Inspiration also came from friends and colleagues with whom I had particularly meaningful exchanges through a series of State of the Possible retreats organized by the Positive Futures Network for progressivexi leaders. These included Sharif Abdullah, Rebecca Adamson, Brahm Ahmadi, Nane Alejandrez, Negin Almassi, Carl Anthony, Kenny Ausubel, Rachel Bagby, John Beck, Juliette Beck, Edget Betru, Grace Boggs, Yelena Boxer, Chuck Collins, Susan Davis, John de Graaf, Drew Dellinger, Brian Derdowski, Yvonne Dion-Buffalo, Cindy Domingo, Ronnie Dugger, Mel Duncan, Sheri Dunn Berry, Mark Dworkin, Malaika Edwards, Jim Embry, Chris Gallagher, Bookda Gheisar, Tom Goldtooth, Sean Gonsalves, Sally Goodwin, Elaine Gross, Herman Gyr, Han-shan, Rosemarie Harding, Vincent Harding, Debra Harry, Paul Hawken, Pramila Jayapal, Don Hazen, Francisco Hernandez, Francisco Herrera, Cathy Hoffman, Melvin Hoover, Ellison Horne, Thomas Hurley, Timothy Iistowanoh-pataakiiwa, Verlene Jones, Don Kegley, Peter Kent, Dennis Kucinich, Wallace Ryan Kuroiwa, Meizhu Lui, Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Marc Luyckx, Melanie MacKinnon, Jeff Milchen, John Mohawk, Bill Moyer, Charlie Murphy, Eric Nelson, Nick Page, Susan Partnow, Nicole Pearson, Nick Penniman, Kelly Quirke, Jamal Rahman, Paul Ray, Joe Reilly, Anita Rios, Michele Robbins, Ocean Robbins, Jan Roberts, Vicki Robin, Shivon Robinsong, Jonathan Rowe, Peggy Saika, Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, Priscilla Settee, Ron Sher, Nina Simons, Alice Slater, Mark Sommer, Linda Stout, Dan Swinney, Clayton Thomas-Müller, Barbara Valocore, Roberto Vargas, John Vaughn, Sara Williams, Ray Williams, Akaya Windwood, and Melissa Young.
This book was researched and written as a project of the People-Centered Development Forum (PCDForum), an informal alliance of organizations and activists dedicated to the creation of just, inclusive, and sustainable societies through voluntary citizen action. The PCDForum is a purely voluntary organization that pays no salaries. I have received no personal compensation from any source for the preparation of this book, and all royalties from book sales will go to the PCDForum to support its continuing work. The views expressed in this book are mine and do not necessarily represent those of any of the persons mentioned above or of the PCDForum or any other organization with which I am affiliated. I extend my deepest appreciation for all the many friends and colleagues who helped to make it possible and apologize to those I may have neglected to acknowledge.
David C. Korten
www.davidkorten.org
www.greatturning.org
www.developmentforum.net
ix We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.
THE EARTH CHARTER (2000)
The Great Turning
Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning.1
Joanna Macy
By what name will our children and our children’s children call our time? Will they speak in anger and frustration of the time of the Great Unraveling, when profligate consumption led to an accelerating wave of collapsing environmental systems, violent competition for what remained of the planet’s resources, a dramatic dieback of the human population, and a fragmentation of those who remained into warring fiefdoms ruled by ruthless local lords?
Or will they look back in joyful celebration on the noble time of the Great Turning, when their forebears turned crisis into opportunity, embraced the higher-order potential of their human nature, learned to live in creative partnership with one another and the living Earth, and brought forth a new era of human possibility?
It is the premise of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community that we humans stand at a defining moment that presents us with an irrevocable choice. Our collective response will determine how our time is remembered for so long as the human species survives. In the days now at hand, we must each be clear that every individual and collective choice we make is a vote for the future we of this time will bequeath to the generations that follow. The Great Turning is not a prophecy; it is a possibility.
5
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 6terrorism, 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 7barriers 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, 8Internet 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.2
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.
9 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.3 Unfortunately, such cases were actively discouraged by program officials.
Fran and I subsequently observed the same devastating consequences10 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, smal
l 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.4
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 we11 witnessed as part of a recurring pattern. We also saw that whether power and authority are centralized or decentralized is a question of choice.
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