 Image: Suicide by Scandinavian artist Joakim Back. Caveat: Some possible book ‘spoilers’ here. But not really, unless you’re already part way through the book. Nick Hornby’s newest book A Long Way Down is, on the surface, about suicide. Its four protagonists, who take turns throughout the book speaking in the first person, telling their personal and collective story sequentially (not redundantly) meet atop a tower famous for suicides, each with the intention of jumping off, and become a sort of goofy self-help group. Here, as a teaser (and testament to Hornby’s extraordinary writing) is a glimpse of each of the characters in their ‘own’ words: Martin (middle-aged, has-been, self-destructive morning talk-show host): I’d spent the previous couple of months looking up suicide inquests on the Internet, just out of curiosity. And nearly every single time, th coroner says the same thing: “He took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed”. And then you read the story about the poor bastard. His wife was sleeping with his best friend, he’d lost his job, his daughter had been killed in a road accident some months before…Hello, Mr. Coroner? Anyone at home? I’m sorry, but there’s no disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I’d say he got it just right. Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can’t take any more, and then off to the nearest multistory car park in the family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that’s fair enough? Surely the coroner’s report should read: “He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.”
JJ (young, failed rock-star): The trouble with my generation is that we all think we’re fucking geniuses. Making something isn’t good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something. It’s our inalienable right, as citizens of the 21st century. If Christina Aguilera or Britney or some American Idol jerk can be something, then why can’t I? Where’s mine, huh? OK, so my band, we put on the best live shows you could ever see in a bar, and we made two albums, which a lot of critics and not enough real people liked. But having talent is never enough to make us happy, is it? I mean, it should be, because a talent is a gift, and you should thank God for it, but I didn’t. It just pissed me off because I wasn’t being paid for it, and it didn’t get me on the cover of Rolling Stone. Jess (young, impetuous, troubled daughter of a wealthy, dysfunctional family): I’d be lost if JJ and people like that got their way, and there was nothing unpersonal in the world. I like to know that there are big places without windows where no one gives a shit. You need confidence to go into small places with regular customers — small bookshops and small music shops and small restaurants and cafes. I’m happiest in the Virgin Megastore and Borders and Starbucks and Pizza Express, where no one gives a shit, and no one knows who you are. My mum and dad are always going on about how soulless those places are, and I’m like, Der. That’s the point. Maureen (middle-aged, single mother trapped with a severely handicapped teenaged son: I wanted to tell Jess that I hadn’t even seen an English beach since Matty [her son] left school; they used to take them to Brighton every year, and I went with them once or twice. I didn’t say anything, though. I may not know the weight of many things, but I could feel the weight of that one, so I kept it all to myself. You know that things aren’t going well for you when you can’t even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they’ll presume you’re asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it’s why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible. The novel has the typical Hornby sense of impending doom running throughout it, and the typical Hornby lame ending (it’s as if the author doesn’t want the novel to end, so it doesn’t, really), but it is still wonderful, utterly engaging, and thought-provoking. Perhaps this is why the movies made from his books don’t quite work — there just isn’t enough time in a two hour film for all the action plus all the reflection that the ideas in his novels warrant. Because of Hornby’s cleverness and his wry, delightful sense of humour, his novels cry out for cinematic treatment (since most movies today are so utterly lacking in both). Jess’ critique of Virginia Woolf is the most hilarious piece of writing I’ve read in a decade, and is alone worth the price of the book, but I suspect in the movie it will be just too much too fast to work — the audience will be laughing so hard they’ll drown out half the funny bits. But it is the ideas in the book that had me shivering as I read, putting the book down and wandering around and thinking. I suspect his novels are Hornby’s cathartic way of getting these profound and troubling ideas out of his head where they can be examined more objectively (Hornby has an autistic child). There are three in particular that resonated with me, and they are all somewhat related, and a book about suicide is the perfect vehicle to illustrate them. The first idea is that in life, as Jess puts it, we have no choice. We are who we are and we will do what we will do. This is the concept of ‘free will’, but reduced to immediate, personal terms. Despite all the New Years’ resolutions (A Long Way Down begins on New Years’ Eve), despite all the plans and self-help books and Getting Things Done tools we employ, we will ultimately do what were going to do anyway, and, more importantly, not do what we were not going to do anyway. Those who go up the tower with the intention of killing themselves consist of those who will go through with the plan, no matter what happens, sooner or later, and those who will not, no matter what happens. Hornby is saying that suicide prevention hotlines will only prevent those who would be prevented somehow or other anyway. The city of Toronto has spent a small fortune building walls and fences around its ‘popular’ suicide sites (mostly buildings and bridges) and is considering similar infrastructure in subway stations. They understate the creativity of those who will do what they will do. And those who lack imagination or knowledge or opportunity will find other, metaphorical ways to kill themselves: alcohol or other drugs, or just shutting down, disengaging. We are surrounded by the living dead, but not of the type you see in the movies. The second idea, and the one that I think his title most refers to, is what is holding you back? Not just from committing suicide, but from doing other things you think you should be doing or wish you were doing. Here’s how Jess puts it: Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. You don’t know how long, though. It’s not your choice. Maureen’s rope ties her to Matty and is about six inches long and it’s killing her. Martin’s rope ties him to his daughters and, like a stupid dog, he thinks it isn’t there. He goes running off somewhere…and then suddenly it brings him up short and chokes him and he acts surprised, and then he does the same thing again the next day. I think JJ is tied to this bloke Eddie he keeps talking about, the one he used to be in the band with. And I’m learning that I’m tied to [Jess' older, accomplished, inexplicably missing sister] Jen, and not to my mum and dad — not to home, which is where the rope should be.
The distance from the top of the tower to the bottom, from intent to realization, seems short, but is, in fact, a long way. While we are who we are and will do what we will do, it is not quite that simple. We are social creatures, and as we go through life we find ourselves limited by people, and held back, not so much by who they are as by what they stand for, the role we, or they, or fate, has chosen for us. Are these ropes, these people and things and circumstances that hold us back, imposed on us, or are they our own self-imposed lifelines? If we have no choice, is that to some extent because of the restrictions we have somehow chosen to impose on ourselves? When I met my wife, I was pretty messed up, and she has kept me on a pretty short lead ever since. I owe her everything for that, I think. In recent years, though, now that our* amazing children no longer need our support, she has loosened the lead somewhat. Or maybe I tugged the lead out of her hand. Or perhaps it wasn’t ever there at all, just a figment of my imagination, self-imposed. (It’s a good thing she doesn’t read my blog; I wonder if that is deliberate, too?) You can perhaps guess at the third idea in this book, since it follows somewhat from the other two: What happens when we suddenly lose our lifeline? Martin says: A long time ago, I worked with an alcoholic. And he told me that the first time he failed on an attempt to quit the booze was the most terrifying day of his life. He always thought he could stop drinking if he ever got round to it, so he had a choice stashed away in a sock drawer somewhere at the back of his head. But when he found out that he had to drink, that the choice had never really been there, Well, he wanted to do away with himself, if I may temporarily confuse our issues. I didn’t properly understand what he meant until I saw that guy jump off the roof. Up until then, jumping had always been an option, a way out, money in the bank for a rainy day. And then suddenly the money was gone — or rather, it had never been there in the first place. It belonged to the guy who jumped, and people like him, because dangling your feet over the precipice is nothing unless you’re prepared to go that extra two inches.
We cling to our presumed choices, our dreams, our distant plans and hopes, as if they were lifelines keeping us from careening off into space, and perhaps they are. I imagine myself an activist, a much-published and influential author, a founder of intentional communities, an incubator of natural enterprises, a change agent revolutionizing the way we teach, the way we treat animals, the way we produce energy, the way our economic and political systems work, the way we think about the world. All of these valiant roles I picture myself filling, yet I inch towards them so slowly that progress can barely be measured. Are these my lifelines, my tower ledge, and do I know in my heart that none of these heady roles is my destiny? Is that why I grabbed onto the non-philosophy of John Gray, giving me permission to fail at all of these because, as he says, it is not in human nature that any of these changes can occur on any meaningful scale? Is his infuriating belief that the best we can do, all we can do, is to be a good model for those in our immediate communities and to be open to and aware of and fully participating in life’s astonishing joys — is this my new lifeline, thin and frayed and shabby as it may be in comparison with the awesome, grandiose ones I clinged to before? And what would become of me if I were to lose this lifeline too? The questions in the two paragraphs above are rhetorical, but these three are not — the great take-away from Hornby’s book is how we, each for ourselves, decide to answer these questions when we close the book’s cover:
Nothing simple here. Beneath the brilliant raucous humour of Hornby’s writing lie some very dark issues, matters of life and death, like a black hole twinned with a star going nova. (*hers biologically, though I am honoured and humbled that they call me their father,considering the deliberately small role I played in their upbringing) |
May 21, 2006
A Long Way Down: What’s Holding You Back?
May 20, 2006
Links for the Week – May 20/06
 image from jade at UToronto’s dynamic graphics project Lots of politics this week: Mega-Polluters and Government Corporatists Turn Up Propaganda Machine: The term Orwellian, and the neocon creed “tell people something often enough they’ll believe it” have been bandied around so much in recent years that I think we have become a bit blasÈ about propaganda. But I’ve noticed that recently, with the corporatists in somewhat disorganized retreat as their lies about imperialism and global warming have lost credibility, the propaganda machine has been ratcheted up considerably. Here in Canada we’re bombarded by outrageously deceptive ‘advertisements’ by Shell (“we’re working with the people to return the tar sands to nature” — describing Canada’s worst-ever ecological holocaust-in-progress) and a lobby group that calls itself ‘Canada’s Nuclear Industry’ (“nuclear energy is clean, clear, affordable and safe” — if you disregard the horrifically toxic waste products, massive cost overruns, frequent leaks and other security breaches, and vulnerability to terrorist attack). In the US the same thing seems to be happening (we get US stations with their ads here on cable): ExxonMobil, through the junk science right-wing ‘Competitive Enterprise Institute’, is blanketing the media with outrageous commercials about the benefits of CO2 and slandering Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, and the Bush regime has released a PR piece on Gitmo claiming that most of the injuries to inmates occur “on the basketball courts”. Most of us on the blogosphere know these faux-advertisements are nonsense, and we can use sources like the Center for Media and Democracy to decipher their Orwellian newspeak and discover which corporatists are spending their tax cuts and subsidies for these ads, but most viewers are not accustomed to such blatant propaganda. What is most distressing is that the mainstream media seem to have no hesitation about accepting money to broadcast these lies, and don’t even tell viewers who is really behind them. When political propaganda masquerades as public service announcements, and as objective information, the public needs to know. That is what Orwell was warning us about. Thanks to salon.com’s Andrew Leonard for the link to the Center for Media and Democracy, and for his ongoing thread on corporatist propaganda. Meanwhile in the Real World, Guantanamo Prisoners Are Still Trying to Kill Themselves: The force-feeding and padded cells continue, but conditions at the Gitmo torture centre remain so dreadful that suicide attempts are reaching epidemic levels. Must be the agony of losing those basketball games. And Maybe Nuclear Isn’t So Safe After All: Also via Common Dreams, Greenpeace reveals a leaked study from nuclear engineers Large & Associates that says vulnerability of new nukes to terrorist attack has been dangerously underestimated. And Coalition Troops Aren’t Really Protecting a Stable and Democratic Afghanistan Either: A former Minister of the new Afghan government admits that foreign investment has gone almost exclusively to building a parallel foreign-owned and foreign-run political and economic infrastructure that is drawing all the talent, money and energy away from domestic institutions and programs. Since the ‘government’ of Afghanistan is in control only in the capital city, while warlords, pro- and anti-Taliban, control and ruthlessly govern the rest of the country, it is hard to blame foreigners for not wanting to build anything on a non-existent domestic foundation. This is why the Afghanistan campaign was such an utter failure — there is no domestic infrastructure, grossly inadequate investment in rebuilding, and a power vacuum outside the capital. The US-led coalition just bombed the hell out of the place, secured the capital for an elite ‘government’ of pro-American politicians, and left the rest of the country to fend for itself. Now the ‘peacekeeping’ troops have the impossible task of keeping a peace that never existed, in a country with none of the resources it needs to build a viable state, and hence hugely vulnerable to opportunistic militias seeking to exploit the chaos and desperation and fill the power vacuum. Ernst & Young Admits 800 Billion Dollar Accounting Error in Estimating China’s Banks’ Bad Debts: A week after issuing a report estimating that China’s Big Four banks have close to a trillion dollars in “non-performing loans”, my former employer said it was wrong and retracted the report. Salon’s Andrew Leonard investigates, and suggests that the real reason for retracting the report might be something more sinister than incompetence. Canada Rejects Harper’s Anti-Immigrant Appointment to Public Appointments Board: In a rebuff that had Canadian minority Prime Minister Harper foaming at the mouth, a parliamentary committee rejected his appointment of an oil industry buddy to a key post, calling the candidate, on record for xenophic statements, “unsuitable for the job”. Both the selection of the appointee and Harper’s intemperate response to it showed Harper’s true stripes. Cutting Out the Bank Middleman: Peer-to-peer finance is now beginning to disintermediate another service where the middleman charges an unreasonable ‘agency fee’ — banking. Information Week’ Tom Claburn reports that two companies are now offering eBay-type services to connect lenders to borrowers. This is just one more step towards peer-to-peer everything, a world where buyers and sellers can contract with each other directly. We’ve already seen this in travel agencies and investment brokers, and it’s starting in real estate as well. These are just baby steps, however. The final destination is one where no intermediary is needed at all, even a ‘discount’ one. It’s a direct reaction to the usury ofoligopolies, and a true ‘free market’ victory. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link. |
May 19, 2006
Self-Experimentation: For More Than Just Diets
 Seth Roberts, the Shangri-La Diet guy, originally discovered his diet idea through scientifically rigorous self-experimentation*. Over years, he tried many different methods to lose weight and to cure his acne and insomnia, changing one variable at a time and measuring the results carefully. The results in all three areas were remarkable and novel: his now-famous weight reduction program, a cure for his acne, and an unusual insomnia prevention program (watching talking heads on TV shortly after awakening each day, or standing erect at least nine hours per day, or exposure to fluorescent light early in the morning). His paper notes that self-experimentation might be very effective at coming up with out-of-the-box thinking on ways to address just about any illness or unwanted mood or behaviour. While self-experimentation may lack objectivity, and certainly lacks the volume of test subjects and presence of a ‘control group’ that medical research generally considers essential for scientific validity, it has the unarguable advantage of taking into account individual variability (our bodies and minds are all different), and the personal engagement of the ‘patient’ must inevitably improve its efficacy. In the long run, if the ‘customer’ believes it works, that’s all that matters. It is only learned helplessness, and the outrageous prohibition of self-experimentation in the early days of the 20th century (until then you were allowed to self-prescribe any drug or treatment you could buy or concoct, caveat emptor) that diminished self-experimentation from the principal means by which we accepted responsibility for our own health, to “inadvisable”, “rash”, and “irresponsible” behaviour. We now defer to ‘professionals’ to tell us what’s good for us, at huge and arguably unnecessary cost to the ‘health care system’, our self-reliance, our independence, and our sense of personal responsibility. When I was in the hospital for my kidney stones, I leapfrogged others in the waiting room because I had carefully monitored exactly what I had eaten, which exact drugs I had taken, and what symptoms had occurred precisely where in my body, and when, down to the minute, so that I had self-diagnosed (based on two previous bouts with stones) my problem and even self-prescribed the treatment (unfortunately the narcotics I had kept, against pharmaceutical advice, from my last bout were stale and no longer effective). I did my research on the Internet, and asked intelligent questions about preventing future occurrences. The doctors in the emergency ward said I was “a breath of fresh air” — able to answer all their questions with a high degree of self-awareness and knowledge of my illness, and lamented the fact that much of the time required to diagnose patients was due to their helpless inability to even describe what was wrong with them. Damn the medical ‘profession’ (which must have seen new laws prohibiting self-treatment as a great make-work project, back when they weren’t too busy or too knowledgeable) and damn the legal ‘profession’ (which was almost assuredly behind these new laws as a means of creating new liability for doctors and hence a new revenue stream for them). The whole ‘alternative medicine’ industry, which runs the gamut from brilliant natural treatments selfishly opposed by Big Pharma (e.g. Monsanto’s continued lobbying against stevia, to protect its toxic chemical artificial sweetener monopoly) to outright criminal quackery (e.g. most of the self-treatments on late-night infomercials), is a direct result of citizen dissatisfaction with the monopolization of treatment of our own bodies by self-anointed ‘professionals’. And it has led to the medical profession, in defence of that monopoly, pretending to know much more about health and disease than they really do, creating false and unreasonable expectations, worsening our learned helplessness, and making the whole ‘industry’ absurdly and unnecessarily expensive, and grossly inefficient. One doctor I know says 90% of what he does could be done just as well by nurses, para-professionals and/or patients themselves, but he is prohibited from allowing them to do so by the lawyers and insurance companies. What’s more, with ‘professional supervision’, those suffering with serious allergies, diabetes and other volatile conditions already do and must self-experiment, both to define the extent of their condition as precisely as possible and to self-treat when ‘professional’ treatment could be too late. Fortunately, the Internet is on our side, allowing us to share information with others, and to take back some control and responsibility over our own bodies from ‘professionals’, and not rely on shady hucksters of alternative, often-dubious under-the-counter substances. I have suggested before that ‘all of us know more than any of us’ (including the professionals) and that self-experimentation combined with information-sharing with millions of other self-experimenters could lead to a much healthier population at much lower cost than the dysfunctional system we have now. This is another example of the Wisdom of Crowds. What Seth did was learn about the medical research process by self-experimenting. What he offers us now (<– note: this is a long but absolutely fascinating paper) is his knowledge of the research process, so that we can apply it to our own self-experimentation. This process is not rocket science, and should be obvious to anyone familiar with the ‘scientific method’ we all learned in high school: Conduct a series of experiments, holding most of the variables constant and varying just one at a time, Observe the results, Formulate a hypothesis to explain the results, Use the hypothesis to predict other results, Conduct tests to verify the predictions and hence confirm or refute the hypothesis. Rinse and repeat. What is interesting about self-experimentation is that it allows you to abandon and modify hypotheses much more quickly than formal testing, drawing on your instincts, and to hone in on better hypothesis candidates more quickly, by successive approximation, trial and error. In effect, this is a more natural way of learning, drawing on both subjective and objective assessments instead of just the latter. It is improvisational rather than advanced-planned. Although it is less disciplined than formal scientific testing (and hence would not stand up as well in court, or in fusty peer review) I would argue that it is more effective. If you’re talking about improving your own health, which is more important to you? So while Seth’s test allowed him to find a cure for insomnia (looking at large talking heads on TV each morning, a simulation of social contact with others at that hour), the extent and personal context of the data he collected surfaced hypotheses in entirely different areas that would be unlikely to have come to light from normal, objective scientific work. For example, he has hypothesized (compellingly) that looking at those large talking heads at that time might also be an effective treatment for depression. He has hypothesized that changes in natural light patterns (due to the seasons, and to East-West travel) may have a much more pronounced (and once understood, perhaps controllable) effect on our circadian rhythms and hence on our psychology, physiology and metabolism than we would expect. What informed his hypotheses-creation is precisely what has informed much of my thinking in recent years: How does nature deal with this? In my case I draw on my amateur study of birds and animals in the ‘wild’ near our house and in the forest nearby, and on my extensive reading about animal behaviour. In Seth’s case he draws on his understanding of how pre-civilization humans lived. That led him to appreciate that social conversation in the morning was useful in tribal cultures, and detrimental at night when others were trying to sleep, and that hence watching talking heads in the morning would improve natural rhythms and mood, while watching them after midnight would have the opposite effect, hypotheses he verified by self-experimentation. Likewise his assessment that in tribal cultures standing or walking nine hours a day would have been normal, led him to hypothesize that standing or (less practical in the modern world) walking nine hours a day would improve natural rhythms and mood, and alleviate insomnia, which he also verified by self-experimentation. And from there, the corollary hypotheses are immediate and exciting: Could standing nine hours a day also alleviate osteoporosis and back problems? And what would be the effect of replacing all our desks with standing-height tables and orthomats (to relieve the stress of standing in one place for extended periods)? A key step in determining what to try, and what hypotheses to test, in self-experimentation to improve your (physical or mental) health is acknowledging that we are physiologically largely unchanged since pre-history, and hence asking What about my current way of life is unnatural? So Seth’s message for self-experimentation to improve your health is tripartite:
This, far more than the concept of the Shangri-La diet, is what really excites me about Seth’s work. Giving yourself permission to take responsibility for your own health, learning a simple process for doing so, and hence liberating yourself from our society’s learned helplessness, is an extraordinarily exhilarating prospect. As I am prone to morning moodiness, insomnia, and chronic back problems, I’m planning on stealing Seth’s idea of using a standing-height table and anti-fatigue mat to replace my desk and easy chair (I did this briefly after my last back injury, when I couldn’t sit down, and I really liked it). I also plan on having more breakfast meetings with people in my neighbourhood, and taping and watching the talk shows I now watch at night (Daily Show, Bill Maher and occasionally Charlie Rose) in the morning instead. And then I will apply my imagination to create and test other hypotheses. I’ve had a seasonal severe skin itchiness for thirty years that doctors have never been able to diagnose, that I now treat effectively with short immersion in a (very hot) hot tub, but I’m going to start self-experimenting for a preventative cure instead of a treatment. And since there is absolutely no medical consensus on how to prevent kidney stones (as I’ve reported, much of the medical advice is self-contradictory) I’m going to try self-experimentation for that as well. I will, of course, keep you all informed of my progress, of what apparently (at least for me) works and what doesn’t, and would ask you to do the same. Let’s see if we can put the medical ‘profession’ and Big Pharma, and the lawyers and insurance companies that leach off them, out of business. * It would be more accurate (but more verbose) to refer to the process as ‘self-experimentation plus self-observation’. In this article I use the term self-experimentation to include the accompanying self-observation. Images above: Saddle-chair to relieve pressure from prolonged standing, from Canadian government occupational health site; Sit-stand desk from Neilsen Associates, a UK furniture company. I’m not happy with any of the commercial standing-height furniture (it needs to be able to tilt, for a start, it should not be that expensive, and it should ideally be portable). So to further demonstrate my victory over learned helplessness, I’m going to design and build my own. Final note: I’m still on the diet, in the hope that it will reduce my evening cravings for sugar, oil and salt. My status report will follow nextweek. |
May 18, 2006
Is Idealism Good for Society?
 My recent review of the 1929-39 Great Depression opened my eyes to the dangers of idealism, which manifested itself in ideologies that aggravated and prolonged the misery of millions. And while it was neocon ideology (either the populist or privileged class variety) that reigned throughout the Western world (except briefly for FDR and his New Deal), the fact that many opponents of the status quo were just as idealistic (calling for the overthrow of the system in favour of true communism) didn’t help the people of the working and middle classes, driving them into the waiting hands of fascist populists with simpler, more covert, and more dangerous ideologies. I grew up in the 1960s, and I saw idealism as a force for good — ending the War in Vietnam, opposing the neocon excesses, and creating some community-based models for living, and making a living, that we would be wise to study closely as the world charges towards a series of complex crises that none of the prevailing political orthodoxies has the faintest idea how to cope with. Not surprisingly, I became an idealist. Maybe I always was. So idealism in the 1930s impeded desperately needed change, and helped prolong the Depression and propel the world into global war, but idealism in the 1960s helped bring about needed change, and brought an end to the regime of a deranged ideologue (Nixon) and an end to war. So is idealism a good thing or a bad thing, in general and specifically in today’s context? Just to be clear, I’m referring to idealism in the common ‘dictionary’ sense of thinking about and aspiring to achieve things in ideal terms, not the narrower meaning of the word in philosophic and religious taxonomy. In its extreme form idealism becomes utopianism, a belief in striving for an impossibly perfect society, and a fierce, uncompromising, intolerant belief in a specific ideology or code of beliefs as superior to all others. Its opposite, depending on your point of view, is either pragmatism or realism. Pragmatism, a belief in incremental, practical, readily achievable change, has the advantages of often being consensus-driven and more easily achievable, but carries the risks of ‘end justifies the means’ rationalization. Realism (again, referring to the term’s use in common parlance not its technical meaning) is, of course, in the eyes of the beholder, and can serve as anything from a sturdy defence of the status quo (“you can’t change it, it’s been going on for ten thousand years“) to an excuse for defeatism, resignation, even suicide. A lot of the world’s most inspiring and enlightening books are ideological — they imagine, and assert as possible, something ‘better’ than what exists today. They stretch our minds and force us to challenge the myths of our current culture, the myths that, as long as everything appears to be going reasonable well, entrench us in our thinking, reinforce our narrow frames, make us like everybody else. Ideologies carry with them implicit moral codes of what is ‘right’ and ‘good’, how we humans should behave. They become our frames, the lenses through which we ‘see’ the world and which make us (at least unless and until the next compelling ideology shatters that frame) blind to other ideologies. Even pragmatism (though not the end-justifies-the-means variety) can be viewed as an ideology — an ideology that is opposed to any ‘idealistic’, ‘extreme’ ideologies. Are non-human creatures idealistic, ideological? My answer would be that they are not — not because they are not capable of such intellectualization (many creatures evidently have rich imaginations), but because they don’t need them. If that’s the case, why would the human species have evolved idealism? What need does idealism serve that it would be selected for in the evolution of our species? Wouldn’t our society be more peaceful, more content, if we all thought the status quo ideal, or didn’t think of ideals at all? My theory is that idealism is a stress reaction, the intellectualization of an intuitive acknowledgement that something is very wrong and needs to be changed, much like the instinctive reactions of mice, when they find themselves in conditions of overcrowding, to hoard, to attack each other, to create hierarchy, and hence to reduce their numbers quickly to sustainable levels. If the status quo were ‘ideal’, there would be no purpose for idealism. I would guess that at some point thirty thousand years ago, with much of the large game on which humans had lived a leisurely life suddenly extinct, and with the sudden onset of the final ten thousand year expansion of glaciation of the last ice age, life became something much less than ideal, and some people idealized a less vulnerable world of agriculture and settlement, and set about creating it. They did so, I would suggest, because they had to — there was no other choice except to perish. We now live (despite the efforts to deny it by those at the top of the hierarchy that agriculture and settlement necessitated) in another time in which life is, and will certainly be for our children and grandchildren, once again much less than ideal. We now have some very limited knowledge that agriculture and settlement, and subsequent human innovations and technologies, each designed ideally to make life better and to solve immediate problems that had to be solved, have in fact created as many new problems to be solved as they have solved themselves. So we are now living in a complex human society with millions of ideologies, each ‘imagined’ to direct us to solve perceived urgent and threatening problems. And because there are now so many of us living so closely together, these ideologies conflict violently with each other. We have devised political systems that allow us to vote, somewhat democratically, for the ideology that we think has the best chance of working, but these systems are increasingly breaking down as many grow impatient and overthrow or subvert the democratic vote in favour of their own personal, selfish ideology, or opt out of the process as they perceive their ideology to be unrepresented by any of the people at the top of the social hierarchy. As we now see everywhere, idealization and ideology have ceased being evolutionary advantages that allow us to imagine and collectively institute adaptations that can improve our quality of life. As human society has grown larger and more complex its adaptability has waned proportionately, and idealization and ideology are now mostly just wishful thinking and noise, imaginings that make us unhappy, angry, impatient, and ultimately violent yet offer no real hope of realizability. This is why I believe there is such growing interest in rediscovering community, a ‘political’ unit that is much smaller and less complex and hence more adaptable, where idealism is realizable and therefore still has value. Pioneers have always recognized this. The great challenge today is that there is no place left to go where our large, massively complex and dysfunctional global political cultures do not hold sway. We can run but we cannot hide. John Gray is an idealist who essentially espouses reducing the degree to which idealism and ideology drive our actions and behaviours. He argues that it is too late to achieve idealistic changes in our society — human society is now too vast, interdependent and complex to be ‘saved’, and we will have to leave it up to nature to correct our excesses. Despite this belief, or perhaps because of it, he urges us to refocus our lives on things we can ‘realistically’ change: Our own impact on the Earth and on our communities, physical and virtual, and our own awareness and understanding of, joy in, and belonging to, these communities. He suggests we do this for our own sake and for the sake of those we love and care about, rather than because he thinks this will spread virally to create a new and enlightened human consciousness. Our role, he is saying, is simply to be models, for those close enough to learn from and be inspired by, and to be aware of and happy with life’s astonishing joys. This does not mean denying our ideals, but rather putting them in their place, and not being consumed by them. I was ready to realize this and, while I am still and will always be an idealist (we are what we are) I am trying to learn to inflict my idealism less on others, and on myself, and instead be real, do what I can, and what I love, and what makes a difference in important small ways. I want to be a model, not a preacher. Our only choice, ultimately, is the choice between which of three masters to follow: (1) The organisms that make up our bodies, which make most decisions on ‘our’ behalf for us, and which evolved our minds for their collective well-being; (2) Our culture and society, which is trying to make us sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of all the human mice in this horrifically overcrowded and violence-ridden laboratory; and (3) Gaia, the Earth-organism that is quietly telling us what our place is as part of all life on Earth, and how to behave accordingly. We have no choice but to obey the first master, and we are brought up to follow and even lay down our lives for the second, where our idealism holds sway. There are those who believe, of course, that Gaia, a life-world self-organized for its own collective benefit, is also an ideal and an ideological construct. There is no arguing with such people, since their argument is circular and hermetically sealed inside their own frame of understanding. I don’t believe Gaia is an ideal or ideology, any more than the Earth revolving around the sun (once such a heretical idea, so threatening to prevailing ideology, that merely espousing it could get you killed) is. Gaia simply is. You can observe it at work, and see how it makes sense, and made sense for billions of years before we arrived on the planet, and will make sense long after we’re gone. It is an adaptation that works. I also don’t believe that following Gaia is spiritual — she (I use the female term endearingly and metaphorically) meets none of the definitions of spiritualism: she is not immaterial (on the contrary!), she is not deific or supernatural (merely natural), she is not religious (tied to a single set of values — as the wonderful cartoon above shows, she does not even care about values) or even sacred (in the sense of demanding worship or idolizing). She is physical. She is connected and connecting. She is all of us, all of life on Earth. She just is. When the sun goes nova and obliterates all life on Earth, she will be no more. I choose to follow Gaia, the third master, because I no longer believe the second master works or can be made to work. It is broken beyond repair. And Gaia is different from the other two masters in that she does not make demands of us, all she asks of us is that we pay attention, listen, and learn. And if we don’t, she will cut us a lot of slack in our youthful folly, and only correct our excesses when it is the consensus of all the life on Earth that is is time to do so. Noidealist, she. |
May 17, 2006
Time for the Progressive Party in the US?
 Bucky Fuller said:
ìYou never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsoleteÖI look for what needs to be done. After all, that’s how the universe designs itself.” The US two-party system needs to be changed — it is dysfunctional. The pandering to right-wing power-brokers going on now by the most-likely 2008 presidential candidates, McCain and Clinton, is disgraceful, a complete betrayal of the principles they alleged to stand for and which their supporters believe in. It is a recognition that the power wielded by those who control the machinery of government in the US now, over both parties, and which has bankrupted the US and corrupted the American democratic process, is insuperable within the existing party structure. The tools that supported Howard Dean in 2004 were sufficient to mobilize millions to support an outsider and carry him to front-runner status, but not enough (scream notwithstanding) to overcome the party machine and the establishment’s interest in keeping the status quo — two parties that essentially stand for the same policies, offering apparently dramatically different ‘brands’ of what is ultimately the same ‘product’ — laissez-faire corporatist, militarist imperialism, a sell-off of the commons to private interests, and the dismantling of public social services. Even Howard Dean, deliciously tested by Jon Stewart last night, laughed off Stewart’s pointed criticisms of Democratic Party betrayals and incompetence and waffled on all the tough questions. Canadians and Europeans can show you the way. We introduced third parties in our countries, with great difficulty but successfully, when the two dominant parties failed to offer us any real choice. As a result, although our systems are not perfect (Canada desperately needs proportional representation, for example), our model of democracy is much healthier and more robust than the moribund US model. And all you need to do is what you did to support Howard Dean in 2004, except with a third party and a set of candidates committed to integrity and change. I would suggest the name Progressive Party for this new movement. And the candidates who I believe could give the party momentum and credibility are Bill Moyers (pictured above) and Dennis Kucinich. By starting now, this party would have time to build sufficient momentum, visibility and credibility by 2008 to contest not just the presidency, but the federal House and Senate as well. The disenchantment with both existing parties is widespread, and building now will not prevent the Democrats from winning back at least one chamber this fall, and then showing America that they’re not really any different from the Republicans by 2008. There are two first steps: Organization, and platform development. The platform should not be specific programs but rather unequivocal shared principles, a framework that sets out the common beliefs of progressives and against which proposed party policies and legislation can be assessed. That framework needs to be broad enough to accommodate changing needs but uncompromising in the core principles that all progressives hold dear, principles of democracy, peace, consensus, social justice, equal opportunity, environmental, energy and economic sustainability, stewardship and egalitarianism, principles that assert the joint responsibility of citizens and their communities and governments for the welfare of all. That platform need not even be written; it exists now. It was drafted by the US association of green parties in 2000, it is comprehensive, and it needs only the substitution of the word “progressive” for the word “green”. The only reason for even this change is optics: The green party is perceived (incorrectly) to be a narrow-agenda party, and it is easier just to change the name than to have to struggle to change public perception. The organization process should be grassroots, designed not to find a single national leader so much as credible progressive candidates in every constituency in the US, and allow the leader to emerge naturally from the local candidates. As the party grows in recognition and credibility it should be prepared to entice leading progressive candidates from other parties to join it, but only if they fully embrace the principles of the Progressive Party, not opportunistically. The Internet will and must be a key organizational enabler for the party, but the organizational process must recognize that some 80% of Americans are not active online, so other media must be used as well. It probably makes sense to organize the party by creating and linking grassroots cells into organic local party ‘organisms’; the cells would remain the lifeblood and key building block of the party — constituency organizations are too broad and vulnerable to ‘take-over’ by the power-hungry or moneyed interests, and tend to wither between campaigns. Cells would work all-year-round, whether it is an ‘election year’ or not — the purpose of the party is to bring about political change consistent with its principles, by any and all means available, not just to elect candidates. In that sense, the party would be more like some grassroots churches than a traditional political organization. Having said that, we need to create some momentum for the party. That won’t come from full-page ads in the NYT or dependence on a single charismatic leader. It will require the support of some big names (George Soros and Oprah Winfrey come to mind) but the condition of their support will be that they offer it out of principle and not take a highly visible role within the party itself. I’m not convinced we need coverage or advertising in the mainstream media at all — these media are broadly loathed and distrusted by Americans, and I believe viral communication of our message is more affordable, more effective, and more interesting to voters. Simply by eschewing traditional media and methods we can paradoxically attract more attention and be more credible to voters. This new party, taking its lead from Bucky’s quote above, should not play by the old rules. It should make up and use new, guerrilla rules. Above all, it needs to start and remain accessible to every citizen. There should be no need to have ‘constituency offices’ and make quadrennial whirlwind door-to-door tours. The elected representatives of the Progressive Party should be among us, highly visible always, passionate about local issues, less concerned about formal, meaningless debates in faraway legislative houses and more concerned with helping each cell achieve meaningful change in their own community. The legislation they introduce should be designed to equalize power, wealth, services and opportunity for all, eliminate pork and corporate welfare, restructure the economy around sustainability instead of growth, exercise social and environmental responsibility and stewardship, and restore the integrity and regulatory discipline of the nation so that the laws apply to all, not just those who can’t afford to buy their way around them. And to those who are worried that a Progressive Party would ‘split the left’ and allow Republicans to win elections with as little as 34% of the vote, I would argue that the opposite is the case — the Democrats and Republicans can split the vote of those who continue to like pork-barrel, trough-feeding, arrogant, say-one-thing, do-another, back-room politicians who think the status quo is wonderful. We’llsettle for the 90% of the population looking for a New Deal. What do you think? Hopelessly idealistic? Anyone have a manual for cellular organization? What other spokespeople (not leaders) for the movement would you suggest? |
May 16, 2006
More Thoughts on Finding Your Purpose and Your Genius
 I‘ve written before about Dick Richards’ book Is Your Genius at Work?, and amplified his model somewhat (as shown in the graphic above) by breaking what he calls Genius into two components: Your Gift (What you’re uniquely good at), and your Passion (What you love doing). What he calls your Purpose I have narrowed somewhat to What’s Needed, because I think that most of us, unless we are of independent means, need to be pragmatic about defining our Purpose in terms of what is needed, and affordable, today. Otherwise we may be doomed to be forever too far ahead for our own good. Most of us struggle to ‘move’ work that is currently in Area 5 on the graphic above (stuff we’re good at, and which has a market, but which doesn’t really fulfill us) to Area 3. Or we try to ‘create’ a market, through promotion, for work we love and are good at, and hence move a thankless and unprofitable business (Area 2 on the graphic above) to Area 3. I have argued that both of these efforts are somewhat futile, and that the work in the ‘sweet spot’ (Area 3) exists (for each of us) and needs to be discovered rather than manufactured. Most of us simply don’t know enough to know how to discover it, or even how to go about beginning to discover it. I confess I am still searching myself. There is no silver bullet approach to this discovery process. I have suggested that one approach is to start with who you want to work with, and then work with them to discover work that is needed, which the collective group is good at, and which each member of the group can work within, doing work that they love. Another approach is to start by asking the question Who needs your gift now? And as part of my writing on The Natural Enterprise I have suggested a way to discover What’s Needed, as a starting point to finding or creating Area 3 work. For those (like me) who know what’s needed (goods and services that are recognized as needed and affordable by those who need it), but are not at all excited about making a living filling that need, I have no suggestion other than — keep looking. Jeremy Heigh has received a lot of ideas from other people on Dick Richards’ Google group on what his Genius and Purpose might be. He ended up with a host of possible candidates for his Genius, and a host of different views on which of them best reflects his Gift and Passion, and was looking to understand how I managed to identify my Genius and Purpose so quickly (though not, alas, their intersect). I responded that what helped me most was looking first for the Gift/Passion overlap. To do this I considered each candidate for my Genius in turn and asked:
So I started by identifying the Gift implicit in each possible candidate for my Genius, and asked myself What kinds of work would give expression to that Gift, that ability. And then I asked myself if I would genuinely enjoy spending a large part of my time and energy doing such work. This enabled me to whittle down the list of Genius candidates quickly. Because (I think) I have a pretty good imagination, this might be easier for me than for others, however. I also found that deciding on my Purpose also focused my Genius. Finding that sweet spot in Area 3 really requires approaching it from all three angles, using a large amount of imagination, iteration, soul searching, and exploring and researching each possibility until you find one that intersects your Gift (what you’re good at), your Passion (what you love doing) and your Purpose (what the market recognizes it needs and will pay for. Several times I’ve thought I’d found some Area 3 opportunities, only to find, on further consideration and research, that I’d overestimated the market, or my interest or skill in doing them. But the process works. I’m convinced I need to explore the Area 4 opportunities more closely — perhaps by partnering with others who have skills I lack, together we can make a living each doing what we love using our Gift, producing a collective product that is needed. Trying to make a living alone makes the task unnecessarily difficult. Two things will often prevent us, or at least delay us, from finding those intersects. The first is unawareness of markets and opportunities, i.e. not knowing what is needed, by whom. This is doubly difficult because quite often the people who have a need that we could fill don’t realize they have it. We may need to imagine it, surface it, explore it with those who may need it, co-develop the solution to that need with them. And if they still don’t recognize that they need it, then they don’t need it yet, and we are too far ahead. The second blocker is not knowing ourselves. If our work and life experience is limited or unvaried, we may not really know what our Gift, or even our Passion, is, and can’t be expected to until we have broadened our experience. Volunteering, travel, research, and exchange programs can speed up this process, but to some extent we have to give ourself time for our Gift and our Passion, and hence our Genius, to emerge. If you think you’ve found work at the intersect of your Gift, Passion and Purpose, i.e. genuine Area 3 work, I’d love to hear your story, and the process (deliberate or accidental) that helped you find it. |
May 15, 2006
What to Expect When the Dollar Collapses — Part Two of Two
 Yesterday I contrasted the attitudes of people in 1929 with their attitudes today, on the precipice of another Great Depression. I said that I believe racism, religious hatred and the distrust between economic classes was more pronounced and more overt in affluent nations in 1929 than it is today, and that while economic disparity is just as great, our use of technology and automation to gut future generations’ share of resources to meet the needs of today’s mass of humanity means that both rich and poor are relatively better off now than they were in 1929. Here is the picture Pierre Berton, in his exhaustive study The Great Depression, painted of the way the Canadian people, their governments and corporate management behaved in response to the decade-long crisis seventy years ago:
The authors of The Fourth Turning expect that the next fourth turning — the next cycle of stark authoritarianism — to begin between 2010 and 2020, about eighty to ninety years after the last. The economic fragility of massive US debt and trade deficits, the End of Oil, ideological wars and terrorism, threats of pandemics and the spectre of eco-collapse precipitated by global warming all add fuel to their argument that the fourth turning is imminent, as such turnings are generally sparked by a crisis. We certainly have plenty of candidates to choose from for such a crisis. So suppose we map the behaviours and events of 1929-39 on the situation we find ourselves in at the dawn of the 21st century. How might we expect people, governments and corporate management to behave if the crash of the dollar brings about another Great Depression? Will our 21st century ingenuity, pragmatism, connectedness, collective wisdom, resilience, and more tolerant, democratic outlook lead us to a quick and radical correction of the excesses that produce the coming Depression, a rapid and relatively painless end to it, and a more humane response to the suffering it does produce? And is this all complicated by the fact that this time, unlike 1929, we are facing permanent, absolute ends to the critical resources on which our society relies for its existence? Here are my guesses on these questions:
I welcome your comments on any of these questions and forecasts. We may never be ready for such crises (it is our human nature to be reactive, and not to do anything until we have no choice), but at least we can know what to expect. And our response to an economic crash may help us cope better with the additional crises that almost inevitably await ourchildren and grandchildren as this century progresses. |
May 14, 2006
What to Expect When the Dollar Collapses — Part One of Two
 Just as in 1929, we now live in an economy that is living wildly beyond its means, depending on greater and greater fools to keep bidding up governments’, corporations’ and citizens’ paper wealth. Just as in 1929, everyone is borrowing to buy, either in the hope that they can sell later for a profit (because it is the only way they can hope to increase their net worth), or because it is the only way they can buy at all. And just as in 1929, it is unsustainable, and will lead to a sudden severe reversal followed by a decade (or more, this time) of ever-worsening conditions, except for upper-income (six-figure, this time) earners. I’ve just finished reading Pierre Berton’s The Great Depression, the definitive history of the 1929-1939 depression. In Part Two of this article tomorrow I’m going to map the behaviours of that era onto the realities of the early 21st century, and tell a story of what life in the next Depression could well be like. Berton’s depiction of the last Depression is one of spectacular political blundering and pig-headedness, and a mean-spiritedness that permeates the whole society. So today I want to explore whether (and if so, how) the attitudes of people (elected, management and grassroots) to their fellow humans are significantly different from what they were seventy years ago. The human effect of a Depression is, after all, as much a matter of how we treat each other as the economic variables that conspire to convert seeming affluence to staggering and protracted misery. In 1929, the class-conscious society that had existed more or less for millennia was still a reality. While slavery was no longer legal, racism was still very common and overt. Notwithstanding the message of the Statue of Liberty, new immigrants were treated suspiciously and as second-class citizens, when they were allowed citizenship at all. Anti-Semitism was rampant (and had been for decades), and hatred and distrust of other religions and cultures was considered quite ‘normal’ by most citizens. Segregation, at least until a group was assimilated, was the accepted and preferred reality. Women in the US and Canada had only just achieved full suffrage (in Quebec they would not achieve it until 1940). Economic class distinctions were sharp, and there was a general assumption by those in power that the ‘lower classes’ were lazy and needed to be supervised and bullied to perform. Opposition by management to organized labour was virulent, and the government and police forces had no qualms about putting down civil strife violently. Anti-Communist sentiment was uniformly high, had been for years, and organized religions, mainstream political parties and social organizations all preached the dangers of the ‘red menace’. The affluence we attribute to the ‘roaring twenties’ was that of a minority elite only, but then that had been the norm since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Everyone else was deeply in debt, part of the deliberate process of keeping the middle and lower classes in line. The middle classes were the ones who tried to leverage their debts into wealth through the stock market, and were especially hard hit by its collapse. Economic Disparity between rich and poor was massive, with managers earning comfortable 5-figure incomes while many workers’ annual incomes (there was no minimum wage, no unemployment insurance or labour protections) were only in the high 3-figures. One could argue that most of this is still true today, except that the economic, religious, racial and cultural animosity is mostly tacit rather than overt, and, thanks to automation and other ‘productivity’ technologies that are taking resources from future generations to meet the needs and wants of people today, the economic prosperity of all social classes in affluent nations, adjusted for purchasing power, is proportionally better, though the disparity is as large as ever. Culture is all about mastery — domination, imperialism, control, and restrictions on behaviour. It can be argued that we humans have three masters, fighting for control of us:
The argument about where ‘free will’ fits into this, if indeed we have any free will at all, is best left for another day. So what happens when an economic depression hits? Suddenly the stress level is increased by an order of magnitude, the poor begin to fear for their very survival, and there is no longer any assurance that there is ‘enough to go around’, so the rich and powerful begin to hoard and to repress the poor and weak to ensure they do not rise up so there is not enough for anyone. Indeed, Berton asserts that the Great Depression could equally be called the Great Repression, so great was the physical, social and cultural clampdown on the masses, and the steadfast refusal to invest tax dollars or incur deficits to relieve the human misery of the time. That refusal, Berton says, was not deliberate cruelty, but rather ideological — the economists of the time (Keynes was not yet in vogue) believed that government intervention and government spending in economic turndowns would worsen the situation, and the political wisdom was that giving people anything for free would make them lazy and unmotivated to work and lead to communism. It was neocon ideology, and it was ubiquitous among the ruling classes (and the political parties in their thrall) at that time, except for the extraordinary administration of FDR. In fact, there were at the time three competing ideologies, all of them idealistic, and all espoused, more and more loudly as the crisis worsened, as the solution for the society’s ills, by men (women were not taken seriously in politics in those days) who were both arrogant and ambitious — laissez-faire neoconservatism, communism, and fascism. This toxic combination of qualities — fanatic idealism, arrogance and ambition — produced some of the most despotic, extreme and dangerous ‘leaders’ the world had ever known, swept into power on populist platforms that preyed on the utter desperation and learned helplessness of the people. When moderation seems inadequate and ineffectual to deal with extreme suffering, extremism flourishes. Could this happen today, or are we more reasoned, better equipped, more suspicious of simplistic idealism and ideology? Is it already happening? Will the collapse of the dollar, precipitated by the staggering incompetence and fanatic, dim-witted ideology of the Bush regime, inevitably bring about the Fourth Turning? Or will our 21st century ingenuity, pragmatism, connectedness, collective wisdom, resilience, lead us to a quick and radical correction of the excesses that produce the coming Depression, and hence a rapid and relatively painless end to it? And is this all complicated by the fact that this time, unlike 1929, we are facing permanent, absolute ends to the critical resources on which our society relies for its existence? My answers to these questions in Part Two tomorrow. |
May 13, 2006
Links for the Week – May 13/06
 Cartoon from Hugh Macleod. Environment Plan B 2.0 for Earth: They’re coming fast and furious these days. This plan is from Lester Brown, and is available entirely on-line. Like Amory Lovins’, this book is extremely optimistic and fails to appreciate how complex systems works and why they cannot and do not change quickly, even when someone has a great plan. Well researched, though, and his heart’s in the right place. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link. Migrating Birds Not Cause of Poultry Flu: More evidence, via the NYT of the insanity of wild bird slaughter as a means of delaying the inevitable flu pandemic. The real culprits are still the same, though no one wants to admit it: Illegal trafficking in poultry, unhygienic farm practices, overcrowded ‘factory farms’, and lack of diversity in farmed animals. Money dictates that all four practices will continue and increase, with the inevitable and disastrous consequences. And now most people have been conned by Big Pharma to believe Tamiflu and other silver-bullet drugs will be able to protect them and stave off pandemic. Stop Old-Growth Forest Clear-Cutting in Northern Ontario: Another petition, this time for Canadians. Not sure what good these petitions do — have they ever really worked? More info on the subject at RAN. Fritjof Capra on Sustainability: Two interesting interviews by Irish permaculturist Rob at Transition Culture (great blog BTW). Part 1. Part 2. He gets that it’s all about grassroots community building, and appreciates that what’s preventing us is lack of widespread knowledge and political will. He’s a lot more optimistic than I am that communication and “political change” will fix that. Thanks to deconsumption for the link. US Politics
Five Keys to Effective Presentations: Carmine Gallo at BusinessWeek tells us how Steve Jobs does it: Stress the benefits, practice a lot, visualizations not bullet-points, speak passionately, and have a novel, memorable closing. Thanks to Kathy Sierra for the link. Canadian Music Creators Oppose DRM: Canadian artists are calling a spade a spade, to the great discomfort of the music oligopoly. DRM and lawsuits against customers are not only ineffective and insulting, they say, they are designed to increase profits for the oligopoly that stands between the artists and their fans, not for the benefit of the artists. In Canada, the Supreme Court has ruled that file-sharing is completely legal, and that the oligopoly’s arrangement with the government (by which they are paid the proceeds of a special Canadian tax on blank recording media) already compensates them for copying. The oligopoly is now trying to renege on this agreement, of course, since they never envisioned the innovation of file-sharing software and other peer-to-peer technologies. Google’s Humbling New Trends Tool: Here in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, we tend to think the memes we originate, pick up on and amplify are getting through to large numbers of people, at least those online. The latest Google tool, Google Trends throws cold water on this conceit. Some of the most popular blog memes, like The Wisdom of Crowds, corporatism, and the Two-Income Trap, and some of the ideas and concepts we have been trying to increase knowledge and awareness of, like Intentional Communities and the Gift Economy, according to Google, “do not have enough search volume to show graphs”. Ouch. Meanwhile, type in the name of the most obscure celebrity, or sexual term, and you’ll see what people are reallylooking for online. We’ve still got a long way to go. |
May 12, 2006
Sympathy
 It’s hard to cope with the insanity of living at the start of the 21st century, perhaps civilization’s last century, knowing what lies ahead. Like everyone but fools and fanatics, I worry a lot about the future: The coming Great Depression, and what will happen when our savings are wiped out and our pension plans go bankrupt; The End of Oil and Water, and what it means for those whose substantial incomes are yet barely enough to make ends meet now, and for those already struggling to eke out a living on desolated soil, or in the vast and fragile economic pyramid that ultimately depends, precariously, on that soil; Global Warming, and the misery and suffering it will inevitably inflict especially on those least resilient; and Pandemic Disease (to us or our foods), the fourth horseman, the one we are least prepared for, and which threatens to hollow out our civilization and bring out the very worst in our brave, fierce and terribly intelligent species.
I worry too about the other dominoes — species extinction, deforestation, poisoned food, air, soil and water, nuclear war, chemical sabotage and bioterrorism, that the above crises could so easily precipitate and cascade, and the bankrupted and corrupted political and economic systems that will be at best useless in the face of these long emergencies, and at worst exacerbating forces. Most of all I worry about the fate of my granddaughters, now age 6 and 16, who will inherit the dreadful legacy we are recklessly and thoughtlessly leaving for them, and who will I fear face the full brunt of these cascading miseries as the second half of this century unfolds with an exhausted groan. The more I learn, the more I worry and the more pessimistic I become. But learning brings its own solace — somehow it is still better to know, I think, even if one cannot hope to begin to prepare before it is time to belatedly react. At least we will know what to expect. I’m now reading Pierre Berton’s epic The Great Depression, so I’ll know even more. Knowledge may not be power, after all, but it has its value in providing perspective, and as therapy. What other therapies are there? I described one yesterday — spending time out of time in nature with creatures too wise to worry about what they cannot control (though I know they sense it, the way you can smell trouble brewing, read it in the lines on people’s faces), creatures showing us how to live in the moment, the eternal Now, effectively, lightly, fearlessly, without waste or harm to others. Such creatures include, to some extent, human children. One of my ways of disarming stress, dread and anger is to itemize its sources — write down all the things you think you have to do, and then decide not to do, ever, the ones that are not important, but only urgent (when you let others dictate your life’s agenda and play on your learned helplessness). And then, write down all the things that are causing you distress, from the global stresses like the ones in the first paragraphs of this essay to the local, temporary annoyances like the irresponsible behaviour of a bad neighbour, the dirty tricks of a schadenfreude-afflicted co-worker, the customer, recruiter or partner who doesn’t return your urgent call, and the belittling spitefulness of that relative, in-law or friend-of-friend — and one by one, let go of them. Will these things really matter ten years from now in hindsight? And even if they will, is there something you can do to resolve them now? If not, then these things don’t matter now — let them go, clear your mind of them, move beyond their stranglehold. And another therapy — doing something useful or helpful for others, or for the Earth, every day, making the world a tiny bit better, no matter how small that something is, is the greatest gift you can give yourself. Learning, spending time in nature, ‘calling out’ and letting go of unimportant things beyond your immediate control, and being of use to others — I know it is presumptuous of me to suggest these things as salves for personal anguish, especially since half the time I can’t even bring myself to do these things. I think ‘self-help’ books and programs are mostly useless, especially when they are devised by someone else, but I do believe the first step to coping, to being happy and effective as a human being, is helping yourself, or perhaps more accurately knowing yourself well enough to be able to ‘see’ what to do, and be at peace with that. Articles like this, one-sided conversations, are the writer’s way of saying:
When I listen, every night these days, to the chorus of thumbnail-sized spring peeper frogs on our pond, I think they too are saying this, at the top of their tiny lungs, to anyone who will listen. We’re not so different, after all. |
