OUR TWO MOST ON ways of trying to address our toughest social challenges are the extreme ones: aggressive war and submissive peabsp;her of these ways works. We bsp;try, using our guns or money or votes, to push through what we want, regardless of what others wantbut iably the others push babsp;Or we bsp;try not to push anything on a that leaves our situation just as it is.
These extreme ways are extremely on, on all scales. One on one, we bsp;be pushy or flibsp;averse. At work, we bsp;be bossy or "go along to get along." In our unities, we bsp;set things up so that they are the way we want them to be, or we bsp;abdicate. In national affairs, we bsp;make deals to get our way, or we bsp;let others have their way. In iional relationswhether the challenge is climate ge or trade rules or peabsp;in the Middle Eastwe bsp;try to impose our solutions on everyone else, or we bsp;iate endlessly. These extreme, on ways of trying to address our toughest social challenges usually fail, leaving us stubsp;and in pain. There are many exceptions to these generalizations about the prevale;of these extreme ways, but the fabsp;that these are exceptions proves the general rule. We needand many people are w on developingdifferent, unon ways of addressing social challenges: ways beyond these degeive forms of war and peace.
A character in Rent, Jonathan Larson's Broadway musibsp;about struggling artists and musis in New York City, says, "The opposite of war isn't peabsp;it's creation!"[1] To address our toughest social challenges, we need a way that is her war nor peabsp;but collective creation. How bsp;we cocreate new social realities?
TWO FUAL DRIVES
To cocreate new social realities, we have to work with two disti;fual forbsp;that are in tension: power and love. This assertion requires an explanation because the words "power" and "love" are defined by so many different people in so many different ways. In this book I use two unusual definitions of power and love suggested by theologian and philosopher Paul Tillibsp;His definitions are ontological: they deal with what and why power and love are, rather than what they enable or produbsp;I use these definitions because they ring true with my experie;of what in practibsp;is required to address tough challenges at all levels: individual, group, unity, society.
Tillibsp;defines power as "the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing iy and extensity." So power in this sense is the drive to achieve one's purpose, to get one's job done, to grow. He defines love as "the drive towards the unity of the separated."[2] So love in this sense is the drive to reebsp;and make whole that whibsp;has bee or appears fragmented. These two ways of looking at power and love, rather than the more on ideas of oppressive power and romantibsp;love (represented on the cover by the grenade and the rose), are at the core of this book.
OUR FULL WORLD
We ot address our tough challenges only through driving towards selfrealization or only through driving towards unity. We need to do both. Often we assume that all it takes to create something newwhether in business or politibsp;or teology or artis purposefulness or power. This is because we often assume that the text in whibsp;we create is an empty world: an open frontier, a white spabsp;a blank vas. In general this assumption is incorrect.
Let's look at a historibsp;example. In 1788, British settlers arrived in Australia and entered the indigenous people who had arrived 40,000 years earlier. This history illustrates not only the ce and entrepreneurialism of people willing to travel across the globe to create a new social reality, but also the human and ecologibsp;devastation that this pi mi bsp;produbsp;For more than two turies, the flibsp;between settlers and abinal peoples in Australia was framed in terms of the doe of terra nullius, a Roman legal term that means "land belonging to no one," or "empty land." It was not until 1992 that the High Court of Australia ruled that the ti had in fabsp;never been terra nullius, and that the modernday settlers had to work out a new way of living together with the abinal people.
None of us lives in terra nullius. We bsp;pretend that our world is empty, but it is not. Our earth is increasingly full of people and buildings and cars and piles of garbage. Our atmosphere is increasingly full of carbon dioxide. Our society is increasingly full of diverse, strong, peting voibsp;and ideas and cultures. This fullness is the fual reason why, in order to address our toughest social challenges, we need to employ not only power but also love.
A challenge is tough when it is plex in three ways.[3] A challenge is dynamically plex when cause and effebsp;are interdepe and far apart in spabsp;and time; subsp;challenges ot successfully be addressed piebsp;by piebsp;but only by seeing the system as a whole. A challenge is socially plex when the actors involved have different perspectives and is; subsp;challenges ot successfully be addressed by experts or authorities, but only with the e of the actors themselves. And a challenge is geively plex when its future is fually unfamiliar and uermined; subsp;challenges ot successfully be addressed by applying "best practibsp;solutions from the past, but only by growing new, " practibsp;solutions.
The fullness of our world produbsp;this threefold plexity. We bsp;pretend that we are indepe and that what we do does not affebsp;others (and what others do does not affebsp;us), but this is not true. We bsp;pretend that everybody sees things the same way, or that our differe;bsp;be resolved purely through market or politibsp;or legal petition, but this is not true. And we bsp;pretend that we bsp;do things the way we always have, or that we bsp;first figure out and then execute the correbsp;answer, but this is not true.
When we pretend that our world is&n
第4章 Introduction: Beyond War and Peace[1/2页]