INTRODUCTION Building a Win-Win World: Life Beyond Global Economic Warfare is an effort to continue deconstruction of the economism/competition/conflict paradigm and construction of new platforms for action. We are all constructing new "quality-of-life" language together. The dysfunctional economism paradigm still controls the debate, however, and we must never forget it for an instant. The economists are still the "thought police," and we are enmeshed every day in the old structures in hundreds of ways. There has been tremendous progress. It is slow-motion good news, but that is what I am out to communicate. The war system in human societies is at least six thousand years old, but according to much new archeological and paleoanthropological evidence, humans lived in generally peaceful, small egalitarian groups in prehistory. Most of what we are taught as the history of human civilization chronicles the rise of human ego-centeredness, technological ingenuity, and territoriality (as populations and agriculture spread), and the inevitable rise of competition, conflict, and violence in general.

This kind of history of the evolution of human societies is a biased account. The conventional history of conquests, military leaders, and the lives of the powerful has been largely indifferent to the experiences of the great majority of ordinary human beings. The work of broader historians, such as Fernand Braudel (1980, 1984) and Emmanuel Wallerstein (1991), the challenge of feminist historians, and new interpretations of archaeological records have enriched our understanding of our past. This is a vital prelude to changing our view of our potential and our future. In the twentieth century, humans have clearly demonstrated the limits of their six-thousand-year experimentation with competition, territoriality, expansionism, and military conflict. More scholars are at last studying humanity''s ancient war system and the roots of human violence--all the bad but important news in our biochemistry, brains, evolution, social conditioning, and hierarchical, patriarchal institutions. Increasing technological virtuosity linked to this war system has brought us to the brink of many annihilation scenarios--from nuclear and biological holocausts to slower, more insidious threats like toxic wastes, urban decay, desertification, and climate change. This book, however, will not dwell on this now-dysfunctional system and its post-Cold War expressions in civil and ethnic conflicts, as well as violence in city streets, in the media, and in our families.

Instead, we will trace the emerging death rattles of this violent, competition/conflict paradigm and its dominance-submission, win-lose games. I will identify the flash points and crises that illustrate the dysfunctionality of the paradigm and force us--for our very survival--toward new approaches. As we examine these signs of human potential for personal and social learning, we see how breakdowns are often precursors and even necessary for breakthroughs.2 THE GOOD NEWS IN THE BAD NEWS This book will focus on finding the good news in the bad news: where humans are encountering the endgames of the competition/conflict paradigm, where there are signs of transition and transmutation. The very globalization of the war system, of technology, and of industrialization brought the Cold War to a dead end. Since then, the global warfare paradigm has given ground to global economic warfare, which many economists, politicians, and business leaders have hailed as a victory of capitalism and competitive free markets. Yet this global economic warfare has proved little better than the military warfare it was advertised to replace. By the mid-1990s global economic warfare had already reached crisis points of its own.

Part I of this book, "Pathological Paradigms," examines the nature of recent crises. Chapter 1, "Global Economic Warfare versus Sustainable Human Development," zeros in on flash points from global to local levels. Chapter 2, "Juggernaut Globalism and the Bankruptcy of Economics," surveys the global economy, financial markets, and the unleashed forces of free trade. Chapter 3, "The Technology Trap," examines our love affair with technology and its perverse impacts on our lives and environment. Chapter 4, "The Jobless Productivity Trap," looks at how the noxious new brew of free-market technological innovation driven by global economic warfare has led to jobless economic growth and further global commercial exploitation of the planet''s peoples and natural resources. Chapter 5, "Government by Mediocracy and the Attention Economy," examines the rise of global mass media as a new form of governance now driving our politics and private lives--and its birthing of hybrid Attention Economies.3 Part II, "Slow-Motion Good News: Road Maps and Resources for Rebirth," examines our human resources and potentials for rebalancing ourselves and our societies on new paths to more cooperative, equitable forms of ecologically sustainable development. Chapter 6 describes a new force in the world, "Grassroots Globalism," as it shows itself in the emerging civil society and the traditionally cooperative, unpaid Love Economies bubbling up to challenge juggernaut globalism and competitive economism rooted in the old war system.

Chapter 7, "Rethinking Human Development and the Time of Our Lives," refocuses our attention on the importance of the time of our lives-- our only real asset. Chapter 8, "Cultural DNA Codes and Biodiversity: The Real Wealth of Nations," shows that the encoding of our collective experience, as it has coevolved with the biodiversity of all species, is our real source of wealth. Human resourcefulness, choices, and aspiration for personal development can create new societies. Our minds and spirits are powerful beyond our full awareness. Part III, "Building a Win-Win World: Breakthroughs and Social Innovations," examines how our human potentials are finding expression in new forms of enterprise, institutions, partnerships, and cooperative agreements that can lead to the building of a win-win world. Chapter 9, "Information: The World''s Real Currency Isn''t Scarce," describes how money became mistaken for wealth and was cartelized in the global casino, and how the new, pure information currencies (which have always been the world''s real currency) are now emerging at the global and local levels. Chapter 10, "Redefining Wealth and Progress: The New Indicators," takes a look behind the statistical veils of economics. It describes how old indicators of economic growth-- for example, the gross national product (GNP)--are being overhauled, and how new indicators of quality of life are slowly replacing economic indicators as new scorecards of human development.

Chapter 11, "Perfecting Democracy''s Tools," describes the importance of the spread of democracies around the world and the urgent need to perfect this still imperfect system of collective decision making and governance, including social and technological innovations waiting in the wings. Chapter 12, "New Markets and New Commons: The Cooperative Advantage," compares and contrasts the strategies of cooperation and competition, of markets and rules/agreements, of public, private, and civil sectors, and how they can all be rebalanced to build a win-win future. Chapter 13, "Agreeing on Rules and Social Innovations for Our Common Future," reviews efforts during the 1990s to forge new international agreements and institutions to create a social architecture suitable for a truly human twenty-first century.4 THE ROLE OF OUR MENTAL TOOL BOXES This book, like my earlier ones, is also about the mental tool boxes we carry in our heads: our belief systems, cultural conditioning, assumptions, worldviews, concepts, and habits of thought. On the societal level, I have termed these collective mental tool boxes paradigms--extending the scope of the term originally coined by Thomas Kuhn to describe such mental processes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Our mental tool boxes are lenses or spectacles by which we humans view and construct our responses to the world around us. Each of us, whether we acknowledge these powerful mental tools or not, shapes our world through the use of such paradigms, which evolve in response to our experience, as I elaborated in Paradigms in Progress (1991, 1995). For me, two of the most useful of these mental tools are (1) my "zoom lens," which I use to zero in on something that interests me and to keep going deeper with increasing magnification of the details until I have a more complete picture; and (2) my "wide shot," which allows me to pull back and see the phenomenon as successively smaller and smaller pieces of a much larger jigsaw puzzle.

All of us have this mental equipment, which can be honed and perfected as a high-quality camera for viewing our world. This can help us see the flow of events and understand the paradigms we and others are using to shape our perceptions. Developing mental paradigm-spotting equipment is also a spiritual pursuit. Such mental exercises make us deeply aware of our essence--in fact, our souls--since when we look at our own mental functioning we see that it emerges from our brains but cannot be placed neatly in some set of neurons. We are brought to the oldest puzzle of our species: Who is the "I" that is studying and judging all this? Every great religious and spiritual tradition has posed this question--through meditation, as in Buddhism and Hinduism; through prayer, as in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism; through contemplation, as in many indigenous traditions; as well as through rituals, ceremonies, holy days, festivals, celebrations, music, dance, and art.5 Many traditions have sought to.