Imagine a world where humans are able to strike a sustainable and more equitable balance between the community and the individual, the government and the people, wages and labor, consumption and protecting natural resources. A world mapped out into communities where people actively engage in democracy and support local production and services to create and maintain jobs.
What would a community like this look like?
What economic system(s) would emerge to replace our current creation of “money” in the form of debt?
Practical farming and farmer’s markets where we humans can buy and sell foods and other goods not saturated and/or coated with pesticides, you know, like it was done throughout most of our history on earth. But this time around we can use the benefits of science and technology to improve sustainable farming techniques in earth-friendly ways. Sustainable living instead of the unique American brand of hyper-consumption that’s threatening future prosperity.
What materials would (or could) replace plastics? What about DIY solar heating systems for homes? In what ways could industrial hemp be used to alleviate our dependence on petroleum?
But this improved community cannot come about and be sustained without cooperation with neighboring and foreign communities and nations. How can this come to be? One way, and perhaps the only way, would be for all of us (in all nations, communities, and churches) to actively heed the words and wisdom of great peacemakers and intellectuals throughout history. Such as Thich Nhat Hanh:
“We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.”
Or Albert Einstein:
“Communities tend to be guided less than individuals by conscience and a sense of responsibility. How much misery does this fact cause mankind! It is the source of wars and every kind of oppression, which fill the earth with pain, sighs and bitterness.” (1934)
“It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption. I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis in our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evil.” (1949)
“..the greatest obstacle to international order is that monstrously exaggerated spirit of nationalism which also goes by the fair-sounding but misused name of patriotism. During the last century and a half this idol has acquired an uncanny and exceedingly pernicious power everywhere.” (1931)
Or Martin Luther King Jr.:
“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
“Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.
John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: ‘No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ And he goes on toward the end to say, ‘Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ We must see this, believe this, and live by it if we are to remain awake through a great revolution.”
Or Mahatma Gandhi:
“Once one assumes an attitude of intolerance, there is no knowing where it will take one. Intolerance, someone has said, is violence to the intellect and hatred is violence to the heart.” (1942)
“It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.”
This would be an improved, “enlightened” community where people understand that religion cannot be spread via governments, lest it be corrupted and corrupt the system that promotes it. Why? Because there is no such thing as a Christian Nation. Nor an Islamic Nation. Nor a Jewish Nation. And there never truly will be. There are simply nations with Jewish, Islamic, and Christian followers residing within their boundaries, mixed with those of other faiths and those without any faith at all. Faith requires voluntary participation and the exercise of free will and cannot be legislated or forced upon the masses. Using politics to push religion of any kind on the public can only result in superficial conformity and/or indignant uprising. Imagine a world where people came to accept this truth, and the subsequent peace that ensures.
All of this speaks to the greater underlying truth: Establishing and maintaining peace means respecting the rights and choices of others, even if you do not personally agree with them, so long as they do not violate the actual rights and physical person or property of others. Essentially, to live and let live (or die if the case may be), and to treat fellow human beings with dignity and respect.
Women have rights as humans, regardless of what any religious text might declare. This is a truth that until it is accepted, discontent and inequity will remain. Imagine communities and nations that accept this truth and support women’s rights to be mothers (or not), to work inside or outside of the home with proper and fair compensation, and to participate in all facets of the democratic process as equals. To imagine this is to explore the concept of universal respect for all persons regardless of irrelevant biological variants. Other arbitrary variants include a person’s “race” and skin, hair, or eye coloring.
Imagine a place where intellect and wisdom are granted more importance and admiration by the general society than, say, absent-minded beauty and unearned prestige.
Imagine a sustainable community built on trust and cooperation. It has existed in pockets of the past and will exist again for those willing to fight for this peace.
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