A Climate of the Heart: Only Relatedness Can Save Us

We are coming into dire catastrophe through our turning aside from inter-relatedness. Reality is relational, but our present way of being in the world is an adversarial going against others (our politics) and a displacement of our innate desire for relatedness into a grasping for ever more things (our economics). We now know, if most continue on our present way, we humans will become extinct within a few decades, Our main problem is our self-contradictory identity; we are each simultaneously material-relational, but, for the most part, we humans choose to act as if we are each merely a separate object self. It is only when a crtical mass of individuals, each forgetting the self, lives her own true nature as a unique expression of Relatedness, that each and all will be saved. As Vergil tells Dante, there is “another road”, love, the “direct way that is lost”. The first step on the “direct way’ is to forget the idea of a separate self, which allows room for a participation in inter-cultural difference with the “other”, so that we see what is ours as alien and what was alien as ours. Then we can engage in an economics based on mutually beneficial relating and a truly democratic politics arising from the practice of listening-dialogue.