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Old and new leadership combined
When you drive back along a road that you just came from it will look very different even though it is the same road. This is called “perspective”. Often we do not even notice but when it does reach our awareness we refer to it at “perception”. In the global transition of societies perspective and perception are key, for ourselves and especially for our leadership. Perspective refers to the way we look at things, perception gives meaning to the conscious awareness with which we observe and make our choices. Perception is a rational way of awakening. We suddenly experience a “aha”, a flash of thought that illuminates something to the point of a better “understanding” or curiosity to look deeper. In the STIR Foundation we learned to deal with this by helping old leadership change perspective, even when trapped in a specific paradigm. We show them that time and space does not exist. Changing perspective we change the perception of reality. We assume an independent role of new leadership that invites old leadership, acting as catalyst for complex transformations. Let us try to get to an understanding of the phenomenum.
The conscious and unconscious.
We travel the spiral of our life’s complexity chronologically and largely in an admosphere of automated actions. On the one hand our preprogrammed spiritual reality makes us act without thinking and according to the natural patterns of living life in a diversity of life forms and situations. The same patterns we see back in all life forms. It consists of the large cycle of life, beginning with birth, then growth, death and evolution, and in smaller ones (living life) of harmony, greed, chaos and awareness. On the other hand we are conditioned by the human culture in which we live. The spiritual dimensions determine our automated actions while our cultural dimensions determine what our human surroundings expects from us. Both routines are experienced as “normal” and hence do not often get a second thought. It is as if we sleep through life as it does not reach our awareness to make us reflect about the perspective. This goes for leadership too. Unless something happens that wakes us up.
This can be anything. A sudden burst of awareness of a beautiful sunrise that awakens our spiritual senses into our rational mind. Or the loss of a job that makes us panic around sustaining our wellness. The credit crisis that upset the entire financial world. It are these bursts of the conscious breaking through the unconscious that enrich our lives because we become aware and start thinking about it.
Three phases in our individual and collective evolution
The normal flow of a lifetime represents an interaction between the way we conduct our life and the reflection about the consequences of our actions or things that occur in the process that break through into our awareness. We are of course manipulated by the human surroundings that expects from us a certain behavior. This has changed over time and nowadays translates into economic dependencies, growth and consumption. While we live our lives we donot give all this much thought and behave according the patterns that are normalized in our surroundings as long as we get what we need. Noone would think of a transition of society. So what makes these days different?
Burst of awareness
Many things happen these days that make people think and reflect about the daily reality. Global issues, such as global warming, climate change, pollution, poverty, migration, religious conflicts, etc, tend to reach people through the media and often get very close, affecting people personally. The fear for chaos is enough for people to reflect and become aware that things need to change. The natural reaction is than to pinpoint at government and the responsibility of our political leaders. When these leaders seem to be wound up in their own culture of power and system dependencies the problems only seem to get worse. A difference in perception develops between the way society is managed and the way people see it. Society is not united anymore and conflicts arise against authority while people look at new ways to conduct their lives, often in survival mode. As individuals we suddenly have a choice. Do we follow the meanstream which clearly evolves into chaos? Or do we change perspective and deploy self leadership?
Personal leadership is made effective when stepping out of the meanstream
Self leadership
When we break loose from the meanstream of society we enter a phase of strong self reflection, the “I am” determination. Instead of walking the line unconsciously we place ourselves consciously on the cross of our own interpretation of reality. We question our surroundings from this point of self determination weighing our actions against our own perception of personal needs, ethics, awareness and responsibility. At this point we let go of our cultural meanstream and arrive at self leadership. We have a choice and every person takes the choice in a personal way. We see the timeline but placed ourselves outside and can now determine for ourselves where we place our focus. In our spiritual self time does not exist nor the timeline, just choices. Do we seek growth? Do we prefer conflict, competition or death? Do we seek self reflection and awareness development? Or do we want harmony? Our choice is conditioned by the way we perceive our surroundings and the support we receive for what we want to achieve. In the middle of a city our choice may well be to standup and join demonstrations against the political and economic forces that seem to block our progress or take away our wellness. Others may look for criminality as a way out of potential misery, or decide to go on the move in search for better opportunities elsewhere. Individual choices give rise to the breaking up of the old collective reality and culture. Within such tumult new community initiatives appear that do not follow the evolutionary timeline of the old community. New leadership is born.
Old (current) and new leadership
Community leadership
The key of community leadership is the understanding that time nor evolution exists, just purpose of establishing harmony and wellness today. This new leadership does not reside in the political and economic leadership simply because there time and evolution does exist! The old leadership is conditioned by its past, promises and choices made that commit structures in an evolutionary setting. The old leadership does not lead anymore, it manages its own potential deterioration and collapse by trying to avoid it. The 1970’s political choice to let post war harmony go in favor of economic growth has now captured old times leadership in a self suicidal grid of unsustainable dependencies and liabilities. Leaders cannot step off the evolutionary line because they were chosen to stay there and make the best of it. If they do they loose their leadership position and level of power. Only at times of elections new leadership potential can make a theoretical difference but once installed they are surrounded again by all the strings attached to the position. Only natural collaps can free us from these community management styles giving room for true renewal.
New leadership, such as in Sustainocracy, makes a difference because it places itself independently above contemporary economics and politics. It invites old leadership to the field of cocreative harmony. By challenging old leadership to assume the role of awareness driven change for harmony the same leadership can remain in the field of growth feeding itself with new values created in harmonizing initiatives. No total collaps is needed when old leadership is given room by new leadership to clean up itself in an evolutionary way by stepping over its own chaos and managing the transformation in a peaceful and value driven manner.
Perspective and perception
When we now go back to the perspective and perception issue of the beginning of this blog we can look at old and new leadership and combine both for sustainable progress. Old leadership positions itself on the evolutionary line of growth through greed and risk avoidance. The perspective of leadership is to sustain its position and produce growth, no matter what. The perception forward is chaos through competition or collaps. This conditions decision making by avoiding it through fear. Decisions are not make against ethics or harmony anymore but against fear and self interest. The perception backward is the origin of this situation and the decisions of the past that condition the decisions of now. Old leadership is trapped between fear and the old securities that require growth.
Old and new leadership develop under different paradigms
New leadership positions itself voluntarily and visionary in the field of harmony with the knowledge and sense of ethics of the times we reached. Its perspective is to create harmony through innovative change. Within the complexity of human community building the invitation to create harmony is extended to all who desire such mission. Among those invited are also the old leaders who fear collaps and find their challenge for growth unsustainable in their own context. By joining the new context they can create new oportunities of growth through the harmonizing effect of the new setting. Things need to change, and some need to disappear but all is done with a perspective of renewal of wellness and harmony. It provides old leadership with arguments and support to allow change while avoiding overall collaps. It only needs to accept new leadership that has no handicaps and provides room for renewal through a different perspective of reality. Perception at new leadership sees change as a feeding condition for harmony while new age values automatically follow the line of natural growth forward through enlargement and old growth driven leadership.
Conclusion
Old political and economical leadership has historically chosen to position itself on the unsustainable timescale of economic growth. It produces the enormous stress in society, locally and globally, among people and our environment due to structural lack of harmony. Old leadership cannot adopt harmony because of the way they sold their soul to the paradigm of economic growth in which collaps is the only way out. New leadership is unconditioned and positions itself in the paradigm of harmony with a perception of change and potential of new elements of growth. When old leadership finds new leadership in value driven communities such as Sustainocratic ventures then old leadership can undergo its own transformation process without collapse and sustaining its growth paradigm by adopting change through harmonization. Key in the process is that new leadership remains settled in the harmonization paradigm and only passes on elements of growth instead of itself. In our new world this combination of new and old leadership will become institutionalized, shaping a new society where wellness reigns in symbiotic alliance with our surroundings provoking change when harmony is challenged by greed.
Old and new leadership can develop in a complementory way
What will 2015 bring?
Explosively more everything, except harmony!
While working hard with my STIR Foundation on the City of Tomorrow with all its initiatives (AiREAS, SAFE, FRE2SH, STIR Academy, etc), to produce a harmony driven society and culture, the big reality is evolving in exacty the opposite way. 2015 will bring the world more of everything, especially explosive stress but no harmony.
The reason for this is the positioning of our leading influencers and policy makers, to which we entrusted our wellbeing development and progress, in the field of greed and economic growth (instead of harmony where they should be).
Growth of Greed
The dominant field of insensitive speculation for financial growth, debt collection and social cost reduction produces at the same time the further development of poverty, people in chaos and in search for survival.
Greed produces poverty and tries to protect its interests through bureaucracy
The problem of executive power concentrated in greed is that they develop legal instruments to increase bureaucracy and control mechanisms that block innovation and criticism of greed. This whole situation eliminates any sense of responsibility or ethics from the community while some people and institutions expand their greed over the back of everything else. Justice is in the hands of immoral criminality but this is not recognized in a system that created its own moral, blind and insensitive to its consequences.
Breaking the impasse
Many people turn their backs to the immoral executive of power by not recognizing their “authority” anymore. They start developing themselves into various directions:
1. They lay their hope into faith of the super natural, such as God, or religions, in search for spiritual meaning and purpose.
2. Or they lay their efforts into criticism of the greedy system that they turned their back to, in the hope to make it reflect and change, if necessary with force.
3. Further advanced people start to develop a new reality out of awareness and co-creation with like thinking people. Such new systems of complexity are challenging the old reality of greed but not necessarily target harmony yet, just the expression of their awareness and dissatisfaction. They often just want the destruction of the old wall of impediments rather than start developing the alternative in the field of harmony.
The field of awareness is hence still largely an unstructured chaos of initiatives and beliefs that have yet to mingle and commit to co-creation and direction. Meanwhile they do tend to become active in challenging the wall of impediments, offering more and more people the chance to escape from the senseless chaos and get into something more constructive.
All diversity of expressions of awareness are necessary to eventually develop a new evolutionary complexity of self aware harmony. Ethics, or the resistence to the lack of it, is a fundament for new society development but needs to cristalize itself into a common perception of structured progress and wellness. The search challenges the individual awareness in order to generate a level of empathy and cocreative effort. That is a next step. People involved first need to reassure for themselves their individual TO BE before they can contribute to a collective one. This only happens when they let go of the past and break through into creating their present and future together.
Awareness is necessary but also fragments all kinds of expressions
The self aware individuals (and even institutions) that manage to break through the wall of impendents are still themselves in struggle to define their own freedom and identity. Their anger with the blockage through impediments and their suffering of chaos first needs to given an emotional and spiritual position. You cannot eat “Awareness” nor does it provide housing, basic need or luxury. Awareness of what one leaves behind does not provide awareness where one goes to. Often freedom is accompanied by fear, a different type of fear than chaos, but fear it is. What will the future bring?
* Some let themselves be lured into the grips of other dogmatic systems that promise salvation but happen to be as dominant and greedy as the ones left behind
* Only few develop leadership skills to create a new harmonic human world. But these people are in such minority, with so little effect still in the shadow of the big movements of expansion of greed, chaos and awareness development, that the difference they make is still negligable.
Summing up all this we can easily state that harmony is still a long way away because of the powerful counter forces that move away from it. The sum of all arrows, especially greed and chaos, move away from from harmony making it an increasingly empty field, despite the efforts of some, like the STIR Foundation. At one stage the turning point will come and all forces will be directed at hamony but right now this turning point is still far away at the expense of more and more stress.
So 2015 will show an increase of:
In negative sense:
- greed and speculation with all powerfull (legal) instruments of the evil to further suck wellness away
- poverty and chaos development with all signs of dispair, aggression, criminality, etc
- the reaction of governments with more taxes, bureaucracy and control mechanisms
- the further blockage of true innovation out of self interest of a few
In positive sense:
- the increase of collapse of the old system feeding both chaos and awareness
- collapse of the old system eventually weakens the wall of impediments allow for more break throughs
- the breakthrough of people in search for their own freedom and self determination
- the search for spiritual meaning and solutions for new phases of wellbeing
Every individual, every community, every family or institution is facing one of the situations and will recognize for themselves where they stand. The ultimate situation is to work together on harmony in society, like Sustainocracy tries to establish by inviting people from each area to work together (not everyone is chaos or greed is in that particular state but represent institutions that are. They are most likely to use their own breakthough into awareness to try to get their institutions along and accept the invitation into Sustainocratic value driven ventures).
Health is a responsibility not a cure
Often I am asked to speak about the AiREAS organization, a multidisciplinary cooperation that co-creates “healthy cities, with healthy people in a healthy environment”. The presentations have to do with the importance of “health” for the progressive stability of a community, such as a city and the current lack of it, causing all kinds of crises. I then call for responsibility and awareness with a strong sense of urgency. Now I make you also part of the challenge that affects everything and everybody.
What is “health”?
The World Health Organization (WHO) already defined health in 1948:
“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Healthy people tend to take health for granted while only people with a direct or indirect health problem become aware of the importance of health for their well being. This would indicate that health is only a point of attention for sick people. They tend to rely on health care, a reactive structure within society that deals with the visible part of disease or disorder. The lack of proactive attention to health is showing up in global issues, the local productivity and cost of living. The proactive nature of AiREAS for human health and a healthy environment is breaking through into those cultures where the societal sickness has become a serious impediment. People and policy makers open up to the issue of what “health” really is and become surprised of the ethical issue of negligence that has affected our species to an extend of lethal proportions. This breakthrough in awareness leads to a totally new perception of our reality and a new phase of ethics that transforms our societies in a complex wave of interrelated innovations.
In order to make people aware of what health is I use a few animated films. This one has proven to be significant:
Mitochondria are the little engines of our cells. Some believe that they are evolutionary remains of the first single cell life forms that represent complex life on Earth already 600 Million years after Earth was born out of stardust, 5 Billion years ago. The single cell’s working is an illustration of how life works at microscopical level. There is no sign of pollution, just an intense repetitive harmonic interaction with a large diversity of inter-molecular relationships. Water is a key carrier.
A human being consists of billions of such cells with mitochondria. These cells of our own body, together with cells of the bacterial world that populates our organism in symbiosis, help us to live life comfortably in a well orchestrated, material and spiritual complexity. In essence every living human body is a universe of its own with billions of species interacting and helping us live a comfortable life. Trying to understand this in a rational way is the same as trying to find out how life and the universe work.
But what happens when we pollute this delicate living interaction?
Pollution
Then I ask my audience what could happen when we pollute the mitochondrial world? What if we tamper with the harmonic interaction at atomic and microscopical level? This is the case when I show the effects of Ultra Fine Particles (UFP) on our body, as discovered in AiREAS and other scientific research at microscopic level. UFP’s may have a biological nature that is solved by the defense mechanisms of our human body. We refer to pollution when the UFP’s contain human made substances that our body cannot deal with. They produce infections, blockage of arteries, lung and brain problems, intestinal disorder, etc.
The WHO has declared Air Pollution as number 1 cause of death in public space, 3 times more than traffic accidents!
By comparison:
- The water catastrophe in Holland in 1953 claimed a one time amount of 1500 human deaths. The Dutch government decided to take protective action by starting the construction of our water defense systems that are now being seen as one of the modern world miracles and a source of inspiration and innovative economic progress.
- Air pollution in the 21st century claims over 3000 deaths per year in this same country. Instead of declaring its a catastrophy the money driven government wants to make it into a business case first.
The immorality of the current system’s approach is one of the key issues that we will face. 1953 was a time frame within the moral sensitivity that remained after WorldWar I and II. Since the 70’s this morality has transformed into a financial dependence in which human wellness is subject to business development rather than ethics.
AiREAS is “Making the invisible visible”:
“What you cannot see does not exist” is a common awareness problem. Most people are unaware that pollution causes three levels of reaction at molecular level:
- Infectious deformation at birth or at a later stage in life (physical and behavioral)
- (Premature) Death
- Genetic disturbance
All these issues do not show at once, they appear gradually and shock people when they give birth to a baby with visible and invisible problems, develop cancer and other diseases inside their own bodies, suffer the premature death of a loved one, or face death oneself, all due to our overall lack of awareness and related negligence.
We have been pollution our environment to such an extend that it is causing climate change, global heating and general disturbance of our habitat. When reflecting on the mitochondria people suddenly realize is that our microscopical reality is a mirror image of the universe that surrounds us. When we pollute our surrounding we pollute our microscopic self as well. The anthropocene (the era in which human beings affected life on Earth in such a dramatic way that it can be traceable for ever in the future) is not just a potential archaeological reality but also biological and genetic.
Common sense or shameless greed?
It is tough to accept that the lifestyle issue that causes the visible consequences today in healthcare costs and human suffering already dates back in development for many centuries. It just got more intense over time and hence more apparent. In any gathering I can safely state that 70% of all the people present will die of some sort of cancer that could have been avoided. The same goes for all those who read this, including me and my loved ones. For some the drama of awareness makes them feel desperate, others, like me and many feel highly motivated to stand up and develop ethical alternatives for society.
Scientists claim that our species and way of organizing ourselves will auto-eliminate our human species within 250 years. Banks, money driven governments and businesses are to blame and so are we in our greed to consume at the expense of our evolutionary well being. It is hard to accept that people who feel healthy today already have severe illness programmed inside their being simply because of the pollution that has accumulated inside and around us.
We suddenly realize that “health” is not a matter of curing a decease yet a collective responsibility towards life itself. It starts with ourselves.
3 levels of ethics
This then brings me to the evolution of ethics (the philosophical science of determining what is “good behavior”) and the gradual break through into awareness that appears around the world:
- Negligence and unawareness
- Reactive to illness
- Proactive for health
But awareness is not enough. Our current societies are built around negligence (fragmented money driven interests of economies of growth) and the reactive, consequence driven secondary economies (health care, insurance and consequence driven tax on consumption).
People claim responsibility world wide
Healthcare is only dealing with the superficial issues of illnesses in an economy directed by medical care and pharmaceutical industries. They do not cure the problem, they suppress it, mask it, stretch it or cut it away.
To take responsibility in a proactive way in a community that is not just addressing the holistic issue of health, we also challenge the entire system’s complexity built around economies of care. The care taking system is not based on ethics but financial instruments that use the human being, just like the banks expose us to debts and governments sustain themselves through taxation. We see that the political and economized care system itself is unhealthy, unethical and inhuman, part of the problem rather that the solution, despite the human passion of people who populate the workforce of caring professionals.
A huge humanitarian problem is facing us
From an economic point of view the costs of lack of health are unbearable. In Holland alone the costs have multiplies by 5 in 8 years time (from 12 to 72 billion between 2006 and 2014!)), not just because we grew more ill or older with an equivalent increase on demand of care. The cause of the exponential cost explosion is the same as what caused the bank crisis in 2008, being the system’s corruption and total lack of morality in finance driven care organizations that use human fear and pain to increase their own institutional financial wealth. While certain governance and human beings break through into awareness and sense of responsibility it are the corrupt secondary systems and their leaders that oppose and maintain a degree of system sickness that is as difficult to address as health itself, simply because the financial lobby is more important than the human wellness.
Ethics is hence an issue that goes beyond the human being and addresses also the way we organize and redefine our societies. This is the biggest challenge humankind faces. Awareness only breaks through into change when the pain is highest, i.e. when it is almost too late. This means that we have very limited time left over to take corrective and proactive measures at the expense of our disappearance as a species if we don’t. And even if we react with urgency we still face the issue of making “the invisible visible”, just to find out that the damage may be beyond repair.
AiREAS is step 3 in structured ethics:
The new society is proactively human value driven. AiREAS is a precedent of Sustainocracy.
AiREAS and its sustainocratic working is hence not a cure, it is a collective ethical responsibility, an evolutionary step and a precedent that could be adopted by the United Nations, the human rights organizations and the International Court of Justice. By making the precedent visible and known to the world we invite the world to follow our example out of holistic self preservation.
AiREAS uses the puzzle pieces of the same society that make up the phase 2 (reactive) ethical community yet in a different, phase 3 ethical composition. This drawing shows how it works and that is very easy to implement if the right people, at the right levels of authority are willing to accept the invitation to co-create health and step from the dis-harmonic phase 2 type of society to the harmonic phase 3 type.
AiREAS is connecting responsibilities around the purpose represented by the blue field of co-creation
- Create: business innovators
- Area: local government
- Learn: scientists
- Behave: local citizens (culture)
- Sustainocrat: the representative of human values in jeopardy
Jean-Paul Close
Sustainocrat
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 