 I have just revamped my blog taxonomy, retaining but renaming the 6 main categories, reducing the number of second-level categories (so the table of contents takes up less space on the right sidebar) and increasing the number of third-level categories (so it’s easier to browse the table of contents to find what you’re looking for). I hope those of you (and judging from the number of hits there are many) who use the table of contents find this reorganization helpful. I will be adding the last month’s articles to the revised table of contents by Sunday, so we’ll be all up to date. Just in case anyone is interested, my new blog taxonomy is depicted graphically above. These are the 54 subjects I care enough to write about. I’m surprised that, except for the Politics posts, few of my 1000+ articles have lost their currency. If I were to edit a magazine, this is how it would be laid out. Built to last, to keep, and to provide ideas and insight you can actually use. I apologize to those who have signed up for my blog by e-mail through the Bloglet form in the right sidebar. You won’t get e-mails until the owner of Bloglet replies to my many messages and gives me ‘control’ of the Bloglet RSS feed for How to Save the World. And since the rumour seems to be that he’s deceased, I’m not holding my breath. There’s a new German RSS-by-e-mail app just starting up, that I’m beta testing. As soon as it’s upgraded to include graphics and formatting I’ll put it up in place of Bloglet and write more about it. Some updating of the blogroll is also overdue — I will try to get to that this weekend. Thanks for your patience with the Salon Comments Server — it took awhile for the switchover but it seems to be getting back up to speed. They’re still working on fixing the line breaks problem (in the meantime, put in <br><br> for a paragraph break with a blank line). Those of you with ISPs who block disclosure of your IP address will still not be able to post comments — apparently the only way to block comment spam etc. is to capture the submitter’s IP address before the comment post is accepted. If you get blocked, just e-mail your comment to me with the date of the article it apples to and I’ll post your comment for you. That’s it for the blog housekeeping. Now back to writing. |
April 22, 2005
My Blog Taxonomy, and some Technical Notes
April 21, 2005
Open Space Conversations
 The Idea: Some suggestions for making conversations more graceful, polite and productive, drawing on Open Space protocols. Over the past week, I’ve spent at least twenty hours in conversations, and had lots of opportunity to practice what I preached in my recent article on Better Conversation. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m coming along very slowly. Move me from written language, which can be composed carefully, and where no one needs to see your horrific first drafts, to oral language, where you can’t take anything back, and where every silence hangs like an accusation of inarticulateness, and I’m way out of my element. I’m really struck at how apt the ‘dance’ analogy is:
Since most of my conversations are on Skype, I’ve posted some practice reminders on my laptop, to work on during conversations:
This last one is tough — what if there’s something else you want to talk about (or worse, nothing else you want to talk to this person about. How do you gracefully change the topic or end a conversation? This got me thinking about Open Space, and the protocols for that process, which is substantially a process for conversation. Could these protocols be applied to informal conversations (and even to various types of meetings)? Here’s what I came up with:
I have several more conversations slated for the next few days. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go write some invitations. |
April 20, 2005
George Bush, Closet Anarchist
 The Idea: The actions of George Bush suggest a frontier-mentality faith in the individual’s ability to do anything better than the state. But the plan built on that faith is so naive, unworkable, and tinged with religious fanaticism and intolerance that it should be easy for opponents to present a vastly better one, much more to the electorate’s liking, yet still based on faith in and respect for the individual.Lately this article by Mike Gecan in the Boston Globe has been generating a lot of blog buzz (formatting seriously messed up, but this seems to be the only version online). I thought it was interesting, but not for its main message (that Bush opponents don’t take religious faith seriously and hence alienate swing voters). The message that interested me was that Bush opponents don’t take faith in the individual seriously. Now I know George Bush is hardly your poster boy for libertarian anarchism, but think about it a minute. Almost everything he has done is consistent with a (naive, idealistic) faith that individuals left to their own resources will do a better job than institutions. He destroyed the governments of two nations and has left them to rebuild themselves. He wants to dismantle government and social institutions like social security. He would like to privatize education. He seems hell-bent, with the assistance of Ayn Rand’s most devout worshipper, Alan Greenspan, on bankrupting the US government so that it will no longer be able, or trusted, to do anything. He chants “freedom” and “democracy” with absolutist fervour. In his abhorrence and distrust of government and central authority, he sounds not at all unlike Timothy McVeigh. He is fiercely opposed to gun control of any kind. In the mistaken belief that there is such a thing as a ‘free’ market economy, he espouses deregulation and a private ‘ownership’ economy. On the surface, his beliefs and actions are entirely consistent with libertarian-anarchist philosophy. His decisions are those of someone who thinks even no government is better than the tyranny of Saddam or the Taliban — and better than the governments of Iran, Syria, and most of the other nations on the planet. He has enormous faith in the “little guy’s” ability to rise from the ashes, as long as institutions of power and interference are kept at bay. So what about the Patriot Act and his opposition to the right to die, to abortion and to gay and lesbian rights? My sense is that he is very much an ‘ends justifies the means’ guy — he evidently has no qualms about stealing elections, lying and committing fraud to achieve a ‘higher goal’. So what is the ‘end’ of the Patriot Act? Simple: The expulsion of those who threaten the master plan of needing no government in America. And in his philosophy, the right to die, to abortion and to gay and lesbian rights are moral evils, not rights at all, and it’s deplorable that they are being upheld by government institutions — the judiciary and the constitution. In Bush’s perfect world, those that espoused such evils would be reformed, dismantled, executed or cast out by right-minded Americans, and he obviously fiercely resents public institutions that prevent divine law from being carried out. So running back to Washington to sign a bill to smack the judiciary for upholding the right to die is morally justified, while the millions being slaughtered in Darfur should be looking after themselves and ridding themselves of yet another loathsome government that sponsors such atrocities, rather than expecting some other government to intervene. Every man for himself. (Women, well, as the Bible tells us, they’re moral slackers and should do what they’re told.) There’s a bizarre consistency to all his actions. Yes, I know he has a psychopathic personality, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t capable of assembling a cogent moral philosophy and using it to drive his agenda forward. Remember, that German lunatic in the last century also had a consistent and quite persuasive, well-intentioned moral philosophy. The answer, as Gecan suggests, is that opponents need to provide a cogent moral philosophy that is simple, consistent with different American political frames (all styles of progressives, and libertarian conservatives — the authoritarian conservatives are beyond reach) and demonstrably more workable than Bush’s McVeigh-style extreme anarcho-libertarianism. That shouldn’t be too hard to do. It should be built on community rather than just individual, and on autonomy rather than charity, which would place it right in the American philosophical heartland and co-opt the great bulk of those who voted for Bush. And it need not be heartless or un-humanitarian — it merely needs to devolve its heart and its humanity and its economy to the local community, and distance itself from centralized command-and-control institutions. And what about the terrorist threat? As the Internet model has shown, the best way to protect yourself from attack, short of miraculously solving the problems and diseases that cause perpetrators to launch them in the first place, is to move everything out of the centre, to the ends, so no single offensive can cause much damage, and so that resilience is high and almost instantaneous. Anarchism is a great theory. But we can’t get there the way Bush is trying to get there. Progressives, like conservatives, should have faith in the individual — to realize a fraudulent, ill-conceived and naive moral philosophy tinged with vicious religious intolerance when they see it, and to see the value of an alternative that is devolutionary, respectful, unpatronizing and generous. |
April 19, 2005
The Ten Greatest Impediments to Personal Change
 The Idea: The ten most common reasons people who want to change don’t. And some possible ‘cures’.
You know what you’d really like to do with your life. You know what you have to do to get there. You know why you’re unhappy — with your job, with your relationships, with your accomplishments, with your whole way of life. But like me, you’re still sitting there. In coming to grips with the reasons for my own inaction, tentativeness, and lack of courage, I’ve recently had quite a few conversations with others, most of whom have similarly struggled with achieving, or even getting started on, changes that they want to make in themselves and in their lives. Some of them thought they were happy with their lives until our conversation, and now not so much — I seem to have the effect of fomenting dissatisfaction in people. I’ve started to recognize some patterns in the reasons people give for not making personal changes that they really want to make. Here’s the Top Ten list:
Thanks to all that contributed to the advice on the right side of this chart (too many to mention). |
April 18, 2005
Is Emotional Neediness Destroying Our World?
 The Idea: Look at those who crave and hoard power, and who are indifferent to suffering and death and destruction, and you’ll probably find a psychopathic personality who has been tipped over the edge by lack of emotional connection. The lack of affection, and the neediness it breeds, may be the toxic seed that grows into the architects of the destruction of our world.
I confess I have struggled with Glenn Parton’s most recent pro-polyamory (free love) essays. It’s not the ideal that bothers me, it’s the amount of weight he puts on the idea: That if we all freely and unjealously found multiple sexual partners the basic problems of the world would be solved (I’m exaggerating, but not by much). This has bothered me especially because his earlier essays resonate so powerfully with me. So I’ve been giving it some thought and I think I see a reconciliation between his ideas and mine. I would argue that it is emotional neediness that underlies most of the antisocial, ecocidal behaviour that is destroying our world. I would acknowledge that a polyamory culture would be both a manifestation of a less emotionally needy world, and a means to reduce emotional neediness, though I doubt that it is either a necessary or sufficient condition to significantly reduce emotional neediness. First, some definitions. Needs versus wants. A need is a want that will lead to pain, illness or suffering if it is not met. Needs and wants can be physical (food, material possessions, sex), emotional (space, peace, natural connection, security, reassurance, to be loved, to be needed), or intellectual (share ideas and information). Nutritional food is a physical need. Personal possessions are physical wants. Sharing ideas and information are intellectual wants. Emotionally healthy people have few emotional needs other than the need for connection. Emotionally ill people, I would argue, have substantial emotional needs, bordering on the addictive. This article will attempt to present a theory of why there is so much emotional neediness in our modern world, and how this neediness is causing us to destroy our planet. I’m going to use myself as a case study, and I hope that this will help readers to understand the ‘frames’, the social worldview, underlying my argument. So I need to give you a brief history of my emotional life and health: I presume that as an infant I was needy, but that in the Gift Social Economy that was my world at that time I managed to somehow return the gifts of attention that my parents bestowed on me. As a baby I was attractive enough to be featured on the front page of the city paper. Until I was 8 or so that Gift Social Economy continued: The neighbourhood kids with whom I played were generous with their time and attentions, as was I. Everyone knew I was partial to one girl in particular, but to my knowledge there was no jealousy, as my infatuation never caused me to decline social interaction with anyone else. But then the Gift Social Economy gave way to a Competitive Market Social Economy: The cute girls began to hang out exclusively with the tall guys. The teachers began to favour the more obedient and diligent students as I grew bored with the lessons. My body grew slowly and awkwardly. I lacked, and didn’t learn, social graces and coordination, so I couldn’t dance or swim, was lousy at sports, and my face was ravaged by acne. My communication skills, written and oral, failed to develop. By the age of sixteen I was a shy, introspective teenager with few friends, and an average student. I was a daydreamer, and (showing my shattered ego and desperate need for ‘popularity’) I aspired to move to Australia and become a politician. I had nightmares, and I was anxious and unreasonably frightened of people and social interaction. And then at seventeen I discovered I loved poetry and literature and began to read, and then to write — unoriginal, banal stuff atrociously written at first, but it improved with practice and encouragement from a wonderful small group of peers. And my increasing reading breadth gave me more authors to mimic in style and vocabulary. After a year I had become an accomplished writer and I graduated from high school with several scholarships, a renewed sense of self-confidence, and utterly, hopelessly, intellectually in love. From that enormous and sudden emotional high the crash was precipitous. I loathed university — the idea of learning by sitting in a classroom and listening to someone talk seemed ridiculous to me. I was intellectually bored and emotionally numb. Then I went into the work-world and faced the humiliation of begging for crappy menial jobs. I sank into a serious depression (early 1970s — a lot of that going around then). Then I began to succeed in the work world, moving up quickly. My social life went quickly from non-existent to frenzied, exploiting the lingering remains of the ‘free love’ era for all it was worth. My ego recovered (over-recovered) and then, when I realized that there was no depth to any of these relationships, I crashed again. For a couple of years my few friends worried that I would commit suicide. And then I met Anita, and she pulled me up, told me to grow up, introduced me to her extraordinary, open, well-balanced children, and made me what I am today. I re-engaged with the world, worked hard and successfully, taught myself to be creative, and leveraged my ambition and skills into several promotions, until I once again hit the wall five years ago. My depression returned. I found my newest job, which tore me away from customers and had me working for a guy whose leadership style and vision were the antithesis of mine, to be ill-suited to my talents as a writer, an idea cross-pollinator, and a skilled coach of entrepreneurs. We moved to our new neighbourhood in the country, which I love, but my intellectual restlessness continued. It was filled in part by a voracious increase in reading and then by this weblog. I quit the job, and with it left the depression behind. I’m still struggling with my ‘Second Career’ decision, and I’m nervous about where my life is going, but I’m confident and happy. Even my growing sense of despair about where our world is headed can’t get me down. The three periods in my life when I lacked emotional connection — late childhood and adolescence, early twenties, late forties — led to emotional neediness, which in turn led to emotional illness (depression) and then to anti-social behaviour (withdrawal, anger etc.) That’s a bit of an oversimplification of my roller-coaster life, but it’s pretty accurate. I was lucky — three times I fell victim to emotional disconnection and three times I was rescued by those who cared, or to some extent rescued myself. I’ve always been blessed with great ‘support groups’. I’ve talked, especially in recent years, to dozens of people who recount this same downward spiral in themselves and/or many people they know — starting with being emotionally cut off, through exaggerated emotional neediness, emotional illness and anti-social, even pathological behaviour. It manifests itself in different ways but the pattern, illustrated in the top chart above, recurs with astonishing regularity. I’ve known a number of very wealthy people, and in those environments emotional disconnection seems almost endemic. Parents are detached in showing affection (or any other emotion) to their children, they’re often physically absent, the kids go to private schools where they associate only with others of their ‘station’, they learn all the social graces but never seem very comfortable with other people, almost as if they’ve lived their lives in a bubble. They tend to either conform to a disturbing degree or all-out rebel at some point in their lives, and substance abuse and other addictions are common among them in adolescence and early adulthood (sound like any politicians you know?) Then they fall into line and behave outwardly in an acceptable manner, but by then the damage is done. Most of them are psychopathic personalities:
When they got older and were handed power on a platter it further corrupted them, giving them employees and customers and voters and lackeys and sycophants and gold-diggers to abuse and cheat, land and natural resources to despoil, and the means to avoid responsibility for their actions and even avoid contact with those their corporate, political, economic and social damage hurt the most. These are behaviours of the emotionally disconnected, playing themselves out in dangerous ways. The few people I knew who were physically abused as children manifested nearly identical behaviours. All of these people hurt, in turn, orders of magnitude greater numbers of others. A disproportionate number end up in positions of power and influence, positions which seem to draw them, perhaps to serve as a salve for their emotional emptiness. “If you don’t want to connect with me emotionally”, they seem to be saying, “then I’ll get so powerful and so successful at manipulation and scheming you damned well won’t have any choice”. Rich or poor, power over someone is very important to them. Scratch a political tyrant, a corrupt business leader, a polluter, a pimp, a spouse or child or animal abuser, and nine times out of ten you’ll find that emotional hollowness, that vestige of disconnection. The vast majority of such people, for some reason, are male. As Kurt Vonnegut has argued, I suspect it’s because they’re such expert liars, and so manipulative, insecure, ambitious, addicted to power and needy for attention, that they end up holding a wildly disproportionate sway over political, economic, social, educational, media and other activity in our world, and as such their psychopathy is playing itself out in massive ecological and human destruction. Only an emotionally damaged psychopath would fly back from his private ranch to sign a bill to force nurses to keep a brain-dead woman alive indefinitely, yet knowingly wouldn’t so much as lift a finger to help the half a million in Darfur who are suffering from relentless and savage brutality, deprivation and overt genocide. How many unhappy couples do you know that are bound together in co-dependence rooted in emotional disaffection earlier in (or even throughout) their lives? He desperately needs to be loved, and if he’s not well placed enough or ruthless enough to build his fan base politically, economically, coercively, he will command it from the one he claims to love, and the children conceived with that love. He’s jealous, angry, yet somehow emotionally distant, insensitive. She, on the other hand, needs to be needed – and he’s the perfect antidote because he needs so badly. What possible hope is there for the children of such a dysfunctional relationship, with this horrific model the only one they know to follow when their emotional emptiness and need begins to manifest itself? So that’s the theory — neglect or ignore or abuse a child and he’ll grow up to ruin the lives, livelihoods and environment of hundreds or thousands, and will have children who will perpetuate the cycle. The answer lies not so much in polyamory as in community– a connected community (not the transient neighbourhoods of coincidence and convenience most of us live in today) where affection and attention is gifted generously, and where everyone feels emotionally whole, fulfilled, healthy, and secure. This in turn creates a virtuous cycle, as that emotional warmth and connection breeds generous, self-confident behaviours, behaviours that heal heartache,discharge fear and loneliness, and in so doing heal our whole planet . A planet where there is no need to destroy the world to fill the empty place inside. |
April 17, 2005
The Gift Economy
 The Idea: The Gift Economy offers us a means to learn, to understand, to take charge, and to change our world. It is a natural economy, steeped in millions of years of pre-civilization human culture and the culture of all life on Earth. If enough of us embraced it, the modern ‘market’ economy, built on the faulty and inhuman foundations of inequality, scarcity, false quantification of value, and acquisition, could not survive.
Several of the comments I have received about AHA! The Discovery & Learning Centre have been about the idea of reciprocality(my preferred word: the more common word ‘reciprocity’ now has an unfortunate connotation of negotiated market exchange rather than the simpler idea of sharing without obligation). I’ve explained that AHA! will have the effect of forcing down the ‘price’ of transfer of knowledge and ideas, and of leveling the value we put on every individual’s contribution to discovery and learning conversations, so that there is no ‘premium’ on the contribution of an ‘expert’, and so that great ideas and important knowledge are affordable to everyone. The end result could be, if we had the collective will to bring it about, a world in which everything is free, and everything has inestimable value. All of this is consistent, I think, with the (suddenly very popular) concept of the Gift Economy, which is not at all the same as an ‘exchange’ or even a barter economy. What is the Gift Economy? A seminal work on the subject was written over 20 years ago by Lewis Hyde, a book called The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. Hyde wrote: I speak of the inner gift that we accept as the object of our labor, and the outer gift that has become a vehicle of culture. I am not concerned with gifts given in spite or fear, nor those gifts we accept out of servility or obligation; my concern is the gift we long for, the gift that, when it comes, speaks commandingly to the soul and irresistibly moves us.
In her review of the book (which I have not yet read), JoAnn Schwartz writes: Hyde is interested in examining the effect our current immersion in the market economy and the myth of the free market has both on our view of gifts and on our ability to give and receive them. The market economy is deliberately impersonal, but the whole purpose of the ‘gift economy’ is to establish and strengthen the relationships between us, to connect us one to the other. It is this element of relationship which leads Hyde to speak of gift exchange as ‘erotic’ commerce, opposing eros (the principle of attraction, union, involvement which binds together) to logos (reason and logic in general, the principle of differentiation in particular). A market economy is an emanation of logos.
In a market economy, one can hoard one’s goods without losing wealth. Indeed, wealth is increased by hoarding— although we generally call it ‘saving’. In contrast, in a gift economy, wealth is decreased by hoarding, for it is the circulation of the gift(s) within the community that leads to increase— increase in connections, increase in relationship strength. Through this book, Hyde helps us focus on the importance of gifts, their flow and movement and the impact that the modern market place has had on the circulation of gifts. Here’s an explanation by Genevieve Vaughan of the fundamental difference between an ‘exchange’ or ‘market’ economy and a Gift Economy: The present economic system is based upon exchange, giving in order to receive. The motivation is self-oriented since what is given returns under a different form to the giver to satisfy her or his need. The satisfaction of the need of the other person is a means to the satisfaction of one’s own need. Exchange requires identification of the things exchanged, as well as their measurement and an assertion of their equivalence to the satisfaction of the exchangers that neither is giving more than she or he is receiving. It therefore requires visibility, attracting attention even though it is done so often that the visibility is commonplace. Money enters the exchange, taking the place of products reflecting their quantitative evaluation.
The very visibility of exchange is self-confirming, while other kinds of interaction — nurturing, unselfish and other-oriented gifts — are rendered invisible or inferior by contrast or negative description. What is invisible seems to be valueless, while what is visible is identified with exchange, which is concerned with a certain kind of quantitative value. Besides, since there is an equivalence asserted between what we give and what we receive, it seems that whoever has a lot has produced a lot or given a lot, and is, therefore, somehow ‘more’ than whoever has less. Exchange puts the ego first and allows it to grow and develop in ways that emphasize me-first competitive and hierarchical behavior patterns. This ego is not an intrinsic part of the human being, but is a social product coming from the kinds of human interaction it is involved in. So the exchange or ‘market’ economy is entrenched in the concepts of inequality, scarcity, quantifiable equivalence of value, and acquisition, while the Gift Economy is rooted in the concepts of parity, abundance, unquantifiability, generosity and connection. As Eric Raymond puts it: Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods. We can observe gift cultures in action among aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant food. We can also observe them in certain strata of our own society, especially in show business, science, Open Source and among the very wealthy.
In a ‘market’ economy, says Hyde, the highest status belongs to those who have acquired the most. In a Gift Economy, the highest status belongs to those who have given the most. But what is most important, he says, is that the gift must always move. This idea was recently popularized by the terrific little movie called Pay it Forward. Every gift is its own reward, but that reward is multiplied, without limit, when the gift, or any gift, is passed along to others. A story is a gift. Blogs are gifts. Ideas and insights and teaching and counsel are gifts. Conversations are gifts. Here is a gift from Chris Corrigan, Jack Ricchiuto and George Nemeth, a wonderful 45-minute Skypecast conversation (with George’s contribution unfortunately inaudible). I am paying it forward by linking to it and by summarizing below some excerpts I have taken from it, much of which are about the Gift Economy. Until you put something in front of people that they are hungry for, you can’t bring out the best in them. We all have a hunger for connection, for “mates” who understand our frames, our terms of reference.
Weblogs can create powerful virtual relationships. After reading them for awhile you come to “know” the author and when you then “meet” them you can then go to work with them right away. The media have stripped us of direct emotional connection to our world. We now look at the news anchor for clues on how to respond to the news. The media ‘mediate’ our emotional response to the outside world. When tribal elders witness Open Space they say “This is exactly how we used to meet”. Open Space is an indigenous technology, a technology of connection, allowing rapid emergence of understanding. When something is given, something is always inherently given back in exchange. But gifts work best when you pay them forward. You must find another place to use your learnings acquired from others — it’s this passing along that creates the Gift Economy. Scientists have long understood the Gift Economy, the networked way of giving their thinking to each other and relating with one another. This is where the real science happens. The Internet serves a similar purpose, as those who have tried unsuccessfully to make money or bottle up knowledge on the Internet have discovered. The Gift Economy is about ‘agency’ — you can’t be a passive consumer of gifts. Everyone has within them the capacity to contribute, and the network will only grow if everyone turns the gifts they have received to others. We need to learn to become aware of our own agency. A friend of [Chris'], a Lakota doctor, speaks of the ‘circle of courage’, and describes the way giving builds self-esteem and hence spirit. Everyone, he says, must build four ‘capacities’:
The ways in which we connect — these ‘technologies’, need to be in the service of presence. Open Space and similar technologies create the conditions for authentic presence. These technologies work best when they ‘go away’, when due to good process design the technology becomes invisible, transparent. Then, when you’re in it, it’s simple because it’s natural. It is just a part of the process. Good technologies provide ‘back porch aesthetics’ that enable natural conversation, comfort and connection. If we accept that we do not have all the answers then we acknowledge that each one of us has a crucial piece of the answer, and what is important is the aggregation and emergence of the pieces of truth each one of us carries. Here is a great gift from Yes! magazine by Beverly Feldman and Charles Gray: 37 ways you can participate in the Gift Economy. What else can we each do to bring about a Gift Economy? The most important things we can do are internal — transformation of the way we look at our world and its economic principles and the way we act towards others and the world in which we live. Chris calls it “passion bounded by responsibility”. Responsibility simply accepted, not thrust upon us. Passion that comes from understanding and the sense of personal capacity. We need to constantly engage ourselves and others in communication and connection, and fight furiously the media paradigm of passive consumption and the market-economy paradigm of only giving when we receive measurable fair value in return. We need to constantly invite each other to address the all-important question What do you really care about? When we engage each other in conversations about this question, we open up possibilities, we begin to feel and realize our own power, capacity, and mastery, we recognize that generosity has nothing to do with charity, and we sense the movement and strength of collective understanding, will and passion. We realize that together, collectively, collaboratively, we know more, and know better, than leaders, presidents, executives, economists, experts, and others who exploit our passivity to tell us what we should do and believe, and engender in us feelings of helplessness, dependence, and addiction. We have more capacity and power to act than all the multinational corporations and the tyrants and the state apparatus of control and repression. Perhaps AHA! will begin its mandate not only exemplifying the attributes and capacity of the Gift Economy but collaboratively helping to encourage and broaden that economy, enabling it to undermine the old economy and replace it with one of parity, abundance, generosity and connection, helping us to imagine and realize a world without money, without personal property, without poverty, without ‘economic diseases’ (those that kill thousands each week simply because the inexpensive and ubiquitous cures are unaffordable to half the world’s people). A world where the very idea that pollution, ecological destruction, loss of biodiversity, slavery and exploitation of humans and other animals could be ‘economic’, becomes simply absurd. As Chris says, “When each of us does something that is more true to who we really are, the collective impact of all these actions can have profound implications for the direction of our world.” |
April 16, 2005
US News of the Week
 Everyone Hates the US Media: Nicholas Kristof in the NYT covers a pair of new reports that indicates that Americans of all political stripes deeply distrust the mainstream media. Maybe the time for reconsidering the job of the media has come. Mad Cow in the US: There is growing evidence that the US has covered up incidents of Mad Cow disease. Is anyone really surprised? US Income Disparity Balloons Again: Pay increases for US CEOs last year again reached double-digit levels, with salary increases compensating for the drop in stock options. meanwhile pay increases for the average US wage-earned declined in real terms last year. The differential between the income of the elite and the average worker is now the highest anywhere since such statistics were first collected. Meanwhile, nothing of significance happened up here in Canada. We might have another election soon as a result of continuing revelations about our small-potatoes government fraud, which will almost assuredly (a) produce another, even more splintered, minority government, and (b) embolden the separatists in Quebec to make a last gasp effort to win a separation referendum. And last but not least, a bunch of people have sent me links to James Kunstler’s essays. They’re very entertaining and well-written, but they add no new information and are sure to further polarize the US population. What is it going to take for us to get past insane partisan politics and start working together to find real and lasting solutions to the crises we’re ignoring and the crises we’re precipitating? UPDATE: Two erroneous links fixed. |
April 15, 2005
More on AHA! The Discovery & Learning Centre
 The Idea: A day in the life (c. 2006) of AHA! The Discovery & Learning Centre, which I proposed on these pages last week.
I‘d like to thank everyone who commented on my AHA! proposal. I appreciate your candour that the concept is not sufficiently differentiated from other facilities and programs designed to encourage innovation, collaboration and learning. I especially thank reader Dave Davison for his great encouragement and the time he spent with me today hashing this out. I thought it would be useful to tell a few (hypothetical) stories about how AHA! would be used and what it would do, to articulate its unique attributes better. So imagine we have been up and running a while — here are some of the successes I envision we will have: J is the CEO of one of the world’s largest banks, and he was attracted to AHA! by the diversity, the intellectual and creative power of AHA!’s ‘members’, which now include Nobel scientists, Pulitzer authors, corporate kingpins and former state presidents. That ‘people power’ was in turn attracted by AHA!’s reciprocality model: You help me on my project, and bring your unique experience and insight to it, and I’ll stay around after the project to help you on yours. The price tag is a sliding scale based on the size and profitability of the entity or institution being helped: Basically, you pay what you can afford, and, astonishingly, it is the importance of the issues and the opportunity to rub shoulders with those with different yet considerable skills and resources that draws crowds voluntarily to AHA! events regardless of remuneration. It is the human passion to make a difference, to do something remarkable and memorable that draws such huge creative energy to AHA! ‘events’. That, and the reputation of AHA! for accomplishing amazing objectives that many thought impossible, and the simple elegance of The Invitation to an AHA! event, now a coveted and even resume-able possession. J’s bank is dealing with a dilemma: Competition for the giant corporate accounts is so fierce that it is barely profitable. Customers are so angry with credit card and mortgage rates and the plethora of ‘service charges’ that regulators are starting to take notice and legislators are proposing laws to ease the burden. The only area for growth and profitability are therefore the small-to-medium enterprises and individuals that big banks like J’s have avoided for years on the basis that they’re too risky and too small to make money from: More trouble than they’re worth. AHA! is hosting a Rediscovering the Small Customer session that will have some brilliant innovators, unorthodox thinkers and actual customers seeking the formula that will allow J’s bank to increase small-customer satisfaction and profitability simultaneously. J is on the Board of Directors of an international insurance company that has accomplished exactly this dual improvement thanks to an earlier AHA! session. The session is being held in AHA!’s playful and stimulating San Francisco Discovery & Learning Center, which has inspiring displays, recorded speeches and stories of great human achievements, such as the eradication of smallpox, the moon landing, the abolition of slavery, and the unraveling of the human genome, and where some of California’s and the world’s greatest thinkers and doers often hang out. It will use the 13-component AHA! Discovery Session Framework (illustrated above) supported by a suite of 20 (Open Source co-developed) enabling technologies and through both physical and virtual Open Space invitations and ‘crowd’-canvassing tools will gather ideas, viewpoints and information from over 5,000 people, synchronized as gracefully as a dance. As quickly as groups of participants are surfacing ideas and opportunities, other participants and AHA! staffers are doing market and technical research, still others are developing rapid prototypes of the ideas that have passed market and technical research hurdles, and yet more are showing these prototypes to potential customers and gathering The Wisdom of Crowds. The following week, many of the participants, stunned at how quickly and successfully the Discovery sessions qualified and brought new ideas to market, would volunteer to repeat their roles and apply the same process to a small entrepreneurial consumer electronics company’s struggle to develop human-powered communications technologies for areas with no reliable electricity supply. Their hourly ‘rate’ for this project was 80% less than the rate for the bank, but there were no dropouts — and several of the participants immediately went to work for the fledgling entrepreneur, convinced it would be a winner. K is one of the first to complete AHA!’s Natural Enterprise program. She was surprised to learn that this program has no instructors — the course materials are all on-line pre-readings, and instead of ‘lectures’, students participate in facilitated tours and Q&A sessions at the premises (in person or by videoconference) of entrepreneurs (all of them AHA! ‘members’) who are exemplary in one of the twelve aspects of entrepreneurship. Students therefore get twelve different, first-hand perspectives of entrepreneurial greatness. The entrepreneurs jointly assess the ‘students’ business plans, and their collective assessment is the ‘mid-term’ grade for the course. There is no final grade — the program is designed to get each student’s business successfully up in running by the time of its completion. For K, that is more valuable than any grade. And in the process, K discovered she needed some additional skills in story-telling, also available as part of AHA!’s curriculum*. Like the Natural Enterprise program, Story-Telling & Narrative has no classrooms, no lectures and no examination: Students study the basics of great narrative online at their own pace, listen to the world’s best story-tellers relate and dissect their stories, and watch and practice telling stories to others, ‘scoring’ each other on a reciprocal basis. Her business was launched thanks in part to an outright grant from J’s bank, in return for which J is participating in the bank’s Rediscovering the Small Customer session. Another participant in the bank’s session is M, a Harvard economics professor and former World Bank executive who has dropped out to try to grapple with the vicious cycle of poverty, disease, poor sanitation, large families, lack of education and environmental destruction in many African countries. In return, J is participating in the Discovery Sessions for the AHA! Cycle of Poverty project, donating many hours free of charge, and twisting the arms of others to donate time to the project as well. Cycle of Poverty, like Natural Enterprise, does not use any of AHA!’s impressive session facilities, using instead many ‘virtual’ locations around the world, and using virtual reality technology to ‘project’ all of the participants into Tekel, a small village in Cameroun, where they will be ‘virtually’ welcomed and hosted by a Camerounian family, given a virtual ‘tour’ of the village and invited to spend one entire virtual day in Tekel at their nearest IMAX theatre. IMAX is a delighted AHA! customer and filmed the ‘day in the life’ in the village in IMAX-3D and agreed to immerse Cycle of Poverty participants in it free of charge. The immersion works: The context that the participants get from their deep understanding of why life is the way it is in Tekel inspires a flurry of extraordinary ideas on programs and inexpensive leap-frog technologies that offer the promise of breaking the cycle. J proposes that communication around the project be centered around the entrepreneurial human-powered communication tools (notably cell phones and portable DVD players) that were just developed in the AHA! session described above. Tekel serves as the real-world laboratory for testing the ideas, and participants can watch live over the Internet as programs and technologies are launched. The video record serves as a model that can be used to replicate successes across the continent. Everything learned at AHA!, except for proprietary sessions like J’s bank’s for which premium prices were paid, is archived and made available online. In addition, AHA! research staffers continuously scan and synthesize knowledge about global needs, trends and opportunities, and make this knowledge available free online, where it can be tapped not only on other AHA! projects but by anyone, subject to Creative Commons licenses, so that it contributes to making the products of knowledge free to everyone. And the ‘members’ also take what they have learned and discovered and use it to power other new ventures and projects, to broaden and deepen relationships, and to accelerate the flow of knowledge, innovation and ingenuity around the globe. *The AHA! Learning Session Curriculum: |
April 14, 2005
House, MD
 The Idea: Go watch House MD now. Way too good to last.The last time I recommended a television series (Karen Sisco, and the recommendation was due to early-episode writing by creator Elmore Leonard), it was the kiss of death. I seem to have had this effect on the handful of good television series over the past decade: The Big Easy, Dave’s World, Reasonable Doubts, Max Bickford and the best of them all, Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night. What distinguished all of these series was excellent writing: You didn’t even have to watch — you could enjoy just listening to the smart, quirky dialogue, and the rich, carefully woven story-lines. So I’m almost afraid to go to bat for the latest well-written drama (on the Faux network yet — sheesh), House MD. The show features British theatrical actor (accent undetectable) Hugh Laurie as the eponymous Dr. Gregory House MD, brilliant but bitter medical specialist, whose team must solve the medical mysteries lesser minds have given up on. Some of the medical cases are intriguing, usually with wry twists, but the real magic in the program is the dialogue, which sparkles and hasn’t an ounce of fat on it. The writing is mostly done (I think — writing credits are hard to catch in Hollywood productions) by Sara Cooper and Lawrence Kaplow, who were last seen as the writers of Hack, the short-lived and claustrophobic (but also cleverly-scripted) drama that featured David Caruso as a disgraced cop working as a cabbie. I’ve seen quite a few well-written shows destroyed by studio and network hacks insisting on more ‘human interest’ (i.e. improbable ‘cute’ romances that are dragged out like soap opera story lines), more ‘action’ (i.e. simpler shorter dialogue and more implausible disasters with ample shouting and shooting), or more ‘conflict’ (i.e. black-hat stereotypes that conspire and do inconceivably mean things to impossibly good guys, also a soap opera staple). The Pretender actually took a soap opera actor and, thanks to good writing, made him engaging and heroic — but the hacks dumbed down the show and refocused it on the conspiracy of ‘the center’ and the absurd Snidely Whiplash-level nastiness of the antagonists. The (anti-)hero was reduced to a comic book caricature and the program became unwatchable. Same thing happened to Max Bickford, which started brilliantly but was soon forced by the studio to introduce more romance and bigger roles for the young actors on the show (i.e. shed the older-demographic skew because advertisers know older viewers buy less, and less impulsively). Richard Dreyfuss could have been excused if he had murdered the producers, who reduced a show of great promise to pathetic drivel and may have wrecked Dreyfuss’ career in the process. Maybe it’s a good thing that some of the best shows never lasted long enough to be polluted and dragged down by the pathetic media-oligopoly moneygrubbers who run the studios and networks and care only for ratings points among their most unsophisticated viewers. The consequence is the flood of cheap ‘reality’ dreck that has filled the schedules and made shows like House stand out so remarkably. The attempt by the hacks to damage House is clearly evident (the hospital administrators are predictably corrupt and ludicrously manipulative and out to ‘get’ our hero — they force him in the latest episode to choose between firing one of his brilliant interns or shilling for a new overpriced drug; and the way-too-pretty young people on the staff are being given more close-ups and featured in vapid, simple subplots) but what is remarkable is that the show seems to have found a way to accommodate this interference without losing its edge. A particularly fine episode, Fidelity, has a convoluted, stunning plot and a merciless, horrifyingly human ending. It would make a wonderful stage play. And House’s spare and savage come-backs and asides are still original, lovingly crafted and totally believable. House is tailor-made to be the stereotypical rude and short-tempered medical specialist, yet Laurie and the writers refuse to allow him to be caricaturized — with each episode he grows deeper and more engaging and complex. Catch it while you can. House is way too smart for its own good, especially on that network. As a real-life doctor said in his review of the show on imdb: “Somewhere there is a team of writers who actually know their craft, and an acting ensemble that knows how to pull it off. Now I can watch my TV one hour a week.” I’m with you, doctor. |
Free Love, by Glenn Parton
| The Idea: As regular readers know, I have occasionally published articles on this site from people who do not have their own weblogs. This will mark the third time I’ve published the work of Glenn Parton, best known for his wonderful eco-philosophy/ eco-psychology essays The Machine in our Heads and Humans in the Wilderness. His essay Love Politics was published here last year, and Part 1 of this three-part essay, entitled Exterminism, was published here in January. As I mentioned in Part 1, the ideas in the essay are Glenn’s, not mine, and you can tell him what you think through the comment facility below, or e-mail him directly. I’ll add my two cents at the end of Part 3. In this part, Glenn moves from criticism of Western culture to mysticism in support of a polyamory life:
Free Love, by Glenn Parton Look up at the clear night sky! The free play of two cosmic forces, Eros and Thanatos, Love and Hate, Attraction and Repulsion, Intimacy and Distance, sustains harmony among the heavenly bodies and evolves the beauty, wisdom, and goodness of the universe. What is the message or lesson for human association or society that is written in the cosmos? We know that human society is a microcosm of this great celestial order, and that we have fallen out of balance with the rest of Nature. What must we do in order to become part of the Universal Harmony again? Everyone recognizes that friendship cannot be mandated or legislated, that it arises naturally, spontaneously, one person at a time, and that it is possible and desirable to have many friends, on different levels of communication, conversation, and commitment. The hope of peace on earth, and peace with the earth, has a lot to do with spreading friendship around the world, but I do not believe this ideal will ever be realized (enough to save the world) until we acknowledge that Yin and Yang, the feminine spirit and the masculine spirit, are also cosmological principles and/or forces, which change the balancing point between men and women by adding sexuality to the mix. We should not pursue a vision of worldwide peace and friendship that ignores, minimizes, or misunderstands the sexual-polarity of human association. My heavenly vision, and long-range political solution, is Free Love between man and woman. By free love I mean sexual love that does not restrict itself to one person at a time. It means holding oneself open to the possibility of sexually loving more than one, and taking that voyage when the opportunity arrives; it means taking each man/woman relationship on its own terms, as far as it will go, as far as it wants to go, including sexuality, until it finds its own point of equilibrium between Love and Hate, Intimacy and Distance. That is the Way to reach the proper balance between men and women. The message of evolution is that each being finds its balancing point with all other beings, according to the laws of nature, including Yin-Yang, creating a self-balancing dynamic whole in which each being is what it is in terms of the totality of its relationships. Human beings must freely associate, form, and bond, including Yin-Yang sexual energies, or we disturb the natural order of human society, our alignment or agreement with the logic and love of the cosmos. Human society, with its sexual-polarity, must freely arrange itself, or we will not achieve a harmonious community, and without a harmonious community we will not reach consensus on the political level because sexual frustrations, conflicts and hostilities spill over into the major areas of life, work and government. In other words, the ideal of friendship will remain an empty ideal if we do not understand that free love is part of the original architecture of human togetherness, and that we must allow sexuality between men and women to work itself out, according to inherent interests and desires, or we will never build good government, real democracy, or a true Republic because if we do not first put our sexual lives in proper order, then politics will collapse on a faulty foundation. Out of the fundamental harmony of a sexually balanced civil society will come political intelligence and wisdom. Respond, as much as you can, to all heavenly bodies orbiting around you. Thatís how the suns and moons and planets behave toward one another, pushing and pulling everything into a vibrating, pulsating, interconnected totality. Of course it is not possible to love everyone with the same intensity and completeness (with some people a simple nod or smile, or even silent toleration, is enough), but each man/woman relationship has its natural sexual closeness and distance, and we must have the courage to seek it, and go there, without interference from custom, convention, or imposed morality. Friendship is always, at bottom, a relationship between two people, but everyone knows that it is not socially desirable, not community-building, for each person to have only one friend. Rather, each person is permitted and encouraged to have a diversity of friends, each one created on its own unique terms, as deeply as possible, with no outside direction or definition. If sexual love was free to follow this path, like friendship, then we would have discovered the secret ingredient in a self-balancing social constellation (of friends and lovers), and secured the social foundation for rational discourse and action. If there was only Love, then the Big Bang would not have occurred, and the world would collapse (into undifferentiated Oneness), and evolution would have to begin again; if there was only Hate, then the world would fragment, scatter, and fly apart. The Great Harmony is a balance between the forces of Attraction and Repulsion, Contraction and Expansion, Integration and Disintegration. Free Love is the mystery of the universe, and if human beings would learn to sexually love who we want, when we want, in the way that we want, as much as we want, instead of imposing artificial constraints, or false morality, on love, then the gravity of love would create a tight and intricate web of human connections in which we would not have to struggle for political consensus because we would already basically have it. The first and foremost criticism that is raised against free love is that it harms children, but actually it is best for children because the nuclear family is too small a world for the development of the vast potential of children. The nuclear family limits childhood reality to the overbearing influence of two adult perspectives, making it nearly impossible for the child to escape from prejudice, ignorance, narrowness, and parental unconsciousness. The wounds of the parents are visited on the children, and the cycle of the neurotic family is perpetuated from one generation to the next, which slows down the evolution of the human species tremendously. Free love makes intimate communities (like tribes), rather than isolated families, the center of childhood upbringing, exposing the child to many viewpoints, expanding his/her consciousness, increasing the opportunities for sanity and self-realization. A second objection that is raised against free love is that it will not work because human beings are competitive, jealous and possessive creatures, but actually it is monogamy that causes these problems because it makes us fearful that if s/he loves someone other than me, then s/he cannot also love me. If your concept of love is limited, then that creates jealousy and possessiveness because you are afraid of loss, abandonment and loneliness, but if you ìseeî that it is possible to love more than one, then you will not fear abandonment and loneliness when love overflows to include others. Free love makes intimate networks (like tribes), rather than fragmented couples, the center of personal life and love, exposing the adult to a diversity of potential lovers, broadening the horizon of intimate contact, communication, and knowledge, increasing the opportunities for security and happiness. Another criticism leveled against free love is that there is not enough time to love more than one, but of course love concerns quality, not quantity. Eliminating the boredom of monogamy alone would provide more than enough time for at least a few additional lovers, and then there are those habits, routines, hobbies, and fantasies that could be replaced, for almost no money, with deep and thrilling real sexual love adventures. There will never be enough time for co-dependent individuals because every gesture or sign of independence is seen as a minimization or devaluation of their relationship, and there will never be enough time for someone who is waiting for the one and only perfect lover. Such people cannot get enough love no matter how much they get because they misunderstand free love. To these people I say: contemplate the heavens and let your personal life become a feeling and thoughtful expression of the Will, intention, and intelligence of the Universe! |
