 In yesterday’s article I prescribed a two-part process for prompting people to change (their beliefs, and/or their behaviours):
Two readers protested: “You can’t make people care”. They’re mostly right — you have to wait until they’re ready for what you have to show them, or tell them. But what you can do is inform them, so that, if they would care if they knew, they will.
The best way to inform people depends on what I have called their ‘information behaviour’. Some people respond to stories, while others need to see for themselves. Showing is usually better than telling:
But, if what you’re showing is too stark, or perceived to be manipulative (think of the ads for charities that show starving children), it can backfire. Showing someone what they need to see in person is best, but films, photos, music, personal accounts and other stories, and even novels ( e.g. Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and CM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello) can be effective ways to inform people in ways that will engage them emotionally and get them to care, and then to change — if the change is not too hard.
Yesterday I gave the example of getting people to care about the cruelty of factory farming by showing films of what goes on inside them, while at the same time inventing wholesome and delicious meat-substitutes that make it easy to become vegetarian (or creating distribution markets for local, organic, free-range farms); the two steps together could bring about the necessary change of eliminating the demand for factory farmed foods.
A woman’s shelter in Toronto is running ads that try to walk the line between grabbing attention and turning people off, featuring pictures and data on the abuse of women, children and seniors. One of them is shown above. The people I’ve talked to are split about whether they ‘work’ or not. These are PETA-style tactics — The real question is whether the hotline telephone number rings more because of them — whether it makes the ‘hard’ behaviour of reporting abuse ‘easy’ enough.
So what’s your favourite cause, and how might you be able to make it real, personal, something that people care about, and easy for people to change? If you can’t think of one, here are some to put your mind to:
Answering the question “How can we make these issues real for people who don’t care or can’t relate to them?” is about making it personal. It takes a lot of imagination to do this: Why should someone who’s lived all their lives in a city care about protecting rainforests, other than conceptually and abstractly? Answering the question “How can we make it easy for people to become part of the solution?” is about innovative thinking. It takes even more imagination to do this. If carbon credits and donations to charity are the best we can do to makeit easy, we are setting ourselves up for failure. And if we can’t answer these two questions, or believe there is no answer, we are guaranteeing failure. Thanks to The Toronto Observer for the copy of the poster |
June 19, 2007
Getting People to Give a Damn
June 18, 2007
The Lessons of the 1960s
 A day late for Father’s Day, this article is a tribute to my father. Life has not been terribly fair to him, but he greets every challenge he has faced with equanimity and grace, and he is kind and generous to a fault. He taught me to think for myself, and then to fight for what I believe in, no matter what. I just hope I will be able to pass on a fraction of the wisdom to others that he has. He has always been, and remains today, my role model, my intellectual foil, and my inspiration. Take a bow, Dad.There are a lot of people — seemingly mostly embittered born-again conservatives, professional cynics, and disengaged academics — second guessing the 60s these days, on this the 40th anniversary of Sergeant Pepper and the Summer of Love. They would have us believe the era was one of illusory and untenable change, of the co-opting of humanism for economic gain, and of lazy uncommitted people jumping on a convenient ‘revolutionary’ bandwagon as an excuse to take drugs or start riots. I suppose this was to be expected. The collapse of that amazing social revolution left many of us depressed, disillusioned and angry. Some of those who missed out are, I suspect, a bit envious and all too willing to embrace the schadenfreude of the revolution’s demise. There is no small amount of guilt from those who, for selfish reasons, abandoned the lofty ideals of the day to make fortunes in real estate or finance or law — the slogan of the day was “If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem”, and many of us, if we were to be honest, would have to admit that we have become part of the problem. Easiest, then, to associate those days with hopeless naÔvetÈ and write it all off as a bad trip. Not so fast.
The values that we espoused to take their place were: love, peace, justice, spirituality, social experimentation, an organic, communal lifestyle, and “power to the people”. This was not that long after the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts in the US, and these ideals were extremely threatening to those who believed fiercely in law and order, in respect for the “establishment”, in obedience to authority, in the endless struggle of “good” against “evil”, and in the ethic of hard work. When Timothy Leary advised an entire generation to “turn on, tune in and drop out” this was seen by many as heretical, dangerous, even criminal. Very few bothered to understand what he really meant. Some of the things we strove, clumsily, to espouse and create — the peace movement, the search for true justice, self-change and spirituality, egalitarianism, and living healthy, natural lifestyles — are enjoying something of a subtle, pragmatic resurgence, and have been since the 1990s. It is a motley crew advocating these things, a mix of 1960s diehards who have held onto our idealism, and two or three new generations who seek similar things but are doing so their own way, with their own cohort, using a somewhat different language to describe it: Communes are now Intentional Communities, “finding yourself’ is now self-actualization or self-improvement, and Power to the People is now equal opportunity, equity and heeding the Wisdom of Crowds. I think it is a bit sad, and illustrative of the degree of fragmentation and isolation in our modern society, that each generation is to some extent working towards these things independently, rather than together — a series of ironic new unintentional Generation Gaps. Some things never change. What intrigues me is trying to understand why some of the goals of recent social revolution have been substantially achieved, while others, just as urgently needed and just as worthy, have not. Here’s my scorecard, 1965-2007:
Two things seem to differentiate the successful movements from the failures: How easy it is to make the change, and the number of people who perceive that they have a personal stake in the change. Communities that are ethnically and racially integrated have been able to achieve greater cultural harmony than those that are segregated because it’s easier for them (they experience diversity daily), and because they are more likely to have neighbours of different cultures and ethnicity, so they have more at stake in getting along with them. The horrific cruelty to animals in factory farms is deliberately kept invisible to us, so we have no personal stake in their suffering, and we’ve been convinced by the Big Agriculture oligopoly that small family farms are not viable and that factory farmed foods are ‘economic’, so we perceive supporting local, small-scale, humane, free-range farming as too hard. The impact of the political lobbying and massive PR spending of the corpocracy (with full mainstream media complicity), has ensured that change that threatens established economic and political interests is seen as hard to achieve and ‘radical’, and change advocates have been deliberately ‘depersonalized’ so that peace activists, anti-globalists, pro-immigrant groups, the people of Iraq, environmentalists and ’liberals’ are seen as ‘others’, and their labels stigmatized. We are easily brainwashed (by our aversion to change and fear of the unknown) to see them as dangerous, a bit weird, so we can’t relate to them, or their issues, personally (“what is ‘the environment’ they are talking about anyway, and how can I personally get worked up about the ozone layer and greenhouse gases — it’s just too abstract”). Those of us who have struggled unsuccessfully for the changes in the right column above have tended to beat ourselves — and each other — up for our failures, but we shouldn’t. We can’t care for something we can’t see, and life is challenging enough without being told that we must make hard changes — we will wait until we have no other choice, whether that’s too late or not. This is perhaps why the social revolution of the 1960s fizzled out in the early 1970s. Our causes were too hard and too abstract. Once we ended the War in Vietnam (which was hard but not abstract) we were spent. So what do we do, those of us still fighting for these causes, and those of us who’ve just discovered them? Find a way to make it easy. And find a way to make it real, personal. If you hate factory farming, work to invent plant-based meat substitutes that are inexpensive and delicious and taste like meat. And then smuggle a camera into the factory farm your meat comes from and show the film to your neighbours. Make it easy for them to change, andmake them care. My Dad told me that, forty years ago. He’s still teaching me. Happy Father’s Day, everyone. |
June 17, 2007
Sunday Open Thread – June 17, 2006
 I’m intrigued at the idea of self-portraits as a means of learning to love and understand yourself better, and perhaps as a means to Let-Self-Change. UK photographer Victoria Sims, whose self-portrait is above, is a master at this. What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon: Grasping at Straws: Figuring out how to make the world a better place. I’ve given up on the ‘free market’, political system reform, social consciousness movements, and technological innovations — these are all part of the problem, and we’re deluding ourselves to think they will be part of the solution. The solution must be bottom-up, community-based, resilient, experimental, collectively self-managed, and infused with love for each other, and oriented to creating ‘working models’. Beyond that, I don’t know, we’re just going to have to make it up as we go along. But we have to get going.What Happened to the Spirit of the Sixties?: A new generation is now dissecting the phenomenon of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and has concluded that it wasn’t as big a deal as it seemed at the time. I’m not sure sure, and I was there. To understand what that era was about, I think we need to understand what happened to the momentum that it created. Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. Still working on practice podcasts, readings of my own works just to try out the new medium. I’m psyched, I’m upbeat, I’m happier than I’ve been in decades. But I’m so damned impatient. I need to learn to learn from everyone I meet, every observation, every experience. I need to learn patience, generosity, grace. What’s the one quality or skill or attribute that you think you most need to acquire in your Let-Self-Change journey? |
June 16, 2007
Saturday Links of the Week – June 16, 2007
 From Agence France-Presse. Some of the slaves freed from years of forced labour in a brickworks owned by a senior Chinese government official What’s Important This Week: Yet More Chinese Atrocities: This week brings news of widespread forced slavery in China’s construction trades, mines, and even Olympic trinkets manufacturing. The victims include young children, and are mostly peasants — the poor, powerless and dispossessed. What is surprising is that anyone is surprised, and that we’re buying the Chinese government line that this is just an isolated problem. This, after all, is the country that systematically chains unwanted girl babies in orphanages to their high chairs. This is the country that knowingly poisons its own people, and the world’s, for profit, and kills, tortures and ‘disappears’ anyone who dares to question authority. This is the country that shows the true face of untrammeled corporatism and what the desperation of poverty, resource exhaustion and horrific overpopulation inevitably leads to. And this is the country upon whose ‘economic miracle’ the US economy, and hence the global economy, now depends utterly. Yet our governments and corporations continue to turn away from the truth, and our citizens blithely go on buying their tainted crap and planning to spend their Olympic dollars propping up this nightmare. We will not be able to tell our grandchildren we were not warned. [Thanks to prad for the Olympics link.] What Would You Like the Inflation Rate to Be: In a masterful con job, US government economists averaged two numbers — huge price increases for food, energy and other consumer staples, and prices in a collapsing housing market that are causing record mortgage defaults, foreclosures and lender bankruptcies — and concluded that, on net, inflation was ‘under control’. Investors cheered and ran up the overpriced stock market even more. How dumb can we get? Fixing Beach Erosion By Dumping Military Ordnance: While the loss of natural barriers against erosion by the sea, and the rising water levels due to global warming, have made the world’s oceanfront properties hugely vulnerable, the short-range thinking of the US Army Corps of Engineers (the clowns that brought us the Katrina disaster) is to uselessly dump offshore sediment back on the shore — including unexploded World War Two ordnance. AT&T Elects to Become Digital Rights Watchdog – With Your Files: Consummate corporatist AT&T is working with the paranoid, greedy entertainment industry to intercept all data flowing through its vast networks and block, rightly or wrongly, anything that is copyrighted. Big Brother is watching. David Weinberger says it isn’t right, and it isn’t. Global Warming, Not Seals or Fishing, Blamed for East Coast Cod Exhaustion: A new Fisheries Society study suggests that environmentalists blaming overfishing, and fishermen blaming seals, for the exhaustion of the Atlantic cod stocks are both wrong. The real culprit is minor changes in ocean temperature, and the resultant major ripple effects on the entire complex ocean ecosystem. We will, alas, never understand what’s happening in complex social and ecological systems until it is too late. Running Out of Oil Faster Than Expected — And Critical Metals Too: New scientific research reported in the Independent and Business Week suggests that the production fall-off will be sharper than even Peak Oil experts have predicted, because producers and governments are obfuscating the data to prevent panic price run-ups. And the rare metals needed to make PCs and other electronic components and equipment are also running out. Thanks to Charles Hall for the links. The Future Garbage Crisis Hits Home in Naples: Cities with daily mountains of unrecycled garbage have always had poor rural counties, disenfranchised urban slums, and desperate struggling nations to take their garbage. Naples is showing what can happen when those cheap dumpsites aren’t available anymore. Thanks to Chris Brainerd for the link. Ideas for the Week: The value of local experiments: Canadian Jason Diceman explains at the grassroots level what Chavez is trying to do to reform the political and economic system in Venezuela, from the bottom up. Obviously inspired by the Cuban experiments of Castro, and likely to be subverted when the CIA assassinates or overthows Chavez, these are important experiments for those thinking ahead to the world post-civilization. Just for fun department: My daughter sent me this, which has been floating around the Internet: How To Properly Place New Employees:
1. Put 400 bricks in a closed room. 2. Put your new hires in the room and close the door. 3. Leave them alone and come back after 6 hours. 4. Then analyze the situation:
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June 14, 2007
Vignette #3: Unspoken
 Neighbourhood blue jays Raucous & Stripe, whom I wrote about here. Whenever I’m in a restaurant or other public space, I study facial expressions. It’s an astonishing experience. You quickly learn why it is that dogs and cats scan our faces constantly for clues to what we mean, and largely ignore the incoherent gibberish of what we say. Not only are faces able to express an amazing breadth and nuance of emotion and intellectual information, they do so very quickly. Blink, and you’ll miss it. Yesterday morning I arrived for my meeting thirty minutes early, so I stopped in down the street at a sidewalk cafe, grabbed a tea and a muffin, and sat down at a table outside where I could watch the people going by. I started watching body language, especially when two people would approach each other — either intentionally (where observing the different body and facial signals of the two people, and how they often contradicted what was said orally, was so funny I could not help laughing), or unintentionally (where one of the two strangers would have to make way for the other, and a kind of unspoken power game was played to determine which, also hilarious to observe).
When the caffeine from the tea kicked in, I moved my attention up to faces. This can be tricky, because if a stranger catches you looking briefly but purposefully at their face, some socially-programmed autonomous behaviour takes over. First, they will (nine times out of ten) avert their gaze so you cannot continue to do so, or at least so they can justifiably claim not to be aware of you observing them. I would guess this to be necessary behaviour for any species in a horrifically overcrowded environment. In many animals a direct stare is an aggressive act, and glancing away is a simple deferral (“I don’t want to fight”). Animals that do not know each other have a neutral approach etiquette: they approach at an angle, looking sidelong at each other, and then circling until, from olfactory and pheromonal clues, they convey (usually) a simple curiosity to be social with each other. There is usually a tacit signal of authority communicated (“Yes I see this is your home, and I’m just a visitor — hello”). If it’s miscommunicated, or the animal is improperly socialized, it could lead to a more obvious display of dominance and acknowledgement of submission, or even a scuffle.
We humans have unlearned to pick up on these signals, and we don’t have the time or inclination to acknowledge and greet, even briefly, every stranger we meet in our congested world. But our bodies and faces don’t unlearn behaviours as quickly as our brains do, so the result is a comical and perplexing mix of modern social/cultural signals and primeval instinctive ones. Two languages ‘we’ speak, with the part of us that speaks each unable to decipher or comprehend the other. No wonder our companion animals find us to hard to figure out.
Sometimes, when you’re caught looking, the object of your attention will not look away. You may get a glare (dilated pupils, raised eyebrows), whose meaning is aggressive and clear: “Stop looking at me”. This can be directed at you, or, more slyly, just away from you, sending the message that, not only is your stare unappreciated, it is not even worthy of a direct response (“I’m too busy to stare you down, but you catch my drift”). It can also be an ambiguous move (“I think I mean to put down your stare, but correct me if I know you or if for some other reason that behaviour is inappropriate”). You may get a more coy response — a quick glance down (for propriety’s sake) and then a look back at you, perhaps repeated several times. Then it’s back to you, to assess or explore whether that’s a flirtation, or an expression of shyness (“please don’t be mad at me, but your stare makes me uncomfortable”). Despite our modern ineptness at making these signals, and the complication of social and cultural norms and alternate spoken language signals, it doesn’t take much observation to re-learn exactly what nuance is intended. And all of this communication occurs in a fraction of a second, faster than you could utter two words – and it’s much more precise.
One of my favourite exercises is looking and smiling at people who are within eyeshot but safely inaccessible — e.g. people who are on a bus I am walking beside, or who are in the subway car beside mine, moving in the opposite direction. This ‘safety valve’ significantly changes the dynamic of the communication. Now people will look back more directly, and convey their response to your look more honestly. You are far more likely in this situation to get a smile back (or a scowl) in response. And if you then wink at them (still smiling, pleasantly), just as the vehicle moves away, you are likely to get a look of surprise and, quite often, delight.
As I was people-watching and thinking about this, a sparrow hopped up onto my table, about arms’ length away from me and my muffin. He looked at me, head cocked (like the blue jay, Raucous, pictured above), and then back at the muffin, and then back at me. There was no misinterpreting his meaning, and I knew he knew my response before my hand moved and before I said “hello there”. He knew this, I am sure, just from reading my facial expression. I tore a piece off the muffin and put it on the ground beside my table (somehow, I knew not to try to offer it directly). The sparrow hopped down, took a first bite, and then, deliberately, kicked the rest under the table, where it could be nibbled without fear of being trampled by half-awake cafe patrons walking between the tables. He came back half a dozen times for the rest, and twice en route had to practice a deft and spare little dance among the tables to avoid being stepped on. When he’d finished, he’d already confirmed that there were no other morsels available (only coffee drinkers at the other tables) and flew off to his next (probably already scouted) destination.
A moment later I looked up again and there was a young woman standing at the curb looking at me. I did the glance-down, glance-up thing, and she was still looking at me, with her head cocked exactly the way the sparrow’s was. And then with a kind of half-smile she put her index finger, which was pointed upwards, to her pursed lips, and opened her lips very slightly, and then turned and walked away.
Category: Short Stories
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June 13, 2007
Measures That Matter and The Misguided ‘Productivity’ Scorecard
 A new report by the Conference Board of Canada laments the country’s lagging productivity, measured by factors such as business and technology literacy, innovation and investment in R&D. To this extent they have a point. However, their prescription for improving the situation is mostly the same tired, discredited and decidedly un-innovative ‘globalization’ techniques:
With ‘ideas’ like this — I’ve debated often with those at the Conference Board, and they’re sloggers, mostly competent but short on imagination and critical thinking — it’s not surprising that we rank low in innovation. So what should Canada do? Well, for a start, we should change how we define and measure ‘productivity’. As I’ve explained before, corporatists have (for self-serving reasons) got economists, the media and others (including, alas, the Conference Board) equating productivity with corporate profit margins, or, as they put it, the amount of ‘output’ (revenue) per unit of ‘input’ (salaries and other costs). By this measure, Canada’s ‘productivity’ is lower that in the US for two important sociological reasons: We work significantly fewer average hours per week, and our participation rate (notably the number of two-income families) is significantly lower. Is this something we should define as a problem? Only, I would suggest, if you’re a corporate shareholder, trying to squeeze more work out of more workers for lower wages. Take these factors out of the equation, and our ‘productivity’ is directly comparable to that of the US. And this is despite the fact that the 70% of larger Canadian companies that are owned by foreigners invest an average of one third less in infrastructure and R&D in their Canadian subsidiaries than they do in comparable-sized domestic operations. Go into most Canadian ‘branch’ plants and warehouses of companies with US parents and you can see almost immediately how shabby they are. They get the cast-off systems, equipment and software of the foreign parent. They get antiquated, badly laid-out facilities. They get the management rejects from head office, people who frequently make colossally dumb decisions with zero knowledge of the Canadian marketplace. What’s astonishing is that despite this, they consistently outperform the head office country’s plants in quality — Canadian auto plants, for example, are routinely rated among the best in the world. I used to think that, for that and other reasons, we should prohibit foreign control over Canadian businesses, and ban foreign ownership of Canadian land and resources. I’m still not sure that wouldn’t be a good idea — it’s tough to make economic decisions in the best interest of Canadians when foreign-owned businesses dominate the Canadian economy (and campaign contributions to Canadian politicians). But there’s a more effective approach that the Conference Board and other non-thinkers never seem to broach: Supporting Canadian entrepreneurship. Drucker realized that entrepreneurship is the principal driver of innovation, and that innovation (not profit margin) is the driver of real productivity. It’s all about meeting needs more effectively. It’s about making stuff that works, and is durable, not how cheap you can import throwaway crap. Canada has, by global standards, a reasonably entrepreneurial culture, but we’re losing the propaganda war to the corporatists who think cost reduction is more important than quality, sustainability, and enterprise. Until we can change the language of ‘productivity’ to something that contributes to the well-being of Canadians instead of the size of corporate dividend cheques flowing quickly out of the country to foreign shareholders, the bozos in political office and the media will keep blathering on about this absurd ‘productivity’ and GDP bullshit, and not recognize the urgent need for (and huge potential ROI from) a major public investment in Canadian-owned enterprise. This investment should be focused on three things:
A Canada that accomplishes the eleven objectives in this sustainability blueprint (Suzuki says it can be done in a generation) will be the envy of the world. How we would measure up by the corporatists’ yardstick of ‘productivity’ if we made all three of the investments above (financed substantially by a tax shift and a reduction in war and ‘defence’ spending) is hard to say. But no one will care, because we’ll be investing in Canadians’ well-being, instead of in a morally and creatively bankrupt and unsustainable economic system. We’re way overdue replacing ‘productivity’ and GDP with measures that matter. Category: Understanding Economics
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June 12, 2007
Slideshare
| I‘m starting to upload my PowerPoint presentations from various conferences to Slideshare, “the YouTube for PowerPoint”. This site hosts presentations of up to 30MB free of charge, and handles .pdf files as well as .ppt’s. The on-screen display is not crisp, but you can download the presentations to your own machine, and the site also shows all the text from the presentation in a summary view below theslideshow. First up: my presentation Librarians as Knowledge Managers, which I gave last week at the SLA conference in Denver. As I add more you’ll find them here.
Thanks to all the organizers and participants at this remarkable annual event. Librarians are among my favourite people. |
Christopher’s Story
 Christopher Key is a former fellow Salon blogger, and a friend. He’s a Vietnam War vet and the descendant of F Scott Key, who wrote the US national anthem. He was so unhappy with Bush he announced plans in 2004 to move to Canada and renounce his US citizenship. This, of course, earned him a fair bit of notoriety. Then we stopped hearing from him, and his blog went silent, and e-mails to him went unanswered. And then about a month ago, he broke the long silence with this astonishing letter to his friends:
An apologia, if you will. As you may remember, I was a bit of a media star back in 2004. National media in both Canada and the US were holding a bit of a circle jerk over the patriotic American who was ready to become a traitor to his country. Or so it seemed. I should know better than to announce my plans in public. Every time Iíve ever done that, fate has pulled the rug from under me and I end up with egg on my face. So it was this time.
Category: Science & Health
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June 11, 2007
What Will We Need After Civilization’s Gone?
 I‘ve received some interesting responses to my post yesterday wherein I said:
To which my fluwiki colleague lugon replied:
He and David Parkinson and a couple of other readers refer to the feeling of freedom that comes from going into wilderness or otherwise finding yourself outside civilization’s influence, where things aren’t done for you, and where you have the self-confidence and ability to make your own decisions and be fully responsible for your own actions. YOYO (you’re on your own), he concludes. Perhaps a better acronym might be WOOO! ( we’re on our own).
The opposite of Learned Helplessness is self-sufficiency and the self-confidence it brings with it. Kal Joffres suggests that faith in something that imprisons you is what we call addiction. Like junkies, our deluded faiths (“I could quit anytime; it just helps me relax”) and our addictions, work together to lock us in – there’s no way out even if we wanted one, which we don’t. What we need is liberation from all five types of faith — economic (“the market will save us”), political (“the opposition party will fix it when they get in”), social (“a great movement of global consciousness is going to occur”), technological (“our ingenuity will save us”), and theological (“a higher being will save us”).
Lugon’s closing question “what’s next?” is the point many of us are at now. It’s all well and good to say (as I have) that we need to find people we would love to live with, and love to make a living with, and then establish with them experimental intentional communities that are self-sufficient, self-managed, ‘radically simple‘, and outside of and unaddicted to our unsustainable civilization. Most of us (including me, though I’m getting closer) are not yet ready for that. So, what’s next in the meantime? (Or, to use Getting Things Done jargon, what’s the “first, next action” that will set us on the road to where we want to get to, eventually)?
My sense is that it’s more self-change, oriented to prepare us for that bold and independent future. I’ve concluded that my next Let-Self-Change programs should be based on answers to the question: What will we need in the world after civilization?
I don’t think our generations (either Boomer or Gen X) will live long enough to see more than the beginning of civilization’s collapse, but answering this question now, and learning what we would need, could be both liberating (freeing us from the addiction to civilization even before we’re ready to walk away from it), and useful training for teaching our grandchildren, who will probably need answers to this question urgently.
Here are some of my “what will we need” answers, that are now directing my Let-Self-Change activities and learning:
What else will we need? And while we may agree that these are skills we should learn (or re-learn), are we willing to pay people what it would cost (no massive subsidies as rewards for corporate political contributions for us) to show us how to do it, and/or to provide these things to us until we learn to be self-sufficient? These are the types of Natural Enterprise I’d like to create, but I’m not sure there is – yet – a large enough market for them to be viable, and I don’t want to sell only to the rich (and transporting elite goods all over the world kinda defeats the purpose,doesn’t it?) What do you think? Categories: Let-Self-Change and Building a Community-Based Society |
June 10, 2007
Sunday Open Thread – June 10, 2007
 Our younger granddaughter, discovering her gift, her passion, and her purpose What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon: What This Blog is About: This weblog began as my vehicle for thinking out loud. It has evolved in part into an expression of my gift and passion (imagining possibilities) and of my purpose (provoking what I have come to call Let-Self-Change, in myself and others). I have had the opportunity to discover that the five most popular reasons for believing our civilization can and will go on as it has are either propaganda or wishful thinking. So some of my recent provocations have focused on disenchanting readers of five persuasions who believe that some human or super-human force will save us from civilizational collapse in this century:
Those readers who no longer believe in any of these five miracles are searching, as I am, for another way forward. The best we have been able to come up with is a new self-managed society built on local, responsible, self-selected communities, living, and making a living, in natural (i.e. in balance with the rest of life on Earth), sustainable ways. It’s a very idealistic vision, one that will have to emerge right in the midst of our fragile, furious, exhausted civilization, based on many local experiments, evolving ‘working models’ that others can copy and adapt to their needs. These communities need to be autonomous and self-sufficient but also connected to learn from each other how to cope, together, with the crises that this century will present to us and the generations that follow. One reader has called this “grasping at straws”. Perhaps it is, as the people who seem to be most knowledgeable about the state of the world and this community-based vision seem to believe efforts to realize that vision will be in vain, but are worth trying anyway. Our ‘success’ depends largely on recruiting more and more of those disenchanted with the five faiths above, and our ‘walking away together’ to improvise and emerge something completely different, a way of living and making a living that can work, at least for a few million years. So upcoming articles will continue to provoke readers to let themselves change and learn and free themselves from the delusional faiths that are destroying our world, and to figure out, together, how to move forward. Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. The first few will be practice podcasts, and may not make it to the blog. I plan to post some monologues first, readings of my own works just to try out the new medium, and perhaps, if I can get a copy of the recording, a podcast of my presentation last week at the SLA in Denver. Paradoxically, the less faith I have in the established order and the ability of civilization’s well-intentioned systems to save us from ourselves, the more energized and exhilarated I become. How’s your mood? Is the Bush regime’s intransigence, and the Democrats’ equivocation, getting you down? If you’re more upbeat, or more depressed, than you were a yearago, or ten years ago, why? |
