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Home arrow EMC Blog arrow Introduction to the concepts behind Everything Must Change
Introduction to the concepts behind Everything Must Change
By Rick Bennett   
Thu, Mar.06.08
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Introduction to the concepts behind Everything Must Change
Page 2

Everything Must Change

The biggest problem in the world is the way we think about the biggest problems in the world.  

Some of us don’t think about the world and its problems at all. Some think about one or two of the world’s problems in isolation from others, not realizing the ways they are interrelated in one global system. Some look at a whole range of problems and become overwhelmed and paralyzed by their enormity. Some look through the lens of a particular ideology and become incapable of seeing problems or dealing with them outside of that framework. 

In his book Everything Must Change, author/activist Brian McLaren invited us to think in fresh ways about global crises and what we can do about them. Through this website, a group of readers decided to put their thinking into action. 

The Big Picture

To help us get a handle on global crises, author/activist Brian McLaren made a simple proposal in Everything Must Change: that we see global crises not as distinct, unrelated issues but as a connected and interrelated problems operating within a single system. He compared human society to a machine driven by human desire. He suggested that human societies always pursue three essential desires: a desire for prosperity (everything that contributes to human survival and thriving and happiness), a desire for security (everything that protects the prosperity we have attained), and a desire for equity (everything that makes for fairness and decency in the way people are treated).  

These three desires are directed or driven, he proposed, by a fourth desire: to have a coherent meaning or purpose to our individual and communal lives. We express this desire through framing stories … narratives that tell us who we are, where we’re from, what’s going on, and where we need to go.  When our framing stories are askew, he argues, they twist our societies and turn them toward dysfunction and even suicidal patterns of behavior.
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