The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Dysfunction

In a conversation earlier today with colleagues from the Invest In Peace Investors Conference held back in July in Caux, above Montreux, overlooking Lake Geneva in the Swiss Alps, we talked about how we are living today with a popular paradigm for prosperity that is really built on two foundations. Greed, and fear. Since greed is actually derived from fear, our currently popular paradigm for prosperity is really built on a single pedestal of fear.

This is unnecessary.

As people, we are all born into a world that is not of our own making. Also, we are each born with the capacity, through inquiry, insight and cooperation, to take the world around us as we find it, and change it to be more a way we choose to make it.  This great human enterprise of putting learning into action has evolved to the point where today we, as a population, have the capacity to provide each other with an adaptively evolving sufficiency of all that we need to live more or less well, and to pursue happiness as we each experience it.

The only thing we really have to fear today is that we allow our systems of enterprise, investment and governance to degenerate into dysfunction, so that we do not share this prosperity of adaptively evolving sufficiency sufficiently.

Unfortunately, in this regard, we have much to fear.

This is not our best. We can do better. We can learn how to live together in a shared prosperity that is built on peace. And not on fear.