I now believe that to avoid collective catastrophe we must radically transform the underlying system of business to restore power to the small and local. With regard to spiritual values, I was raised in the Protestant Christian faith but find wisdom in the teachings of all the great religions. I believe that we have access to an inner spiritual wisdom and that our collective salvation as a species depends, in part, on tapping into this wisdom from which the institutions of modern science, the market, and even religion have deeply alienated us. Through this rediscovery we may achieve the creative balance between market and community, science and religion, and money and spirit that is essential to the creation and maintenance of healthy human societies. These problems stem in part from a fivefold increase in economic output since 1950 that has gushed human demands on the ecosystem beyond what the planet is capahle of sustaining.
Governments seem wholly incapable of responding, and public frustration is turning to rage.
It is more than a failure of government bureaucracies, however. This has concentrated massive economic and political power in the hands of an elite few whose absolute share of the products of a declining pool of natural wealth continues to increase at a substantial rate-thus reassuring them that the system is working perfectly well. In fact, these are all myths propagated to justify profligate greed and mask the extent to which the global transformation of human institutions is a consequence of the sophisticated, wellfunded, and intentional interventions of a small elite whose money enables them to live in a world of illusion apart from the rest of humanity. These forces have transformed once beneficial corporations and financial institutions into instruments of a market tyranny that is extending its reach across the planet like a cancer, colonizing ever more of the planet's living spaces, destroying livelihoods, displacing people, rendering democratic institutions impotent, and feedin on life in an insatiable quest for money. As our economic system has detached from place and gained greater dominance over our democratic institutions, even the world's most powerful corporations have become captives of the forces of a globalized financial system that has delinked the creation of money from the creation of real wealth and rewards extractive over productive investment.