The Fastest
Growing New Social Movement on the Planet
Adapted from writings in the 1970s,
80s, and 90s. Updated Nov. 2014.
Currently,
spreading around the world is the fastest growing new social movement the world has
ever seen.
This
movement is growing using direct inter-personal contact at gatherings,
festivals, ceremonies, and celebrations spreading throughout earth.
People
are beginning to create contexts where they are thriving together surrounded by
thriving environments.
They are
evolving ways to link these environments towards oasifying the earth.
People in
these New Social Movements are using experiential learning in face-to-face
contact.
They’re
using audience and crowd effects.
They’re
using purposeful contagion and virus type effects,
They’re
evolving and using what has been termed ‘enabling environments’. People are
evolving people friendly spaces, places, localities, and atmospheres.
This new
social movement is drawing very extensively upon nature and using bio-mimicry.
There’s viral networking, intertwining, fertile seeding, germinating. There’s
abundance.
There’s
time to ebb and there’s time to flow. There’s self-organising. There’s swarm.
There’s rapid growth on the margins. There’s growth in the cracks and crevices.
There’s
innovation among those who have had ‘society’
knocked out of them. People who have been lonely in a crowd are re-creating the
little village atmosphere where everyone knows everyone.
Diverse
people are experiencing living well
together during experiential gatherings, festivals, celebrations, and
ceremonies, and taking this experience back with them for living well with each
other in everyday life.
There’s
exploring processes for facilitating experiential learning in large and small
groups. Processes that work have been documented. And are being passed on to
others. Refer Healing Group
Processes.
Ideas are evolving for changing alongside others. People
are experiencing ways of relating well with others, especially those who are
different. There’s the use of slogans. ‘Strangers are friends you’ve yet to
meet’.
Processes
are being evolved and shared for raising people’s consciousness. Refer Realising Human Potential.
People
are transforming by experiencing living well
together.
All forms of artistry are being used. People are playing together.
People are being spontaneous.
People who have had societal induced ‘breakdowns’ are getting it
all together and becoming well with others in community. And these same kinds
of folk are getting it all together by living close with animals and birds and
by growing things with others.
Some are
taking micro-actions. Others are linking in ways that have mass momentum and
mass effects.
People
are entering into common understandings and agreements about local, regional
and global futures.
In this,
the social-life word is taking a lead
in energising transforming action within the political life world and the economic
life world!
People
are evolving common understandings and values while respecting valued
differences.
These
celebratory gatherings are also bringing together tribes and clans and other
groupings; collectives, and peoples, and even reaching out to leaders of
sovereign nations’ governance.
Some
of the interwoven themes (refer Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest) are:
a)
indigenous cultural wisdoms of
interconnectedness
b)
ecology
c)
social ecology
d)
environmental action, and
e)
social justice.
This new
form of social movement has spread around the world hardly noticed by
mainstream people - .the mainstream media and social commentators. Typically,
they do not have the modes of perception to notice it (refer Connexity Perception).
The social
planners, the administrators, the community development people, the event
management people, the bureaucrats and all of these types, if they do attempt
in engage with this new social movement, typically find all of their skills and
experience irrelevant and a hindrance. They may experience dis-empowering of
their zero-sum power (if I get more power, you get less). After prolonged
engagement they may end up absorbing authentic power (refer Authentic Empowering and Tapping into Alternative Sources
of Power).
And
there’s also a reaching out to non-state actors; the insurgents, the
separatists, the guerrillas, the freedom fighters and the like.
There’s a
passing on that, as in the old song lines:
The
times, they are a changing, and
Give
peace a chance.
The Movement engages in Community Mutual Help Action for
Wellbeing. This is happening towards local,
regional and global reform of life on earth.
Some precursors to this New Social Movement may be traced
to action documented in the paper Informal
Networks and New Social Movements that outlines the social relating based movements spreading through South America and
through the Asia Oceania Australasia Region since the 1960s.
Resonant Links:
Precursors
to New Social Movements