What is the Crisis of Conscience?!

If the many crises of our time can be conflated into a single phrase it is the phrase “crisis of conscience”. Because of universal ecological/environmental degradations, the global population of humankind is beginning to realize that the “economics” of corporate consumerism is a way of living that cannot be sustained or justified. Universal guilt over the wasting of Earth and each other is beginning to prod more consciences, and with increased worries, people take up the blame-game. That game is counter-productive.

The crisis is not without cause and guilt. Of course we are all complicit in causing it and we must all be honest in our discernment of complicity and equally honest in recognizing the universal need to change consumerist habits.

Belief, worldview and politics are all skewed to sustain each other in consumerist culture. To change culture, the erroneous insights of belief, worldview and politics must be challenged for their misinformation and misdirection. There is reason to believe that the elections of 2006 were a referendum for change from political, cultural misdirection. Public consciousness in this direction is likely to grow because of global ecological, social crises that none can escape.

The status-quo of “orthodox” thinking, that is, of staticism, centrism and dominion, is sustained by the conspiracy of belief, worldview and politics. Belief effects worldview; worldview effects culture; and culture effects politics. Static belief fixates worldview; static worldview fixates culture; and static culture fixates politics.

For millennia, worldview has been fixated in cosmic centrism, dominion theology and imperial politics. Fixation of belief in dominion theology has fixated culture in the politics of dominion (imperialism). The experience of Christian/European colonialism globally weighs heavily on its inheritors—us. Conscience and good faith no longer tolerate the unconscionable habits of social/ecological degradation.

The global consequences of dominion theology/politics have proven to be socially, economically and ecologically unsustainable and unjustifiable. Global concern for survival now compels changes in belief, worldview, culture and politics. The imperative of ENLIGHTENMENT, of awareness of the global “crisis of conscience”, compels everyone. Enlightenment compels global societal movement from imperial culture to Earth Community. It can’t happen too fast.

[Reference: David C. Korten, “The Great Turning from Empire to Earth Community”]