WHAT A GLORIOUS THOUGHT, THAT WE COULD CHANGE THE WORLD IN TIME

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This quote is from Thomas Paine, in words that resonate now:

“These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”

While those words were written in 1776, they have an almost eerie relevance to our lives today. My friend historian Harvey Kaye often reminds me of Paine’s importance; for good reason, given how this paragraph alone is a stark reminder of the way truth rings out across centuries. In Asian philosophical systems, time doesn’t move in a straight line but rather in spirals. We don’t move forward so much as we constantly repeat ourselves, faced with the same lessons until we get them right.

These are indeed times that try men’s souls. A species so incredibly brilliant and magnificent has made and is making such a mess of things. Things are falling apart at the seams in ways most of us would never have imagined in our lifetime. We thought things were, well, sort of secure enough.

Well, they are not secure. The most debased impulses of the human mind now permeate the way we govern ourselves, how we treat the planet, and most importantly how we treat each other. Which is not to say I don’t see acts of beauty, and kindness, and even heroism all around me every day. I do. And that’s the conundrum.

People are not the problem, and in another way we are every bit the problem. Individuals can be nothing short of divine in our capacity and willingness to love one another, but systems by which we operate pull us away from ourselves and away from each other constantly. It is people who create and guide those systems, and it is people alone who can change them. If we do not hold those systems accountable, then they will not change. In too many ways, in too many instances, those systems are destroying that which is most beautiful and good. Just as we must face our own darkness, we must face the darkness of the world.

I saw a segment on TV last night in which the CEO of a cereal company was saying, in effect, that so many families now eating cereal for dinner was boosting their sales.
”We need to meet people where they are,” he said. Now I don’t blame him personally …but this is insane. With 39 per cent of Americans now reporting that they regularly skip meals in order to make their rent, in a sane world the masters of the universe should be sounding the alarm, not celebrating stockholder gains. Filling the food pantries, not exploiting the hungry. But we are currently not a sane world. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “The problem with the world is that humanity is not in its right mind.”

So what do we have to do? We have to get busy. We have to change our minds. We have to show up for the times in which we live. We have to not only listen to those like Paine and Gandhi - we have to be the Paines and Gandhis of our age.

For that, we need to stop playing small. Most people, if we’re honest with ourselves, do know what we need to do in order to best show up for life. It’s not so much that we don’t know, although we pretend we don’t; it’s more that we don’t want to face what it means to put away the psychological toys of childhood and inhabit the genuinely mature places within us. In the world today, the limited self has become a perverse comfort zone. We know we need to be the change - we just keep telling ourselves we’re not ready.

Well, big news: you’ll never feel ready to be your highest best self because of a voice in all our minds telling us we have no right to be. Yet make no mistake about it: that voice is the same thing holding back - and destroying - not only you, but our species and our planet. It is the inner darkness that’s reflected in our outer world.

In religious terms, tell that voice to go back to the nothingness from whence it came. In personal growth terms, whatever it is feel the fear and do it anyway. And in political terms, get out there and kick ass. The hour is late and we must act.

The tyranny of our age is not the tyranny of a tyrant king, but rather the tyranny of thought and behavior that puts lifeless things before life itself. It is the soft tyranny of an economic paradigm that over and over again favors the few at the expense of the many. Yet listen again: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” What a glorious thought, that we could change the world in time. Humanity now will either find our better selves, or we will lose it all.

Thank you, Thomas. We’ll take it from here.