Part 1 — A New Declaration of Interdependence: Healing Our Global Intimacy Disorder Through an Evolving Universal Grammar of Shared Value
“We need a new Declaration of Independence together with a new Declaration of Interdependence. Not only are all human beings created equal; all human beings are born creative and all human beings are irreducibly unique. Uniqueness unlike separateness is not the cause of alienation but the currency of connection. All human beings are already intimate, containing the whole and for the sake of the whole.In that precise sense, the unique creativity of every human being for her own sake and the sake of the whole is the purpose and joy of a human life. This realization moves us from the Democratization of Governance to the Democratization of Enlightenment.”
A Note to the Reader
This is part 1 in a series taken from a spontaneous live talk given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain: Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard.
This is an almost unedited and unplugged version of Dr. Gafni’s talk. Thus, the style of the piece is the spoken word and not a formal essay.
In this series of short excerpts from Dr. Gafni’s talk we explore the deeper meaning of Independence Day and more importantly of the existential challenges to Democracy itself, in this crucial moment in our history.
A Fourth of July Talk by Dr. Marc Gafni
Introduction:
The 4th of July is an incredible day, on which the United States, and all of us around the world, celebrate freedom. The 4th of July is also a complicated day. The United States has been a leading democracy in the world. Yet it’s not easy to celebrate freedom. Things have changed. We’re living in a different world than the world of the Founding Fathers. Democracy itself must evolve. We need new forms of democracies. Instead of democracies based on win/lose metric in which polarization and alienation is destroying the heart of our society and crippling our capacity to deal with both catastrophic and existential threats, we need what Barbara and I have called “synergistic democracies”. We will talk more today and in the coming weeks about what that might look like.
What does it mean to celebrate freedom in a post-postmodern digitized world? A world in which our information ecologies are broken and we have lost our trust in the legacy institutions that govern our sense making. In which our collective decisions are manipulated by digital split testing beyond the pale of awareness, to an extent that easily has the capacity to change the result of an election.
This of course is not a conspiracy theory and has nothing to do with right or left wing politics. That is a simple fact that has been pointed out in great detail by responsible reporters in mainstream scholarship. If you want one example take a look at Shoshanna Zuboff’s magisterial work, Surveillance Capitalism and a half a dozen other pieces of serious reporting that parallel her analysis. This is but one question in a long list of pressing existential issues that confront us in this moment when we celebrate our freedom.
We remember well in this moment that when Benjamin Franklin was asked, after the constitutional convention in Philadelphia at the dawn of the American experiment, what kind of government had we formed, he answered “a republic, if you can keep it?”
This is a moment however not only of great risk but of great opening and possibility. We are poised not only before a series of possible dystopias, but more accurately between possible utopias and possible dystopias. We are at a time between worlds and a time between stories. This is a moment where we must all rise up and stand for value, for freedom, for Goodness, Truth and Beauty and more than anything else for the realization that we are the next chapter in the great love story of reality.
2. In part 2 we focus on celebrating the Eros of Goodness, Truth and Beauty in a digitized world that militates towards attention-hijacking, through the click bait of Pseudo Eros. Let’s clearly formulate the need for a revisioning of Freedom. Not just as a Declaration of Independence, but a Declaration of Interdependence.
3. In Part 3 I share the context which our Founding Fathers lived in and how we can reclaim the power of citizenry by articulating a shared ground of value from which we can do shared sense making.
4.In Part 4 I would like to share a number of reasons why democracy is failing and why the next stage of governance must include but also transcend democracy.
And to understand with you why that next stage must be rooted in a new shared story, a new emergent collective intelligence. Based on what I have called for many years a collective enlightenment or Democratization of Enlightenment. And why as Barbara Marx Hubbard and I have said together for the last many years, that “only a shared story creates global coherence”.
5. Let’s understand [in part 5] the “Global Intimacy Disorder” as the root cause or generator function for our Global Action Paralysis and Global Action Confusion. In response Zachary Stein, Barbara Marx Hubbard and myself have formulated what we might call the relativity equation of the interior sciences. This is what we have called the “Intimacy Formula” — an equation which marks a significant innovation in the interior sciences that has the capacity to generate global coherence.
6. Finally [in part 6] we need to call for a new Renaissance of shared values. We need what I have called over the last five or six years an evolving universal grammar of value based on First Principles and First Values that are innate and intrinsic to human consciousness and ultimately to Kosmos itself.
Together we must understand that in order to preserve our democracy we must also evolve it. We must evolve from the Democratization of Government to the Democratization of Enlightenment. This in turn must be supported by what Barbara and I have called the movement from a win/lose metric democracy to a synergistic democracy. But we can only succeed in evolving to a synergistic democracy if we have a new shared story.
Healing the Global Intimacy Disorder cannot happen without articulating a New Story for a New Humanity. This new story must be rooted in evolving First Principles and First Values. The New Story then becomes the matrix for a Global Ethos for a Global Civilization.
To be clear, this is not a totalizing ethic. It is rather the shared score that we need for the music of diversity. We do not need a totalitarian superorganism. That is the direction that the Tech Plex is inexorably trying to move us towards in multiple ways. Rather we need a Planetary Awakening in Love, Evolutionary Love, through emergent Unique Self Symphonies all over the world.
If you are new to One Mountain, Many Paths, these are a lot of new terms. We have unpacked all of them in the previous months and years and will continue to deepen them in the following months. In order to move Reality forward we need new languages of intimacy, new languages of governance, new languages of relationships, new languages of economics, new languages of spirit and more. It was the magic of language as a new emergent in Reality that allowed homo sapiens to explode life into every niche of the planet.
It is the emergence of new languages that will allow us to not be the generation in which the curtain falls on the great drama of evolving human life and evolving love on planet earth. The articulation of such new languages is one of our primary intentions in this revolution of Evolutionary Love that we call One Mountain, Many Paths.
I just want to add that these short remarks are spontaneous and incomplete. But at least we can start the conversation and we will continue it in the coming weeks.
