Future Fear is rampant.
Some are heading for the hills but for most this is just not a viable
option. Some are heading to the garden
to become more self sufficient in food but are finding themselves still tied to
the grocery store for most of their daily needs. Some are buying silver coins to secure their
buying power into an uncertain future.
Some are oblivious to the storm clouds that are so visible for many of
us (I call them the “panmillenialists,” it will all pan out in the end). Some are just hunkering down with a sense of
dread.
I am introducing this blog with the thought that we do not
need to know how drastic our lifestyle adjustments will need to be to cope
appropriately with the change that is coming.
There is an alternative to Future Fear.
We do not need to agree on the significance of the Mayan Calendar, the
timing of the collapse of the dollar, the efficacy of silver coinage, or the
relevance of peak oil and whether or not it is trumped by Global Warming. We can instead reconsider our past to
instruct our future. We can make choices
that reflect our values without knowing what the future holds.
There is nothing more important about our past than the
values that have been passed down to us.
How do we value education? Is it
a tool to attract more monetary wealth or does it have intrinsic value? How do
we view religion? Is it a pathway to
life beyond the grave or a map to guide our journey in the here and now? How do we view government? Is it here to protect and provide or is
intended to plan and guide? How do we
value the earth? Is it a resource put
here for us to exploit or a heritage to which we owe protection? Health and medicine, food and diet, housing
and neighborhoods, means of travel, war and peace, the list goes on and
on. We are, in fact, saturated with
values that run so deeply in our cell memory as to be indistinguishable from
truth.
Our goal here is to employ critical thinking skills to
differentiate between accepted norms and intrinsic values. Can we critically view our schools,
hospitals, power plants, churches, political parties, banks and insurance
companies and realign the norms to better reflect what we truly value? This is harder than it sounds. Only a tiny sliver of our population has made
the effort to challenge the very basis of our education system, for example,
and yet the evidence that it has been manipulated by industrialists is
overwhelming. I begin then, with the
assumption that only one out of ten can make the leap to reconsideration of
what we have been led to believe. I hope
I am wrong but in any case I also believe that a motivated five percent can alter
the path of the world. And a motivated person can speak up and be
heard by that five percent.
So this brings us back to the question in the title, “How
Then Shall We Live?” My thesis that we
do not need to agree on prophetic vision stands. We do however need to find ourselves in some
agreement on what we determine our intrinsic values to be and seek to align
those values with our choices. We need
to walk the walk. If we cannot agree as
a society what those intrinsic values are then we need to agree as members of
the five percent. And if that goal seems
elusive then we need to focus on doing it for ourselves. We need to align our own actions, artifacts
and priorities with our own intrinsic values and lead rather than follow.
My conclusion is that by Visualizing Intrinsic Value
Alignment (VIVA) we can embark upon a journey that is appropriate for all
prophetic outcomes. For me this means I
want to grow more of my own food. Will
that serve me and my family if the world economy falls apart? Yes.
Will it still serve me if we muddle on much like we have for the last
five years? Yes. Will it serve if energy
becomes scarce? Yes. I cannot imagine many scenarios where growing
more of my own food will not be of great benefit to my well being. I can then cast aside Future Fear and live
according to my intrinsic values which assumes of course my values align with a
system of productivity in community and not with derivatives and fiat currency.
The process of discovery of intrinsic values will cover many
fields. I will begin with seven that
will no doubt be augmented by those who chose to enter in and expand the
conversation: economics, education, ecology, food, energy, innovation and
religion. Along the way we will explore
new paradigms in each field and hopefully come up with some that reach across
disciplines.
