"Do the Reverse"

WE MET IN A COZY TORONTO CHINESE RESTAURANT along with Scarborough MP John McKay. Muhammad Yunus had won the Noble Peace Prize a couple of years earlier and he had come to Canada to sell the merits of his Grameen Bank – a microcredit organization that has assisted 140 million of the world’s poorest people to start their own businesses. His demeanour was gentle, his wit disarming, but one could easily see he was totally committed to helping the world’s marginalized. Yet he worried as to the direction the financial world was taking. We talked about his home nation of Bangladesh as well as South Sudan, where my wife and I were running a non-governmental organization. I could tell at once that his wisdom was deep, his commitment even deeper. He left me inspired.Yunus was in Davos a couple of weeks ago listening to world’s elite talk about money, money, money. When asked what he thought of it all, he simply said, “We must do the reverse.” Quizzed as to what he meant, the Nobel Laureate proceeded to walk civilization back from the brink in which it presently found itself.But first he set the context by observing that the concentration of wealth will come into ever fewer hands – today it’s the 1%, tomorrow it will be half a percent, then one-tenth. It’s not a linear, but an exponential process, Yunus noted, and the general population isn’t in control of any of it.It’s then that the wise investor from Bangladesh made his insightful and bold insight:

“Everything we have done is the reverse of conventional. They go to the city; we go to the village. They go to men; we go to women. They say people should come to the bank; we say the bank should go to the people. They say you need to be job seekers; we say you need to be job creators. Everything has to be done in the opposite if we are to save ourselves. Everything has to be done in the reverse way.”

Yunus went on to say how following such practices builds better and more stable societies. Whether one is inclined to agree or not, it’s clear that what we presently have is a clear contradiction to what he proposes.“You can’t see change until you change the way you see,” writes Raimy Diaz. We as citizens are the sum total of our thoughts, and we’ll never change our world until we change the way we think.