(Politics and the Human Spirit – Installment 9)
How best to manage the world?
That’s the big question.
The right answer will be a lot different today than it was a thousand years ago… or even 50 years ago. It’s a different world, thanks to modern realities like burgeoning population (7 billion mouths to feed), energy use (especially the exhausted supplies of fossil fuels), environmental breakdown (especially global warming), globalizing technologies (including the Internet and wireless phones), and malignant technologies (including designer drugs, harmful pharmaceuticals, nuclear, chemical, biological products and weapons).
Only one thing hasn’t changed much across the centuries… human nature. We’re still the same noble-savage creatures we were long, long ago. As I explained in the introduction to this series, our noble side operates on love, trust, and good will… but it’s constantly undermined by our savage side, which gives in to fear, suspicion, hunger, desire, and aggression.
Our noble side bubbles up from the finer spirit deep within us, while our savage side is stirred up by the hormones, egos, and carnal compositions that were hardwired into our physical bodies long ago.
Maybe the best way to answer the bold question above, in a single article, is to take a snapshot of humanity, and then come up with a few basic guidelines for managing the world based on what we know today about ourselves, our societies, and our world.
Humanity spread across the world, seen as lights at night.
And a view of the general geography and ecology of the planet.
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Planetary Snapshot
A “snapshot” of today’s world reveals a nested, overlapping structure of mankind.
Nested. Humanity is one big living system spread over the Earth… made up of human beings and human groups that are nested like boxes inside boxes inside boxes—individuals within families within communities, within states or provinces, within nations….
Overlapping. Human groups also cross-cut and overlap each other. Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and other mighty world religions have all spread around the world without geographic borders… so they overlap each other, and they crosscut many nations’ borders. Transnational businesses, industries, and nonprofit groups also overlap each other and crosscut national boundaries.
Embedded in ecosystems. At the same time, all of our human groups live within, around, and among the various planetary ecosystems—forests, oceans, mountain ranges, savannahs, river systems, deserts… and we tend to build our cities and congregate near the water.
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With that snapshot of humanity, we can start thinking about the behavior of people and groups… specifically how the activity is managed or regulated across the levels and borders of world society.
Planetary Management
As I mentioned in Part 7, good regulation generally starts with insightful decisions that are made at all levels, from personal choices to United Nations resolutions. I listed four basic guidelines for good regulation:
• Every decision should be made at the lowest possible level, but high enough to take into the account the well-being of everyone affected by the decision.
• Decision-making bodies should reflect the diversity of the people they represent.
• In most groups, especially nations, there should be a balance between the rights of individuals to be free and the rights of groups to be stable… which suggests that for modern nations, social democracy is the optimum political system… as it is evolving in most European countries today.
• For decisions with the best possible outcomes, the individuals involved in decision-making have honed their intuition over time through inner reflection or meditation, to be in touch with their finer spirit within.
I’d like to add several more guidelines to that list:
- Efforts should be made at all levels to cultivate our noble side and to tame our savage side.
- Every individual and every group should be free to make decisions… within the framework that’s been set up by higher levels.
- A small world government, with a few basic responsibilities for keeping peace and safeguarding the planet, is overdue. The UN in its present incarnation isn’t suitable, but could be with a few changes.
These last three guidelines are the main focus below—1) nurturing humanity’s noble qualities and taming the savage, 2) aligning our self or our group to the standards and values of the larger group(s) to which we belong, and 3) empowering the United Nations with clear and undisputed authority on a few key issues of global peace, compatibility, and stability.
Cultivate the Noble, Tame the Savage
It’s normal for us humans to exert our noble and savage qualities intermittently… depending on the situation we’re in at the moment. We might be inspired by a drive through the countryside then suddenly stunned by a pothole or irritated by a thoughtless driver who cuts us off. We might enjoy decades of peace with a neighboring community, or an adjacent nation, then escalate a land-use dispute over a vast, beautiful, resource-rich forest that spans the borders. Should we exploit the resources or protect the beauty?
In the grand scheme of things, the noble qualities of humanity always win out because they are timeless. Love, trust and decency shine forever at the core of our being. As qualities of our innermost god-self, they live on, untarnished, perpetually, as the central part of us, throughout our lives and even long after the death of our physical body.
The savage qualities flare up frequently, and they are typically short-lived.
We need to rethink the age-old concept of two all-powerful, opposing forces: Good vs evil, God vs Satan, noble vs savage, light vs dark….
Only one force is all-powerful and omnipresent—the light… the good… the god-source at the center of our being… and at the center of all that is.
The physical realm lies far out in the fringes of multidimensional reality, where the light vibrations from the source are so dim and dense and slow that pockets of darkness and chaos form. It’s these dark, illusory little pockets, which exist only out here on the material frontiers, that we equate with evil and spiritual darkness.
Translating that reality to human lives, we could describe ourselves as forever-noble creatures with fleeting savage inclinations.
So… at the very heart of world management is the need for us humans to cultivate our noble core and to tame our savage tendencies in all human relationships at all levels… from friendships and marriages to multinational treaties and alliances.
At the personal level we can cultivate our noble side over time with practiced meditation, prayer and mind control… in which we clear the cluttered channels between our carnal mind and our higher self, or god center. Self-discipline also comes into play… getting into the habit of making rational decisions… noble choices.
At the group level we cultivate the noble side with household rules, social mores, business ethics, laws and law enforcement, and other tools of management.
The emphasis in the future needs to be 1) to draw a clear delineation between the noble and the savage in human affairs, 2) to cultivate the noble at all levels, and 3) to specify how best to tame the savage, again, at all levels.
Examples of noble motivations: Unconditional love, trust, good will, cooperation, empathy, protection, support, education, truth, sincerity, negotiation….
Examples of savage motivations: profit, competition, conquest, punishment, lying, cheating, deception, assault, murder, lust, indulging and exploiting human weaknesses for addictive substances….
Even our most basic biological behaviors are savage by nature—eating and excreting… mating and procreating… even breathing.
These are not qualities of our finer spiritual (noble) make-up; they are things we have to do to survive in a rugged carnal world. They’re savage needs.
So… the intent of world management is not to eliminate the savage side of mankind—which would destroy the noble-savage human being—but to tame and direct it.
(to be continued….)
Politics and the Human Spirit series:
1 Introduction 2 Privatization and the public good 3 Military 4 Information 5 Spirit of Society 6 Education 7 Regulation 8 Economics 9 Managing the World in the 21st Century – 10 The carnal line between noble and savage – 11 Embrace the divine; it’s where we shine – 12 Who decides what? – 13 Finally… good politics
Related articles:
Best and worst countries to be born – Election fraud 2012 – Best and worst US presidents – Humor in politics – Biggest political news – End of the American dream – Blown to bits in the computer age – Standards, the key to peace – What Obama and Stalin really have in common – Bad counsel and a short leash – Capital punishment & the human spirit
Noble Savage World 
Thanks again Mark.
This is good morning reading to get me going, and set straight my perspectives. Nice link to the mighty world religions, from which, unfortunately, some of the savage side has exercised itself over the years. Wars over ideologies.
Just think, before some 2000 years ago, or so, there were not any Bibles or alot of other manuscripts delineating the rules on how people were supposed to worship. People lived in Nature and Nature was what was worshipped as the mirror of who we are.
Now we use much of our savage side to manipulate and “control” Nature, our Mother.
I think the Biblical edits at Nicea only helped assist our decline away from our spirit identity, at least as far as Christian thinking and doing goes.
I often wonder what our world would be like if the Library at Alexandria had not burned before Christ was born, or what if they had not edited out all of those biblical texts at the Council of Nicea. I beleive we may be a more spiritually oriented race. I think Christianity has spawned too much of the savage.
Last night I watched James Cameron’s film “Avatar.”
The movie depicts a pagan and spiritually evolved race of beings, the Omiticaya, who live in close intimate connection with their spirit selves and they exercise this connection via their connection to Nature around them.
Along come the earth people who mine a rare mineral there which is valuable to earth preople. The business people and the military people exert their savage will over the sacred world of the Omiticaya. A conflict ensues and the Omiticaya reclaim their domain and drive out the earth people.
We are doing this exact same scenario today to our own planet.
People go to church, say, the politicians go to church, maybe just for show. What are they being taught in church? Are they being taught that war is normal and that it is good to usurp Nature and other countries’ resources?
No–they are being taught about the same old guilt, shame, and fear based thinking that Christ did not teach.
I often say that we do not teach history correctly, and that is why we keep repeating the same old savage antics.
Like I stated above, your post got me going. I’ll have another cup of tea………..
Hi John,
I agree. There’s a big gap between most religious practice today and timeless spiritual truth. Sometimes they even seem to work against each other.
Not easy for us humans to see through the savage veneer that’s so consuming, to get a glimpse of that perfect, light core shining deep inside.
I loved Avatar. Amazing, amazing movie. The special effects especially, but also the age-old message of use and abuse on a societal scale.
Couldn’t believe Cameron lost the Best Picture to his ex… for Hurt Locker, the Mideast war flick.
In Hollywood, as in the Church and most other human institutions… there’s always a lot of political and personality tension that affects decisions.
Warm wishes…………
Mark
Funny that you should mention….as I watched Avatar again last night, I also wondered why it did not win best picture, and then I remembered that maybe they don’t want to reward incredible productions which deliver such vital life sustaining messages.
I have long considered Hollywood to be all mobbed up.
The violence which this industry promotes for financial gain is ruinous, and this spectacle of propaganda is helping to drive the violence in our society…no doubt about it.
What if the actors and actresses and directors just started boycotting these damaging productions and shut down producers like Quentin Tarantino, the master of ultra violence?
Hollywood is mobbed up by those who are there to make sure that war and violence are continued as themes to be glorified.
I pray about this problem…..
Agreed.
I think maybe those who sell their products and ideas to the public are always tempted to appeal to the public’s savage side… things that stir up our hormones and addictions.
Easy money, they figure.
As you say, it takes self-reflection and noble decisions to rise above that situation… as both seller and buyer.
Mark
Mark,
I wrote this short and stirring entry on Christmas Day: http://haelanlifestream.com/wordpress/christmas-day-ode-to-joy-and-lightning-in-a-jar/.
I hope you and some of your readers enjoy it.
Hi John,
Thanks for that article on your Crestone blog.
It really captures the need for peace in the world.
Blessings………..
Hi John,
I thought your article was a great read and messages like this can spread like absolute wildfire, as it touches upon our deepest spiritual desires and leads us ‘back home’, so to speak. If given a choice between eternal peace, happiness, compassion and well-being, vs. war, bloodlust and destruction, I’m quite sure that when most people are truly honest with themselves, they’d choose the former. I’d give anything to see humans collectively return to their noble, magnificent and peaceful roots and turn away from these dark, savage things that are so thoroughly financed and supported by the mili-petro hybrid or “military industrial complex”. The M.I.C. is paving humans a pathway to destruction and dismay and harms us deeply on a spiritual level. I truly love the message and cause of spreading warmth and light in the world. I still believe there is hope for this epoch of humanity.
Just wanted to share my appreciation and thoughts to both you and Mark for writing the good word!
Ricky
Thank you, Ricky, for the good words. Collective consciousness needs to attend to and reach some other kind of new mass. I believe it is coming.
John
Ricky, Mark, and All,
We have so much of our human energy entangled with our mental and emotional selves that we have very little energy left over for our spiritual being.
This is why many wise ones have recommended that we get quiet, and witness our inner terrain.
We simply are not being educated correctly about who and what we are.
Here is another Journal link related to the “problem with war” type of theme. I hope you can find time to read it and spread the word:http://haelanlifestream.com/wordpress/in-remembrance-of-veterans-day/.
There is another previous Journal entry which I wrote back on Memorial Day entitled “A Way to Help End War.” You can see that one when you have the time.
John
Hey John,
Thanks for the link to that brilliant, vital information that you link to in your CrestoneBeyond article.
I wasn’t aware of Rohr’s book or Clark’s presentation or Scott’s article.
Excellent information in all of them.
I guess as long as we all just keep planting seeds as best we can, and not expect too much from the harvest (given the dense soil), we’ll have done our part in the project.
Mark
Mark,
I read this one of Rohr’s books daily. I am on my 3rd passage on the Daily Medidtations which, fortunately get deeper with the readings, more dog-eared, and more underlined.
That is a good allusion about seed planting and dense soil. Every garden needs good annual soil prep (composting and digging), and then one can expect a good harvest especially if the other ingredients of water, sunshine, and weed pulling are done.
You’re right, it is in the soil, but pulling the weeds in our individual garden of self love helps too.
There are lots of weeds in the garden of self love.
For yesterday’s meditation Rohr wrote:
“If you want others to be more loving toward you, choose to be love first.
If you want a peaceful outer world, reconcile your own inner world.
If you are tired of cynicism and negativity out there, cultivate hope in here.
If you wish to find stillness in the world, find the calm within yourself.”
Then he goes on to quote Gandhi, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
Then he says, “transformed people transform people.”
And then I say: until we transform our own pain, we just keep transmitting it. The dense soil people do not understand their own pain and the cultural collective of pain. They keep transmitting it.
John