Each of us is a vessel for the conservation of a plethora of unique potentials for intelligence and ability that our cultures can neither imagine nor invoke. Most of these have to do with peculiar forms, purposes and bodies of relation. That is to say: being together in many different ways.

These are waiting inside us for signals from contexts we become involved in or create. These signals do not come. The contexts we find in our cultures are, in most cases, the polarized opposites or caricatures of those that would invite us into healthy and open development. The underlying culture schemas from which our cultures and most of our subcultures descend are fundamentally toxic.

And it is precisely this invitation to development that we deeply and naturally crave. We may seek it from love, adventure, intoxicants, trance, art, recklessness, sex, meditation, narrative, music, religion… and however noble these may or may not be… what we are actually craving is contexts that awaken and develop the carefully conserved treasures of our personal and collective human inheritance.

We want to be invited into developmental effulgence.

Most of what we may become is denied us for a simple reason: we do not encounter the contexts that would awaken the potentials we each conserve within us. The contexts we encounter -promise- fulfillment, but deliver inhibition in the form of coercion or co-opting.

In a great impoverishment of healthy and natural relational contexts (and I here wish to highlight our diminishing and abstracted relationships with living places and other living beings), we become greatly impoverished of our own potentials… and, in fact, will live and die in ignorance of them. The resulting cultures and many of the lives they consume will be unbearable, and gravely inhumane.

We must therefore work to establish vital new contexts for human relation and cooperation; particularly as regards our abilities to meet for common cause and to protect or defend vital ecological assets and relationships. Contexts whose purposes and functions protect, invite, develop and celebrate the endless unique abilities we each bring to our human birth, so that we may at the very least discover them during our lifetimes.

If we are to have any ‘rights’ at all, we must have the right to openly and freely discover our humanity together with our fellow beings, in free and cooperative assembly, without fear of threat or inhibition.

Yet this is not half enough, for we must summon the will, intention, ingenuity, and active insistence upon a future in which our human potentials are invited into their broadest and most beautiful fruition. And this means we shall require contexts so alien to what we now practice that we may expect resistance.

We will not be disappointed in this expectation, but we shall be surprised — for it has long been clear that the most severe resistance comes from our own complacency, lethargy, habits of complaint, and failure to act.

Our habits were formed under stress. We are, like the Jews of ancient Egypt or any slave-people, awaiting the rescuer-hero we must each become. There can be no more waiting. We must become the way out of the stranglehold of stupidity that our modern cultures have locked the planet into. Together. With and for each other and our world. Now.