We are fortunate to live at a time when we have access to information that shakes us awake to the absolute need – and the fabulous opportunities – to change the course of human history. We can look back, analyze the mistakes we’ve made, and blaze trails into new approaches for surviving on this magnificent, yet fragile, planet.
For at least 3,000 of the 200,000 years that humans, as we know ourselves, have existed (1), we’ve developed civilizations based on the exploitation of other people and nature. We’ve moved from hunters-gathers, through the agrarian and industrial revolutions, and into the current technology/information age. Yet, for these past three millennia we’ve continued to build our socio-economic-political structures around hierarchies.
What we have today is the direct descendant of the classical empires (e.g. China, Persia, Greece, Rome), medieval fiefdoms, European colonizers of Africa, America, Asia, and the Middle East, slave-owning plantation systems, and 19th century factories where women and children worked under horrible conditions. People employed today by short-term profit-driven corporations may live less squalid lives than the slaves, serfs, and indentured workers of former times, but they too are subject to the greed-driven, often brutal policies, of their corporate masters. They are bought and sold in labor markets, sent off to fight wars that profit Big Business, and paid wages that are hundreds of times lower than those of their bosses. (2) Billions of people around the world labor long, hard hours, often under insufferable conditions, for wages that are insufficient to support their families and their own retirements. Meanwhile, fortunes that boggle the imagination are piled into the treasure chests of a handful of billionaires, the latest edition of global potentates.
