We don’t need a new normal. We need a better story.
Everything is a story. Your mind creates thousands of stories a day.
Following this line of thinking it’s clear that our Western culture is made out of an underlying story. Some stories grow old, others will never die since they touch the divine. They stay true forever.
Our current story of lack, separation, infinite growth and competition is slowly becoming untrue for millions of people. It’s slowly dying.
What are possible implications for you? Since you’ve been conditioned to function and survive in that story.
You might still be fixed on the targets your company gave you. On reaching those 10k Instagram followers to feel good about yourself. Selling that many books, outcompete all the other writers here on Medium, be the best in whatever you do since your culture told you that people that never give up win.
Have a look around. Who’s winning and to what price? Where did our story take us?
To pending civilization collapse on an unprecedented global scale.
For the record, you’re not to blame. We’re all trapped in that old story.
It’s time to embrace a new story for humanity. You are the storyteller of that new future. We all are. We are in a revolution of inclusion where nobody will be left behind.
Here is how we can create a new story for humanity.
Our old story going obsolete
Our old story is rapidly going obsolete since it is causing global civilization collapse. We are witnessing the cataclysm of, well, almost everything since everything is connected these days
Catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems with more than 40% of insect species declining and a third being endangered ( no insects = no humans)
A global ‘Biological Annihilation’ as billions of populations of animals have been lost in recent decades
Democracies are being replaced worldwide by tyrannical technocratic overlords claiming absolute power
The world 2200 billionaires got 1.2 trillion richer in a so-called pandemic that left 20 million Americans jobless
25–35% of the total US $ supply has been printed in 2020 alone and the US debt ceiling has been heightened to $28.9tn. Only till December 2021.
The official inflation is estimated at a record 5.4% in 2021. Double this number to get close to the real inflation.
Electricity and gas prices are soaring. In Czech Republic’s electricity prices doubled and gas prices went up a staggering 150% in 2021.
Mafia conglomerates buying up houses to turn them into clerk-less hotels. In the US alone, by the end of the year, 750.000 people fear being evicted from their homes
Elites calling out a great reset that strips you naked while you should be happy
There is not much to be happy about.
But let’s not blame our billionaire elites, they are caught up in the same dying story. They’re just the best in playing the finite game.
Still, I hear you think, they could end all of the above in a week by giving only 25% of their wealth away. Well, Elon Musk is considering giving 6 billion to end world hunger.
That’s great Elon, but that still won’t change the underlying story.
We need to go one level deeper. To the place where stories are made.
The place where stories are made
Stories are made out of values, imagination and one person or a small group of people breaking with the old rules imposed on society.
Or what we collectively adopted and thought was right and true.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has — Margaret Mead
In Australian Aboriginal Culture, the Dreamtime creation stories are a set of moral guidelines for the clan’s behaviour. An ethical roadmap for communion. Stories are law, art and education at the same time. Everybody and everything has a place in that cosmology.
The west has lost that place of belonging long time ago. Let’s zoom back at our civilization in trouble.
Our culture going to shredders
Did you notice lately our ethics have gone on a walkabout?
We literally lost the plot.
Social media is a snakepit. The concept of fake news is the death of free speech. Critical thinking has turned into a crime.
Let’s tune up the propaganda dial and brainwash some more innocent souls.
Exit moral compass. Exit higher values. Don’t even start with responsibility or leadership
That could have looked like;
Uniting people to face the challenges together. We need everybody on board to turn the cards in favour of humanity (Instead of separating us with silly vaccine passports)
Promoting people’s personal empowerment (instead of scaring people literally to death for 19 months)
Using our A.I and tech to improve the social fabric, to enhance social technology like sense-making. To basically help humanity to become a better version, support our transformation and systemic change (Instead of Anti-social media like Facebook consciously dividing people and creating a bubble world around them to influence their behaviour for the holy profit)
Teaching children and young adults to have open discussions, to listen to others, to use solid arguments, to engage in debate, to embrace collective intelligence (Instead of putting a non tested gen therapy up their arm to make some adults feel better)
Strong-man people with different opinions, honour their point of view and realize everybody on this planet carries part of the puzzle. In one sentence; embrace dignity and respect in others as you embrace it in yourself (instead of organizing the biggest public shaming and blaming campaign in history, abusing a crisis to play a toxic low-frequency game)
Emphasis on natural immunity and massive attention and money for regenerative systems. (Instead of using a completely sick model where healthy humans are bad for profit so big pharma keeps them addicted or sick as long as possible)
The loss of moral guidelines and a solid ethical framework is literally destroying the fabric of our societies.
What happened?
When you restructure the world based on a lie, everything becomes bad fiction
Our society used to be built on robust values. Like most thriving cultures in the past. Even capitalism has had its finest hour.
In the past 19 months, you’ve witnessed the complete restructuring of our world, all based on a lie.
How on earth can you belong and feel good in an imposed new normal based on a lie?
The result is fiction. A story that doesn’t resonate with the heart.
A bad novel with an evil plot.
Fortunately, what our new scriptwriters don’t understand is that all cultures in all of the history of mankind rise bottom up. That means, made by the people, for the people.
We are entering a story in between stories
We need to cross the twilight zone first. A vacuum. A place of uncertainty since we need to let go of our old story, but the new one isn’t there yet.
We have entered a story in between stories.
It is the time when the old story of who I am, what is real, and how to navigate life has broken down. It is the time when my familiar ways of making meaning are no longer relevant. I don’t know who I am. What had seemed so permanent, reliable, understandable and real is revealed as an illusion — Charles Eisenstein
Our narrative of infinite growth on a finite planet has come to an end. And we’re feeling the heat. We played around long enough with our technology, it’s time to grow up. Own our shit.
Let’s co-write a new story together.
A new story will be birthed
The 4th industrial revolution is scaring the shit out of most of us.
Again, the answer to our exponential growing tech, what we want and how we want it, must and will come bottom up.
History shows us it always worked like this. When new technology shakes society, people get scared. We hold on to the old. Mean actors jump into the power vacuum to claim absolute power and to impose a new order.
One tool will be our guiding light in these times of darkness; Our imagination.
According to Yuval Harari, homo sapiens outcompeted 4 other sapiens, since we had one kick-ass add-on the others didn’t have; our imagination.
Our imagination is an extremely powerful and coordinating principle.
We are living inside the dreams of mythical entities like the European Union, and like Google, and like the dollar, which exist nowhere except in these fictional stories — Yuval Harari
We have a dream
When one man shouts; I have a dream, we can instantaneously imagine that dream collectively. There’s nothing more powerful than this, at the right time.
Our collective imagination can move mountains.
It’s exactly the consciousness we experienced during the first lockdown in March 2020. This was a global collective choice. But it arose out of fear.
When this choice is made from love, it’s 1000 times stronger. It will blast the copywriters of fake New Normals away. Creating space, trust and collective intention to let miracles emerge from a new story that is closer to our hearts thus closer to truth.
It will be nothing less than miracles we need.
The time will come soon when the majority of us will feel the potential to become the next Leonardo DaVinci, instead of a scared Amazon shopper wearing a mouth cap inside a car.
Lucien Lecarme
Storytellers will Reshape our Future - not Billionaires and Politicians