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The World Is Not Mindless
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Social ecologist Gregory Bateson foresaw how the separating of mind from matter — spirit from nature — creates all sorts of problems. For Bateson, this separation is an error of the most fundamental degree. This error, Bateson saw woven into Western habits of thought at deep and partly unconscious levels, undermining our capacity to flourish sustainably on Earth.
He felt that it is what pits humanity against nature and provides for our prevalent worldview of survival through competition, in what he viewed as “an ecology of bad ideas” breeding parasitic humans, purely self-centered and destructive of their host environment.
He noted that if you, “see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration, the environment will be yours to exploit…If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and over-grazing” (Bateson, 2000).
~ Giles Hutchins, Regenerative Leadership: The DNA of life-affirming 21st century organizations
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The story of villains is much more entertaining than the story of heroes, because monsters are not born, they are…
