From Tikkun/Jeremy Lent: “Imagine living in a home with structural flaws in the foundations. At first, you might not notice too much. Every now and then, some cracks might appear in the walls. If they got too bad, you might apply a new coat of paint, and things would seem fine againâfor a while.
But suppose your house were in an earthquake zone? Some of us who live in California know what itâs like to call in a structural engineer and be told the foundations need to be retrofitted if the house is to survive the Big One. Sometimes foundation work is necessary if there are hidden flaws that our home is built on.
We can think of our civilizationâs worldview as a cognitive home that we all live inâan edifice of ideas thatâs arisen layer by layer over older constructions put together by generations past. Our global civilization is facing the threat of its own Big One in the form of climate change, resource depletion, and species extinction. If our worldview is built on shaky foundations, we need to know about it: we need to find the cracks and repair them before itâs too late.
Our worldview is the set of assumptions we hold about how things work: how society functions, its relationship with the natural world, whatâs valuable and whatâs possible. It often remains unquestioned and unstated but is deeply felt and underlies many of the choices we make in our lives.
We form our worldview implicitly as we grow up, from family, friends, and culture, and once itâs set, weâre barely aware of it unless weâre presented with a different worldview for comparison. The unconscious origin of our worldview makes it quite inflexible. Thatâs fine when itâs working for us. But suppose our worldview is causing us to act collectively in ways that could undermine humanityâs future? Then it would be valuable to become more conscious of it.
In researching my book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanityâs Search for Meaning, I excavated the hidden layers of our modern worldview and found that many of the ideas we hold sacrosanct are based on flawed foundations. They are myths that emerged from erroneous assumptions made at different times and places in history. Theyâve been repeated so frequently that, for many people, it may never occur to question them. But we need to do so, because the foundations of our civilizationâs worldview are structurally unsound.”
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