When March of the Penguins came to local theatres, I didn’t go. I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear it. On Friday night it premiered on the Canadian movie channel. I watched, as best as I could, spending most of it in tears and at times turning away, unable to look.

The movie critics, for the most part, saw it as just a documentary, and while being unwilling to criticize it overall (the cinematography is stunning, and the script is factual and non-moralizing — this is just a simple true story, after all), some of them were annoyed at the ‘anthropomorphizing’ — the mere suggestion that non-human creatures can actually think and feel, and aren’t doing what they do ‘automatically’. I don’t know what planet such people live on, but then there are still some people who believe global warming isn’t man-made, or even that it is not occurring at all. Hell, there are still some people who believe the world is only a few thousand years old and will soon be ‘saved’ by a big funny-looking guy in a beard.

Having read the positive but underwhelming critical reviews, I learned as well that conservatives ‘saw’ the film as a reaffirmation of their values — monogamy, heterosexuality, family above all. As Paul Simon said “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”.

Those of you who ‘know’ me will know that what I saw in this film was:

• Evidence of the astonishing joy, sensitivity, love, acceptance, appreciation, wisdom, courage and resilience that permeates all life on Earth: These creatures know the real meaning and value of life and how to live more richly and sustainably, and hence better, than we humans have in millennia; and
• Realization of the staggering beauty, wonder and precious value of what we humans are now thoughtlessly and recklessly destroying.

Penguins have been living the same way of life depicted in this film for fifty million years, nearly twenty times as long as our species has been on Earth. They are part of the astonishing diversity and complexity of life that has emerged to be perfect for this strange, vulnerable and hostile planet, to keep it in Sacred Balance. And thanks to our species, this will all be gone in one hundred years or so. All gone, destroyed, extinguished forever. All because we humans, we arrogant monsters, believe that our ‘right’ to breed 6, or 9, or 14 billion rapacious, destructive, thoughtless, unconscious members of our own species trumps the ‘right’ of every other creature on this planet to exist.

In nature there are no ‘rights’ — this is an abstract, human concept, invented to prevent our stressed out, mentally ill, massively excessive numbers from killing each other arbitrarily, and giving us an excuse to exterminate other species and claim ‘personal’ ‘ownership’ of their, of our collective Earth.

In nature there are only responsibilities. That is the unbearable truth of March of the Penguins. That is why I cried all the way through it, why I had to turn away at the gentle, noble lessons that these wondrous, gorgeous creatures show us, try to teach us, with every move, every glance, everything they do.

But we cannot hear them any more. Our human ‘frames’ no longer countenance such truths. It is all too late. This film is not merely a celebration of life in a place of terrible beauty. It is an early memorial to the unbearable truth of what our horrifically irresponsible and insensitivespecies will soon have extinguished.

It seems to me there is something else besides fear of failure holding us back, however, something that is in some ways connected to fear of failure, and that, for want of a better term, is lack of presence. We are so distracted by stress, by overwhelming amounts of information and demands on our time and attention, that we rarely live in the moment, we are rarely really ‘all here’. In business this is called ‘lack of focus’, but it is something much more profound and personal than that. This lack of presence I think manifests itself in an inability to take joy in simple, beautiful things (“no time”), an inability to concentrate on one thing at a time, an inability to meditate, pay attention, ‘quiet your mind’, think differently or imaginatively, or relax, an ‘insensitivity’ in every ‘sense‘ of that that word, an inability to have non-competitive fun, a distrust of our instincts and emotions, and perhaps even an inability to really love (other than in the shallowest, escapist way).

Things are the way they are for a reason, and I suspect there is both a short-term and long-term Darwinian reason why so many of us today seem to lack ‘presence’. The short-term reason is that presence cannot easily happen in an environment of constant stress — it takes time and opportunity to turn off the Machine in Our Heads and really live in the moment. We are not rewarded for it — in school and in work we are rewarded for juggling many tasks simultaneously, doing abstract things well, taking on more stress, producing more ‘stuff’, and living in ‘clock time’ that marches forever forward in relentless, constant increments.  It ‘pays’ to live inside our heads instead of in the real world.

And as a consequence, attention has become a scarce commodity, and though we spread it around as best we can, we no longer have adequate time to pay sufficient attention to anything. When we cannot pay attention to the real world, we stop living in it, and become (as Varela put it) disconnected from our own experiences. We see everything — nature, the rest of life on Earth and everything that happens to it — as ‘other’, as apart from us, rather than seeing ourselves ‘realistically’ as a part of all life on Earth, a part of everything that happens. We become autistic, antisocial, biophobic, psychopathic, absent, in the original sense of these words. Stress makes us mentally ill.

The neurons in our brains are, when we are young, very plastic, and they form themselves in patterns needed to do what we do as we grow. In modern civilization that means learning language, and doing all the school and work tasks we are forced to spend most of our young lives doing. Our neural paths are therefore physically programmed into our brain to make us creatures of abstraction and distraction, not ‘present’ in the real world.

So now not only do we have to make the time for presence, ‘cure ourselves’ of our mental illness, we have to work against all the programming in our brain that has not equipped us for presence, that ‘hard wires’ us for ‘ab-sense’. No wonder it is so difficult!

I wrote last year about the book Presence that presented a U-shaped ‘presencing’ process chart and defined presence and our need for it as follows:

The authors wrote principally for a business audience, though my guess, from looking at the dreadful sales data, is that they might have been wiser to aim it at individuals. Big business is not ready for such heresy.

Varela, whose work largely inspired the book, suggests three steps to achieving presence:

1. Suspension (of our habitual pattern of ‘objectifying’ the experience, instead leaving ourselves in the experience); 
2. Redirection (of our undivided attention to what is really happening, to the whole and not just to discrete objects in it and our conceptions about them); and 
3. Letting Go (of the terribly human tendency to analyze, interpret, think about meaning, and of our own perspective, so we instead learn to ‘see’ what is happening from inside it, rather than from our traditional position as ‘objective’ viewer).

He acknowledges the difficulty of doing this, and the amount of practice it requires, and criticizes those who arrogantly argue there is one ‘best way’ to do this. He also suggests that a consequence of our ‘ab-sense’, our lack of presence, is that we end up living in a figment of reality, a thin, shallow, objectified representation of reality in our own heads.

Part of that thin, one-dimensional representation of reality in our heads, according to research done by Canadian biophysicist Peter Beamish is our conception of time. He argues that most animal communication, except in times of stress, is not “signal-based” like ours, but rather “rhythm-based”. This is because, he says, humanity has become so focused on one-dimensional, abstract linear time, and so constantly stressed, we have lost touch with another dimension of time he calls “rhythm-based time” or “Now Time”, which is based on interval and music, rather than on sequence, and which has the characteristics of waves, rather than particles.

Now Time is the original complex time ‘dimension’ that most animals, living in the moment, at times of low stress, continue to inhabit, and within which rhythm-based intra-species and inter-species communication occurs. Humans, in their modern prosthetic inside-the-head representation of the universe, formed and limited by language, spend most of their lives in local, one-dimension mechanical “watch time”, and are able to communicate only through the signal-based communications that function in that limited dimension. The communication of Gaia is important, and takes its time. The communication of humans is merely urgent.

This is of course extremely difficult to understand conceptually: it’s like trying to imagine string theory’s eleven dimensions by looking at explanatory two-dimensional pictures. Artist Andrew Campbell offers a ‘map’ of Now Time in the graphic above, accompanied by this explanation:

The ‘arch of the U’ he refers to is the bottom-point of the process in the book Presence, the point of “presencing”, the still point between letting go and letting come (allowing to emerge).

Meditation, sleep, love, music and the arts, spending time in nature, other exercises that focus attention, and activities like Open Space that acknowledge complexity and allow time for emergence can all, it is claimed, open us to Now Time, and hence to be present, here, now.

I confess I’m not very good at any of these things, though I keep trying. There is, I think, a connection between fear of failure and lack of presence. They are both to some extent manifestations of failure to ‘realize’ the truth. Living day-to-day in modern civilized society really demands the perpetuation of both these ‘ab-senses’. As Eliot wrote:

Rousseau pointed out how different children, who have not yet acquired either fear of failure or lack of presence, are from adults, and the folly of education systems that assume they are like adults and instill in them the fear of failure and lack of presence. Eliot not only acknowledges this, and the inability of adults to ‘bear reality’, but echoes Beamish’s argument that the only true time, Now Time, is ‘always present‘.

Without fear of failure we would all go off and do what we wanted, instead of what we’re doing now, and civilization as we know it would simply collapse. That would be a good thing, quickly and profoundly redistributing de facto power from the few to the many. But it would be tumultuous, anarchic (in the positive sense of the word), disruptive and, at least in the short run, possibly even more damaging to our already-struggling environment than civilization culture is.

And without lack of presence we might find the truth of what we’ve become and what we’re doing to this world so unbearable that we might commit suicide in massive numbers (perhaps that accounts for the short life span of so many great artists). Our current global mental illness is arguably a coping mechanism. If becoming truly ‘present’ did not overwhelm us with grief, it might overwhelm us with anger, fury at what civilization has robbed us of. Neither alternative would bode well for civilization. Better to keep the people ‘absent’, unaware of what they are missing, of how their lives and this world are being wasted. If the lunatics are running the asylum, what chance would a sane person have of surviving in it anyway?

I’m not arguing that civilization was some massive, deliberate conspiracy. It was a natural evolution for a species that is inherently fierce, intelligent, adaptable and socially malleable — civilization, beginning with agriculture, evolved because without it our naturally ill-equipped species, facing ice ages and the sudden extinction of the big game animals it depended on, would probably have perished. Here’s a great little story “The Way It’s Always Been Done”, from Jeff Bridges (yes, the actor) explaining how the great idea of civilization has morphed into the soul- and Earth-destroying monstrosity it is today.

Civilization today, although it is The Only Life We Know, the “way it’s always been done”, has outgrown its usefulness. And while overcoming our fear of failure and our lack of presence will make us increasingly intolerant of civilization’s excesses, we must do both if we are to be part of the solution to those excesses. There’s an implosion coming, and while it may still be more comfortable in civilization’s bosom now, the edge is a much safer, saner place to be,and from here, you can see everything.

Thanks to deconsumption for the link to Jeff Bridges’ story, and to Andrew for the inspiration for this post.

It all starts with the education system. That system is designed to make us dependent on the economic system that finances and controls it. We are brainwashed to fear failure, the ultimate punishment the system doles out: As artist Andrew Campbell puts it so eloquently: “In order not to fail most people are willing to believe anything and not to care whether what they are told is true or false.” In order not to fail we ‘learn’ to toe the line, to believe and to do what we are told, and not to question the four great myths of modern civilization culture:

• The myth of progress: That humans are the culmination of evolution, the crown of creation, and that life is better now than it has ever been, and getting more so;
• The myth of growth: That all things grow or die — there is no stasis, no steady state — bigger is better, you must eat or be eaten, produce and consume more and more or perish;
• The myth of competition and scarcity: That society inevitably has a few winners and a lot of losers, and if you’re smart and work hard you will win the never-ending ‘survival of the fittest’ war against scarcity, and achieve ‘competitive advantage’;
• The myth of the ‘free’ market and ‘free’ trade: That the economy, the ‘market’, is fair and free from distortion, and open to all — anyone can succeed in it, the supply of goods and services is a precise reflection of what people genuinely want and need, and left to its own devices untrammeled ‘free’ markets and ‘free’ trade are possible, real, and optimally efficient and effective at distributing resources.

These are all, of course, lies, designed to keep us all from realizing the truth: That life was simpler, richer, happier and more resilient in ‘prehistoric’ gatherer-hunter times and has, with some major ups and downs, been getting worse for most ever since; that unconstrained growth is unsustainable and threatens all life on Earth, and as a consequence the sixth great extinction of life on our planet is already well underway; that collaboration, not competition, is the rule that has always governed healthy and diverse life on our planet, and that hierarchy and inequality are, in nature, abhorrent aberrations; and that the economy is grossly and deliberately distorted to perpetuate a continuous and massive redistribution of wealth and power from the poor and disenfranchised to the already obscenely rich and powerful.

The education system teaches you relentlessly to accept the four civilization myths, not to believe in yourself, to be ashamed of being ‘wrong’, to conform to be like everybody else, to fear failure and hence shun risk, and therefore to be obedient and do what those in ‘authority’ tell you to do. It deliberately does not teach you any of the critical skills shown in the mindmap above, because these skills would make you dangerous, independent, self-sufficient, and out of control — and that cannot be permitted.

Here’s some terrifying data that shows what this utter dependence and lack of critical skills have produced in our modern economy, thanks to Paul Craig Roberts, former US Assistant Secretary to the Treasury (it’s US data but the picture in the rest of the affluent nations is not much better):

• In the past five years manufacturing lost 2.9 million jobs, almost 17% of the manufacturing work force. The wipeout is across the board. Not a single manufacturing payroll classification created a single new job.
• Communications equipment lost 43% of its workforce. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37% of its workforce. The workforce in computers and electronic products declined 30%. Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25% of its employees. The workforce in motor vehicles and parts declined 12%. Furniture and related products lost 17% of its jobs. Apparel manufacturers lost almost half of their work force. Employment in textile mills declined 43%. Paper and paper products lost one-fifth of its jobs. The work force in plastics and rubber products declined by 15%.
• The knowledge jobs that were supposed to take the place of lost manufacturing jobs in the globalized ìnew economyî never appeared. The information sector lost 17% of its jobs, with the telecommunications work force declining by 25%. Even wholesale and retail trade lost jobs. Despite massive new accounting burdens imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley, accounting and bookkeeping employment shrank by 4%. Computer systems design and related lost 9% of its jobs. Today there are 209,000 fewer managerial and supervisory jobs than 5 years ago. There are no jobs for graduates. There are several hundred thousand American engineers who are unemployed and have been for years. Offshore outsourcing and offshore production have left the US awash with unemployment among the highly educated.
• The total number of private sector jobs created over the last five year period is less than one eighth the net immigration during that period. 

So now most of us are caught: On the one hand, we have no ‘marketable’ skills; on the other hand, the economy no longer needs us — we are too expensive, too demanding. We have become, like the angry, dispossessed destitute masses in the struggling nations already bankrupted by local corruption and complicit global corporatist theft, Disposable Citizens.

We have become, to use Jerry Michalski’s grim image, gullets whose only purpose is to consume products and crap cash, and when we run out of cash we are expected to keep borrowing and get deeper into debt so we can consume even more, or else get out of the way as billions of obedient new gullets are waiting, willing to take our place.

If we want meaningful work we are going to have to collaborate with the rest of the world’s Disposable Citizens to create it. We are going to have to build a wholly new economy, one that will undermine and then replace (and be fiercely opposed by the beneficiaries of) the existing dysfunctional ‘market’ economy. Are we — are you — ready to do this? Perhaps not yet — there are several downsides to keep us frightened to do so:

• There is a high likelihood of failure, at least at first — brave or foolhardy early pioneers often perish to pave the way for those who come after and learn from their mistakes.
• It will take a huge amount of work and sacrifice — creating something from scratch, with no foundation, can require lifetimes of effort, mostly thankless, mostly arduous.
• You cannot straddle the new economy and the old one — once you walk away from the old economy and its gross practices and addictions, there is no going back — you’ll be Living on the Edge for the rest of your life.
• It will take enormous patience and willingness to weather setbacks, before the seeds of this new economy can be expected to finally take root.

The perpetrators of the existing ‘market’ economy are counting on us not having the courage to do this, and the odds are in their favour. Fear of failure is deeply ingrained in us, and its effect is paralyzing.

We keep hoping that something will happen within the existing economy, to allow us to find meaningful work and become ‘undisposable’ within the system. We move back and forth between the edges of the existing society and economy (the outer circle of the diagram above) and the richer, more comfortable inner circles, gratefully taking and constantly scrounging for the scraps tossed out by the elite. We are addicted to consumption and debt, and will do almost anything, demean ourselves nearly without limit, to feed our addictions.

When I talk on this blog about making a living writing, or in innovation consulting or environmental work, I am inundated with e-mails asking me: How do I get a job doing this? They don’t want to hear my answer — that the existing economy doesn’t value this work, and that they need to do the nearly impossible work necessary to create a role for such meaningful work in an entirely new economy.

So I ask again: Are you ready to do this? If so, here is what we need to do, each of us, pioneers of what could be the most rapid and astonishing change in human culture since civilization began:

1. Discover your gift: Find the intersection of your genius (what you’re uniquely good at) and your passion (what you love doing). If you dont know how to start, read Dick Richards’ book. Don’t worry if there’s no commercial market for it — the new economy we’re creating will accommodate it.
2. Assess how your gift can be of service: Who needs your gift now? even if they cannot ‘afford’ it. If your gift is selfish, instead of generous, then it’s not a gift — keep looking. But if it is generous, don’t belittle it even if it is not ‘valued’ in the current economy. As long as its intention is to be of use, then it’s what you should be doing, and in the Generosity Economy it has value.
3. Find the people you want to make a living with: This is the hardest part: There is no mechanism at present to find such people, and for now you’re largely limited to those people who are, like you, Living on the Edge, people who are ready to create the Generosity Economy, and who know what their gift is.
4. Design your offering: This is an iterative process: You need to imagine how the combined gifts of the people you are making a living with — the partners of your Natural Enterprise — can be of value and service to others. The genius of you and your partners (what each of you is uniquely good at) must be mutually exclusive (no heavy overlaps) and collectively exhaustive (no serious gaps). That means you may need to ‘drop’ enterprise partners (tearfully) and find others to fill critical gaps in your offering. These need to be people you love, who deeply share your vision and principles. And collectively what you offer must fill an unmet need — whether or not the people who have that need can ‘afford’ it.
5. Network with other Natural Enterprises: Networks are the foundation and glue of any economy. In a Generosity Economy you need to network with other Natural Enterprises whose partners recognize the value of your offerings, and who are therefore willing to ‘generously’ exchange and combine your offerings with theirs. That means that all offerings in the network are ascribed the same value: There is no pricing based on ‘cost’ or ‘scarcity’ — everyone’s gift is equal, and no money need be exchanged in the acts of generosity. This is entirely consistent with existing Generosity Economy offerings: Open source, free libraries, scientific exchange, peer production, social exchanges, the Internet (especially blogs & wikis), philanthropy and file sharing. These exchanges can be woven into your networks. The fabric for such networks istrust and generosity.
6. Form Natural Enterprises into Local Community Economies: While much exchange can be virtual, there is a natural place for local economic networks and exchanges, especially for goods that consist of atoms, not bits. What drives Local Community Economy formation is the compilation of a set of offerings that collectively meet all local community members’ needs, and hence make the local community self-sufficient, resilient and fully independent of the old ‘market’ economy. Together you can then Live on the Edge (the outer circle of the diagram above), comfortably and joyfully without the need or temptation to fall back into reliance on the old economy. Each Local Community can then offer its surpluses to other Local Communities in return for their surpluses. By this means, the few needs that cannot be absolutely met locally can be met by trade that is absolutely voluntary and not subject to extortion by the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots’. This is a reflection that the Generosity Economy is an economy of inherent abundance, not artificially created scarcity like the ‘market’ economy. As such, these exchanges reinforce egalitarianism, and are a force for sustainability and peace.

This is not easy to imagine, and will be exceedingly difficult to do, but it is entirely natural, modeled on the ‘economy’ that prevails in nature and which prevailed in ‘prehistoric’ gatherer-hunter cultures.

It is the only sustainable economic model, the only economy that can allow each of us to do exactly what we love, what we’re uniquely good at, in service for others — what we were meant to do. If we do it together, it need not be quite so scary. We can create thejobs we want, and, in the process, set ourselves and our world free.