Some necessary issues that create a totally new economy, save humankind and the planet but make the current power structures obsolete
Our current human world is in drastic need of a fundamental transformation. If we don´t we destroy our habitat and our sustainable expectations as a species. If we do we create numerous new opportunities for humankind but challenge all the power hierarchies in place right now. Let us take the four big lines of transformation that we see as an absolute necessity.
Energy
The sun is the main supplier of energy on Earth. All life on our planet has been made possible thanks to this continuous source. Other energetic players in the development of life have been the rotation of our planet Earth, the movement of water (influenced by gravity, evaporation and the Moon) and the windy weather patterns. Humankind however decided to build its golden age of (technological) welfare on the usage of fossil fuels. This natural source of storage of millions of years of sunlight and carbon combinations provided us with incredible amounts of energy and equal amounts of pollution. Part of our climate issues can be directly related to our addiction to burning fuels.
The end of the fossil fuel era in sight. It has had and still has devastating consequences on our surroundings and our health. After all we have been using it for a few hundred years without any ethical bounderies. Now a desperate search is going on for alternative sources that sustain the same level of energy usage. Most of the solutions found are as destructive as the original fossil fuel problem.
The real issue is not the availability of sources of energy. It is our unjustified massive need for it. Most individuals (especially in industrialized countries) and communities use energy for transportation, the production and logistics of everything we consume, for warmth in our homes or offices, and for cooking our food. Compared to any other living species, in our modern world of technology, we use up many thousand times more energy per person and society than we stricktly should and need as a natural species.
If one tree in a forest would behave as a human being than the forest would disappear, consumed by this single tree. And in the end the tree would disappear due to the lack of a forest. Thankfully the tree uses sunlight to live and develops a working relationship with the other trees and the living world around it. If human beings would behave like trees we would be bathing in abundance and wellness, not in the risk of our self elimination.
The message hence is to reduce our individual and collective energy usage by at least 75%. This is a great challenge in which we can deploy our scientific knowledge as well as a creative, innovative nature. Our main supplier is the sun for the remaining 25% and for this we need to become regionally self sufficient in a clean and neat way.
Social engagement instead of money
In our current society all relationships between people, our needs and institutions are organized through money. In essence this means that we delegate our wellbeing to a whole set of financial players. This has two important consequences. The first is that we as individuals have lost our sense of responsibility towards important issues. Secondly we expect that responsibility to be taken by those financially oriented players. We are now becoming aware that this is not taken, certainly not in a proactive manner. The institutions built within the financial cloud have a financial dependence and fragmented focus. None can be helt responsible for “the whole”. Even local territorial government is managing a territory as a profit and costs, not as a shared responsibility.
This means that we need to engage again directly with our own responsibilities, certainly when they refer to our core natural human values as a biological species that also dependents on its natural environment for our integral health, wellness and sustainable expectations. We need to learn to see society not as a profit and loss account but as a cocreative shared responsibility. Our financially based society has torn our relationships apart based on self centeredness and shared services against a price. Our social engagement brings back our care for and with each other, our environment and the abundant reciprocity we receive through this interaction.
The message here is that we connect again with real values directly, like the air we breath, the food we eat, the water we drink, the warmth we need and work together with our follow people on our health and safety together in self aware cocreation. Money, if needed at all, is just a means. Institutions are our values driven instruments that share our responsibilities with us, not against us.
Regenerative, local, circular and clean productivity
We currently misuse our available resources in a destructive and abusive way. We are surrounded by a sense of shopping abundance that is being realized against the destruction of our habitat, often without recovery due to lack of return or circular processes. We have created black holes of blind consumption and waste pollution. Overall this era is referred to the Anthropocene. This is the only era that humankind leaves an unerasable destructive footprint on our planet Earth. In a way that we are well on our way in eliminating ourselves.
The only way to turn this around is to develop regenerative, local, circular and clean productivity that covers our needs and reuses our resources over and over again. We don’t have to own any material resources and can create patterns of usages and reusage. Local productivity in this way demands the involvement of the entire population.
The message here is that we share our responsibilities, our productivity and value creation together in a natural, circular and regenerative manner. We redesign our communities (cities, rural) to optimally fullfil this on a local for local scale. We interconnect regionally to share our abundance and help cocreate wellness and our core values on a global networked scale.
Engagement of our youngest generations
The leadership required for these points is one of wise senior adulthood, not (young) blind speculative opportunism. Our learning towards such leadership starts already at the level of early childhood. This means that our educational patterns need to be restructured. Rather than setting the scene of an indoctrinized social structure of dependence we need to help our young people themselves in awareness, empathy, sense of responsibility, open reflection and feed back loops, self leadership, cocreation of core values and togetherness. Their guidance will be done on developing their own authentic and meaningful identity, equality, safety, health, awareness, trust and cocreation of genuin values.
The message here is that we need to present an open learning space for our youngest generations where they can optimally develop themselves without indoctrination but a core natural human values attitude towards awareness building, self reflection and self leadership. They will walk through all their growing up phase with new role models in societal engagement and working together.
Sustainocracy and world peace?
Mid 2022 a Peace concert will take place in Nigeria. It is being organized by peace ambassador Ukpeme Okon and contemporary jazz musician Rick Dellaratta. The happy expectation of this unique gathering, that will be broadcast worldwide, is a wonderful occasion for us to initiate a dialogue about Peace, its significance and how to achieve it in a lasting manner.
If we look up the word Peace then we get a number of meanings, all representing relatively passive states of tranquility, the absence of agression or war. This is not enough for us. Peace needs to be a continuous process of harmonisation and conflict avoidance. Is this possible in our current human world order? We believe it is not. Our world is full of conflicts which are caused by a self centered attitude of having, taking and controls. In order to achieve world Peace humankind needs to grow up and start behaving in a different way.
“Peace is achieved when all people and institutions are capable to resolve their differences or conflicts without violence, and work together in cooperative co-creation (also with our natural environment) to improve the quality of all life“.
In our current world of political and financial hierarchies “diplomacy” is already a good step into the direction of lasting Peace. In certain regions institutions learned to work together. Often this is to strengthen their financial position by sharing costs or addressing financial needs together. The concept of Triple Helix (Government – Business – University alliances) is such an example. But is still focused on the financial wellness of a region, not integral wellness through the involvement of all. Citizens are still consumers, workforce and tax payer. Not societal partners for sustainable progress, because in a world run by institutions progress is measured in financial parameters. The financials are presented as shared global responsibility, not certain core values. Even certain social securities have been translated into financial buffers as care, creating even more financial dependences. This creates the distortion among people and our environment which leads to climate issues, pollution, increased costs of society, inequality, speculative actions for financial growth, and the appearance of points of singularity upon which all kinds of collapse can be expected.
Sustainocracy introduces a set of core human values that are a shared responsibility in a multiple helix environment. It is theoretically not that difficult to create clustered, multidisciplinary communities to develop those core human values. In practice we see that such gathering at the regional cocreation level of Sustainocracy (sustainable HUMAN development and Democracy) is effective to provide people with real securities in their basic needs. It also assures their involvement in realizing them and sharing the abundance among all equally. With our current state of scientific knowledge there is no area in the world where circular community self sufficiency can not be realized.
“If we accept that sustainable human wellness and progress is a cocreation, not a cost, then we can also develop lasting Peace together” (Jean-Paul Close, Sustainocracy).
Peace is achieved when we do not have to compete for our needs. Living nature around us is based on shared abundance. When we associate ourselves wisely with nature and trust ourselves in applying well our knowledge with a sharing attitude, then we can all benefit from the natural abundance in a peaceful manner. What reasons could there be for not taking this responsibility together?
Are you THE 1 out of 400 Million revolutions?
Many initiatives are born through activist and entrepreneurial citizens that want to make a positive difference for “a better world”. Together we represent a world changing movement without precedent.
A few month ago we (a group of social/ecological entrepreneurs in Europe) decided to look out for other values driven citizen’s initiatives throughout Europe (and the World). In each of our entrepreneurial environments we had detected many people who address issues such as pollution, climate, social care, ecological care, etc as a personal mission to make a difference in a world of destruction and abuse. The common denominator of all these initiatives is their drive to produce general 4 x WIN (human, societal, ecological and financial) value instead of the mindless old style, speculative and blindly destructive pursuit of just money.
Bringing these innovative entreprises, small and large, together in a platform would show the world that an fundamental and powerful change is happening everywhere.
We needed a name for that overarching platform that represented a new set of genuine values than the old political financial steering that was reigning and destroying the world. We did not want to present a new business entity, nor a new institution, yet a sence of generalized movement that makes the human world turn around into genuine sustainable progress due to the efforts of millions of pioniers. On their own they remain vulnerable, small scale, locally focused, often even sub-critical due to lack of support or opposition of old school power silos.
But together they make a force that changes the world.
A uniting image, representing 400 Million + 1 revolutions, was proposed by one of the partners that goes under the name of Unstitution. Another partner, Youth4Planet, was addressing the youthful generations that already seem to look at reality with different eyes than their ancestors. They are challenged to show their youthview views through video’s, collected in the Earthbeat platform. All these partners had UNITED and found each other in the weekly online gatherings of Sustainocracy.
This is the visual that has been created for the gathering of values driven initiatives. The 400M stands for 400,000,000.– or 400 Million, a large abstract number showing the massive movement that is growing among citizens with an entrepreneurial “can do” attitude. The “+1” refer to each of us who sense to be part of the movement with our own initiative. The circle and word “revolution” established a sense of movement with values driven change as a motoric force for sustainable progress. The word “revolutions” refers to the turning of the wheels, such as the wheels of the bicycles that will travel from Luxemburg to Glasgow to show the world climate conference, COP26, that “It’s Happening”, with or without the political participation.
400 Million and 1 revolutions has a broader motivation than just COP26.
We bring together initiatives interregionally in order to establish dynamic sustainocratic clusters that empower themselves in their results driven focus. Examples of existing interregional cooperative clusters are:
- AiREAS – air quality and regional health
- Earthbeat – video challenge for young generations
- School of Talents and Wellness – participatory learning in the space of Sustainocracy
- Integral Positive Health – healthy neighborhoods, regional small heroes (focus on quality of life through cocreation)
- Unstitution – bringing multidisciplinary clusters together
- STIR – multidisciplinary and multicultural clustering research with the Sustainocratic context of core human values
- Youth4Planet – engagement with primary schools for ecological learning programs and climate awareness
All develop as multidisciplinary platforms that prioritize local human and ecological values. Involved are local citizens, entrepreneurs, science, schools and local governments.
Are you the 1? Or do you know initiatives that need to be part of this? Just let us know and join the network. It is free of charge, as your commitment is worth more than can be expressed in money.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 