This is a followup to this week’s essays Conflict: The Norm of Current Civilization and Programmed for Conflict.
Remember CONFLICT is the struggle to avoid loss—the struggle to avoid being hurt. Here humans must fight and flee to stay alive, and they do. Always ready at a moments notice to go tooth and nail to avoid losing—to avoid death. Losers/winners is the harshest of games. Winning is always at the cost of another’s life. The loser tends to resist with all of his might occasionally prevailing by killing or wounding his attacker. So both parties can lose, turning the game—losers/winners into losers/losers. If we analyze adversary relationships, we discover that individuals are less after the relationship. (1+1)<2. In the adversarial world where the loser forfeits his life (1+1)=1. Or in the end game of losers/losers, both adversaries may die in battle, then (1+1)=0.
Barry Carter
If we go into an Information Age and develop no more emotional intelligence and spiritual awareness than we have today, then we’ll simply destroy ourselves out of the fear derived from our lose/win paradigm. Today we are like a group of five year olds who are having our Play Dough replaced with plastic explosives. We are in fact a civilization of children with enormous potential to destroy or create.
False neural associations are why we can see the irrationality behind someone else’s actions when they cannot see it. Others can see our irrational behavior and we cannot see it. To the person performing the irrational behavior, it is perfectly rational. His or her brain is simply calculating from its false neural associations and therefore the action appears logical.
The person viewing the irrational behavior does not have the same false neural associations. He is able to see the irrational behavior clearly. It is not uncommon to hear someone in this position ask, “Why in the world would he behave this way?” Paradigms tell us that there are different realities depending upon one’s perspective. Our false neural associations create paradigms and our different realities.
As we watch a gang member on news programs and listen to their rationality, we easily see where it is warped. We also see the gang member’s logic. We can see from his conviction that there is clear logic and reasonableness from his paradigm. We can see this in the Mid-East conflict. We saw it with Hitler, as well as slavery, South Africa, and the holocaust of the Indians.
Though there are many extreme cases, the vast majority of our problems stem from our small daily conflicts and mis-perceptions. This is because all people have false neural associations. They effect us, and hold us back in many ways. Though they helped us survive in a lose/win era, today they have become destructive, self-destructive and self-defeating. Our false neural associations are, therefore, today threatening society with death by a thousand cuts.
Most of us today are routed for lose/win because this has been humanity’s experience and conditioning for tens of thousands of years. More immediately, however, we as individuals were raised in a lose/win society. Lose/win is the clouded window from which most of us see. However, there is a growing number for which this is shifting to lose/lose, as our overflowing prisons reflect.
In a society of lose/win, somebody has to lose. Some people and groups lose all of the time. The people who continue to lose develop “loser” neural associations and pass these on to their children. This has posed little threat to civilization in the past, however, it does now.
“Knowledge is power.” As the saying goes, a little knowledge is dangerous. As we are at the infancy of a Knowledge Era, we today have just enough knowledge to be dangerous. Humanity has evolved to a point where we can no longer get away with what we could when we were younger and less mature. Marianne Williamson, in one of her lectures, makes the point that when we, as individuals, were younger we could get away with a lot of things that age and maturity no longer allows. One could abuse one’s body or stay out all night drinking and get up and go to work the next day. However, with maturity one has less ability to do this. It is time for humanity to grow up, we have no choice.
What we are witnessing is the metamorphosis of wealth creation from lose/win to either win-win or lose/lose. We can no longer maintain the lose/win human relations norm of our entire human history. As we press the accelerator to propel our lose/win civilization, it is disintegrating before our eyes. We must provide it with more power in order to continue driving our complex civilization, however the more we accelerate the lose/win system, the more hell we create for ourselves in crime, violence, war, terrorism, welfare and so on.
As long as wealth creation and spiritual awareness remain misaligned we likely will not be able to break our lose/win norm. As long as our wealth creation reality is one where I must win at your expense we are trapped in a lose/win reality. Lose/win wealth creation has in fact created our present worldview and without a change to a win-win wealth creation worldview we are likely doomed.
We must shift to the win-win paradigm based upon collaboration in aligned structures. We’ve already tried helping other people to win in unaligned lose/win structures and the result has been welfare and massive failure. The last resort is to do what most of us presently are doing–ignore the trends and attempt to stick with the lose/win competitive paradigm. This will lead directly to lose/lose as losing individuals are empowered in a knowledge era.
Copyright 2000 by Barry Carter
About Barry Carter.
Infinite Wealth is available at the author’s website, and can be purchased in bookstores everywhere including Amazon and Barnes & Nobel.
There is also an abbreviated free online version, which has been reposed at Future Positive: 1) The Rise of a Win Win Civilization 2) A Personal Journey of Discovery 3) Why Corporations Don’t Work 4) The Emancipation of Capitalism 5) Mass Privatization: Organizing in the Information Age 6) Decentralized Wealth Creation 7) The Infinite Wealth Potential of Liberated Humans 8) The Mandate for Win-Win Wealth Creation 9) Breakpoint: Why You Must Act Now 10) SYNOCRACY: True Democracy Through Synergy 11) THE SHIFT: Awaking to a Win-Win World 12) The Synthesis of a Win-Win World and 13)Vision for a Synergic Transition.