The great lie (and what to do about it)

My children are pretty wise to our family's economic fragility.

“Economising” here on our little farm in the Priorat is a word in common usage and, when we are mindful, it is far from depressing.

We have found great goodness in it, from harvesting free (and sustaining) food in our garden, to asking the recycle question before anything is discarded, to noticing how much there is in our lives to appreciate that doesn't have a price, to recognising the value of looking forward to occasional treats rather than the deadening numbness of too much of a good thing.

You get it, of course you do. Most people are having to. The state of things right now fosters this resilience and independence, the need to economise and sustain, even if the World order demands dependency rooted in rigid compliance to a selfish hedonistic system of “growth and prosperity”. It's going through one of its occasional cyclical bouts of cold turkey, but after another shot in the arm we will all be bounding confidently along again soon... they keep telling us.

The power-brokers, advertisers and bankers want you to keep believing it is all under control.

Back to the family economics analogy for a moment: None of us want to laden our children with debt. Ideally, we want to leave them something, however small, on which to build fulfilling lives of their own: Instinctive, logical aspirations of any parent. So we toil, burn time and try to accumulate, to keep pace.

But collectively, unconsciously (or maybe not as more people awaken from the sleep walk) we are leaving trusting offspring with crippling debts, both environmentally and economically.

So, good people, 2015 is profoundly the moment to digest the harsh facts and figures, to contemplate deeply and then to begin to change fundamentally the way we obsess with the present, squander the future, live far beyond our means and fail to dwell in the wise and very real world.

The widespread disconnect from our place in the natural world and our modern profit-driven priorities, when you dare to weigh them, are gross. Future generations will damn us for the untruth that we did not know what we were doing to the planet, or about the fiscal debt we were bequeathing.

Most nations have been borrowing to staggering levels more and more every year, trillions beyond what they earn, insane sums that cannot be repaid, just to perpetuate current unsustainable lifestyles and aspirations. This is the great lie. And to keep bankrupt economies afloat we persist with the madness of fossil fuel addiction while allowing pernicious marketing to feed our addiction to mass consumerism.

But what truly stokes the fire in my belly is the way children are groomed at a younger and younger age to perpetuate this addiction, this lie.

Are we impotent? No. What we can do – must do - is turn and begin to earnestly contemplate and debate how it can be, must be.

I so hope the new Catalonia can help define how we humans are able significantly grasp the need for peaceful change; growth and prosperity in the context of wisdom and fulfilment, with community and ecology at the heart.

This article is not negative but full of hope because the year ahead will see awareness of the global dilemma heighten significantly. I have no doubt of it. Change is already happening, eyes and minds are opening.

The challenge is to harness the many good things to bring peaceful, public re-evaluation of what we really need, and just as importantly to re-learn the ancient art of symbiosis, the sustaining close interaction between species on our planet.

That, after all, is how we humans survived in the first place.