The Empathic Revolution

A student of mine sent me this great piece by Richard Noelle in his blog on AstroPro.com commenting in his 2010 forecast on all the changes going on lately:

"This is not just a cyclical economic downturn. As I’ve already written, since 1980 we’ve been in a long-term (forty-year) transition from one cycle of civilization (the Industrial Revolution) to the next. I don’t know what this next one will be called, any more than anyone knew what to call the Industrial Revolution at the time it was beginning – other than a calamity, which is what most people thought it was at the time. (This time around, it may be the Virtual Revolution, Nanotech Revolution, Bioengineering Revolution, Quantum Revolution . . . any one might fit, and yet each one is probably too narrowly focused.)

Looking back on the economic, social and political evolution taking place at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it’s clear that it was not an easy birth - as is typical of the onset of historical epochs. Agriculture and muscle power had been the order of the day; which meant that nobles were supported by the labor of tenants and their livestock, who produced the crops and cut the timber. (Ironically, two energy sources that far predated the Industrial Revolution will long outlive it: wind and water, both being forms of solar energy.) With the rise of machines to supplant muscle power (animal as well as human), and coal to replace wood as fuel, the wealth of the lords was diminished: capital was no longer mere land for producing food and fuel, and the tenants were leaving the farms to go to work in the factories in the cities. The socio-economic structure people had known for centuries was disintegrating, and a new one was taking its place. Anxiety was widespread then – as it is now.

This radical change was perceived as threatening by many. Those who tried to hang onto the old were run over by the new. Lords were steadily losing income as they lost their tenants. In order to maintain their expensive estates, they cut staff as much as possible, and sold off tracts of land. The subsistence family farmers watched as their village infrastructure emptied out to the cities. People from the bottom to the top of the old social hierarchy bemoaned the increasing poverty and decaying security all around them. Sound familiar? It not, you haven’t been paying attention since 1980, when the current dawn period – the one analogous to the 1802-1842 Earth Trigonalis dawn – got underway.

The 1802-1842 Earth Trigonalis dawn was a time when the social, political and economic institutions that had sustained a civilization for centuries were just plain falling apart. People and institutions trying to maintain the old order were run over and crushed by the new system. The old occupations and industries became less and rewarding, eventually bankrupting nearly everyone who didn’t move on into the new system. It looked and felt like the end of the world . . . and yet it turned into what we have been pleased to call the Modern World over the past couple centuries or so.

That’s exactly what’s happening now. Yes, it is the end of an old era, an old economy, an old world. At this point, we’re about halfway through the dawn period. This is why I’ve been saying for years now that the salad days are gone – and that when they do come back, it will be an entirely different salad. In 2020, when the Air Trigonalis of the Great Chronocrator finally arrives, a new long-term boom epoch begins: a new means of production, a new form of capital, a new economy and new markets. Until then, the new normal is transition: the decay of the old (and the suffering of the people who try to hang onto it); and the birth of the new. What we’re seeing, in short, is not the end of the world,but the end of a world. And worlds like that end all the time, every generation at least – just not so much all at once as now, or back in the early 19th Century.

I bring up this difference between the end of a world and the end of the world because I think it’s essential first to survival and then to happiness and prosperity at all levels, from the individual to the collective. If you think the Apocalypse is imminent, you won’t do one thing right for tomorrow, because you don’t believe there will be a tomorrow. If you think a total collapse of the financial system will happen any day now, you won’t invest what capital you do have in such a way as to grow it over the years to come. The Chicken Littles will have none of this "don’t put all your eggs in one basket" stuff. They’ll go to cash, convert it all to precious metals, and then be at the mercy of the governments that show an historical penchant for confiscating those same precious metals. I know, I know, governments are perennial confiscators of everything anyway. But the more baskets your eggs are in, the fewer will get snatched up in one fell swoop by the agents of Big Brother."

I agree with everything he says above and wanted to add what I am seeing in the collective. Yes, we are moving towards a new technological paradigm that will probably be the basis of the new name that this coming era will eventually receive, like Richard Noelle suggests above. However, this new name belies that the real shift that is going on is not technological like it was with the Industrial Revolution, but a revolution of values and emotions. Like the Enlightenment or the Renaissance, this is really a shift that is less material and more about human consciousness, but even more low-key and internal than those eras. People are letting go of the old largely because they are bored. The whole world is shifting largely because of a deep lack of meaning that the capitalist-material paradigm has failed to deliver contrary to its original promises. I have students and clients expressing to me all the time with regards to their jobs, money, and the material dream "Is this all there is?". I am seeing that everywhere. Money and comfort isn't enough to sustain people's inner lives anymore. That sounds like a truism but you have to remember that it was only a few decades ago that money and technology was genuinely enthralling not because it had more life-force or anima then than it does now, but because even something as simple as the invention of a vacuum cleaner or washing machine in the 50's symbolically represented that the technological-scientific paradigm was genuinely looking to make our lives easier and give us back the most valuable commodity of time. By contrast, now we are jaded consumers who do not view technological innovation as culture and time saving but at best as something neat and maybe helpful, and at worst a scam. No longer does our consumer trust reside in the hands of marketers and manufacturers. We might still like illusion for illusion's sake but the jig is up.  We  might want to catch the latest gossip on famous athletes and ingénues but we know it's all meaningless. These illusions no longer symbolically represent something for us, as much as even a few years ago. We know what is real and what isn't. The great material-scientific paradigm is as much of an open failure in fulfilling its promises of more time, meaning, and happiness as communism was a failed utopian dream. The illusions have crashed and we are now doing what we have been taught in the last 60 years of turbo-capitalism to do best: shop. We are now shopping en masse for new cultural values.

Most people are looking for something more and are finally willing to take risks to pursue something that feeds their soul. It is subtle but the workforce is shifting around based on values, not money. And the people who are still working for money and security alone by leveraging their individuality, gifts, and potential are suffering because they still don't get it. As soon as they are willing to do what they love, what makes them feel human again instead of a cog in the machine, the universe will support them because this is the evolution humans are going towards.

It probably won't get named this, but I think Jeremy Rifkin (economist and big-picture thinker/writer) nailed it when he wrote his recent book The Empathic Civilization. Given what's happening the next era should be called the Empathic Revolution. People are less tolerant now than ever before of others inflicting suffering on the less empowered. Because of mass education and economic independence and prosperity in industrialized countries people are empowered enough to start saying "Enough! By the grace of God there walk I. I want to help the less fortunate and fight the unjust." But it will be less about pitchforks and more about creative re-wiring of our society by just finding alternatives around the existing power structures.

So what I see is talented people who are currently working for the old power structure eventually going off and starting her/their own alternative or joining one of these communities. Most of us have talents that are not being fully utilized in our existing jobs. In this era of diminishing natural resources, our collective consciousness will shift to start valuing the one thing that has never been valued in human history: the vast untapped resource of human potential, not as work horses or cheaper than robots, but if we give a kid an education will s/he go on to be the person who invents the next renewable fuel source or cure cancer etc.? We believe in this potential more now than ever. Bill Gates proved that someone who a few centuries ago would have been plowing a field or a merchant in the city, could go on to be a pivotal mind in the creation of a new wave, because he was given an education and some socio-economic mobility. This was more than a technological revolution but the beginning of a revolution in consciousness.

What are your values? What makes you feel alive? Impassioned? What makes your heart overflow with empathy or happiness? What are you willing to fight for or give up? And what creative solution lies just around the corner?