Massive, monstrous factory farms that reduce living, feeling creatures to milk and meat machines, in lifelong misery and suffering. Slaughterhouses whose activities are so heartless and barbaric that a single visit can leave you traumatized for life. Testing labs that profit by torturing animals because it’s cheaper than other methods of demonstrating product safety. Puppy mills (many run by ‘quaint’ religious groups) that breed sickly animals non-stop under unimaginably dreadful conditions, just for profit. And some of the animal cruelty designed to procure organs, tusks and other parts from (often endangered) species as quack cures and health enhancers defies description. It just goes on and on.

Regular readers know that I’ve largely given up on political solutions to complex problems. There is just too much money greasing too many greedy political palms to ever permit the passage and enforcement of any kind of reasonable animal welfare regulations. So what can we do?

First, we can refuse to buy the products of companies that profit from animal cruelty. Become a vegetarian or a vegan. If you can’t do that, buy only locally-produced, free-range meats from small farms whose owners you know personally. It’s good for the local economy, for your health, and for the animals. And boycott farms that produce, and restaurants that serve, meats from confined milk-only-diet baby animals (e.g. veal).

When you buy health, personal and chemical products, buy only those clearly certified as not tested on animals. The standards are poor, inconsistent and sloppily regulated, but they’re a start. Or make your own products from simple natural ingredients (saves money too).

Never buy animals from puppy mills or pet stores. If you are looking for a pet, please select one from an animal shelter. And make sure it’s neutered. If you choose a cat, please do the birds a favour and keep it indoors. And please don’t keep animals caged in small spaces or tied up. Confinement is crueler than pain.

We’ll never get the laws changed, or the religious practices changed. People have been trying to reform animal cruelty laws and religious practices for centuries, with virtually no success. Of course we should keep trying, and identify and vote for candidates who take no money from Big Agribusiness or Big Pharma. But political activism will never be enough.

What we can do is starve the organizations that profit from animal cruelty — factory farms, slaughterhouses, Big Agribusiness and Big Pharma, pet stores, fur merchants, irresponsible restaurants, cosmetic, health product, personal care and chemical companies, and transportation companies that ship live animals.

Only when enough of us buy intelligently (or, more accurately, stop buying ignorantly) will we have enough of an effect to make animal cruelty unprofitable. And onlywhen it becomes unprofitable will it stop.

It turns out they’re all the same qualities.

1. Intelligence: A combination of good critical thinking skills and excellent instincts (and a willingness to trust them). Smart people are fun, and sexy.
2. Emotional Strength: Freedom from neediness — it’s OK to love attention and appreciation, but when someone can’t live without constant external validation, they can become unbearable. If you want others to love you, you have to love yourself first.
3. Attention Skills: Emotional sensitivity, perceptiveness, awareness, openness, capacity to listen, to focus the senses on what is really happening, and collaboratively figure out what it all means. I know people who live their whole lives in their heads, and others who live in an emotional cocoon; they need to learn to get out more, to get outside themselves.
4. Honesty: About what you love, what you can’t stand, what you believe in, and what you have doubts about. Just get it all out there. But be positive — don’t criticize, offer constructive ideas and alternatives. And never, ever lie (that includes saying nothing when there is something that must be said).
5. Communication Skills: Ability to articulate concisely and precisely what you know and what you think and what you love, orally and in writing (and to show, not just tell).
6. Learning Skills: The self-directed ability to discover, access and process useful information (captured, experiential, and in conversation). This is the key to self-management and independence and making yourself a useful and valuable partner.
7. Passion and Responsibility: Belief that what’s possible can happen, and energy and a sense of responsibility directed to a shared purpose. 
8. Curiosity, Imagination and Creativity: The desire and capacity to find out what you don’t know, to think about what could be, and to bring those imaginings to fruition.
9. Different Perspectives & Complementary Strengths: We are often attracted to people who share our beliefs, our culture, and our skills, but in my experience the best partners are those whose gifts and points of view complement each other (i.e. neither conflict nor overlap).
10. Self-Knowledge, and Knowledge of Others’ Capacities: Knowing which capacities you have, and which you lack, and what you know, and what you don’t, and what others can do better than you can, is enormously important to collaboration and love, especially in coping with challenges.
11. Love, Respect and Trust: Most of us love and trust those who love and trust us in return. The alternative is dysfunctional and dangerous, a recipe for either abuse or co-dependency.
12. BGP: Beauty, grace and presence: Deny it all you want, we all prefer to be with people who are attractive, gracious, charismatic, and energizing. Some are naturally more gifted at this than others, but we can all improve, with practice.

As I was compiling this list it occurred to me that these are also the qualities we, as writers, hope to attract and bring out in our readers, and the qualities that, as readers, we value in good writers.

So now you know, dear readers, why I love you so much I am compelled, out of joy and the privilege of your attention and the desire to keep you coming back, to write my heart out, every day, a total so far of 5,000 pages, 25 books’ worth of what I know and think and care about. I think you, those of you who stick around, exemplify these twelve qualities.

And your attention and appreciation, more than anything else, has informed and defined my journey to learn and discover and convey and start to make a difference in this world. This blog really has been, from the start, a collaboration, a partnership with you.

I’m honoured to be in your company, dear collaborators and partners in love and conversation and community.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Image from DoggyBloggy.com

And now, in our desperation to keep the unsustainable going, just a little longer, we are re-embracing nuclear energy as the great hope for combating global warming. I can only shrug. There is no point arguing with those who cannot and will not hear.

It occurred to me, looking at these magnificent animals in this strange, beautiful, poison place, that this is what the world will look like, in the not too distant future, when the human species is gone (or reduced to marginal, harmless numbers on the downside of the bell curve).

And I recalled John Gray’s words:

B

I’ve already written about a few miniature truths that have emerged for me after a lot of thought and a lot of fortuitous experience; most of them are what I’ve learned about human nature in trying to make the world a better place:

1. We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, then we do what’s fun (Pollard’s Law). There is no time left for what’s merely important, for ‘doing the right thing’. This law seems to govern all human behaviour, everywhere. Thanks, by the way, to those who tried to get this Law into Wikipedia, only to be told by the Wikipolice that “an idea presented on a blog does not warrant inclusion in Wikipedia”.

2. Things are the way they are for a reason; if you have any hope to change something, first understand what that reason is. It’s rarely obvious. Reality is evolutionary, and so is change.

3. Life’s meaning, and an understanding of what needs to be done, emerges, most often, from conversation in community with people you love. This is based on an idea by Nancy White and her colleagues. It is the key to changing anything, whether you it be the political or economic system, and whether you want to save the whales, stop global warming, reform education, spark innovation or anything else. 

4. Community is born of necessity. This I learned from Joe Bageant’s son (via Joe) when I visited him recently. Consistent with Pollard’s Law above, experimental, Intentional Communities can only succeed when their members have no choice but to make them work. 

5. To get people to change, first Let-Yourself-Change, to become a model that shows people personally, one-to-one, a better way to live, rather than just telling them what to do. — Gandhi, with a bit of amplification. 

6. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete, a working model of a better way, one that others can follow. — Bucky Fuller. You want to save the world? Do it bottom up, not top down. 

7. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. — Margaret Mead. Although many doubt that small working models of a better way to live are scalable i.e. that they could become pervasive in our society and actually replace what’s dysfunctional, there is evidence that only such models are scalable.

8. To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day,
   to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.– ee cummings. 

9. Our civilization is in its final century. This is the important lesson of John Gray’s Straw Dogs. It doesn’t matter what we try to do to reform it, every civilization ends, and ours will be no different. That’s not depressing, it’s invigorating and liberating. The world will be just fine without us. We need to do everything we can to make the world a better place for those we love and for our children and grandchildren now, to reduce suffering. But at the same time we should live a life of joy, every day, a natural life, not a life of struggle and sacrifice to save what cannot be saved.

During my pilgrimage to Belize, I came up with two more miniature truths. Here’s the first of them:

• The key to Letting-Yourself-Change is to get rid of the gunk that you have collected throughout your life that prevents you from being authentically yourself.

When I was a child, I was wild. Not in the sense of being unmanageable — I was quite attentive back then. Wild in the sense of uncivilized, raw, open, unrepressed, natural. I am told I was constantly taking my clothes off, not to show off but because I found them confining, unnatural, and saw nothing embarrassing about nudity.

I was fearless (I did a photoshoot as a baby, hamming it up for the camera, that appeared on the front page of the local newspaper), I was imaginative (too much so for my neighbourhood friends, who couldn’t follow the games I invented), affectionate (my favourite game as soon as I could walk was ‘kissing tag’, since most of the kids my age in the neighbourhood were girls). Back then I struggled with communication (I didn’t learn to write reasonably well until my late teens, read little until then, and was nervous singing (I was a pretty good boy soprano) and talking in crowds.

And then all the trappings of civilization came rushing in — the cruel games kids play, the preference for cute, athletic, clever, funny, well-coordinated friends (I got pretty gangly-looking as I aged, my voice broke so my singing teacher lost interest in me, and I was terribly coordinated — I couldn’t swim or dance and my penmanship was illegible. I began to acquire a lot of the fears, doubts, and prejudices of the groups I desperately wanted to belong to, which were only made worse as my advances were rebuffed). I became a loner, and not even a ‘smart’ one.

By the end of high school, I’d acquired some talents that were popular, became a scholar, and regained my self-esteem in spades. But in the process, and even since then, I’ve picked up a lot of ‘stuff’ that isn’t me. I’ve become, in many respects, “everybody-else”.

My days are now terribly busy, even without family responsibilities to look after. My job and my book both have a lot of self-imposed responsibility, that I took on willingly and knowingly, because they’re consistent with my passion for supporting Natural Entrepreneurs and building caring communities working to make the world a better place. But it’s slow going and time consuming. My blog carries with it the responsibility to write useful stuff, often, and to at least try to respond to readers’ comments. Looking at a backlog of over 100 e-mails and months of unanswered comments (not to mention an obsolete blogroll and table of contents, that will take weeks of work to update) I can only groan at the workload that lies ahead of me.

In an article a month ago I wrote about how I thought I should ideally spend each day:

• 9 hours a day for sleeping and personal hygiene
• 2 hours a day for physical exercise — running, meditation, working out, yoga, hiking etc.
• 3 hours a day for play — learning things you love, having non-competitive fun, just paying attention and being in the moment, and expressing love and joy in different ways
• 3 hours a day for meaningful conversation — not small-talk, conversations with intention (this time could include meal-times)
• 2 hours a day for reflection — thinking, reading/watching/listening to actionable information and stimulating entertainment content, and deciding, thinking ahead, considering what it all means and what needs to be done as a result
• 2 hours a day for creation — writing, model-building, sketching, composing
• 3 hours a day for action — first/next steps towards doing important things, productive actions that make the world a better place
• 0 hours a day doing work that isn’t one of the above types of activities
• 0 hours a day for administration, paperwork, ‘non-value-added’ work
• 0 hours a day driving to and from places
• 0 hours a day shopping
• 0 hours a day waiting
• 0 hours a day for chores
• 0 hours a day for small talk
• 0 hours a day for reading/watching/listening to mindless, unactionable stuff

In fact, I’m not getting enough time for sleep, exercise, play, meaningful conversation, reflection, creation or action. Why? Because my life is full of time spent dealing with all the commitments I’ve taken on. And because I’m spreading myself way too thin, taking on too much. I keep forgetting how to say no. My twelve suggestions for making more time for what’s important in that earlier article just aren’t working. I suspect I’m caught up in Pollard’s Law myself, procrastinating on doing things that are important (and which I mostly really want to do) but that are time- and energy-consuming, in favour of things that are easy, undemanding.

But underneath all that, I think, is this growing sense that I’m not myself. The real, authentic me would not take on commitments that would be unreasonable and tedious to discharge. The real, authentic me would not procrastinate. The real, authentic me would not find himself fretting about my work backlog, or watching TV because I’m just too tired to do anything else.

So if (as I claim above) things are the way they are for a reason, what is the reason for this? How did I become “everybody else” and stop being “nobody but myself”, as cummings put it? I think it may be because, like most people, I respond to attention and appreciation, and love — and when I get it I agree to do almost anything to keep it coming. With love such a scarce commodity in our terrible world, is there anything we won’t do for it, including becoming “everybody else”?

I think this is why I’m such a visceral believer in polyamorism, even though I haven’t been able to make the argument for it very articulately. If I felt, as a did as a young child, that I was surrounded by unqualified love, that it was everywhere and eternal, would I then stop taking on commitments I don’t want and can’t keep? Would I then stop changing myself into what I’m not, adding all this gunk that isn’t me, just to nurture a scarce and uncertain commodity that is naturally abundant?

Is the lack of love, in family, in community, everywhere, what’s behind the loneliness, the desperation, the anomie that we see everywhere in our society, which becomes pathology and violence and misery and cruelty?

I suspect the gunk we accumulate is mostly protective, the stuff of fear and uncertainty and anxiety over the potential loss of intimate connection, which we all need to survive.

It’s not yet an intention, because I’m not sure I can do it, but I’m going to start working to be fearless about the loss of attention, appreciation, and love, to believe that it can be abundant, and to start saying no to things that are not really important to me, regardless of the consequences. And to do fewer things, the things I’m really good at (imagining possibilities, and writing) better, and exclusively. Perhaps in so doing I can become, for the first time in my life, a model — of courage, of generosity, of authenticity, of getting important things done.

And in so doing, perhaps I can become, as I was as a young child, raw, naked, wild. Nobody but myself.