Top 15 David Korten Quotes

The stronger the relationships of community, the less the need for the formal control structures of government. A primary need of the moment, however, is to use the power of government to curb the power of corporations, clean up the messes that corporations create, and facilitate natural processes of community building. Government is currently failing at all three for an evident reason. Global corporations control the political process and thereby control government.

Fortunately, the emergence of a new consciousness and the new organizing structures required to actualize our potential for responsible planetary citizenship is already underway. Our mutual awakening is unfolding at an accelerating pace as collapse of critical Earth systems unfolds.

Time is rapidly running out... Given what is at stake, we must assume we still have time and act with the speed and determination we might muster if Earth were under attack by alien invaders. In the words of Pogo, the comic strip character, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Modern humans appeared some 200,000 years ago. Human activity began to change Earth’s carbon balance roughly 200 years ago. Then, just a bit over twenty years ago, the World Wide Web created the potential for humans to communicate, think, and act as a planetary species with a collective awareness of the global impact of our presence.

The challenge at hand goes far beyond making some adjustments to our economic policies and institutions. We must take the step to a new human civilization defined by a mature relationship to one another and Earth’s community of life.

Establishment interests are gaming the political system. They support Democrats who blame corporations for our problems. They support Republicans who blame government. We the people line up on one side or the other and are so focused on the opposing party as villain, we fail to notice the extent to which corporate power and government power are unified in the cause of corporate rule, through the oligarchy’s control of money, markets, politics, and media.

I call this system a “suicide” economy because it is systematically destroys the foundations of its own—and our—existence. Also known as capitalism, it is dedicated to what Pope Francis calls the idolatry or worship of money. The terminally destructive outcomes of the suicide economy are not acts of nature. They are the result of human choices. We can make different choices, but to do so we must understand where we went wrong and why.

By contrast, the system now in place: Counts Ecosystem Destruction for Financial Gain as Wealth Creation: It values life only for its market value. And counts as wealth creation the depletion of Earth’s capacity to support life in order to grow the financial assets of those who already have financial assets far beyond any need. This assures both the systematic depletion of Earth’s capacity to support life and increasing control of what remains of that capacity by a tiny oligarchy.... Encourages and celebrates ever more excessive and wasteful consumption by the few while reducing the many to increasing desperation and exclusion from access to the essential means of living—including clean air to breath, water to drink, fertile soils to grow food, and a place to live....Limits Meaningful Participation in Rule Making to the Winners in a Rigged Game: A corporate dominated, money-driven political system puts the power to make the rules in the hands of those who profit from environmental destruction and economic exclusion, thus creating a positive feedback loop reinforcing political choices that assure ultimate system collapse.

I call the next system economy a “living” economy, because its underlying design principles come from our understanding of healthy living systems.

The goal is a new economic system that supports three essential and inseparable outcomes: Ecosystem Health and Balance: It must value life above all else and support individuals and communities in growing the generative capacity of Earth’s biosphere, while meeting human needs within the limits of that capacity. Shared Prosperity: It must support the sharing of resources to meet the essential needs of all people by securing their right of access to a means of living. Living Democracy: It must give each person an active voice in the decisions that affect his or her life, and support the just and nonviolent resolution of conflict through processes that are both inclusive and transparent.

The current system failure is thousands of years in the making and touches on every aspect of society. There is no magic-bullet solution. Nor will marginal adjustments to the current self-destructive system suffice. We must reinvent our culture and our institutions from the bottom up. The observations I share in this report are the product of my life experience, much of it living and working in Africa, Asia, and Latin America...

For those of us who grew up believing that capitalism is the foundation of democracy and market freedom, it has been a rude awakening to realize that under capitalism, democracy is for sale to the highest bidder and the market is centrally planned by global megacorporations larger than most states.

In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy and the market economy.

As power begets power and competition becomes more ruthless, the appetites of the wealthy become more extravagant and the excluded become more desperate. The growing gap erodes trust and institutional legitimacy, which in turn compels an ever greater diversion of resources to security measures — from car alarms and security guards to police and prisons.

Over the past twenty years there has been an enormous shift in power from the institutions of the state to global corporations with economic resources far greater than those of most states and with a global reach that places them beyond accountability to any persons, place, or public institution. Through the processes of corporate globalization humanity is moving rapidly toward Empire’s ultimate goal of unifying the world’s people under a unified system of governance.