We are Hard-Wired to Care and Connect

David Korten:

For the past 5,000 years, we humans have devoted much creative energy to perfecting our capacity for greed and violence—a practice that has been enormously costly for our children, families, communities, and nature. Now, on the verge of environmental and social collapse, we face an imperative to bring the world of our dreams into being by cultivating our long-suppressed, even denied, capacity for sharing and compassion.

Despite the constant mantra that “There is no alternative” to greed and competition, daily experience and a growing body of scientific evidence support the thesis that we humans are born to connect, learn, and serve ....

He goes on to say that "Happiness is a Caring Community." Actually, Aristotle said the same thing, happiness is living well in a just society, a life of magnanimity, virtue, and achievement in a well ordered community. So maybe philosophy and psychology point to the same truths. Still, unhappiness in an atomized society can be cured if you take enough pharmaceuticals and read enough self-help books and learn self hypnosis, or drink, or live in denial, or take pleasure in inflicting pain, and have a steady supply of underlings to torment. Not that I am complaining. I am pleased in my suffering to provide some momentary bliss to she who rules us all.

Comments

[Jeff Trexler]

Hard-wired to serve? That's kind of depressing.

"The DNA code--we've broken it. It's . . . it's a COOK BOOK!"

[Jay Taber]

Professor Richard Atleo asserts the Law of Generosity is universal. His book and audio interview are located on the Center for World Indigenous Studies website. Dr. Atleo is a hereditary chief of the Nuu-Chah-Nuulth nation of Vancouver Island, and the first aboriginal to earn a doctorate in British Columbia. He's also a very interesting person.

[Phil]

Thanks, Jay, for the introduction.

[Phil]

Hard wired to be gullible too, and violent, and to hoard.

[Philanthropic Travel]

Blogga please...

"Someday after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire." -Teilhard de Chardin

[Phil]

And make a good living, too, I suppose, and live in luxury, among the ruins.