Last night I read a fascinating article in What is Enlightenment? Magazine (www.wie.org) by Howard Bloom subtitled “Descartes’ Delusion”. The delusion was that René Descartes settled himself into a house in Amsterdam, back in 1636, and decided he’d sit there, more or less by himself, until he penetrated the bedrock of reality, ie “What is that I can know for sure?”. And he came up with the famous statement “I think, therefore I am”. Bloom deftly critiques Descartes’ methodology – and makes the statement that Descartes could only think because he inherited a body, a mind, a language, and an entire social environment from millions of years of evolution. Like Descartes, each of us is in fact a multitude.
Descartes has had such an impact on our culture that today we tend to think it “common sense” that each of us is an island – or at least we behave that way. One of my teachers, Julio Olalla, was fond of pointing out that we tend to think of ourselves and our problems as our own isolated psychological case, when in fact we are playing out cultural scripts that date back centuries. These scripts are passed on through family stories, cultural messages, official history, and the very words we use to describe our world.
Our culture has achieved incredible material success/excess because of our ability to view ourselves as separate – as if, like Archimedes, all we need is a place to stand and a lever big enough, and we can move the earth. The only problem is, we are standing on the earth. There’s nowhere else to stand, space fantasies notwithstanding. Despite our limited success at conquering nature, we are in danger of overbreeding, starving and poisoning ourselves with our own toxins.
Eastern philosophies, particularly buddhism, offer a radically different worldview, based on mutual causality. Western philosophy has generally focused on linear causality until very recently. A causes B, which causes C. Which is exactly why so many of our great inventions have brought about unintended consequences. Pharmaceuticals have conquered many diseases, which is a good thing, but are now polluting our water, subjecting fish, and ourselves, to unmetabolized birth control pills, anti-depressants, etc. Only recently, with the development of Systems Theory, have we begun to see how phenomena emerge, sometimes unexpectedly and chaotically, from a variety of causes.
In a chaotic, interconnected world, we see that we cannot control everything, but instead influence a complex chain of events through intentions and small actions – even if we are not sure which ones matter. This is why random acts of kindness are a good thing! Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese buddhist monk and peace activist, has coined the term “InterBeing” to describe this mutual connectedness. Rather than believe our own story about how things happen to us, he suggests we continually ask why things occur the way they do. And, when we keep asking that question, we ultimately see there is no one to blame, including ourselves.
The way of leading business that I see emerging among “natural” entrepreneurs draws from this well. Any complex product arises from a number of ingredients, that come from different places. Each has an impact on the local economy that produces it, the local ecology, the health and well being of the people who live and work there. Likewise for the way it’s manufactured, packaged, used and ultimately disposed of.
Today on my BlogTalkRadio Show, I interviewed Joshua Onysko, the founder of Pangea Organics. Pangea is the fastest growing organic skin care line in the world. Josh has built Pangea from the ground up to be a business that acknowledges the connectedness of all players in the manufacture and use of the product. Josh has even thought deeply about packaging. Since cardboard packaging consumes millions of trees a year, Pangea’s products are packaged in downcycled paper fiber which is impregnated with seeds. Plant your holiday gift pack wrapper and a Colorado Blue Spruce tree will grow.
Josh is using profits from Pangea to fund micro-financing efforts that go back to the people – mostly women – who grow the crops that supply Pangea with ingredients. This creates stable livelihood for the growers, and a steady supply of quality product for Pangea.
The market for organic personal care products is growing at 22% per year. Why does this matter? Our skin is our largest organ, and absorbs 87% of what we put on it. Cold processed organic soaps maintain the liveliness and efficacy of the ingredients so they can be available to the skin.
Josh pointed out that we are led to believe that healthy products are a luxury. In many cases, because of their effectiveness, organic products are actually cheaper per use, and infinitely better for long term health. Is a “cheap” bar of soap actually cheaper, when we consider the real cost of petroleum by-products, wasteful packaging, and unknown efffects of chemical ingredients?
All of this may sound like fringe thinking, but Josh summed it up when he said “the Fringe predicts the Future”. Business people and economists are beginning to see how many costs we have traditionally “externalized” – but on a small, crowded planet, all those “externalized” costs, like the pharmaceuticals in the water supply, ultimately find us.
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