Breaking with Our Heritage Mental Health – Empowerment
Authors: Close Jean-Paul 
Published: November 2024

My article “identity and authenticity: breaking with our heritage for sustainable regional human development” [1] was motivated by a global academic encounter in the University of Urbino (Italy). It had been organized by the European SPES1 “Business and Spirituality” initiative. The meeting and related publications discussed “place-based approaches to sustainability.” This basically refers to the local sustainable development of municipalities and regions, as opposed to the general era of finance based globalization. In the paper I discussed two breaks with heritage processes: my own and that of the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Interestingly, by letting go of the overarching behavioral mindset heritage, a new space of empowerment, meaning and purpose appeared. This gave a boost to our individual and regional mental health.

Having said that, the question arises: “Do we know what ‘mental health’ is?” Currently we have the definition suggested by the World Health Organization (WHO):

“Mental health is a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute to their community. It has intrinsic and instrumental value and is integral to our well-being.”

This definition in my view is incomplete. There are key elements missing that are inherent to mental health. Aspects such as `purpose`, a sense of responsibility, authentic self determination and existentialist awareness, need to be included. My own breaking example brought me on a totally new, positive and evolutionary path, including such mental boost. For the city of Eindhoven it evolved into a charismatic attraction for people and business development with a new boost of activities and growth. For me it had opened my mind to a new, previously hidden, unnoticed world of existential values. It introduced me to the complexity of human evolution, leading [2] eventually to a proposed society built on a set of five natural conditions (Figure 3) for our sustainable existence as a human species (referred to as a Sustainocracy).

This whole and uniquely sensed experience developed my curiosity about this phenomenon of mental and behavioral breaking points or moral crossovers (Figure 2). I learned to see them as both an instrument for mental healing and human evolution through transformative adaptability. However, at this stage, in 1996, this “post breaking point reality” was only related to me. My surroundings were reasoning still in a totally different way, often even wondering about or disputing my choices. Could I find or even develop more proof of principle of my instrumental suppositions? I could not force people, institutions or entire societies to a breaking point, or even to try to understand me. What I could do is to create an environment related to the core human values and positively invite them to my “post personal breaking point” way of thinking with Sustainocracy. But would they (people and institutions) accept? And if so, would this have the expected mental health effect? And all the other societal and evolutionary effects that I was attributing to it all? That became a challenge for me to find out.

1 https://eurospes.org/our-mission-spiritual-based-humanism/