by Charles Eisenstein

Here is what that new story and new conception of progress might look like:

• Real security comes not through control, but from relationship and belonging.

• Nature has a fundamental tendency toward complexity and wholeness. Our destiny is to participate in the coming alive of the cosmos, to be part of the unfolding of complexity and beauty into new domains.

• Now is the time to turn the technologies of control toward a new purpose: to serve life and beauty on earth. That starts with healing the damage we have done.

• No technology is inevitable. We have the power to collectively choose how we will develop. We can choose technologies that conform to our emerging values of beauty and life.

• More is not necessarily better, because reality will always escape the primal cognitive technologies of control called labeling and measuring. In the future, we learn the limits of quantitative reasoning, and turn our main energies toward qualitative enrichment.

• Life and earth are sacred. When we reduce them to a finite value, we commit sacrilege. All resources of the earth are therefore meant for sacred use. When we use them, we always ask whether this will contribute to more beauty, more love, more wonder, and more life.

• Labor is also sacred; meaningful labor is necessary for human well-being. Therfore, technology should seek not to replace it, but extend its creative powers. 

• Because we humans are not the sole possessors of intelligence, order, and purpose, we can achieve much more by allying ourselves with an intelligence larger than ourselves, than we can relying on our own power to control the world through force.

• What was once marginalized as holistic and alternative will become the new reality. Most things that we chased with technologies of control will come to us. Seeing the body as intelligent, we unlock unforeseen healing powers. Asking, “What does the soil need,” we help it to heal and find that it returns our gifts to it many fold. Asking “What does my brother need?” we restore right relationship among all the tribes, races, and ethnicities of humanity. Coming into attentive relationship to forests, oceans, rivers, wetlands, and other ecosystems, we participate in their healing too, and it proceeds at astonishing speed. Exploring the relationship between matter and consciousness, we develop material technologies of energy, travel, construction, and more that were inconceivable in the paradigm of force.

• Progress means progress in peace, beauty, life, connection, and wisdom. In the built environment, we replace the modern landscape of cheapness with the kind of architectural wonders still remaining from before the 20th century. We replace industrial farms with a mosaic of gardens, food forests, and small ecological farms. We open the floodgates of alternative medicine, vitalizing what has been long suppressed and returning medicine to the people. In governance, progress means moving toward transparency and decentralization. In economics progress takes us toward local, community-oriented, zero-waste economies in which money plays a much smaller role. We retool society with the goal of healing on every level, so that progress is to end the cycles of trauma and abuse that have kept humanity miserable. We develop all the forgotten sciences: of geometry, vibration, light, mind, energy, and ceremony, learning how powerful we are in cooperation with, not opposition to, the intelligence of nature.