The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  Relationships of Earth Community

  Earth Community, which gives expression to the democratic impulse, features a drive for what Eisler calls partnership power, the power to create, share, and nurture. It organizes through consensual decision making, mutual accountability, and individual responsibility. Its focus is on 37cultivating mutual trust, caring, competence, and an equitable distribution of power and resources. This is more fulfilling, more efficient, and ultimately more human. In addition, it allows for a massive reallocation of the available human surplus away from maintaining hierarchies of domination to the work of improving the lives of all.

  Because females have been socialized to specialize in the cultivation of partnership relations, recognizing the possibilities of Earth Community often comes more easily to them than to males. Indeed, much of the pathology of Empire has arisen from suppression of the feminine. Part of the transformation of social relationships at Hacienda Santa Teresa involved a shift from all-male bunkhouses to family living units, which brought wives and children into the social mix of the ranch. The current global turn to more balanced gender relationships is a significant source of hope for the future of the species.

  The golden rule of Earth Community is “Do unto your neighbor as you would have your neighbor do unto you as you work together to create a better life for all.” Service, compassion, and cooperation are valued as essential social goods and considered a measure of healthy maturity. If each individual has the opportunity to experience the intrinsic rewards that come from responsible service and shares in the benefits of the growing generative power of the whole, then trust, compassion, and cooperation become self-reinforcing. Conflict can be embraced as an opportunity for creative learning. It becomes natural to expand the circle of cooperation in anticipation of the increasing opportunities for mutual gain that expanded cooperation makes possible.

  In Earth Community, violence and competition for dominator power are considered irrational, because they destroy the cooperative nurturing relationships essential to the welfare of the individual and society. It becomes self-evident that such behaviors are morally wrong because they are destructive of life. Through their daily experience, people learn that meaning and purpose are found in equitably sharing power and resources to explore life’s creative possibilities in ways that secure the well-being of all.

  The cultural principles of Earth Community affirm the spiritual unity and interconnectedness of Creation. They favor respect for all beings, nonviolence, service to community, and the stewardship of common resources for the benefit of generations to come. The economic principles of Earth Community affirm the basic right of every person to a means of livelihood and the responsibility of each person to live in 38a balanced relationship with their place on Earth without expropriating the resources of others. They favor local control, self-reliance, and mutually beneficial trade and sharing. The political principles of Earth Community affirm the inherent worth and potential of all individuals and their right to a voice in the decisions that shape their lives, thereby favoring inclusive citizen engagement, cooperative problem solving, and restorative justice.

  THE LAST FREEDOM

  Like every other species, we humans must contend with the inherited physical limitations of our genetic coding. However, the limits of human possibility are more psychological and cultural than genetic and are largely self-imposed—a consequence of individual and collective fears that blind us to our own and to life’s creative possibilities.

  One of the most powerful commentaries on human choice in the face of seemingly impossible odds comes from the report of the distinguished European psychiatrist Viktor Frankl on his years in the German death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau.10 For the prisoners, life in these camps was a nightmare of deprivation and dehumanization, with the constant threat of instant, arbitrary, and meaningless death. One might think of these camps as a brutal study in the variety of human responses to the most extreme of Empire’s dehumanizing dynamic. The range of responses by both prisoners and guards to circumstances none of them had chosen left a deep impression on Frankl. In Frankl’s words, some behaved like saints, others like swine.

  There were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.…

  Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.11

  By Frankl’s account, some prisoners enthusiastically curried favor with the guards by informing on their fellow prisoners or serving as 39overseer, cook, storekeeper, or camp policeman—positions from which they might participate in the arbitrary treatment and humiliation of their fellow prisoners. Others, who remained steadfast in their dignity and humanity, “walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”12

  Much the same range of possibility was observed among the guards. Some were sadists in the purest clinical sense, finding special pleasure in inflicting physical and psychological pain. Known to both officers and prisoners, they were the ones assigned to conduct interrogations and administer punishment. Others, despite the brutal environment of the camp, refused to take part in the sadistic measures. Some extended acts of genuine compassion to the prisoners. The SS commander of one camp secretly paid considerable sums out of his own pocket to purchase medicines for his prisoners from a nearby town.

  Although our circumstances may limit our individual choices, human circumstances are often collective human constructs and thereby subject to collective choice. The excuse that “it’s just human nature” carries no more moral weight than the young child’s claim that “everybody does it.” It is our nature to be creatures of choice. We humans are ultimately the architects of our own nature.

  Empire and Earth Community are generic names for two models of organizing human relationships at all levels of society, from relationships among nations to relations among family and work-group members. Empire orders relationships into dominator hierarchies that monopolize power in the hands of elites to expropriate the life energy, and thereby suppress the creative potential, of the rest. Earth Community orders relationships by partnership networks that distribute power equitably to nurture the well-being and creative potential of each individual and the whole of the community. Each model is within our means, and ultimately it is ours to choose between them.

  Cynics argue that the idea of human societies organized on the principle of partnership is idealistic nonsense beyond our capacity, because 40we humans are by nature violent, individualistic, and incapable of cooperating for a higher good. Failing to recognize that our nature embodies many possibilities, the cynics look only at the readily observable lower-order possibilities of our nature and neglect the higher-order possibilities. It is ours to actualize these higher-order possibilities. First, however, we must acknowledge their existence.

  41

  CHAPTER 2

  The Possibility

  A human being is a part of the whole called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

  Albert Einstein

  According to conventional wisdom, hierarchies of
dominance are required to bring order to human societies because we humans are by nature an inherently unruly and self-centered species prone to violence and lawlessness. We therefore require the discipline of a ruling class and the competition of an unregulated market to impose order. By telling only part of the story, this conventional wisdom becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, defining our beliefs about human possibility, the preferred architecture of our institutions, and the appropriate parameters of our political conversation.

  Chapter 1 framed two narratives—one a dominator narrative of Empire, the other a partnership narrative of Earth Community. These stem from sharply contrasting assumptions about the human condition and our human nature. Although they appear to be in opposition, in truth they define possibilities. The dominator narrative defines the limited possibilities of the immature consciousness. The partnership narrative defines the far larger possibilities of the mature consciousness. Neither defines our destiny.

  We are blocked from realizing our positive potential, not by our nature, but rather by the social dynamics of Empire. We now have the opportunity to liberate ourselves from its deadly addictions. The story of the journey of the individual human consciousness from newborn to 42elder is a tale rich with insight into the nature of and pathway to the realization of more mature human societies.

  AWAKENING CONSCIOUSNESS

  The first experience of individual human consciousness begins in the mother’s womb, where we float effortlessly in undifferentiated oneness with the warm and comforting fluids of the amniotic sac. The well-rehearsed processes of the body’s physical development take place at the cellular level far beyond the ability of our budding consciousness to monitor or influence. Our conscious mind experiences no demands, bears no responsibilities. There is no beginning, no ending. There is no “I” and no “not I.” Just to be is sufficient.

  Suddenly an involuntary traumatic passage unceremoniously thrusts us into a world of unfamiliar and generally discomforting sensations. Our first reaction is typically one of outrage—an elemental expression of grief at what has been lost. We now face the challenge of adapting to our new circumstance, ordering sounds into rhythms, sights into images, and learning to distinguish between them. We experience the blanket as scratchy and irritating or smooth and pleasant, but with no awareness that these sensations come from an external object. The feel of a soggy diaper evokes discomfort unassociated with any cause or object. Suckling on the mother’s breast brings comfort, but with no sense of separation between breast and lip.

  Our next important challenge is learning to differentiate the “I” from the “not I”—the first step in learning to relate to our world, and most importantly to other persons. Throughout our lives we will depend on our relations with other humans not only to meet our physical needs and secure ourselves from physical threat but also to obtain support in developing the cognitive, moral, and emotional capacities of our consciousness. Learning to relate to other humans is thus foundational both to ensuring our survival and to actualizing the possibilities of our humanity.

  Below I set out a five-stage map of the developmental pathway from the least mature to the most mature orders of human consciousness. I draw from the work of many prominent students of human development, including Larry Daloz, Erik Erikson, Carol Gilligan, Stanley Greenspan, Robert Kegan, Lawrence Kohlberg, Abraham Maslow, 43Rollo May, Sharon Parks, Jean Piaget, and Carl Rogers. The map provides a framework for understanding the central place of a politics of consciousness in the work of the Great Turning.1

  First Order: Magical Consciousness

  The Magical Consciousness of a young child of two to six years of age experiences the world as fluid and subject to the whims of magical beings both benevolent and malevolent. It has only a rudimentary ability to recognize causal relationships; the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred. These are the years of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. The classic fairy tales of magical worlds populated by friendly and sinister spirits give expression to the rich fantasy life of these early years.

  Because the Magical Consciousness is unable to distinguish between the enduring self and the emotional impulse of the moment, behavior is impulsive, immediate, and emotion driven. Limited in its ability to recognize the connection between the actions of the self and future consequences, the Magical Consciousness depends on external figures to make things magically right, experiences betrayal when trusted protectors fail to do so, and is unable to recognize the consequences of its own actions or accept responsibility for them.

  Second Order: Imperial Consciousness

  The transition from Magical to Imperial Consciousness normally occurs somewhere around the age of six or seven, when the child develops a greater capacity to distinguish between real and imagined events and discovers that many relationships are predictable and that actions have consequences. The discovery of order, regularity, and stability in the world is a significant advance that opens possibilities for controlling what once seemed a fluid and unpredictable reality.

  The primary learning agenda at this stage is to develop an understanding of relationships and consequences and to explore one’s ability to influence the world through one’s actions. The residual of the Magical Consciousness is manifest in Imperial Consciousness through identification with superheroes, through which it plays out fantasies of possessing superhuman powers. As with the Magical Consciousness, the perspective of the Imperial Consciousness is primarily, if not exclusively, self-referential, even narcissistic.

  44 During the transition to Imperial Consciousness, children learn that other people have other points of view and that getting what they want for themselves generally requires some form of reciprocity. To the understanding of the Imperial Consciousness this means an elemental “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” market exchange. The idea of justice is generally limited to a primitive and personally enforced “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” retributive justice. The ability to consciously constrain an emotional impulse—for example, anger— rather than to act it out physically, remains limited.

  The Imperial Consciousness is able to acknowledge another person’s point of view for purposes of calculating how best to get what one wants, but with little concept of loyalty, gratitude, and justice. Kegan cites the example of an adolescent offender who was asked by a judge, “How can you steal from people who trusted you so?” The youth replied in all sincerity, “But Your Honor, it’s very hard to steal money from people if they don’t trust you.”2

  Most children of the age of Imperial Consciousness can recite the Golden Rule without hesitation—”Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—but find it difficult to experience the self in the feeling place of the other. When asked, “What should you do if someone walks up and hits you?” a characteristic answer, at least for boys, is “Hit ‘em back. Do unto others like they do unto you.”3

  The Imperial Consciousness recognizes that conforming to the expectations of authority figures generally results in rewards. Good behavior is motivated more by a desire to please others in order to improve one’s position, or to avoid being caught, than by a selfless concern for others’ needs or an internalized ethical code. The Imperial Consciousness justifies bad behavior with the excuse “I didn’t intend to hurt anyone” or “Everyone else is doing it.”

  Third Order: Socialized Consciousness

  The transition from Imperial Consciousness to Socialized Consciousness normally begins around eleven or twelve. Coinciding with the onset of teenage rebellion against parental authority, it marks the transition to the internalization of the cultural norms of a larger reference group. It brings a growing emotional intelligence and a recognition of the extent to which personal security depends on the mutual loyalty of the 45members of one’s group in a sometimes hostile world. The Socialized Consciousness defines itself by its relationships with others whose acceptance becomes a primary criterion for assessing self-worth.

  T
he Socialized Consciousness brings an ability to see one’s self through the eyes of another. In contrast to the Imperial Consciousness, which is able to take the view of others only to manipulate them in the service of one’s own purposes, the Socialized Consciousness is capable of empathy, the ability to feel and care sufficiently about what another person is experiencing emotionally to subordinate one’s own needs and desires to theirs. It also brings a recognition of group interests that transcend immediate self-interests.

  The Socialized Consciousness brings a growing appreciation of the need for rules, laws, and properly constituted political and religious authority to maintain essential social and institutional order, and it internalizes a play-by-the-rules, law-and-order morality. In the eye of the Socialized Consciousness, fairness means a society that rewards those who work hard, leaves slackers to suffer their fate, and demands of wrongdoers that they pay their debt to society through fines, imprisonment, or execution. Not yet grasping the reality that complex system relationships might prevent whole classes of people from finding and holding jobs or staying on the right side of the law, the Socialized Consciousness views the concept of restorative justice as an invitation to break the rules with impunity.