Sustainability 3.0 Issues
Even if social-economical resources are still very limited, it is worth to keep in mind a picture of natural human needs when developing approaches to solutions for problems.
Howard Gardener’s Theory of multiple intelligences (1983): (linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic) is a great example which states that there is a natural human need to develop our human potential which would multiply our society potential. However, so far humanity has not developed the right conditions for maintaining a good quality life for the general public, and it is most likely not going to happen in the near future. By quality of life I mean opportunities and abilities to fulfill and develop natural human intelligences under conditions of financial security and enough spare time without being exhausted physically, emotionally, and mentally after work for economical survival. According to psychological tests which used by Employment Development Department in California, only a 30% fit of personal qualities and interests for a particular job is considered as a very good fit. Since a job takes most of our human time, and fulfilling only about 30% of intelligences, we cannot avoid the fact that most of jobs are more or less harmful for people. That’s why usually the more “human friendly” the job is, the less it is paid because many people prefer to have a less harmful job for little or no money if they can afford it. The majority of people have to choose between “life quality time” and “money”, and most of people have no choice because of facing the problem of economical survival.
Please do not take me wrong! I do not want anyone to quit their jobs, even if their jobs are hard, boring, stressful, or harmful for their human nature in any other way. I am not looking for an excuse for any kind of laziness or irresponsibility. I am a responsible hard worker myself. I am always committed to excellence at work, and have a number of excellent references from work I've done. Of course, the first priority is to have a job for economic survival, and the second priority is to have a less harmful job for more money for better social survival. Everyone chooses one of the best options which are available in their real life to obtain their socioeconomic balance. There is a great deal of truth in the joke: “Who does not have a job dreams to have one, who does have a job dreams to trade it for a better one”. It is the time to face this fact. High pressure on a person’s consciousness under contemporary life conditions make us to start seriously working on finding strategies and conditions which can improve the economical and social survival of a person.
Here are some examples of strategies for decreasing the social-economical pressure on a person’s consciousness. “Socioeconomic blood circulation” strategies for connecting layers in different levels socioeconomic systems and between them will help organizations/businesses/government departments to be open to new ideas of improvement and to have a better interaction with the general public. Treating employees like customers will require some extra effort and maybe even a little economical loss at first but in the long run it will make a huge difference to companies. Reasonable distribution of human and financial recourses like full or partial, regular or temporary job-share or jobs-exchange, and other strategies for improving the conditions of jobs and lives should attract more attention of communities, organizations, and businesses. Job applicants should not be discriminated by potential employers for taking a couple months or years off after many years of service on the same one job, no matter if they took a leave of absence for their own purposes or took a job in a completely different field. If needed, they should be given an opportunity to update their skills and catch up with the new job they are applying for. Unemployment survivors need regular help from psychologists to keep their consciousness sustainable, especially if their period of unemployment lasted for a long time.
The hiring process has become a mass frustration disaster because of mass unemployment in our current deep economic crises. Did anybody ever count the number of hours that thousands of people are wasting on their job application packages around the world per day, per month, per year? Or numbers of hours of people’s care that other thousands are wasting on reviewing those enormous piles of information? Or number of referees constantly being bugged until an applicant finally gets a job? Did anybody ever count an efficacy at least of the average application process per vacancy and per person? In our contemporary world we do care about not wasting natural resources. How about not wasting human lives? I don’t see any reason why employers cannot begin their application process with just a minimum of the information from potential candidates instead of making them to fill out long detailed online applications for hours for each job they are applying for. Then, the more their applicant list gets narrowed down, the more information they can request and consider at a later time.
Now is the time for creating a set of laws to protect human consciousness from wasting enormous amounts of people’s attention, energy, and time; from destroying their minds and emotions by the stress of a constant feeling of not being valuable for society, from feeling that they don’t get paid enough for the harm on a job, or they get ignored or denied day after day of applying for work, sometimes for years. A human being should not feel like a weed in the flower bed of society!
The management of unemployment, the hiring process, paperwork maintenance in organizations or businesses became a whole huge “ industry” with a long complex way of serving people’s original needs. That’s why having social skills and stamina for being socially aggressive has become more important than being a professional in any field and having stamina for excellence at work. This is a strong example of the unsustainable functioning of social-economic structures which carry over a lack of sustainability into the personal level.
The socioeconomic pressure of contemporary life issues on a person in our century is higher than ever, so we need to take better care of the sustainability of human consciousness. Mass harm on the personal level has become a serious social issue. Society doesn’t seem to be sensitive any longer to this kind of people’s needs. On a personal level, people’s natural need for serving society using a great deal of their human potential is blocked in an unsustainable society which is harmful for their potential and their quality of life. An outer cure: fixing problems in society, establishing and maintaining sustainability on a socioeconomic level, combined with an inner cure, establishing and maintaining psychological balance on a personal level, is the way to solve these problems.
In addition to the unsustainable impact of society’s structures to a person, there is a large impact of personal interactions. As social pressure on a person is increased, techniques for maintaining interpersonal relationships should go deeper to make up for the unbalanced consciousness. There are many good working psychological techniques for social protection and success, and also for personal relationships but apparently many people are still illiterate and not skilled in communication in their private lives. People want to learn skills for more effective work but they want to be relaxed at home. Truly deep-down happy couples and families are rare. The majority of people in the world experience emotional hurt and constant energy drain in their everyday lives from not being able to obtain harmonic personal relationships in the long run. They take it as normal and even don’t think of the possibility of change on that deep level of feelings. It is time for the science of psychology to take deeper care for the proactive emotional health of people. The nature of developing love should be explored more thoroughly in order to teach people of all ages to obtain communication conditions for driving personal relationships with their loved ones, their family members, and their friends.
Most of the existing psychological techniques teach people how to protect themselves and others and survive in “severe social-economic and in an interpersonal-personal climate”. How about gradually changing this climate with a combination of personal balance strategies and socioeconomic changes, and “throw off those protective heavy coats”?
In general people want peace and harmony at all levels in their lives but the problem is they want it in their own ways, with their different understandings of what is a fair distribution of limited social and personal resources. Kids experience a continued lack of their needed amount of love and attention because their parents are too busy with economic surviving. Employees experience a continued lack of needed amount of respect at work because of the high pressure of social-economic survival for their company. Relatives and friends experience continued lack of the necessary amount of support from each other. Lack of those resources in certain patterns of communication habits are carried over generations and over communication networks in contemporary life. People without proper emotional waste management multiply lack of sustainability on personal level. Occidental and oriental traditions of connecting with an infinite universal source via meditation or prayer help get and pass on love, respect, inspiration, peace, patience, responsibility, etc. which covers all types of strategies for sustainable living. Jesus’ rule of ethical behavior “whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the left one also” is a great way to confront and stop the “epidemics” of unsustainability. However, this W-strategy seems to be sustainable only under certain limits. If it helps to raise “monsters” who are counting on unconditional absolute forgiveness and love of others and use them as a “nurturing environment” of their unsustainable habits for their own purposes, those strategies are no longer sustainable. There is another rule in the Bible: “Cast not your pearls before swine”. The following quote goes along with that one: “When a thief looks at a holy saint he sees only pockets”. If there is a chance for correcting the ethical values of such individuals and groups, the correction process needs to begin with concepts that they understand, using “their language” of concepts. Apparently, the ethic foundations and strategies of social behavior of the best known world spiritual leaders have survived over the centuries, and they keep contributing a great deal for the sustainability of consciousness. However there are many examples in history when those ethics foundations of unlimited patience and unconditional love were very convenient for managing people and using them for the benefit of particular organizations but not for the benefit of humanity.
Generally, a process of choosing strategies at important key points is a strategy in itself, and the way to make this meta-strategy sustainable is identifying sustainability goals of each strategy choice and the limitations of sustainability of each strategy chosen.
Human history shows lots of lack of harmony in communications over generations, and growing (!) understanding of all kinds of human rights over centuries. Mass frustration of not being able to maintain a decent place in the economical world by the end of the industrial period of the 20th century led to the development of many different communities of alternative living which were nurturing values of love/respect/support greater than economical values: Hippies, Dianetics, New Age, etc. Those communities couldn’t avoid economic communication with the rest of the world anyway, and over the years it turned out that they were not able to build up economic well-being for their members. Most of the people there work hard all their lives for their leaders, still have nothing, and rarely have a real opportunity to come back to the “civilized world”. When communities like that can create a well-functioning network when maintaining sustainability on a personal level, and the number of such communities grows above a certain percent of people in society, it would warm up the “social-economical climate” in a big society and make it more “human friendly”. Communistic Russia started with great ethical ideas of a better life for everyone in a big country with rich environmental resources but eventually it failed to provide proper care of a person in the long run. That’s why they eventually fail fostering ethics of serving their society in general public which was well established in the beginning.
I consider a human being as a tool of the world’s self-exploration. It goes well with Hegel’s “absolute idea” (1817) which is running the world and coming back to itself. The “chicken-egg” model illustrates it clearly. Consciousness (egg) and the world (chicken) help each other to evolve, and basically they are different stages of the same system-process. The mass of human consciousness grows over the centuries along with the number of humans. The quality of human consciousness, the ability for a quality perception of the world is varied in different societies and different times. The civilized world is getting more complex which enriches world opportunities for its perception and cognition, but contemporary civilization is also making people’s connection with the universal source shallower which decreases their creative abilities. In general, the total mass of deep powerful human consciousness grows and affects our whole world, maybe even in ways which are not explored by science yet and contribute to changing the world’s climate and developing natural disasters. We need to explore this phenomena and take it into account when develop strategies for sustainable living.
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