Ask Google what morality is, and you get this definition:
“Morality is a system of rules and values that helps people decide what is right and wrong. It guides how we treat others and shapes our personal and social character.”
It sounds perfectly reasonable. In fact, it probably describes rather accurately how our civilization has approached morality for thousands of years.
We obviously need a system.
We need rules.
We need values telling us what is right and wrong.
We need something outside ourselves to guide our behavior.
But in the movie K-PAX, Prot offers a radically different proposition.
Prot is a psychiatric patient who claims to come from a planet called K-PAX. When his psychiatrist (Mark) discovers that K-PAX has no laws, the obvious question follows: how do people know right from wrong?
Prot’s answer is wonderfully simple:
“Mark. Every being in the universe knows right from wrong.”
Put these two ideas beside each other and the difference is profound.
One says we need rules and values to help us decide what is right and wrong.
The other says we already know.
So which is it?
And if Prot is right, how many rules do we actually need?
Morality
Perhaps morality isn’t fundamentally a system of rules at all.
Perhaps what we call morality is something much deeper.
Awareness
If you truly experience another being as another expression of the same life you are experiencing, do you really need a rule telling you not to hurt them?
If you are fully aware of the suffering your actions cause, do you need a law to explain that causing suffering is wrong?
If you truly understand your dependence on the biosphere around you, do you need a moral doctrine telling you that poisoning the water you drink, destroying the soil that feeds you and destabilizing the climate you depend upon might not be a particularly good idea?
The important distinction is that this awareness does not necessarily have to be taught.
It may already be there.
Look at very young children before we have had much opportunity to teach them about economics, status, careers, property or social hierarchy. They certainly aren’t perfect little saints. They can be demanding, angry, impulsive and completely absorbed in their immediate needs and wants.
But they can also display astonishingly spontaneous empathy, affection and concern for another being.
Perhaps children don’t gradually acquire some mysterious moral substance as they grow older.
Perhaps something else happens.
Layers accumulate.
The Ego
We learn that this is mine.
That is yours.
We learn status.
We learn comparison.
We learn competition.
We learn that some people have more and others have less.
We learn that having more can make us important.
We learn that losing what we possess can make us vulnerable.
And gradually the separate self becomes enormously important.
In a way, the monetary system reinforces the ego.
But the ego did not begin with money.
Human beings were territorial, possessive, competitive and violent long before anyone invented coins, banks or stock markets.
Money didn’t create the ego.
If anything, the causal relationship originally ran in the opposite direction.
Money had its conception in the ego.
Once I perceive myself as fundamentally separate from you, a trading system makes perfect sense.
I have something.
You have something.
If you want what I have, I don’t simply give it to you, because then I will have less.
So you give me something in return.
Eventually barter becomes cumbersome, and we invent something vastly more practical: a commonly accepted representation of value that can mediate exchange.
Money.
It was ingenious.
It allowed increasingly complex civilizations to coordinate exchange among millions and eventually billions of people who didn’t know or trust one another.
But something fascinating happened along the way.
The system that emerged from the ego began reinforcing the ego itself.
The Feedback Loop
As more and more of human civilization became organized around money, ownership and trading, people increasingly had to behave according to that logic.
Accumulation became security.
Possession became status.
Competition became survival.
More became success.
Other human beings became not only friends, lovers, relatives and neighbors, but serfs, kings, queens, customers, competitors, employers, employees, landlords, tenants, creditors and debtors.
And because access to almost everything required money, participation wasn’t optional.
You could be the most generous person in the world and still need money for food.
You could believe deeply in sharing and still need to pay your rent.
You could hate competition and still have to compete for a job.
You could care enormously about the environment and still participate every day in an economy structurally dependent upon consumption and using polluting vehicles.
The system didn’t create the ego.
But it exercised it.
Rewarded it.
Normalized it.
Expanded it.
And eventually the relationship became a feedback loop.
The ego helped create the monetary system.
The monetary system strengthened the ego.
Generation after generation grew up inside that loop until eventually we began mistaking the behavior it produced for our fundamental human nature.
Humans are selfish.
Humans are greedy.
Humans will always compete.
People won’t contribute unless they are rewarded.
Nobody will share unless they get something in return.
Without ownership, nobody will take care of anything.
Without the threat of punishment, people will simply do whatever they can get away with.
Maybe.
But there is another possibility.
Perhaps we have spent so long looking at humanity through the system we created that we have forgotten what lies underneath it.
Helping Strangers
Because underneath all of this, something stubbornly refuses to disappear.
People love unconditionally.
People care.
People help strangers from whom they will never receive anything in return.
People risk their lives for other people.
People give away their time.
People comfort someone who is suffering.
People rescue animals.
People create music, art, dance and literature without knowing whether anybody will ever pay for it.
People care for children and elderly parents without issuing invoices.
We do these things every day.
And very often there is no transaction whatsoever. And no laws or rules telling us to do it.
Perhaps these aren’t exceptions to human nature.
Perhaps they reveal it.
Perhaps beneath the egoic layers of separation, possession, comparison and competition is an awareness that never disappeared.
Our True Core
Not something that needs to be manufactured.
But something that needs room to emerge.
And from that perspective, humanity’s problem begins to look very different.
Maybe we don’t need to somehow manufacture eight billion better human beings.
Maybe we need to stop constructing civilization in ways that continually bring out the worst in the human beings we already have.
Waking Up
This is fundamental to the future civilization I describe in Waking Up – A journey towards a new dawn for humanity.
Humanity did not suddenly become a different species.
Nor did some enlightened government impose a new moral code on everyone and finally teach humanity how to behave.
Humanity woke up.
Not completely. Not magically. Not overnight.
But enough.
Enough people began seeing through the layers of separation we had constructed around ourselves.
Enough people began recognizing that humanity wasn’t billions of independent economic units competing against one another.
We were one species.
On one planet.
Dependent upon one biosphere.
Sharing one future.
And as that awareness began shining through, the civilization built by the ego started looking increasingly absurd.
Why were humans competing for resources they could manage cooperatively?
Why were abundant things artificially restricted because somebody couldn’t afford them?
Why were enormous amounts of resources wasted while other people went without?
Why were we destroying ecosystems upon which all of us depended because destruction could sometimes be more profitable than preservation?
Why were billions of people spending their lives trying to acquire enough money to gain access to resources that already existed?
Why had we organized the resources of an entire planet around ownership and exchange rather than intelligent stewardship and access?
Why did we go to war for these resources when we could just as well optimize all resources to work for everyone?
The answers increasingly came back to the same thing.
We had built civilization around separation.
And once humanity became sufficiently aware of that, we could begin building something else.
The Other Loop
This is where system change and inner change become inseparable.
Humanity had created the monetary system partly from the ego, and the monetary system had subsequently strengthened the ego.
But the same feedback mechanism could operate in another direction.
Awareness could create a different system.
And that system could create conditions in which awareness was no longer constantly buried beneath fear, competition and scarcity.
If your access to food, shelter and healthcare doesn’t depend upon defeating somebody else economically, one enormous source of competition disappears.
If resources are stewarded rather than owned, accumulation loses its meaning.
If access replaces exchange, another human being no longer needs to become a source of income before cooperation makes practical sense.
If production is organized around actual human and ecological needs rather than monetary return, waste stops being economically useful.
The new civilization doesn’t force people to become less selfish.
It stops constantly rewarding selfishness.
It doesn’t manufacture compassion.
It stops creating so many conditions that suppress it.
It doesn’t teach humanity some entirely new morality.
It allows something already inside us to become visible again.
The feedback loop reverses.
Ego created a system that strengthened ego.
Awareness creates a system that strengthens awareness.
And perhaps that is what awakening really means.
The Rules
Would such a civilization have no rules?
Of course not.
Human beings still need coordination.
We need to agree which side of the road to drive on. Aircraft need communication procedures. Buildings need engineering standards. Computer systems need protocols. Shared resources need systems for determining how they are used.
Awareness cannot always tell you whether everyone should drive on the right or the left.
Those aren’t moral rules.
They are practical agreements.
The more interesting question is how many rules we need to prevent ourselves from harming each other.
How many rules against exploitation do we need when there is nothing to gain from exploiting somebody?
How many rules against theft do we need when access has replaced ownership?
How many rules against fraud do we need when there is no monetary advantage to obtain through fraud?
How many environmental regulations do we need when humanity genuinely understands that destroying the biosphere means destroying the foundation of our own existence?
Maybe the highest form of civilization isn’t the civilization with the most sophisticated system of rules.
Maybe it is the civilization that needs the fewest.
And that brings us back to Prot.
“Every being in the universe knows right from wrong.”
Maybe he wasn’t talking about laws at all.
Maybe he was talking about what remains when enough of everything we have piled on top of ourselves has fallen away.
Not morality imposed from outside.
Not obedience.
Not fear of punishment.
Awareness.
And perhaps the great task facing humanity isn’t to learn what is right and wrong.
Perhaps, somewhere underneath everything else, we already know.
We just need to wake up.
Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity is a story about what might happen if humanity did exactly that.
A hundred years from 2015, Benjamin Michaels wakes into a civilization that has left money, ownership and competition behind—not because humanity was forced to become something different, but because we finally became aware enough to build a world reflecting something that had been inside us all along.
Maybe the future isn’t about becoming better human beings.
Maybe it’s about remembering who we are.
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