Interview with Jordi Pigem, author of Good Crisis, December 2009, dc


The system is dismantled and we have the unusual opportunity to change the world.
Jordi Pigem is the philosopher of our time. This is demonstrated in his new book Good Crisis (Ed. Kairós and Ara Llibres), where he makes a faithful portrait of the special moment in which we have lived. His recipes to the great challenges can be summed up in two lines: to end the divorce between the human being and the rest of nature and start looking for happiness in creativity, solidarity and human relationships. Consumerism and materialism are the past, the era of postmaterialism has arrived. Pigem has been a professor at Schumacher College, a contributor to Raimon Panikkar, Fritjof Capra ... And most importantly: he is very good people.

Good Crisis is the title of your last book. Normally crisis is usually associated with something negative but you point to something positive.

The word crisis comes from a medical term used to describe the moment in which the patient heals or worsens. If it heals, it was traditionally said that the patient had had a happy, favorable crisis or a good crisis.

We are in a system that was already sick and has entered into crisis, that is, it can get worse and turn more towards the thirst for control, violence, alienation or it can transform into a healthier, more sensible, more ecological world, more Fair and wiser.

It is useful to realize that this gives us a power of action that we did not have before. In a stable situation you can try to change things and nothing moves. On the other hand, in a crisis situation everything is in transformation and it is much easier to influence the course of things.

Now everything is flowing and it is much easier to guide changes in the sense that we believe are positive. The only certainty we can have is that nothing will stay the same.

In a world where there are increasingly more inequalities and increasingly subtle forms of exploitation, the fact that a crisis like this comes is a bell that awakens us. The economic boom and the possibility of consuming more and more were like a bribe to our conscience that made us ignore the terrible problems of the world, at the level of human rights and ecological crisis, for example. We thought that since I charge at the end of the month and I can buy whatever I want, the system works.

In the same way that we have believed that the economy is the key to the well-being of a society, we believed that consumption was the key to human well-being. Now we know that it is not so. And when this whole belief system was dismantled, all the problems that were already there, but that society preferred to ignore, now look us in the face.

It is a bitter medicine ...

Yes, but it wakes us up from a state of drowsiness. The system was like a giant sleepwalker that advanced by squeezing ecosystems, communities and the planet's balance under its steps. Now the system is dismantled and we realize that we have the unusual, incredible and privileged opportunity to change the world.

Few generations have been able to feel that their decisions can affect the future, not only of their local community but of the whole of the Earth. We are in a very hard and very difficult time but we can also think that it is a great privilege to have come to Earth at this time. Having a human life in this age of enormous transformation, with all the unlimited possibilities that this entails, is the most interesting experience you can ask for.

Materialism has had a series of political manifestations, such as capitalism and communism. What kind of social organization can emanate from this new holistic paradigm?

The holistic view of the world leads by nature to much more decentralized systems of governments. The power is in the local communities. It is a society where there are no hierarchical structures, there are no people who lead the population as a whole, but each one is capable of taking greater responsibility for what they do and consume, for their impact on the local community and the set of earth cycles.

I believe that this crisis marks the beginning of the end of economic globalization and that will open spaces of cultural diversity that until now had been stifled. It will allow a greater diversity of ways of acting in tune with the rhythms of each ecosystem. In fact, this is how cultures have always evolved: in tune with the climatic and biological rhythms of the ecosystem that hosts them, something that we now practically do not take into account.
Right now what we have at the political level is the great transition from rigid structures and centralized hierarchies to a whole series of participatory initiatives that will emerge locally.

All this involves promoting citizen participation and the recovery of self-sufficient ways of living. Recover trades that were being lost, recover local agricultural varieties that were being abandoned. We must strengthen these local communities and let the more global structures be only as a protective umbrella, not as a pyramid that accumulates power on its cusp. It would be a power that emerges from the bottom up, not from top to bottom.

At the symbolic level we would be talking about moving from the pyramid formula to networking?

Yes, exactly. The pyramid is a metaphor that is worth a lot for the systems we have created so far, both political and business. But nature does not work that way. The concept of the pyramid can be associated with theological notions that proclaim a superior god that is above the Earth. The version of Christianity that has triumphed (which is not, for example, that of San Francisco) is very hierarchical and the hegemonic worldview has become compatible, in which competition and the struggle for survival stand out, everything is governed by mechanical laws and what has more strength triumphs.

The holistic vision reveals that all things are closely related and everything depends on everything else. It is a vision much more compatible with the idea of ​​network. Each act, like a stone that falls into a pond, generates waves that then expand. In this crisis, the pyramids collapse and the networks are strengthened. We all know that pyramid structures no longer work.

Inventing pyramidal structures is an experiment of humanity that we have found to work. And it doesn't work even for those who are upstairs, many of whom are filled with dissatisfaction.

Now we have to try new forms of organization. We know that the cosmos and life work in a network. The more we network, the more we will flow with nature and the better we will go.

Is the universe a cozy place?

Traditional indigenous peoples have felt part of their immediate ecosystem and of the Universe. When they look at the Moon and the Sun, they see them not only as part of their cosmology, but of their mythology and of their own family From that primordial perception of the world, in which we We felt instinctively brothers of plants, animals and stars. We have passed into a mechanistic vision in which we consider that the only real thing is what can be measured, what can be quantified. That gives rise to a world that can be controllable and efficient in many ways, but where everything that is not quantifiable, everything that has to do with creativity, imagination, art, spirituality, our relationships, Love is all perceived as an accessory and unimportant thing. If we believe that the most human thing is an addition, we create an inhuman and hostile world.
It is curious that the conclusions that avant-garde science is reaching coincide with the more traditional spiritual philosophies. It seems that scientists and physicians end up being understood at the end of the journey.

Two 20th-century Nobel Prizes in Physics, Schringer and Wigner, independently reached the conclusion that certain experiments in contemporary physics could only be satisfactorily explained if we move on to consider that the foundation of reality is not matter and energy, but consciousness and perception. That means a 180 degree turn in how we see the world for centuries. And this is not said by spiritual masters, but Nobel Prizes in Physics. There are, at a minimum, parallels between the worldview that the non-dualistic philosophies of various Buddhist, Taoist and Hindu schools have cultivated, and the vision that f Contemporary music.
Physics has discovered things that physicists themselves are not able to assimilate in their daily lives. The worldview that emerges from quantum physics erases the view that there are separate entities. Most physicists live in a kind of double life. When they are working with quantum physics, they embrace the vision of radical interdependence of all things, but when they are in their daily lives, everything is again fragmented and many things They are still governed by traditional values.
Our culture has not yet been able to integrate what a hundred years ago began to emerge from quantum physics and more recently from neurobiology.
We have the scientific basis for a holistic view, in which we realize that all things are interdependent and in which the most natural and most effective attitude is to cooperate and not compete From this, an attitude that is not of control but of participation in the cycles of nature can be born spontaneously.

Of control, when flowing. How can we learn to flow? I guess trust is the key?

Yes, trust is part of this process. If we feel separated from the world and separated from each other, the only effective way to act is to control and compete. It is an attitude based on distrust. But the word trust can have the connotation of naivety. I would use the word participation, in the sense that we feel part of a network of cycles, of an inexhaustible network of multiple cycles and that way we can feel part of the whole universe and part of the continuous miracle of life renewal.
Moving from this attitude of control to an attitude of flow is what allows you to let yourself be guided by your creativity. It is also a much healthier attitude. You can measure physiologically how a person who tries to control has much more tension than a person who feels that he is participating in the flow of things, which is naturally more relaxed.
In a worldview in which things are separated, they must be linked with control links or with mechanical laws that govern their operation. A more participatory vision leads us to flow with the cycles of nature and with the cycles of human relationships.

There are thinkers who believe that humans can no longer reintegrate into the cycles of nature, that the expulsion from Paradise is final

The root of the problem we have today is the dualism between us and the world, which manifests itself for example as dualism between humanity and nature. The key to getting a world that works is to overcome that dualism.

There are attitudes that start from the idea that humans are here to manage the planet. They start from the arrogance of believing that they know how the planet works.

But as we breathe without being aware of all the processes linked to our breathing and as our heart beats without our knowing how, nobody knows in detail how the countless cycles in continuous transformation that constitute nature work.

Nature is a leader in technology because everything it creates is much more complex, much more beautiful and much more efficient than what we create. Believing that we can artificially control the ecological balance of the Earth is of great naivety and arrogance.

We human beings from rich countries and rich elites from southern countries have lived in a way that nobody had ever lived before. Flying, adapting the temperature of each room to what we want and regulating everything that happens around us, importing food from the other side of the world and having all kinds of electronic gadgets ... they are comforts that even the great emperors did not have, but we have ended up believing that this was the natural way of life.

Does the solution involve living with less?

Conventional economics continues to ignore that it depends on nature. The impending shortage of key energy resources forces us to recognize that the life we ​​have been leading in recent decades is not sustainable. If we want to endure as an integrated species in the cycles of the earth, we must consume less energy and we must learn to live better with less, be happier with less.

There is no viable energy alternative that is capable of providing the level of consumption we have had so far. But that is not bad news, because this consumer society is a source of addictions and psychological problems that did not exist before. We must relearn to live better with less external energy and instead strengthen our inner energies: creativity, solidarity ...

We have to limit our impact on the environment, but there are a thousand things that are unlimited: friendship, solidarity, imagination, creativity, art, the ability to learn ... we can always strengthen them.

Everything that does not depend on a material basis, has no limits. Realizing that we are in a world of unlimited possibilities opens the door to realize that the world we can create has no limits. Perhaps a world awaits us that we cannot imagine right now. It has the potential to get worse or better. We can live a bad crisis or a good crisis. A world awaits us that will not be like this. Contributing to a better world is in our hands, and in our hearts.

SOURCE: By Alberto D. Fraile Oliver Namaste Magazine

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