Climate Movement Values: Success
Introductory Series 10.10
Success a value? Really? It doesn’t seem to go with these others. Success is, well, ambitious. Isn’t ambition self-focused, self-serving? Isn’t it, well, crass? Unseemly? Craven?
For individuals it can be.
But, for us, not to want to be successful is to be a movement-poser. We are driven to achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal. That’s why we exist. Together we have positive ambition. Together we must crave success for our Movement.
To be a moral movement is to be ambitious for success, committed to success.
We have a big ambition to become the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world. To do so we will have to realize our ambition; we will have to be successful. It’s tautological; definitional.
We want to be bigly successful, gargantuanly successful, humongously successful. Success inspires more action, guides future action, and creates value teed up for growth. We want it all.
We want to be successful in living out our love.
We want to be successful in achieving justice by doing the three actions of justice: stopping bad stuff, setting wrong right, making things better.
We want to be successful as beauty-creators, in seeing beauty in all that we do, all that we become, all that we achieve.
We want to be successful in choosing rightly to create a better world, in making the fullness of freedom into reality.
We want to be successful in encouraging and unleashing creativity and fighting for its existence, in supporting creativity’s ability to change the world.
As we are successful in living in and living out our values we are the hope we’ve been waiting for.
We want to be successful in discerning through wisdom how to balance our Movement Values with our calling, who to trust, the right paths to take, how to balance organic and strategic change, when to compromise and when to accept temporary defeats as we find new fields of victory, how to maintain our integrity as we maximize our chances for success.
We want to be successful in balancing the prophetic and the pragmatic, in compromising with integrity to keep us moving forward.
We want to be successful in being faithful to non-violence.
We want to be successful in creating balance and harmony between humanity and the rest of the natural world, in creating a future filled with flourishing, fun, and fulfillment.
Successful steps towards fulfilling these values as we overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything are filled with hope. Our success makes hope happen and our vision a reality, turning vision-hope into action-hope.
In living in and living out our values we are the hope we’ve been waiting for. Today and tomorrow and the next day and the next, we are the hope because we are successful in making the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful as we make our future come faster. Join us!
Remember to check out other posts in this Introductory Series, including the movement values of love, justice, beauty, freedom, creativity, wisdom, pragmatism, non-violence, and sustainability. If you like this post, please “like,” comment, and share. And thanks for all you’re doing.