Biocracy, not Democracy, to Save Planet Earth
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2019/11/24 · 14:24
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Choose Biocracy Over Democracy
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After dealing with Trump and Republican immorality I believe we will move towards a collective renaissance of moral intelligence. The kernel comes when we come to a recognition that we can only survive and thrive if Earth survives and thrives. Escaping to another planet won't change that. We won’t thrive in a monarchy or any of our current governments. I see now a vision of a biocracy.
My first encounter with the term, biocracy was reading Wild Mind by Bill Plotkin, PhD. Plotkin speaks to the part of the human psych that he calls Dark Muse-Beloved. “The Muse imagines deeply, wildly, and from beneath things, and who inspires us to all sorts of revolutions and psychospiritual deaths and rebirths.” No set-in stone map can get us there. Maps are helpful, to a point. Seeking answers deadens us. Also, don’t seek answers, seek mysteries which are key sources of energy for our growth. It is from our deep imagination that nature expresses itself through the human. Nature gave us imagination and we need to learn how to use it to all of life’s benefit. Plotkin then asks if “we’ll learn to collaborate with the deep imaginations of the Muse, of Soul, and of Gaia and engender a new era in which Earth and humanity become mutually enhancing, an era in which we allow Earth to heal herself and in which we create postdemocracy biocracies, a possible future that Thomas Berry has called the emerging Ecozoic era.” (pg. 105)
Lynton Keith Caldwell wrote an article published in Politics and the Life Sciences, Vol 3 No. 2, 1985, entitled Biocracy and Democracy: Science, Ethics, and the Law. He gives a brief history of the term. “…biocracy indicates the influence of the life sciences, actual or perceived, upon those social choices and behaviors which in human societies are expressed through processes that may be broadly identified as “political.” Biocracy may have first been used by the physiologist Walter B Canon. It appeared in his 1940 presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Cannon, 1941). A comparable term biocratie was used by a French writer, Alain Sargent in the journal Combat (Sargent 1950). As of 1984, however, biocracy had not appeared on the pages of any standard English dictionary.”
W. Thompson Martin's book From Democracy to Biocracy: Finding the River of Life, wrote about biocracy in this way. "To create a biocracy, we will need the collective functions of both the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of our brains working together. We will need to make wise and balanced choices. We will need to listen to and respect not just the needs of our human neighbours, but the needs of all our biocommunities.
When we vote for biocracy, we choose life---the life of the planet Earth.”
(pg. 127) From: https://books.google.co.nz/books/about/From_Democracy_to_Biocracy.html?id=-RHACwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y Book published 2016.
What this author is saying for me is to live life like the indigenous people did…. learn from Nature, follow Nature’s patterns. That’s the genius of Permaculture as well. Western culture is good at shutting down the right brain function. Our life is richer with mystery and working with the unknown as ultimately a beneficent force.
I know I have just barely scratched the surface of what biocracy means or could mean. It’s up to us to shape our future, and I for one, see biocracy as an open and viable option for human endeavor to co-create a better life, to make life on this planet benefit all life, not just human life. As W. Thompson Martin says, a vote for biocracy, is a choice for the life of the planet Earth.
