Who Do We Choose To Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

I know it is possible to create islands of sanity in the midst of wildly disruptive seas.

The powerful always defend the status quo because it is the source of their power and privilege. Any change that benefits others would destroy their position. And their position is all they care about defending.

If it’s not creating change at the large scale, if it’s not striving to reintroduce sane decision making into large systems, if it doesn’t stop the disintegration, then what does it mean to make a difference?

We start over by returning to our identity, the source of self-organization, reclaiming what we still believe in, what description gives meaning to who we want to be.

Time to reflect and learn from experience is essential. Knowing how to host exploratory conversations and support reflective processes are paramount leadership skills.

We believe we are the height of human evolution rather than just its most recent, predictably problematic manifestation.1

Communication on social media moves in one direction, toward increased emotionality and distortion of message.

In the Age of Decadence that Glubb describes, everyone is focused on their self-interest. Elites protect their wealth, leaders protect their power, and the masses clamor for entertainment. We worship actors, musicians, and athletes. We are bought off with food and grand spectacles; we become obsessed with sports. And we grow more and more demanding

But as people become anxious to be accepted by the group, their personal values and behaviors are exchanged for more negative ones. We can too easily become more intense, abusive, fundamentalist, fanatical—behaviors strange to our former selves, born out of our intense need to belong.

It is the commitment to create the conditions for these capacities to blossom, protected from the external environment. It is the deep knowing that, even in the most dire circumstances, more becomes possible as people engage together with compassion and discernment, self-determining their best way forward.