Balance in the Balance

This entry sprang from a discussion on eco-philosophy in my Systems Perspective Course. It was kind of running off the rails so I decided to move it here where it wouldn't get in the way of the course content.

...I agree. We do need to find the balance between rationality and emotion, the masculine and the feminine, Cosmos and Kosmos. I agree completely (colleague) that "healing and integration has to start within before we can reflect it outwards to heal our world." -Beautiful quote btw.

Unfortunately we are currently living in a consumer society that constantly devalues emotion, wholeness and Kosmos. Engineers, product designers, geneticists, reductionists like Dawkins, pharmacologists rule the world. We are becoming a global society of quick fixes to big problems. We have shortened our attention spans to the length of a 20 second sound bite or 30 second SuperBowl commercial.

What nobody - and I mean NOBODY - has been able to tell me is how the hell we get people to slow down, unplug, shut the hell up and listen. To listen to themselves and their inner conversations, listen to breezes blowing through their hair, listen to the air move in and out of their lungs.

Absolutely [redacted], you, me, the rest of "the converted" need to start from within and then reflect it out. But, at this point all we are doing is spinning theory, searching for meaning and arguing about who's model of the nature of being is correct.

None of which is of the slightest concern to a population at large who is on the one hand spouting off about how GHG's are causing global warming and on the other hand drooling over a new X-box because the old one they got last year just isn't new enough.

Eco-philosophy can't be packaged and sold to the markets of the world. And, that's not a bad thing. It shouldn't be commodified. However, until we figure out how to "sell' eco-philosophy to a public (at least here in Alberta) that largely views the environmental movement as being a collection of weepy, doe-eyed, no-nothing, pot-heads full of dreams and no clue of how the real world works... we're Quixote tilting away at his windmills. In more common vernacular... we're screwed.