Let the Giants Fall

$700 billion bail out? More like bailing out the Titanic as it crashes into the iceberg. But like all icebergs, the deeper issues are hidden from view. So hidden, in fact, that nobody’s even talking about them, not Obama, certainly not McCain, and Palin looks like a kid on Christmas, dazzled by the lights and still believing in Santa Claus.

Panic is understandable, but billing $10,000 per family to fix the falling giants of the old era is merely staving off the inevitable. We’re going into a recession no matter what and we may as well start thinking about what that means and what to do about it.

Mortgage loans aren’t the only thing built on false foundations, but the entire economic system is losing its ground. Unlimited growth, oil-based energy, environmental exploitation, and feeding the rich from the mouths of the poor are clearly unsustainable and destined to fall sooner or later. No amount of bailout is going to change that reality. In fact, it just perpetuates it, by refusing to name the disease until it’s become terminal, metasticized into every facet of society, and most parts of the world. But then maybe the U.S. needs a little taste of what it is to be poor and vulnerable in order to learn compassion.

Like Olympian gods making way for a new era, these monolithic pillars are dinosaurs of cultural evolution. They served their purpose of expanding production and innovation, making it possible for an emerging middle class to gain some control over their lives from a feudal system of land ownership. We’ve had our heyday, but now it’s time for a new system.

Beginning with the World Trade Center, the interdependent dominoes are cascading, picking up speed as they fall. Our best hope at this point is that they fall so completely that business as usual becomes impossible, and everybody finds themselves in the same boat. Then the unfortunate few cannot be singled out for foreclosure and eviction, and we just might have to do it a different way. After all, they can’t evict everybody, and if they do, who will be sending money to the banks?

In the endless expansion and contraction of the evolutionary process, failed savings and loans, stock market crashes, rising oil prices, collapsing banks, and rising unemployment are all contractions that signal a new birth. Have you noticed these contractions are happening more frequently? We must be approaching that stage that midwives call “transition.” In the birthing process, this is a point of no return where the baby’s head is fully engaged in the birth canal and can no longer retreat back to the uterus. The contractions must be balanced by a simultaneous opening or things get very intense and dangerous. Birth is painful and messy. But what are we birthing and why does it hurt so much? Every mother has wondered this at some stage of her delivery.

This isn’t our first birth, however, but a re-birth of archetypal proportions, no less than our emergence from planetary adolescence into our young adulthood. It is the shift from an organizing principle based on the love of power: where the few on top rule the many down below. Like a parent child model, where goods are supplied by the parent, we have been organized around the powerful, whose trickle down economics reward the faithful who follow the rules. It’s time to move from a chain of command to a web of connection, from competition to cooperation, and from children to grown-ups, who take power into our own hands.

We can’t follow the rules any more, because the old rules no longer work. Our parents are exhausted, depleted, aging and dying. The children are growing up, getting smarter. The tools of power that enable mass communication are now in the hands of the common people. We must now learn to supply our own needs and create adult relationships based on equality and cooperation, networking together our best minds to find new solutions that work for all. This is the basis of the emerging power of love, an organizing principle truly based on “we the people” as we help each other out, turn our lawns into gardens, stop buying unnecessary stuff, stay off the freeways and lower the temperature. Only necessity is going to make this happen on a wide enough scale to create the sea change that is required.

An economic downturn is exactly what needs to happen. It will take us into the adolescent initiation that brings us to our knees and opens us to grace. Like enforced bedrest, it will create space for a re-evaluation of all our needs and expectations. We can slow down and think things through. We can withdraw from the insanity of driving in traffic every day to work harder to buy more things that use up resources and pollute the atmosphere and raise the temperature. Out of this will emerge new discoveries and innovations, new possibilities and connections, new and more efficient ways to exchange energy and information. As a nation and a people, we will most certainly find our humility. And that is the beginning of wisdom.

No, it won’t be easy, I’m sure about that. But that’s what makes it an initiation, that’s what brings maturity, and that’s what makes it vitally necessary to change. But like most births, we don’t even know what’s on the other side. It could surpass our wildest dreams.