Resolving the Question of Adding
to Our One-Point Program
In recent years I have done a lot of work, inside and outside RC, on climate change. I have learned a lot about it: the science, the impacts on people and the environment, and the global political situation. I have also discharged for many hours on issues related to climate change and on my early distresses that are restimulated by it.
One of my goals has been to fully face the situation and not let my thinking be dominated by my distress recordings. Another goal has been to think well about the role the RC Communities could play in the climate crisis. I see climate change as the biggest challenge humans have faced, and I want RCers and the RC Community to engage much more fully with it.
All this led me to make the following proposal on the RC e-mail lists in February:
That the RC Communities temporarily include a second point in the one-point program of RC: That all Co-Counselors be urged to take action to end the threat posed to life on Earth and human societies by human-caused climate change.
(The one-point program as it currently exists is “to use RC to seek recovery of one’s occluded intelligence and innate humanness and assist others to do the same.” For more details, see Guideline A.3 in the 2017 Guidelines for the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities.)
There was a good discussion of my proposal on the RC e-mail lists, some of which is published in the following pages. Then we discussed it at the East Coast North America and Caribbean Regional Reference Persons’ Workshop in March. As a result of the discussion at the workshop, I withdrew my initial proposal and instead made other suggestions that I thought would accomplish my goal.
The following are some of the points people made at the workshop:
- We need to do more work on climate change, but modifying the one-point program is not the best way. We can and should try other new ways to increase the attention our Communities put on it.
- Where leadership goes, people follow. We can and need to take more steps as leaders.
- Many working-class and raised-poor people would hesitate to be part of a project that requires them to address climate change.
- The proposal doesn’t address how it’s hard for a lot of people to put their attention on climate change and how that difficulty is at the core of the problem.
- Once people are in RC and have access to discharge, they can work on the proposal, but putting it at the “front door” could block some people from coming in.
- RC might be fundamentally changed by modifying the one-point program, and that would interfere with our goal of offering the means to re-emergence to everyone and playing a big role in the transformation of society.
- RC is about trusting people to use their minds.
- No matter how the proposal is framed, it would be seen as a requirement, and that would undermine our goal of creating the conditions for people to think for themselves.
- It could cause some people to question who we are, or to feel like we don’t want them with us.
After the discussion I thought that instead of my proposal we could either create a “Super Goal” or have an “International Reference Person initiative between the World Conferences.” I thought that either of these would demonstrate to the Communities the importance of addressing climate change but would do it in a more understandable, less divisive way.
[See “Taking a Needed Initiative,” in Present Time No. 195 for the initiative out of this, by the International Reference Person, Tim Jackins.]