Corinne McLaughlin: The Politics of Dynamic Change

This week I speak with long-time social change agent and the co-author of Spiritual Politics, Corrine McLaughlin. Corrine explains the coming changes of 2012 largely in terms of their economic and political significance. She asserts that there are drastic changes underway in both areas, particularly as a result of budding social entrepreneurship and what she calls non-adversarial politics.

You know Corrine, I know that you’ve been working in the field of social change, and I’m curious how you feel and why you are associating your work with the phenomenon of 2012, the mystery of 2012? Here there’s so much talk of Mayan calendar dates and the potential galactic alignment, etc., and here you’ve been doing serious, in-the-trenches social change work for over three decades. How do you feel about being associated with this mysterious phenomenon that some people think is suspect?

Corinne McLaughlin: Well I see it as an opportunity to talk about the future, and how we’re creating the future moment to moment in our choices and in our actions. Right now, we’re in this period leading up to 2012, which is really this period of transformation. It’s going on right now.

Tami Simon: Do you believe there’s something special about the date 2012?

Corinne McLaughlin: Well, it’s also an election year! But I think what’s really happening is it’s giving a lot of people a focus point to think about the future. It’s sort of a Rorschach test, in a way, that people project onto the future date … either their fears about the future, and of course right now with all the economic financial crisis, we could feel pretty fearful about the direction things are going. On the other hand it gives people an opportunity to project something positive. And there’s many changes going on right now that I’ve been tracking and researching that I think orient us in a more positive direction, and give us opportunity for choice, in how we think, the actions that each of us are involved in day to day, as consumers our choices in what we buy, what we invest in, what companies we work for, what companies or businesses we start, what candidates we support politically, what political action we’re engaged in, and what spiritual work (practices) that we do to help create a more positive world. To me, there are a lot of opportunities. Nothing is set in stone. Many who are students of the Mayan calendar say that that is really the message. It’s a time of transformation and choice.

Tami Simon: Many of the people who talk about 2012 describe it as a time of fundamental change, that we’re becoming a “new human species,” that we’re in this very particular decision window, that it’s not just a time of accelerated change in general. Some people call it a quantum change. I’m wondering what you think about that. Do you think we’re undergoing some kind of fundamental shift or are we simply in a time of accelerated change?

Corinne McLaughlin: Certainly accelerated change. Every time you pick up your newspapers there’s something new and dramatic, from environmental crises to political change, electing the first African-American president, the first woman running for president that almost was elected, and a vice-presidential nominee as a woman. Certainly rapid change in all the economic crises, financial crises. But I think it’s more transformative than that. I think it’s something deeper spiritually that’s going on in this period that many of us feel and experience. It’s providing real opportunities to both transform ourselves, deal with our own shadows and our own negative qualities that we want to redeem and transform, and making friends with our subconscious rather than just pushing it all down and trying to ignore it or projecting it onto others. It’s also a time for a spiritual awakening where more and more people are waking up to other dimensions. I just saw an article in USA Today, a poll that they did … I forget the figure, but over 50 percent of the population has experienced angels, or some kind of spiritual beings coming to their aid, protecting them, helping them. I was blown away that was such a huge portion of the population! I think this is a sign of really unusual times, not just accelerated change.

Tami Simon: And what do you think are the indicators that we’re actually in a time of change of that depth and magnitude, not just a time of the furniture is moving around on the exterior, as it has done for decades upon decades?

Corinne McLaughlin: I think there are many times in history where we have powerful transformative change. Whether this is the most unique … history will reflect that. But as I see it, because so many people are going through some deep changes, personally, spiritually, because we’re seeing a world financial crisis right now, the world is much more interconnected than in past times. When all the derivatives, the short-selling, and the credit default swaps … all these really unusual financial instruments that were pretty hidden are becoming transparent, and the problems that they cause, because all the financial institutions are so interconnected. So whatever affects us affects all of them. They’ve tried to keep this quiet and hidden, and now it’s obvious to everyone. I think this is a reflection of these deep changes that are going on. We’ve gone a certain direction as a whole culture, a Western culture … in fact, much of the world. We’ve been thinking we can get away with basing our culture on greed and selfishness and ignoring the effects of what we’re doing on other people, other humans, and other life forms. The karma, if you will, is ripening. It’s becoming very visible in so many fields. And ignoring global warming indicators … I was involved with President Clinton’s council on sustainable development in ’94, and we then at that time at the presidential level, this council, as well as many activists for years, were warning about global warming, and about what we need to do to reduce our carbon output and our energy use and so on, as well as protecting species that were disappearing, as well as the environmental pollution in the water, the air, the earth. And so many have ignored this and focused on just the bottom line, just on profit. I think what’s coming do is showing that everything is connected, and we have to honor a triple bottom line: people, planet, the environment, and profit, in the business world, and include a more whole-systems perspective when we make our political decisions. We can’t just do what’s right for, say, the United States. It affects other nations. It ripples around the world, whatever we do. Our culture, our media, our movies, television, goes out around the world and affects everyone.

So I think today, all of this is showing us this spiritual truth of our inner connection. I think that’s what the Mayan calendar is really referring to, is that our technology has connected us. We’re such a wired world now. Everything is so connected, so visible, it’s very hard to hide anything now. Everything’s becoming more visible, there’s more transparency, whether people want it or not. This is adding to this spiritual change and transformation that has been going on for so many people in their own personal lives. So I see something like Obama’s election that many people said, well how could this man come from almost nowhere, become a senator so easily, and now president? But it’s like he’s a catalyst, the image of a catalyst being dropped in a super-saturated solution that then gathers around it a crystalline structure based on its own innate pattern. That catalyst transforms a whole solution. Many of us have been resonating to the same ideas, the same tone, the same approach, and the same values that Obama has put forward. So as we’ve said, we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for. He’s part of a whole wave of transformation. He’s just the visible political side of it. Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, you have to admit he’s bringing a real transformation already. And a trans-partisan, post-partisan approach to politics, going beyond Right and Left, and the choices he’s made in his cabinet, the things he’s talked about, the decisions he’s made … it’s very unusual.

Tami Simon: But just to be clear here and not to beat this to death too much, the actual December 21, 2012, end of the Mayan calendar predicted date… it sounds like you’re not really focused on that date as a point of change as much as you are that we’re in the midst of a wave that we’re in the middle of now, that could last another, who knows, 10 or 20 years. And that wave is a change toward recognizing our interdependence. More so than in January of 2013, we’re going to be living in a world that’s going to surprise us today.

Corinne McLaughlin: Yes. I don’t think we’re going to wake up and suddenly everything’s different. I think it’s more we’re living in the times right now of this incredible transformation. That’s what we’re seeing all around us. What will happen on any given date in 2012 is based on, as I said, the changes we are all making now, our thoughts, our feelings, how we’re projecting things out that affect the world. Even scientists are showing how the thoughts of an experimenter affect the experiment. Talking about entangled minds, how we’re all affecting each other moment to moment.

So I think the calendar, the Mayans, who some of whom putting this together, their whole culture, were very attuned to cycles. There certainly are cycles of times. There’s astrological timing, there’s cycles related to the sun, cycles of the sun, there’s deeper cycles each of us as humans go through. I think there’s a confluence of things coming together right now. I think the Mayan calendar is one just very visible, concrete, specific lens to look through these changes. So I think that there will be in the next very few years, four years from when we’re talking right at the moment, some even bigger surprises than we’re experiencing right now.

But again, we have free will. It’s not like everything is pre-ordained. I don’t see that human free will isn’t part of this, that we aren’t affecting what’s going on. It’s the tapestry of events that’s interwoven with human choices and divine choices, if you will, a higher evolutionary plan. That’s what we’re seeing unfolding today.

Tami Simon: When you said there might be bigger surprises, what kinds of things are you imagining when you say that?

Corinne McLaughlin: I’m not really imagining exactly what it could be. I just think that it may be on every level, from politics, to business, to revelations of things that none of us expected, to the world coming together in ways that we didn’t expect. There are incredible groups, like Search for Common Ground that has something like 300 people around the world and offices in all these countries working behind the scenes. There are many groups like this to solve conflicts, deep-seated ethnic conflicts around the world. This is the untold story of these groups that are bringing together Palestinians and Israelis, Hutus and Tutsis, and many of these deep conflicts, and finding solutions both through dialogue and through the media, like through soap operas and radio shows. Things that people didn’t expect, often there will be healings of these conflicts. Some of these things can seemingly happen overnight, but it’s because there’s been so much work on the ground. Like in South Africa, people think it was Nelson Mandela. They don’t realize there was something like 10,000 people trained in conflict resolution on the ground in South Africa that created the field, that created the culture for a peaceful transition. That’s the kind of thing I think we’re going to be seeing in many areas, arenas, that we can’t hardly imagine at this point. Maybe some surprises in terms of visitors from outer space announcing themselves! Who knows? It could be any number of things. Announcing themselves more widely … I mean, certainly some people have experienced things, but I think beyond a shadow of a doubt. This may be a time that we’re approaching.

Tami Simon: Some people I know who are focused mostly on transformation from a spiritual dimension, inner change, think that the outer world changes when our inner lives change. As somebody who’s been involved in social change movements for a long time, I’m wondering what you think about that. We have to change our consciousness first, that’s where it all begins … is that how you think change happens in the outer world?M

Corinne McLaughlin: Well my last book was called Spiritual Politics: Changing the World from the Inside Out, and that was in ’94. The Dalai Lama wrote the forward to it. So I clearly come from a place of the importance of inner spiritual change. I find that the inner changes affect the outer world, as I was talking about scientists are showing us today. But likewise, the outer world affects our inner process, because if we create more environments that are conducive to people’s spiritual practice, a more peaceful world so people can have time and safety to, say, meditate or pray, so they can find spiritual teachers, so they can find spiritual books and spiritual practices, then that outer world … and more democratic, open societies that also support people’s basic, economic survival needs … so it’s all intertwined. I feel like if we say it’s one or another, we’re caught in this very dualistic mindset, and it’s always both. It’s always both aspects; inner and outer affect each other. You can’t separate out one from the other. That’s an illusion.

Now it’s important to realize at this level that we have to make choices, because we are physically in this dualistic world. There are, I think, times that certain decisions are right and some are wrong in terms of the outcomes. But when we see how the inner affects the outer and the outer affects the inner, certainly serving people around the world, finding that if there’s a more peaceful, prosperous society, they’re more able to engage in their spiritual practices. Although on the other hand, difficulties and crises also draw people to spirit, to renew their faith or their practices. So, the inner and the outer affect each other very dramatically.

Tami Simon: I know you’ve written on the idea of non-adversarial politics. And here, even in the midst of the Obama phenomenon and the Obama election, we saw so much adversarial debate, discussion, and tearing down in the election process. It seems like we’re pretty far away from non-adversarial politics, at least when it comes to political debate and the election process. What do you have to say about that? It doesn’t seem like we’re making that much progress on that front.

Corinne McLaughlin: First of all, I think it’s important to distinguish between debate in itself is not a bad thing. The Tibetan Buddhists, the Dalai Lama’s people, when we went to visit with His Holiness in Dharamsala, one of the things that they showed us is they’re debating the way they work together to debate fine points. One of the points they showed us was the mind in the body, or the body in the mind? When they score a point, they have this unusual way of slapping their hands as if to say, here’s another point to be aware of. This showed us that debate is not in itself a bad thing. It helps clarify differences and clarify things mentally. Because we have to see distinctly what are the choices, what are the differences. But then there’s a further step.

What I see in our political campaigns, I think there’s been a movement toward the voters saying we don’t want negative campaigning. Voters tend to vote for those who run a more positive campaign. At the same time, we’re seeing efforts toward truly trans-partisan dialogues and coming together, where both sides of an issue are brought together in facilitated dialogues, professionally trained facilitators, who’ve worked in the conflict resolution field, where they create an environment of safety so that both sides can really be heard. A lot of the divisiveness and anger comes from people not being heard, people suffering injustice around the world, they’re not heard. Their needs are not taken into account.

So when both sides or all sides, we’ll call it multi-stakeholder dialogues, people are brought together and hear each others’ perspectives and understand the differences, but then build on the commonalities … so that’s the direction we want to move in. Where is there common ground? What is the grain of truth on each side? Not their stuck positions, not their dogmas, but what are their common interests? Moving from positions to interests. What do you have in common right now? One wonderful example that I love that’s been adopted by Obama and others is the whole question of abortion. Pro-life, pro-choice: one of the most divisive, heated adversarial issues in our nation today. There have been people like Search for Common Ground, Public Conversations Project, and many others, bringing both sides together and over a period of time, they’ve found that first of all, their opponents were real human beings and they could come to appreciate who they were and why they were so committed to their point of view. But they’ve found that they’re both arguing about when is a fetus life … and there’s no scientific proof of that. So instead of arguing about that, they reframe the whole debate. They go upstream to the cause of pregnancy, a look at how do you prevent unwanted pregnancy. How do you work with conception rather than after the fetus is in the womb? And they found that both want to prevent unwanted pregnancies, particularly teen pregnancy. Again, further down the line if you’ve found that both sides want to make adoption more easily available. So if there’s concerted effort to prevent unwanted pregnancies and to make adoption more easily available, then you don’t need to keep fighting about the same problem. And there are many examples of that in the environmental field, environmentalists and developers dialoging to find common ground. And that’s what we did with the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.

Tami Simon: And is the theory of transformation that we’ll come into a time when people will seek that type of coming together around common interests instead of taking adversarial positions as a more common approach? Is that…?

Corinne McLaughlin: Yes. Absolutely. To me, this is the seed to the new politics. And there’s so much of it going on behind the scenes that most people don’t even know about. There’s an article here or there in the papers, but there’s so much going on in resolving conflicts and even marriages … people seeking mediation before they go to court and finding more harmonious ways to solve the problems and deal with divorce. So I think we’re going to see more and more of it.

The reason I’m so hopeful is that many of these things I’m mentioning … I’m writing a new book on the new culture, the new world, the new civilization that’s emerging and the connections between the inner spiritual growth process and the outer world, how they affect each other. And from what I understand in the spiritual teachings I’ve studied over the years and researched, and from my own intuition and meditative practice, I’ve been meditating for 30 years … and so intuitively and from these spiritual teachings I’ve seen that we are part of this evolutionary plan, a higher intelligence that’s guiding this. It’s unfolding in this direction of everything coming together more, there being a new and higher synthesis, there being a blending, a unifying, a coming together of the separated parts, keeping their uniqueness. A world culture doesn’t mean that we’re all the same, McDonald’s everywhere, just Western culture everywhere, which is certainly underway today. But more and more people are realizing the beauty of the uniqueness of all our cultures, both our cultures and our individual expression. It’s like holding a picture of a whole system, but unique expressions within it, unique gifts that each of us have to give. It’s boring if you’re with people that are exactly like you. The difference and creativity is always where the edges meet. The differences come together. The inter-disciplinary approaches to things.

Tami Simon: You know, I both feel amazed and appreciated what you’re saying about people seeking mediation before moving into a violent divorce proceeding and things like that … but at the same time I see around me people, many of whom have been meditators, and they still find themselves polarized, having public arguments online, trashing each other, and it makes me feel not so hopeful about the ability of people to work out their differences. When I see people who I think are pretty mature in some ways … do you know what I mean? Fighting dirty in other ways.

Corinne McLaughlin: Yes, I’ve seen that as well. I think that what this is showing is that each of us has these shadow areas. We have to address the subconscious and work on cleaning that up and make our subconscious our friend, rather than these things kind of lurking there, these unresolved power issues, or fear, or hatred, that then suddenly comes exploding to the surface because it hasn’t been dealt with. Meditating and just trying to transcend all of this is not enough. I feel and I’ve seen this working out in so many peoples’ lives, in my own life and many people that I know, we have to move in both directions. We have to move into connecting with the light, I would call our soul or our highest self, but at the same time bringing that light into the subconscious. That’s work that my husband, Gordon Davidson, is very involved in with a new psychology called psychosophy.And the whole work is to integrate the subconscious, the conscious, and the super-conscious. All three dimensions need to be addressed. When people avoid it, eventually … you know, we have these wonderful organizations, great ideals and values, but like you said, these huge arguments and power struggles and separateness and fights break it apart. That’s because they’re not integrating other aspects of themselves. We’re whole beings. We have to address that. I see more and more of that happening. More and more people are recognizing it, because it’s so painful to not do so.

Tami Simon: Can you explain what you mean, maybe giving an example, of how some unintegrated aspect of a person, some part of their shadow, is what’s causing them to be polarized in an argument, and difficult?

Corinne McLaughlin: Yes, I’ve seen this for instance in the peace movement. It’s so interesting that people who are very drawn to work for peace often get in these horrible arguments and fights, and destroy their organizations. What I think that is often is that it’s not addressing the issue of power. It’s not enough to say, “Oh, we’re all one, we’re all nice people, we’re all working for the same things, so we’ll all just get along.” If you don’t acknowledge power … and I learned this particularly with the psychological work, but also living in Washington, DC, for 15 years after growing up in California and going to school in Berkeley, being part of the activist movement there in the 60’s. Living in Washington was 180 degrees a different culture in some ways, but power is more acknowledged. People really recognize it and don’t so much try to hide it and pretend they’re all equal. There’s more recognition of power and an honoring of it and an honoring of leadership. A lot of groups are into a super-egalitarian, as Don Beck and Ken Wilber talk about the “Green Mean” … you don’t acknowledge differences in consciousness, differences in ability, different stages of development. What happens then if you’re just trying to acknowledge that everybody is equal … and of course we all have equal potential, divine potential, each of us … but at any given moment, if you stop time and look right at this moment, people are at different levels, different stages of actually expressing their full potential. If you don’t acknowledge that and you don’t acknowledge leaders and make them accountable, make them have transparency in how you deal with power, if you try to pretend that everybody’s equal and we’re all creating this together, but clearly some people are taking a lot more responsibility and are a lot more effective … you can get into a lot of trouble. I’ve seen that in the spiritual movement, I’ve seen it in the communities movement. My husband and I cofounded a spiritual community, Sirius, after the star, in Massachusetts 30 years ago. It’s still going strong. One of the key things we learned that in working to make decisions by consensus, is that we really had to finally acknowledge differences in commitment, differences in taking on responsibility, and different skill sets. What we did was create a core group or a governing group after years of reacting to that kind of approach and thinking that everything had to be egalitarian, and giving equal power to people that just walked in the door. We had to learn how to have processes to deal with issues, with conflicts that came up, to help people deal with their own shadow projections and things that they project on other people, their own negative pattern. So both through these experiences in communities and the experience in Washington, DC, where there’s a lot of aggressiveness and power plays, but it’s more overt in Washington. It’s more hidden and underground in a lot of spiritual and progressive groups.

Tami Simon: Now I can’t help myself here. You mentioned that you named the intentional community after the star Sirius. And when you were talking about the potential big changes that could happen, it could involve the potential for us to further definitively recognize beings from other planets. So I’m just curious if you’ve had any direct experience in this realm, or what is your sense of the Earth’s relationship to other stars and star systems?

Corinne McLaughlin: Well, we were guided to name our community that after the brightest star in the heavens for obviously symbolic reasons, as a bright star, as a connection to spiritual qualities. In terms of actual visitors from other dimensions, the closest I’ve personally had was just seeing unusual patterns of lights in the sky one time that couldn’t be explained in any way, that about 10 of us who were at a meeting and were out walking home, and we all saw the same things. So where I come from in all this is, how can we think we are the only conscious intelligent species in the universe? So I think of course there’s life out there. But I think many people focus too much on that, and forget that we’re here on Earth for a reason, to keep it in mind that we are connected with all of life beyond the Earth as well, but more importantly, today our responsibility is how we deal with Earth. That’s what I’m focused on, though I think we may have some surprises down the line in terms of coming to accept the reality of life on other planets, other star systems. I think a huge percentage now of people, quoting the latest polls, actually believe there is life beyond Earth. I find that very encouraging.

Tami Simon: You mention that in your own meditations that you’ve intuited this sense of an evolutionary plan at work, or what some might call the evolutionary impulse at work. Can you tell more about that?

Corinne McLaughlin: My understanding of a higher evolutionary plan is both that we have free will as human beings and that there is that higher plan encoded in our very cells. It’s moving in the direction of greater compassion, greater wisdom, a greater sense of interconnection. That’s why all these efforts that I see move in this direction, when I see them politically and in the business community, in science or in education, psychology, or whatever, to me, I can pick up on them and see them, see the patterns, if you will, because I have this intuitive sense, both from my own meditation practice as well as from many things that I’ve studied and spiritual teachings, that we are co-creating this plan. It’s like the end is known from the beginning, from say the mind of God or spirit. But how quickly or how much pain we experience along the way to get there is up to us. We are making choices moment to moment that either move us toward this higher evolution or that hold us back. I think that seeing the collective choices that we make, science is studying is how our thoughts and feelings affect the health of our body through the neuro-peptides, the psychoneural immunology … what about our collective thoughts and feelings affecting our collective health? If we study this more, we will see this pattern unfolding that we are moving in the direction of a greater synthesis, of a greater awareness of the whole system, a greater awareness of all of life. Many people play this part. For instance, Al Gore’s slideshow and commitment to global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, that he showed all over the world and finally received a Nobel Peace Prize for … he played a major part in bringing that to people’s awareness. But many thousands of people were waking up to this sense of interconnection, and this approaching crisis that scientists are already documenting now.

It’s like I see this plan as both something we can tune into in our deepest meditation and intuitive insights, and I think most importantly, tune into what is our unique part in it. We each have something to contribute in whatever field and whatever gifts or talents that we have. To me, it’s all about finding what our contribution is and responding to opportunities that arise moment to moment.

Tami Simon: Corrine, there is one more area I’d like to talk with you about which has to do with your work in the field of social entrepreneurship. Specifically, how do you feel the current economic crisis that we’re in as individuals and as a nation and as a world will affect the way people approach running their business?

Corinne McLaughlin: Well I think it’s a huge wake-up call. As I said, it’s really showing how everything is interconnected, and for those who haven’t studied much about business or finance, I think it’s time to be aware of how banks and credit and loans and defaults and all these things are a huge portion of the economy worldwide, in the trillions. Even experts don’t know how much of this has been going on.

So on the one hand, it’s waking us up to what’s really going on and a demand for greater transparency, and a demand for greater regulation of corporations and particularly financial corporations. The conservative approach has been deregulating, as hands-off, that that’s the best way the economy can function, and the liberal approach has been to be more government intervention and regulation. We’re seeing what happens if we let too much of an unregulated approach unfold. We’re seeing the horrible results, the drastic side of this, and even the former Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, admitted this.

So on the one hand, we’re learning a lot. We’re seeing the interconnection and how everything is related. And if people are given, as they have recently, these bad loans, home mortgages out of the greed of the banking companies that wanted to make more money, and people really can’t pay them, and there’s just this rippling effect, we see what happens. There has to be more moral standards in our business dealings. I think it’s also showing us, again we’ll see as this all unfolds, is that companies that have greater values of what they embody, socially responsible businesses that treat their employees better, better benefits, that contribute their local community in terms of time and money, what they give back to good causes, and companies that are more environmentally conscious and more sustainable for the future because of greening their business, reducing their energy, reducing their carbon output … that they’re going to be the most successful companies. We’re already seeing what’s happening as this is unfolding with companies where they’ve created better business practices, they’ve been more solid in their weathering the storm. When they’ve, for instance, like the Ford motor company, if you look at the big three automobile companies today, General Motors and Chrysler and Ford … Ford was building more hybrids, and was transforming the management of the company, and moving in some new directions. Not in every arena, but they’re doing better at this point, so they’re not going to need the loan right away in the way that the other two companies need.

I think we’re going to be seeing companies that see the handwriting on the wall in terms of global warming and the environment; they already are transforming their business. For instance, Interface Carpets, of course one of my favorites, and Ray Anderson, who founded the company, transforming the company from the top-down. He had a vision because of reading Paul Hawkins book, The Ecology of Commerce, and he said it was like a spear going into his chest when he realized how his company was destroying the earth. And they have in the last few years done tremendous work in reducing their carbon output, reducing energy, and have already increased their profit margins hugely because of reducing energy just in the last few years. And because of the good PR that they’ve received because of this work, because his commitment is to create the premier environmental company, and it’s already paid off handsomely in terms of the bottom line.

Tami Simon: I wonder, though, during times of economic stress, if companies that perhaps wanted to move more in a direction of environmental consciousness, or for example, something like having more work/life balance for their employees, might feel like, well, I want to be able to let people work more reasonable hours, but this is just not the right time. We’re under pressure now economically, blah blah blah, this isn’t the time to say go ahead and work a 40-hour week, I really need you to keep working 50-60 plus hours, so we can keep this ship afloat.

Corinne McLaughlin: Yeah, I think it’s really important balancing practicality with your long-term goals and with your values. I think that companies that successfully navigate this maybe look at, well, how can we each pull a little more in these difficult times, but on the other hand, have enough flexibility so that … those 50-60 hour a week jobs don’t work for a lot of people! What I’ve seen is that companies that have a sense of respect for their employees and are moving in this correction gain their trust.

One of my favorite examples was Malden Mills, started by Aaron Feuerstein in Massachusetts. They make the Polaratec fabric that many of us have in our jackets and so on. When they had a fire and lost three out of four of their factory buildings in this town, I think it was Lawrence, MA, it was probably one of the highest rates of unemployment, he kept everyone on the payroll during these difficult times. The employees were so grateful that they helped him rebuild it. They did extra because they were so grateful in terms of his generosity. Because I think that when there’s a willingness to work together to address difficult times, people are willing to go a little extra.

But again, they have to feel that the sacrifices are also being made at the top. I think that’s why again with the big three automakers and some of these companies, CEOs of some of these financial institutions, when people see the CEOs making outrageous amounts of money in relationship to their employees, and see the CEOs not making sacrifices, they don’t feel like they’re in it together. They feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick.

So it’s all a question of building a sense of trust, working together. Going back to Interface, Ray Anderson was saying that one of the reasons they’re successful is that they create teams right on the floor of the factories, and they invite input and new ideas right from the factory workers on the floor of the company. It’s created a sense of respect and team, a sense of being on a team together that I think is going to get them and many other companies through the hard times.

Tami Simon: And Corrine, just one final question. We’ve talked about inner spiritual change, we’ve talked about spiritual politics, non-adversarial politics, and we’ve talked about the role of business in a changing world. I’m curious if you had to pinpoint what you think the most important levers are that create social change, what would you pinpoint?

Corinne McLaughlin: Good question. Well, my first sense is that the lever is within each of us. That’s the key thing. It’s like each of us making a commitment to serve the good of the whole in whatever field we’re in with whatever gifts we have. On the one hand, it’s within each of us, and again transcending this duality of the inner of the outer.

In terms of the outer levers, I think that it’s always a question of both numbers of people and in politics; it’s all about the numbers of voters, the money in politics. Change comes about because of this connection between numbers of people waking up, standing up, and being courageous. Going back to the 60’s, many of us said, we can’t stand what’s happening in Vietnam, we can’t stay on the sidelines, we can’t be silent when we see people being discriminated against. We’re going to stand up, we’re going to speak out. This created movements, realizing that we’re all part of something so that leaders, as they emerge, know that there’s numbers of people behind them.

Just a couple of examples, in Rhode Island, maybe about 10 years ago, Senator Pell as the Democratic senator, and he was into a lot of new consciousness, spiritual practice, life beyond death studies, many new consciousness approaches. And Claudine Schneider, a congresswoman, was running against him for his senate seat, was also into all these new-age, new consciousness approaches. She’d healed her own cancer through meditation and holistic approaches, and talked about it very publically. Both of them wanted to talk about these dimensions of things, the spiritual side of things, a new consciousness … but they both said that their constituents, both Republican and Democrat, in Rhode Island weren’t ready for this. They basically had an agreement with each other that they wouldn’t attack each other for all their public statements along these lines. And both Claudine Schneider and Senator Pell, who I knew, both said they were very saddened that a lot of spiritual people were not engaged in politics, were not voting, were not supporting them, so they couldn’t say and do all they wanted to. So we’re all part of this wave of change that needs to unfold today.

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