There are no planning committees or feasibility studies being done to organize the destruction of fish stocks. None of the world’s governments have a Department of Destroying Rain Forests.

Still, these things happen.

In the private sector, no company has bonuses, secret or otherwise, to reward the executive who creates the most spectacular oil spill, most lethal radiation leak, or lowers the world’s air quality within each fiscal year. They don’t have to. As we will see, the combined actions of all of us make them happen.

It is the unconscious power of humanity that is driving these realities.

Of course, if we’re causing the problems, even unconsciously, then it must mean that we also have the power to fix these problems.

Few of our divisive theories about social woe stand up to close examination.

For example, creating populations so poor and unhappy that the resulting anger threatens the security of everyone makes no sense if the rich and powerful wish to remain rich and powerful. If one country is full of wealthy, happy, self-empowered people, and another one is mired in grinding poverty and rebellious dissatisfaction, which one offers more potential to its leader? Which leader has more money to spend? Which leader wields more power?

No matter how power hungry they may be, sane leaders don’t want to lead miserable poor people anymore than any one of us wants to live a miserable poor life. Every single poor and unhappy person reduces the overall potential of everyone in that community, in that country, and in the world.

But if no one wants these things to happen and no one is planning them, why are they happening?

Sometimes we find ourselves forced into unwanted positions or actions by circumstance. But it is not only individuals that succumb to this compelling influence. Circumstance can be powerful enough to force the hand of entire communities, corporations, nations, and sometimes all of humankind.

What exactly is circumstance? Is it actually possible for us to unlock its mysteries and learn to direct it? What might our world look like if we did?

At first, it is hard to imagine the extraordinary change this could make in our lives. What if circumstance could be programmed to force us to be supported in our endeavours? What if it became much harder to use crime to make a living because of prevailing circumstances?

What if circumstance compelled families to spend significant and rewarding time with each other, thus forcing a wave of well-adjusted, happy young adults to enter society?

Learning to manipulate our own circumstance at this level hands us enormous power. The best possible outcome is that we could create an enormous leap in the quality of life for everyone on Earth. This would be led by invoking a profound joy that could transform the experience of life for you, me and every living thing we touch.

This is not a promise of Utopia. There will be those of us who are always discontented and will want to test boundaries. As we will see, this behaviour is entirely necessary for the health of humankind. However, this activity will not have the cost or despair that is currently attached to it.

This is not the direction we are headed today. Right now, circumstance forces many of us to seek happiness along a largely barren path. Whenever this search fails, the message around us tends to be that the failure must be a result of our own weaknesses, lack of preparation, or lack of conviction. More planning, more effort, more education is needed if we are to find success and the happiness that must follow.

Do you notice how isolating these messages are? They concentrate only on how an individual’s plight is the result of individual decisions. There is no mention of the possibility of strength, support, or healing through connection with other people. The warm side of many modern communities is given little value. One result of this is that community carers are rewarded with some of society’s lowest wages, if they are paid at all.

This can leave us feeling like cogs in a machine that is only interested in how well we can contribute to goals that are frequently divorced from our own desires. Even those who begin with a passion for their work can be worn down to indifference by circumstances – or, even worse, find themselves compromising deeply held principles. Those most affected sometimes look back wistfully at a broken quality called “youthful idealism”.

Forces in our economy gather up all our contributed efforts into a large presence, frequently utilizing our efforts in ways that rarely touch our hearts. This disconnection has created the right circumstances to convert the fruits of our efforts into heartlessness. The result is that the largest and most powerful human organization in the world, the free-market, has become a heartless presence striding

the Earth seeking to turn everyone and everything into economic wealth. The consequences have included extinctions, pollution, organized crime and the rapid decline of beauty and resources.

Don’t worry, the market says. In exchange for these sacrifices, the enormous wealth and exciting new technology generated from our tireless productive efforts will ensure the greatest harvest of human happiness possible.

Let’s test this argument.

In the 1980s, conditions within many Native American communities were so poor that community developers frequently compared them to conditions in struggling third world countries. So when oil was discovered right in the middle of Native American land near Hobbema, Alberta, there was a great deal of hopeful anticipation.

The deal to extract the oil included a royalty that varied according to oil prices and other factors, but it amounted to around $3,000 per month for every family. In addition, there was a bonus of $30,000 for anyone turning eighteen years old, ensuring a good start for young adults.

Most parents would be overjoyed at this single provision alone. There is little that satisfies parents more than the happiness of their

own children.

Combined with all their other entitlements, these Native American families could earn a very comfortable living before anyone even got out of bed. Several Native American communities instantly exchanged a life of grinding poverty for one of easy wealth.

According to everything we know, this is a happy ending to a story of deprivation and misery. The reason why many of us work so hard, live in busy crowded places, and nurture such a stressful relationship with clocks, banks, and the market in general, is to ensure that we increase our wealth and therefore become happier.

What many people dream the world over became reality for the Hobbema communities; they found a huge pot of gold at the end of their rainbow. It is just common sense that these tribes would step unhindered into the promised land of joy and abundance.

Right?

So how do we explain that after the money began to flow in, the social statistics measuring the overall health of the community took a very serious turn for the worse? To take the most glaring example: during this time of abundance, the suicide rate for their young men peaked at 83 times that of the national average. This was several times higher than other Native American communities still struggling

with intense poverty and the resulting social problems. Many parents would be horrified at this statistic alone.

The influx of wealth resulted in a very unhappy place indeed.

This was the Hobbema’s Native American experience immediately after receiving the market society’s highest reward. When other Native American communities (and other groups around the world) resist progress, perhaps this example might help some people to understand why.

But does it make sense? As many people can personally attest, receiving money clearly generates happiness. If nothing else changed, any community receiving more money would be happier.

The problem is with the phrase “if nothing else changes”. It is next to useless when examining complex systems such as communities, countries, or the world. Every input, like more money, changes thousands of different but connected factors, which go on to reshape the forces within a community. Eventually a new balance emerges, but whether this new balance is better or worse than the old one it is rarely directly related to the quality of the input.

As the saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

When dealing with many people, regardless of whether in a local community or the global market, our usual understanding of cause and effect breaks down. We have to cast much further afield to find wisdom in this area.

Most of us know that scientists like to measure things, so it should come as no surprise that they have been working on ways to objectively measure our happiness. Even more surprising, they have found a way to do it.

While measuring happiness is never going to be as accurate as measuring something like mass, using a combination of EEGs, PET and MRI scanners, serotonin levels and questionnaires, scientists have found that happiness is actually surprisingly easy to quantify. It even worked with people all over the world from all kinds of different cultures. Even more surprising is that most of us perceive happiness in almost identical ways, even though our expression of it may be strongly influenced by our cultural background.

The purpose of all this measuring was to try to determine exactly what it is that makes us happier. The most important factor by far seems to be our relationships with those closest to us. For just about everyone, it is the nature of our closest connections that has the strongest influence on our happiness.

However, there is one thing that is supposed to make us happy but does not. What keeps showing up in the research is that once our basic needs of security, food, clothing and shelter are fulfilled, more wealth makes very little difference to our happiness.

Understanding why is simple. Once our basic needs are met, if our time is spent cultivating happiness instead of continually answering the call for more production, the result is really quite straightforward.

Since wealth and happiness are not connected, chasing wealth in the hope that it will make us happy is unlikely to work. At worst it will result in more stress and problems, just as it did for the Hobbema community.

So what set of circumstances continues to generate such a powerful, almost inviolable (as some may be experiencing right now) belief that the quantity of wealth and technology we possess is directly linked with our happiness?

In the history of humankind, there have been many attempts at creating a Utopia. Thousands of ideas, philosophies, meditations, healings, religions, and political models with great promises have all come and gone. Perhaps most surprising of all is that the market system stands among these attempts. At its very heart lies the concept of “utility”. Utility is the economist’s measurement of economically

relevant human happiness. The free-market was designed to grow utility, or human happiness, in a way that was previously impossible. This is one reason why so many people, even today, are convinced that letting the market have its way is our best chance for happiness.

As far as wealth is concerned, this has been proven true. No other economic system has demonstrated even a fraction of the free-market’s ability to generate increasing levels of wealth. Unfortunately, our economy’s ability to perceive human happiness through utility has narrowed until only the desire to become wealthier remains. All other needs have become invisible. Even worse, the economic meaning of wealth is a fraction of its potentially expansive meaning. While a single fish has value, a sea full of fish does not. While medicine has value, keeping the world’s air clean, as would be required for optimal human health, is not even noticed, let alone valued, by the market. If you took a moment, you could probably think of many more examples.

Happiness, as defined by the market concept of utility, is far more rigid than the complexity that lies within us. The result is the economy only serves and promotes one particular kind of happiness while denying the rest. Humankind is experiencing an overabundance of riches in one area and starvation in many others. This imbalance is generating a deep restlessness in society.

It is our natural inclination to lose interest in areas where we are satiated. This way, we can shift energies away from producing more of what we no longer need into areas that do need attention. However, the free market does not allow this to happen. The drive to create wealth is being strongly renewed, irrespective of how desperate some people are for other needs to be satisfied.

Today, most of the world is ruled by the market economy while the people within have been reduced to its servants. How often have we heard a business leader or politician suggest something should occur in order to “serve the economy”? It takes only a moment of reflection to realize that in some important respects, this should be the other way around.

Our unconscious creation has successfully wrested power from its conscious creators. The result is the world economy as we now see it – an enormous unconscious power raiding the world’s treasures in its blind search to create ever more wealth, more technology, and more efficiency, while remaining oblivious to the destruction of priceless treasures.

Those of us who have bought, sold, traded, stolen or possessed anything of value at any time in our life are feeding this power.

The solution is to reprogram the free market so it can detect a far greater range of feelings and thoughts and so act more appropriately for the times. If we do this with enough awareness, we will lose no productive efficiency at all. It may even increase; we could call it the “happiness dividend”. This could begin a chain of events that

would open the door to the possibility of a huge leap in the quality of our life, even for those who count among the richest and most powerful people on Earth today.

To realize our full potential, we have to understand how circumstance emerges and how to control it. In doing so, we will open up a whole world of possibilities.

This is about reversing the pollution of our planet without damaging our economies. This is about becoming a nurturing force for plants and animals instead of an extinction event. This is about human beings living happier lives than they could possibly imagine today, without losing any of the edge and grittiness that makes life so colourful and fascinating.

In order to step beyond the reality of today’s society, many of us will have to engage a deadly foe who knows our every move and our every weakness; for our fiercest battles will almost certainly be with guards that circumstance has placed within our own minds.

If we can get past these guards, entirely new vistas will emerge.