"The Urgency of Citizen Participation" with Ashok Panikkar
Ashok Panikkar
Meet Ashok Panikkar. He is founder of Meta-Culture and a diversity and conflict management consultant - who also teaches Critical and Creative Thinking. Today most of his energies are focused on strengthening our democracies by working with communities to help build a culture of democracy.
This episode hard and realistic. We take a serious look at the current state of politics, the challenges we are currently facing in the world, and we have more questions than answers.
Learn more about Ashok and support the work he’s doing in the world on Patreon.
Want to know more about Meta-Culture? Click here.
Resources
In this episode we talk about the work of Sir John Glubb. His book is called The Fate of Empires and the Search for Survival
Here are some essays about Glubb's book, since the book is out of print and hard to get a hold of.
“‘The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival’ – or, why do empires rise and fall?” by Tom X Hart
Here is Margaret Wheatley's summary of John Glubb's work from her recent book Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity
“Glubb studied thirteen empires in the Middle East, Asia and Europe…from Assyria in 859 BCE to modern Britain in 1950. The pattern of the decline and fall of these superpowers was startlingly clear. It didn’t matter where they were or what technology they had or how they exercised power. They all declined in the same stages and it always took ten generations, about 250 years.
“The logic of this is very clear: each generation matures in better socioeconomic circumstances created by the preceding generation; thus, there is always a march to increasing materialism. In every generation, youth will have higher expectations for comfort than their parents. Improved material conditions create attitudinal changes that insist on still more material changes; and predictably, because of its wealth and erosion of morality, the civilization declines into decadence.” (Who Do We Choose to Be? 34).
“The United States is nine years shy of its 250th anniversary. We are deep into our Age of Decadence, which Wheatley (following Glubb) describes as a time when “wealth and power have led to petty and negative behaviors, including narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fanaticism and high levels of frivolity” (35).
Ken Wilber (creator of Integral Meta-Theory) has a series of videos (and podcasts) where he talks about the state of current politics, while making an analysis of the Intellectual Dark Web. It's called “What's Missing in the Intellectual Dark Web.” Wilber's political analysis really puts the conversation with Ashok Panikkar in perspective. The videos/episodes "Left & Right” and “Postmodernism and the Culture Wars” are particularly relevant.
Here is a link to the videos and the audio (episodes 126 & 127) versions. Click here to open the podcast on your mobile device: https://pod.link/1378476230.
Music
This episode includes music from Trevor Justice. Listen to the song “Yes We Can Lead” here, or go to https://www.trevorjustice.com/songs/ to get three song downloads.