Shaping Influences and Collective Identity

1. Shaping Influences and Collective Identity David Lorimer

3. EF Schumacher • Humanity is now too clever to survive without wisdom • Information, knowledge, wisdom (Eliot)

4. Interesting Times - Acceleration • Crisis as danger and opportunity • Tipping point, turning point • Phase transitions • Bifurcation: breakdown/breakthrough? • Death – rebirth • Convergence/Divergence • Integration/Disintegration (holon balance)

5. Levels of Shaping Influence • Family, Gender, Class • Temperament and Body Type • Biological Cycles (including age) • Culture and Society (history) • Archetypes and Collective Unconscious

6. System Levels of Identity and Ethics • Self/Ego (narrowest) • Gender, Family, Class • Profession • Community • Nationality • Planet – planetary ethic (widest)

7. A Psychohistory of Metaphors • Depend on visualisation and spatialisation (body, perspective) • Decentering and expansion of time/space > alienation • Cyclical to linear time, past > future orientation • Quality > quantity (mathematics)

8. Emancipatory Ethos • Rise of capitalism, science, technology, industrialism, national statism, market forces, democracy, bourgeois lifestyle and civil society • Words with the self prefix appear from the 16th century onwards. Self-love appears in 1563, self-knowledge in 1621, self-interest in 1649, self-esteem in 1657 and self-determination in 1683. We have to wait until 1775 for self-important and 1795 for self-respect. • Individual > therapeutic turn, self-promotion

9. Shaping Influences and Metaphors in the West • Greek philosophy (reason, law, TOE) • Monotheistic orthodoxy/heresy • Enlightenment Secularism, Materialism, Marxism, Unconscious • Scientific Method including Mechanism • Progress and Future Orientation • Individualism • Colonisation, Globalisation, Planetisation • War, Struggle, Liberation

10. Systemic Connections – Intersectionality • Climate change as ‘a manifestation of the convergence of historic global patterns of domination, extraction and oppression’ emerging from the history of capitalist colonisation where natural resources were acquired and exploited, resulting in the impoverishment of the many and enormous wealth among the few.

11. Embedded Masculine Ethos (LH) • ‘White, masculine, sexual domination of a dark, feminine (sometimes promiscuous, sometimes virginal) and forced to give way to the thrust of (white, male, phallic) penetration, including military invasion, occupation, and resource exploitation.’ (missiles as phallic symbols)

12. Nature, Body and the Feminine • Church already otherworldly and ascetic with an attitude of suspicion towards the body, dance and sexuality. Trinity male! • Mechanistic scientific revolution based on LH/masculine striving for mastery, control, manipulation and subjugation (Faust) – objective observer (fear of Nature in disease and disaster)

13. RDK Herman • Men [domination] Women [partnership] • Egotistical Empathetic • Dissection Organic holism • Logical analysis Intuitive, sensuous • Impose will Respect integrity • Mastery Care • Conflict Harmony • Reason and science Tie to wild and natural

14. Limitations of Ways of Thinking • Philosophical – individualism, materialism • Scientific – mechanism, value neutrality • Political – power, manipulation, control • Economic – greed, unlimited growth • Ecological – unsystemic, disconnected • Spiritual/Religious - fundamentalism

15. Systemic Crises • Technical progress outstrips moral progress (drones) • Ecological overshoot (growth) • Inequality (individualistic greed) • Militarism, violence and terrorism > refugees • Health - stress, overload, obesity • Meaning

16. Richard Falk on Geopolitics • ‘A state-centric world order has shown its inability to find sustainable solutions to nuclear weapons and climate change at the global end of the spectrum and address severe and prolonged situations of criminal injustice in Syria, Palestine etc.’ Nation states are incapable of responding to global challenges, and global solidarity is helpless against preventing genocidal violence and crimes against humanity. The old geopolitical realism is still based on hard military power where law, morality and people are fundamentally irrelevant. The current global political leadership still treats this old geopolitical realism as the basis for rational behaviour, but this is manifestly inadequate with its focus on narrow national interest rather than planetary responsibility.

17. The New Geopolitics • A new geopolitical realism [recognises that] war and militarism can no longer generate security and stability in an era when species vulnerability has become the signature reality. Structural reforms must be brought about so that global and human interests become primary. Then the development of political will to regulate the world economy on the basis of the values of justice, sustainability, self-determination, and ethical and ecological consciousness. (Huxley on power and needs)

18. New Metaphors • Wholeness • Complementarity • Harmony and Balance - Holons • Interrelating Systems • Transparency

19. Evolution of Consciousness • Cyclical views - Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin (sensate/ideational) • Ervin Laszlo - from Logos to Holos (Macroshift) • Spiral Dynamics (blue, orange, green and beyond) • David Hawkins – Power vs Force • Owen Barfield – original participation, separation of ego, final participation (also Tarnas) • Beinsa Douno – > Cosmic Consciousness

20. Four Degrees of Human Culture – Beinsa Douno • Violence - Force, Domination, Power • Law - Threat, Control (external) • Justice - universal, excludes privilege • Love - life for the Whole, Love as a Force in the Mind and a Principle in the Spirit • Gandhi – Love is basically not an emotional but an ontological power, the essence of life, the dynamic union of the separated.

21. Desirable Shifts of Emphasis • Individual to Universal (widen identity and ethics) • Separation to Wholeness • Power and Fear to Love • Competition to Partnership / Co-operation • Greed and Neglect to Caring • Outer to Inner Authority • Secrecy to Transparency

22. Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968) • Hate begets hate, violence engenders violence, hypocrisy is answered by hypocrisy, war generates war, and love creates love. Unselfish love has enormous creative and therapeutic potentialities, far greater than most people think. Love is a creative and life-giving force, necessary for physical, mental and moral health – it should not just be preached but consistently practised. Universal sublime love is the supreme value around which all moral values can be integrated into one ethical system valid for the whole of humanity.

23. The Creative Minority/Cultural Creatives • All growth originates with creative individuals or small minorities of individuals, and their task is twofold: first the achievement of their inspiration or discovery, and secondly the conversion of the society to which they belong to this new way of life. (cf withdrawal and return, being and doing)

25. Dennis Kucinich • The world is multidimensional. The new vision is an holistic one that understands the power of intention and the power of co-operation, of mutuality, of trust, of seeing the world as one. That vision then becomes our outer reality. Ours is the ability, through our consciousness, to create peace, to create love. The organ of transformation is the human heart because there is nothing - no weapon ever made - that is more powerful than a human heart.