We ask Sir John if this propping up of an old system will inevitably lead to a greater crisis further down the line.

By understanding the pattern that individuals follow, the progress of a culture or a nation becomes predictable, and the stage that they have reached is identifiable by certain known characteristics. Those who study the evolutionary consciousness of humanity all over the world, have developed countless maps and models of the evolutionary journey, from simple easy to understand three stage models to complex ones of 15 or more stages. When they are superimposed over one another, they show a consistent sequential pattern.

One of these models, a four stage one devised by Kohlberg and Gilligan, labels Egocentric as the lowest level, followed by Ethnocentric, then Worldcentric and finally Kosmocentric. The other more complex models provide more detail, but I am intentionally keeping it simple here. This model can be described as showing the size of the person’s consciousness or what the person includes in his or her field of care. A recent study suggested that some 77% of the world population is currently Ethnocentric or below.

This Ethnocentric stage is characterised by tribal orientation, nationalism, rivalries, adolescent behaviours, and the like. Let us consider now the responses made by the bankers and the politicians to media and public criticism. They were very similar.

• The claim that “Everything I did was within the rules.”
• An inability to recognise that what they did was ethically or morally wrong.
• The excuse that “I made a mistake”, but the mistakes were all to their own benefit.
• An almost pathological inability to take responsibility, and to say “I am sorry”.

 Anyone who has a teenage son will recognize these adolescent traits; however, when one is under 25 such behaviour is to be expected as an acceptable phase in growing up. Above 30 or so, and especially if one is a banker or a politician with power over many, such behaviours are not only unattractive, unacceptable, and inexcusable, they are positively dangerous. Why have the media not picked this up and pointed it out?

Introducing tighter regulations for bankers or politicians does not raise their level of maturity, morality or their ethics, it just limits what they can get away with. No, it is the type of people, the Ethnocentrics themselves, that have to go. Worldcentric people by definition and by their nature would not have abused the old regulations, let alone need new ones. Anyone below Worldcentric on the “chart” should not be selected or elected into positions of leadership in politics or big corporations, not just banks. Fewer people would fit the bill and that would limit our choice, and so it should.

The second of the two issues was the failure of commentators to seriously question the capitalist economic system that has proved to be so fragile and unjust. It has brought wealth to half the world while the rest starve; it thrives on excess consumption and the inevitable emissions, and it seriously retards the evolutionary development of individuals and cultures. Bankers and politicians alike strive to prop up the old failing system which they abused, because they know no better.

It did not occur to them that this was a golden opportunity to start to create a viable, sustainable economic system in line with the requirements of emerging Worldcentric human consciousness stage. Putting off the inevitable only makes the next economic crisis bigger and sooner. Worldcentric observers are amazed, distraught by the primitive ethnocentric thinking of our politicians and bankers, but they are up against the power that they still exercise.  

However there is also a groundswell of more conscious or ‘worldcentric’ people who will no longer tolerate the old order and they will become ever more vociferous until the ethnocentric majority of politicians are discredited, ousted and replaced. Some commentators will reread if not resurrect Karl Marx, but the way is forward not backwards. A new economic order is essential, one that puts people and planet before profit.

So why have these two core issues been bypassed? Because few can contemplate the demise of capitalism and so they retreat into a state of denial, and few so called leaders can face the fact that despite their profile and in some cases their cleverness, their behaviour is adolescent. They have no knowledge of the evolutionary imperative that determines our future and ultimately our survival, let alone any understanding of it, or are guided by it. Why not? Because our schooling has tragically failed many generations now by ducking evolution, in simple terms, it omits the development of emotional intelligence followed by wisdom. Instead schools have been obliged to promote quantitative technowledge to meet commercial goals. The result is a gross excess of designed obsolescent material gadgets, goods, guns and emissions, and an absence of the wisdom to use our innovative ability responsibly for the collective benefit of mankind.

Are Worldcentric politicians and bankers too much to ask for? Many conscious people are waiting in the wings for this adolescent lot to get out or grow up. Worldcentric people are described as having “a greater expansion of self to embrace all people regardless of race, gender, class, or creed; social activism, moral relativism, rationality that questions rigid belief systems and transcends traditional rules and roles”, and so on. Kosmocentric ones would be better still. They “identify with all life and consciousness, human or otherwise, have a deeply felt responsibility for the evolutionary process as a whole, and have an innate universal morality”, amongst other things. This is, after all, what we need if we are to overcome further economic crises and the even greater environmental and social justice crises that are on the way.

Prime Minister Brown and President Obama are doing precisely that with their rescue packages, though they think they have gone beyond that by discussing new regulatory frameworks. That, however, is only what should have been there in the first place, and might have been so, were it not for the Thatcher/Reagan free market folly. I am amazed that she/he did not know that powerful greedy people will take advantage of any loophole, relatively speaking, or is that a jibe to close to home in her case? New regulations do not change a rotten system; they perpetuate it.

The next generation of Madoffs and Goodwins will find their way round any new regulations legally or illegally, and other banks will provide the secret services that Swiss banks have now been reluctantly obliged to curtail. People will continue to overlend so that others can overspend, and economic and land policies will continue to concentrate wealth in fewer hands and foster further social injustice and unrest. The inevitable result in quick time will be even greater crises; that is until we are forced to restructure the whole global trading system. The longer we delay making the inevitable fundamental change, the harder and more painful the process will be. At least this generation of politicians will be off the hook, which seems to be all they care about anyway.

So what might a whole system perspective reveal? It takes no more than an early glance to see that capitalism, as we know it, has no long term future as a stable structure for the fair and equitable existence of all of life on this planet. This is so for as long as the level of human consciousness fails to evolve beyond where it is today. Ultimately conscious is more significant than systems, and a variety of systems could be made to work.

• Clearly Adam Smith’s founding principle of capitalism that, “The trickledown theory will take care of the less well off” was plain wrong. Despite all the economic growth in the past two hundred years and the vast wealth accumulated by some, the gap between the rich and the poor is now widening at an ever increasing rate. The description by US economist J. K. Galbraith was more apposite, “If one feeds a horse enough oats, some will pass through it onto the road for the sparrows.”

• Economic growth, an essential tenet of capitalism, demands ever more production and consumption of energy and resources which we simply do not have – and more emissions that we don’t need. Despite all the efforts today to use renewables to meet our needs, and new fuels and ideas in the pipeline, only massive cutbacks in consumption will save us in time. To promote growth and consumerism to save the economy at this time is counter productive, short sighted and irresponsible, but that is precisely what our politicians are doing.

• Capitalism, especially the Thatcher/Reagan version, glorifies the success of the individual at the expense of the collective. That expense goes far beyond merely increasing the rich/poor divide to create a catalogue of social problems from obesity to teenage pregnancy and produces diagnosable emotional distress. (The Selfish Capitalist by Oliver James 2008, Published by Vermillion)

• Another failure of capitalism is the social impact of land ownership. It concentrates land and wealth in the hands of the few and severely constrains future generations. We need to see ourselves as stewards of the land that we tend for future generations, and we need to pay for the right to use it, but not own it. “People cannot own mother earth, they just think they do. If we don’t care for it, our mother may reclaim it at a cost.”

• Capitalism is a system that, by its very nature, invites people to seek competitive advantage for gain, which in turn encourages people to sail close to the wind, in other words to bend or break the rules. We have enough hardened rule breakers not to have a system that causes other ordinarily naturally honourable people to see no option but to join that club and play that game.

Capitalism is a system designed and modified occasionally by and for people at the level of consciousness that prevails at the time. The creators may be a step ahead of the average consciousness and the followers a step behind, but the system will nevertheless reflect the collective group think. The group think of capitalism was for competitive individual material gain, something akin to what we see in adolescents trying to make their mark in life.

Capitalism gained traction as the industrial revolution took hold and the new found coal and oil provided the opportunity for great feats of engineering in the form of steel and steam ships, bridges, railways and later cars and aeroplanes, and now it is electronics. It also created wealth and lifted many out of poverty. We became enamoured with knowledge and technology, and the belief grew that we could engineer our way to Utopia. This in turned skewed our education towards the quantitative away from the qualitative, towards knowledge rather than wisdom and towards outer riches rather than the riches that lie within.

Materialism took hold, but without the wisdom to use our technology wisely, within 200 years we had taken humanity to the brink of self-destruction through a lack of vision and wisdom, and through over consumption in the illusion that more stuff will make us happy. Meanwhile we in the industrialised countries having plundered the resources from the less “developed” world, we left them behind in poverty, yes, one third of the world’s population. Where is the wisdom it that? For many it may not have been the intention of capitalism, but that has been its effect, and now it is in trouble with only ourselves, our bankers and our politicians to blame.

The riches that lie within, and the wisdom referred to in these two paragraphs, could and should have been ours along the journey of evolving consciousness, except that we failed to foster and later even recognise that journey in our rush for other things that we deemed more important and now we have the consequences. Our whole educational purpose is skewed by the perceived needs of capitalism. We educate our children to be good consumers rather than to be wise or self-responsible.

When the human evolutionary process goes too far off track in one direction, in the end it will hit the guard rails. Those guard rail collisions are lined up before us, and setting aside several earlier ones from futile wars to unnatural disasters, we have now met the economic one. The environmental one that is far more consequential awaits us if we don’t wake up fast, and to a considerable extent even if we do. Fortunately there is a new groundswell of conscious people arising all over the world who see through the transparent folly of unconscious political and corporate leaders who are acting out of fear, and as I suggested before, behaving at an adolescent level of consciousness. As Albert Einstein reminds us “We will never solve the problems at the same level of consciousness that created them in the first place.” (Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken 2007 Published by Viking)

Hope lies not in our current leadership, but within ourselves along with all those humble but wise people who are awakening from the illusion of the consumerist dream, and can envision a better world, one that is back on the psychosocial evolutionary track. The task of divesting the power from those politicians and corporations that are driven by growth, greed, fear and self-interest is not easy task. The challenges we face are huge, but evolution is on our side and we have vision and wisdom, something that they lack. That is apparent. We may have to use methods that seem a little distasteful at times, such is the planetary urgency. I compliment Leila Deen for dishing out green custard to Lord Mandleson, though that may not have been distasteful enough.