Be healthy.
Be kind.
Respect the environment.
Seven words.
• Sounds simple enough.
• Why don’t we do it?
We don’t do it because we have competing sets of survival instincts.
Our competing sets of survival instincts — the products of evolution — produce opposing worldviews, beliefs, impulses, and actions that account for the epic struggle daily for the evolution and survival of humanity.
Our first set of survival instincts is perfectly normal, natural, organic, and . . . disastrous.
These are our short-term survival instincts.
• Like all creatures, we are programmed, genetically predisposed, hardwired, to make it to tomorrow, i.e., to survive and reproduce.
• These short-term survival instincts generate behavior that is characterized by fear, greed, power, control, immediate gratification, self-centeredness, authoritarianism, denial of inequality, and the like.
• This is a set of survival instincts — essential in primitive times to survive — that now retards our evolution.
Evolution has also given us another set of survival instincts, our long-term survival instincts.
• These occur as a result of our large and evolved brains.
• Among all vertebrates, relative to size, we have the largest brains.
Unique among all species, we are able to reflect on our behavior and project to where our behavior is taking us.
It’s not a pretty picture.
We are like an airplane flying overhead with someone out on the wing popping rivets until the plane crashes.
We are beginning to understand that our short-term survival instincts and related behavior are destroying us.
We want to survive for the long-term, not the short-term.
We want to improve the quality of our lives, sustain humanity, advance our civilization, and succeed as a species.
The word “sustainability” has come into wide usage.
• It means that we must leave this planet as we found it or improve it so those who follow us will have the same or better opportunities that we have had.
• We are a species, likely the first on this planet, who has an opportunity to advance beyond short-term survival instincts.
We are beginning to understand that our behavior cannot be characterized by fear, greed, power, control, immediate gratification, self-centeredness, authoritarianism, denial of inequalities, and the like.
• Instead, our behavior must be characterized by health in all of its dimensions: physical, mental, and emotional.
• By kindness toward each other and other nation-states.
• By respect for our environment, our ecological systems, and our biosphere as we inhabit a very narrow and fragile band within our solar system that allows life to exist at all.
Our long-term survival instincts and associated behavior can sustain humanity and advance our civilization.
Each of these sets of survival instincts — the older short-term instincts and our emerging long-term instincts — generates powerful belief systems in the areas of politics, business, social interaction, and religion.
Politics
Our old short-term survival instincts generate adversarial, hostile and belligerent politics focused on the destruction of one’s perceived opposition whether that is an individual, organization, political party, or a nation-state.
It is politics that favors unilateralism and unjustified pre-emptive wars.
Our long-term survival instincts and emerging worldview favor non-adversarial politics that seek to find the common ground.
• It is a worldview that recognizes that we don’t have the time, resources, or energy to squander fighting with each other.
• And, that we have severe and complicated problems on our planet — social, political, economic, and environmental — that must be addressed urgently in a cooperative and constructive manner.
It’s a politics aware that all of our challenges are compounded by the addition weekly of in excess of 1,500,000 people to our global population.
Business
In business and commerce, our old way of thinking is about short-term gain.
We maximize profit in the short-term.
We exploit people and our environment.
Our emerging worldview is about long-term gain and sustainability.
• It’s socially responsible business.
• It’s about a triple bottom line to include people, planet, and profits.
• It’s the enlightened understanding that life is a far more complex phenomenon
than a race to see who can accumulate the most.
Social Interaction
In social interaction, the old worldview is focused on us versus them.
It favors exclusivity and segregation.
The emerging worldview recognizes that there is no “them,” it’s just “us.”
And that social interaction must be inclusive and integrated.
It’s a world view that emphasizes oneness and togetherness.
Religion
Old religious thought positions one’s truth and tribe against others’ truths and tribes.
The result is never ending conflict and chaos, the antithesis of peace.
The emerging worldview, whatever the religion, emphasizes kindness and universal benevolence.
It thinks intelligently about the origins of ancient religions and the phenomenon of religion itself.
In summary, our old worldview is characterized by separation, exclusivity, segregation, and unilateralism.
Our emerging worldview is about togetherness, unity, inclusiveness, integration, and multilateralism.
Many of us are predisposed as a consequence of our genetics and/or our life experiences to think and act in our old, destructive, and unsustainable ways.
This requires unlearning and evolution of thought and behavior, all of which are daunting challenges.
The new way of thinking is one that requires learning.
What is it that we must learn?
• We must learn that we exist as a tiny fragment of an immensely larger interlocking whole in which all of the parts are interconnected and dependent upon each other for survival.
• Simply put, everything is connected to everything else.
• We exist not separately but in communion with all living things.
• Life is an interrelated interdependent phenomenon.
• That is the nature of life — the web of life.
• That is the nature of the reality in which we exist.
Reality has behavioral demands, that is if we want to stick around, i.e., remain alive.
These can be summarized in seven words which form three simple rules for living:
Be healthy.
Be kind.
Respect the environment.
These seven words have the power to change the way we govern, the laws that we enact, the way we do business, the products that we create, the services that we offer, how we treat our employees, our environment, each other, and ourselves.
Be healthy.
Be kind.
Respect the environment.
• Leaders must model this behavior.
• Teachers must teach it.
• We must exhibit it.
That is if we wish to sustain humanity, advance our civilization, and succeed as a species.
• To do so requires entering into a completely new understanding of the reality in which we exist.
• Our window of opportunity to make the necessary and monumental shift in thinking is small compared to the large obstacles within our current belief systems that must be dissolved.
• Yet, we must do this if we and all the life forms that share this jewel of a planet are to survive.
Be healthy.
Be kind.
Respect the environment.
Why are these seven words so critical and powerful?
• Because we exist as a tiny fragment of an immensely larger interlocking whole — the operative words — in which all the parts are interconnected and dependent upon each other for survival.
• We exist not separately but in communion with all living things.
This interlocking whole is the inescapable foundation that supports both the architecture of life and our civilization.
If we continue to destroy the relationships that form the foundation of this interlocking whole (relationships with our health, each other, and our environment), our civilization will disintegrate and, eventually, collapse.
Conversely, if we honor these relationships, we will succeed and prosper in every way.
• The choice is ours.
• Our future lies in our own hands.
• It always has.
The difference today is that we understand a great deal more about what sustains and optimizes life.
It is time to honor the knowledge that we have and act in a sustainable manner.
It’s time for humanity to grow up.
Only then, will we improve the quality of our lives, arrest and reverse our destructive and unsustainable momentum, end our needless suffering, prosper together, find peace, sustain humanity, advance our civilization, and succeed as a species.