ONLY FIVE RULES FOR THE PLANET
Let us do a little thought experiment. Imagine you have an opportunity to pick five rules for The Planet (Earth) and these will be the only rules the planet can live by. Then you would turn your rules loose and see what would happen.
The idea for this thought experiment began as I was watching a group of starlings (black birds) fly in a beautiful, ever-changing pattern. It made sense that they would do so to elude predators. Yet the natural question was how are they able to fly in such intricate beautiful patterns without bumping into each other? Was there a lead bird with her trusty lieutenants guiding the flock? What I discovered was that each bird has a certain set of rules built into their genetic code. For example, each bird always keeps equal distance from the other birds. In addition, they travel in pods of seven birds that intuitively know each other’s habits. In this way, large flocks can come together and choreograph evasive movements from falcons and hawks as a whole.
It got me to thinking about human beings and the rules we live by. Our behavior tends to be fairly complex, yet within that complexity is a set of rules that tends to guide our behavior as well. In his book, The Righteous Mind[1], Jonathan Haidt talks about five pre-wired morals in human beings when they are born. They are (1) No Harm/Care, (2) Fairness/Justice, (3) Ingroup Loyalty, (4) Authority/Respect, and (5) Purity/Sanctity. Depending on the environment you grow up in, there is a tendency to foster certain aspects of these values more than others. For example, liberals tend to favor the first two over the last three wherein conservatives tend to value all five in certain specific ways.
As you think about your five rules, you will want to ask yourself is there certain biases based on your values and upbringing that will guide your choices? The answer of course, is yes, yet understanding how your biases might guide your five rules for the planet will take some thoughtful reflection.
For example, as I share my five rules below, you will discover a strong bias towards natural systems in my rules. The purpose of this essay is not to battle out whose rules are right, but to make us aware of what our values are and how we might begin to find common ground towards the social rules we wish to live by in a rapidly changing future.
Below are my five rules:
RULE NUMBER ONE-WHEN IN DOUBT, COOPERATE WITH THE WHOLE SYSTEM IN MIND
Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection suggests that populations adapt and survive through competition for resources, yet there is evidence that it is not just competition that leads to flourishing, but also cooperation. Nature has both aspects of competition and cooperation in play. We are facing unprecedented challenges socially, economically, politically, and environmentally in our current times and the best chance for our survival is to find ways to cooperate, pooling our collective wisdom towards life-giving solutions. Cooperation not only means finding common ground with diverse populations and cultures, but also involves stepping over our tribal boundaries to build relationships with people we normally view as the invisible other. If we can come to see our perceived enemies as real people with real names we can begin to experiment with trust. Without trust cooperation will simply not be possible.
RULE NUMBER TWO-ALL WASTE GENERATED MUST BE USABLE BY OTHER PARTS OF THE SYSTEM
Nature really doesn’t have waste. It has byproducts that are used by other elements of nature. If everything in our lives were recycled, reused, consumed, composted, or transformed into useful ingredients, we would operate within a balanced ecosystem. This would include all the energy we used to power our homes, cars, businesses, etc. Global warming would be drastically impacted. Our human bio-waste could be utilized to enrich our farm fields. We would have no need for landfills and pollution would be non-existent. We could become citizens of the natural world again and contribute to the ongoing evolution of the natural world in life-giving ways.
RULE NUMBER THREE- THE DEFAULT MODE OF AUTHORITY IS TO NURTURE SHARED POWER
All systems need people who have specific jobs or authority to get things done, yet people in authority can easily become corrupt if there are not shared systems of power to balance things out. Shared power is rarely efficient and can be quite messy at times. Yet it can also ensure that there is a high level of ownership for solving some of our most challenges problems. In addition, the gift of diverse perspectives and strategies enables long-term solutions to be developed for all people not just a few. In this day and age, many people in positions of authority or power fear losing their status and will do everything they can to consolidate their power. This is nothing new. However, what is new is that the urgency of our survival depends largely on cooperation across the planet to achieve a shared vision. This will not happen if we operate from old tribal leadership paradigms.
RULE NUMBER FOUR-WE MUST DESIGN OUR HUMAN SYSTEMS WITH SEVEN GENERATIONS AS OUR GUIDE.
What does it mean to live with seven generations in mind? It means that we must live as if our daily actions will impact seven generations in the future. While this may seem like a “no-brainer” to many, we rarely live our lives with this in mind. The original idea stems from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, whose governance greatly influenced our current United States Constitution. This principle implies that we must utilize sustainable, renewable resources if our children’s children stand a chance for living a vibrant, healthy life. If we adopted this principle/rule into our lives, we would suddenly have to make some very hard decisions about energy use, land management, home construction and many other social elements of our current culture.
RULE NUMBER FIVE-LIVE SIMPLY WITHIN OUR MEANS
One definition of living simply means that we do not consume more than we need, although the vision of this rule goes beyond consuming to how we engage in every aspect of our daily lives. Defining our needs can be a tricky business and is often dependent on cultural norms, ethnic traditions, and spiritual beliefs and practices. Maslow attempted to define our needs with his Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, but even that can be widely interpreted. The important thing to explore with this principle or rule is that living within our means offers us the freedom to make life-giving choices for ourselves and our families because we are debt-free and can invest our life-energy in activities that continuously improve our wellbeing.
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I suspect you will ask some questions about these top five rules. For example, you might ask, “where is kindness or compassion in this mix?”. It’s a great question. I would offer, that these five rules reflect kindness and compassion in action. Kindness, love, respect, and compassion are great broad-brush strokes, but they leave so much for interpretation that I chose specific manifestations of these big words with these five actions.
It really is the Designer’s Dilemma. You have only five rules to create the best planet you can and you recognize that the more all-encompassing words are symbols that can be wildly interpreted to mean many different things. Some can have unintended consequences. Take “empathy” of which I am a big fan of…it can offer understanding towards the perpetrators of some of the most vile acts, but understanding alone doesn’t guarantee that the behavior will be different in the future. Although to be fair, empathy may lead us to creating conditions that prevent the causing of harm in the future.
Each of my rules reward specific outcomes directly. They are not perfect, which is why I am inviting all of you to imagine the five rules for creating our desired future. Five rules and five rules only.
Keep in mind that the one filter that I use for creating these rules is that they must be life-giving to the whole, not just parts of the systems we live in. Life-giving means that your rules will improve individual, community, organizational, and environmental wellbeing.
Please send your rules to my email address at docklein1@gmail.com. I will write a future article that reflects your ideas and best thinking.
Here is a poem to close with. Good luck in creating your ideal world.
FIVE RULES
Five rules
From five schools
The schools of life that is
Life-giving
Whole Living
This is our daily biz
Step right up
And drink from the cup
The equivalent of the Holy Grail
Sacred days
Exiting the maze
Love will never fail.
