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sustainability philosophy

We are now living in decisive times.

It is said we are at a stage in history when the future of mankind as we know it will be determined by events taking place within our lifetime, if not within the next one or two decades. We are facing challenges of an ecological, social and economic nature but we are only slowly acknowledging the acuteness of this crisis. Maybe too slowly?

At the Light Centre we support the concept of sustainable living. As well as supporting people's individual health we also encourage the health of our society as a whole and ultimately the earth's. To do this we provide a home for events and activities that engage people in discussions about the state of our society and support projects that might help individuals to make a difference to their community.

The Light Centre was established in 2005 with the aim to provide a place and team of people who could inspire the local community to strive for a healthier and more sustainable way of living.

it’s our belief that a person’s lifestyle and therefore their health is a direct consequence of their experiences, thoughts and the world they find themselves in. Without new experiences that change their belief or environment they are unlikely to change their habits or the outcomes of their lives.

Here in London we are immersed in one of the greatest melting pots on the earth, so dynamic and multicultural that it epitomises a process of globalisation that has consumed most of the developed world in the last 50 years.

This  model, which follows the ideology of free globalised markets is centred in the US. It seeks to turn the world into one homogenous and open market place, where multinational companies and global financiers are able to control and sculpt the mechanics, amenities and thus the lives of people all across the globe.

For 50 years these economic ideals have been forcefully imposed on one country after another. First politically, by the US and other beneficiary countries, then economically by supportive global institutions such as the World Trade Organisation, International Monetary Fund and World Bank and then finally by a trailing bandwagon of multinational companies who have made massive profits from mopping up all the weakened and nationalised local industries that the system has produced.

A Short History of our Economic System

In the 1970s, the socialist governments of Latin America were overthrown and replaced by capitalist sponsored military dictatorships. Under brutal martial law they imposed pure free market systems on their countries, removing protection for local businesses, abolishing wage controls and workers rights, privatising the people’s national assets and encouraging personal and national indebtedness. Very soon most of the people’s private and collective assets were transferred into the hands of foreign companies, banks and a few individuals related to the local dictators.

Through the 1980 ‘Regan and Thatcher’ years, these interventional methods were honed to exploit any weakness that emerged in a country, even democratic ones.

The fall of the Soviet Union for example, allowed US trained economists and World Bank financiers to persuade fledgling governments to ignore the moderate wishes of their voters and adopt the free market model. Very soon the national assets of these countries were also controlled by the capitalist bandwagon. In fact in Russia, Boris Yeltsin managed to successfully enforce a suspension of democracy long enough to change the system and transfer nearly all of Russia’s wealth into the hands of just a few of his supporters (the new oligarchs).

In the 1990s the tiger economies of South East Asia, such as South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia weakened by exposure to global currency pressures were also forced to give up their remaining national controls and embrace the free markets. Meanwhile China, whilst retaining firm political control, also managed to implement capitalist policies and thus transfer enormous amounts of wealth from the state to a few party faithfuls.

Even the widely celebrated overthrowing of apartheid in South Africa, rather than liberate the country from oppression, only resulted in the economically illiterate new leaders allowing international banks to impose deeper capitalist values and further inequality, poverty and dependency on their country. 

Today, ever more sophisticated versions of the bandwagon have rolled into Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan and any other country in crisis. Of course the people of these countries may at first be happy to give up their former corrupt and brutal dictators, but they are probably not aware that the prospect of free market democracy comes with its own dependency and restrictions.

In all these cases, globalisation and capitalism simply results in a transfer of land and resources away from ordinary people and their collective governments to a few large organisations, bankers and individuals. In effect, they swap localisation, accountability and relative independence for globalisation, facelessness and dependency.

The Pathway to Dependency

But the world hasn’t always been this exploitative. 

For 99.9% of our 6-million-year, human evolution, we were nomadic, hunter-gatherers, living an egalitarian lifestyle in which all members of a group shared collective responsibility for its direction and goals and thus retained an equal share of its productivity. It was in this environment of collective interdependence and purpose that our sense of fairness, justice and equality evolved.

10,000 years ago when the first farmers created permanent settlements, people still worked in the same collective manner, but each had their own home and land to farm. But as some people’s land and methods became more successful, so challenging times resulted in these people and their families becoming more dominant. Over the next few thousand years, a system of landowners and serfs spontaneously evolved.

Eventually the dominant land owners ennobilised themselves and set up their own countries and governing institutions, creating laws and law enforcement that would keep the serfs in ‘their place’.

In the 1300’s plagues dramatically reduced the number of serfs who could work for the owner’s and so they were forced to make some concessions. At the same time people with useful trades were also starting to gain a small elevation in status and independence from serfdom.

As inventive tradesmen spawned industrialisation, so labour-saving and expansive products became important and the life of landowners and serfs became interweaved with an associated life of business owners and company ‘housed and fed’ workers.

As worker numbers became larger and more concentrated so these people gradually realised that their sheer weight of numbers allowed them to demand better pay and conditions. They hoped that increased remuneration might one day allow them to be independent of their working contract and again own their own home and the means to feed themselves.

But with the owners also in control of their governments, any concessions the workers got at work were soon taken away again by government price controls and taxes. It was thus impossible to save enough to escape the system.

Eventually the only option for workers who felt oppressed was to forcefully revolt. But successful socialist revolutions only served to produce a different type of authoritarianism, this time controlled by the state and the people who ran it.

Where popular revolts failed to fully overthrow the prevailing system, concessions were made to workers in the shape of democratic reforms, welfare systems and more leisure time.

Realising that under a democratic, ‘one-person-one-vote’ system, the owners would soon have their power eroded, they sponsored and encouraged a massive upgrade of certain sectors of the population to administrative (middle) class. These people were paid a premium to administer the system, but because their extra privileges were tied to its continuation, they were also inclined to vote for it.

However, paying these white-collar workers more, meant that they were now capable of saving money and thus escaping the working contract. Fortunately for the system, these people were easily persuaded by advertising and the consumer media to spend their extra money on buying status symbols that displayed their higher class. They thus simply gave the money back to the business owners and continued to accumulate little of lasting value.

By creating a middle class consumer society, the land and business owners were able to continue their elite system under a democratic banner, setting wages for both lower and middle classes that would enabled them to purchase their own property only once they were no longer useful. Anything they had accumulated, the system could then force them to spend in old age or reclaimed through inheritance and death taxes.

The creation of welfare payments, another concession to revolting workers, also contained a hidden benefit for the system. Generally only people without food are desperate enough to revolt, so by creating a safety net to stop people from starving, the working population became much more docile. Additionally, the creation of a surplus of docile labourers on minimum benefits (the unemployed) also allowed industry to quickly increase production once promising new consumer markets were opened up.

Until worker concessions arrived, most factory workers were forced to labour for as many hours as their employer could physically get out of them. With concessions, these hours were reduced, but most workers still had to devote five entire days a week to their work and only a small amount of extra leisure time emerged.

But even this concession had its silver lining for the system because the extra time allowed a new and profitable entertainment industry to grow, one that would further entice working people to fret away their free money on items of no long-term value. In fact, not only were workers now more docile, they were distracted too!

Where we are Today

Kept busy by this never ending trap of perpetual working contracts, mortgage debt, social competition and hollow consumer trinkets and distractions, the average person today has become bound into a system of dependency, which has barely more freedom than the serfs of the middle ages. Only now the landlords are multinational corporations, financiers and an elite few, who not only own most of the available private assets, but also increasing amounts of the public assets too. What’s more they have further deepened their control by encouraging individuals and governments to rack up significant and binding debts.

The recession of 2008, rather than hurting this system, merely served to rack up even more individual and collective debt for ordinary people, while redistributing proportionally more of the world’s assets to the elite.

The Cost to our Mental and Physical Health

Faced with a growing feeling of powerlessness, but not really knowing where it is coming from or who is causing it, the ordinary person has become increasingly despondent with the system and the life its given them, and the despondency seems to be getting ever deeper and sets in at ever-younger ages.

Psychological research tells us that people who feel trapped in a system, without a plan for how to get out of it, quickly develop depression. It is thus pertinent that the World Health Organisation now considers depression the most serious risk to health in the Western World.

Today our children are encouraged to educate themselves so they can embrace, administer and perpetuate the capitalist system that we allowed to develop. They are asked to turn a blind eye to the environmental and social destruction that this has caused and console themselves with consumerist trinkets and distractions.

Most either show an active dislike for the world that we have created or they simply get hooked on addictive habits that help them to escape from it. Perhaps they realise that accepting this lifestyle will simply embed them more deeply into it.

The continuation of such a dependent system, will further deprive the coming generations of the collective support and interdependence people once had, isolating them in world without mutual care. Stripped of their collective solidarity they will be powerless to question or object to ever increasing layers of faceless bureaucracy.

In a nutshell, instead of living acute, purposeful lives, they will live increasingly docile, predictable ones.

A Glimpse of a Fairer, Sustainable World

In the 1980’s the BBC set up an experiment to take a number of individuals and families from typical British cities and place them on a deserted Scottish island. Called ‘Castaways’, they were left with just a few tools and provisions and asked them to form their own autonomous community and build lives independent of the modern system.

At first these people missed the trinkets and distractions they had become used to, but soon they started to enjoy the sense of self-control, collective purpose and the independent thriving community they were creating. By the end of the experiment all agreed they were happier, healthier and more inspired than they ever were in their former lives. The people (and especially the children) didn’t want to leave.

In 1991, when Yeltsin’s capitalist coup caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, all its communist dependencies were left to fend for themselves. Cuba, already under a US embargo for daring to resist the capitalist bandwagon, was desperate for fuel and food. Faced with blackouts, limited transportation and the prospect of starvation, the people quickly reorganised their economy away from external dependency towards internal self-reliance. Like a huge version of ‘Castaways’ they grew their own food and found new ways to live without the usual consumerist trappings. Their communities became closer and the people became healthier and happier. Not only did they have more independence and collective purpose, but they also had a new self-sustaining lifestyle, a ‘Permaculture’.

Today, each of us in the ‘privileged’ world has to decide whether we want to stay complicit with a capitalist system that lets a global elite continue to buy up all the world’s assets. We have to decide whether we want to remain dependent on these people to shelter, feed and clothe us. We have to decide whether we want to continue to take part in the erosion of the Earth’s limited resources to create empty foods, useless trinkets and meaningless distractions.

nstead we could decide to learn from the Cuban experience and realise that we already have all the property, land, food and resources we need to live a sustainable life. All we need is a simpler, fairer system in which we all work collectively to establish more localised and self-reliant communities. Communities we can feel comfortable bringing our children into

At the Light Centre we want to champion and support these ideas and the educational experiences that will lead people to change their beliefs and environments. Changes that might eventually prove to be a model for a new national and/or global culture.

Further Reading

• The Spirit Level - Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett, 2009
• The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein, 2007
• The Enigma of Capital - David Harvey, 2010
• Ten Evolutionary Steps to a Successful Life - Mark Thompson, 2005 (available only from the Light Centre)

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