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Unwelcome Guests #510 - The Race Towards Global Consciousness

Robin Upton | 02.08.2010 20:33 | Analysis | Ecology | Social Struggles | Sheffield | World

Hitting Rock Bottom & Realising The Reunion

This week's show includes three speakers' exciting vision of a single, global, interconnected human family. We start with Jeremy Rifkin's uplifting conclusion of last week's Empathic Civilization talk, before an interview with Charles Eisenstein and concluding with a similarly uplifting call to change the human narrative by David Korten.

Unwelcome Guests #510 - Hour 1 - mp3 27M

Unwelcome Guests #510 - Hour 2 - mp3 27M


The first hour starts with Jeremy Rifkins's concluding his Dec 2009 presentation, "The Empathic Earth", by talking about the potential for technology to extend the world's "central nervous system". With the help of a short section from Ivan Illich, I give my understanding of this as a global gift economy system in which people can state their feelings, in which no one has control, but everyone has influence over others. This leads into the conclusion of a 2008 interview with Charles Eisenstein (author of Ascent of Humanity) about the personal implications of changing over to living in the gift.

Our second hour concludes the Charles Eisenstein interview and then continues with a rousing speech by David Korten, entitled "The Great Turning - From Empire to Earth Community", in which he highlights his discovery at the Rio conference that, psychopaths aside, almost all of humanity want the same things - peace, healthy food, community, fulfilling activities. How, for the last five millennia, he asks, has empire's story of humans as ruthless and aggressive managed to dominate public discourse. In this era of global communications and global problems, he suggests, people are finally learning that our differences are merely superficial, that all of humanity is one, and that the sooner we bring an end to the story of division and strife, the better everyone's chances.

Robin Upton
- e-mail: unwelcome@altruists.org
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