Paul Ray

Today´s politics is failing to deal with some of the most important issues of our time, and everyone knows it. National politicians deal with the few easy issues they can handle conventionally, while a growing number of issues are not handled at all.

Most polls tell us voters want politicians to get on with dealing with the big, difficult, emerging issues of our time, such as global warming, globalization, health care, education, biotechnology, giant corporations out of control, violence around the world, and the future of their children. But our political system is not supplying what people want. Voting remains at an all time low, reflecting widespread disgust with both the absence of good ideas and the dominance of big money. Survey upon survey shows over 70 percent of voters unhappy with politics and politicians. We are looking at the political equivalent of market failure: the breakdown of supply and demand.

What is it that voters want? The answer at least in part can be found in the wave of change that is going through western culture. A new constituency is emerging that is at home in neither the Democratic or Republican parties. As this constituency grows, we are seeing the decline of both Left and Right, and of both political parties.

I call the new constituency the New Progressives because they reflect the concerns of the social movements and consciousness movements that have emerged over the last 40 years. Some cut their teeth in the anti-nuclear movement, others in the civil rights movement or the women´s movement. Even when they weren´t directly involved in a cause, they tend to sympathize with its aims, so they reflect the wave of values change that has been emerging in American life over the past few decades, which is giving rise to the subculture I call Cultural Creatives.

The easiest way to describe this emerging political constituency is to say that they are at 90 degree angles to both the liberal Left and the social conservative Right, and they are directly opposed to big business conservatism. These ìNew Progressives” are not ìthe center” or mushy middle of Clinton lore. They tend to oppose corporate globalization and big business interests, and favor ecological sustainability, women´s issues, consciousness issues, national health care, national education, and an emerging concern for the planet and the future of our children and grandchildren on it. Many of their issues are claimed by the Left, and sworn at by the Right, but their stance departs from both liberal Left and religious Right, as do business conservatives´ stances.

This group is nearly invisible in the mainstream press. But the New Progressives are the biggest of the four constituencies at 36 percent of population and 45 percent of likely voters. If the New Progressives were mobilized under a single political tent, they could replace one of the political parties and dominate American politics for the next generation or more.

Left versus Right doesn´t work any more

A century ago, Left vs. Right meant progressives and unionists vs. big business and maybe the Ku Klux Klan. But that was before nuclear weapons could destroy life on the planet, before the civil rights movement and women´s movement, before the insurgent radicals of the religious Right came back into politics, and before saving the planet from ecological destruction and globalization became a huge issue. Both the issues and the constituencies of the US have evolved, but our political rhetoric stays frozen in century-old lingo and metaphors, and so have our political parties and our politicians.

When we add new data about values and political positions, it becomes obvious that this image of our politics is beyond inadequate, it´s hopelessly wrong and misleading. With only 31 percent of the population fitting the image of Left versus Right, it simply doesn´t have a future.

My data for the New Political Compass come from a 1995 values survey that included just enough political information to do this analysis. They don´t cover all the issues and voter behavior we might ideally want; however, because they cover many issues, plus values and political affiliations, they do point clearly to what
is emerging. The underlying structure of the data shows the opposition of liberal Left versus social conservative, crossed by the opposition of the New Progressives versus the Big Business Conservatives. The only ones left in the ìcenter” are the politically alienated, the ignorant, and the studiedly apolitical.

The New Political Compass diagram shows that all that remains of the secular liberal Left is 12 percent of the US adult population–about 15 percent of voters. Social conservatives, including the religious Right, are 19 percent–about 22 percent of voters. Those who vote with multinational Big Business Conservatives are at 14 percent of the US–19 percent of voters.

As we might expect, there is more similarity between liberals and New Progressives and between the two kinds of conservatives. However, while they may ally from time to time, the culturally conservative, Main Street Right often opposes the Wall Street big business Right. Worldwide, the traditionalism of social conservatives and the globalism of Big Business Conservatives are often deep enemies.

Likewise, the New Progressives may look Left to the rest of the polity, but they don´t identify as ìLeft.” The New Progressives are less interested in the liberal Left´s cultural struggle with the religious Right (East vs. West on the political compass) than they are with opposing the pro-globalization forces. The real ìjuice” in progressive politics is no longer with the class and union and rural-urban struggles of the early 1900s; instead, the growing edge is in the feminist, ecological, anti-globalization, pro-civil-rights, pro-peace, pro-health-care, pro-education, pro-natural/organic and even pro-spiritual movements that together make up the New Progressives.

As of 1995, the evolution of the four points to the compass wasn´t complete, but that was seven years ago. Since then, the anti-corporate globalization movement came into existence, both in the anti-WTO-IMF-World Bank form and in the gathering in Porto Alegre of planetary democrats, where tens of thousands of people gathered under the banner, ìAnother World is Possible.” [See update by Walden Bello on page 50.] The war against terrorism, the meltdown in Argentina, and the collapse of Enron are further delegitimizing giant corporations. As that happens, we see a strengthening of the second dimension, the New Progressives versus Big Business Conservatives or North vs South on the political compass.

The New Progressives

The reframing of reality by new social movements is key to the New Progressives´ worldview. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., didn´t stop at issues of voting rights or the overturning of Jim Crow laws, for example. Instead, he reminded all Americans of their love for freedom, justice, and dignity, and showed that when some Americans are degraded, all are degraded.

Betty Friedan did not limit her framing of women´s issues to the glass ceiling or pay equity; she showed that a majority of humanity is excluded from public life, and diminished at home and in gender relations.

Likewise, Rachel Carson was not simply asking polluters to stay out of her back yard; she was warning of the death of nature and warning that when birds and insects die, we and our children will soon follow.

The anti-nuclear movement reframed itself to became a pro-peace movement, incorporating conflict resolution and respectful communications into everyday life. The alternative health care movement focused on overall wellness, a concept that has permeated the awareness, if not the practice, of mainstream America.
Another reframing came with the recognition of inner experience as a source of authority. Beginning with the civil rights and women´s movements, this seeking for inner authenticity quickly became part of the various consciousness movements, the peace movements, the spiritual side of the ecology movement, and the liberal churches. While this inner directedness was rarely a sign of enlightenment, it did indicate an inner searching and a growing maturity.

Along with these shifts came the insistence that cultural change is a valid part of the larger social change process. Most importantly, the inner dimensions of transformation were carried into political work, in the beginning causing dissonance with the more Left, macho activists.

The New Progressives have been going from movement to movement, retaining loyalties to one as they move to the next. They account for the convergence of all the movements into a common worldview and set of values. The New Progressives have developed new moral stances, new explanatory analyses, and new tactics and strategies founded in this emerging worldview. As each movement grew, New Progressives eventually adopted the movement´s basic stance as part of their own worldview. If, as I estimate, the New Progressives are 36 percent of adults and 45 percent of voters, they represent a huge unmet political demand.

We stand at a watershed in politics where the two parties are weaker than they have been in over a century. There´s room for immense creativity around the emerging agenda of the new millennium.

The New Progressives are well positioned to work with all the other three sides: with the social conservatives around bringing civility back into public life, with the Left on social justice and ecology, and with the business Right on efficiency issues. The key will be drawing upon the themes of the New Social Movements, proposing positive solutions, addressing hot-button issues that others won´t touch, healing the loss of political trust that has degraded politics over the past 40 years, and using processes for dialogue and mobilization that are empowering and respectful. Doing so could allow the New Progressives to set agendas that will bring values of justice, sustainability, and compassion into public life for decades to come.

©2002 Positive Futures Network

Download:  New Political Compass, 167 kb  
(This is Paul Ray´s full 78 page report with illustrations that was the basis for today’s essay.)

Visit: Paul Ray´s website

Natalie Angier

What feels as good as chocolate on the tongue or money in the bank but won’t make you fat or risk a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission?

Hard as it may be to believe in these days of infectious greed and sabers unsheathed, scientists have discovered that the small, brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.

Studying neural activity in young women who were playing a classic laboratory game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which participants can select from a number of greedy or cooperative strategies as they pursue financial gain, researchers found that when the women chose mutualism over “me-ism,” the mental circuitry normally associated with reward-seeking behavior swelled to life.

And the longer the women engaged in a cooperative strategy, the more strongly flowed the blood to the pathways of pleasure.

The researchers, performing their work at Emory University in Atlanta, used magnetic resonance imaging to take what might be called portraits of the brain on hugs.

“The results were really surprising to us,” said Dr. Gregory S. Berns, a psychiatrist and an author on the new report, which appears in the current issue of the journal Neuron. “We went in expecting the opposite.”

The researchers had thought that the biggest response would occur in cases where one person cooperated and the other defected, when the cooperator might feel that she was being treated unjustly.

Instead, the brightest signals arose in cooperative alliances and in those neighborhoods of the brain already known to respond to desserts, pictures of pretty faces, money, cocaine and any number of licit or illicit delights.

“It’s reassuring,” Dr. Berns said. “In some ways, it says that we’re wired to cooperate with each other.”

The study is among the first to use M.R.I. technology to examine social interactions in real time, as opposed to taking brain images while subjects stared at static pictures or thought-prescribed thoughts.

It is also a novel approach to exploring an ancient conundrum, why are humans so, well, nice? Why are they willing to cooperate with people whom they barely know and to do good deeds and to play fair a surprisingly high percentage of the time?

Scientists have no trouble explaining the evolution of competitive behavior. But the depth and breadth of human altruism, the willingness to forgo immediate personal gain for the long-term common good, far exceeds behaviors seen even in other large-brained highly social species like chimpanzees and dolphins, and it has as such been difficult to understand.

“I’ve pointed out to my students how impressive it is that you can take a group of young men and women of prime reproductive age, have them come into a classroom, sit down and be perfectly comfortable and civil to each other,” said Dr. Peter J. Richerson, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California at Davis and an influential theorist in the field of cultural evolution. “If you put 50 male and 50 female chimpanzees that don’t know each other into a lecture hall, it would be a social explosion.”

Dr. Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich and colleagues recently presented findings on the importance of punishment in maintaining cooperative behavior among humans and the willingness of people to punish those who commit crimes or violate norms, even when the chastisers take risks and gain nothing themselves while serving as ad hoc police.

In her survey of the management of so-called commons in small-scale communities where villagers have the right, for example, to graze livestock on commonly held land, Dr. Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University found that all communities have some form of monitoring to gird against cheating or using more than a fair share of the resource.

In laboratory games that mimic small-scale commons, Dr. Richerson said, 20 to 30 percent have to be coerced by a threat of punishment to cooperate.

Fear alone is not highly likely to inspire cooperative behavior to the degree observed among humans. If research like Dr. Fehr’s shows the stick side of the equation, the newest findings present the neural carrot – people cooperate because it feels good to do it.

In the new findings, the researchers studied 36 women from 20 to 60 years old, many of them students at Emory and inspired to participate by the promise of monetary rewards. The scientists chose an all-female sample because so few brain-imaging studies have looked at only women. Most have been limited to men or to a mixture of men and women.

But there is a vast body of non- imaging data that rely on using the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

“It’s a simple and elegant model for reciprocity,” said Dr. James K. Rilling, an author on the Neuron paper who is at Princeton. “It’s been referred to as the E. coli of social psychology.”

From past results, the researchers said, one can assume that neuro- imaging studies of men playing the game would be similar to their new findings with women.

The basic structure of the trial had two women meet each other briefly ahead of time. One was placed in the scanner while the other remained outside the scanning room. The two interacted by computer, playing about 20 rounds of the game. In every round, each player pressed a button to indicate whether she would “cooperate” or “defect.” Her answer would be shown on-screen to the other player.

The monetary awards were apportioned after each round. If one player defected and the other cooperated, the defector earned $3 and the cooperator nothing. If both chose to cooperate, each earned $2. If both opted to defect, each earned $1.

Hence, mutual cooperation from start to finish was a far more profitable strategy, at $40 a woman, than complete mutual defection, which gave each $20.

The risk that a woman took each time she became greedy for a little bit more was that the cooperative strategy would fall apart and that both would emerge the poorer.

In some cases, both women were allowed to pursue any strategy that they chose. In other cases, the non- scanned woman would be a “confederate” with the researchers, instructed, unbeknown to the scanned subject, to defect after three consecutive rounds of cooperation, the better to keep things less rarefied and pretty and more lifelike and gritty.

In still other experiments, the woman in the scanner played a computer and knew that her partner was a machine. In other tests, women played a computer but thought that it was a human.

The researchers found that as a rule the freely strategizing women cooperated. Even occasional episodes of defection, whether from free strategizers or confederates, were not necessarily fatal to an alliance.

“The social bond could be reattained easily if the defector chose to cooperate in the next couple of rounds,” another author of the report, Dr. Clinton D. Kilts, said, “although the one who had originally been `betrayed’ might be wary from then on.”

As a result of the episodic defections, the average per-experiment take for the participants was in the $30′s. “Some pairs, though, got locked into mutual defection,” Dr. Rilling said.

Analyzing the scans, the researchers found that in rounds of cooperation, two broad areas of the brain were activated, both rich in neurons able to respond to dopamine, the brain chemical famed for its role in addictive behaviors.

One is the anteroventral striatum in the middle of the brain right above the spinal cord. Experiments with rats have shown that when electrodes are placed in the striatum, the animals will repeatedly press a bar to stimulate the electrodes, apparently receiving such pleasurable feedback that they will starve to death rather than stop pressing the bar.

Another region activated during cooperation was the orbitofrontal cortex in the region right above the eyes. In addition to being part of the reward-processing system, Dr. Rilling said, it is also involved in impulse control.

“Every round, you’re confronted with the possibility of getting an extra dollar by defecting,” he said. “The choice to cooperate requires impulse control.”

Significantly, the reward circuitry of the women was considerably less responsive when they knew that they were playing against a computer. The thought of a human bond, but not mere monetary gain, was the source of contentment on display.

In concert with the imaging results, the women, when asked afterward for summaries of how they felt during the games, often described feeling good when they cooperated and expressed positive feelings of camaraderie toward their playing partners.

Assuming that the urge to cooperate is to some extent innate among humans and reinforced by the brain’s feel-good circuitry, the question of why it arose remains unclear. Anthropologists have speculated that it took teamwork for humanity’s ancestors to hunt large game or gather difficult plant foods or rear difficult children. So the capacity to cooperate conferred a survival advantage on our forebears.

Yet as with any other trait, the willingness to abide by the golden rule and to be a good citizen and not cheat and steal from one’s neighbors is not uniformly distributed.

“If we put some C.E.O.’s in here, I’d like to see how they respond,” Dr. Kilts said. “Maybe they wouldn’t find a positive social interaction rewarding at all.”

A Prisoner’s Dilemma indeed.

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Barbara Ehrenreich

It’s a pleasure, of the schadenfreude variety, to sit back and watch the credibility peel off our principal institutions with no help from their usual critics.

Our corporate CEOs, for example, have gone from rocking to reeking in a mere two years. At the height of the dot-com bubble, when they had won the highest status American culture awards–that of “role model” and even “icon”–we hastened to offer them our adoration and, via the stock market, our life savings, as well. No traditional patriarchs, these–the ’90s-era CEO combined the silver-templed authority figure of old with an appropriately up-to-date “out-of-the-box” image derived from Silicon Valley: reliable old dad and “edgy” young rebel wrapped into one. What was to rebel against when the leaders of our economy were already in full-throttle rebellion themselves–against irritatingly slow communications technologies, stultifying regulations, and obsolete national boundaries? If they earned 500 times more than their average employees, wasn’t this a fit reward for the risks they took and the stress they endured?

But now–after Enron, Global Crossing, Adelphia, ImClone, Tyco, Merrill Lynch, WorldCom–it turns out the only thing they were rebelling against was common decency, and the only risk that of getting caught.

Or consider the federal agencies charged with saving us from gruesome deaths by terrorism. The FBI and the CIA, omnipotent bogeymen of my radical youth, turn out to possess archaic software and a system of information flow designed by Franz Kafka. And who would have guessed last fall, when the President promised us a long war, that these two agencies would be the warring parties? The only hope at the moment is that the new Department of Homeland Security will somehow be able to mediate.

The President himself–or as he was widely known before September 11, the “President”–has seen wild fluctuations in his credibility quotient. The nonelection of 2000, combined with the chosen winner’s incurable callowness, left him scrambling for a bit of gravitas. After 9/11 though, and his subsequent bold pulverization of Afghanistan, Bush briefly had even liberals eating out of his hand. Maybe he was a dimwit about domestic governance and a sworn foe of birds and trees, but, the pundits insisted, he had crushed the “evildoers” with remarkable speed and aplomb.

A few months later, however, we discover that he was so complacent about the urgent warnings of oncoming terrorist attacks he received in the spring and summer of 2001 that he went ahead with his four-week vacation–the longest in Presidential history–while Atta and Co. were buying up box-cutters. He even followed up the particularly sharp warning of August 6 with a soothing afternoon spent fishing. To paraphrase the popular T-shirt slogan: Fish may fear him, but the terrorists of 9/11 had nothing to worry about.

Then there’s the Catholic Church. A year ago, this ancient band of patriarchs stood fast against sexual pleasure in all but its married, reproductive forms, and endeavored–by prohibiting condoms, birth control, and abortion–to condemn sinners to pregnancy or AIDS. Now we know that the priests have been leveraging their alleged intimacy with the deity to get their hands into little kids’ underpants, while John Paul II–God’s infallible delegate to Earth–gazes on in perplexity, apparently unable to lift his chin from his chest.

It’s not only the occasional radical crank who understands that our major institutions are rapidly approaching the reliability of Amtrak. In mid-June, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found 60 percent of Americans expressing “just some” or “very little” confidence in the government’s intelligence agencies. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they didn’t trust CEOs or brokerage firms not to lie, with particular hostility directed toward the captains of the pharmaceutical and oil industries. Sixty-eight percent thought the Catholic Church was trying to “cover up things” rather than root out its pederastic subculture. “After a surge of public optimism after September 11,” the Journal concludes, “Americans now are expressing a loss of faith in a broad range of institutions.”

Yet, strangely, things go on more or less as they have. People keep genuflecting at mass, entrusting their savings to the brokers and CEOs, and believing that the President is a fine fellow and fit match for Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, or whoever it is. While his approval rating has dropped from the god-like 82 percent he enjoyed in January, it has dropped only to 69 percent–a level Bill Clinton would surely have envied. So far, the only spirited response to the general collapse of institutional credibility has come from those in the Catholic laity who are demanding a greater role for lay boards in the governance of the Church. No one has suggested that equivalent bodies–composed of, say, consumers, investors, and workers–play a similar role in the corporations, or that the President should be impeached for nodding off on the job.

Maybe we’ve lost the habit of citizenship, along with the idea that we–the “ordinary people”–are capable of leading. Announce a crisis in our institutionalized forms of leadership, and most of our neighbors would hasten to stock up on canned goods and hunker down in their basement dens. If no one’s in charge–or at least no one you can count on–then it’s everyone for him- or herself, right?

Or it could be that the problem lies deeper, in our collective subconscious. For at least two decades now, the right has endeavored to implant there a shivering fear of, and sneering contempt for, the fatherless condition. The only real families, the rightwing ideologues insist, are those with an adult male at the helm. Households headed by women are “broken”; the children of unwed women are, in right-talk, “illegitimate” rather than “born out of wedlock,” as courtesy requires. In his influential 1995 book, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, David Blankenhorn traced almost everything–from teen violence to academic mediocrity–to the absence of strong fathers in the home. If we were to acknowledge that “Dad”–in the figurative sense shared by priests, Presidents, and CEOs–is a deadbeat, if not a criminal pervert, would that make the rest of us social misfits and possibly bastards?

But even the most reluctant child must eventually wake up to the fact that the grown-ups in charge can’t always be trusted. What we have learned in the last few months is that no one is looking out for us, guiding our souls, or ensuring our future prosperity. And when the powerful begin to act irresponsibly, it’s the responsibility of the rest of us to take their power away from them.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive and the author of “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” (Metropolitan Books, 2001).

Timothy Wilken

The American political economic system is is classified by synergic science as a neutral system. Neutral systems require unlimited resources to grow and thrive.

Neutrality means you don’t need help from others. You are so rich that you can survive all by yourself. And, we Americans have been very rich for the last 100 years. Now I know some of you will scream, RICH! I am not rich. But really you are. You see we Americans have so much cheap energy we don’t even notice it. We modern humans have been sucking petroleum out of the ground as hard as we can for those 100 years. We don’t pay for it. We do pay for the straw, but not for the oil.

In 1981, Buckminster Fuller calculated the real cost of that oil, if we were paying for the oil itself and not the cost of sucking it out of the ground.

The real cost of one gallon of gasoline was $1000, 000. Correcting for inflation to 2001, that would be $2,000,000 a gallon of gasoline. How many gallons of gas did you use this month? Then consider the fact that most of our electricity is generated by burning petroleum, so how many gallons did you use to heat your home, or cool your home, or run your electric appliances and cook your food, and pump and heat the water for your bathrooms and laundrys?

I expect if you add it up, you would discover most Americans are billionaires.

Now we humans can only continue to waste such great wealth, if wealth is unlimited.

Guess what? Santa Clause is dead. We are running out of oil. The earth itself, and certainly the oil reserves of earth are finite. That means they are limited.

Lets take a moment to understand, how we got here.

There are three classes of life on Earth–Plants, Animals and Humans. The plants are an independent form our life. They can directly convert the unlimited sunlight into matter and energy for growth and reproduction. They have a neutral relationship.

The animals are a dependent form of life. They depend on ingesting the bodies of other plants or animals to obtain the matter and energy they need for survival. Good space is limited for the animals. They must compete. They have an adversary relationship with each other.

We humans are an interdependent form of life. We share our body with the animals and like them we depend on plants and animal food for our basic survival. But our human minds can learn and invent without limit and we can discover new tools and new ways to work together to solve our problems. We have the potential to develop a synergic relationship with each other. Synergy means we can work together. Sometimes you depend on me, sometimes I depend on you. The synergic way is the only way that will work for humans.

But along the pathway to synergic relationship, we humans got lost. Jesus of Nazareth told us 2000 years ago we should be synergists. We should love and help each other. But then humantiy got seduced by the the market place and what seemed like an unlimited world.

When America was founded in 1776, the North American continent provided relatively unlimited resources.  The early colonists were in the right place at the right time. The right place was the nearly empty continent of North America. Millions of acres of arable land and forests, filled with abundant water in millions of steams, rivers, and lakes and stocked with uncountable numbers of wildlife. This was further enriched with enormous reserves of iron, coal, copper, aluminum, zinc, lead, gold, silver, oil, and much more – all available for the taking.

The right time was 1776, by then the collective power of humanity’s time-binding had discovered, invented, and developed the tools and knowhow that created the mechanism of the Agricultural, Industrial, and Transportational Revolutions. The level of knowledge and technology available to the American colonists coupled with enormous North American reserves, provided them with cheap food, cheap power, and cheap transportation. And, the greatest gift was oil. It began in 1859, when Edwin L. Drake drilled America’s first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

Thus, conditions were perfect for the success of human Neutrality. America would have the equivalent of unlimited resources for the next 150 years.

However, today things have changed. The North American continent is getting full. In 1776, there were less than a billion humans on the planet, today we are over 6 billion. We no longer have a limitless abundance of natural resources available for the taking. Our world of plenty is being reduced to a world of scarcity. In fact, petroleum already peaked in America in 1971. The world peak is estimated to occur somewhere between 2007 to 2012.

Recently, the electrical power crisis in California has drawn national and world attention to a shortage of crude oil and natural gas. These fossil fuels are currently the primary source of the cheap energy that powers our modern Industrial Civilization. If we are running out of crude oil and natural gas, as some of the best scientists and engineers in the Energy field are telling us,  we have big problems. 

Think back for a moment to the year 1801, only two hundred years ago, that was a time when there was no gasoline, no refined oil, no natural gas, and no electrical power derived from oil and gas. As a thought experiment, try to  imagine what life was like at the beginning of the 19th century. If you were transported back two hundred years, how would the lack of petroleum affect your lifestyle?

While we might accurately imagine the loss of cheap energy from petroleum, most of us would overlook the 70,000 products that are manufactured using petroleum as a raw feedstock. This includes plastics, acrylics, cosmetics, paints, varnishes, asphalts, fertilizers, medications, etc., etc., etc.. Now, in addition to our loss of cheap energy and the 70,000 products that you and I have come to depend on, imagine our sharing that impoverished Earth with over six billion other humans?

When the price of oil reaches $2,000,000 a gallon. How much oil will you use? Listen at the sounds as your automobiles sit in the driveway without gas, listen as all your appliances and electrical pumps all go silent. Not even the sound of running water. Nice and quiet, huh.

Now think of the physical work you will have to do to suvive. Think you might need help? Perhaps you really aren’t independent.

As things start to get scarce, the humans lose their option for Neutrality. Soon they have to learn to do without. They go without owning their own homes. They go without higher education for their children. They go without free time for recreation as they are forced to get a second job. Or, they sidestep back into the adversary world – they steal, embezzle, or defraud.

Today, within the United States, the very center of human Neutrality, we see declining quality of life, declining compensation for all workers, deteriorating nuclear families, and declining numbers of humans able to own their own homes. We see increasing mental illness and child abuse; ever escalating health care costs, and more humans without access to medical care. Examining today’s youth, we see declining numbers of college graduates, mixed with increasing drug and alcohol use; increasing suicide; casual sexuality and unwanted pregnancy.

And there are even bigger problems facing Americans and the rest of humanity.

Acid rain, ozone depletion, water and air pollution, toxic buildup, strip mining, deforestation, erosion & topsoil depletion; greenhouse effect, ice age, nuclear winter, el nino, and even asteroids threatening the planet. These big problems are invisible to indifferent governments and ignoring citizens. Whose problems are these anyway? In Neutrality, they belong to no one. They are certainly not mine. Something is wrong in Paradise When we humans institutionalized Neutrality over two hundred years ago, it was a great advance over Adversity, it dramatically reduced the pain and suffering for humanity.

 In the 18th century, Neutrality was a major advance for humankind. The neutral system gave individuals opportunities for great economic success. The birth of capitalistic economics greatly enriched the human condition. Neutral organization was more powerful than adversary organization. Neutrality did work well in the free world for many humans who inhabited it two hundred years ago. But that was then. …

Today, it is up to us. You and me. Our governments can’t help us. They don’t understand the problem. Our corporations can’t help us they don’t understand the problem. We can only rely on ourselves. Individuals of integrity will need to join together to build a new model of society that depends on co-Operation and abundance. And, by abundance I am referring to an abundance of integrity, intelligence  and responsibility. Then we can begin restructuring our society in ways that will lead to a relative abundance even within the finite world we inhabit.

Wake up America! Wake up Humanity! WE must learn to work together, or we will die separately.