WAITING FOR THE GREAT SHIFT
SIX KEY TRENDS TO WATCH
When the economic recession hit in 2008, my consulting work suddenly dried up and I found I had a lot of time to do other things, so I wrote a book. It was my first venture into spiritual philosophy and is called What’s Happening—Making Sense of 2012 and a World in Chaos. It’s a personal narrative describing my spiritual understanding of the nature of life and the changes occurring in our world, offering a positive take on events at a time when many people expected a cataclysmic end to our planet.
I published my book through Amazon in 2011 and it is still available in either paperback or Kindle. I recently reread the text and found much of it still relevant today. If I were to revise it, I would tighten up the prose and change a few things but leave about 90 percent intact. A few weeks after the book came out, I discovered Unity Worldwide Ministries and found the spiritual home that I had been seeking for a lifetime. A new edition would include a long chapter on Unity and how its five principles have changed my life.
A key element of the narrative focuses on six major trends that I saw emerging in our culture and institutions. Here is a brief description of how I saw our world changing. In 2011 these trends were not as apparent as they are now. It has been fun to watch them develop.
The first shift is a rise in personal independence. Individuals throughout the world are thinking and acting more independently. They are no longer willing to accept without question what they have been told by their parents, their teachers, or their political and religious leaders. As a result, this trend is changing the way they relate to government at all levels, and affecting how they relate to each other as co-workers, neighbors, friends, family, and intimate partners.
The second shift is the revelation of secrets and the demand for integrity. In recent years an unprecedented number of improper activities have been exposed in the highest levels of business, finance, religion, and government. Although it may seem that abandonment of honesty and integrity is a sign of moral decay, these activities may actually be less common now than they have been in the past. Such behavior has long been covered up or ignored but is now being exposed and condemned.
The third shift is a move from competition to cooperation. Competition, as it has been traditionally defined, requires that there be winners and losers; cooperation results in winners on all sides. We have been taught that competition encourages people to try harder. Personal recognition and rewards, though, may be bigger incentives to innovation than is beating out somebody else. I see the world moving toward a system that encourages innovation and growth, but not with the intent of making losers out of others who are trying to do the same thing.
The fourth shift is a balancing of masculine and feminine energy, where women and men reach parity in authority and power. Women will not be taking over all the leadership and power, but assuming an equal position with men in society. We are already seeing the behavior of men in power becoming more caring and the behavior of women in power becoming more confident. Gender differences simply will not be part of the discussion when the younger generation now coming of age chooses individuals for positions of authority.
The fifth shift is toward a society motivated more by compassion than by fear. For most of recorded history, we have seen conflicts that resulted in cruelty ranging from mean-spiritedness to all-out war. The root of this cruelty is always a sense of fear. As we gradually learn to set aside our fears, both as individuals and as societies, we will become more compassionate toward the needs and concerns of others.
The sixth shift is a fundamental change in attitudes among a majority of the world’s people. Half of the planet’s population today is younger than twenty-five, but nearly all of the world’s leaders in government, religion, and education, are much older. The fastest growing businesses, though, are run by surprisingly young entrepreneurs, and these new leaders are beginning to bring their enlightened management styles into government.
Look for the effect of these shifts to become more apparent very quickly over the next few years. The old ways and attitudes will not suddenly disappear, but they are now more evident than they were in 2011 and will eventually fall of their own weight. The new ways of thinking and acting are more subtle and may take generations to become fully integrated into our social fabric. Our world will be very different when that happens.