Lotus flowers have been used throughout history in South Asia and have been featured in Buddhist and Hindu art, architecture and literature.
It was even a symbolically important plant before the religions at the time of the Indus Valley civilisation.
The flowers became symbolic of immortality and resurrection because people observed that they would grow from the bottom of dried up pools after
the monsoon rains.
The not yet totalitarian colonization of the
global culture of consumption --
infantilizing human behaviors --
a challenge to planetary democracy.
Born of competition and rooted in entrepreneurship, consumer markets today
have become monsters of monomania. With "everything for sale" (R. Kuttner, 1997)
rival spheres come under attack, and "Government stands impeached and impoverished,
along with democratic politics itself." There is only one paradigm--"unfettered
markets are deemed both the essence of human liberty, and the most expedient
route to prosperity"--and hence but one value (profit) one activity (shopping),
one identity (the consumer), one paradigm of behavior (market exchange), one
life world (commerce) that qualify as legitimate.
The challenge is to demonstrate that as consumers we can know what we want
and want only what we need; and that, with the rest of our lives we intend to
live as lovers or artists or learners or citizens in a plethora of life worlds
in which consumption need play no role. Once we resume our lives as complex
human beings with diverse wants, only some of which can be satisfied by material
consumption, capitalism will be compelled to resume its role as an efficient
respondent to real human needs, even if (as often happened in the early history
of markets) profits come only further down the road because so many of those who
have genuine needs are not in a position to pay in full for their satisfaction.
This kind of fundamental change is likely to come only when citizens reassert
their democratic sovereignty over the economy, requiring a revolution that is
more like a restoration of the situation under which capitalism has historically
been most successful.
The People have exclusive power to vote, and the People must learn
how to use their vote "so that corporations become our servants not
our masters." Presidential candidate Ralph Nader speaks with MSNBC.com's Bob Sullivan (March 28, 2008).
MASSIVE SOCIAL INEQUITY,
HUMAN SUFERING, DEATH & DESTRUCTION
WE ARE THE ONES WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR
Courtesy puppetgov.com
Return to Barbarity --
Mushroom Cloud Over Hiroshima (Browse Survivors Recolections)
Sky is Falling --
"60 Seconds to Save the Earth"
Ecospot Grand Prize Winner
Wired but disconnected E-culture
Courts of Robbery
Reinventing Courts of Justice
NOAA image of the globe dedicated to public domain
British Graffiti artist Mohammed Ali and British Photographer Peter Sanders. Knowledge, or Ilm, written in Arabic script.
Salam in the City, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. ALJAZEERA.Net (2 Mar 2006).
The Problem
Everyone loves the idea of democracy - a genuine union of true individuals -
but there are very few lovers of democracy -- people devoted to achievement of
the democratic ideal who possess knowledge of a Technology of Democracy
that offers a viable means to achieve this goal.
What we witness appears to be an endeavor to extend various fragmented self-interest
spaces, through a search of common interests. Maybe this represents a slow,
glacially slow, and seemingly unconscious attempt to break the hold that the idea
of nation-state has taken; it has full dominance now over our minds, over our
ability to conceive of other new ways of establishing larger and wider social
bonds. For the moment, no evolutionary leap seems to be in the making in this
field. Nevertheless, we are forced to conclude that the introduction of ecological
balance into our normative scheme requires that the notion of social bonding be
viewed as transcending the idea of nation and extending to the planet as a whole.
, in PERSPECTIVES OF PLANNING
47-155 (OEDC Report, Jantsch ed. 1968); explained in A.N. Christakis, A New Policy
Science Paradigm, FUTURES, Dec 1973; applied in Ozbekhan, The Future of Paris,
in ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON, PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS SERIES A, at 287, 523 (1977)
The Ultimate Goal
To advance a shift in the global paradigm of the Setting for decisions of the
Information-age, toward democratic sustainability.
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Cornelia
P. Atchley, artist, Portrait of Vigdor in blue
2001.
