Total Change by Manbeard. 

Mixed Media: acrylic, charcoal, pastel, and colored pencil. Copyright 2012

Note: I will be posting this essay in five sections. This is the first of those sections. You can email me at mannbeard@gmail.com for a PDF version of the essay in its entirety.

Total Change and the Myth of Permanence

            This essay is a sketch (or in more philosophical terms, a prolusion) on the general theme of positive global change. As a sketch this essay will focus on an inter-related cluster of concerns related to this theme, and will seek to spell out those concerns and their connections to one another and the core concept of positive global change. I will divide the clusters of concerns into two central clusters, and consequently will be dividing the essay into two primary sections: (I) the myth of permanence and (II) total change. (I) My opening concern is the myth of permanence – a myth that has successfully prevented many of us from dedicating significant aspects of our lives to erecting positive global change. After I have explained this myth and its consequences, I will show how it is indeed a myth and not a competent and healthy perception of reality. I will show this by demonstrating that humanity as a whole has core positive characteristics that form a significant portion of our nature, and that the real problem we face is not one of potential but of vision and actualization. For the actualization of these potentials is largely dependent on external conditions over which we cumulatively wield a great deal of control currently, but have not always done so. More importantly, we have frequently lacked an adequate vision of our potentials and our goals as a people, one that would have enabled us to be at peace with ourselves and the environment for very long at all. I will then argue that in order for us to manifest our positive potentials consistently and coherently as a people, we require a near-universal vision of our potentials and goals. I aim to provide this vision in this essay; in this way we can make the positive global changes I will be describing generally in the second section. According to the concerns of this essay, the chief among the positive potentials is our compassion. This is because compassion is the potential that is perhaps our greatest single potential, but it is also our most fickle in terms of its manifestation, and is the most misunderstood and most questioned of our potentials. To address these questions and concerns and to firmly root the exposure of the myth and to make way for the second half of the essay, I will engage in an extended discussion of our key potentials, centered on our potential for compassion. After this I will then demonstrate how we have reached a stage in our evolution in which we can and need to control those external conditions and channel our compassion and other positive potentials to an extent greater than ever before. I then briefly outline the two major hurdles we face in changing our presence on the planet, which I discuss more fully in the context of total change and the syndividual in the second section. (II) In the second section I will argue that the kind of change we need to aim for must take the form of total change across virtually all spectrums and aspects of human life – and we must do it primarily from the inside out – by changing our desires and our thinking about what constitutes the good life and how best it can be achieved and protected. As my contribution to the necessary discussions that will have to arise before such changes can become widespread, I will then lay out my tentative and general concept of the syndividual and the changes I hope this concept can help engender in our species. In this context I discuss the two hurdles we must face in order to change first ourselves and then the world around us: 1) changing our imagination from a closed and negative one to a positive and open one; and 2) changing our external conditions through syndividualistic action. I will break down the discussion of syndividualistic action into the two aspects of (I) communication and (II) institutional creation, use, and participation. I will then summarize the overall concerns and claims of the essay and conclude with a renewed and enriched final assessment of our current status as a species and where we are headed and can be headed on this planet.

            As a personal note, I am sketching these concepts out so that in a short space these concerns can stand together as vitally connected concerns and not as stand-alone, piecemeal concerns. I too want to play my part in the changes of which I write, and for me adumbrating these concerns in this rough, loose, and relatively brief fashion leaves room for me to leave my ego and stark individualism at the door to discussion and contemplation. It also leaves room for others to contribute, adjust, and evolve these concepts and the overall discussion in which my concerns take their place without the overt need for prolonged and laborious philosophical study, or for egoistic striving, or for potentially divisive and partisan competition. I write here in the name of growth for us all. I do not write to vainly seek my advantages, to blow up my pride, to mark myself out as one who has thought nobly on these things – I am one of many who live and love imperfectly, but have gifts to share, and are as ready to receive and understand as we are to give of ourselves. I wish by this to make our world brighter, to share my light with the light of the world, to let my darknesses away and to help if I can to ease away your darknesses too. So let us share our beauties and gifts in joy, not in divisive and destructive competition.

I

The Myth of Permanence

            There is a pervasive sense throughout the Western world, but particularly in American society, that we inhabit a settled world – a collection of roughly static and unchangeable societies. When we are young and hungry for life and change, when we are just becoming individuals and are busy finding and settling into our places in life, we often see situations we find morally unsatisfactory and on some profound level avoidable, such as global poverty, global pollution, AIDS, state-endorsed violence, racism, bureaucratic ineptitude, wide-spread political deceit and cynicism, and the like. This list is actually quite extensive; and as time passes and we devise more and more technologies and ways to manipulate the world around us, the list of perturbing and seemingly avoidable human activities that grate at some part of our core being seems to only increase. “Where are we going?,” we wonder to ourselves and to other seemingly like-minded souls. What is humanity doing to itself and the world around it? Where will we be in 100 years?

            The answers we give ourselves when young differ dramatically from the answers society at large gives us, from the answers most of our elders give us, even from the answers our peers give us once they have settled in the menagerie of society. Those first answers, those answers from our own innocent young hearts, were almost always ones of hope. Blinding hope. Hope for a great and beautiful world in which we as humans can be happy together with the rest of the world. With the tigers and the trees, happy with the blue sky, happy with the green grass and clear clean rivers. But it is a hope without duration, a hope frequently without direction and without sufficient confidence to mark our path in life as charged and ready to change this world together for the better, the definitively and beautifully better. The answers of the latter, varied and often times unspoken or inarticulate, oft-presented in the form of rejection, coaxing, teasing, and an overwhelming (but illusionary, I assure you) sense of necessity, are profoundly disheartening. Thud goes our hope, down to the bottom of the well. Life as we see it becomes life as we know it. This is, fortunately, not a true situation for all of us – but it is true for the vast majority of us. Becoming an adult in the accepted sense means accepting society for what it is, and struggling to find our best and most comfortable place in it – if we can. Becoming a complete person means channeling your talents to find a job and a family (if you want one), and letting go of those marvelous but vain and youthful dreams of real and meaningful change. If the world moves, you move with it. It doesn’t move because of you.

            Those answers are perpetuations of a big, fat, ugly lie. A myth. The myth of permanence: the myth that we are permanently destined as a species to live a life of mass conflict, depredation, greed, and ignorance. Most of us don’t know it is a lie, but most of us also feel a slight tickling in the back of our mind when we tell our children, our friends, our colleagues, our enemies, “people don’t change,” “ha, what are you going to do? Change the world?,” “Please, face up to reality!,” “Get real,” or, my personal favorite, “Get a job!” If we were Pinocchios, whenever we felt that tickling, our noses would be growing. Most of us might very well have small trees growing from our faces right now. Because we have been telling ourselves and others that if we want to change things, we can change jobs, we can change technologies, we can make meaningful art, we can write great books, we can make or join non-profit organizations, we can volunteer – but we can’t change society. We can’t change who we are as human beings. We’re stuck with the same crappy material that we have had for millennia, and we can only change the size and appearance of the tubes out of which we squeeze our crappy selves. But we are still crappy, greedy, angry, gullible, violent, (and now, disillusioned), forgetful, vindictive little turds. So we might as well make the best of it!

            I’ll tell you what is really the little turd – that myth we have been telling each other. It is the invisible set of handcuffs binding us to our ignorant past, to the mistakes of our ancestors. What makes me so sure it is a myth? Because history tells me so. Because the Dalai Lama tells us so. Because wise men and women across all ages and continents, from Lao Tzu and Rumi to Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Jefferson, from Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Aung San Suu Kyi and Vaclav Havel have told us so. Because my own eyes, my own ears, my young heart, and my heart and mind now have told me. We have enough potential and actual good in us to overcome our adversities and to mark out an increasingly brighter future for ourselves and for the planet. But we have had two consistent problems preventing us from successfully using what I call our concordive potentials: 1) an inadequate guiding perception of our potentials, both concordive and discordive; and 2) an insufficient, incoherent, and inconsistent species-wide history of actualizing our concordive potentials. So despite what the myth of permanence claims, the problem we really face is not a problem of potential; it is a problem of vision and actualization.

            In terms of vision, the myth of permanence is merely the newest version of the countless ruling cultural perceptions that have clouded our vision throughout our history and mitigated and diffused our will as a species. Rarely before has even a single society had a sufficient vision of humanity’s potentials to motivate its members to cumulatively act towards securing a reign of significant and sustainable peace, equity, and wide-spread wellbeing. And when a society, such as the Aborigines of Australia, has actually achieved such a union of vision and praxis, at some point that society has run into conflict with at least one other society (such as the European would-be conquerors of Australia) whose vision of our potentials and the good life has led to interminable conflict with both the environment and other human beings, and the end of the previous edenic era. Yet we have entered into a heretofore-unseen period of world-wide interconnectivity and technological power that spells the end of such former kinds of vision-isolation and vision-conflict. Now the time has come, as I shall discuss in the second section, for either vision-convergence and cooperation, or the ultimate destruction of most life on the planet, human and otherwise.

            In terms of actualization, the inconsistent and incoherent actualization of our potentials has actually helped to inform the myth of permanence, but as I noted, the myth is but a version of the problematic visions that have dominated most discordant societies the planet has seen, such as the Romans, the Greeks, the Chinese, and the Aztecs. And it takes an adequate vision of our potentials to motivate an entire society (and for this discussion, our species) to take the steps necessary to actualize our concordive potentials and create a state of stable and sustainable concord both among humans and with the surrounding environment. Up until now the interconnected modern world has lacked a united vision adequate to both our potentials and to our pluralities of religion, lifestyle, culture, and political structures that will enable us to act cumulatively to achieve worldwide peace, wellbeing, and sustainability. This essay seeks to address this lack, and to set forth both a vision of our concordive potentials that can be the seed of total and positive change, and a general vision of what this change should look like. The two aspects of this vision correspond to the two sections of this essay. This vision recognizes and aims to allow for the kind of plurality and non-destructive individualistic behavior that has come to characterize much of our modern vision of the good life, but it also seeks to curb the destructive attitudes and behavior that have also come to characterize our modernity.

Next week: Section 2: Our Concordive Potentials.