This week's news highlights attempts to fix the economic
system. While toxic assets, bonuses, and bailouts take centre stage, the
background beliefs, ethics and values get much less attention.
The British governments chief scientific advisor warns of a perfect storm of
food shortages, scarce water and high energy costs that will hit the global
economy in the next ten to twenty years. To continue a course using personal and
national debt to feed high levels of economic growth is unsustainable. There is
also the debt to nature: the constant depletion of topsoil, forests, fresh water
and biodiversity.
Chris Hedges, graduate of the Harvard Divinity School and former correspondent
for the New York Times notes that “we kneel before the cult of the self,
elaborately constructed by the architects of the consumer society, which
dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty...Success,
always defined in terms of money or power, is its own justification. The
capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized.”
John Ralston Saul writes that values have been crushed. “Imagination,
creativity, moral balance, knowledge, common sense, a social view wither...what
is encouraged is growth of an undisciplined self-interest in which winning is
what counts.” University graduates often accept the ways of questionable
corporate culture because they have not been taught to think morally or
ethically.
Confucius, 2500 years ago, made a link between personal ethics, politics and
leadership. To have a just harmonious society we need to start with ourselves
because outer order comes through inner order. He taught that there is no
difference between ethics and politics.
This great master, like many others, emphasized the importance of education to
cultivate ones own inner being of love, beauty, harmony, justice and compassion,
and to want the same for others. When we overcome our own tyranny, there would
be order in us, order in the family, and order in society. An awakened leader
who leads by example gives space for others to cultivate their own human and
spiritual qualities.
