 Source of all we hope or dread, Sheepdog, jackal, rattler, swan, We hunt your face and long to trust That your hid mouth will say again Let there be light, a clear new day. But when we thirst in this dry night, We drink from hot wells Poisoned with the blood of children. And when we strain to hear a steady homing beam, Our ears are balked by stifled moans And howls of desolation From the throats of sisters, brothers, wild men, Clawing at the gates for bread. Even our own feeble hands Absolute in flame beyond us, Till our few atoms blow to dust |
July 24, 2004
JAMES TAYLOR’S NEW HYMN
July 23, 2004
TRYING TO UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER
 This week there was a letter to the editor of our local community paper entitled Disgusted With Today’s Young People. The author, apparently a man in his sixties who owns a small business in the nearby town where he has lived all his life, lamented that this town was not what it used to be. When he grew up people treated each other with respect, and showed respect for people’s property. They were obedient and appreciated and deferred to authority. Now, he said, the children stand around idly on street corners, at night they run around drinking and smashing beer bottles on the street, vandalize cars and spray-painting graffiti on the walls of stores. He and his daughter, he went on, now drive down the streets of their “once lovely” town “angry, revolted and disgusted” at the “moral decay” of “young people” that has “ruined” their town.
I could almost picture dozens of readers nodding nostalgically in agreement, but my reaction was “What planet are you living on?” The town he describes is awash in failed, boarded-up businesses, eyesore strip-malls, horrendously-snarled traffic (it’s a major thoroughfare for commuters, and the town has failed for 20 years to develop an alternative route to the one ‘main drag’), and sprawling, ugly, shoddy, identical houses on postage-stamp size lots. I avoid it like the plague because it’s been horribly mismanaged, and the quality local shops have moved to more tourist-friendly areas as the big box stores have started moving in. But all this guy can see in this ugly sprawl is a handful of “disgusting young people”. How could he have such a warped view of reality? I concluded it must be the result of some direct personal experience. I wanted to understand. I started by reviewing George Lakoff’s theories about where our worldviews and prejudices come from. A brief aside: I’ve noticed that Lakoff’s varied theories of human behaviour and cognitive science seem to be converging. He is beginning to look like the successor to Merleau-Ponty, the philosopher whose ideas underlie David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous. In a recent interview in Edge Magazine, Lakoff says: When Mark Johnson and I [studied] the cognitive sciences in detail, we realized that there were three major results that were inconsistent with almost all of Western philosophy (except for Merleau-Ponty and Dewey), namely: The mind is inherently embodied. Most thought is unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
The differences [when you approach philosophy from a cognitive science perspective] are differences that matter in your life. Starting with results from cognitive semantics, we discovered a lot that is new about the nature of moral systems, about the ways that we conceptualize the internal structure of the Self, even about the nature of truth… We are neural beings. Our brains take their input from the rest of out bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything – only what our embodied brains permit. Metaphor appears to be a neural mechanism that allows us to adapt the neural systems used in sensory-motor activity to create forms of abstract reason. If this is correct, as it seems to be, our sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped by, made possible by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our embodied interactions in the world. Abram quotes Merleau-Ponty saying something similar: Synaesthetic [involving all the senses together] perception is the rule [among all life on Earth], and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist sees it, what we are to see, hear and feel.
I think this is important, revolutionary thinking, and I’m going to ponder on it and write about it further. But back to the letter to the editor. Lakoff is best known, at least in the blogosphere, for his explanation that the dramatic differences between the politics, philosophies, and entire worldviews of liberals and conservatives are due to the different metaphors they use to describe and understand the world: The conservative uses the metaphor of Moral Strength (The world is divided into good and evil; To “stand up to” evil one must be morally strong through self-discipline and self-denial; Someone who is morally weak cannot stand up to evil and so will eventually commit evil; Therefore, moral weakness, lack of self-control and self-indulgence are forms of immorality) and the Strict Father metaphor (It is the father’s job to support his family and protect it from evils — both external and internal; He insists on his moral authority, and commands obedience.) The liberal uses the metaphor of Moral Empathy (We must understand what others feel and why; We must look after each other; Social ties to others are vital; Happiness should be maximized as long as it does not hurt others; Fairness is paramount) and the Nurturing Parent metaphor (protecting and helping yet empowering our children and those less fortunate to care for themselves, being cared for and cared about, having one’s desires for loving interactions met, living as happily as possible, and deriving meaning from one’s community and from caring for and about others). So Lakoff is saying, on the one hand, that the way we think is intimately connected with, and limited by, our bodies: Perception lies behind all Conception, which is why we think mainly in ‘physical’ metaphors. And on the other hand, he’s saying that liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different, almost opposite, worldviews because they use opposing metaphors to understand and explain the world. We all have more or less the same bodies, the same ‘perceptual equipment’, so that must mean that liberals and conservatives have had radically different life experiences with that equipment. Conservatives, believers in a world of danger and weakness, must have experienced first hand, through their senses and bodies, violence, the threat of violence, abuse, neglect, repression, deprivation, uncertainty, morally atrocity, and/or moral ‘failure’. We learn from what we see and what we are shown, not what we’re told, which would explain why children of conservatives who live very comfortable lives tend to be more liberal, why children who are abused tend to be both conservative and abusive, and why liberals, as they get older and experience more violence, tend to get more conservative. It would also explain why liberalism peaked in the late 1960s, a time of unprecedented comfort and peace (so that, unlike the Iraq War, most saw the Vietnam War for what it was — ideological aggression — not for what the conservative government portrayed it as — protection). By contrast, conservatism has peaked in depression, wartime and post-war times, when there is more physical evidence of violence, deprivation, danger and the other factors that promote a conservative worldview. Here’s where Lakoff and I disagree: He says that conservatives are winning the PR war for political hearts and minds because their metaphors are better understood and easier to appreciate than liberals’, and that therefore liberals need to better articulate their worldview and belief systems. I think the reason why there are still such an astonishing number of conservatives in the world is simply because the world is filled with violence, abuse, neglect, repression, uncertainty, threats of violence and danger. The fact that the media are obsessed with showing us these things adds to the general anxiety, as does the amazing rate of change in all fields of human endeavour, but these are not first hand things: Most of the world lives with, or has lived with, personal physical or psychological terror of one kind or another for much of their lives, and that has to affect their worldview. What is particularly surprising to me is that the conservatives who are trying to make the world ‘safe from terrorism’ don’t realize that terrorism is, in most forms, an innately (if extreme) conservative act. Bush can bluster about terrorists “hating freedom” and “being evil” but the truth is that most terrorists are not anarchists who blow things up for a lark out of self-indulgence, but rather devout, conservative fanatics who are acting out of moral outrage against what they see as evil, and who kill others as acts of retribution that they see as profoundly moral. Very much as the American neocons saw their hysterical and immensely-costly destruction of two Arab nations as profoundly moral acts of retribution for 9/11. In this sense, conservatism is self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing, and what we have seen in the last three years is different sects of aggrieved conservatives attacking each other with increasing savagery and calling each other ‘evil’, while we liberals sit on the sidelines saying ‘huh?’ But my view of all this is, of course, a liberal one. Both the American neocons and the Arab fundamentalists would be outraged by the above paragraph, because their bodies and their personal experiences have taught them to know who is moral and who is evil, and to them, liberals just don’t get it and are therefore morally weak and ‘evil’ as well. If you’re not on the side of America/Allah/God/Whoever, you’re on the side of terrorism/our enemy/Satan/evil. If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Just as the conservatives will never convince me (even if I now, at my late age, were to become a personal victim of violence) that I’m immoral and encouraging the ‘enemy’ because I don’t support pre-emptive wars, anti-abortion laws, capital punishment, the right to bear arms, the war on crime, the war on drugs, three strikes laws, an eye for an eye, drowning government in a bathtub, confrontation above consensus, untrammeled ‘free’ trade, blind patriotism, reckless deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and holy, ‘family values’, gay-bashing, repression of civil liberties in times of ‘war’, feminist-bashing, increased military spending, and the right to beat one’s children — so will I never convince conservatives of the opposite. They see me as naive and weak, or worse. I see them as psychologically damaged to the point they can no longer see clearly. And that, ultimately, was my conclusion about the “angry, disgusted” gentleman who wrote to our community paper. Some personal experience has caused him to become so bitter, so blind, that he can’t see the trashy Wal-Mart and the strip malls of discount ‘dollar stores’ and the boarded-up shops and the shoddy, pathetic homes and the loud, polluting, interminable traffic congestion and the staggering ugliness and numbing mediocrity of the town he’s lived in all his life, but he can see a small group of young people, one of whom perhaps spray-painted something on his whitewashed wall and then, seeing the owner coming, sneered or laughed at him and fled. And with that one personal incident, all the real problems of the world and their real root causes and the desperately-needed solutions vanished and all that was left was a Moral Vacuum and the personal rage and anger and feeling of helplessness and victimization, and the fight between Good and Evil. I could be a pessimist and confess that the conservatives are bound to win, because as the world gets more crowded and hence more violent, dangerous and filled with catastrophe this will breed more conservatives (and because conservatives are now breeding, on average, much larger families than liberals). But as a liberal, I can’t be too pessimistic. As a liberal I believe that all humans are born and remain inherently ‘good’, or at least start out undamaged. We are all born liberals. We have to be trained to be conservatives. |
July 22, 2004
CRITICAL THINKING
 I‘ve mentioned on these pages that, once my three books are complete, one of the things I’d really like to do next is to teach young people three things:
Earlier this week I described how I’d like to teach The Truth About Nature, using Model Intentional Communities — because you teach people by showing them what to do, not telling them, and because you learn better when you participate rather than just reading or observing. I’ve also written a lot about Natural Enterprises. This article is about Critical Thinking, and how, I believe, we could learn to be better at it. First off, not all thinking is, or should be, critical. Both reflective thinking and creative thinking, for example, use very different processes. There are many university courses that teach you how to think critically, even one that you can take online. My ‘minor’ in university was philosophy, so I took quite a few of them. I found them pretty academic, and unnecessarily hard and unintuitive to master. One of the best models I’ve found of the critical thinking process is the one from Dartmouth’s Composition Center that I’ve illustrated above. So, a young person visiting a Model Intentional Community, for example, would do her homework, observe and participate during the visit, consider both what she was told and shown (“this is a better way to live”) and what she was not told (“what’s the dropout rate?”), draw inferences (“they seem to be having fun and really believe in what they’re doing”; “having wilderness so close does seem healthy and inspiring”; “this is too radical a departure from the way I live for me to want to do personally”), challenge and evaluate her and others’ assumptions (“maybe living in the city is the real ‘radical departure’ “; “this model doesn’t appear to be scalable”), and form tentative opinions (“this is an important experiment, but I don’t think I could live this way”). That could be the end of it. Or, she might have to report back to class on her visit, or might decide to talk to friends about her visit, so she would then develop supporting arguments for the tentative opinions she had come to, and challenge those arguments, and their refutations, in her own mind and in conversations with others. Following such a process would prevent two opposing critical thinking failures: in this case writing off the Intentional Community as a bunch of wackos (perhaps based on what others said to her before her visit), or becoming so enthralled she becomes blind to the Community’s problems and refuses to go home. So critical thinking is always a balancing act. It acknowledges that things (and people) usually are the way they are for a valid reason, and that at the same time just because something is ‘common wisdom’ doesn’t mean it shouldn’t change, perhaps radically. Balance doesn’t always lead to middle-of-the-road opinions, but it does require continuous skepticism. Our culture has its own biases, and one of them is that ‘rational’ thinking is ‘sounder’ and preferable to both emotional thinking and relying on one’s instincts when forming opinions or making decisions. I don’t share this view. There are times when we can over-rationalize a situation, and when drawing on our emotional intelligence (“she says she’s happy here, but you can see in her face that she isn’t”) or our intuition (“this place is unhealthy, though I can’t put my finger on how I know that”) leads to more useful opinions and decisions, as hard as they may be to defend in our logic-biased human language. But I don’t think this invalidates the Dartmouth model: Even if the synthesis, the challenging and the analysis we do may be subconscious or emotional, the process remains unchanged and may actually be richer and more valuable for the inclusion of these ‘irrational’ elements. A while ago I wrote an article on media ‘spin’ describing how, using techniques like selective emphasis, judgement-charged wording, and omission, a reader could be led to utterly invalid opinions and conclusions, and that sometimes neither the writer nor the reader is conscious of their role in the deception. Take a quick re-read of the study of the NYT coverage that I cited in that earlier post. How was the critical thinking process perverted in this article? The synthesis process (compiling and organizing the facts) was confounded because the writer was deceived about and hence misreported the facts. Some of the people (like President Clinton) that the writer quoted said things based on unsupported assumptions (perhaps based on political expediency). And the NYT writer’s own conclusion (that the 1998 bombing of the Sudan pharma plant was a justifiable anti-terrorist action), which was based on incomplete and erroneous information (and perhaps that writer’s faith that Clinton wouldn’t lie on something that important), allowed him to bias the reader by what he wrote, by what he didn’t write, and by how and in what order he wrote it. The result is that the vast majority of people in the West concluded, erroneously, that this devastating act, based on either a horrendous intelligence error or deliberate criminal deception, which caused untold and lasting horror for many Sudanis, was a justifiable and relatively harmless action. It would take extraordinary critical thinking skills to have been able to come to an appropriate conclusion in this instance. I remember at the time I was completely taken in. I was overly generous in my trust of Clinton, because he was being subjected to the outrageous Republican witch-hunt at the time. I had read about the government genocide in Sudan so I was inclined to believe that they might disguise a bioweapons plant as a pharmaceutical plant. And there were no obvious clues in the NYT coverage of the event (or other, mostly derivative articles in the mainstream media) to make me skeptical. It was really only the fact that I read a lot of the alternative press, whose coverage did raise doubts in my mind about what had happened, that caused me to change my opinion. Until then, I just wasn’t thinking critically. There was a very interesting study done in California in 1990 called Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction. The study drew together about 60 leading thinkers on the subject. You can read more about it here. In essence it said that effective critical thinking requires a combination of three things:
In other words, you need to acquire these skills, be disposed to use them, and apply them in a disciplined way. I think our educational system tends to teach, and even require, students to be passive, but there are many opportunities in life to exercise these cognitive skills, and in my experience they improve with practice, not classroom training. So I wouldn’t be inclined, in teaching these skills to young people, to do much more than give them some interesting exercises to practice them. I think we’re all naturally curious, and once students realize they have these intellectual muscles I think they’ll be self-aware enough to start exercising them. I’m not sure you can teach critical spirit or intellectual rigour — it tends to be attitudinal and contextual (for example, I care a lot about whether Bush is lying to us, but much less about whether he’s clinically psychopathic, so a discussion on the former will energize my critical spirit and intellectual rigour while a discussion of the latter probably won’t). What I think really needs to be taught is critical thinking as a defensive skill. We all think logically, but we can be fooled. Inadvertently or maliciously. If I were to design a Critical Thinking course it would quickly cover the basic cognitive skills, and provide some exercises for students to get these muscles working, and would then focus entirely on learning to challenge intellectual deception. It would be almost entirely case-study and exercise-based, and would focus on the two principal media of intellectual deception: (a) ‘political’ speeches and editorial writing, and (b) advertising. As citizens, we need to learn to think critically about what we’re told by those with a political axe to grind. Politicians, writers and speakers of rhetoric of every political stripe, editorial writers, lobby groups and lawyers, and those in their employ and under their control (like the major commercial media) all essentially make their living by spinning the truth, by deception and distortion. They are not interested in balance, so we need to learn to challenge and balance what they tell us. And as consumers, we need to learn to think critically about what we’re told by those with an economic interest in deceiving us. Corporations, advertising agencies, stock and real estate scam artists, brokers, Ponzi and pyramid schemers, and promoters also make their living by spinning the truth, to sell their product, so we need likewise to learn to challenge and balance what they tell us. Success in such a program would be students who could deconstruct an unfair editorial, an inflammatory stump speech, a talk-show diatribe, a real estate huckster’s come-on, an infomercial, a televangelist’s sermon, or any of the other products of those con artists who prey on our lack of critical thinking to separate us from our reason or our money. The last class in the course would be to dissect an infomercial — some of them are powerfully seductive, and use every trick in the book. It’s a survival skill we all need.
|
July 21, 2004
RAISE YOUR STANDARDS!
 When I was young, the quality of Japanese merchandise was so poor that many consumers began to boycott Japanese goods. Consumer groups warned that, although these shoddy goods were cheap, they were actually poor value for money because they lasted only one-fifth as long as products costing only twice as much. Eventually the spontaneous consumer rebuff of poor quality worked: Japanese manufacturers were starved and shamed into improving the quality of their practices and components, and now have a reputation for high quality. But how soon we forget. We are now barraged with cheaply made, poor quality products and services from both domestic and third world suppliers, and this time we appear a lot more timid about objecting to it, and about demanding better. To understand what’s behind this (no, it’s not a conspiracy) we need to appreciate the economics that produce this declining quality in today’s global, oligopolistic marketplace:
Inevitably this has resulted in much lower product quality, poor or non-existent service, less value for money, domestic unemployment, and unwanted garbage. But it’s happened so slowly that you probably haven’t noticed that as large corporations have been lowering their standards, they’ve gradually coerced you into lowering yours as well. Anyone who blows the whistle on this fraud (that’s exactly what it is — an intentional deception of consumers) is sued by an army of corporate lawyers (as in the famous Nike case where that company sued for the right to lie to consumers about its sweatshops, and the pending Suzuki case where Consumers’ Union has been sued for reporting safety defects on Suzuki SUVs). Anyone who tries to get around this high-price, low-quality quandary by creating their own markets (knock-offs and file-swappers for example) is also sued. And all because the management of these companies are constantly forced by greedy shareholders (that’s us!) to use any method at their disposal, whatever the consequences, to increase profits by utterly-unsustainable double-digit amounts every year. Sound like a ‘bubble’ to you? Here are just a few examples:
As consumers, we can either wait for the bubble to burst, and the stock market to move down to more reasonable levels (taking half of our savings with it, alas), or we can start raising our standards and refuse to put up with this crap. What are some of the things we can do (without being sued)?
Corporations won’t raise their standards until and unless we raise ours. And they won’t take responsibility if we don’t. We’re being inundated with messages to make our voice count in the ballot booth this year. We need to make it count in the corporate boardrooms and shopping malls as well. The best way to do that is to teach them what we taught the Japanese — that we won’t buy junk at any price. We have our standards. It’s time to live up to them. Just do it? Just don’t buy it. |
July 20, 2004
FINANCING YOUR BUSINESS ORGANICALLY
 (Seventh part of a series, and of an upcoming book entitled Natural Enterprise)
In a traditional start-up, your advisor or accountant works with you to project your cash flow. To do that they’ll take your forecast revenues and expenses, and adjust them for the normal collection period and payment period, and then add in the up-front and ongoing capital costs (premises, equipment, intellectual property etc.) They’ll then tell you you need at least three types of financing:
Financing basically has two forms: debt, which carries a fixed interest rate and is usually repaid according to a set schedule, and equity, which may or may not pay dividends, and which carries with it the rights and benefits of ownership, including a share of the after-tax profits of the business. There are some hybrid forms of financing that offer creditors the benefits of both debt and equity, especially in high-risk situations. Most financing for new and entrepreneurial businesses is extremely expensive, requiring effective rates of return of 10-20% and even 30% in some cases, and creditors often demand a say in how the company’s money is spent, and reserve the right to demand repayment of their investment at any time. No surprise, then, that the relationship between entrepreneurs and their lenders/investors is often adversarial and anxiety-provoking. These investors, the people with the money, don’t particularly care whether entrepreneurs want or need their money or not. They have low-risk, low-return alternatives for their money, and they are able to demand very high returns from businesses that want them to take a risk. That’s how they made their money. Bankers offer more reasonable rates but simply won’t accept any risk at all, and will routinely sink businesses by cashing in loans or jacking up interest rates the first time the security or cash flow of the business fails their very stringent tests. Although it’s popular to blame banks and investors for torpedoing and gouging small businesses, and there are some predatory practices out there, the root problem of entrepreneurial cash flow is more often the way entrepreneurial businesses are launched in the first place. Borrowing money or issuing equity before you start a business may allow you to launch the business faster, and give you more room for error, but it’s an unnatural, costly and stressful way of establishing an enterprise. Natural Enterprise differs from traditional business (even traditional entrepreneurial business) in two critical ways:
These differences have important implications for how the business is financed. Let’s take a look at the three types of financing that traditional businesses use, and see how Natural Enterprises handle them. Seed Capital: This is the most difficult and expensive type of capital to raise. It is used for purposes like set-up of premises and tooling of equipment, development of prototypes, initial advertising, promotion, legal and professional services, licenses and similar start-up costs. Most of this money is spent before the company begins receiving any cash from product sales. These costs are almost always under-estimated, and actually represent start-up losses that many new businesses never recover from. Financing organically is the process of minimizing or even eliminating these losses. This can be done by:
Capital Financing: Leasing instead of buying allows you to amortize the costs and the cash outflows over the same period as the revenues, so you need no ‘long-term’ capital loans. Or, as with seed capital, an older, cash-rich partner may choose to contribute capital assets to the enterprise in exchange for investing less hours into it, so the cost of capital to the enterprise is very low but the ROI to the investing partner is better than he or she can get in the bank. Working Capital Financing: Receivables can be sold or ‘factored’ to a bank on a revolving short-term basis, essentially converting these assets into cash that can be used to pay current liabilities to suppliers. Inventories in most entrepreneurial businesses are negligible, since most such businesses make products to custom specifications and on a just-in-time basis — the inventory is only bought or made when it has already been sold, so the customer effectively finances it. There are many other creative ways of funding the business when it cannot be financed organically. With a cautious spending strategy, and reinvestment of profits, most Natural Enterprises shouldn’t need to borrow often, or for long periods, or have to give up equity at all. It’s been said that many entrepreneurs fail because they don’t ‘pay themselves first’. Many small businesses that are profitable on paper are, in fact, losing money, because the entrepreneur doesn’t pay himself or herself a reasonable wage, or reinvests their salary back into the business. When the entrepreneur can no longer afford that luxury, the business quickly runs out of cash, the bank seizes and sells the assets, and the entrepreneur’s ‘back wages’ and reinvestment are lost forever. This is an important cautionary lesson for entrepreneurs, whether theirs is a Natural Enterprise or not. Here’s a story of two businesses in the same line of business, one that made some classic start-up mistakes and failed quickly and spectacularly, and another that succeeded primarily by using organic financing and other Natural Enterprise techniques. The first business I described in the chapter on Avoiding the Landmines: A client of mine bought the North American rights to a new technology that would extrude a rugged, colour-fast plastic that could be used in decking, fencing, and other outdoor applications. He spent a fortune setting up the manufacturing plant. Problem is, he did this in the 1980s, when plastics were distrusted as ‘cheap’, wood was cheap, and creosote in pressure-treated lumber was not yet known to be a carcinogen. The big box building stores wouldn’t give him the time of day. Being 10-15 years ahead of the market cost him his life savings. Jump ahead 15 years. Another entrepreneur did his homework on the market and competition very thoroughly, recognized the unmet need, and bought the North American rights to a very similar product. He got the European distributor to set up and finance the North American manufacturing plant for him, repaying them from his royalties on sales. He spent virtually nothing on advertising, relying on viral marketing from satisfied customers and installers, and an excellent rating of the product in Consumer Reports. Essentially all he did was attend Home Shows in convention centres to show off samples of the product, hand out lists of local satisfied customers, and take orders from qualified installers and box stores who couldn’t get the product fast enough. The market was ready, and he had a multi-million dollar, very profitable business, which he and his partners own 100% outright, with not a single penny of debt, nor a single penny of his own money involved. Know of other successful stories or creative financing methods that have kept entrepreneurial businesses out of the clutches of absentee shareholders, usurious lenders, predatory investors and bankruptcy trustees? If so, please let me know, and I’ll acknowledge them in my book. Like most of the lessons of Natural Enterprise, this isn’t rocket science. It’s simply a combination of common sense, drawing on the experience and know-how of others, learning quickly and inexpensively from your mistakes, doing your homework, and being constantly creative. Being in debt is the scourge of most consumers, the cause of much grey hair and divorce and wage slavery, so it’s not surprising that it’s also the cause of failure and stress and unhappiness for many entrepreneurs. The best solution to debt is not to get into it in the first place, and, if you have to borrow, do it with no strings attached and repay it fast. As Mom always said, “Don’t spend money you don’t have”. It’s an essential lesson for entrepreneurs. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if a lot of troubled big companies and governments paid heed as well, instead of relying on us taxpayers to pay for their financing folly. |
July 19, 2004
EXPOSING THE YOUNG TO NATURE: COULD MODEL INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES CHANGE EVERYTHING?
 We have many myths about nature. Most of them are about ‘wildness’ — savagery, hardship, suffering. Most of our stories about nature are of the ‘Man vs. Nature’ variety, about ‘survival in the wild’, as if that were some extraordinary thing. We build these myths to keep people from running away from our well-meaning but damaged, terrible, unsustainable culture. Richard Manning in Against the Grain has just exploded another of the myths about our culture: He provides a compelling argument that the Great Wall of China, a work of staggering and gruelling human labour visible with a telescope from the moon, was not built, as we were told, to keep the Northern hunter-gatherer cultures (the ‘Mongol Hordes’) out, but rather to keep the stooped, slave labour in the ‘new’ civilization culture’s peasants in. If you really believe nature is savage, turn off the hysterical nature documentaries and read Bernd Heinrich’s Winter World, about how, even in Northern winters, even the tiniest ‘wild’ animals live joyful, carefree, comfortable lives. And then read David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous to find out how you, too, can reconnect with lovely, peaceful, easy, sustainable nature. The myths we teach our impressionable children about nature, from dragon fables to Old Yeller, are usually about nature’s terror and the need to defend and return back ‘home’ to our ‘safe’ civilization. There is an astonishing amount of animal cruelty in children’s stories, and it is an extremely predatory and desensitizing indoctrination technique. We reinforce these dreadful lies about nature’s savagery by sending our children to under-supervised day-care operations called Summer Camps, which, despite their locations and stated objectives, are not at all about nature, but rather deplorable and usually incompetent immersion courses in social skills. At least the British are honest enough to do this without pretext of it being a ‘natural’ experience: Their social indoctrination is called Boarding School and occurs principally indoors. Whatever its intention, the principal effect of Summer Camp is to untether children from their parents’ protection and their need for privacy, and force them to ‘get along’ with others, find their place in the social pecking order of their ‘peers’. For the shy, the weak, the uncoordinated, the physically and emotionally scarred (and that’s most children) it can be living hell. For psychopathic children and predatory adults, its lack of supervision provides the ideal environment for honing their manipulation skills on unprotected and vulnerable victims. Whatever this may be, it is certainly no way to introduce a child to nature. Even psychopathic adults use the ‘natural experience’ cover to prey upon weaker adults. This activity was most famously depicted in the film White Mile, where the aggressive company CEO (played by Alan Alda) bullies younger staff who want to ‘get ahead’ to go on a ‘character-building’ white-water rafting trip where they are absolutely at his mercy, and where nature is set up as the straw-man enemy. This psychological brutality is also evident in many cults which use social isolation and deprivation in a pseudo-’natural’ setting to break down resistance to the cult leader’s propaganda. I recently witnessed a plane-load of teenagers returning from a six-month ‘working field trip’ billeted in peasants’ homes in Paraguay — these kids were raw with emotion and filled with horror and loathing at the thought of returning ‘home’ and ‘abandoning’ the poor Paraguayan families who had opened their homes and hearts to them. Absolute gut-wrenching culture shock. We humans are so easy to socially recondition, so vulnerable to programming and re-programming! Our psyches are so fragile that, especially with the young, we must take great care not to tear them even by the simple act of exposing them to new ideas. This is very dangerous stuff. Damn our adaptability. Not surprising, then, that most people view nature with great fear, as something to be conquered or survived. Most of us have no alternative experience of it. And not surprising that so many of the well-intended ‘communing with nature’ alternative living experiments have collapsed or been hijacked by psychopaths or megalomaniacs. If we were to start with young people, how could we expose them ‘naturally’ to nature: Teaching them gently the Spell of the Sensuous without so unhinging their psyches that they would be incapable of returning to civilized life and working within it, and without exploiting their ideological vulnerability? (I know, I’m a hopeless liberal — I refuse to use propaganda to advance the cause). Because if we don’t show them nature, what possible hope is there for our world when we can only romanticize (or demonize), idealize, try to imagine a natural way to live and love and be? We learn (especially as children) what we’re shown, not what we’re told. There are almost no remaining models of natural life to show them, to correct the entrenched, neolithic misperception of nature as something brutal, savage, dangerous, frightening, threatening, hard, and apart. As James Taylor puts it in his song Gaia, we are taught, and left with no alternative but to: Turn away from your animal kind,
Try to leave your body just to live in your mind, Leave cold cruel Mother Earth behind — GAIA, As if you were your own creation, As if you were the chosen nation, And the world around you just a rude and dangerous invasion. I was at a conference a week ago with some of the most creative and intelligent people on the face of the Earth, but when I talked to them of the importance of wilderness, these mostly urban geniuses had no idea what I was getting at — they could not imagine what I meant. I think we need to abandon the route of in-class nature documentaries and the one-day (or six-month) field trips (and ‘summer camps’), and instead invent and design something completely new: Model Intentional Communities that will give children and adults the opportunity to rediscover nature, and our true nature, first hand. Just as we save endangered species and try to build their populations back up in ‘natural’ settings, we should try to recreate, and show, alternative human cultures, so that people brought up in our monolithic and troubled culture can be exposed to people living in balance with wilderness. Not in order to learn how to ‘survive’ it, but to learn how to be part of and at peace with it. Glenn Parton talks about this in his essay Humans-In-The-Wilderness. I advocate the development of a human lifestyle in which people live in small villages sparsely scattered through a wilderness environment. Although this framework or groundplan is borrowed from aboriginal peoples, it is far more flexible than has been thought. We can devolve or scale-down modern civilization to closely fit ancient land use patterns without returning to the Stone Age.
So we’re not talking about a back-to-the-land commune that refuses to use technology and shuns the ‘civilized’ world, but rather a series of communities of, say, 100-150 people each, plus perhaps another 20 guests at any one time who would stay no longer than a month, and bring in new ideas and take away their learning of another way to live. These model communities would meld the best of do-more-with-less innovation and technology (the Internet, solar energy, hydroponics etc.) with the best of natural community (zero growth, 100% sustainability, everything recycled, no pollution, no hierarchy, LETS money, no private property or separate ‘family’ dwellings etc.) These communities would ‘use’ only a tiny proportion of ‘their’ land for human purposes, leaving the rest as wilderness for other creatures, for learning and exploration and discovery and reflection and connection but not exploitation. Their population density would vary depending on the carrying capacity of the area, but on average would probably not exceed one person per four acres (a globally sustainable level). Everyone would live as part of a self-sufficient, self-managed and self-selected community, and everyone would also live on the doorstep of wilderness. The people would work only as hard as they needed to, to be comfortable — perhaps an hour per day each (as primitive man did according to revisionist history, and certainly enough in a modern egalitarian society with the benefits of today’s technology). The rest of the day could be spent in leisure, in learning, in discovery, in making love (possibly, as Glenn suggests, with more than one partner, at the collective discretion of each community), in art, in writing or other expression — whatever each individual wanted to do. Members would be free to travel, and through the Internet and communications media and visitors there would be lots of interaction with other Model Intentional Communities and with the ‘outside world’, but if they stayed away too long they would be asked to give up their membership in the community. What would be needed to make this work would be someone to donate the land, without recourse or obligation, and some self-selection mechanism for determining who the members of the communities would be. Building on a small standard set of inviolable principles to ensure egalitarianism, no-growth, and wilderness protection, each community could develop its own rules and code of conduct (or operate without rules, if it so chose). It would probably take some time, and learning from failure, before these model communities would stabilize and be ready to accept visitors — their only obligation to the civilized world. Now imagine a young person exposed to such a community for a month in adolescence or high school. She would probably find it fun (certainly more than classwork, anyway), charming, stimulating, but not appealing enough to want to stay. But when she graduated and realized the devil’s bargain of civilization — the trade-off of ecocide and wage slavery and emotional suffocation in return for ‘financial security’, she might well decide then to join an existing Model Intentional Community, or start her own, spreading out and refusing to buy the crappy consumer products and over-priced postage stamp building lots that drive the current economy. In short, she, and many or most or all of her similarly-exposed classmates, might walk away — millions each year, until diverse Model Intentional Communities flourish across the globe, and the old economy, with no ‘consumers’ left to sustain it, crumbles away, and with it the old politics and the old social rules and the old hierarchies and the old education systems, and a new culture that values wilderness and well-being rises in its place. That’s my dream. It cannot work, of course, in a world of six billion people, let alone the 12-14 billion we are likely to see by the end of the century. But if we show people another model now, a better way to live, maybe it’s not impossible to believe that people will willingly, eagerly reduce their family sizes to no more than one child per female adult, so that, within a couple of centuries, our population is down below one billion and we can all live this way. We could therefore do what early ‘civilizing’ cultures like the Anasazi and Incans perhaps did, when, after experimenting with urban civilized culture, they suddenly and inexplicably walked away from their cities and returned to a non-hierarchical and natural life. What a valuable education that could turn out to be. |
July 18, 2004
HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD READING LIST
 In Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn says:
People will listen when they’re ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren’t ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don’t preach. Don’t waste time with people who want to argue. They’ll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.
When presenting a new idea, you don’t have to have all the answers. It’s better to say ‘I don’t know’ than to fake it. Make people formulate their own questions. Don’t take on the responsibility of figuring out what their difficulty is. We each internalize information differently. If you don’t understand a question, keep insisting they explain it until it’s clear. Nine times out of ten they’ll supply the answer themselves.
Above all, listen. Your close attention is sometimes more important than your articulateness in winning converts. And learning is always a good thing.
Here’s the list — 56 books and articles that forever changed my worldview, and my purpose for living:: What Life was Really Like Before Civilization: Revisionist History
What’s Going On Under our Noses: The Real News
About Gaia: What Nature is Really About
Radical Analysis, Radical Solutions (these are the most important readings, but you probably won’t ‘buy’ their arguments unless you’ve first read much of the material above)
Toolkit for Change: Knowledge We Can Use to Save the World
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July 17, 2004
AMERICAN PROGRESSIVES GET ANGRY, AND BUSY
 A few interesting lefty sites to look at as weekend reading:
The indomitable Bill Moyers tells why progressives should be angry, and not complacent, about what has happened to the political, social, educational and economic systems in the US in the past few decades. My favourite excerpts: A profound transformation is occurring in America: the balance between wealth and the commonwealth is being upended. By design. Deliberately. We have been subjected to what the Commonwealth Foundation calls ìa fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power.î From land, water and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift toward private and corporate control. And with little public debate. Indeed, what passes for ëpolitical debateí in this country has become a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on ñthe not-so scrupulous business of getting and keeping power in order to divide up the spoils…Letís face the reality: If ripping off the public trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the poor; if driving the country into deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until the labor force resembles a nation of serfs ñ if this isnít class war, what is? Itís un-American. Itís unpatriotic. And itís wrong…What we need is a mass movement of people like you. Get mad, yes ñ thereís plenty to be mad about. Then get organized and get busy. This is the fight of our lives.
And he quotes this gem from Time magazine: ìWhen powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But itís ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you donít contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of Americaís tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. Youíre compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. Youíre barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast, the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails
them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.î This is part of the Demos website. Thanks to GentleBreeze’s excellent blog for the link. And once they’re angry enough, American Progressives now have an organizing body to do something about this travesty: The Progressive Vote PAC’s United Progressive Alliance is working at the grassroots level to reform the Democratic Party into a genuinely progressive party, or at least get some progressive planks in its platform, from the bottom up. |
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THE CONFERENCE BOARD ON INNOVATION
 The Conference Board of Canada recently conducted a survey that revealed six common features of “highly innovative” firms (those that get more than 20% of their revenues from new products).. The six features:
These aren’t rocket science, or particular surprising findings, but from my personal observation some or all of these six features are not only often absent from large organizations, but have often been abandoned by such organizations as part of the past few years of cost-cutting and ‘rationalization’. I have been astonished to hear senior executives of large organizations essentially say they can no longer ‘afford’ innovation — that is has become a luxury that does not engender enough short term return on investment to warrant any expenditure. This is classical large corporate myopia, of course — since you’re rewarded only for what is measured in the latest fiscal quarter, you’re overwhelmingly tempted to outsource, offshore, slash staff, eliminate training and otherwise cut costs that will increase short-term profits at the expense of longer-term viability. Any investment in infrastructure — new technology, knowledge, fundamental research, education, support processes that improve front-line worker productivity — is frowned upon. It’s insanely dysfunctional behaviour, but increasingly commonplace in corporations driven by tyrannical demands of shareholders for constant double-digit profit growth to justify wildly inflated stock prices. And just like the parent who tells his child that he has to go out to work at 18, rather than investing in a university education, this short-sightedness will have profound and lasting long-term negative consequences. When will the overpaid clods in the corner offices learn that you can’t cut your way to greatness? |
July 16, 2004
THE CONSEQUENCES OF FAILURE: WHAT ECO-COLLAPSE MIGHT LOOK LIKE
 Several readers have asked me to explain what I have called eco-collapse, the cascading series of catastrophic environmental and cultural failures that most scientists believe will start to occur unless we radically rethink and correct our unsustainable behaviour. Unlike the Club of Rome and the Malthus/Ehrlich population doomsayers, I’m not going to predict that this will happen in our lifetimes (though I think we’ll see the early symptoms), nor that a single cause or effect will dominate the collapse. I do think, based on this chart of population and resource consumption, that collapse is likely to occur by the end of this century, and that therefore the great-grandchildren of the baby boom generation will likely bear the brunt of it.
If you study history, and specifically the history of overcrowded areas, you can learn the past consequences of the type of conditions that exist already in much of the world today, and get an idea what the elements of eco-collapse will be. In no particular order, and not for the easily depressed, the ten elements are:
The Flashpoints: The frequency of each of these ten elements is likely to increase slowly over the coming decades, amplified by the reality that many of these problems are self-sustaining, and reinforce and precipitate the other elements, in a cascading sequence like we saw in the first half of the 20th century. Throughout history, the main locations of violence and catastrophic loss have usually been those with at least two of (a) high population density, (b) high population growth rate, and (c) high utlilization of limited resources (arable land, energy, water etc.) Three areas to watch, therefore, are the Mideast/South Central Asia area, China, and Latin America. These are all under massive environmental stress already — horribly polluted and degraded and under huge population and resource stress. Many of the ten elements above will thrive in these areas, so watch for these areas to explode first — ‘the beginning of the end’. The Last Straw: The wild cards in how all of this will play out are human innovation and technology. Remarkable human resourcefulness has made fools of Malthus, Ehrlich and the Club of Rome. I don’t believe famine will be our undoing. There is currently a veritable (though highly vulnerable) glut of human food on Earth — obesity is now commoner and a greater killer of humans than starvation. I think human ingenuity will keep food production high enough that we won’t starve before we kill each other off. I also think that we will kill each other off before nature even comes to bat with the devastating consequences of global warming. (So save your money and don’t go see the incredibly silly Day After Tomorrow). We have three much greater vulnerabilities: (#2) Diseases, (#5) War and (#8) Terrorism, all of which already fill the daily newspapers, any (or a combination) of which will, I believe, prove to be our undoing rather than the other seven elements. Once the world starts to be pummelled regularly by famines, crop failures, desertification, water scarcity, economic depressions, weather catastrophes, and cultural collapse, we’ll be so caught up in physical, social, economic and political turmoil that we may not even see the knockout punch coming — India/Pakistan nuclear war, a major bioterrorist attack, or emergence of a new superdisease to take the place of Smallpox and the Plague, or some similar rapidly escalating catastrophe that will simply get out of control. There simply won’t be time for us to step back from the brink as we did at least twice in the 20th century. Whether this holocaust is nuclear or biological, the result will be what scientists call an Extinction Event — a sudden drastic change in Earth’s absolute biomass and its constituent makeup. There will be a huge drop in human population as well as a similar drop in the populations of all the species that have cast their lot in with us — the major animals and high-carb grains we eat, plus the pets, rodents, insects, weeds and diseases that feed on or thrive in dense urban and monoculture environments. Whether the rest of life on Earth is better or worse as a result of this Extinction will depend on its direct cause — if it’s a human-specific disease like Smallpox, the rest of the planet’s life could recover and thrive quickly, whereas if it’s nuclear war or an undifferentiated bioweapon, its impact on the whole ecosystem could be as profound as the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs and much of the rest of the planet’s species 60 million years ago. Scientists currently seem to believe that the next cycle of life will be dominated by birds and insects — creatures that can fly above the devastation and cover long distances to find scarce food. Apres nous les dragons. Nature abhors absolutes, and it is unlikely that either humans or our co-dependent life species will be completely wiped out by an Extinction Event. At least not immediately. Depending on the nature and cause of the Event, the human survivors could find themselves with a second chance — back in an Eden with the opportunity to build a new culture and society that melds a simple hunter-gatherer-gardener economy together with those technologies still relevant in a post-apocalyptic world. Or, if the Event leaves the planet seriously poisoned, we could instead be a marginalized, poorly-adapted, struggling minor part of a new global ecosystem dominated by those species better suited than we to what we have wrought, until evolution brings our wretched history to an ignominious end — a whimper after the bang. |
