Cultural Upheaval

Individuals, relationships and families, as well as nations, are built upon the scripts they develop as blueprints for carrying out the essential tasks of life. When these scripts or life blueprints are disrupted upheaval results, be it personal or cultural, bringing with this disturbance an existential void – and – the accompanying panic that one’s  very mortal survival is at risk.

Scripts are naturally created to aid humans in resolving basic existential challenges; most fundamentally these involve answering core questions such as:

1.      Who am I?

2.      Who are you?

3.      What is everybody doing here?

4.      And, of singular importance – “What am I supposed to do in a place like this, with people like you?

Future Shock, as Alvin Toffler wrote of it more than forty years ago, predicted the existential void we humans would encounter when our traditions, even the minimal ones practiced in a new country such as the  U.S.A., would be threatened into demise by the fast moving pace of our lives.

“Future shock” is no longer off in the future. Future shock is now! And, it is driving us into an an insane way of life.

One of the key symptoms of this malaise is the “othering” that we do when we join in with the prevalent cultural practice I call “othering.”  

I do it. You do it. We all do it, even when we, oftentimes, consciously believe we do not. Othering is the opposite of “happening to one another” (a topic you might begin exploring here.) Beyond the cost to the individual is the enormous cost to our society, as a collective, and beyond that, again, even to the death and destruction carried forth over this entire planet that “othering” breeds.

Do, please, join me this week as I host the Possible Society In Motion Show and explore this issue with our “Consciously choosing to travel with “others” topic. 

This show has as its intent the generating of engaging community conversations, along with storytelling, to help, collectively, pave the way to awe.

Awe meaning, at least, win-win problem solving which, frequently, begins with letting go of our “othering.”

Check it out, the Possible Society In Motion Show.
Thursday, 6:30 p.m.