Episode Description:

In this episode of our Engaged Elder series, I dialogue with George Lakoff, distinguished professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, and known to many as the author of the previous New York Times best-sellers ‘Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think’, and ‘Don’t Think of an Elephant’, and now his latest and very timely book ‘The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st Century American Politics with an 18th Century Brain’.

The matters George and I dialogue about have universal implications to any country and political system, even though we are here focused on examples from the upcoming “tipping (or toppling) point” 2008 election in the United States. You will find it interesting no matter which country you live in because the archetypal structure of the human brain, as we know, is something we share across the globe and that really is the point of these programs.

We are all called to go beyond the initial adolescent “breaking away” from the oppressive rule of Mother Church and Father Sovereign in the 18th Century European Enlightenment through the celebration of “Reason”, using the printing press and widespread “democratized” dissemination of knowledge as a path to empowering the “middle class” and “the people”, to a more subtle leap of consciousness in the 21st Century. In our present latter stage adolescent polarization – stuck in rationalized secular and religious “identity” ideologies and estranged from our early heritage of empathy, with our over-emphasis on expressing self through exclusivism and dominance rather than cooperation and co-creative collaboration – we need to move into a nurturing, mature politics based on self-confident, not self-assertive, transpartisan dialogue.

For practical proposals I have made in this vein, you can see my additional website www.newenergycentury.com or contact me at www.livingdialogues.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode Description:

In Part 2 of our dialogue, George and I recap how our political choices are influenced by the imprint of our early socialization in our families of origin, and the subsequent acculturation we receive in our education (or lack of it) and in our communities. As George describes it, our early neurological imprints from our family lead us to think of political parties as a “family” (an idea often reaffirmed by the language of politicians themselves). The Republican Party in the U.S. he sees as associated with the “strict father” parent and the Democratic Party associated with the “nurturing parents” archetype (belittled and caricatured by the Republicans, abetted by a compliant and somewhat cowed media, as the “Mommy” or “nanny” party, falsely represented as supposedly taxing the “hard-working” middle class and doling out monies and welfare to the undeserving poor.)

Because of these neurological imprints – manipulated by negative and misleading ads, including outright deliberate deception – many voters do not vote their economic interests based on “the issues” (as one would expect from a Maslow hierarchy of external needs psychological model, based on “kitchen table” issues of food, shelter, and jobs). Instead, many voters are emotionally triggered and duped by fabricated wedge distractions into voting based on fear, anxiety, and compliance with authority – often against their own interests and that of their children and grandchildren – in order to reaffirm their ”identity” within a group.

The final section is devoted to the dominant “narratives” that are at play between Obama and McCain, what they represent in the collective American psyche, and how they relate to the evolutionary challenge and initiation beyond adolescent group mind we are all confronted with. Will this election be a Tipping Point and a leap forward, or a Toppling Point in a great fall backward.

You can contact me at www.livingdialogues.com, and see also my new website www.newenergycentury.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode Description:

In Part 3 of the dialogue -- recorded September 12, 2008 after the Democratic and Republican Party Conventions -- George and I update and expand considerably on the “narrative” themes of the campaign, why the Republicans say that the campaign is not about “issues” but about “personalities”, and how that approach derived from a corporate marketing strategy begun by Nixon and firmly established as Republican precedent by Reagan. Understanding the modes of manipulation of these “framings” – unconscious to the ordinary voter and not illuminated by the media – is a key to understanding the election as it proceeds, including the formal debates between the candidates. The collective psyche of the U.S., like that of the planet, is at a critical evolutionary turning point. As observed by C. G. Jung, if we bring the elements at work in the unconscious to awareness, as we do in participating in these kinds of dialogues, then we open the possibility of fulfilling our higher purpose and destiny, rather than enduring an unconscious fate.

You can contact me at www.livingdialogues.com, and see also my new website www.newenergycentury.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode Description:

In this episode of our Engaged Elder series, I dialogue with Tom Hayden, known to many around the world as a leading activist for progressive change for the last five decades, spanning both his “youth” and “elder” roles in the ongoing “ethical dialogue” about society’s values – from being a Freedom Rider in the Deep South of the U.S. and a founding member of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1961 and author of its visionary call, the Port Huron Statement, to nearly two decades in the Legislature of the State of California passing over one hundred critical measures, to his role in Progressives for Obama and his commentaries on The Huffington Post. As a writer, he is the author or editor of fifteen books, including the recent Voices of the Chicago Eight: A Generation on Trial and Writings for a Democratic Society.

In Part 1 Tom and I review the post-World War II creation of various institutions, including the United Nations, intended to secure a peaceful and cooperative world, succeeded by the transformational energies of the Sixties world-wide, led primarily by a younger generation and its vision of a coherent social movement that could energize and sustain those ideals in the face of the Cold War, widespread racial intolerance, and the Vietnam War. This review of our role in social change as youth then leads into the era of the Eighties and Nineties, and sets the stage for a compelling analysis in Part 2 of the current evolutionary challenges of our times that comes full circle.

For practical proposals I have made in this time of required change, you can see my additional website www.newenergycentury.com or contact me at www.livingdialogues.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode Description:

In this episode of our Engaged Elder series, I dialogue with Tom Hayden, known to many around the world as a leading activist for progressive change for the last five decades, spanning both his “youth” and “elder” roles in the ongoing “ethical dialogue” about society’s values – from being a Freedom Rider in the Deep South of the U.S. and a founding member of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1961 and author of its visionary call, the Port Huron Statement, to nearly two decades in the Legislature of the State of California passing over one hundred critical measures, to his role in Progressives for Obama and his commentaries on The Huffington Post. As a writer, he is the author or editor of fifteen books, including the recent Voices of the Chicago Eight: A Generation on Trial and Writings for a Democratic Society.

In Part 1 (Program 65) Tom and I review the post-World War II creation of various institutions, including the United Nations, intended to secure a peaceful and cooperative world, succeeded by the transformational energies of the Sixties world-wide, led primarily by a younger generation and its vision of a coherent social movement that could energize and sustain those ideals in the face of the Cold War, widespread racial intolerance, and the Vietnam War. This review of our role in social change as youth then leads into the era of the Eighties and Nineties, and sets the stage for a compelling analysis in Part 2 of the current evolutionary challenges of our times that comes full circle.

In Part 2 (Program 66), Tom and I speak in and about the present from the engaged elder perspective of the “wisdom of learned experience”. I begin by describing the unprecedented breach of trust between the generations that occurred in our youth in the Sixties (“don’t trust anyone over 30”), fueled in large part by the U.S. government’s waging of the Vietnam War with massive deception, later revealed in the apologetic memoirs of Robert McNamara, the then Secretary of Defense, and others. Tom and I then dialogue – reviewing a number of contemporary topics -- about the nature of leadership, and how a new form of collaborative and transparent leadership and participation (“yes we can”, rather than promises of “I will fight for you”) can restore the existence and vitality of an “ethical dialogue” between the generations, a dialogue that is critically important if we are to meet the new century’s evolutionary challenges. The youthful “participatory democracy” of the Sixties can come into an evolved mature form in our time, and enable us together to reach a “tipping point” into a transformative, energizing future, rather than a “toppling” point into a great fall backward.

For practical proposals I have made in this time of required change, you can see my additional website www.newenergycentury.com or contact me at www.livingdialogues.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode Description:

In this episode of our Engaged Elder series, I dialogue with Jay Inslee, U.S. Congressman from Seattle, who for a number of years has been the leading voice in the U.S. Congress for what I term New Energy and a New Energy economy. Since I began writing about my vision of it more than four years ago, I have called it New Energy for a New World, New Energy for a New Century, etc. Jay is the co-author of the excellent recent book Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy, written with Brandon Hendricks, one of the original co-founders of the Apollo Alliance. Together with Worldwatch Institute founder and current Earth Enterprise Institute president Lester Brown’s Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Apollo’s Fire is one of two of the key truly up-to-date educational and informational resources for personal and public policy choices that meet the ineluctable evolutionary imperative for us to consciously move from the Old Oil Elite Fossil Fuel economy to a New Energy economy for a New World. Such a New Energy economy will provide the foundation for self-reliant prosperity, real security and abundance, and generosity of collaboration for all in this New Century.

Recorded during the Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 25, 2008, our dialogue highlights the reality of the technological options already available for us that we can quickly, efficiently, and economically bring to scale, capable of moving us to the kind of New Energy economy and policy proposals I first put forth in 2004 and which the times are now catching up to: to empower and reward all citizens, not just the already wealthy, and to salvage and repair our broken economy in the only sustainable ways possible. And in the process our dialogue also identifies where the blockages are occurring in our political system, and which individuals and interests are opposing, stalling and undermining that necessary evolution.

Next week, on Program 68 in dialogues with Jay Inslee and co-author Bracken Hendricks, and with Bob Gough of InterTribal COUP wind energy and Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy, I go into detail regarding my proposals for New Energy Bonds and the establishment of a O.N.E. AMERICA Corps.

For a summary of the practical proposals I have made in this time of required change, you can see my additional website www.newenergycentury.com or contact me at www.livingdialogues.com. Visit my blog at Duncan.personallifemedia.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode Description:

In this episode of our Engaged Elder series, I dialogue with widely-acclaimed activist Van Jones, author of the just-issued The Green Collar Economy, Bob Gough, international clean energy award winner and Secretary of the InterTribal COUP Wind Energy association and project, Bracken Hendricks, co-founder of the Apollo Alliance, and Jay Inslee, U.S. Congressman from Seattle, who for a number of years has been the leading voice in the U.S. Congress for what I term New Energy and a New Energy economy.

Since I began writing about my vision of an evolutionary New Energy Economy more than four years ago, I have called it New Energy for a New World, New Energy for a New Century, etc. Bracken Hendricks and Jay Inslee are the co-authors of the excellent recent book Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy. Van Jones is the author of the just-published and highly praised The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, with a foreword by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Together with Worldwatch Institute founder and current Earth Enterprise Institute president Lester Brown’s Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (see Program 70), Apollo’s Fire and now The Green Collar Economy constitute perhaps the best trilogy of the key truly up-to-date educational and informational resources for personal and public policy choices that meet the ineluctable evolutionary imperative for us to now consciously move from the Old Oil Elite Fossil Fuel economy to a New Energy economy for a New World. Such a New Energy economy will provide the foundation for self-reliant prosperity, real security and abundance, and generosity of collaboration for all in this New Century.

In addition to my previous dialogue with Jay Inslee recorded during the Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 25, 2008 (Program 67), this Program 68 dialogue highlights in wider detail the great benefits and new energy resources that are readily available in the U.S., and the reality of the technological options now available for us that we can quickly, efficiently, and economically bring to scale, capable of moving us to the kind of New Energy economy and policy proposals I first put forth in 2004 and which the times are now catching up to: to empower and reward all citizens, not just the already wealthy, and to salvage and repair our broken economy in the only sustainable ways possible. My New Energy proposals discussed include both democratizing a portion of venture capital to restructure our economy, now in global crisis, through New Energy Bonds, and the job creation and training program I have termed O.N.E. America Corps.

The O.N.E. America Corps also presents us the possibility for the U.S. to go a long way in reality and in the eyes of the world to cleanse the national psyche of what Pulitzer Prize-wining historian Joseph Ellis (see Programs 37 and 38) has called the “two original sins of America” which have contracted and held America back from realizing its full destiny: the ongoing long-term effects of slavery and our treatment of the Native Americans.

Next week, on Program 69 in dialogue with Barbara Marx Hubbard, we talk about how the evolution of consciousness can be reflected in Conscious Citizen Solutions to our current economic collapse, including as an example my proposal for New Energy Bonds, and how each of you can contribute your own new energy ideas.

For a summary of the practical proposals I have made in this time of global economic crisis and required change, you can see my additional website www.newenergycentury.com or contact me at www.livingdialogues.com. Visit my blog at Duncan.personallifemedia.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode Description:

“Thank you so much, Duncan. You are definitely a co-creative partner!” – Barbara Marx Hubbard

In this episode of our Engaged Elder series, I dialogue with Barbara Marx Hubbard, President of the foundation for Conscious Evolution, who helped create the field of conscious evolution. In addition to contextualizing the current global economic crisis and tipping point U.S. election as a great evolutionary call and opportunity, we discuss the proposal of Barbara and others for a three-point “Citizen Solutions” program to be integrated into the U.S. Vice-President’s office (as Barbara initially proposed when her name was placed in nomination for Vice-President in 1984), carried on the Internet, and embodied in local and regional Citizen Solutions Councils, to which each of us can contribute.

This democratization of engendering practical transformative proposals reflects the already emerging “prophetic consciousness” present in many of us (and in potential in all of us), and evolution’s requirement for a democratization of awareness, collaboration, and benefits for necessary change to take place – as illustrated in one example by my proposal for New Energy Bonds.

Next week, on Program 70 in dialogue with globally-acclaimed author (Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization) Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and President of the Earth Policy Institute, we go into the details of why and how the New Energy Economy can and must be realized as the next major step in the conscious evolution of our species in the very near future, activated and empowered by understanding what technology and resources are already at our disposal, and the urgency of mobilizing to do so -- much as, for instance, FDR and America did in mobilizing existing resources and a determined and generous national will to emerge stable and stronger from the economic collapse of the 30s, leading the way to the beginnings of global consciousness with the creation of the United Nations after World War II. Exciting new ideas emerge from the dialogue on the spot.

For a summary of the practical proposed solutions I have made in this time of required change, you can see my additional website www.newenergycentury.com or contact me at www.livingdialogues.com. Visit my blog at Duncan.personallifemedia.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode Description:

“This dialogue, as the title of the program – Living Dialogues – indicates, is one of the keys to advancing thinking, in helping us to better understand the challenges that we face so that we can intelligently respond to them. I’m delighted to be here.” – Lester Brown, President, the Earth Policy Institute

In this episode of our Engaged Elder series, I dialogue with globally-acclaimed author (Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization) Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and President of the Earth Policy Institute. We go into the details of why and how the New Energy Economy can and must be realized as the next major step in the conscious evolution of our species in the very near future, activated and empowered by understanding what technology and resources are already at our disposal, and the urgency of mobilizing to do so -- much as, for instance, FDR and America did in mobilizing existing resources and a determined and generous national will to emerge stable and stronger from the economic collapse of the 30s, leading the way to the beginnings of global consciousness with the creation of the United Nations after World War II.

Exciting new ideas emerge from the dialogue on the spot.

Since I began writing about my vision of an evolutionary New Energy Economy more than four years ago, I have called it New Energy for a New World, New Energy for a New Century, etc. Bracken Hendricks and Jay Inslee (Programs 67 and 68) are the co-authors of the excellent recent book Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy. Van Jones (Program 68) is the author of the just-published and highly praised The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, with a foreword by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Together with Worldwatch Institute founder and current Earth Enterprise Institute president Lester Brown’s Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (in this Program 70), Apollo’s Fire and now The Green Collar Economy constitute perhaps the best trilogy of the key truly up-to-date educational and informational resources for personal and public policy choices that meet the ineluctable evolutionary imperative for us to now consciously move from the Old Oil Elite Fossil Fuel economy to a New Energy economy for a New World. Such a New Energy economy will provide the foundation for self-reliant prosperity, real security and abundance, and generosity of collaboration for all in this New Century.

Ways in which we can all contribute our own new energy and ideas in this emerging paradigm shift are outlined in the dialogue with myself and Barbara Marx Hubbard re Citizen Solutions in Program 69.

Next week, on Program 71

For a summary of the practical proposed solutions I have made in this time of required change, you can see my additional website www.newenergycentury.com or contact me at www.livingdialogues.com. Visit my blog at Duncan.personallifemedia.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode Description:

“I can wholeheartedly say that this has been a most stimulating dialogue. Thank you so much.” – David Mendell, author and journalist with the Chicago Tribune

David Mendell is the first and premier biographer of the man newly elected President of the United States, Barack Obama. This dialogue illuminates the background of the man and his/our mission in ways that illustrate why he is the destined choice in this role of and for our global zeitgeist, the world soul consciousness, the unfolding spirit of the times. With the election of Barack Hussein Obama, we have successfully crossed an evolutionary threshold and are in position to dynamically move forward as a species.

The etymology of Barack is “blessed” and the etymology of Hussein is “beautiful” or “handsome”. By our collective choice in this instance we have become blessed to once again talk of, aspire to, and embody Beauty, Truth, and Goodness in our lives without the sophistic soul-corroding irony of the past decades, and with the confidence and wisdom of Plato, Krishna, and all such predecessors everywhere in all cultures in renewed dialogues for the 21st century.

Neither redeemer nor prophet in the adolescent paradigm of “I will fight for you”, but in deep listening eloquence an expression and reflection of “Out of the Many We Are One”.

Next week, on Program 72, my guest will be Deborah Tannen, widely-acclaimed author of the landmark New York Times bestseller You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation, in conversation with me about how we can transform our Argument Culture into one of evolutionary dialogue. “I have done many interviews, but this was very special. A privilege.” – Deborah Tannen

For a summary of the practical proposed solutions I have made in this time of required change, you can see my additional website www.newenergycentury.com or contact me at www.livingdialogues.com. Visit my blog at Duncan.personallifemedia.com.

Ways in which we can all contribute our own new energy and ideas in this emerging paradigm shift are outlined in the dialogue with myself and Barbara Marx Hubbard re Citizen Solutions in Program 69.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.