Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.
In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.


May 12, 2009

Ten Important Business Trends

Filed under: Working Smarter — Dave Pollard @ 21:45


weber cartoon new yorker
Cartoon by Robert Weber in The New Yorker

I‘ve been asked to be a panel member at a conference on Thursday with the intriguing theme What’s Next? My role on the panel is to talk about What’s Next in Business. So I thought I might rehearse what I might say there, here, and get some comments from you, dear readers, before I make my presentation.

The interesting thing about forecasting What’s Next is that, usually, forecasters simply project that the future will be like today, only more so. There is little perception of possible upcoming discontinuities, and little imagination for what might follow such discontinuities. So if three years ago I had predicted that the Dow would be at 8000, the major American banks would all be substantially broke or nationalized, and that almost every major newspaper chain would be failing, my audience would have laughed me out of the place.

Today, however, despite the constant drumbeat of pundits proclaiming the end of the recession and the return to growth as normal, those who predict radical discontinuities might be afforded a little more attention and credence.

In that light, here’s what I’m thinking of listing as the ten most important current trends in business:

  1. The dawn of an age of uncertainty, and a refocusing on business risk and sustainability: What we have witnessed recently — turbulent markets, vacillation between good news and bad news, and growing skepticism over the veracity of what we’re being told — is actually a historical normal state, but since the 1960s we have experienced such a protracted period of invariability that we have come to think of it as normal. It is not. We can look forward once again to astonishingly rapid and unpredicable cycles of boom and bust, collapse and reinvention of corporations and entire industries, the fall of empires, belief frameworks and conventional wisdom. Our whole approach to health care and education, on which so much of our tax money is spent, is poised for revolutionary change. Insurance may soon become so risky to insurance companies that the industry disappears. Mexico may well fail as a state, and become as dangerous and expensive to keep in check as Afghanistan — and a lot closer. We will probably witness environmental phenomena that are almost unimaginable — hurricanes, droughts, flooding, hail and ice storms on a massive scale. And when a real, high virulence, high transmissability flu pandemic hits (and it will, we just don’t know when), a simulation done by Homeland Security says it will cause business disruption on the order of the Great Depression. As a result of this there will be a growing realization that the primary purpose of business is sustainability. This is not to say that all businesses will become green. It means that there will be a huge new emphasis on risk management as Job One in most businesses, and an appreciation that short-termism, the propensity to obsess about short-term profits over longer-term viability, is extremely dangerous. It means that climate change will be discussed in board rooms not because the company wants to be seen as socially and environmentally responsible for PR reasons, but because executives and directors realize that if the planet is sick and depleted and constantly coping with catastrophes, every company is imperilled too. More than trying to mitigate their emissions and waste, companies will be struggling to figure out how to adapt themselves to what comes next — when they don’t know what comes next. Competent scenario planners and experts in simulation will be in popular demand.

  2. Rethinking the religion of growth: In business guru Charles Handy’s book The Age of Paradox, Handy interviews the natural entrepreneur who owns a top-rated winery in California. He writes: “After one sun-drenched day in the wine country of California I asked the owner of the winery about the future. He was passionate about their winery, he said; they were putting back every cent they could into its growth. ‘Where can you grow?’ I asked, looking around at the valley where every inch of land was now fully planted with other people’s vines. ‘Oh, we don’t want to expand,’ he said, ‘we want to grow better, not bigger’.” Natural entrepreneurs understand that your business doesn’t have to grow to succeed, and a lot of companies whose future has depended on double-digit annual profit increases to placate their investors, are now looking at ways they can thrive by simply being better, and staying the same size, so that even when we move to a steady-state economy, these companies will stay prosperous.
  3. The new business model: Your basic product/service is free: This is the world that marketing whiz Seth Godin describes in his books and blog, and was to some extent predicted by Clay Christensen and Mike Raynor in The Innovator’s Solution. And it’s beginning to force every company to re-examine its business model before some competitor comes in and prices its bread-and-butter product or service at zero dollars. The ‘freemium’ model (“Give your product or service away for free, acquire a lot of customers virally, then offer premium priced value added or enhanced products and services to your most loyal customer base.”) is no longer limited only to software firms. For the next few years, this business model innovation is likely to change what we buy, how we buy, and what we pay for virtually everything in the marketplace.
  4. A ‘World of Ends’ for business: In their famous treatise explaining the Internet phenomenon, Doc Searls, Dave Weinberger et al said that what made the Internet so powerful and so resilient was that it had no control ‘centre’ and no hierarchy: All the value was added, by millions of people, at the ‘ends’. And if someone tried to disrupt it, these millions of users would simply work around the disruption. There is growing evidence that the same phenomenon is happening in businesses, which have long suffered from diseconomies of scale and bureaucracy that stifle innovation and responsiveness. Think of this as a kind of ‘outsourcing of everything’ (parodied in the cartoon above). Already companies like Levi Strauss make nothing at all — they simply add their label to stuff made by other companies, and distribute it (largely through independent companies they don’t own either). The Internet can allow this fragmentation to be carried to its logical limit — R&D, manufacturing, sales, logistics and service can all be done by different companies, cutting out the ‘management middleman’ entirely. And even beyond that lies what is called Peer Production, that even blurs the line between these ‘suppliers’ and the customer, such that the customer ‘invents’ what she wants and then works with various partners to produce it. I described this in an earlier article:
    • Suppose I want a chair that has the attributes of an Aeron without the $1800 price tag, or one with some additional attribute (e.g. a laptop holder) the brand name doesn’t offer? I could go online to a Peer Production site and create an instant market, contributing the specifications, a bunch of technical links available online about just what makes this chair so special, and, perhaps a maximum price I would be willing to pay. People with some of the expertise needed to produce it could indicate their capabilities and self-organize into a consortium that would keep talking and refining until they could meet this price — and, if not, they might counter-offer something close. Other potential buyers could chime in, offering more or less than my suggested price. Based on the number of ‘orders’ at each price, the Peer Production group could then accept orders and start manufacturing. The possibilities are endless — somebody might want customization or some other attribute, to which the same or some other Peer Production group might respond. Another Peer Production group might self-form and come in with a lower price, perhaps creating a new or larger market. People might ‘subscribe’ to this market to watch bids and offers progress, or put in ‘silent’ bids if the offer fell to a certain point. Perhaps Herman Miller (maker of the Aeron) might enter the bidding itself, meeting my bid and offering the intangible value of their brand as well. Perhaps eBay would chime in with used Aeron chairs that meet my specifications at an even lower price (in fact eBay would be a natural host for these virtual instant markets), bringing their reputation systems into play.

      The intellectual capital associated with this instant market becomes part of the market archive, available for everyone to see, stripping this intellectual capital cost, and the executive salaries, dividends and corporate overhead out of the cost of this and other similar product requests and fulfillments, so that all that is left is the lowest possible cost of material, labour and delivery to fill the order. And the order is exactly what the customer wants, not the closest thing in the mass-producer’s warehouse. See a fashion design by a big-name designer on FTV that you really like, but which sells for $10,000? Get a generic for $200, with your own custom modifications, before the big-name designer can even get the originals into the stores.

  5. A shift from ‘free trade’ to ‘fair trade’: Free trade is a euphemism for unregulated trade, and it’s been a colossal failure for everybody except multinational corporations and a few third-world workers. Its cost has been the collapse of the middle class in many affluent nations, horrific working conditions in many struggling nations, and massive environmental destruction everywhere. As WTO talks dissolve in disarray and we begin to see NAFTA for the social and environmental disaster it truly is, we will start to see trade regulated to ensure protection of working-class jobs and local environments. This will be a huge boon to local and green employment and businesses opportunities, that will far outweigh the additional cost of imported junk.
  6. Growing oil scarcity: Our economy — from the fertilizer that produces our food to the energy that accounts for virtually all the ‘productivity’ improvements we have benefited from since the dawn of the industrial revolution — runs on oil. There is no way to reengineer our economy quickly, even at a cost of trillions of dollars, to wean ourselves off it before its availability begins to plummet. Once it becomes scarce we will have to decide between closing down factories and letting people freeze to death. Even if we were able to find enough new oil, even at the cost of creating more environmental holocausts like the Alberta Bitumen Sludge Mines (sorry, the “oil sands”), the cost of that oil will quickly soar to $200 and then $2000 per barrel by simple supply and demand. What’s worse, climate scientists tell us that even consuming half of the known oil and coal reserves of our planet will push atmospheric CO2 past the 350ppm tipping point and produce calamitous climate change by the end of the century. 
  7. Growing water scarcity: Next to oil, our economy runs on a staggering level of consumption of fresh water. The Western half of North America, according to agronomists, is losing its fresh water supply so quickly because of glacier melt that they will face severe rationing within 10 years and absolute shortages — to the point where, as happens now in many struggling nations, the water supply will only be turned on for a hour per day, and each household and enterprise will be limited to a fraction of what we now use. You don’t want to know how much water the Alberta Bitumen Sludge Mines use, and turn into toxic ponds, already.
  8. A three-stage entrepreneurial boom: Even before the recession, in the 1997-2007 period Canadian businesses with more than 500 employees created less than 20% of net new jobs, and in the US the situation was and is much worse. If you’re young, or a boomer looking for a ‘second career’, chances are you’ll either have to start your own business, or work for someone who recently has done so. Last month virtually all of the sudden surge in job growth was entrepreneurial. I’ve been watching the entrepreneurial market for years, and I’ll make a prediction: In twenty years, working for a large company will be rare. But there will be major hiccups in the transition to an entrepreneurial economy. The first burst of entrepreneurs will almost all fail for one reason: they will be sole proprietors who try to do everything in their business alone. They will find this so difficult that they’ll burn out, or run out of money, or scurry back to the job market as soon as they see a recovery. The second wave will be younger — educated new graduates who are too impatient or idealistic to claw their way up the increasingly steep corporate ladder. They will fail because they have to fail to learn. Many, unfortunately, will fail badly and find the experience so unnerving that they’ll lose the heart and confidence to try again. But the third wave will be educated and experienced at failing quickly and inexpensively, and they will blaze a trail for others to follow that will be transformative. It will become the norm for new graduates. It will reduce the big corporate oligopolies and the big professional associations to minor players in the economy.
  9. The Gen Y phenomenon: There is something fundamentally different about those coming of age in the 21st century, as Don Tapscott has documented for the past decade. This generation is very sociable, connected, trusting, collaborative, and protective of each other. They’re comfortable using technologies the rest of us haven’t really got the hang of, and they’re fearless and masterful at finding workarounds when corporate policies or restrictions or firewalls or bureaucracy get in the way of them doing their job the way they know is best. They’re going to work, on average, in 12-14 jobs over their lifetimes, so they aren’t as easily cowed, dictated to, or influenced by bribes or threats as previous cohorts of workers. You won’t be able to tell them what to wear, when to do their work, when to do or not do ‘personal stuff’, what tools they must or cannot use, or where they must work. They know none of these rules make a difference to their performance, so get used to it. But also know this: Unless they’ve worked as entrepreneurs, they won’t have the faintest ideas what ‘business’ is really about. You’d better be prepared to tell them, show them, explain it in terms they can understand, because if you don’t, they won’t be able to help you do what’s important to your business, and its success.
  10. A shift back to basics and real value: There’s nothing like a recession or three to make you refocus on what’s really important in your life. There are already signs that people are valuing their time more than they have for decades, and that may mean that workers will seek careers that allow them time to do what’s more important than their jobs. Fewer hours and less overtime means they’ll have less disposable income, and that means they’ll do more things themselves that they used to ‘outsource’ — less eating out, more do-it-yourself home and car repairs, purchase of clothes and other durables that are well-made and timeless, more self-made entertainment and recreation (good for your health and creativity!), less willingness to commute, less tolerance of low-quality goods and services, preference for locally-made and hand-crafted products, more saving and less spending in general. That means companies that are depending on a rebound of frenzied consumer spending after each recession will not fare well, and those that help customers to be self-sufficient, to connect with each other, and to learn, those which have a reputation for quality and attentiveness, and which get most of their business by word of mouth, will flourish.

Oh, and in the process, twelve tools that you are getting used to in your business will disappear. They include corporate websites, Intranets, e-mail, groupware, cell phones, classrooms, ‘best practices’, and most of the types of boring text-based documents you love so much.

May 11, 2009

The Future of the Media: Something More Than Worthless News

Filed under: How the World Really Works — Dave Pollard @ 21:29


adding value to information

Nearly 15 years ago I was asked to give a speech at a conference of Canadian mainstream media types and ‘content aggregators’. I quoted Marshall McLuhan (“Information is always trying to be free”) and told them that, in 15 years, if they didn’t change, they would be extinct. Specifically I told them that they had to do more than regurgitate stories from the newswires, and that if they wanted to be paid for their work they would have to do something valuable — either provide information content that was actionable, or provide some service that added value. I described seven ways to add value to information (see chart above):

  1. Provide an actionable alert about something new and urgent.
  2. Provide an actionable briefing about something new and important.
  3. Provide the results of a survey of informed people that has never appeared anywhere else.
  4. Provide genuine research that explores an issue in depth and gives readers/viewers a thorough and useful understanding of the issue, and which asks important and provocative questions.
  5. Provide guidance on what the readers/viewers should do about this information (something more valuable than “be on heightened alert”)
  6. Provide a gauge or measure by which people can self-assess what they know about an important subject vs. what they should know.
  7. Organize a real-time event where people can engage with each other and with people who know more than they do, about an important subject.

The media types laughed at me. They insisted “this is not what the mainstream media do”. I insisted that if that was so, they had better start looking for a steadier job. As usual I was a bit ahead of my time, but not by much. The mainstream media are drowning in debt and losing readers every year, and their only answer is to try to find ways to force us to pay for the same old content, what I call “worthless news”.

Bill Maher famously said “The job of the media is to make what’s important interesting.” And the above list provides seven ways to do so. So why don’t they do their job?

Well, for a start, it costs more to do these seven things, and media companies are notoriously cheap (that’s why, a century ago, media barons were so wealthy). It’s risky. It’s hard work. It requires real skills. And it requires the company to really know its readers/viewers. The mainstream media fail on all counts. The alternative/indymedia, by sheer force of numbers and the astonishing range of new technologies at their disposal, are proving more capable of all seven ways of adding value to information than the stodgy old media.

There are exceptions. Some local newsmedia do some excellent investigative reporting of local issues (corruption, neighbourhood pollution, local culture). The New Yorker provides great analysis on important issues like government torture, American cultural phenomena, and environmental issues. The NYT, in its weekend and special editions, does some admirable long pieces and multi-part investigative series. The Op-eds in both The New Yorker and the NYT are often insightful and informative, not just empty rhetoric. So are many of the environmental articles in Orion.

A lot of people are asking what will happen if most of the mainstream media fold — where will the raw ‘news’ that most of the new media write about come from then? The reality is that most of the ‘news’ in most of the mainstream media are not information items at all — they’re entertainment items. In fact many of them are entertainment items about the entertainment industry — pure pap. Much of the ‘news’ comes from wire services that, increasingly, use vast networks of freelance reporters, rather than having their own staffs, so in the worst case after the mainstream media’s demise, freelancers (who already work for next to nothing) will have to become part-time reporters, and earn their living doing something else. In that case the raw news reports (most of which aren’t actionable in any case — more worthless entertainment) will end up being served up by millions of part-time freelance reporters, who will provide their copy and multimedia free (it won’t cost them anything) just to see their name in the byline of all the narrowcasting blogs and e-newsletters that will thrive once the newspapers and the remains of real radio/TV journalism disappear.

A larger problem is that, even now, there is a dearth of skills at doing the seven things that add value to information. Doing great research is a rare ability, and insightful research is lost in oceans of superficial, thoughtless regurgitation and academic esoterica. Few people care to take the time needed either to do great investigative work, or to think creatively and profoundly about what all the mountains of facts really mean. And the short attention spans of most of their potential audience is not a great encouragement either.

But it’s interesting to see how, no matter how the intermediaries and governments and corporatist packagers of drivel to dumbed-down consumers obfuscate, trivialize, neglect and deny any obligation for doing the real job of adding value to information (and making what’s important interesting), somehow there is always someone out their to take up the slack. Government censorship has never been a match for citizens’ passion to know important truths. The education system can never quite stamp out all the creativity and intellectual curiosity of its inmates. And there is always someone out there prepared to risk everything to speak truth to power, to the deceived, to the deniers, and to the ignorant.

For all the worthless news served up to us by the dinosaur media conglomerates, there is more useful, valuable information available to us today than ever before, and the magical thing about it is that the people providing it are doing it not for money or glory, but because they care about the truth. And the more they inform us, against all odds, the more we come to care too. And when a connected, organized group of people come to care about something actionable, watch out: there is no stopping them. It’s the phenomenon that has brought down tyrants and empires, and brought us just about everything that is worthwhile in our struggling society.

As Margaret Mead said: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Category: The Media

Links for the Week — May 10, 2009

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 01:54


esperance2
surf coming in from the Antarctic, Esperance, W.A. last month; photo by the author

The Animal in the Dark Tower: Ran Prieur from 2004 (thanks to Dale for the link) on why we can’t “go back” to being what we were before the invention of agriculture and civilization. Excerpt:

[John] Livingston [in Rogue Primate] writes:

Nowhere may the human presence be seen as fully integrated and “natural,” because wherever we may be, or however long we may have been there, we are still domesticates. Domesticates have no ecologic place, and they show it consistently and universally. When non-European indigenous peoples received and began to use firearms, for example, they revealed their exotic placelessness without missing a beat.

A common anti-civ argument goes that “we” lived sustainably for more than a million years before the few thousand years of civilization, that stone age technology and only stone age technology has ever been sustainable, and that therefore we should live pretty much like we lived for that million-plus years. But that wasn’t us! Those were our less biologically-domesticated hominid relatives. Arguably, Homo sapiens sapiens has never lived sustainably, by which I mean that we have had societies that gave as much as they took, but that these societies themselves were precarious, that they could and sooner or later did fall out of balance — or get knocked out of balance by conquest or technological infection from some imbalance over the horizon.

I suggest that we draw the line in our heads not between industrial civilization and hunter-gatherers-plus-nature, but between Homo sapiens sapiens and all other life — and of course not in the sense that we are more “highly” evolved, but that we have evolved to some strange place off to the side, isolated and dangerous, the animal in the dark tower.

We Have Already Twice as Many Known Petrocarbon Reserves as Our Atmosphere Can Bear: To keep CO2 under 350ppm, we need to leave half of the oil, gas and coal reserves we’ve already discovered permanently in the ground, and stop, forever, searching for more. When are we going to realize this?

US Real Unemployment Rate Nears 16%: That’s a total of 23 million Americans. Of course the “official” unemployment rate, like the “official” inflation rate, is a much smaller, phony number.

Richard St John’s Eight Secrets of Success: Richard interviewed 500 TED attendees and their ‘secrets of success’ were:

  1. Passion: You have to love what you do, and be guided and inspired by it.
  2. Hard Work: You have to invest a lot of time and energy, but, hey, if you have passion for it, is it really work?
  3. Gift: You have to be good at what you do, by nature and/or lots of practice.
  4. Focus: Don’t try to do too many things.
  5. Courage: You have to push through shyness and self-doubts.
  6. Service: You have to be of use to others, do something of real value, something that meets a real need.
  7. Ideas: You have to innovate something unique, by listening, observing, being curious, asking questions, tackling problems, and making connections.
  8. Persistence: Persevere through failure and CRAP (criticisms, rejections, assholes, and pressures)
Good advice. I guess it would be immodest to point out that my book Finding the Sweet Spot says all this. Thanks to Natalie for the link.

Take Care of Your Body!: My friend Colleen describes her recent Crohn’s flare-up, her first in three years (I have the sister disease, Ulcerative Colitis, and it’s been two years since my last flare-up). It’s a very personal, very funny, very moving article and it’s a great reminder that, if/when we lose our health, everything else we love and intend is jeopardized. Great bonus quote from Merlin Mann: “You eventually learn that true priorities are like arms; if you think you have more than a couple, you’re either lying or crazy.”

Should We All Be Part-Time Farmer-Gardeners?: A Japanese study suggests the key to healthy living is to have two part-time careers, one working on the local land, and the other in our personal sweet spot. Thanks to David P for the link.

Artists’ and Writers’ Fear of Failure: Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love fame talks about how artists can move past the fear of failure (and the vanities of success) by realizing we are just the vehicle through which genius expresses itself. Thanks to Mariella for the link.

Intentional Communities Find Niche With Seniors: Co-housing, a form of Intentional Community, is perfectly suited to seniors’ social and support needs. In Denmark there are 250 co-housing communities dedicated exclusively to seniors. Thanks to Tree for the link and the one that follows.

Will The Government Drug Us All With Lithium Next?: Research indicates that lithium put in the water supply could pacify us enough to significantly reduce suicide rates. Psychiatrists are all for the idea.

Just for Fun:

Video of a surfer from inside the wave. Thanks to Viv for the link. And if regular surfing isn’t enough for you, in the Amazon you can surf a single long wave of the tidal bore, for 37 minutes.

The world’s 10 most dangerous roads.

Thoughts for the Week:

Harrison Owen, coaching a newbie on Open Space Technology (thanks to Viv for the link):

I have a big secret. We are all amateurs, and all gifted with a 13.7 billion year old process that basically runs itself almost no matter what we do. Of course there are a few tricks of the trade, particularly when it comes to the ongoing use of OST and integrating it into the everyday life of organizations. I don’t think this is rocket science, but it will take some attention. Here is another big secret: All organizations are already in Open Space but they just don’t know it. Or in some cases, they do know it but it scares them to death. The point is, you are not bringing anything new – just helping them to remember what they already are, and be it better.

All of that said — things do get better with practice, and in the case of Open Space that usually means discovering more and more things not to do.

From Sam’s always raw and astonishing blog diary, as she adjusts to yet another move:

May 7th: DogJill’s visible cancer has worsened quite rapidly and has spread to the other side of her throat and finally we will say our good-byes tomorrow afternoon. I had expected six good months with Jill and we have had seven or eight really great ones together. I wanted to make sure there was no choice here, that it was not merely a money issue, because that is something we could work around if it possibly would do any good. But she makes it clear that it afflicts not only her throat but, as the vet suspects, her abdominal organs. I have to lift her onto the bed now and lift her down again because she finds it painful to stand on her hind legs or jump.

Things are shifting and changing. I had worried we would not commune with the moon here as I’d hoped because of the blasted street lamp north of us, but last night when we sat on the south stoop and watched the cats dancing in the driveway the rain clouds parted in the southern sky to reveal the moon’s gorgeous smiling face and it was so bright and the sky was wide and all brilliances and depths of silver and black and I was much relieved. Late tomorrow night (12:01am) May’s full Flower moon will blossom and bless us with its hope and fresh energy…

May 9th: pressed my face against Jill’s muzzle yesterday and smelled her smell and whispered I love you you’ll be fine now don’t worry and she breathed in the scent of my ear in long slow hunting-dog sniffs, I held her head in both my hands and kissed her and the pink fluid left the syringe and passed into her narrow vein and she went heavy and slack and I wept to free her. Later on I thought I sensed her happiness. When I came home after, I walked in the front door as someone on my brother’s TV show said You did the right thing, Captain. It was reassuring. Brian asked, in the evening, and so I told him the story. When he goes to bed now for a week or two he’ll say as he did last night “My friend Jill she died.” No more Angel of Death now for me please. Please just let me plant the rhubarb roots and crowns of asparagus before it’s too late, while I still can scratch a trench in the soil.

May 6, 2009

The Curse of Idealism

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 21:32


idealismI have always been an idealist. Even as a young child I imagined worlds that were, in every way, perfect and simple. I had a paper cutout dial pasted on my bed’s headboard that, in my imagination, could give me anything I wanted with the push of a button, instantly — long before Star Trek came up with the idea. While the other kids were playing games of conflict and competition, I was encouraging them to play collaborative games that everyone ‘won’, or playing, quite happily, by myself.

As I learned (mostly in school, outside the classroom) about greed, pettiness, jealousy, vindictiveness, anger, and power politics, I retreated more and more into my head, dreaming of worlds of peace, happiness, balance, beauty and generosity. In my poetry and short stories, there was no grief, no violence, no suffering, no unhappiness. An idealist was born.

There is a problem with idealism, though. In fact, the contemporary ideas of ‘ideal’ and ‘perfection’ seem to be relatively new inventions. Ideal originally meant merely something imagined, and perfect originally meant merely made complete. When Thomas Moore conjured up the word Utopia in the 16th century he quite deliberately chose a combination of two Greek words meaning no place. An idealist, then, has always been someone who deals with the unreal, the impossible. And Voltaire told us “the perfect is the enemy of the good”.

In the face of criticism (such as accusations that an ideal is, tautologically, ‘unrealistic’) the idealist can quickly become an ideologue (in the modern sense of someone who espouses a set of inflexible doctrines, regardless of their logic). And with ideology, too often, comes a willingness to defend or confront conflicting ideals with violence. The result has been religious wars, political and economic oppression and suppression, brutal authoritarianism, and countless acts of murder, theft, assault and cruelty. To the idealist, what is real is never good enough.

So the idealist dreams of living in a perfect place, where everyone is always and forever happy, safe and beautiful, and lives in perfect harmony, doing only and always things that are blissful. Even in my youth, my impossible romantic and sexual fantasies, for example, would put even the most well-crafted romances and erotica to shame. And today I’m searching the world for a perfect place that cannot possibly exist, full of a diverse and stunningly beautiful and talented multiplicity of people and creatures who cannot possibly exist, except in my imagination. 

As long as it’s kept in its place — the worlds of art and fiction and dreaming — there is nothing wrong with idealism. We live, as I am so fond of saying, in a world of terrible imaginative poverty, and much of the complacency of our world in the face of so much violence, waste, corruption, misery and poverty, is due to most people’s inability to imagine any other, better, way to live or make a living than the ‘real’ one they see all around them. Ironically, many of these ills were perpetrated by idealists, who imagined the impossible and tried, insanely, to realize it.

Because as soon as we imagine something better, it is in our nature to aspire to make it real. And there’s the rub. Einstein, who asserted that imagination was more important than knowledge, also observed that the more the people of his acquaintance knew, the more pessimistic they became. Is that because they realized the hopelessness of achieving anything close to the ideal, precisely as they were discovering just how ghastly the real really was?

Is it because they came to understand, by studying history, that humans (and any creatures) are incapable of radical change without slaughter? Social and political change only occur as the generation with old ideas dies off and the younger generation, infused or propagandized with new ideas, new knowledge, takes its place. Even in business, we discover, the only way to bring about comprehensive organizational change in less than a generation is by firing everyone and hiring all new people.

As an idealist and as a student of history and human behaviour, I am increasingly convinced that only an impossibly radical change will be enough to save our planet from the sixth great extinction that is now nearing its point of no return, its tipping point. My instinctive, visceral response is an unbearable grief for Gaia, an anxiety and sense of hopelessness that is beyond reason or logical explanation, a disconnection from this terrible ‘real’ world. And an affection for those who have chosen to fight, no matter what the risk or consequence, no matter how impossible, with every bone in their body in every waking moment, for the type of better world I can imagine (and abhorrence for those fighting, with equal vigour, for equally impossible ideals opposed to my own). And, finally, affection for those who live stoicly with the sadness or blackness of the noonday demon, or who cannot bear to do so and simply and quietly give up, and end their lives.

Had I been a bit more foolish, a bit more ambitious, a bit more damaged by this modern culture, I might today be doing something much more dangerous than searching for the impossible ideal in a terrible real world. I might be leading a political or social movement, working to force my ideals on others, or on the whole world. Instead of a pathology born of disengagement and withdrawal from an unacceptable, unbearable real world, I might be afflicted with a pathology born of anger and fury and megalomania and self-adulation or self-loathing, and trying as a result to impose my particular brand of perfection on everyone else.

What I have learned is that the energies and imagination of idealists are best exhibited and discharged in art and story, and, infused with a bit of humility, in self-examination and self-change. So I have given up on politics, which has never succeeded in making anything better anyway, and now focus my imaginative energies on writing that incites nothing more lethal than understanding, recognition, appreciation, and perhaps a smile.

For disenchanted idealists, there are two ways forward. The first, and most tempting, is to live with one foot in each world. One foot in the real world, whenever and wherever we can find beauty, love, hope, peace and joy; the other foot in our own ideal, imagined, impossible world of fantastic perfection — a world of dreams. The artist in me is content with this schizophrenic way — when the real world disappoints, or hurts, or the grief becomes too great to bear, there is always safety and refuge (and creativity!) in this other, imaginary place. That is, as long as I don’t hope, or try, to make the imaginary real.

The other way is to let go of the ideal and live fully in the real world — to let yourself change and accept what is, immerse yourself and revel in it. Evelyn has embraced this second way, and she recently tweeted:

My innate idealism is imploding (as no ideas, ideals, deals big enough to contain truth); aha.. innate innocence is surfacing under debris.

and then elaborated:

i went to meditate by a big lumbering live oak and realized that having my innate idealism destroyed was not such a bad thing…
 
when and if i don’t have so many notions and ideas about what is preferable, i am finding that under those mental skyscrapers (metaphorically–) once they imploded, under that debris was this shimmering intelligent innate innocence — the ground that had been built over with constructs — that is intricately life itself and it does know how to evolve “heaven on earth” or whatever our wildest grandest ideals are….so i feel more like i am getting out of my own way, and letting it lead, and i mean lead as in dancing more than lead as in politics!

When I read this I was reminded of the advice of the Indian philosopher — that, in order to be authentically ourselves, we must first rid ourselves of all the gunk we have accumulated over our lifetimes, stuff that we have attached to ourselves or allowed others to attach to us. And I thought about how my own life has been “built over with constructs”.

I was also struck by Evelyn’s implication that the opposite of idealism isn’t realism, but rather innocence (from the Latin words meaning harmlessness) — seeing the world through unclouded, non-judgemental eyes. Seeing and accepting the world for just what it really is.

But how do we do this? How do we “get out of our own way”, and let go of our ideals and pretenses to knowledge and control? How does “just being a space through which stuff passes“, and living in Now Time, become more than an ideal, an intention, and instead become a way of living, of being?

How do we become innocent again?

Recently I wrote, optimistically, that I was ready to “start over”, and that starting over would entail:

  1. Letting go of my beliefs, my stuff, my responsibilities and obligations and expectations and all sense of control and power over people and situations.
  2. Giving up on the illusion that language conveys any precise meaning, and using it instead as a purely creative and imaginative tool.
  3. Being fearless. There is however a tension here between fearlessness (being free from insecurity), which is liberating, and recklessness, which can be hurtful.
  4. Not belonging anywhere. This doesn’t preclude a reverence for place, but rather acknowledges I can be a part of any place that can naturally sustain me.
  5. Trusting my instincts and my senses as much as my emotions and intellect, and relearning when to be guided by each. Jung love.
  6. Understanding that we are all, even in crowds, even in the company of those we imagine we love and who we imagine love us, utterly alone.
  7. Understanding that no one is in control.
  8. Realizing that freedom to be nobody-but-myself is more important than anything else, even health. Even love.
  9. Appreciating that time is chimera; it doesn’t exist. Animals live in ‘now time’, a time that stretches out forever, except in moments of stress. Time to be wild.
  10. Giving up my ‘wants’, while being skeptical about my ‘free will’. Stewart and Cohen in Figments of Reality:
Living species, including humans, are emergent properties of the ‘pandemonium’ of the body’s semi-autonomous processes — We are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual benefit i.e. we are an organism. And our brains, our intelligence, awareness, consciousness and free-will, are nothing more than an evolved, shared, feature-detection system jointly developed to advise these creatures’ actions for their mutual benefit. Our brains, and our minds (the processes that our neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their information-processing system, not ‘ours’.

Conceptually, I can see doing these ten things, but it’s hard for me to see who/what I would become if I did. Is letting go of our ideals really as simple as that? Is it even possible? Or are our ideals like addictive drugs, and do they need to be shattered before we can let them go?

I’ve said before that we are each the author of our own story, and that, as Thomas King tells us, our story is all we are. I’m convinced that human idealism is one of the root causes of many of the ills that afflict our society. Perhaps idealism is also the key to our own personal affliction, the fictional story that casts a shadow over our lives and prevents us from being who we really are. Perhaps it’s time to rewrite our story, and, this time, make it true.

Category: Human Nature

May 3, 2009

Australia vs. Canada: The Best and the Worst

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 10:05


BCrainforest
BC rainforest — photo by Henry Georgi

It’s looking increasingly likely that I’m going to end up, in my retirement, spending May-October of each year in British Columbia, Canada (for immigration and health care reasons), and November-April of each year in Australia, New Zealand or Hawai’i. I’ve written before about the things that are most important to me in a place to live:
  1. Warmth 
  2. Beautiful forest wilderness nearby (without too many insects and dangerous species)
  3. Beautiful, uncrowded beaches nearby
  4. Interesting, intelligent, informed people in the community
  5. A tolerant, gentle, diverse, peaceful creative and progressive local culture
  6. Sustainability: local/organic food/resource availability, access, renewability, conservation, transportation
  7. Affordability
  8. Connectivity: Internet/telephony, rail system etc.

There are two paradoxes here. The first is that the most beautiful natural environments in these (and most) countries seem not to be the places where the most interesting, intelligent and progressive people hang out. I don’t know why this is — perhaps rich bored people hog all the good beaches and resort areas and push the alternative cultures out. Or perhaps informed, creative, university-educated people just prefer the crowded, unsustainable urban culture. But for whatever reason the places that score high on criteria 2 and 3 tend to score lower on criteria 4, 5 and 7, and vice versa.

The second paradox is that while a lot of areas are really trying to be sustainable, none is even close to succeeding. So while I might find a place that meets all the criteria except criterion 6, eventually that criterion is going to trump all the others.

So what I’m doing now is exploring six areas — SW BC, NW US, SW and SE Australia, N NZ, and Hawai’i — looking for places that meet as many of these 8 criteria as possible. I lived for 5 years in SW BC, and have briefly visited all of the other 5 areas. So far there are no perfect choices (that I know of — I’m still looking) within any of these areas, and quite a few that meet 5 or perhaps 6 of the 8 criteria. 

In the process, I’ve come up with some interesting lists of the best and worst of (Westcoast) Canada and (Southcoast) Australia. They are surprisingly similar lists! Keep in mind I’m a non-swimmer — I know the surfing is great in S Oz.

Best Things About (Westcoast) Canada:

  1. Forests
  2. Culture
  3. Connectivity
  4. Lots of still-uncrowded areas
  5. Reasonably affordable
  6. Beaches (westcoast Vancouver Island only)
  7. Arts
  8. Tolerance, peacefulness

Worst Things About (Westcoast) Canada:

  1. Unsustainability: logging, mining, gravel/construction, oil tankers, trucking, industrial agriculture, water/air pollution, waste
  2. Unrestrained growth and sprawl: Real estate and construction industry owns local/provincial politicians
  3. Treatment of aboriginal people
  4. Restrictions on dogs
  5. Transportation: Little public transport, poor roads, traffic jams, too many trucks instead of trains, archaic ferry system, disorganized Vancouver airport
  6. Westcoast rednecks
  7. Mainstream media: a right-wing monopoly

Best Things About (Southcoast) Australia:

  1. Beaches
  2. Forests (and the birds!)
  3. Warmth
  4. Culture (alas, not as good near the best beaches and forests) 
  5. Lots of still-uncrowded areas
  6. Local/organic foods (healthy and great variety) (special kudos to Dunsborough’s Samudra, a lovely vegetarian restaurant and yoga/meditation centre)
  7. Tolerance, peacefulness, egalitarianism
  8. No tipping!
  9. Good public transit (alas, in big cities only)
  10. Cute accents

Worst Things About (Southcoast) Australia:

  1. Unsustainability: logging, mining, gravel/construction, tankers, trucking (5-trailer “road trains!”), industrial agriculture, water/air pollution, waste
  2. Unrestrained growth and sprawl: Real estate and construction industry owns local/provincial politicians
  3. Treatment of aboriginal people
  4. Restrictions on dogs
  5. Sydney airport (the hub to everywhere in Oz)
  6. Westcoast rednecks
  7. Mainstream media: a right-wing monopoly
  8. Internet accessibility and cost
  9. So far away from the rest of the world

If you live in the BC Gulf Islands, Qualicum/Parkville or Sunshine Coast, or in New Zealand, Australia or Hawai’i and can recommend any specific areas that meet most of my 8 criteria, I’d love to hear from you, and I will check them out as my explorations continue. And if you have quibbles with or additions to my best/worst lists, I’d love your comments on them too.

May 2, 2009

Links for the Week: May 2, 2009

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 21:29


Two weeks’ worth of links to catch up with, so descriptions are shorter than usual, and some of the links I’m saving for next week.

clark little surf
Surf image by Clark Little — thanks to Tree for the link

The Best Business Model: Umair explains that you should ignore all the consultant/guru blather about how to remake your organization as an innovation leader, and just make something insanely great. In other words, as my book explains, produce something that people really need (even if they may not know it) that no one else comes close to providing. Thanks to several twitterers for pointing me to this.

Education Prevents Finding Your Sweet Spot: In his new book, Ken Robinson is also restating my book’s ‘sweet spot’ hypothesis. He refers to “That place where the things you love to do [what I call your Passions] and the things that you are good at [what I call your Gifts] come together.” My book refers to the ‘sweet spot’ as the intersection where your Gifts, Passions and Purpose (what people really need) intersect. Robinson argues that our education system prevents people from ever finding this sweet spot. Thanks to twitterer GlobalNomadInOz for pointing me to this.

Can We Afford to Eat Ethically?: Salon compares the cost of local/organic food with the processed crap most of the world consumes, and concludes that once you get a little self-education on how to do it, it’s not expensive at all to eat well. And there’s a bonus link to Rebecca Blood’s story on learning to eat ethically and affordably, with some great healthy recipes.

The Death of Knowledge: “The death of knowledge occurs when evidence of learning becomes more important than learning itself.” An interesting article by Richard Berlach on the scourge of “outcomes-based education”. Thanks to Bee for the link.

Bringing Up Kids Successfully Where It’s Cool to Fail: What do you do in inner cities and rural areas where anti-intellectualism is so rampant that being informed, knowledgeable, successful and intelligent is just un-cool?

Australia Desecrates Art for Oil: It’s a story of a kind familiar in the rest of the world, but it’s sad to see it in Australia, too: Aboriginal artworks 30,000 years old destroyed to make room for a gas production plant.

What Intentional Community is About: Great, substantial article on Intentional Community, profiling Tryon Life Community on the outskirts of Portland Oregon. Thanks to Tree for the link. And bonus links to another article on an IC in New Mexico, Sunflower River.

Learning About Permaculture: Maya Mountain Demonstration Farm permaculture training centre in Belize (thanks to Eric Lilius for the link).

Learning About the Transition Movement: The NYT has a lengthy explanation of the transition movement. Thanks to Tom Atlee for the link.

Could the US Meet and Even Beat Its Kyoto Targets?: The UCS’ newest study says yes: “The United States could reduce energy demand by a third through improved efficiency in buildings, industry and transportation systems. More than half of the emissions reductions, meanwhile, would come from cuts [through use of non-carbon sources] in the electric generation sector.” Well, yes, but that would require coordinated effort, and lots of tough laws with teeth. So, no.

Wall Street Bonuses Soaring Again: Krugman makes a great argument that banks add no value to our society and need to be nationalized and made into public utilities with fixed, modest salaries for managers. The banking elite still doesn’t get it, and we’re let them get away with it, again.

Mainstream Media Suppress News of Pulitzer-Winning Expose of Mainstream Media: No surprise that the cooption and corruption of the mainstream media would never be acknowledged by those who perpetrated it. No, no, that’s not news.

You Just Can’t Win in Afghanistan: When will Obama and the US realize that the Afghan War is unwinnable, even with a re-emphasis on non-military activities. You cannot impose democracy on a country, especially one that is clearly not ready for it, and may never be. Even if you do have more than two people in the country that can actually speak the national language.

Does the Moon Affect the Taste of Wine?: There’s enough evidence that major vintners are timing their wine tastings to correspond to the moon’s cycles. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Now We’re Cooking Without Gas: A $6 solar cooker that uses no non-renewable fuel has won an environmental award. Thanks to Andrew for the link.

So You Want to Be a Blogging Millionaire?: Clay Shirky refutes a preposterous WSJ article suggesting hundreds of thousands of people are making a decent living blogging. Thanks to emj in Victoria for the link.

Just for Fun:

NYT explains no-knead bread from scratch that even a 6-year-old can make.

Music to meditate by, from Gemini Sun records, a great new age music stream.

Thoughts for the Week:

From Orion (subscription only): Civilization’s Barbaric Heart: Curtis White explains the basic principles that have driven human economic activity worldwide since the dawn of our civilization (and which need to be replaced with an ethos with the opposite principles):
  • Prosperity is dependent on violence
  • We are motivated most by the self-interested Ego, the pursuit of the personal
  • There is no need or place in our culture for self-examination, or regret for or rectification of ill-conceived behaviour; a society can never be punished for its excesses or learn from its mistakes

From Derrick Jensen (also in this month’s Orion, by subscription only):

Blaming global warming for the melting ice caps is like blaming the lead projectile for the death of someone who got shot…What if, instead of asking the question “If the world is really looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe, how should I live my life right now?” people were to ask the land where they live, the land that supports them, “What can and must I do to become your ally and help protect you from this culture? What can we do together to stop this culture from killing you?” Then the only real question is: Are you willing to do it?

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