What’s the point? Of any of it?
For me, it is the unrest that comes from acknowledging what is wrong in the world.
Poverty. War. Violent crime. Social justice issues. Inequality. Racism.
Choose your weapon. It isn’t hard to see problems in the world.
My point is not to point them out, but to try and posit solutions. Or pathways to solutions.
Because I’m sick and tired of armchair, short-term, quick-fix ‘solutions’ sold by various snake-oil salesmen dressed as therapists, coaches, doctors, and insurance brokers. There is no shortage of ways to solve your problems that don’t work.
What do all of those things have in common? They address symptoms and not solutions. They’re a band-aid you give the rambunctious kid who just needs to learn to calm the hell down.
And like that kid, there are almost always – no, there are ALWAYS other issues working upstream of whatever symptoms we try to alleviate.
I just read a post on Medium that suggests that underneath of, or upstream of, nearly all of our wants and needs is the simple need to be seen for who we are. To be validated and understood.
I can vouch for that because I just had that experience in therapy. Having someone repeat back to me in their own words what I have shared with them is a good feeling.
It’s like Paul Gadola says, everything is either an act of or a cry for love.
In this episode, I talk about reductionism, the enlightenment, and the scientific revolution as having run their course. I think we need the pendulum to swing back to the center where we can examine simultaneously the parts AND the system within which these parts connect.
I use climate change as an example to illustrate these endpoints.
I suggest a systems approach to looking at everything and point to reductionism as being a real problem making us increasingly myopic.
I make the connection that to solve the problems above, we need to work at the local, reductionist level like we are.
But, more importantly, we need to consider all the parts and their interactions. And learn how to make changes far upstream and TRUST they will affect the parts.
We don’t do that anymore. We are so hyper-focused on the trees we can’t see the forest anymore.
I also suggest that, as we learn to look upstream, we reconsider our global values – the beliefs that we share at these most upstream locations.
Currently these values appear to be wealth, power, and status.
I think they should be more like love, connectivity, and cooperation.
Like many others, I am calling for a shift from the selfish individual to the shared collective.
But we can exist simultaneously to meet our individual needs while also living according to communal values.
All we have to do is remember how we used to live.
Streaming podcast audio: https://pdcn.co/e/https://chtbl.com/track/CGDA9D/www.buzzsprout.com/530563/12439104-kew-episode-116-how-to-fix-what-is-broken.mp3?download=true
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Nskyn2q_oGo
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