We are a non-profit organization Humanity Integrated that is comprised of people who find themselves in the most interesting yet trying times of human evolution – the time of global crisis, which is the first stage of a profound change.
If you tell someone they don’t influence anybody, they’re not going to do anything. But if you tell them they influence a thousand people they’ll change their lives. And that’s why I think it’s so critical for us to understand first and foremost how and why we are connected.”
James Fowler, Professor of Medical Genetics and Political Science at University of California, is the co-author of Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends’ Affect Everything You Feel, Think, And Do.
The book describes conclusions from statistical analysis of data that was collected as part of a heart study in Framingham, Massachusetts, tracking over 12,000 individuals for 32 years.
For the first time,” says Fowler, “we are able to get a birds’ eye view of networks like the networks that you live in.”
Here is a 9 min. clip with highlights from Fowler’s talk on social networks at Pop Tech:
Fowler describes a:
Three Degrees of Influence” concept: “Your friends’ friends’ friends’ have an impact on you. They’re going to impact whether or not you’re obese, whether or not you smoke… whether or not you’re happy, whether or not you’re lonely, whether or not you’re depressed…”
Fowler explains that this interconnection works two ways,
We shape our networks but our networks also shape us.” Therefore, “If you do a kind act to a person they’ll do a kind act to another person and that will also spread…” And that this serves an “evolutionary purpose… Human social networks are in our nature… we have grown up over hundreds of thousands of years in these social networks.”
Humans within this planet now are the newest experience of the universe in what, biologically, always seems to come down to cycles: of unity to individuation, through which arises conflict, negotiations happen, cooperation is arrived at; and we go to unity again at the next higher level.
And that’s why the story of evolution is so important today, to help us understand where humanity is, and what is our next step.”
Elisabet Sahtouris PhD, Evolutionary Biologist and Futurist
In her book EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution, Sahtouris describes the evolutionary cycle of other species who, like humans today, transitioned through highly competitive phases of development:
When we look anew at evolution, we see not only that other species have been as troublesome as ours, but that many a fiercely competitive situation resolved itself in a cooperative scheme.
The kind of cells our bodies are made of, for example, began with the same kind of exploitation among bacteria that characterizes our historic human imperialism….. In fact, those ancient bacteria invented technologies of energy production, transportation and communications, including a World Wide Web still in existence today, during their competitive phase and then used those very technologies to bind themselves into the cooperative ventures that made our own existence possible.
In the same way, we are now using essentially the same technologies, in our own invented versions, to unite ourselves into a single body of humanity that may make yet another new step in Earth’s evolution possible.
If we look to the lessons of evolution, we will gain hope that the newly forming worldwide body of humanity may also learn to adopt cooperation in favor of competition. The necessary systems have already been invented and developed; we lack only the understanding, motive, and will to use them consciously in achieving a cooperative species maturity.”
Is Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Incomplete?
In the following video excerpt of an interview with Sahtouris, she explains how Darwin’s theory only describes the competitive stage of each evolutionary cycle:
What I would consider the tragedy of our times is that we are more connected than ever, and yet, we don’t realize it and don’t truly live it.”
Michael Wesch, PhD, a Cultural Anthropologist, stated the above at the end of a talk at PopTech where he shared insights from an exploration of one of today’s most defining characteristics – the development of online culture.
Here is a 6 min. clip with highlights from the lecture:
At the start of the lecture, Wesch clarifies the significance of media in shaping human culture and relationships:
Media is like an environment, it takes us over, and sort of consumes us in many ways. Media are not just tools, they’re not just means of communication, media actually mediate our conversations. Media, in some ways, determine or dictate who can say what to who, what they can say, how it will be said etc. And so, when media change – our conversations change.”
He later adds that the really deep question that he and his students are trying to get at is
not only how our conversations are changing but how our communities might be changing, and even how our selves are changing.”
In contrast to old forms of media, Wesch analyzes the nature of new social media as:
• not controlled by the few, • not one way, • created by, for, and around networks, not masses • having the potential to transform individual pursuits into collective action.”
Towards the end of the presentation, he shows the most responded-to video in the early days of YouTube – an anonymous video that encouraged people all over the world to share messages of love and oneness.
I hope it doesn’t come off as blind optimism,” he says, “because, in fact, these people would not be writing these messages if these things actually existed. If we were one world and one people and all those types of things, then they wouldn’t need to say it.”
I’m talking about a revolution that’s probably the hardest kind, the kind that takes place in the human soul, in the human mind. To be able to tear everything down, throw everything out, and start with a completely fresh paper and say… ‘okay, how do we solve this problem?’”
Starting with peak oil, Ruppert clarifies how oil is literally everywhere in a person’s life…
All plastic is oil. Most paints, all pesticides are made from oil. Everything from toothpaste, to toothbrushes, is made from oil. There are seven gallons of oil in every tire. There is nothing anywhere, in any combination, which will replace the edifice built by fossil fuels. Nothing. Peak oil is probably now very easy to explain. Much easier than it was a long time ago. People have felt what $147 a barrel of oil feels like.”
…and how the running out of oil in the world will force humanity to make very big changes:
The end of oil is like end of the way of life. We’re hitting a new era.”
What Will You Do When Money Runs Out?
Ruppert continues by painting a bleak fade-to-black picture of the world as it heads into the future, stating the complications or even impossibility of replacing oil with the alternative energies usually proposed – ethanol, electricity, coal, nuclear, tidal and solar power – and explaining how food and monetary systems throughout the 20th century were setup in a way that would lead to a collapse of humanity’s systems, and which is being felt globally today.
The whole global economy cannot be sustained, it requires infinite growth. But infinite growth collides with finite energy. … So you have finite energy and you have a financial paradigm which demands infinite growth and we’re at the point of human history where the infinite growth paradigm collides with something that is more powerful than money is.
By 2006, I knew that the collapse was very imminent, that there would be a major implosion of the US economy. … And now, collapse is happening, these pieces are falling exactly as everything else had written, said, done. All the peak oil activists, all the sustainability advocates. Our map was proving deadly accurate. Things don’t break up, they break down.
When a government collapses, what happens? The mail stops getting delivered. Air traffic controllers don’t get paid, so they don’t go to work, which means planes don’t fly. Bridges and highway inspections don’t get made. Food and drug administration inspections don’t get made. Maintenance is going to be defrayed. Law enforcement stops working. I mean, it’s no secret now. You see the headlines every day. California’s bankrupt, Michigan’s bankrupt, Ohio… They’re shutting down services left and right. There are tent cities springing up all over the country, there are homeless, displaced people. The great many billionaires, who we would call the elites, the many very, very wealthy people are getting crashed, burned and eaten alive.
What you don’t hear is the fact that all over the world economies are collapsing much faster than the US economy. Britain is an absolute basket case. There is a curtain of despair descending across Eastern Europe. There’s a revolution underway in Greece: it’s not riots, it’s not civil unrest… it’s a revolution. Drug violence right across the border in Mexico. This is all part of the collapse. Pakistan, Afghanistan, there’s lots of violence. The people who have run the planet to this point and who are running the planet now are losing control.”
Will You Be Concerned About Humanity’s Basic Survival? Will You Try To Find Balance Among People & Nature? Will You Change The Way You Think?
Ruppert continues by discussing a paradigm shift for humanity, involving:
The need to shift to a concern about humanity’s basic survival
The need to find balance between people and nature in order to survive
The need to change the way people think, which Ruppert considers as being “humanity’s greatest challenge ever”
The human race now is only going to be concerned, not with an ideology, but what allows them to survive. Capitalism, socialism and communism are all terms that need to be tossed in the trash can immediately, because all of them were created on the assumption of infinite resources. Not one of those ideologies – which are now dead dinosaurs, archaic fossils – is relevant to our way of life. Not one of them recognizes that there must be a balance between growth, the resources, and the planet.
Forget the idea that you can have as much as you want, because until mankind surrenders to the fact that it lives on a finite planet, and it must have balance with that planet, with the planet’s resources, with the animal life and all the other life, there can be no happiness for anything. Anything. It’s all about getting balance back.”
Maybe You Will If Everybody Does…
After confronting the viewer with a situation that seems impossible to solve, Ruppert’s final words in Collapse shed a thin beam of optimistic light, hinting that when 10% of the human population realize a change of thinking, then that thinking will spread to the entire human population.
There is a legend, or a fable about the 100th monkey. A long time ago, in the late ’40s, early ’50s, when atom bombs and H-bombs were invoked with above ground testing, we set off an atom bomb on an atol in the Pacific. And then we waited a number of years, because we wanted to answer questions like how soon after we nuked something, would it be possible to get any kind of life started again? So they went back to this island and they decided to repopulate it with monkeys. And the monkeys ate coconuts. Everything was pretty healthy, except for the fact that the husks of the coconut were slightly radioactive. So the scientists took 10 monkeys or so, and taught them to wash the coconuts in the fresh water stream on the island before they cracked them open, and turned the whole thing loose to see what would happen. Well, you know, pretty soon maybe 12 monkeys out of a population of 10,000 were washing their coconuts. And then 20, and then 47. But a funny thing happened. As soon as the 100th monkey started washing his coconut husk, all 10,000 started washing simultaneously. I guess one way that I have always looked at my life, especially since I clearly understood what this issue was in late 2001, is – this is my quest for the 100th monkey.”
Based on current scientific research and expert views about the accumulating crises humanity is expected to face over the coming century, Earth 2100 is a predictive portrayal of the century through the life of Lucy, a fictional woman born in the U.S. in 2008.
No Crisis Exists On Its Own
Earth 2100 paints a picture of the global crisis’ tight interconnectedness, how no one crisis exists on its own and cannot be dealt with in a pin-point manner. What the film shows is that:
an oil crisis becomes a food crisis,
they both connect to increase climate change and global warming,
which increases drought and affects a water crisis,
bringing about famine and thus, mass immigration of people seeking food and water,
as well as deforestation and mass animal and plant extinction,
rising sea levels and thus, floods,
which then bring about outbreaks of infectious diseases,
and this all becomes intensified by rapidly increasing human population, increasing worldwide consumption demand and natural disasters.
The Need To See Things At A Global Level
In presenting this complicated global crisis tangle humanity is expected to face, i.e. many individual crises as one global, integral crisis, Earth 2100 fundamentally proposes the need for a change in people’s approach to the world, from approaching problems locally and nationally to approaching them globally. As mentioned toward the film’s close:
[By 2100] we’re going to have joint management of water resources, of energy resources, of disaster management. We’re going to be living on a planet where we don’t see things at a national level, but we see things at a global level.”
–Peter Gleick, Ph.D., world renowned water scientist, President and co-founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security
By the time we get to 2100, the challenge of building a global, green economy where we’re sharing technologies and where we’re not fighting wars over water and oil… That’s going to bring out the best in the human family.”
–Van Jones, senior fellow at the Center For American Progress and a senior policy advisor at Green For All
That’s if we move in a positive direction. However, Earth 2100 also points out a major threat if the change toward a global, integral approach to the world is not met in time. This would result in much suffering, verging on the brink of civilizational collapse.
If we continue on the business as usual trajectory, there will be a tipping point that we cannot avert. We will indeed drive the car over the cliff.”
–John Holdren, advisor to President Barack Obama for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Through the voices of scientists, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward stresses the central, vast role social and environmental influence plays in shaping people’s lives, how today’s Western society’s influence leads individuals and society as a whole deeper into crisis, and the need to change the values permeating society in order to set the conditions for a healthy, balanced society.
Social Influence Makes Or Breaks You
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward raises current scientific views that challenge age-old views that diseases of all kinds – mental, heart, cancer, strokes, rheumatoid, autoimmune, addictions – and inclinations toward violence, are not genetically determined, but acquired through the social and environmental influences a person experiences, from as early as one’s fetal development, emphasizing the considerable sensitivity toward a person’s development through fetal stages, infancy and childhood.
Social Influence Of Self-Interest Values Breaks You
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward thus uses this basis to show how the values that shape Western society – self-interest values that measure people and countries’ well-being based on how much money and assets they have – create an unsustainable feedback loop that continues leading the world deeper into myriad crises.
If Social Influence Of Self-Interest Values Breaks You, What Kind Of Social Influence Would Be Needed To Remake You?
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward very clearly brings the problem and its approach to the surface:
People are products of their societies
Society’s current self-interest values lead individuals and society as a whole deeper into crisis
To undergo a positive change, each person individually and society as a whole, needs to perpetuate different values into the society that would bring about personal and social well-being
It’s clear that we’re on the verge of a great transition in human life. That what we face now is this fundamental change of the life we’ve known over the last century.”
–Dr. Richard Wilkinson, Professor Emeritus of social epidemiology, University of Nottingham
Blind Spot analyzes the problem of peak oil, that:
Oil and fossil fuel energy is finite, and coming to its end in the near future
Human population is constantly increasing
Society is not preparing for the end of oil and fossil fuels, but instead self-interest values, which encourage the direct and indirect use of fossil fuels, continue being perpetuated in the media.
The Problem Of Peak Oil – That It Connects In A Complex Web Of Other Problems
Blind Spot presents the complications in dealing with the problem of peak oil, by showing how it connects to many other current and future problems: inflation, stagflation, pollution, climate change, global warming, overconsumption and overpopulation.
Through interviews with scientists and experts in ecology, economy and sociology, Blind Spot proposes some approaches to these problems, including population control, policies for using less energy and implementing different kinds of energy.
Peak Oil’s Central Problem – Challenging The Strong Influence Of Self-Interest Values Upon Society
However, central to the problems that the film’s experts’ mentioned is the issue of social influence. There is an in-built threat in challenging generations of self-interest values at the center of society’s beliefs and assumptions, or “The American Way,” as people in Americanized societies are used to relying on cheap oil and energy, living in big houses, being highly individualized, and traveling long distances.
The cultural constraint on change becomes very dangerous, because when it is challenged, it is challenging generations of belief and assumptions. … There are people who have to study raw data, who are trained as scientists to have their belief system based upon evidence, and when that contradicts generations of belief, then they become cultural outcasts. That became incredibly frustrating to me. I have kids, I want peace on earth, I want all good things, and yet, I found that people that also want those things unable to realize that we’re all a huge part of this problem.”
–Jason Bradford, PhD, ecological scientist and expert in sustainability and local food systems
Watch Blind Spot Trailer
For more info about the movie & to purchase a DVD copy, visit: blindspotdoc.com
Meltdown: The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse paints a picture of the 2008-to-2010 global socio-economic sphere. It follows the banking bubble’s burst in September 2008, and the worldwide domino effect of troubles and uprisings that followed.
The Financial Crisis Forced People To Recognize Global Interconnectedness
Most notably, Meltdown: The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse presents how the 2008-to-2010 financial crash and its effects stamped an imprint of global interconnectedness into people’s worldviews, especially those of bankers, economists and politicians, forcing a revision on issues of global-scale responsibility and interdependence.
Meltdown: The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse takes the viewer through the times before the 2008 financial crash, when there was little acknowledgement or concern about the vast reaching implications of global interconnectedness, as New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin points out in the first part of the movie, about how people in New York did not take the English bank Northern Rock’s crash as a warning sign:
People in New York saw the crash of the Northern Rock bank in England as ‘that’s happening over there, that’s not happening here.’ The sense of interconnectedness was not realized until the very last moment.”
… to 2010, a time when the change in people’s sensitivities to globally connected relationships became felt, as IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde mentions in the film’s final part:
Everyone has changed in this crisis. When the real estate and financial bubbles burst, it caused an examination of conscience about the creation of wealth, how resources should be allocated, the sharing of wealth, how countries relate to each other, what defined well-being. On those issues, we have all evolved, the President included.”
Watch Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse
When I think about the world I would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have, it is a world that moves away from unequal, unstable, unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities – locally, nationally and globally – that share the characteristics of all successful communities.”
Bill Clinton, former President of the United States.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma
Although it is a simple mathematical idea, it turns out to be an enchanted trap that has ensnared some of the brightest minds for decades.”
The above and following quotes on the Prisoner’s Dilemma are taken from, Super Cooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed, by Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield.
Imagine that you and your accomplice are both held prisoner, having been captured by the police and charged with a serious crime. The prosecutor interrogates you separately and offers each of you a deal. This offer lies at the heart of the Dilemma and goes as follows:
If one of you, the defector, incriminates the other, while the partner remains silent, then the defector will be convicted of a lesser crime and his sentence cut to one year for providing enough information to jail his partner. Meanwhile, his silent confederate will be convicted of a more serious crime and burdened with a four-year sentence.
If you both remain silent, and thus cooperate with each other, there will be insufficient evidence to convict either of you of the more serious crime, and you will each receive a sentence of two years for a lesser offense. If, on the other hand, you both defect by incriminating each other, you will both be convicted of the more serious crime, but given reduced sentences of three years for at least being willing to provide information.
… there is a simple central idea that can be represented by a table of options, known as a payoff matrix. This can sum up all four possible outcomes of the game, written down as two entries on each of the two lines of the matrix.”
The image at the top details this payoff matrix. It varies from the above description slightly: If one of the prisoners incriminates his fellow prisoner, and the incriminated prisoner does not likewise reciprocate this defection, then the incriminated prisoner will receive a five year sentence instead of a four year one.
The Global Economic Crisis
In the face of this tension between increasing interdependence and uncoordinated actions, we need shared visions of the future. These visions can motivate leading decision makers to contribute voluntarily to the global good, out of a sense of shared responsibility and enlightened self-interest.”
– Global Economic Symposium
The Prisoner’s Dilemma works on the basis that two parties are interdependent. In economics the global economy is interconnected and thus interdependent. The global economic crisis can therefore be viewed as a form of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where many participants are each charged with a serious crime (the crisis) and each must then choose how to conduct themselves to exit it, with each player’s decisions affecting all the other participants.
However, unlike the classic example above, one market cannot simply defect from the rest of the global economy. Regardless of the decisions the players make, they still remain interconnected and interdependent.
The Eurozone debt crisis has fallen into a classic prisoner’s dilemma. One party does not cooperate because it would expose itself to the potential non cooperative decision of the other party, the latter of which would be able to extract a greater payoff than the cooperative solution would yield in the short-term.
Fear of losing control over the political decisions taken by the euro area is triggering a series of rational (but sub-optimal) choices incapable of dealing with the core issues of the crisis and so leading to an outcome/equilibrium that no one really wants (and everyone will regret ex post), i.e. the total or partial break-up of the euro area.”
The system isn’t working for the 1% either. You know, if you were a CEO, you would be making the same choices they do. Institutions have their own logic. Life is pretty bleak at the top too; and all the baubles of the rich – they’re kind of this phony compensation for the loss of what is really important: the loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy, the loss of meaning.”
That statement was made by Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics, in the below video, which was made as part of a documentary film project in the works titled Occupy Love. The film asks the question: “how are the economic and ecological crises we are facing today a great love story?”
Watch Occupy Wall St – The Revolution Is Love [5 min.]:
Highlighted quotes from the video:
As More People Wake Up, The Easier It Is To Change
I think now, as more and more people wake up to the truth, that we’re here to give, and wake up to that desire, and wake up to the fact that the other way isn’t working anyway; the more reinforcement we have from people around us that this isn’t crazy, this makes sense, this is how to live.
And as we get that reinforcement, our minds and our logic no longer have to fight against the logic of the heart which wants us to be of service. This shift of consciousness which inspires such things is universal in everybody – the 99% and the 1%. And it’s awakening in different people in different ways.”
The Felt Experience Of Connection
An economist says that the more for you is essentially less for me, but the lover knows that the more for you is more for me, too. If you love somebody then their happiness is your happiness; their pain is your pain.
Your sense of self expands to include other beings. That’s love. Love is expansion of the self to include the other. And that’s a different kind of revolution: there’s no one to fight, there’s no ‘other’ in this revolution.
Everyone has a unique calling and it’s really time to listen to that. That’s what the future is going to be. It’s time to get ready for it, help contribute to it and make it happen.”
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