All about Consciousness

Lately I've been doing a lot of reading about the concept of degrowth and the potential for transitioning to a steady-state economy.  The ideas are so refreshing to read.  They focus around what's fundamentally flawed with the current economic model and how degrowth can address these issues.  These documents contain mostly policy advice for what governments (namely the UK government) can do in order to begin this transition.  Of course, they also acknowledge that before a government can make a fair and democratic transition to another economic model, it must have the support of its people.  But people are so completely stuck in the current model, that it seems almost hopeless to wait for a cultural revolution of the people, to move beyond the mentality of "more, more, more" to "enough".

It all comes back to consciousness.  After all, our systems (political, economic, communications, media, etc.) are all just a reflection of our collective consciousness.  They are outward indicators of our internal consciousness.  We create externally what we know and feel internally.  We are in the mindset of "more, more, more" and so we have created an economy and a society that feeds off of the idea that "more is better".  But why do we  have this obsession with more? 

I would say fear.  We are still so utterly fear-driven, as a species, that this is very much reflected in society in the form of an economic model that promotes greed, corruption and inequality.  I, personally and intuitively, feel that our species is in a stage of development that emphasizes the ego and extremely competitive individualism.  Some people refer back to the good old times.  Or once in a while I'll read in an article, "... so that we can have peace again" or "... in order to have an equal society again".  But why do they write that "again" as if peace and equality have been experienced on a large scale before.  We humans have never had peace and equality.  Maybe in relative terms.  Quiet years.  But never a genuinely stable state of peace and equality.  We've been at earlier stages of development where people felt very much threatened by different families, tribes, species, etc.

So, my research has led me to the conclusion that we need to develop beyond this current stage of egoism and excessive individualism before we can ever create better economic and political systems.  In order to develop beyond this stage, we have to become more conscious.  More conscious of what we do, why we do it and what the effects of our actions are.  It might be easy enough to be more conscious of what we do and it's a bit more difficult to become more aware of the effects of our actions, but the really hard one is to understand why we do the things we do.  This is where, as a species, we are pretty much asleep at the wheel.  And if we start to get into this why, we will have to deal with a lot of the uglier aspects of human nature that we've been promoting in ourselves and in our societies.  And I'm pretty sure that we will find that the underlying cause for relying on these uglier aspects of human nature will be fear.  So, once we finally deal with our fear (or at least start dealing with it), we will be able to develop beyond this egoism and into a new era with new systems that are far better suited to offering a high quality of life, peace, equality, true freedom and justice.