http://ervinlaszlo.com/the-g-8-and-the-g-20-a-matter-of-vision-and-consciousness/
Be Well.
David
The G-8 and the G-20: a Matter of Vision and Consciousness
Where there is no vision, the people perish
Proverbs 29:18
One can’t solve a problem with the same level
of consciousness at which the problem arose
Albert Einstein
The final statements of the June 2010 Canada meetings of the G-8 and the G-20 make for impressive reading (G-8 Muskoka Declaration – Recovery and New Beginnings, 25-26 June 2010, and The G-20 Toronto Summit Declaration, June 26-27, 2010). They contain a long list of marvelous commitments through which the leaders of the advanced world decide to join forces to ensure a better future for all.
All is well then? Hardly. A closer look reveals important lacunae and a major fallacy.
To begin with, the flawless harmony communicated in the G-8 and G-20 Declarations was not mirrored in the actual debates. There was little agreement on how to move forward, with the U.S. insisting on additional public spending to re-launch recovery, and the UK and the other European nations opting for budgetary cutbacks as the way to move forward. The proposals of the member states also had a tacit “beggar-thy-neighbor” dimension: if implemented they would serve the given nation’s economy, without much regard for the sacrifices incurred for the others. The crux of the matter is that there was no real effort to overcome the structural reasons for underdevelopment in the world—not to mention maldevelopment. Beyond earmarking some more of the reserves held by the advanced economies for humanitarian purposes—reducing infant and under-five mortality, for example—the goals were to re-launch material growth in the member economies.
The statements disclose a serious fallacy. The vision of the “leaders of the advanced world,” and of their role in the world, is obsolete. For them the world is made up of groups of nation-states, with national governments in charge of ensuring the national interest. The national interest is economic interest. The leaders’ role is to bring about “recovery,” “renewed stability” and “balanced growth” in the nation’s economy. Cooperation in this domain is to rebalance the kind of world that the recent economic and financial crises had unbalanced.
There is no indication that the G-8 and G-20 leaders would recognize that recovering and re-establishing the economic-financial order of the past would be tantamount to re-creating an intrinsically unsustainable and now terminally crisis-bound system. There is no indication that they would entertain even the possibility that what is needed is not more of the same, but a thorough transformation.
Can we expect this kind of recognition from the leaders of the world’s most powerful nation-states? Evidently not. Real transformation would—or at any rate could—place in question the legitimacy of the very system that grants them power and privilege.
Yet re-launching the kind of growth that the world experienced in the late 20th century is not the way forward. Throwing money at the problems, while necessary and frequently (although not always) helpful, is not the panacea. The current economic-financial system is structurally flawed and will ultimately break down—hardly any serious economist would contest it any longer. The leadership choice is not between allowing countries and peoples to suffer imminent crises or postponing their onset, but between leading the transformation to a more sustainable system, or becoming its victim.
The self-proclaimed leaders of the advanced nations need a better vision of the world, and of their role in the world. In a world where a third of the people live in abject poverty, as many if not more face critical water shortages, and where the atmosphere heats up, the climate changes, sea levels rise, and the processes enabling the regeneration of vital biological resources are seriously impaired, a uniquely or even primarily material focus is not just inadequate; it is strongly misleading. With that kind of vision, the people, or a large segment of them, will perish.
A better leadership vision can only emerge from a level of consciousness that is different from that which produced the current economic, social, and ecological conditions. It must be a consciousness that wide-ranging cooperation based on solidarity and oriented toward fundamental transformation is the basic precondition of peace and sustainability in the world. It must be a consciousness that inspires and motivates cooperation not only in the economic and financial domain, but also in the domains of ecology, technology, education, public information, and cultural contact and communication; it must be a consciousness of interdependence, and, in the final count, the oneness of all people on spaceship Earth, the oneness of their destiny.
The “games” our leaders must play are not the kind where one wins and the other loses, but where everybody wins. Because in the planetary survival and growth game, if not everybody wins, everybody loses—and sooner than most leaders may think.
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