Welcome to Samuel's Interviews from Phoenix Rising, the quarterly newsletter from Phoenix Institute. On this page you'll find over 100 Interviews on a wide variety of searchable topics. Use the search in the sidebar to search all interviews. Have fun!
Winter 2023
You made a point recently that what appears to be a culture war going on in the world is actually a class war. In many ways it seems to be both. In some cases, the middle and poorer classes are actually voting to empower those who would take advantage of them, and not sup-porting those who are most motivated to uplift them. Please help us make sense of these “wars” and the forces driving them.
Well, the first thing that I’d say is, if it made sense it would not be happening, because people would catch on to it and start making changes. But people really don’t seem to be catching on.
Think about when you were a small child—and I put this into a hypothetical scenario since this isn’t accurate for every child—but a sibling or a friend comes over and you have these great toys. You love playing with your toys, and you even have toys that you’ve not played with in a long time because you have so many toys.
But the friend comes over and all of a sudden it’s “These are my toys! I don’t care if I haven’t played with it in a year. This is mine and you cannot have it.” That’s a pretty typical, human kind of thing—a scarcity mindset. “This is mine! It cannot be replaced. It’s all for me.” But whether you have a thousand dollars or a billion dollars, you’ve got to move out of that mindset.
What the humans want to do, be it a message from the ancient evolutionary self or the current self, is say, “This is mine and you can’t have it!” And the capitalistic society, which has ruled this earth for centuries now, says if you have it, you did things right. And if you do not have it, it’s because you’re doing things wrong. So the system is very set up for those who have to be thought of as the “good” and those who have not being the “bad.”
