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The Big Picture: 5 Ways to Know if You’re Making a Difference
David Korten's newly revised and greatly expanded 2nd edition of Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, outlines an agenda to create a new kind of economy: locally-based, community oriented, and devoted to creating a better life for all.
In this special pre-publication excerpt Korten explains how to tell if your actions are helping to build the new economy that "must be lived into being from the bottom up."
For the many millions of us working to create a better world, it is easy to feel discouraged by the seeming insignificance of even major successes relative to the scale of the problems we face as a nation and a species. Consumed by the details and challenges of our daily engagements, we may easily lose sight of the big picture of the powerful social dynamic to which our work is contributing.
Step back from time to time; take a breath, look out beyond the immediate horizon to bring that big picture back into perspective. Reflect in awe and wonder at the power of the larger social dynamic to which your work contributes.
In my career in international development, I saw, time and again, that the most successful projects were not the largest or the most carefully, centrally planned; they were the ones that arose from the bottom up. Likewise, successful social movements are emergent, evolving, radically self-organizing, and involve the dedicated efforts of many people, each finding the role that best uses his or her gifts and passions. Their scope and their success may not, at first, be readily apparent. Social movements grow and evolve around framing ideas and mutually supportive relationships instead of through top-down direction. New ideas gain traction, or not, depending on what works for those involved in the movement. Some alliances are fleeting; others endure.
The organism, not the machine, provides the appropriate metaphor. The relevant knowledge resides not in the heads of outside experts but in the people who populate the system. The challenge is to help them recognize, organize, and use that knowledge in ever more effective ways.
This is the model I think of when I think about what it will take to build the New Economy—one based on fulfilling the basic needs of people and planet—that we need. It's also the way that that economy is already being built: step by step, in creative and surprising ways, by people looking for alternatives to a system that isn't working for them.
To bring down the institutions of Empire, we must begin to build the rules, relationships, and institutions of a New Economy. These must be lived into being from the bottom up.
So how do you know whether your work is contributing to a big-picture outcome? If you can answer yes to any one of the following five questions, then be assured that it is.
- Does it help discredit a false cultural story fabricated to legitimize relationships of domination and exploitation and to replace it with a true story describing unrealized possibilities for growing the real wealth of healthy communities?
- Is it connecting others of the movement's millions of leaders who didn't previously know one another, helping them find common cause and build relationships of mutual trust that allow them to speak honestly from their hearts and to know that they can call on one another for support when needed?
- Is it creating and expanding liberated social spaces in which people experience the freedom and support to experiment with living the creative, cooperative, self-organizing relationships of the new story they seek to bring into the larger culture?
- Is it providing a public demonstration of the possibilities of a real-wealth economy?
- Is it mobilizing support for a rule change that will shift the balance of power from the people and institutions of the Wall Street phantom-wealth economy to the people and institutions of living-wealth Main Street economies?
These are useful guidelines for setting both individual and group priorities. Bear in mind that in a systems-change undertaking of this magnitude, there is no magic bullet and no one is going to make it happen on their own, so don't be discouraged if the world looks much the same today despite your special and heroic effort yesterday. It took five thousand years to create the mess we are in today. It will take more than a few days to set it right.
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44 Comments so far
Show AllHere are some connections to people working on the paradigm shift that will get us beyond the carbon-fuel economy. There are some really cool alternatives already available... Hundred-year-old technologies... that have been successfully suppressed by you know who. At the moment we simply need passionate communicators to share with others. The invention we've been waiting for is the internet!!
Listen to the short videos at the Orion Project (cloak & dagger stuff)... the U-tube ones are of working models. Internet scuttlebutt suggests that the Australian guys might have been paid-off to stop working.. their website has been quiet for a couple of years. The bottom two sites are about a company in Dublin, Ireland. they appear to have big plans for 2010.
http://www.theorionproject.org/en/index.html
http://changingpower.net/articles/free-energy-documentary-producer-pitches-tv-series/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgQXYBRYwbg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh_-DUKQ4Uw&feature
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Site:LRP:A_Proposed_Proof_of_an_Overunity_Asymmetric_System_to_be_Tested
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Go-CrM_llE&feature=channel
Thanks for the links. They are very interesting.
Bring America Back !!!!
****No 6===if you are making Neocons scream at the top of
their voices, calling you a liberal nut case, attacking your job and family, putting you on no-fly lists, and wiretapping your phones===chances are you are making a difference !
****Friend David Korten needs to learn more about
PowerPoint presentation--his is a garbled mess and much
meaning and portent is lost !
Making a 'difference' for what ???
This guy sounds like a typical academic, whose truth is hidden by his own vocabulary. I was one just like him. It is true that the real power rests with the people. But most people would not make the effort required to understand what Korten is saying. Most people do not have the academic mind set required to do so. Most people watch TV and get their 'information' from such corporate dominated sources as Fox Network. What Korten is pushing here requires the participation of a large number of people, who are still not frightened enough to take matters into their own hands. Sorry, Korten, but you have to relearn the common language to make an impact outside of the tiny minority of people who can understand your rather convoluted [and self serving] prose. Say it in English, not academese.
The credits and promotional notes at the bottom nearly outnumbers the article.
Yeah, way too much "academese". Another useless tool gifted to the world by academia.
Too bad, I enjoy Mr. Korten's point of view usually, but I can't understand what he is even saying. I have a graduate degree and have waded through some verbose academic language, but these five questions are unintelligible.
Yeah - could be clearer and simpler. But try it again, and click the hypertexts. With yr degree you should get it.
Clear and simple is good. But sometimes the world isn't.
"If humans were simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it!"
I don't know about that...I work to engage my local community in learning how to grow food. I feel as though making sure we all know how to grow food locally will make a big difference, but I can't see how any of Korten's questions relate. I'm not discrediting a false cultural story fabricated to legitimize relationships of domination and exploitation, not connecting the movements millions of leaders, not sure if I am expanding any liberating social spaces, or providing a public demonstration of a real wealth economy, or mobilizing support for any rule change that will shift the balance of power. Just hoping to get my neighbors together to garden.
We humans love to use our brains and sometimes overthinking things can be an addiction. Then we get lost in the obfuscations and complexity and fail to see the obvious.
1. We humans are the walking wounded and always have been. Our inventions and actions spell that out most clearly. Our collective history is one steeped in blood and hardship.
2. We are born small, extremely vulnerable, powerless and dependent. And, to our detriment, spend a lifetime attempting to compensate for that.
3. We get hurt and traumatized easily, yet heal very slowly, if at all.
4. We fear death and deny its reality most of the time. We create religions and numerous other delusions in order not to see it as punishment for something we must have done.
5. We use words like love and compassion, yet dedicate our lives to pursue power in the name of survival.
6. As long as our lives are kept on the survival level, greed, war, plunder and bloodshed will be with us.
7. We fear ourselves, for here and there, our innate humanity makes its way through all the denial and conditioning. It shows us, how damaged we really are, how far we have removed ourselves from our core nature.
8. At our core we all tick the same. We prefer pleasure to pain, a full belly to hunger and thirst, companionship to isolation, freedom to imprisonment and warmth to freezing.
Coming together is important, yet it is not a substitute for the work that each one of us has to do on our own. Psychology is truly the final frontier and as unchartered as the bottoms of our oceans. Look deeply within, and you'll never be without.
Korten is saying NOTHING... he IS selling his latest book.
As long as you have the pseudo-New Age: "we are the people we have been waiting for" meme, you will sell countless books and pocket lots of $$$, while actually nothing of significance happens - because all the "people" this message resonates with are waiting for their "activist" brethern to do something... which they won't, of course.
Korten really has no idea how to extricate himself nor us from this Existential nigtmare... meanwhile he will sell books and live in relative comfort.
Korten's "meme" makes a lot of sense to me, and I've participated in and helped organize many demonstrations.
The Left (both activists and armchair folks) seems to be more comfortable positioning itself against corporations & politicians (reading about / dreaming about / participating in protests, boycotts, etc) rather than focusing on what it is they specifically do want and then setting about to make it happen, albeit on a small level.
If you think about it, staying mired in a fight against elected officials, corporations and the Have Mores is basically a losing proposition.
We'd get further if we would try to come up with small, positive viral inventions - which, because they start small, would bypass the central scrutinzers. What about a town that finds a way to meet the non-emergency medical needs of its residents for free or super cheap? What about creating a small bank that doesn't use money at all? What about a town in the US connecting with a town in Mexico, and they each agree to fairly trade services, goods and information? It won't solve the gulf oil issue, but it will get us in a more creative mindset. Maybe then we might come up with a way to creatively dismantle BP's charter, while we are at it.
The point is - we really shouldn't wait around for Those In Power to solves these problems for us. They are too busy doing what ever they do, and have a hard time thinking outside of the box. It's up to all of us to dream some new dreams, be joyful, and then take local action.
Fighting the system is not "wait[ing] around for Those In Power to solve these problems for us" It's inextricable entwined with building a new society.
The corporatocracy will not be interested in "local actions" as long as they are not a threat. When they become successful, they will be perceived as a threat and very likely strong, repressive measures will be taken against them. This is not vague conjecture. It happens all the time in countries throughout the world that refuse to toe the corporate line.
It's time to realize that none of this work is going to be easy or comfortable and a dissenting political consciousness is necessary as we build.
Bravo esabi, that's it,
Our job is to create local solutions and, in the process, build democratic communities who enjoy working (and playing) together. Can we, for example, build community gardens and farms which allow us to bypass corporate agribusiness and supermarkets? Can we create local labor unions which are intimately connected to local community organizations? Will these unions be just as interested in forming local co-ops as in winning strikes? Will the co-ops be served by co-operative credit unions?
The "fight against elected officials, corporations and the Have Mores," however, will not go away while we are organizing. As we become successful in building autonomous co-operative institutions, the Powers will feel threatened, even if that is not our intention; and they will move against us, without morals or scruples. Witness the recent Acorn affair.
If we have done our job, and recruited and educated enough people into a co-operative lifestyle, we will have some chance to win the struggle that is inevitable as the System falls deeper into crisis. If we have not done our job, bands of militants chanting "The people united will never be defeated," will not make the slightest difference. The "people united" has to be organized, and we have a long way to go. Shall we start now?
Buy an Aptera electric car. That's a small, positive step that will make a difference.
gold mansacks - I had to laugh when I read your last statement. I've had three non-fiction books for sale in a very popular market for ten years, and may have gotten back my original investment, minus my time spent on them. I seriously doubt Korten is doing much better.
But books are one of the best ways to get out ideas to the largest numbers of people. Sure, a lot of books are filled with nothing more than rambling thoughts, but there are also books with great ideas, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. I've heard that a lot of science fact has come from science fiction.
On a different but similar vein, someone commented to me, with a laugh the other day, that Kevin Costner had presented a plan for a way to clean up the gulf oil disaster, ha ha ha! What would an actor know about cleaning up oil?
Big Name authors (and Korten is one) do quite well. Why would you think that your experience as an author would reflect his? It's a pretty simple formula;if you're selling lots of books (like Korten) you're making lots of money.
David Korton is always worth reading and considering, but where's the fire? (BTW, the links are the most useful parts of this article.)
We don't have decades to get this work done. Also, any progress we do make is likely to be absorbed and transformed in the system just like everything good always is.
The oil volcano should be a metaphor of the world. We should be getting all our resources together now and stopping the critical and acute forces that have been unleashed.
What is needed is constant awareness of what we are doing and specifically what progress is being made. This will entail using some of the methods that are useful in getting projects done successfully. (I'll never forget years ago getting elected to the county council of the Green Party and bringing an ambitious list of things to do. "But we'll have to prioritize, of course," I said. "Prioritize?", they said. "We're not into that kind of thing. You'll find that we do things very casually here." Oh, boy.)
IMO, we need to organize local organizations (rather “large local” to avoid the typical ingrown problems) into a network, work closely together with an ambitious plan to build a post-petroleum, post-capitalist/corporatist society, keep measurable track of our progress, work from a large and flexible list of tactics, and do it now.
Amorphousness is the enemy.
I've facilitated strategic planning with organizations, including corporations and fire departments. They are specific, not amorphous. They do prioritize. This kind of competence and rigor is completely normal in many circles, many organizations, many industries. I think there is great merit to your comments Arry June.
I'm perfectly serious about organizing these "nodes" for accomplishment. One problem that comes to mind, though, is that people will come aboard with varying and clashing assumptions. We need to lay out some guidelines (possibly in a statement) that will be reasonably inclusive but not so much so as to stifle our work just to *be* inclusive.
We need to get started. It can't be done entirely on the internet. We need to be a living, breathing community.
I live about an hour and a half from Sacramento, up in the hills, but would participate as I can in whatever organization the area would be included in. Of course, I would also help organize it. (My personal situation is not good at the moment as I my source of supplemental income just dried up and I have to deal with that situation right now. I should be able to take care of it in the next couple of weeks.) It needs to be done throughout the nation and world, but anything will help at this point. Ambitious, eh? Well, I'm not willing to be a casualty of corporate blindness, greed, and hypocrisy; and we should face the fact that we are truly "up against the wall" this time and act accordingly.
(By the way, Earthian, I change my name regularly. It was Arry May last month, Arry June this month, and will be Arry July next month. :-) )
Thanks for your kind comment.
Excuse my rather ill-designed experiment. (I was hoping for a few, "Yes, we are going to be doing some organizing, too.")
A key ingredient is organizing. It's mentioned once in awhile, but not very often. There is a lot of talk of "fragmentation" and "people just aren't conscious enough". Well, movements don't happen magically. There is a lot of slogging to do.
I'll be out there this summer, but it won't work unless a lot of other people are, too.
Great article. I believe that we have been living Plato's Republic since the time of Alexander the Great. I see this Plutocracy coming to an end in my lifetime. We can all play a part in this unfolding drama by planting seeds with the hope that those seeds will grow in the fertile minds of true progressives and at some point go viral.
Seed: The Plutocracy has not real power over the people. The illusion of power comes from words and ideas strategically imprinted on our very souls from a young age. We have been programmed to believe that we are "sheeple", that we have no power, that there is nothing we can do, to be afraid, that this is just the way it is and it is going to get worse.
Seed: The Plutocracy has no real wealth. The Plutocracy has sold the world into slavery in the form of debt and left the world with no ability to repay the loan. We do not have to pay back the loan at all! Their wealth is no more than numbers on own their page. It was stolen over time from the people of the world in the first place.
Seed: The wealth/capital of the Plutocracy is spread all over the world and is not defensible. What is to be said for empire that can not defeat an army on horseback at a cost of trillions? Thomas Payne wrote "Agrarian Justice". Today, Chavez is implementing Agrarian Justice in Venezuela. The true impotence of the Plutocracy is becoming evident to more and more of the peoples of the world. Fact is the Plutocracy is more afraid of us.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm
http://www.thomaspaine.org/Archives/agjst.html
This is such simplistic bullshit. Another "visionary" has listed another group of steps we can all take to make things "right". I especially like the part about "David Korten's newly revised and greatly expanded 2nd edition." It's sort of a 'new and improved' Tide laundry product.
Korten acts as a first-grade teacher (and he'd be a good one), but even the school's principle would have difficulty understanding his verbiage. I agree with blueskykate1: "I have a graduate degree and have waded through some verbose academic language, but these five questions are unintelligible."
All steps and concerns were convincingly listed and described decades before this one in many books and articles. Do I have to "list" some of them? (Here's three: The Environmental Handbook Prepared for the First National Environmental Teach - in April 22, 1970, In The Absence of The Sacred (1991) by Jerry Mander, and Riane Eisler (a favorite of Korten) wrote The Chalice & The Blade in 1987).
"It will take more than a few days to set it right." Sure, as along as we are all so busy trying to keep up with our new reading assignments.
Can't we at least be direct, instead of constantly beating around the bush? Here's my 'list' of 4 questions for everyone, and it doesn't take another freakin' book (authored by me of course) in order to answer them:
1. Organized religion sucks, esp. judeo-christian and moslem beliefs. What can each of us do to rid these harmful, anti-human, dumbed-down "faiths" from our neighbors minds - and from this planet - once and for all?
2. If Israel and the U.S. (The Empire) attack Iran, Syria or Lebanon - who will YOU be rooting for? Pretend it's World Cup, but provide a serious answer for yourself.
3. How much are YOU willing to give up to make this a better world? For example, would you give up your car, your outrageously spacious home, your air-conditioning?
4. How much longer will YOU work within the thoroughly corrupt system (which YOU are undoubtedly a part of) and expect to see real change?
"It took five thousand years to create the mess we are in today. It will take more than a few days to set it right."
It could take only one day to set it right: an all-out nuclear war.
Not even, a few well placed nukes @ 300 miles up over any country and that country's infrastructure would be toast. The EMP (electro=magnetic pulse) would cook any micro=electronic devices and the electric grid ,phone systems etc. Imagine, if one 800 kiloton nuke was set off over Chicago 400 miles up every electronic device and power system in the U.S.would be fried almost instantly. What would follow would be utter chaos as the infrastructure built on these devices collapsed back into the 19th century. Plus, as a first act any modern airliners or private planes would fall from the sky. Think this is impossible? Google EMP weapons. Were all living in an increasingly fragile society and ironically at this juncture one where our lives could literally change in a flash.
Al Mag sez: "It could take only one day to set it right: an all-out nuclear war."
Do you hate all life or just humans?
For me, it's just the humans.
To answer the third of five stupid questions:
Nothing.
There are other ways to seperate yourself from things you don't like. Seperation is only part of what needs to be done. You really have to have a better plan and that is not easy. I've learned all sorts of things, many were given to me by my ancestors, and while many things change the truth about things doesn't change only our perception and relation.
yes
I do my tiny little part
come visit us at
http://brechtforum.org/
The focus on "Wealth" is troubling.
It could be argued that seeking wealth means that you are part of the problem.
One of the biggest problems is the human tendency to try to establish a personal dynasty. Until your offspring are no more important than any other children and every child of every species is your child, humans will be doomed.
Good tests.
I think it is important to realize that power in the US is largely political. The money in politics is not the real power, but is used to harness that power. So to make David Korten's ideas turn into an actual plan, rather than an amorphous set of ideas and ideals, we need a tactical or strategic interpretation (for we DON'T have decades to do this).
Take this quote from the fifth question:
"support for a rule change that will shift the balance of power from the people and institutions of the Wall Street phantom-wealth economy to the people"
Okay, I agree. But how do we, the American progressive citizenry, make it specific?
I like the analysis by Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale law professor. He has a convincing analysis that (just imagine!!!) says that the American people are one people; that Article V of the Constitution is only one way of amending our Constitution to fix our government; that We the People BY MAJORITY VOTE have always had the right and the duty to amend our Constitution to fix the obvious flaws such as the vulnerability of the government's takeover by an illegitimate minority of rich people; AND that this fact was so obvious and evident to the founders of the nation and the framers of the Constitution that they never made it explicit—except in the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble, Amendments I, IX, and X and the way Article VII was implemented by the states.
Here is a link to his very insightful paper called Philadelphia Revisited (1988):
http://islandia.law.yale.edu/amar/lawreview/1988Philadelphia.pdf
An updated version of his analysis is contained in the first two chapters of his book For the People.
Just think . . . if most Americans believed ourselves to be the source of the Constitution's power, and its primary beneficiary, and its originating creator, and that We the People therefore can amend it by majority vote, (like Montana can and many other states), then to fulfill Korten's ideal of shifting the balance of power, all we need to do is vote delegates into a democratic assembly, deliberate and decide upon solutions, and then have a nationwide vote for a series of democracy amendments or a new constitution. We can fix the system just like that, like is done in nation after nation all over our planet.
THAT would be cool. THAT would be a specific plan—that is, such a plan is a way to operationalize the radical idea that the American people are sovereign over ourselves, our nation, and our government.
"""For the many millions of us working to create a better world, it is easy to feel discouraged by the seeming insignificance of even major successes relative to the scale of the problems we face as a nation and a species. Consumed by the details and challenges of our daily engagements, we may easily lose sight of the big picture of the powerful social dynamic to which our work is contributing.
Step back from time to time; take a breath, look out beyond the immediate horizon to bring that big picture back into perspective. Reflect in awe and wonder at the power of the larger social dynamic to which your work contributes."""
*******************************
I know this isn't supposed to be a 'fix all' plan or points. But how will any of this create a better world when we humans just keep cramming more and more people on this planet like it is free and that the environment will do its part to help us to create a better world. Which it must be because there seems to be a 'point' that there is NO limit to the number of people this planet along with the 'technological companies' can't keep alive so to add more and more people to the rolls.
What will be interesting is the affect, the total affect that just this paltry oil disaster in the gulf of mexico will do that will limit and even bigger chunk of the environment a useless toxic waste dump. And that doesn't take into consideration of where is all the coal ash waste going to go? Poor old alabama in 'gobbling up' what tennessee and other places don't want and how much of that state will become hazardous to the people's health? Where is all the nuclear waste that will slowly burn for millions and billions of years going to be put?
I remember hearing my dad talk about leaving this world just a little bit better than when we came into it but when one's life if spent on taking from and destroying the parts of the environment to 'sustain' some kind of growth, will science and the vaunted corporate world step up and do their part? Only if a profit is to be made.
When one does step back to 'look at the big picture', I rather think that picture just can't be all that big any more because as the travelers of the world know, the world is getting smaller all the time.
Take a step back and look at the big picture. The answer to all your questions are there. The answers are under lies, corporate secrets, and corrupt politicans. You have to learn to validate yourself for the truth you understand and this piece it should have added courage to know the truth. Then you have to have a better plan. Nature is already adapting to our misguided practices. The brown sky should be telling you something. Juvenile diabetes should tell you something. A coke dispenser in every school, workplace, apartment complex should tell you something else. Nosocomial infections (hospital acquired infections moving to community acquired infections should tell you just how carefull you are going to have to be because 50 million people here don't have access to healthcare. The truth is your information, a lie is you blindly repeating someone else's information without seeing it to be the truth. So just telling the truth where you find it is going to be a hugh step.
#6 - you're on 0's hit list.
What it'll take to bring about real change is our rising up en masse snd seeing to it. And we have to start right away, being that time's running out, what with perpetual war + global warming = doomsday. Fortunately the formula for bringing about change is the easy to grasp Vision + Plan + Spirit = Change, where the Vision is a just and peaceful world, the Plan an ever-evolving work in progress and the Spirit is the all for one and one for all in pursuit of a better world. Ready everyone?
There are some FALSE "comments" here...
untrue
Thanks for the chuckle.
Well, it is late in the game, friend. If you missed the news, let me bring you up to speed.
Oil and especially methane is gushing out of a whole in the ocean floor south of New Orleans. There seems to be no stopping this gusher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
Methane is a powerful green house gas. Indeed, this gusher may prove to be the tipping point of the green house effect. If so, we are going to fry in less than two years.
Welcome to 2012.
Reality is despair.
If you'd like to learn more about everyday indigenous life in the Peruvian Amazon, please visit www.ninosdelaamazonia.org You will see amazing photos, all of them taken by the children who live there. It is a unique, intimate perspective and a true document of their realities. Thank you.
- only time will tell, as David says - but we do our best to add to the positive stuff on Green Island http://www.rudemacedon.ca/greenisland.html .
Being a couch surfer (see couchsurfing.org) I feel that I am making a difference, albeit small.
Hey Dude! Ya ain't holdin' yer cell phone right...dats y ya can't see and hear anyfing.
hahaha rofl Dogface ya nailed it!
whocares;)