Jeremy Rifkin: thoughts on human nature

The talks below by Jeremy Rikin got me think­ing about the role of art in our cul­ture and really the world. Rifkin’s has spent the past sev­eral years study­ing empa­thy and its rela­tion­ship to our col­lec­tive belief that humans are nat­u­rally aggres­sive. He chal­lenges us to imag­ine using our con­scious­ness  cou­pled with empa­thy to change the world. Our cur­rent level of con­nect­ed­ness allows us to see the entire human race as a fam­ily allow­ing us to elim­i­nate the his­toric bound­aries that kept us in con­stant bat­tle and fear with non-believers. Instead of fight­ing over our respec­tive “Truths” we can focus on our col­lec­tive commonalities.

What does this have to do with art? A lot…think of what art does, it is a tool for extend­ing our vision of the world and thereby chal­leng­ing the sta­tus quo. We can rein­force an empathic view of human­ity by doing what we do…think about it!

What do you think of Rifkin’s pro­posal? Do you see how you as an artist/creative can con­tribute? Leave a com­ment and share your thoughts…

Evi­dence of the Shift

The talk above was based on Rifkin’s talk at RSA, in it he goes into detail about the major shifts that our civ­i­liza­tion has already expe­ri­enced and what they mean for our future. His research has strongly indi­cated that recent events from the fall of the finan­cial insti­tu­tions two years ago to the earth­quake in Haiti are pre­sent­ing chal­lenges to us to think dif­fer­ently about how we con­duct our lives. The largest of those chal­lenges are based on how we con­duct busi­ness, our col­lec­tive model for commerce.

It is my premise that artists are uniquely sit­u­ated to lead us in new and cre­ative ways to build a new model for com­merce, one based on con­nec­tion and car­ing for those we con­duct busi­ness with. As artists we have an oppor­tu­nity to demon­strate this sim­ply by virtue of how we do busi­ness, most if not all of our busi­ness is con­ducted face to face with our buy­ers and in the process model a more per­sonal non-transaction based way of sus­tain­ing our­selves by what we create.

The full talk below is rather long but well worth tak­ing the time to watch and think about. Let’s talk … what are your thoughts?