Denise Breton & Christopher Largent - The Paradigm Conspiracy: How Our Systems of Government, Church, School & Culture Violate Our Human Potential
  • What paradigms do we have running our social systems?
  • What kind of worlds do they create?
  • How do they affect us personally?
  • How can we create new models?
Examining how worldviews can cause or end suffering, Breton and Largent powerfully indict our systems of government, church, school, and culture as a set of diseased institutions amenable to treatment only if individuals act with insight and power.

Breton and Largent take a solid philosophical perspective and apply it not only to individuals, but also to social systems and cultural patterns. They then combine this approach with ideas from the world's spiritual traditions, new science, and history, providing a model for individuals to claim their power to change social systems by changing the paradigms on which they are founded.

www.isbn.nu/aisbn/breton%20denise - www.hazelden.org/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?a=b&item=2128

(Hazelden Publishing and Education is a division of the Hazelden Foundation, a not-for-profit organization. Since 1949, Hazelden has been a leader in promoting the dignity and treatment of people afflicted with the disease of chemical dependency.)

Excerpts

- What kind of paradigm requires that we blame individuals, intimidate, and punish them in order to keep our social systems "healthy"?

- For fear of chaos, social systems adopt the control paradigm and run with it.

- Through all sorts of institutionalized policies, we get the message that we're unacceptable as we are, but that if we surrender ourselves to the social system (the family, school, business, profession, or religion), we'll become acceptable.

- The major threat to external control is our internal guidance system—our souls.

- Our souls are considered to be sloppy and unmanagable troublemakers; they clog the system's efficient workings, and we're better off without them.

www.trufax.org/paradigm/paradigm/midwife.html

www.trufax.org/paradigm/paradigm.html

www.trufax.org/paradigm/paradigm/welcome.html


Other Books

- The Soul of Economies: Spiritual Evolution Goes to the Marketplace by Christopher Largent and Denise Breton

According to religions and philosophies we all have a role in shaping economies. Economies aren't out there happening to us. They are us. Economies reflect their creators. They mirror not just our needs but more our aspirations and values: questions of philosophy and religion.

Unfortunantly, when experts get near economies, we don't hear much about religious and philosophical issues. At most, they tie the sticky-fingers epidemic to greed, one of the seven deadly sins, but that's about it. Listening to them, we end up shaking our heads at how corrupt we've become, without thinking more deeply about causes and alternatives.

www.bizspirit.com/bsj/archive/articles/LargentBreton1.html

www.bizspirit.com/bsj/archive/articles/LargentBreton2.html

www.bizspirit.com/bsj/archive/articles/LargentBreton3.html

www.bizspirit.com/bsj/archive/articles/LargentBreton4.html



- The Mystic Heart of Justice: Restoring Wholeness in a Broken World by Denise Breton and Stephen Lehman
  • Does punishment create justice among us?
  • Do rewards make us happy?
  • What if justice isn't about blaming and hurting but about restoring and healing?
Almost daily, we encounter a world that seems unjust, while authorities we depend on seem to be powerless or working for the wrong side. To make matters worse, we often feel judged by those same authorities—parents, teachers, employers, religious leaders, and legal officials. Though Denise Breton and Stephen Lehman agree that our justice system should be restructured, they speak to our individual and collective trials in a surprising way. They forge a solution in our own backyards and schoolyards.

In their ground-breaking book, Breton and Lehman show how reward-and-punishment systems dehumanize every aspect of our lives, beginning in childhood. Carrots and sticks, instead of making us productive, shut down creativity. As our inner motivation is destroyed, our creative expression wanes, a loss for us and our societies.

The alternative is to create a culture—as well as a justice system—that affirms the soul, the uniqueness of each individual, crafting social forms that draw out that uniqueness. The Mystic Heart of Justice offers both powerful examples and methods for forging a “soul-centered” society that provides every citizen with an inner and outer sense of fairness and wholeness.

Denise Breton lectures and counsels on practical spirituality and is the co-author of The Soul of Economies: Spiritual Evolution Goes to the Marketplace; The Paradigm Conspiracy: Why Our Social Systems Violate Our Human Potential and How We Can Change Them; and Love, Soul, and Freedom: Dancing with Rumi on the Mystic Path.

Stephen Lehman is former editor and publisher of Elysian Fields Quarterly, co-author of two children’s books, and author of a chemical dependency treatment curriculum for criminal offenders.


www.renaissancealliance.org/imagine/essays/justice.htm

www.livingjusticepress.com

www.swedenborg.com/Bookstore/Presentation.asp?qsContent=ProductProfile&qsPKeyProductID=38


Radio Interviews

www.21stcenturyradio.com - www.futuretalkradio.com

http://secure2.networkssupport.com/21stcen...uest.asp?ID=867

http://secure2.networkssupport.com/21stcen...est.asp?ID=1102

http://secure2.networkssupport.com/21stcen...guestsearch.asp


- Christopher Largent - The Paradigm Conspiracy (Future Talk - May 10, 2001)

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- Christopher Largent - The Soul of Economies (Future Talk - January 19, 2002)

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- Denise Breton, Stephen Lehman - The Mystic Heart of Justice (Future Talk - July 21, 2002)

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