Evelin Lindner(2011). A Dignity Economy: Creating an Economy That Serves Human Dignity and Preserves Our Planet; (2010). Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying Relationships from Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs;(2009). Emotion and Conflict: How Human Rights Can Dignify Emotion and Help US to Wage Good Conflict; (2006). Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict.
Four books by Evelin Lindner, 1-3 Praeger Security International, Greenwood, 4 Dignity Press.
Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict (2006). Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, Greenwood
Emotion and Conflict: How Human Rights Can Dignify Emotion and Help Us Wage Good Conflict (2009)
Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, Greenwood
Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying Relationships from Love, Sex, and
Parenthood to World Affairs (2010) Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, ABC-CLIO
A Dignity Economy: Creating an Economy that Serves Human Dignity and Preserves Our Planet
Evelin Lindner ,2011
CONTENTS
Foreword by the Directors of Dignity Press ????????????????????. vi
Foreword by Linda Hartling ????????????????????????????.. vi
Foreword by Ulrich Spalthoff ???????????????????????????. vii
Acknowledgments ??????????????????????????????????. xi
Preface ???????????????????????????????????????.. xvii
Introduction ???????????????????????????????????? xxvii
Part I: Where Do We Stand? Where Might We Go? ??????????????? 35
Chapter 1: While Critical Voices Get Louder, a Sense of Helplessness Prevails ?. 37
Chapter 2: Let Us Work Together and Dig Up the Facts! ????????????? 47
Chapter 3: Where Might We Go? Toward a Dignity Transition ?????????? 58
Part II: Dignity or Humiliation? That Is the Question! ?????????????.. 75
Chapter 4: When Scarcity and Environmental Degradation Become Systemic ?? 77
Chapter 5: When Mistrust Becomes Ubiquitous ?????????????????? 85
Chapter 6: When Abuse Becomes a Means of .Getting Things Done??????.. 92
Chapter 7: When Fear Becomes Overwhelming and Debilitating ????????? 98
Chapter 8: When False Choices Crowd out Important Choices ?????????.. 104
Chapter 9: When Our Souls Are Injured by the Homo Economicus Model ???. 116
Part III: What Should We Do? Let Us Unite As a Human Family! ??????.. 127
Chapter 10: We Need a Panoply of New Strategies for Dignism! ????????. 129
Chapter 11: We Need to Humanize Globalization with Egalization! ??????.. 147
Chapter 12: We Need Many More Voices and a Clear Direction! ???????? 168
Appendix I: Quotes ????????????????????????????????.. 199
Appendix II: Selected Publications ????????????????????????. 201
Index ????????????????????????????????????????.. 207
Bibliography ????????????????????????????????????. 216
FOREWORD BY THE DIRECTORS OF DIGNITY PRESS
Foreword by Linda Hartling
I have had the honor and privilege of collaborating with Evelin Lindner
for more than a decade. We met through Donald C. Klein, a pioneer in the
field of community psychology who was one of the first psychologists to launch
an in depth discussion of the dynamics of humiliation. In 1995, I had just completed
my dissertation developing the first scale to assess the internal experience of
humiliation; while, in another part of the world, Evelin was formulating her
research exploring the connection between humiliation and violent conflict.
During those years, each of us knew we were virtually lone researchers in a
new field of study. After Don?s introduction in 1998, we celebrated that we
were no longer alone.
From the beginning, I realized that Evelin Lindner was on her way to
becoming the world?s leading scholar on the experience of humiliation and
human dignity. Her decision to live as a global social scientist has given her
the broad-based knowledge, experience, and perspective that make this book
possible. Transcending the limits of working in a conventional academic
setting, Evelin sees the world as her university. She dedicates herself to
synthesizing and integrating knowledge gained from engaging a richly diverse
community of scholars, researchers, and practitioners. Her life as a citizen of
the world has allowed her to question economic systems that deprive and
deplete humankind of vital social and natural resources, threatening our
existence on this planet.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Evelin Lindner?s research over the
years is its complete freedom from corporate and other profit-driven
influences. In a world the worships the accumulation of wealth, Evelin is a
living example of how .money should serve, not lead one?s efforts.. Practicing
this principle has allowed her to sustain a level of independent thinking and
writing that is essentially unheard of in science today. This book is a tribute to
her stunning creative ability to walk the talk of her work, both intellectually
and economically. Her whole life is a portal into what can be accomplished
without giving in, giving up, or selling out.
Evelin Lindner demonstrates her commitment to intellectual integrity by
choosing Dignity Press as the publisher of The Dignity Economy. Other
publishers, influenced by today?s profit-maximization motive, might
undermine the fundamental message of her work. The author?s incomparable
commitment to integrity, combined with her spirit of humility, makes this
publication a one-of-a-kind intellectual treasure. This book will enrich the
lives of readers seeking new economic thinking that can lead us to a
sustainable future that dignifies the lives of all people.
Linda Hartling
Director, Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies
November 7, 2011, Portland, Oregon, U.S.A
Foreword by Ulrich Spalthoff
Evelin Lindner and I first met in 2003 at the airport in Paris, queuing up for
the security check before flying to Tel Aviv. She told me about her life and
invited me into her life project, called Human Dignity and Humiliation
Studies. I was impressed by her passion and zest for action. In addition to
organizing a network and two annual conferences on Humiliation Studies, she
has published extensively, including three books.
Her first book, Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict,
presented a ground-breaking analysis of international conflicts and how these
often result from humiliating practices. This book received an award as
.Outstanding Academic Title. by the journal Choice for 2007. In her second
book Emotion and Conflict: How Human Rights Can Dignify Emotion and
Help Us Wage Good Conflict she extended the discussion to personal emotions
and conflicts. In her third book, Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security:
Dignifying Relationships from Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs,
she emphasized the important role of gender when analysing humiliating
systems. That book again was highly recommended by the journal Choice.
With this new book she extends the analysis of humiliating systems to the
realm of economics. I know from our conversations that she has observed for
some time how Western-style capitalist economic systems contribute to
humiliating practices that pervade personal lifestyles and political decision-
making.
How timely it is that she is able to present her analysis just now, when the
malfunction of our financial system becomes so obvious to people on all
continents. But Evelin Lindner?s personality does not allow her to simply
present an analysis. She goes beyond traditional academic research. She is also
an activist wanting to make an impact. Starting with a description of the
disastrous and highly alarming situation, she then looks for solutions on a
global scale. Hope never dies, indeed, it never needs to die. Her intellectual
framework?identifying dynamics of humiliation and searching for solutions
which bring dignifying systems to the fore?allows her to present a multitude
of initiatives, proposals, and calls for action. She does this in a way that the
reader can feel deeply motivated to contribute personally to the necessary
changes we all have to make.
Necessary systemic change can only be achieved by many people making
personal changes in their attitudes and their behavior. Therefore I find her
highly personal presentation of the subject very appropriate. When reading this
manifest, I not just learned about our economic system, I was also freshly
motivated to be part of the necessary change. I wish many readers a similar
experience.
Ulrich Spalthoff , Director of Projects and System Administration,
Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies
October 25, 2011, D?rzbach, Germany
PREFACE
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To
change something, build a new model that makes the existing
model obsolete.
?Buckminster Fuller
We, the human family, live in times of unparalleled opportunity. So far, we
have created unparalleled crises. Together, we can change that. We can
recognize our good fortune.
In the past, we adapted to changing conditions haphazardly. Today, we are
much less the puppets of history. Never before have we had such a good
understanding and such good tools to shape our fate in systematic and
intentional ways. Today, we can sit together and reflect and plan intentionally.
This book advocates deep paradigm shift, not from one rigid paradigm to
another, but away from rigidity altogether. Away from monolithic fixity
toward co-created fluid processes. Away from inflexible edifices toward
organic coming-into-being, growing like trees grow. Away from monolithic
institutions toward a global movement that is co-created by people and their
energy of passion and enthusiasm. Away from a combative dominator world,
into which people are installed like little cog wheels, toward global partnership
that allows rich diversity to flourish.
This book exemplifies this approach. The first version of this manuscript
was presented on August 20, 2009, at a conference we organized at the
University of Hawai?i at Manoa.1 Since then, it has been growing almost daily
and has had many titles.2 It is not a traditional manuscript planned at the
drawing board, designed .to sell.. It is rather a snapshot taken at one moment
of an ongoing process, an ever unfinished book, a .walking. book, part of a
journey.
This book is not just about a new what. The book is also about a new how.
The new how is about fluid conversation, about public deliberation,3 about
grappling with issues.4 And it is more personal in that I use .I,. because I wish
to model academic work as embedded into a context, rather than pretending to
exist in a social and psychological vacuum. This book brings a very personal
journey to the table, a journey that travels the circles of the reflective
equilibrium (Chapter 12).
For a long time, I thought that this book could never be published. How
could a book on dignity be published in an undignified context? It would be
undermining itself. .Academic Publishers Make Murdoch Look Like a
Socialist,. is a particularly provocative heading that decries the practices of
some academic publishers.5 Then, Linda Hartling and Uli Spalthoff developed
Dignity Press for our Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies network and our
World Dignity University initiative, finally opening a path for this book to be
published.6 This book is among its first publications.
This book?s publication has also been hastened by the Occupy Wall Street
movement. This movement gave me the motivation to sit down and bring an
unfinished manuscript from the drawer to the level of publication.
In 2010, I finished another manuscript about deep paradigm shift, a book
about how we, as humankind, can dignify all relationships, at all levels, from
micro to meso to macro, by focusing on what I call big love.7 I worked on that
book for years. It started with the following paragraph:
The economic crisis that broke in 2008 has changed the path of this book.
The crisis has many labels ranging from .subprime crisis. to .credit
crunch,. to .financial tsunami. or .economic Armageddon,. preceded by
an .Enron crisis,. possibly leading up to a .credit default swap crisis..8
But, around the world, people are coming to a single diagnosis: .Something
is deeply unhealthy in our world.. Even one year earlier, most people I met
were much more accepting: .The world is as it is, and if we want to be
competitive, we should work harder and not complain!.
When I ask about the reasons for the crisis, people point to greed and lack
of morality. However, let us ask: Is it greed? Is it immorality? The bank
employees I know tell me that they are under extreme pressure to maximize
profit and that this pressure has increased since the crisis began, to the point
that some can no longer endure it. Managers report that they will lose their
jobs if they do not place short-term shareholder value first. All seem to be
victims to a mind-set that races toward crisis by default. If there is unethical
behavior, it is nourished by the very design of our systems. It appears that
the roots of our crises are more complex and systemic than one-dimensional
and personal. Could lack of dignity be a systemic challenge?9
In 2011, when .the Arab Spring. unfolded, I added the following paragraph
to this economy manuscript:
We need a dignity revolution, and not just in Tunisia or Egypt. Now we
need a global dignity revolution, a world dignity movement, a movement
that creates inclusion, both locally and globally. We need a dignity
movement that forges global public policies and institutions that help
dignity to manifest in our realities. We need to transcend policies and
institutions that cause the sellout of dignity, that .exclude people from
access to dignified lives, both socially and economically,.10 and that make
environmental damage invisible by treating it as mere .externality.. If we
do not succeed with such a dignity revolution (or refolution, the word that
Timothy Garton Ash drew together from revolution and reform), we might
engineer yet another collapse, as Jared Diamond describes it, this time a
global collapse of human civilization.11
If the Arab Spring is the uprising of the .Arab street,. then the Occupy
Wall Street movement may be just the uprising of the global street that I called
for, despite my despair that the world seemed to be asleep. It may be people
pressure awakening as suggested by analysts like Paul Hawken.12 It may be
what economist Jeremy Rifkin calls a pro-democracy revolution, carrying us
by lateral power toward an empathic civilization.13 This may be the beginning
of a global refolution, the start of a global evolutionary reconstruction, as
another economist, Gar Alperovitz would call it,14 or the beginning of Paul
Raskin?s great transition.15
As any movement that intends to shift paradigms, it risks being coopted
into the old paradigm and derailed. If this happens, it will have to be
reinvigorated, refreshed, and renewed.
We can take any liberation movement as an example. Take the liberation
from narrow-mindedness and bigotry with respect to sexuality. What is the
result, for all to see, at any kiosk that sells magazines? We see women?s bodies
dismembered into legs, breasts, or thighs, reinforcing the message that women
are objects rather than whole human beings.16 Mary Roach asks: When did sex
research shift from prudish to freewheeling to corporate-controlled? How did
this happen, and why?17
The Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement will face many
attempts at control by ulterior interests. My Egyptian friends believe that the
system is still a Nasserist regime and that the Arab Spring has yet to succeed.
Hala Mustafa, one of Egypt?s most prominent liberal intellectuals and the
founder and editor of Egypt?s journal on democracy, is distraught.18
Danger looms from outside and inside liberation movements. The true
believers of change have to be the ones most on guard. In the past, those who
refused being bribed or coerced into forsaking their principles were among the
first victims to be .cleansed out. when power hijacked values.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has been criticized for its apparent lack
of concrete calls for action. My recommendation: when big paradigms need to
change, small-scale Band-Aids that fit into the old paradigm are insufficient.
New large-scale visions that fit new paradigms are not easily created, not least
because the language for them does not yet exist. From collecting ideas outside
of the present grid, to forging innovative visions, to deciding on which visions
to enact, to planning how to realize next steps?none of this can be done
quickly and neatly. We no longer live in a top-down command-and-obey
world. Calls for immediate solutions betray ignorance of the depth of change
that is needed.
I felt very assured when I heard the representatives of the Occupy Wall
Street movement on November 5, 2011, at the 31st Annual E. F. Schumacher
Lectures in New York City.19 They were very clear in standing up to the fact
that deep reflection is now needed, rather than frantic .projectism. (Chapter
2).
Politicians from all camps seem to have problems understanding this; they
believe this movement is about frustrated voters or the middle class losing
jobs. Yet, much more is at stake. Dignity is at stake. The dignity of people,
their equality in dignity, the dignity of all living beings, the dignity of our
planet. We humans need to dramatically change course to reverse the short-
sighted human actions that threaten all life on this planet. So far, we have
blown it. So far, we are going down a ravaging path. Those familiar with Jared
Diamond?s work will understand when I say we seem intent on following the
Easter Island model, a recipe for depleting resources and destroying social and
ecological systems in the process.20
Perhaps now it is time to briefly explain who I am?21 May I start with a
question: Do you believe people are inherently lazy? Would nobody do any
serious work if not humiliated into compliance or rewarded with incentives?
Do our best and brightest go where the money is? Or do our best and brightest
go where dignity is, where the ethics are? Who are our best and brightest, in
your opinion?
I think the view that it is proof of excellence and brightness to .go where
the money is. degrades the humanity of all involved. I presented my
perspective in an earlier book as follows:
I feel personally humiliated when I am expected to draw my motivation for
what makes my life meaningful from status or monetary remuneration. I am
motivated by stature?my pro-social contributions?rather than status,
social rank, or class. I work very hard, day and night, seven days a week. I
receive neither traditional status nor salary for my efforts. My motivation is
entirely independent from such rewards, and if it were otherwise, I would
find the degradation and humiliation unbearable. Therefore, my path is not
altruistic or egoistic; it is both, because I would not survive the humiliation
of having to define myself as a status- or salary-making machine that
endangers the common good. I am not a Pavlovian dog who needs status or
monetary remuneration as incentives to work. I would not survive such
emptiness of meaning and such poverty of spirit.22
Have you seen the film Pleasantville?23 I would feel like I were in
Pleasantville, and I would get severely depressed, if I accepted to be nothing
but the supplier or consumer of sales of products or services. I react with
disgust when the first information I receive about a product or service is that it
is .free. or .discounted. or .expensive, since you are worth it.. I react with
revulsion when I hear the ingenuous sweetness of the advertising voice, or see
the strained smile of an actress who sells her soul to pretend that a certain
product or service has changed her life. The effect on me of the fake world that
advertisement has created around us is that I do not wish to buy anything
anymore. And I staunchly refuse to reduce my creativity to serve .personal
branding. so as to become a product myself.
Allowing myself to feel deficient lest I buy or sell something, would
humiliate my humanity at its core. Cleverness is repulsive to me?nothing
of what I do is done because it is smart?and I draw no satisfaction from
petty power games. I only engage in activities that are profoundly
meaningful to me.24 I respond to the fact that I have to eat, clothe myself,
and have a roof over my head in ways that do not require me to
compromise what I regard as meaningful, on the contrary, they contribute. I
do not wish to have a job, I want to have a life. I am profoundly selfish in
this point because I could not live otherwise.25
I bring very rare experiences to the table, so rare that I often lack the
language to describe them. I am the artist so to speak, not the art critic. I have
created a global life design that could be described to be a social sculpture.
The insights offered in this book are the result of decades of living and
working all over the world?in many countries within Africa, Asia, Europe
and America. I lived for longer periods in Norway (regularly since 1977),
Germany (intermittently since 1954), Switzerland (intermittently since 2000),
France (intermittently since 2001), Belgium (intermittently during 1984?
1991), the Middle East (intermittently since 1975), Egypt (1984?1991 and
since), Somalia (1998), the Great Lakes in Africa (1999), Thailand, Indonesia,
Malaysia, Burma (1981), China (intermittently since 1983), Japan (2004?
2007), New Zealand (1983, 2011), Australia (2007, 2011) and the United
States (intermittently since 1982).
My international life has given me the opportunity to observe global trends
before most people do. It provides me with a bird?s eye perspective and at the
same time with an intimate closeness to the many cultures that make up our
human culture. During the past 40 years, all around the globe, my intuition has
grown that dignity and humiliation?or, more precisely, equality in dignity or
nondomination,26 with humiliation as its violation?are gaining significance as
never before in human history.
I was born into a family deeply traumatized, like many others, by the forced
displacements from Eastern Europe after World War II. That initial experience
set me on a path to work for .never again,. never again war and genocide.
What followed were by now close to four decades of international life.
My aim was to become part of as many cultures as possible and learn as
many languages as possible, to understand, deeply, what we humans are
capable of, in love and hatred, in war and peace, in conflict and conflict
resolution. My goal was to acquire a gut feeling for as many cultural
perspectives as possible. I wanted to bring these perspectives into my body,
under my skin, rather than do .field work,. where I would have to look at
people. I wanted to become a part of as many social webs and local cultural
outlooks as possible. How does it feel to grow up in China, for example, where
a child cannot avoid taking in an elaborate philosophy simply by learning how
to read and write, something which takes a lifetime? In contrast, how does it
feel to grow up with Arabic, a script so phonetic and easy to learn that it can
be done in a single afternoon, while the language itself is so rich that a lifetime
is insufficient for grasping all of its elegance? Or, how does it feel to be proud
of a history that eclipses most peoples? history?as Chinese and Arab history
does?while being humiliated by Western powers for during recent centuries?
The list of similar questions I have asked myself throughout the past 40 years
of global life is endless.
My roots in displacement gave me a considerable degree of inner freedom.
Displacement gave me distance from the cultural dictates of the world, and this
distance has increased through moving between cultural realms. For instance,
attaining higher status in one context may undermine one?s status in another,
and in this way the clamoring for status reveals itself as an altogether rather
futile endeavor. I became ever more independent from local formalities and
ever more at home in direct egalitarian human-to-human relationships, all
around the globe, in all cultural realms.
Today, I resonate with 14th century Persian Sufi poet Hafez-e ?irazi?s
saying: .I have learned so much from God that I can no longer call myself a
Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew. The truth has shed so much
of itself in me that I can no longer call myself a man, a woman..
If asked about my religion, I say: .My religion is love, humility, and awe
for a universe too large for us to fathom..
Recently, I was queried: Why are you so .pure. and so .unbribable.? I
replied that I am not able and willing to sell out meaning for illusionary
.shortcuts.. What do you mean? was the perplexed response. I posed a
question in return: Is it possible for people who have money to buy a home?
Yes, was the answer. No, was my reply. You can only buy a house. A house
can also be a prison. A house is a home only if you nurture the relationships
with the people who live in this house, including the relationship with
yourself. You cannot buy relationships, not with yourself, not with your
family, not with God, and you cannot buy happiness. Therefore, you can only
buy a house, not a home. It is an illusionary hope to believe that it is possible
to shortcut to happiness by way of money, and this illusionary hope is built
into the usage of the phrase .buying a home.. I am unable to be part of this, as
culturally accepted as it may be.
Do you never feel greed? Do you never feel envy at those who have more
than you? This was the next question. My reply: I am much more greedy and
envious than anybody else I know. I am greedy for meaning, for being able to
give love and be loved?I am too greedy to sell out quality for quantity. And I
am envious of the birds, the clouds, and the stars, not of the trappings of
luxury that keep their victims in golden cages (Chapter 9).
I recently added the following paragraph to my biographical page on our
website:
It is important for me to make clear that my global life is not a homeless or
restless life. I do not even use the term .travel,. since I live in the global
village and in a village one does not travel, one lives there, even if one
moves around in it. When I look for cultural templates for my life, which
treats our planet as one undivided locality, I think of migrating animist
hunter-gatherers, a way of life that defined being human prior to 10,000
years ago. I resonate with what indigenous native American leader Sitting
Bull (1831?1890) said: .White men like to dig in the ground for their food.
My people prefer to hunt the buffalo? White men like to stay in one place.
My people want to move their tepees here and there to different hunting
grounds. The life of white men is slavery. They are prisoners in their towns
or farms. The life my people want is freedom.. Clearly, I do not hunt
buffalo and I do not have a teepee. Yet, I refrain from defining a small
geographical locality as .my home.. My home is the entire global village,
or more precisely, the people I love in that village. I do not see my life as
nomadic, and, as mentioned above, I do not resonate with the notion of
travel. To my view, I .stay in love,. rather than .travel in circles in a caged
rat race.. In other words, I see myself being much more .still. and true to
.my place,. namely love, than those who sell out their soul for a rat race
that is defined by large-scale societal frames that have increasingly become
toxic during the past decades. Many people travel extensively, yet, usually,
they have a .caged rat race. frame within which they travel. I prefer to
.stay still. in the realm of love. I am closer to a person who chooses to opt
out of the rat race to live a simpler life nearer to nature, for example, than to
a frequent business flyer who travels in circles in the isolated elite bubble of
international hotels. I never search for a .place to stay.. I move between
different relational contexts of love and .a place to stay. is secondary to
being embedded into relationships of mutual care.
I see my roots in displacement and the path that ensued from it as a
responsibility. It is a path that is extremely difficult, and I pay a very high
price, in many ways and at many levels. However, it is also an utterly
enriching path, and, for me, it is without alternative. Manifesting humanity to
the fullest represents the only way for me by which I can be in a world that
otherwise sells out humanity for profit.
Along with Linda Hartling27 and a valuable and dear team of like-minded
people,28 we have founded the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies
(HumanDHS) network,29 and launched the World Dignity University (WDU)
initiative.30
On the home page of our website you can read:
We are a global transdisciplinary network and fellowship of concerned
academics and practitioners. We wish to stimulate systemic change,
globally and locally, to open space for dignity and mutual respect and
esteem to take root and grow, thus ending humiliating practices and
breaking cycles of humiliation throughout the world.
We suggest that a frame of cooperation and shared humility is necessary?
not a mindset of humiliation?if we wish to build a better world, a world of
equal dignity for all. We are currently around 1,000 personally invited members, with more than
2,000 more people supporting our work, and our website is being accessed
by ca. 40,000 people from more than 180 countries per year.
This economy book is different from my first three books. It is more open,
more .unfinished. in that it follows a never ending journey as it is unfolding.
In my first book on dignity and humiliation, Making Enemies: Humiliation
and International Conflict (2006), I describe my vision of a more dignified
world.31 First, this book lays out a theory of the mental and social dynamics of
humiliation and proposes the need for .egalization. (the undoing of
humiliation) for a healthy global society. It then presents chapters on the role
of misunderstandings in fostering feelings of humiliation; the role of
humiliation in international conflict; and the relationship of humiliation to
terrorism and torture. It concludes with a discussion of how to defuse feelings
of humiliation and create a dignified world. This book was characterized as a
path-breaking book, honored as .Outstanding Academic Title. by the journal
Choice for 2007 in the USA.
My second book, Emotion and Conflict: How Human Rights Can Dignify
Emotion and Help Us Wage Good Conflict (2009) is an expansion of a chapter
that I wrote for Morton Deutsch?s Handbook of Conflict Resolution.32 I
describe how realizing the promise of equality in dignity can help improve the
human condition at all levels?from micro to meso to macro.33 This book uses
a broad historical perspective that includes all of human history, from its
hunter-gatherer origins to the promise of a globally united knowledge society
in the future. It emphasizes the need to recognize and transcend malign
cultural, social, and psychological effects of the past. The book calls upon the
world community, academics and lay people alike, to own up to the
opportunities offered by increasing global interdependence.
My third book, Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying
Relationships from Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs (2010),
examines the social and political ramifications of human violations and world
crises related to humiliation.34 It is a book about big love, in the spirit of
Gandhi?s satyagraha (nonviolent action), a term that is assembled from
agraha (firmness/force) and satya (truth-love).35 It analyzes why women were
devalued during the past millennia, and why the work of nurturing
relationships, including the work of love, became invisible. The book
encourages constructive social, political, and cultural change through the force
of satyagraha. The book is being .highly recommended. by Choice.
In all of my work, I make the point that equality in dignity, with humiliation
as its violation, becomes ever more salient when global interdependence
increases. Never before did anything called a global village exist.36 Until
recently, the world was fragmented into many .villages,. all afraid of their
neighbors who could quickly turn into enemies. No history lesson helps us,
because the notion of one global village turns the whole of humanity into one
single in-group (with inner diversity) on one tiny planet, something that has
never occurred before.37
Like my first three books, A Dignity Economy was written in dialogue with
Linda Hartling and the other members of our network. It is part of a larger
body of work that aims at creating new visions for the future, visions for
systemic paradigm shifts, visions of unity in diversity, not just locally but
globally.
Our aim is to nurture the next Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandelas to change
the world. To serve this aim we strive to bridge existing gaps. We connect
academic disciplines, we build bridges between academia and practice, and we
bring together those who focus on creating a new consciousness within with
those who have their attention on building new institutional frames out in the
world.38
Entre le fort et le faible c.est la libert? qui opprime et la loi qui
affranchit.
(Between the weak and the strong, between the rich and the
poor, between the lord and the slave, it is freedom which
oppresses and the law which sets free.)
?Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire
Evelin Lindner
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