World Creators
Develop our ability to both participate in the world and co-create it through action.
it’s up to us to create a World That Works so that a Global Civilization can thrive. We created the world we have now, so we know we can do it; we just have to do it better.
We have an uncanny knack for changing the world without really knowing what we’ve done or how we did it. From an evolutionary perspective, our ability to affect our own evolution is a new phenomenon, so it’s not surprising that we’re clumsy with it, but we need to get better at it or we’ll accidentally prove ourselves unfit for survival.
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Our world, as distinct from our planet Earth, was designed and built by our ancestors over thousands of generations to help humanity survive and thrive. It’s our turn to develop and improve it.
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Human history is marked by major transition times: civilizations falling, environments being changed and destroyed, diseases wiping out whole communities, but as bad as these catastrophes were, they were always at a local or regional scale. Humans haven’t had the power to change things at a global scale until recently… until just now. We’re now facing another major transition time, brought on by population growth, globalization, exponential technology, the internet and other factors, that has the potential to take us into an amazing new future or destroy us completely as a species.
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As Buckminster Fuller said over 50 years ago, we have a choice between utopia or oblivion.
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And here’s the thing: we can’t expect anyone else to choose and create utopia for us. The current systems are not going to change themselves from the inside. In order to choose utopia, we need to accept our role as evolutionary agents, able to change the world to a new vision that works for all humanity. The power that makes it possible for us to destroy ourselves is the same power that gives us the ability to fix things and live on forever as a species. We are world creators. Here is how Daniel Schmachtenberger describes it:
“[We ask] then how can we apply all that learning now to actually help create that world? And in doing so, we stop just being a part of the whole but in our ability to think about the whole and think about the direction of the whole, we can actually become an agent for the whole. […] To be… not just aboard Spaceship Earth, but crew, right, to help steer the direction of evolution and cosmos. And so we move from evolution as a mostly unconscious algorithmic process that selects for dominance now to a process that can be mediated by conscious agents that can actually forecast a more beautiful future and select to help create that.” — Daniel Schmachtenberger, Emergence talk
- This role is often referred to as being a “changemaker,” and that name hints at the main challenge that comes with such a powerful ability: change can make things better or it can make things worse, so we need to make sure that we’re doing good change making.
Therefore:
However possible, develop your ability to take action, including both your ability to participate in the world and your ability to change or recreate it; increase your effectiveness by thinking strategically and considering all your experience and knowledge. Use your increasing capacity as a world creator to attend to the development—the unfolding—of all humanity and our built world as a coherent whole, for the good of humanity and the rest of the life aboard our planet.
To create a future that we might call a utopia, we need to have a better idea of where we want to go— [[ Shared Future ]], and while we may be born potential world makers, we’ll need to develop ourselves as effective tools for creating that future—Personal Universe. Help a Global Civilization emerge by transforming systems toward Greater Livingness which includes looking at the important relationships— [[ Relationship Design ]]—in a context of an Abundance economy