flâneur

Karen Hinh

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on the atlas — 6

highlights — 11

  • “What is it like to be you?” What are the conditions that generate the things that are hurting the world so much? That are so painful to witness? War thinking actually maintains those conditions. It maintains the status quo by diverting the grief, pain, and rage that injustice inspires onto a proxy called the enemy. Here’s something that hurts. Police violence, incarceration, ecocide, the draining of a wetland, whatever it is, here’s something that hurts. War thinking takes that energy that could go to healing and diverts it onto a scapegoat, so that we fight the symptoms forever, ignoring and…
    Charles Eisenstein | Building a Peace Narrative
  • The alternative comes from an entirely different place: interbeing. It starts by asking, Why? Why is he so greedy or why is she pro-fracking or why is he violent or why are those people – you know who they are – pro-this or anti-that? What story informs their belief system and what state of being co-resonates with that story? What is their experience of life? All we judge, we begin to investigate as symptoms. We ask, for example, Where does greed come from? That question opens up insights, understanding, and new possibilities for change. We may discover that it is another one of those symptoms…
    Charles Eisenstein | Building a Peace Narrative
  • The third pillar of a peace narrative is to end the internal war and to develop a peace narrative inside of ourselves. It is to heal the wound of self-rejection, and thus to remove the psychic engine of war – the division of the world into us and them, good and evil, me the good person and them the bad person. The best, easiest way to establish your identity as a good person (and meet the need for self-acceptance) is in contrast to the evil people. So, are you willing to give that up? Are you willing to give up having been right all along?
    Charles Eisenstein | Building a Peace Narrative
  • That doesn’t mean that there’s never a time to fight. It doesn’t mean never to run away from a robber or never to use antibiotics. Maybe you theoretically know that this person is about to harm your child because he suffered childhood trauma himself, but in this moment that doesn’t help you, and the only response you can see is to intervene forcefully. The problem comes when we default to a fight first because we’re so used to seeing the world in terms of good and evil. So a fight becomes the default, reflexive response.
    Charles Eisenstein | Building a Peace Narrative
  • Killing the strep bacteria will end that particular episode of illness, but it also kills off the friendly bacteria, leaving you more susceptible. This exemplifies a general principle: war creates the conditions for war. When you bomb the terrorists, you create conditions for more terror. When you lock up the criminals and destroy families and destroy communities, you’re creating conditions that breed more crime.
    Charles Eisenstein | Building a Peace Narrative
  • Now we are starting to understand, with research on emergence and self-organizing systems, which are ubiquitous in nature, that the world actually has a tendency toward order, towards beauty, as if there were an intelligence in all things, and not toward disorder as the Second Law of Thermodynamics seems to imply. The selfish gene, likewise, is obsolete biology. Now we are appreciating symbiosis, cooperation, and the merger of individuals into greater wholes in an ascent of complexity. That’s how biology works. The emergence of systems thinking in biology is part of a peace narrative. Nature i…
    Charles Eisenstein | Building a Peace Narrative
  • So for example in the fight over immigration, one side says, “Immigration is harming us, they are breaking our laws, let’s keep them out.” The other side says, “You horrible bigoted, intolerant people, this nation was built from immigrants. It is inhumane to run detention systems and separate families. We should welcome the unfortunate masses from the world.” Nobody, at least in the mainstream media, is asking why are there so many immigrants to begin with. What has made life in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and so forth, so unbearable that people are willing to risk their lives…
    Charles Eisenstein | Building a Peace Narrative
  • Because normally aid was more of a development, a post-colonial guilt thing, or geopolitical: “We wanna buy your goodwill.” This was all about supporting them and their vision. It was not easy to get the US government to say, “We trust you, we believe in you, we're going to give you the money, do it. You lead, you set the plans, we're there as your partners.”
    How To Save Twenty Million Lives, with Dr. Mark Dybul
  • In loving relationships, it’s normal for both people to occasionally sacrifice their own desires, their own needs, and their own time for one another. I would argue that this is normal and healthy and a big part of what makes a relationship so great. But when it comes to sacrificing one’s self-respect, one’s dignity, one’s physical body, one’s ambitions and life purpose, just to be with someone, then that same love becomes problematic. A loving relationship is supposed to supplement our individual identity, not damage it or replace it.
    Love Is Not Enough
  • The entrepreneur Derek Sivers once wrote a blog post where he said, “If I’m not saying ‘Hell Yeah!’ to something, then I say no.” It served him well in the business world and now I’d like to apply it to the dating world. And because I’m more of a vulgar asshole than Derek is, I’ll christen mine The Law of Fuck Yes or No.
    Fuck Yes or No
  • Who you are is defined by the values you are willing to struggle for.
    The Most Important Question of Your Life