How We Saved The World
Today, January 1, 2050, living in our healed, egalitarian, collaborative, peaceful world, we reflect on the dark, disintegrating, militarised world of 2024, when the survival of humanity was in question. At that time, I’d been feeling tired of hearing apathetic statements like,’ I don’t like what’s happening to the planet, but I can’t do anything about it.”. This highlighted the underlying raw emotional vulnerability in the tone of collective discussions. There was a general agreement that entrenched aggressive capitalist systems would keep dishing out the same crises while perpetually searching for solutions that produce the same crisis. As Albert Einstein said, “Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them.”
Back in 2024, I felt that the crisis ultimately stemmed from a male-centred worldview and its values, attitudes, and practices associated with the patriarchal, aggressive, out-of-control materialism of the capitalist global system. Patriarchy had produced one-sided, toxic masculine values that excluded the feminine part, the source of wisdom and connectedness. It created hierarchical, exploitative structures of power and an egotistic mentality based on competition, aiming for unlimited growth on a planet with limited resources. The domination of men over women, the rich over the poor, and the exploitation of Mother Earth.
I had asked myself: Am I capable of becoming an effective catalyst for change? We were each called upon to resist the forces of destruction and to give our gifts. But I was only a storyteller with no influence. Then I thought about how Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, greatly influenced public opinion in the 1850s, laying the groundwork for the elimination of slavery.
Realising that the tipping point was reached for human evolution to be accelerated, I wrote a fantasy fiction story, “The Dismantler of Men’s Toxic Creations,” which I started in 2016 and completed in 2024. The manuscript novel explores creating a feminist utopia within the prevailing entrenched global capitalist market/state systems.
In the story, I show how the very foundations we have built our institutions on may be deconstructed, as an old male-centred mentality and materialist paradigm surrender to a new era of feminine-centred social, ecological life-enhancing value system. Could it start a little movement, giving ordinary people permission to do the same?
In my manuscript novel, a survivor of genocide, after her initiation into the Divine Feminine Wisdom Council of 12 awakened females, together with other women, quietly start a rapidly expanding grassroots, non-heirarchical, ecological, social revolution led by women and underpinned by the feminine values of empathy, connectedness, and peaceful mindset. They operate a collective, cooperative economy, establishing a self-sufficient society run through participatory, consensus-based direct democracy that replaces patriarchal structures in the region. In their social contract, even trees and the natural world have legal rights. Skipping the events and details, some of the new ideas shown include empathy labs, run by trained volunteers, to facilitate groups at the neighbourhood level, learning empathic listening, and how to create a safe, nonjudgmental climate for everyone traumatised by the brutal system of established patriarchal, hierarchical power structures. Their non-violent approach to those resisting change is through education. Those who still doubted that an alternative to the prevailing capitalist state system could ever work were encouraged to search for the truth by involving them in self-directed learning groups called `The Searchers’. They discovered for themselves that around 5000 BC, matriarchal values existed. The hierarchical relationships that led to dominance were absent. With a collective, sharing economy, people collaborated and cared for each other. The matriarchal mode of consciousness was grounded in the feminine values of empathy, sharing resources communally, and living in harmony with the natural world. It perceived the interconnectedness of all living beings. Mother Earth was sacred and perceived to be alive, just like them. So there were no feelings of alienation from nature or fellow humans. Then a transition was made to a masculine culture, which destroyed and replaced matriarchal culture. It replaced the communal, egalitarian society with a hierarchical one, based on the dominance of one over the other. This led to inequality, oppression, and injustice. The patriarchal mode of consciousness established a masculine culture that built the foundations for a society based on egoistic greed to acquire, conquer, and dominate. People lost their sense of interconnectedness with others and nature. The environment became the soulless other, an object to be exploited and destroyed. It led to the global patriarchal structures of aggressive, testosterone-driven market capitalism and state socialism. Both patriarchal creations wreaked havoc on people and Mother Earth.
Men in my story engage in special training sessions to transform the destructive inherited patriarchal values within themselves. More integrated, fully human men in touch with their feelings and able to express compassion, become collaborators with women folk as they integrate matriarchal values with positive masculine values, to create a new caring society in harmony with the natural world where everything is seen as being interconnected. Characters in my fictional story, agree on eradicating violence against people and Mother Earth for good. They lay the foundation for an ecological civilization led by women and their male allies. planting the seed for eco-sanity instead of ecocide. The prototype for a newly transformed world gradually unfolded in the real world, outside my fictional story.
A story of hope that contains detailed ideas about how we could take charge of our destiny and the possibilities that could emerge out of a crisis. A Model in Societal self-direction.
As in my fictional story, back in 2024, at first, the progress appeared to be slow, as the darkness of ignorance had to be brought into light through inner work to increase self-awareness to remove barriers to the expression of love for oneself and others. To produce more integrated, whole individuals who are in touch with their feelings and able to express compassion, inner work is needed. Conscious awareness applied towards healing the collective, ran alongside being activists for change.
The alternative future became possible because people built direct democracy in their neighbourhoods through communes. They first started with monthly street barbecues where people living in a particular street started to get to know everyone in their neighbourhood, and gradually, as they built trusting relationships and a sense of mutuality, they started talking about issues and problems of concern affecting them and then exploring solutions and ways of moving forward together with whatever resources they had instead of relying on the government and cooperations. For example, if there was a water leak in the street affecting residents, people used the services of a professional in the neighbourhood or the community with plumbing skills to fix the communal problem. People exchanged skills and services to help each other in the street. Other ideas used: building a tool-borrowing scheme; gardening scheme; setting up volunteer networks to help older folks or those in need in the neighbourhood; and establishing local communes made up of committees: health committee, peace and consensus committee, collective economic committee, education committee, women’s committee, youth committee, etc. When the alternative lives were successfully built in the community, people discussed ways of defending themselves, taking turns learning self-defence and community defence strategies to defend themselves and the community, instead of relying on the brutal police force.
To build an ecological world, we needed new mindsets. Benjamin Franklin said about education: Tell me, and I will forget. Teach me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I learn. Involving people at the grassroots level in creating a new society was seen as the way to educate and change the old belief system. Even the sceptics who only believed in materialistic capitalism and believed in it as the only system capable of growth, changed their mindset, reinforced by people making and witnessing real changes on the ground.
Things started to change, people thriving, growing in freedom experientially discovered that they have enormous power when working together at the grassroots level, nurturing each other and Mother Earth, developing their collective economy based on need, and maintaining people’s wellbeing. People gradually became self-sufficient, relying on each other to meet their needs in community spaces, sharing knowledge, skills, and resources, within decentralised participatory decision-making self-sufficient communities. The process of social change evolved with the community. Through building the building blocks of the communes and civil society organisations, people could govern their own lives, slowly building their cooperative economy from the ground up.
With people caring for each other and enough community cohesion, the sense of alienation, and isolation was lessened, so individuals who previously resorted to crime, felt more held and valued within the community, therefore less inclined to lash out against it, in the same way that, in a participatory grassroots, consensus-based, direct democracy, people never voted to pollute their environment. As offenders felt integrated and nurtured in the community, crime rates fell gradually. Those committing crimes were dealt with through restorative justice. The community, through the engagement of the peace and consensus committee, and mediation-based non-violent conflict resolution, decided on rehabilitation rather than punishments that lead to reoffending.
Other community educational projects run by people-power assemblies for the public, to instill new values included regular encounter groups for men to explore how one-sided toxic masculinity had harmed them too. It destroys men’s humanity, blocking their compassion, as it leads men to suppress their emotions and kill their inner feminine, causing them to split off and become alienated from their spiritual essence. Men gained insight that only destructive power junkies create wars and violence and that authentic, non-violent communication is the way of resolving conflicts, not through wars that aim to conquer others’s land and subjugate them. The community project programme, facilitated by the peace and consensus committee within the established communes, offered opportunities for men and women to learn communication that was centred on compassion, healing, and protection. This included non-violent communication skills. Gandhi, Mandela, and many others became positive role models for men to follow, producing more integrated, whole men in touch with their feelings and able to express compassion. People learned that the intention to kill leaves a stain on the soul of the person and their descendants. An imprint of perpetual patterns of violence in their future lives.
Other ideas included:
Using social media, the people committed to change reached out to people, who in turn were encouraged to raise their voices, creating a critical mass for positive change. The movement’s approach developed through conversations with like-minded people from across the world.
– Lawsuits against fossil fuel producers (oil and gas, which are the biggest sources of planet-warming gases.) in the civil justice systems of the US and EU, holding them accountable for the harm they’ve caused and the misrepresentations they’ve made, which has slowed adaptation to those problems.
These ideas of self-sufficient neighbourhoods spread to nearby neighbourhoods through education academies that promoted a more conscious, empowered mindset. People themselves, managing the society they lived in together, gradually became the new normal. It spread into other parts of the world like wildfire, making governments redundant. The power-hungry elite rulers and greedy cooperations, without the people under them to breadcrumb and rule, could no longer dominate people who had gained self-sufficiency through the collective economy of cooperatives. Gradually, Mother Earth recovered and healed when those who had exploited, abused, and plundered her, causing catastrophic damage to all life, lost their dominance and influence, becoming redundant, along with a central ‘managerial’ or ‘owning’ government. As Richard Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”