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CHAPTER 9

TOWARD A BETTER WORLD

‘I truly believe that changing the life of one person is like changing the life of a nation. Everything has to have a beginning, and I think if we don’t start the process, if people don’t embark on the journey, then where is the destination? Where are we going?’ James Caan

Based on what we have learned so far, it makes sense that a solution to many of the world’s problems would be to share more, both in our lives and in the world. That means more generosity in the sharing of our resources, of ourselves, of our time and effort. And we need to believe that our efforts will be fruitful, that they are not small and insignificant, and that we can all make a difference. As Alison Pothier says: ‘In order for the world to become the generosity that it wants to receive, the world inside has to shift to trust and believe that that is possible in order to make that change.’

This is why we have explored some scientific principles in this book – to help you to understand that everything is connected, and that every act has consequences. So where do we start?

James Caan believes that if we all do a little, it can go a long way: ‘I don’t think the issues of the world are really down to a handful of people,’ he says. ‘It is about society recognizing and accepting that we all have our own little responsibilities, whether we give £5 a month or £10 a month. I think the gesture is a place to start because it gets you on the journey. It is having the inclination, the want, and the determination to do something for somebody else, whether that’s a gesture, helping out an old person, doing shopping for somebody who can’t do it for themselves, or looking after somebody’s child. It is the beginning of a journey. Once you start and you realize the difference you can make, it goes a long way.’

It doesn’t take much to change someone’s life

Richard Branson encourages us to realize that gestures that might seem small to us can have a transformational effect on those who most need that help. ‘I think everybody can make a difference in the world, some obviously only in quite a small way, others in a bigger way. And I think if everybody in the world tried to make a difference in the world, then the world could be a much happier place than it has been in the past,’ he says.

Richard gives an example of how we could make such a difference. In the developing world, mainly in Africa, many pregnant women suffer prolonged or complicated labor and childbirth and this can lead to obstetric fistulas – a hole between the vagina and the bladder that causes leakage and infections. Fistulas carry great social stigma and the women are often ostracized by their families and communities. Yet fistulas can be repaired in a simple operation that costs just $150.

Let’s put this into perspective. Many people in the world can’t afford to donate $150, but many can. Consider what it would mean if you forwent new clothes or music for a few months, and instead, used the money to change someone’s life. Your own life might never be the same again as you come to that recognition. ‘Pretty much everyone in the world is in a position where they are capable of radically changing somebody else’s life,’ says Richard.

We think that happiness comes from possessions or achievements, but deep happiness can be a product of what we do for others. Richard says, ‘I think people get the greatest satisfaction in life from making a difference to other people’s lives. And it’s not until you actually start trying to do this that you realize the enormous satisfaction it will give you.’ It doesn’t have to be $150. All it takes to start is a gesture, something that is possible for you.

LITTLE THINGS COUNT

‘I think small gestures are critical.’  Peter Buffett

We can start to look at how we lead our lives right now and make some small, but practical changes. Peter Buffett suggests that these can just be in how we recognize others, or recognize their role: ‘Philanthropy means the love of people’ he reminds us. ‘It doesn’t mean you have a big foundation and are giving a bunch of money. So philanthropy can work every single day. When I go to my local coffee store and I acknowledge the person behind the counter, ask them how their day is going, or if I just recognize them as a human being. It is sad, actually, when they come back and say: “Wow, nobody has even seen me today.” Every little gesture can mean so much.’

He also suggests we take a look at ourselves and address any misalignment between what we say and in what we do: ‘I talk about self-reflection. It is like looking at yourself and saying: “OK, am I aligned with what I am saying I am, or what I want to be or do in the world?” I don’t know if you can be 100% aligned – in fact I am pretty sure you can’t, because when I go to the store, I buy things and they stick them in plastic bags and I am out in the world singing about how terrible plastic is. I’m being a hypocrite!

‘So the next time I go to the store I buy a reusable bag and I start to change my behavior. And that happens every day in so many ways. You can’t beat yourself up about it, but you do have to examine it and ask, “Where can I shift my behavior so I am aligned with what I say, I am, or want to be, or want others to be?” And that is a constant work in progress.’

What each of us can do

Jack Canfield makes a similar point about environmental sustainability and how the change has to start with each of us, in our own small ways: ‘Recently, a Choice Point for me was about ecological sustainability – examining my own lifestyle and looking at how much consumption was involved in that, and how there was an underlying belief that “more is better,” whether it was more purchasing, creating a better economy, owning more stuff.

‘Looking at the consumption of oil and energy and all that was a very confrontational moment in time for me: to really look at myself and say: “OK, if I’m going be part of a solution and not part of the problem, I’ve got to change my behavior. I need to have a zero carbon footprint on the planet, and things like that.”’ He points out that it’s ‘not cheap to do that, either. I had to make some choices that have actually cost me more money. So that was an important Choice Point for me.’

Small behaviorable changes like the ones Jack describes can mark the start of being the change that will enable us to create a more environmentally sustainable world. There are many, many things we can do. Here, Jack shares some examples from his own life with us: ‘I plan my trips in the car; I walk more; I turn the water off in the middle of my shower, soap up and then turn it back on again when I’m done so I use less hot water. And I don’t let the water run in the sink when we are doing the dishes. We use canvas bags when we go shopping. We’re recycling pretty much everything we can, and re-using what we can. I still drink water out of bottles occasionally, plastic bottles, but very rarely. I have several stainless steel bottles that I carry water around in.

‘We’re looking at solar panels for the property. And we’re doing carbon offsets, so when I travel by air, we buy credits for the places where they’re creating buildings for cows, to capture the gas so it doesn’t go up and affect the biosphere. These are little things but they all add up.’ He places great importance on this maxim. ‘I don’t want to sit here and know that my grandchildren won’t have a planet because I’m being over-consumptive,’ he says.

And Birke Baehr, one of the younger generation of people committed to a sustainable future, also encourages us to take the necessary action. ‘The answer to all this pollution and everything that’s wrong is to start taking the steps,’ he says. ‘We need to start doing more research, like back when I was eight and I started doing the research, learning more about it, then finally I took the steps and started eating organic. And now when I open up the fridge, everything I see in there is 100% organic, because that’s how I know you can have real, clean, healthy, sustainable food.’

ALL TOGETHER NOW

‘In a world that teaches me to achieve, to get honors and recognition, how on Earth do I come to discover it is not about me? It is about us.’ Robert E. Quinn

We are in this world together and the greatest changes will occur when we all get behind them. If we want to see more compassion in the world then we need to show greater compassion toward each other. If we want to see more forgiveness, then that also starts with each of us.

Richard Branson believes that success is actually reliant on how well you deal with people. ‘I think the most successful people are those who are good at dealing properly with people, dealing well with people; people who genuinely care about others, people who are good at bringing out the best in others. And I think those are the people who, generally speaking, end up being successful in life,’ he says, before adding: ‘So I think you might get lucky if you are an unpleasant bastard, but I don’t think that is the way to become successful in life.’

In other words, being an ‘unpleasant bastard’ might get you results in the short term, but it is definitely not the way to get them in the long term. Being unpleasant doesn’t help us to align with harmonious patterns, either, so most of what we attempt to accomplish will either fail over time, or it will take a lot more effort than it needs to.

We all share this world. Life needn’t be about personal or corporate gain. For when we view it that way, if somebody wins, somebody else has to lose. That might be OK in sport, but in life, cooperation is key. We need to work together. What would it be like if nobody had to lose, if instead we helped each other to win? Our relationships with each other are our keys to the future. In scientific terms, life relies on information exchange and thus on relationships between things. In personal terms, everything relies on our relationships and the exchanges between us.

Building positive relationships

To get to this place, we need to challenge some of our core assumptions. One of these is the idea that humans are inherently selfish, that self-interest is our nature. This assumption lies at the heart of economics and business and because of it, many corporations seek to gain at the expense of the world. But we need to rise above self-interest. We need to seek out the common good and work toward building a future for all of us.

That is the challenge, and the answer lies in reminding ourselves that we are actually not self-interested. In fact, we are wired for cooperation, compassion, and kindness, and when we act on these attributes, we all gain. So we should seek to create positive relationships because they are the basis for cooperation. This means strengthening those that we already have, and even mending fences where relationships have broken down.

Richard Branson recognized that it was very important to repair his relationship with British Airways after he had a dispute with them. ‘One thing I have learned is life is too short to fall out with anybody,’ he says. And if you do have a relationship clash, or a divorce, or something serious in your life, the most important thing is to befriend your enemy, however difficult that may be. Befriend the people you have fallen out with.’ We should aim to mend fences, then, instead of seeking some form of payback. ‘I am absolutely certain the world would a far better place if it was run based more on forgiveness,’ Richard adds.

Richard nominates Nelson Mandela as a model for this, because, after spending nearly three decades in prison, he forgave his captors, brought them into his fold and worked with them. He had a greater vision of a united South Africa and a deep understanding that in order to make such a thing happen, forgiveness and reconciliation had to be a fundamental part of who he was. ‘I had the privilege of getting to know Nelson Mandela. And he and the people around him, I suspect, are the greatest examples of people who’ve learned the art of forgiveness. And that forgiveness sent out a tremendous example to the rest of the world,’ says Richard.

Forgiving and Moving On

Richard also describes how Mandela’s countryman Archbishop Desmond Tutu presided over a court-like restorative justice body in South Africa after the end of apartheid: ‘Instead of presiding over a court to hang or execute people, as would happen, I am afraid, in some Western countries, he presided over the Court of Truth and Reconciliation, where those people who had sinned against the black person came to the court and had to confront the relatives of the people they had sinned against, and ask for forgiveness. And on that basis Archbishop Tutu forgave them, and the relatives forgave them, and the country was able to move on.’

You might argue that we need to have punishment and, of course, there are a great many crimes where that is the most appropriate course of action. But there are also a great many others where a better way would be the encouragement of forgiveness, with some act of atonement – perhaps involving an act of visible social payback. When we forgive, we set ourselves free. Then we can all move forward. In the end, we are all in this together, and it is vital remember that we are all connected. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu says: ‘We look for a glorious dénouement, when we will discover that we are actually members of one family.’

Tony Benn shares a revealing example of this interconnectedness: ‘I once worked out a very simple calculation,’ he says.’ We have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great, great grandparents and 32 great, great, great grandparents. So every generation, which lasts for about 25 years, you double the number of ancestors we have.

‘I worked out very carefully how many ancestors I had. I can’t remember the outcome, but I think if I go back 2,000 years, I have 9,000 billion ancestors or something unbelievable. You can work it out for yourself! And since there weren’t that number of people in the world at the time, it must mean we are all interconnected. And therefore everyone is a cousin. I could say to you, “Dear cousin.” And if we went back, we could find the moment when our families interconnected. And that, I think, is a statistical way of confirming the idea that the human family is a family that has a common interest in survival.’

In an echo of Archbishop Tutu’s sentiment, Tony adds: ‘Nationality, which has been the source of a lot of conflict in the past, is being replaced by an awareness that we are all members of the human race.’ The younger generation, he says, don’t have the same sense of national divisions that we have, and therefore there is hope for us all. ‘If I talk to my granddaughters, who are 15 and 13, about multiculturalism they don’t understand what I’m talking about because they are at a school with 76 different nationalities.

‘When I used to go to the school to speak, it was like addressing a General Assembly of the UN. They have Muslim, French, and Jewish friends; American friends, Jamaican friends. And for them, they are members of the human race. ‘So I think the younger generation, because of technology, have come to appreciate very important lessons about the world in which they live.’

FROM CRISIS TO TRANSFORMATION

‘My metaphor is this: our crisis is a birth.’ Barbara Marx Hubbard

It’s easy to be pessimistic about some of the world’s problems, and feel that everything is going to fall apart. But Jack Canfield says that we should see this as the beginning of something new – as a natural process of chaos that precedes something better: ‘Some of us have had the experience of remodeling a home, and before it gets better, it gets worse. They come in, they tear out the bathroom or the kitchen. There is dust everywhere, plastic sheets hanging down, and you are cooking outside on a butane stove. You wonder if it’s ever going to end. But when it’s all finished you have a much more harmonious home: updated, functional, and effective.

He likens the process to childbirth. ‘Change is messy. Birth is messy,’ he says. ‘I actually delivered two of my own children. I’m not a doctor, but I studied the subject and I wanted to be there; I didn’t want it to be in a hospital, I wanted it to be more organic. And you know, blood happens and everything is sticky and people scream, and so on. But once it’s over, you get this beautiful baby and after a while, the pain of the birth is over and life goes on.’

Jack encourages us not to shy away from change, and to realize that chaos before a change is the natural course of things. ‘So you have to be willing to go through the chaos in order for it to reorganize at a higher level. Now that’s the thing to remember. That it goes: here is a structure, it gets dissolved and then it reformulates at a higher level of integration. And that’s really what we’re always after. We want to take it to a new level, but we sometimes have to destroy what is in order to take it to the higher level.’

There’s a nice example of this in the process used to purify chemical compounds, some of which are medicines. An impure material is dissolved in a solvent, like alcohol, and then the solvent is slowly evaporated. During the evaporation, the compound reorganizes itself into a highly pure, crystalline material. And the crystals are in a much more organized state than the initial material.

If we can get comfortable with the idea that change is inevitable, that it can be messy, that we sometimes have to dissolve the old ways to create better ways, we can make some peace with it and the change process becomes easier for us. Jack talks about the changes that are taking place in the world’s systems: ‘I believe that where we are in history right now, there is a lot of conflict, a lot of breaking down of systems,’ he says. ‘We see it in economic systems. We see possible meltdown in places like Greece, and Portugal, and Ireland; perhaps the whole of Europe is going to be restructured. I think the American system is deadlocked right now, nothing much is happening. We saw the breakdown of the financial system and all those of things just fell apart. It didn’t work.

He believes that we are going to see a lot more breakdown in the systems we’ve come to reply on – from financial systems and currency to forms of government. ‘And I think that’s OK,’ he insists, ‘because something higher is going to come out of that. It is going to be painful for a while. There are going to be some austerity measures and it is nothing that anybody wants but the fact is, humanity as a whole is going to come to a much higher place.’

A social butterfly

When we understand that this process is natural, we can feel more confident that despite the difficulties, we will emerge from the chaos to a much better place. We need to be optimistic, though, Barbara Marx Hubbard says, so we can make the best possible choices: ‘A lot of people I know are pessimistic. They are saying, “I don’t think the human species is going to make it; I don’t think we are smart enough; I think we are too selfish.” And there is a lot of it that’s true. But unless you see that crises proceeds transformation, you won’t be able to look for what’s innovative and creative. And then your own Choice Point is affected by the fact that you feel you’re part of a positive potential.’

Barbara builds upon this sense of optimism by drawing a parallel between our current situation and the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly: ‘The body of the caterpillar, at a certain point, gets bloated; it overeats and can’t continue to grow. Meanwhile, inside the caterpillar are “imaginal” cells. They have an image, an image of what’s coming, you could say. And they start to proliferate and they find each other.

‘The imaginal cells look foreign, though, so the body of the caterpillar tries to destroy them. But they keep on growing, because it’s part of the pattern. And at some point, the caterpillar literally disappears and those cells find themselves in a chrysalis, building a new body. So these little cells that looked like they were going to be destroyed, and many of them were, hold within them their part in building something new. So if you could look inside a chrysalis, you’d see: there is the antenna, there somebody is building the wings, there is the whole body.’

Nature has a goal, she says, and that ‘at some point, the whole body is ready and it’s a new butterfly. It pops out of the chrysalis and there it is: a wet-winged butterfly that can’t quite fly yet. So nature has a pattern there. It’s a metamorphosis – the change in form from the caterpillar to the butterfly.’

Barbara likens the caterpillar’s metamorphosis to societal change. ‘Now the analogy here,’ she says, ‘is we’re going to have a change in the form of our societies: from competitive, top-down structures with all the separate disciplines, to the one that we are building right now for all these Choice Points. That society would be more creative, more just, more peaceful. Not a utopia, not perfect, but we’d be over the problems of separation and deficiency, and into the possibilities of creativity and potential. And we’d have a whole new set of crises and problems, because it’s ever evolving.

‘So I’m not speaking here of creating some perfect society, but shifting from this set of problems to a far higher order. And so the butterfly is out and I think, within our lifetimes, there’s going to be a visible social butterfly, made up of all the Choice Points of all the imaginal cells in the social body that are choosing to be something more positive.’

Leading the change

Robert E. Quinn also says that a hierarchical, top-down structure in society won’t work if we want real change. He favors the idea of ‘transformational leadership’ – where we lead by example, and those who are inspired by our example become leaders themselves and help further the cause, leading to a transformation in society. In this way, as we lead by being the change, the systems in the world begin to change around us.

And the call for this doesn’t come from the top. It starts with anyone who decides to change themselves. When we lead by example because we have a vision for a better way, we embrace an authentic power inside us because we are aligned with something greater than ourselves. In this way, how our lives run is no longer determined by those at the top – those who have historically created the systems – with rules and instructions filtering down to us. As we change, the systems change.

Robert says that ‘the fundamental assumption we find everywhere is that macro determines micro – the big systems turn the little ones.’ But with transformational leadership, there is ‘an exceptional moment where one person changes the whole system. It’s micro determining macro. When we are in a fundamental state of leadership, when we claim who we really are, we turn the world upside down. We gain the power, we gain the freedom, we gain the strength to make the world change according to where it actually needs to go because we can see where it needs to go.’

Robert helps us realize that the world can change when we change. That’s the way it’s always been and always will be. And how better to change than to embrace the power of love.

Things to remember

1) Every one of us matters.

2) Small gestures can go a long way.

3) It doesn’t take much to change someone’s life.

4) There are many things we can do in our own lives to help create a more sustainable future.

5) We’re all in this together.

6) Good relationships are important.

7) Crises precede transformation

8) When we change ourselves and embrace our inner power, we can change the world.