Oct./Nov. 1983 RAIN Page 29 Present and past governments, and those who have profited from their actions, must be accountable for loss to present and future citizens and to the biophysical systems themselves from their actions. PEOPLE, not professions. Our wealth has made it possible for us to institutionalize and professionalize many of our individual responsibilities—a process which is inherently ineffective and most costly, which has proven destructive of individual competence and confidence, and which is affordable only when significant surplus of wealth is available. We have been able to afford going to expensively trained doctors for every small health problem, rather than learning rudiments of medical skills or taking care to prevent health problems. We have been able to afford expensive police protection rather than handling our problems by ourselves or with our neighbors. We have established professional social workers, lawyers, and educators—and required that everyone use their services even for things we could do ourselves and that are wastes of time and expertise of the professionals. As the wealth that has permitted this becomes less available to us, it will become necessary to deprofessionalize and deinstitufionalize many of these services and again take primary responsibility for them ourselves. Our institutions have contributed to isolating, buffering, and protecting us from the events of our world. This has on one hand made our lives easier and more secure, and freed us from the continual testing that is part of the dynamic interaction in any natural system. It has also, by these very actions, made us feel isolated, alienated, and rightfully fearful of not being able to meet those continued tests without the aid of our cultural and technical implements. Our lack of familiarity with all the natural processes of our world and uncertainty of our ability to successfully interact with them aided only by our own intuitive wisdom and skills has enslaved us to those implements and degraded us. We can act confidently and with intuitive rightness only when we aren't afraid. We can open ourselves to the living interaction that makes our lives rewarding only when we cease to fear what we can't affect. Fear is only unsureness of our own abilities. We have to take responsibility OURSELVES for our own lives, actions, health, and learning. We must also take responsibility ourselves for our community and society. There is no other way to operate any aspect of our lives and society without creating dictatorial power that destroys and prevents the unfolding of human nature and that concentrates the ability to make errors without corrective input. No one else shares our perceptions and perspective on what is occurring and its rightness, wrongness, or alternatives. We are the only ones who can give that perspective to the process of determining and directing the pattern of events. Our institutions can be tools that serve us only when they arise from and sustain the abilities of individuals and remain controlled by them. AUSTERITY, not affluence. Austerity is a principle which does not exclude all enjoyments, only those which are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness. It is part of a more embracing virtue— friendships or joyfulness, and arises from an awareness that things or tools can destroy rather than enhance grace and joyfulness in personal relations. Affluence, in contrast, does not discriminate between what is wise and useful and what is merely possible. Affluence demands impossible endless growth, both because those things necessary for good relations are foregone for unnecessary things, and because many of those unnecessary things act to damage or destroy the good relations that we desire. PERMANENCE, not profit. Profit, as a criterion of performance, must be replaced by permanence in a world where irreplaceable resources are in scarce supply, for profit always indicates their immediate use, destroying any ability of a society to sustain itself. The only way to place lighter demands on material resources is to place heavier demands on moral resources. Permanence, as a judge of the desirability of actions, requires first that those actions contribute to rather than lessen the continuing quality of the society. Permanence in no way excludes fair reward for one's work—but distinguishes the profit a person gains based on loss to others from profit derived from a person's work or contribution to others. RESPONSIBILITIES, not rights. A society—or any relationship—based on rights rather than responsibilities is possible only when the actions involved are insignificant enough to not affect others. Our present society is based upon rights rather than responsibilities, and upon competitive distrust and contractual relationships rather than upon the more complex and cooperative kinds of relationships common in other cultures. These relationships have given us the freedom to very quickly extract and use our material wealth, settle a continent, and develop the structure of cities and civilization. Any enduring relationship, however, must balance rights with responsibilities to prevent destruction of weaker or less aggressive, yet essential, parts of relationships—whether other people, the biosphere that supports our lives, or the various parts of our own personalities. Distrust or contractual relationships are the easiest to escape and the most expensive to maintain—requiring the development of elaborate and expensive legal and financial systems—and cannot be the dominant form of relationship in societies that do not have the surplus wealth to afford them. Moral or ethically based relationships; relationships based on cooperation, trust, and love; and the relationships encompassing more than just work, family, education, recreational, or spiritual parts of our lives are more rewarding and satisfying to the people involved. They are also more stable in their contribution to society, vastly easier to maintain, and harder to disrupt. They have always been the most common kinds of relationships between people except under the extreme duress of war or growth. BETTERMENT, not biggerment. Quantitative things, because of the ease of their measurement by external means, have been sought and relied upon as measures of success by our institutionally centered society. We are learning the hard lesson that quantity is no substitute
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