''This is chapter 3 of [[SolSeed: The Book of Life#The "SolSeed Gospel" according to Ben|Ben's portion of SolSeed: The Book of Life]].''
=== Redefining our priorities ===
: "Clearly, the highest loyalty we should have is not to our own country or our own religion or our hometown or even to ourselves. It should be to, number two, the family of man, and number one, the planet at large. This is our home, and this is all we've got."
::: ~ Scott Carpenter, Mecury 7 astronaut, quoted at http://spacequotations.com/earth.html
Imagine a world where society measures its success not by abstract economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product, but by measures of people's happiness and fulfillment, ecosystem health, and so forth. A world where you ask not what you can do for your country, but what both you ''and'' your country can do in the service of people and ecosystems everywhere. A world where technology is neither idolized nor demonized, where every technology is studied carefully to weigh its costs and benefits to all living things.
If your first reaction is to point out the enormous gulf separating this vision from present-day reality, I don't blame you. Ideals like this one have to be considered as either very long-term goals, or general "north star" guides for work toward building a world that more closely approximates the ideal but never reaches it.
It's also useful to ask, if most aspects of a vision like this would be appealing to most people, why does our present-day world look so different? Can we explain the persistence of grave injustice, widespread destitution, and bloody wars, given the extreme unpopularity of these things? What has been blocking us from building a better world?
Here's my best shot at an answer: our society's priorities are completely backwards.
==== Our current priorities ====
First, as pointed out in chapter 1, our society is obsessed with '''material wealth'''. You can see it not only in people's individual desires for financial success, but in the measurement of nations' well-being through numbers like the Gross Domestic Product and the volume of trade with other countries. This obsession has embedded itself at the root of how our civilization functions, to the point where constant growth in financial wealth is required for the economic system to function well.
Second, we're particularly focused on one form of material wealth: '''advanced technology'''. In the 1950s, many wealthy and upper-middle-class Americans insisted on buying the latest and greatest car every year, replacing still-fully-functional vehicles merely because they were "out of date." Today, thankfully, we mostly focus that obsession on much smaller gadgets like computers and smartphones, but the reduction in waste is perhaps outstripped by the growing difficulty of coping with accelerating technological change. "Disruptive innovation" is the buzzword of our time, implying that you can never have too high a rate of technological progress.
Third, although we set up '''institutions''' like governments and corporations to provide benefits to people, we often end up subordinating ourselves and our needs to the needs of the institutions we live in or work for. You can see this attitude in many legal documents: apartment leases, employment contracts, end-user license agreements, and citizenship forms all involve voluntarily setting limits on your life for the sake of an institution's well-being. Nationalism and employee loyalty, when deeply felt, can drive a syndrome where an organization starts to behave as if the continuation of its own existence is all that matters. Some of the worst symptoms of this disease in the private sector include huge corporate layoffs and disobeying or lobbying against laws designed to help people and ecosystems, just because they would damage the organization's profitability or force a major change in its operations. The consequences of excessive nationalism can be even worse: unnecessary and destructive wars, massive-scale surveillence, indefinite imprisonment and torture of people who supposedly pose a threat to "national security."
And finally, most people these days live by a sacred story that places us outside and above the natural world, a species so exceptional that we have the right and indeed the responsibility to reshape the planet to better serve '''human interests'''. Combine this attitude with a staggering overconfidence that assumes we actually know enough about the world to make global-scale changes without triggering massively harmful side effects, and the confluence of environmental crises we currently face becomes easy to understand. Actually, we don't know nearly enough about the long-term future to understand which of our activities will prove to have global impact.
In short, our civilization's list of top priorities currently looks something like this:
# Economic growth
# Technological innovation
# Maintenance of institutions
# Human welfare
# Conservation of natural resources
So what would it look like if we turned that list upside down?
==== My suggested redefinition ====
In the new list of priorities, #5 would simply be '''wealth'''. No longer constrained to material products or services easily measurable using money, this concept would embrace social, aesthetic, ecological, and even spiritual wealth, all of which are clearly desirable. And although increasing one form of wealth at the expense of another might sometimes be deemed good or even necessary, such decisions would always be made with a full understanding of what is being sacrificed.
#4 would be a specific form of wealth, '''creativity''', that humans value more because it represents our most unique contribution to the world. A world without creativity and its fruits would perhaps enable a limited form of human happiness, but would be fundamentally unfulfilling (as well as supporting only a tiny fraction of our present population size, which is supported by millennia of creative developments in agricultural technology). However, in this new model, creative freedom would be constrained by the need to avoid reckless endangerment of civilization's systems, the people in them, or the biosphere around them.
To increase its sense of flexibility, #3 would be renamed from institutions to '''good governance''', a functional definition of which would include things like coordinating large projects, balancing the interests of multiple large groups, and applying some system of justice to deal with harmful behavior. The patterns, practices, and organizational structures that enable these activities would be understood as merely means to an end, and if a clearly superior alternative to one such system were proposed, there should be no major barrier to replacing it.
#2 would still be called '''human welfare''', and thanks to its placement above most of the other priorities, humans would no longer be reducible to "human resources," "consumers," or even "citizens of a country." There would no longer be grounds for blocking measures to improve human welfare on the grounds that it would "harm the economy" or "slow down progress." Such arguments would have to be transmuted into balances between the intended positive effects of a program and the possible negative impacts ''on human welfare'' resulting from the program's social, political, and economic side effects.
And priority #1, as Scott Carpenter says, would be the health and thriving of the whole planet, or more specifically its biosphere. The effects of this shift are hard to imagine; perhaps the easiest example to start with is human population. According to priority #2, a larger number of happy, fulfilled people is always a good thing--but even if we ignore overpopulation's long-term, indirect threats to human welfare, priority #1 says we must limit our population and resource use to Earth's ecological carrying capacity for our species. Otherwise, humanity will have a net negative impact on the welfare of the biosphere, which will no longer be morally defensible as soon as we can find a way to live that has a net positive impact instead.
=== Changing the story ===
==== The illusion of separation ====
* Pachamama Alliance
* David Korten
* ''Planetary''
==== The delusion of union ====
Lack of evidence for mystical unity of all consciousness
==== Middle grounds ====
* Falco: reject both ego and interdependence
* Holons (cite Heather Johnson?)
* David Korten again
=== What it means in practice ===
* Achieving big things by working together still feeds your individual ego
* Broad shared prosperity is good for both individuals and the social/economic whole
* We help the disabled because we value their individual lives, despite their limited contribution to society