Are We Still Children Playing In Pandora's Box?
Author: The Power Of Yin

From Chapter V:

Barbara: Hazel, in managing the decline of the industrial
society, what do you see us managing ourselves toward?

Hazel: Basically toward what I'm calling the emerging
countereconomy, which is, for example, these fifty million
Americans who are already participating in some form of
cooperative enterprise. All it is is a reconfiguration of the
modes of production and distribution. It's just like ancient
Rome, where all of the transportation lines got too extenuated.

It doesn't mean to say that people will no longer be
provisioned, and that there will be no more innovation. All that
will still go on. It's just that the palaces will crumble, and
the overgrowth of centralized structures will devolve. What's so
interesting is that the most irrelevant places in the world
right now are Washington, London, Paris, New York, Canberra. The
nation-state control level is being superceded on the global
level, and pulled back to reality on the local level.

Jean: There are no great central places anymore!

Barbara: You could see it happening with Jimmy Carter, who
looked very powerful until he got to Washington. And suddenly,
it's almost as though the complexities are diminishing him. He
looks less and less powerful as he settles into the White House.
I call it the "principle of rising impotence." The higher you
go, the more structured-in you become. You are forced to
maintain the existing system rather than evolve it.

Hazel: Because you are climbing into a dead coral reef! The
life has migrated out of it.

Jean: Carter's great claim to the presidency was that he did
not know the coral reef, and that he would bring fresh life.

Barbara: But he's ended up appointing denizens of the old coral
reef to his cabinet!

Hazel: There is such a basic contradiction there. And then
there was the rationalization that, "Well, we'll have all the
new voices in the undersecretaryships." I've been asked several
times what role I would play. They wanted me to be a member of
the transition group and all of that. I've been saying an
emphatic no! I'm not going to climb onto the dead coral reef and
tie my hands behind my back.

Basically, the question is: Can it slide down gracefully
without hurting too many? But it isn't really a decline! The
life is all going somewhere else; it's migrating.

Jean: You know, every era has its dominant forms. We're moving
now from Homo-politicus and Homo-economicus to . . . where?
Maybe it's back to Homo-religiosis in the root meaning —
"religio," meaning "to bind."

Barbara: Union; to bind back together.

Jean: Back together, and back into the cosmos.

Hazel: Again, it's this molecule-making image that had been
forgotten when we got into the all-looking-at-the-dictator mode.
Now we're finally going back to learning how to nucleate, to
self-organize.

Jean: The power is moving to the countermodels.

Hazel: It certainly isn't Washington, which is inhabited
largely by Neanderthals.

Jean: No, not even Neanderthals! If they were Neanderthals they
would at least be sensitive, but they're not; they're
pterodactyls! But smart pterodactyls!

Hazel: Oh yes, they're not dumb.

Jean: But are they really as bad as the impression I got from
my experience down there?

Hazel: Well, maybe yours was pretty bad, but I think it's
generally true.

Jean: Does that mean that to become a member of Congress is
automatically to —

Hazel: Well, look at the experience you have to go through to
become a member of Congress. You've got to lie; you've got to
deny your inner nature; you've got to be infatuated with power.

Jean: The education of a brontosaurus!

Hazel: Richard Nixon was the manifestation of the process you
have to go through in order to become president. The problem is
that anyone with a reasonably evolved consciousness has to
wonder if they can put themselves into a pterodactyl suit!

[laughter]

Hazel: The networking that's going on between social-change
people right now . . . thank God the people in Washington don't
know about it! There was a conference on networking in Canada
recently that I was invited to, but I was very suspicious about
it. It was a bunch of typical academic hucksters — I thought,
with my orientation — and they were going to impale this
phenomenon: networking! And they were going to map it, and they
were going to give it form, and go to the National Science
Foundation and get grants. The people who network were going to
be guinea pigs; they were going to eavesdrop on the network.
However, the beautiful thing about social-change networking is
that they can't do that; all you have to do is regroup, change
the name of the group, alter the telephone numbers, and go on as
before. But they were going to intercept the chain of command,
find out who the leaders are, find out the location where all of
the subversive activity is going on . . . It's wonderful!
They've got all the wrong images! Besides, there's really a
subversive in every family: it's either the wife or the
children. There is no chain of command; it's all autonomously
self-actualizing human beings with the same image in their
heads. It's self-organizing activity.

The metaphor that I think is important for the kind of culture
that's emerging from this Logos is the metaphor of
self-organization. We know that we're self-organizing systems.
We know many instances of human culture that have been
self-organizing, and that have had magnificently complex
structures of behavior mediation and regulation, and that have
been in perfect balance with their ecosystems. So we have all of
those models of self-organization. All we don't know how to do —
and maybe we never will — is to organize ourselves with this
level of what Jean would call prosthetic types of technology.
Not that we want to throw away the knowledge stock, or degrade
it, but we do want to assert our own innate ability to
self-organize, and to redress that imbalance.

One example of this is that we do want to restore the balance
in regulating human behavior. If you have viable psychic
structures of sanctions, regulations, and ways of mediating
behavior, you don't need whips, guns, prisons, police forces,
and all the rest of it.

(Reprinted with permission from the three co-authors, Hazel
Henderson, Jean Houston and Barbara Marx Hubbard, to run
excerpts from their book The Power of Yin).


About The Author: The Power of Yin by evolutionary economist
Hazel Henderson; Human Potential Movement founder Jean Houston;
and social innovator Barbara Marx Hubbard, is an empowering
invitation to help evolve the human community. Visit
http://www.thepowerofyin.com.