From impoverishment to empowerment: re-creating healing narratives

By exploring commoning for the last years, I came to identify different collective narratives that make us perpetuate suffering.

1. The myth of scarcity. This is brought by a dysfunctionnal economy of strokes (Steiner 1971), that means that we learn to search for recognition of the authority, rather than to give and get recognition to and from our peers, which then creates abundance.

2. The myth of competition. The fear of lacking resources brings competition. As we are not in peace within ourselves, we built a socio-legal framework that foster competition and pseudo-rationalism (Capra and Mattei 2015), that is war against those deemed different.

3. The myth of the state and the market. Ignorant of our individual and collective capacities, we rely on external authorities to make decisions for us. Hence we come to believe that companies create jobs, and the state provides us with a safety net. In reality, companies and the state only exist because they extract value from the multitude, in the form of the collective intelligence brought, or taxes for example (Dardot and Laval 2014; Rushkoff, 2019).

4. The myth of materiality. Once aware of these myths, we can explore new avenues through the alliance of play, arts, and meditation for example (Winnicott 2005; Jung 1963; Goenka 2020).