If we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When profit and property rights are considered more important than people… racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
The War Economy
As genocide, climate change, poverty, mass incarceration, and other acts of destruction converge into the largest social, political and ecological crisis humanity has ever faced, we must ask ourselves these essential questions: what will it take to end war? What will it take to end the violence and suffering in our world? We’ve been fighting war for a long time, and we’ve realized this: war, poverty, police brutality, ecological degradation, and nearly every other issue we face are all connected by the same root cause. Trace our country’s history back, and see that our entire economy was founded on waging genocide on Indigenous peoples, enslaving African peoples, and violently extracting resources from the earth, in order to accumulate wealth and power into the hands of a few.
We live in a war economy, an extractive, destructive, oppressive economy. Economies sound like complicated, abstract systems, but really, they’re just made up of relationships. Relationships to each other, and relationships to the land. How we manage these — how we manage our home — is what “economy” means.
Right now, our relationships to each other and the land are rooted in violence. To end violence and create the beautiful world that we so long to live in, we must radically reimagine and transform our relationships so they are defined by love instead: by care and compassion and sacredness, by the qualities that nourish our souls and enrich our humanity. This is how we transform our war economy into a peace economy.
Growing local peace economies is a revolution of values. It’s a revolution of practices. Join us here to take the pledge!
It Starts With Culture
What are the values of the war economy? What is the culture that gives rise to the destruction and violence we see in the world?
Our U.S./Western culture tells us that the natural world is to be pillaged and controlled by humans for our consumerist lifestyles. It tells us that we must all compete against each other — that there aren’t enough resources for everyone. It teaches us that our success lies in being independent, that accumulating money and possessions will make us happy, and that we should conform to the status quo.
This culture is what created our educational, political, and economic systems and it is deeply embedded into the worldviews, values and habits of all of us living within it. It’s so unconscious that a lot of us can’t even recognize it, or identify how it manifests in our own lives.
What we practice at a small scale is what reverberates to the largest. To transform the war economy and grow a peace economy, we must transform our culture, and to transform our culture, we must transform ourselves. As adrienne maree brown says, “this doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation and alignment with each other and the planet.”
What would it look like if we put our attention to growing in our lives the beautiful culture we want to see in the world? Join us here to take the pledge!
