“…our civilization has not quite yet reached the point of readiness for a new story.”
This truth hurts. I think Charles is right though for the world continues to be smashed up – we continue to kill ourselves with our current cultural system.
Below are my excerpts from Charles’s essay at https://charleseisenstein.net/we-dont-know-reflections-on-the-new-story-summit/ This is what stood out for me.
- …our civilization has not quite yet reached the point of readiness for a new story.
- Each person had the choice whether or not to organize non-compliance, and no one did. That tells me that underneath their complaining (which, when unaccompanied by action, is actually a symptom of acceptance of the relations of oppression) they were just as unwilling as the organizers to try something different. Whether organizer or participant, the leap of faith and courage required to step into the unknown is the same.
- I see the whole thing as a barometer of our current state of disempowerment, our stuckness. I hope that by making it visible, we can loosen its hold.
- …no one really knows what the new story is, or, if we do catch glimpses of it, how to get there from here.
- …the basic relations of power that were the source of much of the discontent remained fundamentally unchallenged even by those who were among the discontented.
- But even those who were fed up with the structure went along with it, and I wonder if part of the reason might have been fear of the plunge into chaos that precedes true emergence.
- What transpired at the NSS is instructive, for it is in some ways a microcosm of society at large. In the face of the guns, jails, surveillance, and propaganda, we (meaning, probably, “I”) take refuge in the familiar safety of our apparent powerlessness, venting our discontent through well-contained acts of empty defiance.
- … the empty rituals of an obsolete narrative.
- But let me tell you something I do know. The existing institutions of our society are insufficient to the task of transitioning us to a sustainable world. They are products of the old, and propagate the status quo via the built-in dynamics of their structure – even when the people within them yearn for change. Organizations routinely take actions that nary a single person within the organization agrees with. It is necessary to disrupt these institutions, the habits they induce, and the stories on which they rest.
- And! And, we must be careful in our disruption not to conform to even deeper stories that underlie our civilization; for example, the story of us versus them. Ours is a revolution of love. We seek to disrupt the dance of the oppressor and the oppressed, and enter into a new dance together. We look at each person, whatever their role, and know that I would do as you do, my brother, my sister, if I were in your shoes. We appreciate the impossible pressures those in power face – that anyone in a position of any privilege faces – in striving to reconcile their humanity with their position. We don’t castigate or vilify them, just as we don’t indulge in self-hate over the conflict minerals in our smart phones. We make our disruptions as an offering. If the offering is declined, we do not say, “What’s wrong with them?” We do not inhabit the smugness of thinking that if we were they, we would have done differently. Instead we see the response as a message, a temperature reading that reveals both the state of the public and the state of ourselves that the public mirrors.
- It showed us where we are now, and where we want to go. As to how to get there, the conference made it clear that We Don’t Know.
- But perhaps, digesting the experience of the New Story Summit, the next step at least will come into focus. Its revelation of the limitations of the Conference archetype – in particular the disconnect between new-story content and old-story structures – will surely feed in to the planning of future conferences, which will stand on its shoulders. What is exciting to me is the possibility that the NSS marks a transition into a different kind of gathering entirely, no longer a conference, but perhaps more like a festival or a retreat, or something that is all and none of these things, something new, something edgy, something experimental, something destined to succeed and to fail, and thereby to illuminate the next step beyond. What else can we hope for, as we explore this mapless place between stories?