to self-determination of people and communities. Corporations and financial markets make the decisions and reap the profits. Communities are left to deal with mounting human and environmental costs.

These costs have awakened millions of people to the reality that the health of a community depends in substantial measure on its ability to set its own economic priorities and control its own economic resources. Strong communities and material sufficiency are the true foundation of economic prosperity and security and an essential source of meaning. Street protests are one response to this awakening. Calls for reform of corporate legal structures are another. Less visible, but even more important, is a spreading commitment to rebuild local economies and communities from the bottom up.

Such bottom-up efforts can seem like futile efforts to stem the tide —until one begins to recognize that they are springing up at every hand and in every sphere of life, including the cultural and political, demonstrating by results that a different world is possible. To make these demonstrations more visible is to speed the awakening of a new consciousness of the possible and thus encourage yet more local initiatives.

With this in mind, Sarah van Gelder and I joined with other colleagues in 1996 to found the Positive Futures Network (PFN), which publishes YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, to tell the stories of creative social entrepreneurs in an effort to speed the awakening of such a consciousness, help people engage, and facilitate the formation of new alliances. I have since served as board chair. Sarah formed the organization, took on the role of executive editor, and later invited Fran to become executive director and publisher. In 1998, we moved from New York City to Bainbridge Island, on Washington State’s Puget Sound, where the PFN offices are located.

YES! has become a valued resource for those engaged in the work of birthing the era of Earth Community and is a go-to place for readers of The Great Turning who want to keep up with new developments and find new allies and ways to engage. Find it on the Web at http://www.yesmagazine.org/.

Local Living Economies

Even before completing When Corporations Rule the World, I was aware that simply constraining corporate excess was not an adequate solution to the issues I had identified. Protests could slow the damage, but real change would depend on the articulation of a compelling alternative to the existing profit-driven, corporate-planned, and corporate-managed global economy. It seemed that healthy living systems might offer helpful insights. Yet conventional biology, which seeks to explain life in terms of material mechanisms and assumes that a competition for survival by the most fit is the key to evolutionary progress, offered little of evident use.

Then I met two extraordinary women—microbiologist Mae-Wan Ho and evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris. Both were taking the study of life to a profound level that reveals life to be a fundamentally cooperative, locally rooted, self-organizing enterprise in which each individual organism is continuously balancing individual and group interests. Here was the natural model for which I had been searching. Life has learned over billions of years the advantages of cooperative, locally rooted self-organization. Perhaps humans might be capable of doing the same.

Such insights are a key to recognizing that there is a democratic, market-based, community-serving alternative to the unappealing choice between a socialist economy centrally owned and administered by government and a capitalist economy centrally owned and administered by an elite class of wealthy financiers and corporate CEOS. The key distinction between a capitalist economy and the market alternative is that a proper market economy operates with rules, borders, and equitable local ownership under the public oversight of democratically accountable governments. I spelled it out in The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism, released in March 1999.

That same year, I joined a drafting committee of the International Forum on Globalization charged with producing the consensus report Alternatives to Economic Globalization, edited by John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander. First published in 2002 and reissued in an updated and expanded edition in 2004, this report sets forth a comprehensive institutional and policy framework for a democratic, market-based global economic system based on local ownership and control.

Change through Emergence

I still struggled, however, with how best to advance the transition from a corporate-led global economy to a planetary system of communityled local living economies. At the beginning of 2001 I attended an invitational consultation at the Esalen Institute at which Sahtouris and Janine Benyus, a biological scientist and a leading proponent of biomimicry, made presentations. Both noted that the processes of natural succession by which forest ecosystems evolve offer a potential model for economic transformation. The earliest, colonizing, stage of forest-system development is dominated by fast-growing, aggressively competitive, and transient species that are eventually displaced by the emergence of the more patient, cooperative, settled, energy-efficient species that define the mature phase.

This model pointed to a strategy of change through emergence and displacement. These living system concepts defined the underlying strategic premise of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), which was cofounded that same year by Laury Hammel and Judy Wicks, two visionary entrepreneurs with a passionate commitment to the idea that the proper defining purpose of business is to serve life and community.

Soon, local economy initiatives across the United States and Canada were signing on as BALLE chapters. (For more information, see http://www.livingeconomies.org/.) These chapters are devoted to growing and linking local independent businesses, nonprofit organizations, and local governments in mature, locally rooted, life-serving economies with the potential to displace the rootless, opportunistic, money-driven, and ultimately suicidal corporate global economy. The experience of watching the mobilizing power of this idea catch hold is yet another source of my hope for the human future.

Gifford and Libba Pinchot, noted management gurus and founding board members of the Positive Futures Network, launched the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI) simultaneously with the formation of BALLE. BGI offers a pioneering MBA program devoted to preparing business leaders with the sensibility and skills to manage truly life-serving businesses. Its larger mission is to transform business education. It draws the most creative faculty members from existing schools to start afresh and design a new MBA curriculum for developing managers for businesses that seek to advance positive social and environmental outcomes as a core business purpose. (For more information, see http://www.bgiedu.org/.) I joined the board of BGI in 2005, the year BusinessWeek reported on a steep decline in applications to conventional business schools and the year student applications to BGI tripled.

GETTING TO THE GREAT TURNING

Transforming the institutions of the economy is critically important to the human future. I was learning, however, that the need for transformation also extends to culture and politics. In this regard, I was also witness to a global dialogue from which an extraordinary consensus was emerging about the world that growing numbers of people were committing themselves to create.

Awakening Consensus

In the late 1980s and early ‘90s I regularly participated in international conferences of NGOs. Many of these gatherings, particularly those organized by NGOs from Southern nations, issued declarations calling for a radical realignment of development practices to give priority to securing the rights of people and communities to the lands, forests, and fisheries on which they depend for their survival. These declarations rarely asked for anything from governments or foreign donors other than that they respect and secure the rights of ordinary people to the means of creating their own livelihood.

These citizen conferences prepared the way for the International NGO Forum that met in parallel with the official UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The NGO forum brought together some eighteen thousand private citizens representing virtually all the world’s nationalities, races, religions, and social classes to engage in drafting citizen “treaties” spelling out shared values and common goals.

I had the privilege of participating in the NGO forum in Rio and in drafting its final declaration. It was one of the formative experiences of my life, as it burned into my consciousness the reality that for all their profound diversity, the people who came together for the forum shared similar values and a similar vision of the just, sustainable, inclusive, and democratic world they were committed to creating.

The consensus building was carried forward subsequently under the auspices of a private international commission that organized consultations involving thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations from all regions of the world. That process produced a document called the Earth Charter. Often referred to as a people’s Declaration of Interdependence, the Earth Charter elaborates four overarching principles of Earth Community: (1) respect and care for the community of life; (2) ecological integrity; (3) social and economic justice; and (4) democracy, nonviolence, and peace. It is also a declaration of universal responsibility to and for one another and the living Earth. I had the privilege of being a keynote speaker at the U.S. launch of the Earth Charter on September 29, 2001.

Through these experiences, I have grown in my understanding of the processes by which the world’s people are awakening to the reality that we are one people with one destiny on a small planet and that we can and must accept adult responsibility to and for one another and the web of life that sustains us all.

Naming the Time, Changing the Story

From 1999 to 2004, the Positive Futures Network convened a series of invitational retreats that engaged some two hundred social-change leaders from diverse social-movement constituencies in deep dialogue to identify common goals, build relationships of mutual trust, connect with the sacred nature of our work, and facilitate the formation of new alliances. We called the retreats “The State of the Possible.”

Buddhist scholar and teacher Joanna Macy was among the participants, and we found that her term “The Great Turning” captured well our sense of the time in which we live as a transition between eras. Herman Gyr, who was one of our facilitators, captured our sense of the dying of the old and the birthing of the new in an iconic image of two interconnected swirls, one turning inward as it exhausts itself, and the other reaching outward as it grows in energy and potential. Macy speaks of the Great Turning as a spiritual revolution grounded in an awakening consciousness of our spiritual connection to one another and the living body of Earth.

Filipino civil society leader and strategist Nicanor Perlas, who also participated in the retreats, helped us to understand a simple truth: the advantage of civil society in advancing the transition lies in the moral power of authentic cultural values. Perlas helped me recognize that the power of the institutions of economic and political domination depends on their ability to perpetuate a falsified and inauthentic cultural trance based on beliefs and values at odds with reality. Break the trance, replace the values of an inauthentic culture with the values of an authentic culture grounded in a love of life rather than a love of money, and people will realign their life energy and bring forth the life-serving institutions of a new era. The key is to change the stories by which we define ourselves. It is easier said than done, but I have found it to be a powerful strategic insight.

Confronting Our Imperial Legacy

In July 2002, Fran and I hosted our friend and colleague Vandana Shiva, the globally renowned Indian scientist, writer, farmer leader, and global peace and justice activist, as our guest on Bainbridge Island. It was the summer following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States.

Within days of the attack, the U.S. government declared perpetual war against terrorism, began rolling back civil liberties, and branded dissent as support for terrorists. Leaders of many other governments, glad for an excuse to limit dissent and buttress their own power, followed the U.S. example. Around the world, voices of resistance against corporate globalization were briefly stunned into silence.

By the time of Shiva’s visit, the U.S. administration had launched an invasion of Afghanistan and was talking of possible preemptive military action against Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Libya. Influential policy analysts were debating the merits of an American Empire, and documents were circulating in which key administration officials openly advocated imposing a Pax Americana on the world by the unilateral application of U.S. military power in the manner of the ancient Roman Empire.

During our conversations, Shiva noted that the mobilization of global civil society to thwart the misuse of trade agreements to circumvent democracy was based on the by then widely accepted critique of corporate globalization to which we had each contributed. Civil society, however, had no generally accepted framework for addressing the larger and even graver threat to liberty and democracy of forthright military domination. Shiva and I invited Perlas to join us in preparing a discussion paper on “Global Civil Society: The Path Ahead.”

This collaboration brought into focus the relevance of the work of another colleague, cultural historian Riane Eisler. In her classic work The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler placed the conflict between dominator and partnership models of organization in deep historical context and brought to bear the lens of gender analysis to illuminate the deeper roots of our contemporary political struggles for justice, peace, and environmental stewardship. By her reckoning, the repression of creative potential I had been witnessing for more than thirty years has been playing out for some five thousand years at every level of human organization, from relations among states to relations among family members. She traced the tragedy to the subordination of the feminine to the masculine and of the organizing principle of partnership to the organizing principle of domination. Once we made this connection to Eisler’s work we could see that we were dealing with issues that have far deeper historical roots than we had previously considered. This insight led to the book now in your hands.

My intention in writing The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community is to provide a historically grounded frame for understanding the possibilities of the unique time in which we live and thereby enable us to envision the path to a new era. Failing such understanding, we will continue to squander valuable time and resources on futile efforts to preserve or mend the cultures and institutions of a system that cannot be fixed and must be replaced.

Note that throughout The Great Turning I use the term Empire with a capital E as a label for the hierarchical ordering of human relationships based on the principle of domination. The mentality of Empire embraces material excess for the ruling classes, honors the dominator power of death and violence, denies the feminine principle, and suppresses realization of the potentials of human maturity.

Similarly, I use the term Earth Community as a label for the egalitarian democratic ordering of relationships based on the principle of partnership. The mentality of Earth Community embraces material sufficiency for everyone, honors the generative power of life and love, seeks a balance of feminine and masculine principles, and nurtures a realization of the mature potential of our human nature.

I urge you to read actively and critically, testing my observations and conclusions against your own knowledge and experience. I hope you will also participate in expanding the circle of dialogue by discussing the underlying issues with friends and colleagues. You might open such dialogue by recommending to those you want to engage that they read The Great Turning. Perhaps you might organize a discussion group. You will find supporting tools and discussion guides at http://www.greatturning.org/. To redirect humanity’s course, break the silence, end the isolation, and change the story.

Please bear in mind that it is impossible for me to engage individually with each reader of this book who might wish to dialogue with me directly. Much as I might wish the contrary, I am unable to respond to personal inquiries.

SYNOPSIS OF THE ARGUMENT

The human species is entering a period of dramatic and potentially devastating change as the result of forces of our own creation that are now largely beyond our control. It is within our means, however, to shape a positive outcome if we choose to embrace the resulting crisis as an opportunity to lift ourselves to a new level of species maturity and potential.

The outcome will depend in large measure on the prevailing stories that shape our understanding of the traumatic time at hand—its causes and its possibilities. Perhaps the most difficult and yet essential aspect of this work is to change our stories.

If we succeed, future generations may look back on this as a time of profound transition and speak of it as the time of the Great Turning. If we fail, our time may instead be known simply as the tragic time of the Great Unraveling.

Histories written by the victors of Empire’s endless wars, intrigues, and deceits have greatly exaggerated Empire’s accomplishments while neglecting the costs and lost opportunities. Current attempts by the world’s imperial elites to salvage the power and privilege of Empire are accelerating the collapse of critical social and environmental systems and threatening the survival of human civilization, if not the human species.

We now have the means to end the five-thousand-year era of Empire that has reproduced hierarchies of domination at all levels of human organization. A global cultural and spiritual awakening is building momentum toward the birthing of a new era of Earth Community based on a radically democratic partnership model of organizing human relationships. This awakening gives us cause for hope.

There are those who say that the violence and greed of Empire are defining characteristics of our human nature, that ruthless competition for power and material goods is inescapable. They say our impulses must be disciplined either by central authority or by market competition, both of which create hierarchies of power that consign the majority of humans to lives of desperation and suppress the creative potential of the species.

The truth is at once more complex and more hopeful. Our human nature actually embodies many possibilities, ranging from violence and greed to love and service. Contemporary human societies fail to manifest the higher-order potentials of love and service, not because of an inherent flaw in our human nature, but because the dominator relations of Empire actively suppress the development and expression of this potential. As a species, we now face both the imperative and the opportunity to say no to Empire, grow up, and accept the responsibilities of mature adulthood.

Our failing environmental and social systems create the imperative. The global revolution in transportation and communications is creating the opportunity. Leadership in actualizing the possibilities is coming from people everywhere who are making the choice to walk away from Empire’s false promises and engage the work of turning our cultures, economies, and politics from dominator to partnership relations.

THE CULTURAL TURNING.

The Great Turning begins with a cultural and spiritual awakening. Economic and political turning can only follow a turning in cultural values from money and material excess to life and spiritual fulfillment, from relationships of domination to relationships of partnership, from a belief in our limitations to a belief in our possibilities, and from fearing our differences to rejoicing in our diversity.

THE ECONOMIC TURNING.

The values shift of the cultural turning calls us to turn from measuring well-being by the size of our yachts and bank accounts to measuring well-being by the health of our families, communities, and natural environment. It leads us from economic policies that raise those at the top to policies that raise those at the bottom, from economic plutocracy to economic democracy, from hoarding to sharing, and from the rights of ownership to the responsibilities of stewardship.

THE POLITICAL TURNING.

The economic turning creates the necessary conditions for a turn from a democracy of money to a democracy of people, from passive to active citizenship, from competition for individual advantage to cooperation for mutual advantage, from retributive justice to restorative justice, and from social order by coercion to social order by mutual responsibility and accountability.

Some critics will surely complain that “Korten wants to change everything.” They miss the point. Everything is going to change. The question is whether we let the changes play out in increasingly destructive ways or embrace the deepening crisis as our time of opportunity. Now as never before we must unleash the creative potential of the species and direct it to democratizing our cultures and institutions and bringing ourselves into balance with one another and Earth. It is the greatest creative challenge the species has ever faced. Success would seem a futile dream, except that all around the planet momentum is already building.

THE BOOK

Although the issues addressed in The Great Turning are global and universal, I have chosen to focus my analysis on the United States. It is the nation among all others that is most challenged by the imperatives of the Great Turning. Few other nations are so accustomed to living beyond their own means, so imbued with a sense of special virtue and entitlement, or so burdened by a political leadership as out of touch with global reality and as incapable of accepting responsibility for the consequences of its actions. Because of its global presence, whether the United States responds to the imperatives with the logic of Empire or the logic of Earth Community is likely to have far-reaching consequences for all nations. Furthermore, the United States is the nation of my birth, the nation I know best and love most, and the nation for whose role in the world I feel most responsible.

The Great Turning is presented in five parts. Part I, “Choosing Our Future,” explores the choice at hand and the nature and implications of the distinctive imperatives and opportunities now before us.

Part II, “Sorrows of Empire,” reviews the conditions that led humans in an earlier time to turn away from a reverence for life and the regenerative power of the feminine to pursue the path of violence and domination. A synopsis of the imperial experience illustrates the self-replicating social dynamics of Empire, charts the transition from the institutions of monarchy to the institutions of the global economy as the favored instruments of imperial rule, and reveals the costs of Empire’s often overly idealized accomplishments. It also draws lessons from the early Athenian experiment in popular democracy and the insights of the great Athenian philosophers.

Part III, “America, the Unfinished Project,” turns to the United States and the history of the challenge now before us as a nation. In an effort to dispel the myths underlying a dangerous complacency about our institutions and global intentions, it takes a sober look at the reality that we have never been the democracy we imagine ourselves to be and we have always had imperial ambitions. It concludes with a look at the actions of a particularly corrupt and incompetent administration as a national wake-up call to confront the reality of our history and engage a popular mobilization to build the democratic society of our founding ideal.

Part IV, “The Great Turning,” outlines the scope of the work of the Great Turning by contrasting the stories and deep assumptions underlying the values and relationships of Empire and Earth Community that legitimate a hierarchy of domination and wealth concentration on the one hand, and networks of partnership, sharing, and mutual learning on the other. It draws on the deeper insights of both science and religion to make the case that learning and partnership are integral not only to life, but as well to the whole of Creation.

Part V, “Birthing Earth Community,” outlines a strategic framework for bringing forth a new era of Earth Community. It describes how self-organizing processes of citizen action, based on grassroots leadership, can advance an agenda of cultural, economic, and political democratization that roots power in people and liberates the creative potential of the species. It further makes the case that the foundation of a majoritarian political consensus based on family and community values and a concern for children is already in place.