“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”
Albert Einstein
I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to focus on any one of our species’ challenges. With so many holes in the dyke, what use is it to try and plug just one? Even a divide-and-conquer approach — different people patching different holes — isn’t effective for the simple reason that the dyke itself is collapsing. New holes keep popping up, old holes keep getting bigger.
That to me is the real problem, the one that comes into focus after the metaphorical 55 minutes of thinking about it: The dyke itself. A human-made structure that’s collapsing under the pressure it creates simply by existing in the first place.
Rather than just patch, we need to replace.
To be clear, the dyke in my metaphor is an insidious global value system that promotes greed and inequality. That treats life — human and other — as an expendable resource, where the many are exploited for the benefit of the few (and, I might add, for the long term interests of no one.) Every challenge we face is created and exacerbated by this value system — climate change, hunger, poverty, racism, homelessness, immigration, war, you name it.
When I call it a global value system I don’t mean we all necessarily agree with it, but that we all can’t help but participate in it. It’s a value system written into the DNA of the institutions that create the rules we need to follow if we want to survive — or more accurately, the rules we need to follow if the system itself is to survive. A system that demands exploitation and a win-lose mindset in order to perpetuate itself.
But just because we’re caught up in this system doesn’t mean we can’t help to change it. Indeed, being caught up in it is what enables us to change it. Any subversive action of compassion, generosity, and selflessness ripples through the system and has an impact.
Such actions, however, will be more likely, more consequential and more plentiful if we’ve seen clearly that:
A world of haves and have-nots is unsustainable, immoral and dangerously destabilizing, to the point where there are now multiple paths to an extinction level event for the human species: environmental (climate change), biological (global pandemic), social (nuclear war.)
Any value system that creates these kinds of outcomes simply should not be allowed to guide our lives.
Once we have clarity on the problem, then the solution — committing to a value system that prioritizes the well being of all people and all life, not just in theory, but in action — will seem neither impractical nor onerous. We will want to take actions that help ensure other people are able to meet their needs and live full lives. We will want to free ourselves of the clutter and preoccupations that come with having too much. We will want for others that which we most want for ourselves — joy, meaning, purpose, kindness, compassion. We will want the wellbeing of people — all people — to become the organizing principle of everything human societies create.
Some may dismiss all this as impossibly utopian. Others might welcome the vision while simultaneously judging it unrealistic in today’s world. This to me is a harmful and obstructive stance. It implies that somehow, some day, we might live in a different world where such a vision might take root. But such a world won’t somehow magically appear. The seeds of the future are planted in what we do today. We won’t get different outcomes until we take different actions. There’s no logic to postponement.
This is why it’s so important to see clearly. To take the time to fully come to grips with the problem and the solution. That alone is enough to start building the alternative. When we see clearly, an internal shift occurs. We start to think differently. We start to act differently. We make different choices and different decisions. In short, we impact the world every day in a more positive way. And those impacts add up, ripple out, and multiply. In the short term, we make our individual lives better. In the slightly longer term, we make our neighborhoods and communities better. Eventually we make our nation and the world better.
But first, we need to see. Because once we see, we can do no other.
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.
Kern