The Real World
[part 1 of 2]
An essay inspired by Reb. Michael Lerner

© David Moorhead — April 2007

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Earthlings’ real world is a world of gawking at the nature that created us, and, for too many people, that awed nature has been negated. Gawking at the mere presence of Earthlings is part of human’s real world, too. Confusing as it may seem, the only world, if that is to be acknowledged.

Surveys begun twenty years ago in studies of mental health, Rabbi Michael Lerner summarizes a spiritual turning point, a crisis in The United States, in his lecture for Cambridge Forum, February 9, 2006, as heard on National Public Radio (NPR), San Francisco, California USA. ¹

During Lerner’s lecture, he reminds listeners that he is making sweeping statements comprehensively clarified in his writings.

The rest of this essay follows with those sweeping, general statements, easily partnering Lerner’s keystone of societal consciousness with personal cosmology. This author hopes these words might be as educational for you as they have been for me.

Some of the knowledge gleaned from Lerner’s ten thousand surveys is most waking hours of people in the U.S. are spent in offices as well as in travel to and from. Many workers have tendencies to perceive themselves and the world from trainings borne in places of work. Psychodynamics within that perception have a monumental impact of shaping what is called the bottom line, which has been substituted for forms of spirituality—being awed by creation.

The bottom line has become the real world for rationally maximizing money and power for someone else, usually owners of corporations, or owners of retail stores in which workers work; or, if workers are entrepreneurial, they maximize bottom lines for clients and customers. Ego needs of people at the tops of nonprofits may be maximized by office workers.

As office workers are learning how the bottom line maximizes self interests, they are simultaneously learning that every other person is viewed either as a potential client, or, if in the workplace, as a potential ally and assistor. The ultimate question for too many office workers is how could someone else assist the influence of their own importance and bottom line within a corporate system?

Rabbi Lerner and other people saw what was becoming for many the real world. As people internalize the function of the bottom line hour after hour, day after day, month after month, home and family and friends are perceived with similar attributes. For some people, friendships have been thick with compassion, kindness, polite neighborliness; remember the days when a cup of sugar was borrowed by handing it over the backyard fence. Now, many friendships are bottom line, thin with regard only for what families or neighbors can give without communal esprit de corps. ²

The cyclic, continually evolving natural real world, in which humans can experience nature with awe, has for many workers been turned upside down, and redefined as supplying money and resources for a good life (mortgage, food, auto) and siblings’ education. Hence, office workers sense the real world as rational; necessarily fixed without natural cycles of transformation; unchangeable as being caught in a cage; and, darkly competitive. ³

At the same time, many workers feel conflicted, and sense they are being slimed by the training for and subsequent perceptions of their bottom line world. Then, they go home, and attempt to teach their children traditional values, many of which are not substantiated in hours of watching physical and psychical violence on television or on Internet.

¹ Theologian Rabbi Michael Lerner examines roles religion and faith play in USA politics in the book The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. Lerner received a BA from Columbia University, studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary; PhD in philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, and in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute; rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue, San Francisco and Berkeley, California USA.

² Moreover, when a wife feels her husband could cut a better love deal with someone else, she feels the market for her bottom line world shaking beneath her feet. When illness or old age reasonably negate peoples’ exchanges of time and energy within a team, the bottom line world becomes scary for them. Thusly, millions of people report they no longer know on whom or what they can depend.

³ No worker is to blame for society’s disrepair—it’s the societal jungle of perplexing morasses engineered by old, viperous patriarchal systems.
~ DM

Our constant curiosity is key
to watching what’s being created.
~ David Moorhead