We need to make our conventional thinking revolutionary

Author, Thomas H.
Greco - who argues
 that human life
thrives best on
co-operation rather
than competition.

Continuing with business as usual is similar to maintaining the status quo, needing only conventional thinking.

Switching to and understanding how we could be fulfilled and content by working fewer hours, demands revolutionary thinking.

Such innovative thinking begins with the abandonment of cherished, but seriously dated concepts and then their replacement with something new; something that sits comfortably with our evolving world.

Agile, athletic and energetic thinking will help us understand the advantages of that new paradigm; a paradigm that without option we have to theoretically, politically and practically understand, and adopt, because of the damage we have inflicted on the equilibrium of our climate.

Fulfilment in life for all thrives more on co-operation than competition and as Thomas H. Greco writes in “The End of Money and the Future of Civilization”  ….”to recognize that we all have fundamental interests in common; and to organize and co-ordinate our actions to achieve common goals”.

Working a four-hour day is about common goals and co-operation, but it is a concept that is unquestionably beyond the comprehension of most and being wholly disruptive it will end, without question, life as we know it.

Disturbing as that might sound it is in fact a good thing for life as it is abounds with inequity; an inequity resulting from a globalized economy being forced upon on a world-society still fundamentally driven by localism.

We have a globalized economy – money travels uninhibited by national borders, but even in the relatively economically tiny Australia we, in Tony Abbott’s words, “must turn back the boats”, illustrating resistance to a globalized civilization.

The growth mandate of the globalized economy clearly puts profit ahead of people and even a cursory look at world circumstances illustrates that many have been brutalized and plunged into poverty through pursuit of that tumour-like ideal.



Albert Einstein.

That unrelenting quest for growth is exactly what has brought us to this position and that causes me to think of Albert Einstein’s observation that the thinking that has led to this will not be adequate to take us beyond it.

Considering Greco’s observation about the importance of co-operation ahead of competition and Einstein’s suggestion that we need to refresh and invigorate our thinking, it appears obvious, at least to me, that we must willingly surrender many of modern life’s trappings.

Many draw their optimism from technology and human ingenuity pointing to our magical modern life as justification of their faith, but embedded in that conviction is a disturbing indifference to the science on which that celebrated technology and equally acclaimed ingenuity depend.

Most everything we enjoy in our modern world depends on science and yet we ignore that science at our peril; a science that unequivocally declares that we, because of our behaviour, have wounded earth’s atmosphere.