A Path of Hope for the Future
By Daniel Quinn
 http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Writings/houston_youth.shtml
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Obviously in the few minutes I have here I can't give you a blueprint for saving the world. But I can give you a couple of fundamental notions that I think you can follow with complete confidence. The first of these might be called Quinn's First Law. It won't surprise you. It may even strike you as obvious. Here it is. No undesirable behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it.
The second is Buckminster Fuller's Law, which is this: You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Most of the time when people write to me to ask what they should be doing to save the world, there is in the back of their minds two general notions of how change takes place. One is the notion that passing laws makes things change. The other is that fighting makes things change. We're trained to think that you really are DOING something if you're out there fighting and getting laws passed.
But if you heed these two laws, you may think differently about this. Once again they are Quinn's First Law, No undesirable behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it, and Fuller's Law, You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Here is Quinn's Second Law: What people think is what they do. And its corollary: To change what people do, change what they think.
At the present time, there are six billion people on this planet pursuing a vision that is devouring the earth. That's our problem. Our problem is not pollution. Our problem is not consumerism. Our problem is not capitalist greed. Our problem is not conservative selfishness or liberal utopianism. Our problem is not lack of leadership. Our problem is a world-devouring vision that six billion people are pursuing.
Now what can we do about this vision? We can't legislate it away or vote it away or organize it away or even shoot it away. We can only teach it away.
If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by old minds with new programs.
Vision is a flowing river. Programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede the flow of the river. But I don't want to impede its flow, I want to change its direction.
Is it so easy to change a cultural vision? Ease and difficulty are not the relevant measures. Here are the relevant measures: Readiness and unreadiness. If people aren't ready for it, then no power on earth can make a new idea catch on.
But if people are ready for it (and I think they are), then a new idea will sweep the world like wildfire.
In our culture at the present moment, the flow of the river is toward catastrophe, and programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede its flow. Our path of hope is not to add more sticks to impede the flow. Our path of hope is to change the direction of the flow--away from catastrophe.
I think people are ready for this new idea.
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