David Korten writes: “Having reached the limits of an Era of Empire humanity is now compelled to make a conscious collective choice to live into being a new human Era of Community. It is a profound evolutionary challenge and an unprecedented opportunity to graduate from the excesses of adolescence to embrace the possibilities and responsibilities of species maturity in service to the living web of planetary life. Theologian Thomas Berry calls it the Great Work—a creative, life-serving work toward a more creative, vibrant, and fulfilling human future.
“The Era of Empire has led to the pursuit of money as humanity’s defining value and hierarchy/domination as society’s organizing principle. It has led to the emergence of a corporate global economy—appropriately described as a suicide economy, because it is destroying the foundations of its own existence and threatening the survival of the human species. It is the Era’s final stage.
“The human future depends on moving beyond the self-limiting and ultimately self-destructive ways of Empire to live into being a new Era of Community in which life is the defining cultural value and networking/partnership is the organizing principle. Ironically, the possibility of achieving such fundamental change resides in the awakening of hundreds of millions of people to the reality that humanity is on a path to social and environmental collapse, which create an imperative to accomplish the seemingly impossible.
“The dominance of economic, political, and cultural life by global corporations required by law, structure, and the imperatives of global finance to maximize financial returns to absentee owners without regard to the consequences for people or planet draws growing attention to itself as a driving source of the deepening human crisis. This has given rise to an increasingly powerful global citizen resistance movement.
“Unfortunately, resistance alone can do no more than slow the course of a social pathology deeply rooted in the culture and institutions of the Era of Empire. There is urgent need for a practical proactive strategy for individual and collective action to eliminate the pathology at its source by replacing the institutions and relationships of the suicide economy with the institutions and relationships of a healthy living economy that mimics the behavior of healthy living organisms.”