From Me to We

[marmar]

from OnTheCommons.org:



We Power
From Zuccotti Park to Main Street, people's yearnings spark new possibilities for a shift from me to we

By Julie Ristau & Alexa Bradley


Through our experience with numerous community projects, we’ve come to see how deeply contemporary society is immersed in the market mentality. So long as market fundamentalism remains the lens through which most Americans see the world, it will be very difficult for people to envision a commons-based society, let alone work to revive actual commons that are under threat in their communities.

This realization led us to examine how people’s social, political, and even personal consciousness is conditioned by their belief in the market as the only efficient system to organize society, and to look for points of entry for introducing commons-based ideas to the wider public.

It is jarring to realize just how far modern culture has drifted from the commons existence that for ages was central to human society. Our sense of we has been assaulted, chipped away at, forgotten. Of course, we can’t retreat back to the past. But it’s important to look at what we have lost and how that affects us today.

Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science who popularized the phrase “paradigm shift,” defines a paradigm as “an entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on, shared by the members of a given community … a set of unassailable, unconsciously accepted truths.” He goes on to describe the dramatic revolution of thought needed to make a shift—to break out of the deeply held beliefs of an old paradigm that no longer serves us. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/we-power