There is an anguish in the air, born from the perception that we, humans, have already produced so much knowledge, technology, and wealth, yet we remain incapable of finding a way to distribute fairly and in a balanced manner all the products of our intelligence and labor. We choose and accept (or are forced to accept, in some cases) forms of concentrating this wealth in the hands of a few corporations or individuals, to the detriment of billions of others less favored by the criteria that we either helped to determine or else, peacefully or reluctantly, follow. Few are those who have not yet become indifferent to the oppressed portion of human society, or who, enclosed in their cocoon—family, work, church, circle of friends—hardly even notice that the world they have enjoyed for so long is rapidly fading away and will no longer be present, in the form we know, for their children and grandchildren.
To try to reverse this situation, effort and change must necessarily come from each person. It is a process that begins with something that can be called an Awakening: perceiving within oneself one’s singularity as an autonomous human being, capable of generating and enjoying riches far greater than those offered by current contingencies.
And to fuel this change, great nations, empires, armies, or legions on the march are not necessary. What is necessary, rather, are small groups of people with sufficient goodwill, intelligence, and integration to, through precise surgeries, begin to change the reality around them.
And how will these groups of people—of citizens—learn to perform these surgeries? In workshops, dinners, and festivals, organized with the purpose of providing them with new knowledge, which until then had been kept under seven locks by the king: that it is possible to live a life guided by freedom, solidarity, and self-management.
In these workshops, these dinners, and these festivals, individuals will be empowered, communities will be strengthened, emerging as new centers of illumination of human genius, able to multiply what the first workshops were able to produce.
These spaces, these communities, will be guided by an ethics grounded in kindness and mutual support, respecting not only others of the same species but also perceiving the interrelation among all beings, belonging to a long and fundamental web of life.
And there already exist, spread across the world, movements that have become aware of this need, this urgency, and are working to ease the impacts of an exploitative, unjust, inhumane, unsustainable world. Together, all these movements could be changing the reality of our planet in a short period of time.
However, their proposals, their initiatives, their models, their tools, and attitudes are appropriated by the technologies of power. From then on, they cease to have the force for social change they once possessed, because their focus is distorted and weakened.
For these small groups of individuals, or even this multitude of organizations, to be able to carry out the necessary change in time for it to still be seen within their own generation—without being susceptible to the appropriations that will occur along the way—they need to connect through a format of relationship that is already the very change they seek: the Network.
Added to this, mechanisms must be created to generate sustainability within the movements themselves and the means of expression that aim to resist the yoke of oppressive forces that empty meaning and feeling, that nullify singularity and diversity, that produce normalized and massified beings, oriented toward consumption and simulation.
Such the creation of an intrinsic sustainability is one of the challenges we still need to overcome, and we will learn by walking and walk by learning.
On our path, we will necessarily learn that, if we wish to wave the flag of solidarity and altruism, we need to broaden the horizon within which we include those whom we call family.
We need to look at the other as if that person were ourselves. We need to realize that there is no “I” without the “We,” nor “We” without the “I.”
Harmonic interdependence within a network is a fundamental function of the survival of the individuals in this system. Today, we are failing astonishingly to find this balance. We are bad at mathematics. We are capturing and taking (from the environment and from others) far more than we are able (or have the desire) to restore and share. This, which has already been said and repeated to exhaustion, is not sustainable. We live on a finite planet and, until this morning, we had not yet conquered Mars. Even if we had, it seems there is no ocean view there… (can anyone already imagine Earth> Mars flights to carry seawater to private beaches on the neighboring planet?)
We therefore need to extend an invitation to all who sail on this same Ship: embark on the journey now presented—a journey in search of the creation of a NEW ECONOMY, an Economy that follows biology in its diversity, and that integrates into its complexity instead of extinguishing it. An Economy that respects the other as a member of the same family, based on an ethno-ecological paradigm, guided by cooperation, solidarity, social justice, and sustainability, and that ultimately aims at the COMMON GOOD. Shall we go together?