July « 2009 « how to save the world

July 31, 2009

A Conversation

Filed under: Creative Works — Dave Pollard @ 02:54

My friend Dussault always said of people like me “a generalist is someone who doesn’t know enough about anything to know enough about anything.” He was a believer in becoming expert at something, anything — the very best in the world. That, he believed, gave you a foundation, a context for learning about everything else, and most importantly appreciating how little you know about everything else. He argued that without such a foundation you see everything superficially, and as a result you impute meaning, and connections, where there are none.

Last year when I visited him, he had been studying a variant of poker called Tableau. Here’s how he explained the rules:

It can be played with anywhere from 4 to 7 players. You lay out a 6×6 tableau of cards, face down, then deal two more cards, face down, to each player. Each player is looking to maximize two “hands”: The player to dealer’s left plays the top row and the left column, the next player the second row and column, etc. If there are 7 players the dealer (the 7th player) plays the two diagonal rows.

The game consists of a minimum of 4 rounds. Each round, starting to the dealer’s left, each player (until and unless they have folded in a previous round) must either replace one of their 11 tableau cards (one of the cards in their row or column) with a card from their hand, face up (in which case they take the replaced card into their hand), or turn over face up one of their 11 tableau cards. After each round there is a round of betting.

When there are fewer than 10 cards left unexposed, a final round is played: The rest of the unexposed cards are turned over. Then each player in turn can (but does not have to) replace their intersection card (the one that is part of both their row and column in the tableau) with either of the two cards in their hand (in a 7-player game the dealer does not get to replace an intersection card since the diagonals have no intersection).

Best 5-card hand of the 14 total hands in the tableau wins. If the best hand belongs to a player who has folded, or does not belong to any player (e.g. if it is in the 6th row when fewer than 6 are playing), then no one wins, cards are thrown in and the pot is carried over to the next deal.

Dussault insisted that, once you’d played this a hundred times or so, and studied it (he’d programmed the computer to play against him), you’d learn a strategy that would allow you to win, on average, three times as often as players playing a merely diligent game. The strategy involved holding back a good card to play in the final round in the intersection, turning over cards that overlapped with the opponent with the strongest hand showing, and expecting a high three-of-a-kind, on average, to win the pot. If certain cards were declared wild, he said, the strategic player’s advantage was even greater. He claimed that casinos now resort to using cameras and advanced photo recognition technology to ban experts in gaming theory, because they had to confess that expertise conveys such a knowledge advantage that the casino, even with the odds rigged in their favour, can’t match. He argued that banning experts from casinos is as unfair and unreasonable as banning Google from the Internet — because they’re too good for the competition to keep up.

I laughed at him, saying playing 100 games of poker was far short of Gladwell’s 10,000 hour (five year full-time) threshold for developing expertise. I read him Bill Tozier’s brilliant paean to generalists. I told him I’d rather be “part of the world that links things together” than the world’s best at doing something. We’re pattern recognizers by nature, I argued. A little knowledge isn’t a dangerous thing, I told him, its what allows us to see how something over here might be applied way over there, in a way that no specialist, steeped in his or her narrow area of expertise, would ever recognize.

He snorted. “Almost all the patterns you perceive will be red herrings,” he replied, “because you don’t know enough to know whether you actually understand what’s going on either here or way over there. You’re just playing, like a child rearranging a dollhouse, presuming to suggest that the result of that caprice is somehow a potential breakthrough in urban design”. He reminded me that, when I was younger, I had argued that perhaps the “big bang” was an optical illusion. I’d put two chess pieces on my record turntable and had him hunch down and look at them from the side as it spun. “Look!”, I said sarcastically, “the two pawns are accelerating apart! Oh, now they’ve stopped and they’re collapsing back together again!”

“Delightful fantasy,” he’d laughed, “but utterly, staggeringly ignorant of the science of astrophysics. I imagine with this breakthrough you’re ready to tackle cold fusion next!”

“No,” I’d replied. “I thought I’d take on the absurdity of string theory instead.”

“Ah, well, I’m with you on that,” he’d said. “A bunch of dilettantes. Virtual theorists run amok. No understanding of the real world, that bunch. Probably the same clowns who think the brain is like a computer”. He was getting heated.

I told him that I thought it was arrogant to believe we can ever become an expert in, or deeply knowledgeable about, anything important in a world in which everything important is complex, fundamentally unknowable, unpredictable. The best we can do, I asserted, is pay deep attention to as much as we can, as broadly as we can, and look for patterns, and then talk with others about them to see if we can arrive at any congruence on what they signify, what they mean, what opportunities and threats they present, and represent. I said that I’d often talked to experts about some of my ideas but they were, in my view, presumptively and prematurely dismissive. They were only interested in talking with people who confirmed what they already believed.

He sighed. “There is some truth to that,” he said. “This is, however, more a matter of what you rightfully call ‘imaginative poverty’ than it is a reflection of their ’specialized incompetence’. A principal purpose of research, and of knowledge generally, is to identify and pose important questions, and this requires not only deep subject matter knowledge but also imagination. Most self-described experts these days have, alas, the former but not the latter. But to have unimaginative people with deep knowledge meet imaginative people with superficial knowledge is hopeless, because the former won’t entertain the possibility that the superficial ideas of the latter might prompt areas of important exploration, while the latter can’t understand why their ideas are naive and unworkable. This is one of the reasons there is essentially no innovation going on in almost every area of human endeavour. The people with knowledge and the people with ideas can’t and won’t communicate with each other. Our society is at an intellectual nadir, exactly when our collective creativity is most desperately needed.”

“So is what you’re suggesting,” I asked, “that we generalists have to pick up the slack, and learn enough about the subjects we have interesting ideas about, to be able to substantiate that these ideas are not naive?”

“I doubt that’s practicable,” he replied. “You just can’t learn enough about all the things you have ideas about.”

I waited for him to suggest an alternative solution but he seemed nonplussed. Finally, I asked “Perhaps what’s needed is a collaboration of more than two. The idea-ist to float a naive possibility, the expert to assess its practicability, and some intermediaries to enhance it, challenge it, bless it, give it some tempered credibility?”

“Sounds clumsy and cumbersome,” he said, dubiously. “How does it work in business meetings, Open Space events, collaborations, facilitated sessions? How do good ideas get researched or imagined, and what happens to them when the crowd gets hold of them?”

I thought for a while. I suggested that good ideas, when proffered unsolicited, generally provoke no response or interest at all. The prerequisite for entertaining an idea, it seemed to me, is an acknowledged need or problem. The more bold the idea, the greater the sense of urgency and importance of finding a solution that’s required to entertain it. And even when an idea is entertained, it generally won’t get any traction unless it’s easy to implement — unless there is an obvious line of sight from idea to realization.

“That’s about what I thought,” he replied. “That’s why I think the indigenous cultures have always had it right. Your job as an ideator is just to articulate the idea, as coherently and compellingly as possible, which is generally best done by telling a story. It’s not your job to research its plausibility, to become enough of an expert to know whether and how to make it happen. You just tell the story. Then the responsibility for implementing is left to each person to accept, or not. If the idea has wings, then people will do what they must to make sure it is implemented. No lists of who will do what by when. The experts will show up if the invitation is well-crafted and well-offered. And they’ll be open to new ideas if they sense, among the invitees, an appetite for it, a hunger. In which case, if it can be made to work, they’ll make it work.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “So what’s the trick for making the story compelling? And what’s the trick for knowing who to invite to hear it, and how?”

“Ah,” he said, smiling. “The recipe for a compelling story has a lot of ingredients, but no one formula. It has to be a story of passion, of overcoming a difficult challenge heroically, astonishingly. It has to have resonance, so that your audience relates to it, makes it their own. And it has to be real, credible, down to earth, neither too easy nor too difficult to believe. As for the trick for knowing who to invite, that’s easier: people who care. You can’t know that with people you haven’t met. When you tell them why you care, and look them right in the eye, you will know whether they care. The hard part is finding people who care. Not just people who say they care, who nod and shake your hand. If people don’t really care — about the issue, not necessarily about your idea to deal with it — if people don’t really care, you’re wasting your time. If they do really care, which means they also know, because we can’t care about things we don’t know about, which is why so many of us don’t want to know, then all you have to do is invite them together, and tell your story well. They’ll do the rest.”

I commented that this seemed like a lot of work. He told me it would become easier with practice. “No more than 10,000 hours,” he said, smiling. “Practice conversation, until you know how to pay attention, how to really listen, how to show that you care and what you care about and why, authentically, how to understand what the person you’re conversing with cares about and why, and how to connect with them in ways and with language that they understand and appreciate. Then you will know whether to invite them to collaborate with you, and how. And then practice telling your story, which is just another form of conversation, and which requires the same capacities.”

A short time after this discussion, Dussault contracted a painful and wasting disease, and he then became an expert in how to end one’s own life, and in his final practice, took his expertise with him. He left me a note, which read as follows:

Try not to try too hard, my friend.
It’s as simple as letting go of everything, and paying absolute attention to everything.
And don’t spend too much time inside your own head, writing and thinking and posting your thoughts.
Get out and talk with people, about the things you care about.
Don’t waste time on small talk. Tell them what you’d die for, hold nothing back.
Your knowledge and ideas are astonishing, but you must let your passion express them.
Let the world see your broken heart.
You will only learn who you are, Mr. Nobody-But-Yourself, in conversation, in community, with those you love.
Fare forward.
Shine on.

– D.

Category: Fables

Comments (12)

July 30, 2009

Your World-Changing Story

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 02:15

When I recently wrote about “what I want“, included in the list was:

To become better at presenting, conversing and demonstrating, through self-study of presentation, memory, and effective listening skills.
To become an exceptional and renowned story-teller.

From my study to date, it would appear that the best presentations bring together two other skills I seek to acquire: they are all practiced to the point they are substantially memorized, and they all include compelling, first-person stories.

So, I wondered, if it is really my Purpose to make a difference in the world in one or more of these seven ways:

Helping people cope with civilization’s collapse.
Obsolescing industrial agriculture.
Helping people find the right collaborative partners.
Deschooling society.
Helping people learn about sustainable community.
Helping people learn to deal with complexity.
Helping people discover the work they’re meant to do.

then could I create an elevator pitch, a short 5-minute personal story, to articulately explain why I cared about each of these issues, and perhaps in the process engage others in these causes? This would allow me to practice memorization on something shorter than a major presentation, and also practice my story-writing and story-telling skills.

I started with the first of these seven issues, helping people cope with civilization’s collapse. How could I convey why I cared about this (and why I believed that collapse was inevitable) in just 5 minutes? It seemed an impossible task. But that’s what practice is about. So far, I’ve come up with this story:

A few years ago I quit my high-pressure 60-hour-a-week job, for health reasons, and started to read again. In my youth I’d been an ardent environmentalist, so I started reading the books on the state of the world and how we might ’save’ it. The more I read the more alarmed and dismayed I became.

When I looked at the major indicators of human activity, they all looked a little like this — increasing exponentially, with the “tipping point”, when the curve really took off, occurring in most cases about 1900, when the oil-powered economy began:

nc1

Population, resources extracted, land used, total consumption, violent human deaths, aggregate wealth — they all followed the same mind-boggling curve. When I looked a little closer, I could see these curves leveling off very slightly. At first I hoped and expected that these curves would end up looking like this:

nc2

But as I read more, and became a student of history, and sustainability, I began to recognize the curve to be something different — it is the left side of a “normal curve”:

nc3

I learned that there is no such thing as “sustainable growth”. Every civilization ends, and when it does, all its indicators describe a normal curve. It collapses quickly, and then, a shadow of its former self, slowly fades away. When I read and talked with climate scientists, and experts in non-renewable resources, and anthropologists, and population biologists, they explained that it isn’t a matter of if our civilization is going to end, but how and when. Jared Diamond and Ronald Wright, expert students of past civilizations, described the inexorable pattern of rise and fall in great detail.

In fact, I discovered, our civilization is already ending. What biologists call the “sixth great extinction” of biodiversity on Earth began millennia ago, and it is plunging down the right side of the normal curve slope faster than in any of the first five. Our human population is already twice the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet even with no allowance for any other living creatures, and is on pace to hit six times the planet’s carrying capacity before population peaks at 150% of today’s and resource use peaks at triple today’s.

I read more, growing more disturbed the more I learned. I learned that we are rapidly running out of almost every renewable resource — most notably oil, water, nutritive soil, ocean life and forests, and that species extinction is accelerating. I learned that we have already surpassed the level of atmospheric pollution that will inevitably create almost unimaginable climate change — disappearance of all the world’s forests, huge sea level rise, constant storms that will dwarf Katrina in ferocity and decimate vital human infrastructure, global-scale drought, flooding, and desertification. Even the most optimistic climate scientists are now acknowledging that the changes are accelerating and occurring faster and more intensely than they ever expected, and that we have already passed the “tipping point” — our civilization is now starting to become the latest casualty of the sixth great extinction. By the end of this century or early in the next, it is likely that human population will drop 90% from its mid-century peak, down the right side of the normal curve, even if we do our best to mitigate and adapt to these catastrophic changes.

The conclusion of this research, which is never discussed in the newspapers or other mainstream media, filled me with despair. The overwhelming weight of evidence was clear: The collapse of our civilization has already begun, there is no going back, and its effects are going to be unlike anything the world has seen since a cosmic accident caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The last part of this century is going to be chaos, as we slide down the normal curve. And then it’s going to get very quiet. Yet everyone seems to be in a state of total denial.

At first, as I read about what we’ve done, I thought of our civilization as a colossal failure. But as I thought more, and read some books of modern philosophy by thinkers like John Gray who have, like me, done their scientific research, I realized our civilization has been, by every measure, an astonishing success. What our species has accomplished since the start of the curve a mere couple of hundred thousand years ago, through ice ages and staggering challenges to our survival, is nothing short of miraculous. What we have created and maintained, against all the laws of nature, through thirty millennia of relentless struggle for ‘progress’, is simply awesome. We should be proud, not ashamed, of what we have done.

But, I thought, as I reflected on what I had learned, it’s time to let go. It is time, I concluded, to begin the cleaning up of the mess we made while we we were having so much fun with the grand human experiment. And, most importantly, I fervently believe it’s time to mitigate the damage we are doing now, so the suffering that has already begun can at least be minimized, and it’s time to learn to adapt to the changes we have unleashed so that the survivors of the collapse will be prepared for the brave, new, wonderful, uncivilized world they will inherit after we’ve gone. I think we owe them, and the world, that much.

So I turned my research to possible solutions, and I learned that most of the well-intentioned projects that got us to where we are today — industrial agriculture, globalization, the growth economy, high-tech and so on — are of no use whatsoever in managing descent, helping us with the transition to a post-civilization world.

Instead, we need to re-learn self-sufficiency and how to make things work on a small, community-based scale. So far I’ve discovered a consensus, among most of those who are working in the transition movement, for the value of the following 12 projects, and I offer them to you, for what they’re worth, as my personal action plan and my best guess answer to what we can do, today, to make a difference, and in our own modest way, to save the world:

My Knowing and Learning Projects:

Understand What’s Happening: Before I can engage others and act purposefully and effectively I need to understand how this complex world really works (not what they tell you in school or in the media about how it works). I’m pretty far along in this.
Imagine What’s Possible: Next, I need to be able to imagine a better world, one that is not addicted to growth and consumption. If I can’t imagine it, I will never be able to decide how to achieve it. I’m writing a novel to do this, based on what I’ve read about steady-state economies.
Be Pragmatic and Realistic: There are many things I can do, and many wonderful-sounding but unenforced, unenforceable and/or ineffective regulations and actions, so I need to learn what actions actually work.
Know Myself: Then, to assess what I can do about all this, I need to know myself, which means giving myself the time and space to discover who I really am, what my true gifts, passions and purpose are, and — what is at their intersection — what I’m meant to do.
Build Personal Capacity: I then need to discover and acquire the additional capacities I need to be effective at bringing about change in the world. This doesn’t entail changing myself to be what I’m not, just learning some new skills and abilities. In my case, it’s presentation, demonstration and community survival skills.

My Teaching and Sharing Projects:

Converse and Tell Stories: Once I’ve learned these things, I can start to engage others in enthusiastic, passionate, authentic conversation, so my efforts aren’t fragmented and isolated. Not to persuade, but to inform, explore opportunities, find allies.
Engage Obstructionists: I need to talk with politicians and business people I know and meet, show them I care, present them with new, objective information, and proffer positive, practical ideas.

My Doing Projects:

Be an Activist and Pioneer: I have to pick a focus: political, social, economic, health care or (probably for me) educational reform. We must organize to confront people with power who don’t respond to reasonable conversation and information-sharing. And show people the way by experimentation and example.
Create Responsible, Sustainable Enterprises: My experience shows that rather than trying to reform existing organizations we must create new ‘natural’ enterprises that let us to do the work we are meant to do, and at the same time to stop supporting, with our labour and tax dollars, unsustainable organizations.
Be a Model: I will live a life that’s sufficient (comfortable but not extravagant or wasteful), loving, tolerant, attentive (listen more than I talk), responsible (no complaining, just doing), and sustainable. And persuade people that having more than one child in this overcrowded world is an irresponsible, unsustainable act.
Create a Model Community: Likewise, I need to co-create a collaborative, stewardship community that’s a model alternative to the wasteful, ineffective, alienating, isolating ‘neighbourhoods’ of wary strangers living near each other solely because of a mutual proximity to their place of work.
Be Good to Myself: And I must be good to myself and those I love, and not be consumed by guilt, or despair, or grief, or neglect my health and well-being. We have to pace ourselves and look after ourselves, and each other, and celebrate our successes, if we hope to continue to make a difference.

This story still needs a lot of work: it’s too long (it needs to be cut by 2/3 to fit into a 5-minute presentation), and my sentences, those of a writer not a speaker, are too long and complex. But it’s a start. The challenge of memorizing it, and the other stories I plan to write, is more imposing. I never had to memorize in school. Am I too old to learn?

What about you? Is there an issue that you care about that would benefit from constructing a short, compelling, personal story to tell others, that would explain why you care and perhaps engage them to join you? What might your world-changing story look like?

Category: Activism

Comments (9)

July 27, 2009

Why Is It So Hard For Us to Let Go and Live In the Now?

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 06:07

Thanks to prompts from John Graham, Chaitanya Pullela, Paul Heft and Locrian Rhapsody, I have been reading Krishnamurti, and just finished his Freedom from the Known. It’s timely for me, since it’s really about learning to let go and live in the Now, which I’ve been writing about rather obsessively lately. He’s delighfully anti-organized religion and anti-orthodox meditation. Meditation, he says, is the practice of paying complete attention, every moment, to every thing, being aware of every thought and feeling without judgement. To do so, he says, we need to start by understanding ourselves, our alone-ness and our interconnectedness with all-life-on-Earth. And we must appreciate that no one and no system can teach us these things. No one can teach us how to pay complete attention, even though “we all want to be told [what to do], because we are the result of the propaganda of ten thousand years. We want to have our thinking confirmed and corroborated by others.” He offers no prescriptions, just suggestions on what has worked for him, and what not to do. He asks a lot of questions, some rhetorical to nudge your thinking, others genuine to get you started on your own journey to self-understanding and hence to letting go and living in the Now.

We must take personal responsibility for all the suffering on the planet, he insists, before we will act. We must reject all orthodoxy and authority, all the stories we have been told of what to believe and what to do and who we are and our place in the world, things which ‘condition’ us, make us everybody-else. We must let go of all of our beliefs and knowledge and ideas and conceptions and images and hurts and conceits and principles and ideals and intentions and memories and experiences, because these are all fictions that are rooted in the past or future and merely hold us back. Our organism (our intuitive and sensual selves) cannot be separated from our psyche (our intellectual and emotional selves) — and he seems to suggest that it is our psyche, our social self, that must change to reintegrate with our organism, our visceral self. (This of course makes sense to me, after writing about my two ’selves’ and the conflict between them.) For example, he argues that our name ‘tree’ or ‘oak tree’ comes between ourselves and our ’seeing’ an actual tree. We can’t see, or be, when our head, and heart, with their representations and stories and conceptions and judgements and reactions, get in the way, between ourselves and ourselves.

Likewise, he asserts, we blame others (through sentences beginning with ‘if’ or ‘because’) for everything that disturbs us, and then we get used to and accept or escape from these things. Until we face these things, he says, we can never be present. To really see, we need to face the full responsibility and emotional impact of these things (let our heart be broken?) Yet paradoxically, we cannot ‘learn’ over time to really see, with our full attention; it is a breakthrough experience, a discovery of who we really are, here, now, that may come suddenly after a day’s or ten years’ meditation/practice, or never at all. This ‘really seeing’, he says, is like another dimension, one in which fear, time, and self-as-other cease to exist.

When we really see, he asserts, we are really free: free from our mental and emotional constructs, from sorrow, from time. Time is nothing but “the interval between idea and action”, so living in the Now, in what others call “Now Time”, is about getting rid of that interval, letting go of our ideas and other time-bound and time-binding constructions. “Sorrow is self-created, by thought, sorrow is the outcome of [non-Now] time.”

He has an interesting take on love which is consistent with polyamory: “To love without hate, without jealousy, without anger, without wanting to interfere with what [the people you love] are doing or thinking, without condemning, without comparing…When there is love there is no duty and no responsibility.” Love is “passion without motive — to come upon love without seeking it is the only way to find it.” We do what we do for who and what we love because that is what love is and does, not out of a sense of obligation.

He’s an adherent to Let-Self-Change: He thinks it is both a sufficient and a necessary condition for making the world a better place that we each learn to live in the Now, at peace with the world, and model that behaviour for others, “a life which is not competitive, ambitious, envious.” A year ago I might have agreed with him, but now I’m not so sure — no matter how much we do to model good behaviour for others, I think we need to work on projects that will alleviate the damage done by others who aren’t so enlightened. He died 23 years ago, so perhaps if he were alive today his views on activism might be different.

I won’t pretend to be able to capture the whole book in a few paragraphs, but that’s what he’s driving at.

As I read, I began to discover that the fears in my own stories about myself (of letting people down, of not being able to cope if I tried to be an activist in a world of horrific suffering, of making the wrong decisions on my own future) all reduce to a fear of disappointing myself. It is my own high idealistic expectations I am afraid I cannot live up to. Krishnamurti argues that fears are rooted in our memories (what has happened before) or our imaginations (what might go wrong), and that these fears exist nowhere but inside of us; they are us. If we can realize this, look these fears right in the face, give them our full attention without judgement, we will realize that we can do nothing about them, and they will disappear. This makes sense, but I confess I’m stuck on this point — I need to meditate on it, I guess.

I also learned when I enumerated the sources of anger in my stories about others and the world (anger at cruelty, at indifference to suffering, at stupidity and ignorance, at aggression, at irrationality, at insensitivity, and at pathological manipulation), and in my stories about myself (at my procrastination) that anger and other violent emotions are a part of me, are me, and that it is pointless to blame others or myself for this anger, or to try to suppress it. Krishnamurti says that facing the fact of these emotions, like facing our fears, is the key to dispelling them. “To live completely in the moment is to live with what is, the actual, without any sense of condemnation or justification — then you understand it so totally that you are finished with it.” Clearly something else I need to meditate on.

He asks a couple of interesting questions later in the book that I’ll leave with you — he doesn’t answer them, and I don’t pretend to know the answers either:

The first is Why do we desire? Beyond the immediate physical needs of survival (a sufficiency of food, water, shelter/clothing, need for procreation of the species, and security) why do we want more? Why do we crave more than we need? Why are we always comparing what we are/have with what we should be/have, when clearly we are (most of us in affluent nations anyway) comfortably meeting our needs? What Darwinian purpose does this possibly serve, when nature is always seeking to optimize species survival, complexity and variation?
The second is Why is it so hard for us to live in the Now? ”Why is it that man, who has lived for millions of years, has not got this one thing that matters?” If learning to let go and live in the Now is so important to our species’ well-being and success, why haven’t we evolved this skill? Or perhaps, do all creatures have it, and have we, as a result of our large, busy brains, forgotten it, lost it in the noise?

Category: Self-Knowledge and Self-Change

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July 25, 2009

Links (and Top Tweets) for the Week: July 25, 2009

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 22:25

The Living Field: My always-provocative friend Mushin describes the concept of the living field as “[the area in spacetime] within and between living beings. It surfaces as meaning, inner depth, beauty, healing, empowerment, solidarity, mutuality… participation, engagement and collaboration”. It is our self-organized, collective experience and consciousness of and connection and resonance with all-life-on-Earth. When the living field is coherent, he says, its resonance is (among other things) how nature conveys information. The graphic above illustrates the resonance in the living field between two creatures, in space and time, and it reminds me very much of Andrew’s “Lightening Branches” drawing of Now Time (below). Where could we go with this?
andrew campbell lightening branches

Sustainability AND Resilience: Although the author of this article makes sustainability vs resilience out to be a bit of an either/or proposition, his list of eight principles of resilience is an excellent one. The steps we take to become more resilient in an ever-changing world must complement and supplement the steps we take to create communities and organizations that are more sustainable. Thanks to Lance Turner for the link. The eight principles:

Diversity: Not relying on a single kind of solution means not suffering from a single point of failure.
Redundancy: Backup, backup, backup. Never leave yourself with just one path of escape or rescue.
Decentralization: Centralized systems look strong, but when they fail, they fail catastrophically.
Collaboration: We’re all in this together. Take advantage of collaborative technologies, especially those offering shared communication and information.
Transparency: Don’t hide your system – transparency makes it easier to figure out where a problem may lie. Share your plans and preparations, and listen when people point out flaws.
Fail gracefully: Failure happens, so make sure that a failure state won’t make things worse than they are already.
Flexibility: Be ready to change your plans when they’re not working the way you expected; don’t count on things remaining stable.
Foresight: You can’t predict the future, but you can hear its footsteps approaching. Think and prepare

Unschooling Our Way to a Sustainable and Resilient Economy: PS writes: “I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways in which the industrial economy might give way to a natural economy. I wonder what will it take to move from a culture of exploitation to a culture of reciprocity. To move from a culture of abuse to a culture of care for people and places and living things. What will have to change?” She argues that unschooling is a necessary precondition for this change.

Macroscopic Journalism: Tom Atlee writes, quoting Peggy Holman: “microscopes are for seeing what’s too tiny for ordinary seeing, telescopes are for seeing what’s too far away for ordinary seeing, and macroscopes are for seeing what’s too complex for ordinary seeing“. Is it possible, Tom and Peggy muse, to retrain journalists to write macroscopically — in such a way that we understand the context, what it all means, how it affects us, and what we can and should do about it? By the way, Tom’s blog, based on the Posterous platform, is updated entirely by e-mail — if you think blogging is too hard to do, check out this tool!

The Road From Here to There: Imagination + Collaboration: Dave P describes a simple imaginative idea, deployed collaboratively, that makes a big difference: A call-in number that allows volunteers to come and pick fruit off your trees, with 1/3 going to the owner/grower, 1/3 to the picker, and 1/3 to the local food bank. I’m aware that this system has been used in several other places, so clearly it has viral power. What could you do in your community, with a little imagination and collaboration, that would yield important results with very little effort?

What’s Involved in Living Sustainably: Sharon A describes a week in the life of someone living sustainably, and offers a 6-week course (starts August 6) in doing so yourself. Thanks to Dwig for the link. Course outline:

Week 1 – How to evaluate what you have. Major concerns of your place and your community. Region and its climate, culture and resources, and when you should consider relocating.
Week 2 - Focus on your house itself – low energy/renewable infrastructure choices for both private homes and for communities.
Week 3 – Home infrastructure- what your shelter does or could do for you, and what’s in your soil and on your property.
Week 4 – Family Issues – Sharing resources, dealing with people who aren’t on board, building collective infrastructure, cannibalizing what you have, dealing with family issues.
Week 5 – Finances, money, employment, making do, getting along on a shoestring, starting businesses and community economics, and transportation of all sorts. Also 1-5 year scenario planning.
Week 6 - Community at every level, about how to build it, how to get along, building resilience and community, and security issues.

The Courage to Move On: A couple that’s been working for three years to live sustainably decides they are in the wrong place to create a whole sustainable community, and are now packing up to start over in a more hospitable place. Thanks to Dave P for the link.

Activism Offsets: What If You’re Too Busy or Scared to Protest?: A new website is organizing thousands of people for global warming protests, and urging those not able or willing to attend and risk arrest to contribute to “activism offsets” to support and bail out those who can. Thanks to Chris C for the link.

The Future of RSS Feed Readers: An interesting discussion of how we’re learning to cope with information overload. Look at how many of the links in this post come from my readers, rather than from my own reading, and you’ll see how I’m coping. Thanks to Jodene for the link.

Fun and Inspiration:

In case you missed them in the Mushin link above, here are two extraordinary videos that require no words:

Learn to Fly, a 4-minute film by Christian Letruria showing (endangered) South African blue cranes learning to fly, and a first successful flight.
The Struggle for Pleasure, a 4-minute mashup of music of Wim Mertens with excerpts from the Robin Williams/Cuba Gooding Jr. movie What Dreams May Come

Fifteen amazing microscopic images from inside the human body.

Thoughts for the Week:

From Charles Bowden in Blood Orchid (thanks to Beth T for the link):

We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life. We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us.

From Derek Walcott (thanks to Tree for the link, and the one that follows):

LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

From Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut:

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
But, in practice, there is.

From David Watson, the Pathology of Civilization (thanks to Bonnie for the link):

We reproduce catastrophe because we ourselves are traumatized – both as a species and individually, beginning at birth. Because we are wounded, we have put up psychic defenses against reality and have become so cut off from direct participation in the multidimensional wilderness in which we are embedded that all we can do is to navigate our way cautiously through a humanly designed day-to-day substitute world of symbol— a world of dollars, minutes, numbers, images and words that are constantly being manipulated to wring the most possible profit from every conceivable circumstance. The body and spirit both rebel.

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July 24, 2009

Just Breathe

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 22:56

visualization of how we breathe; diaphragm in yellow, lungs in blue, abs in red

Our conscious minds are, largely, strangers to our bodies. They have a kind of uneasy alliance, with our subconscious, autonomic systems basically running everything, when we’re asleep, and when we’re not consciously focused on our bodies. Most of our information processing — probably 99% or more — is unconscious, somatic. The sophistication of our digestive system, for example, is vastly greater than that of our brains — far more decisions and regulatory adjustments are made, literally, in our guts than in our heads.

If you think of our bodies, as Cohen and Stewart have described them, as a ‘complicity’ of our organs, as water-, food- and air-flushed containers evolved for their mutual survival and advantage, then you could imagine that our brains were evolved merely as information processing tools to look after these containers’ residents’ needs, as detection systems. Occasionally (perhaps one in a million decisions), our autonomic systems encounter a problem they do not now how to address, and they may then choose to consult with our conscious minds. Even in these rare cases, they will probably make the initial decision (e.g. fight or flight, love or loathe) but they will give our conscious minds, slow-moving as they are, the opportunity to participate in or even override these decisions. If someone swings a bat at your head, it’s fortunate that you do not have to wait for your conscious mind to react, but equally fortunate that you do not have to depend on your unconscious systems to decide what to do after you’ve ducked.

In some cases, however, our subconscious and conscious ’selves’ need to get their act together. To play a musical instrument, or to dance, or to walk on uneven terrain, you need to be coordinated. I am acutely aware of this because I am probably the most uncoordinated person on the planet.

It’s not surprising, then, that I have tremendous difficulty meditating. Some experts would have us believe that meditation is the ultimate conscious activity, the very height of awareness and self-awareness. They may be right, but to the extent meditation is focused on your breathing, it does require a lot of coordination.

Many meditation practitioners suggest you should in some ways control your breathing — you should take deep breaths, from or filling up the abdomen, and slowly and fully expel all the air in your lungs. They are saying, in fact, that you should override the autonomic process of breathing by conscious effort.

lung
photo of the inner surface of the lung, showing some of the millions of tiny passages where oxygen and CO2 are exchanged with the blood vessels

Let’s take a look at what breathing is all about. I decided that I might be able to focus my attention on my breathing during meditation if I was able to visualize exactly what is happening when I breathe. Contrary to what mystics and vocal coaches might tell you, you cannot draw breath into your abdomen! Some people wonder how we are able to ‘remember’ to breathe when we’re asleep. The answer is that we breathe while we’re asleep the same way we breathe while we’re awake — subconsciously, automatically. Our conscious mind is not involved. Here’s how it works:

Our autonomic nervous system receives messages from all parts of the body telling it composition of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood cells and other parts of the body (and probably conveying a ton of other important information we haven’t begun to fathom).
These levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide are compared to a subconscious ‘memory’ of optimal levels. A subconscious decision is made whether to sustain, accelerate or slow our rate and depth of breathing.
That decision is relayed through the intercostal and phrenic nerves to intercostal muscles inside our rib cage and to our diaphragm, a very versatile and sophisticated muscular structure.
At the time and to the extent this decision prescribes we should inhale, these diaphragm muscles contract downwards, and the intercostal muscles push out the rib cage, to an appropriate degree at an appropriate rate.
As a result of this, more room is created inside the thorax (the area inside our rib cage). The lungs, due to their natural elasticity, expand to fill this empty space.
At this point, the air pressure inside the lungs has become less than that outside. If you remember Boyle’s law from high school science, you know that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ and that the air outside will rush to find a way to move to the area with lower pressure. At this point, we can’t help but inhale.
As we inhale, the air we breathe is filtered, and pollutants diverted to our digestive system for elimination.
When we inhale, the lungs fill with filtered air and the oxygen in that air permeates the walls of the lungs and is taken up by adjacent blood cells in capillaries in the circulatory system for distribution throughout the body; returning blood cells excrete carbon dioxide back into the lungs. The air we exhale is not the air we just inhaled!
Once a level of air pressure in the lungs has reached an equilibrium point, we stop inhaling.
At this point, our diaphragm begins to bounce back to its normal (expanded) position. As it does, it forces air back out of the lungs. We can’t help but exhale. When at high levels of exertion we have to exhale more quickly or forcefully, a second set of intercostal muscles works to contract the rib cage and assist in the expulsion of air.

This is a staggeringly complex process, so it’s probably just as well we don’t have to do it consciously.

When we do intervene consciously in the process, lots of things can go wrong. When we hold our breath for a long time (perhaps because we’re underwater), we are taking advantage of the fact that the diaphragm is the only muscle in the body that is both voluntary and involuntary. So we can learn to control it, but only to a certain degree. Eventually, as the body signals the diaphragm that it is short on oxygen, our conscious and unconscious selves will be essentially warring over control of the diaphragm. Our intercostal muscles, which we can’t control voluntarily, will attempt to expel the air. The war will end, if not sooner, when we lose consciousness.

What happens when we try to control our breathing? When we breathe more deeply and slowly than we would ‘naturally’? When we use our pectoral muscles (the predominant chest muscles) these have no effect on our chest cavity or breathing (they control only arm and shoulder movement). There is no such thing as conscious “chest breathing” or “abdominal breathing” — there is only diaphragmatic breathing. When we breathe consciously, we use our partial control over our diaphragm to slow our breathing rate but increase the amount of air we intake. Pushing out your abdomen when you breathe in isn’t making room for more air there, it’s actually making more room for your diaphragm to press down into your abdomen. In addition, when we exhale consciously, we use our abdominal muscles to help expand the diaphragm to expel more air, and/or to expel air faster. Talking and singing are just refinements of the exhaling process.

Could we meditate more effectively if we could be more attuned, scientifically, to exactly what is going on in our bodies when we breathe? This is an interesting question. I tried in vain to find realistic visualizations of what our nasal passages, trachea, autonomic nervous system, intercostals, diaphragm, lungs, capillaries and abs look like when we breathe. If instead of just ‘picturing’ our breath as we meditated, we could picture the whole neuron-firing, muscle-contracting, air-filtering, rib-expanding, lung-inflating, gas-exchanging, muscle-relaxing process, would we be better able to focus specifically on that one extraordinary, autonomic, miraculous process, and achieve a meditative state of attention more effectively? If you think so, do you know anyone capable of producing a video of this kind?

This raises a broader question. I’m convinced that many of us are trapped in our heads, and trapped by the emotions that the ideas and stories in our heads trigger. As a result we are increasingly estranged from our sensuous, intuitive selves. Would being able to see pictures of what’s going on inside our own bodies, in real time, help reacquaint us with the somatic, visceral essence of ourselves, the aspect that Cohen & Stewart argue is our real, true, original self. And then, having been reacquainted, could we reintegrate this real, earthy essence with our abstract, image-inary intellectual and emotional self, and rediscover, for the first time since our brains took control of our senses and moved our selves’ HQ and identity to that tiny unreal upstairs room, what it really means to be nobody-but-ourselves?

Category: Self-Knowledge and Self-Change

Comments (6)

July 23, 2009

Letting Your Heart Be Broken

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 21:55

Prisoner-labourers in a typical African open pit mine, many of whom will “end up in shallow graves, executed for suspected theft, for lack of production, or simply for sport”
(photo by Jean-Claude Coutausse/ CONTACT Press Images)

For several years I’ve been touting what I call Pollard’s Law, which I think largely dictates what humans do, and don’t do, regardless of what they think, believe and intend:

We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. There is no time or energy left over for doing the right thing, what we aspire to do, what we think we should do, what’s merely important. None. At work and at home, we do what has to be done, and then, most of us do what’s easy and/or fun – watching TV or a movie or reading or tweeting or dancing or doing crosswords.

This has nothing to do with laziness. This is human and animal nature, engrained in our DNA. We are preoccupied with the needs of the moment, and when there are none, we rest, we play. It’s a billion-year-old survival strategy.

My British friend Nick has written about the importance of letting go of our beliefs, fears, hopes, desires, ambitions, assumptions, anxieties, plans, distractions, stories about the past and future, stories about who we are and are not, and about what is happening and should be happening in the world, our reactions, anger, despair, grief, preconceptions, concerns about what others think, illusions about control, and judgements. Much of what we think we must do is driven by these fictions we can’t let go of, and if we can let go of these things then we may start to realize other things, perhaps more important things, that we must do, that we cannot not do.

Nick explains that when we let go of these fictions, this gunk that’s become attached to us, we can bring ourselves to the present, to a realization of what really is, here, now. This takes an enormous amount of courage, because some of what is true, here, now, is terrible. It requires a willingness to let our heart be broken by unbearable truths.

In my recent post about what I care about, I wrote that the “social me” cares about:

Helping people cope with civilization’s collapse.
Obsolescing industrial agriculture.
Helping people find the right collaborative partners.
Deschooling society.
Helping people learn about sustainable community.
Helping people learn to deal with complexity.
Helping people discover the work they’re meant to do.

But, I lamented, the “visceral me” cares instead about:

Eating. Sleeping. That really hot girl over there.
All-life-on-Earth, especially cats, dogs, wolves, birds, trees.
The people I love.

Guess which list is more urgent (must-do stuff), and easier, and more fun? No contest. I do what I must: eating, sleeping, my job, household chores, exercises. Then I do what’s easy and fun: writing this blog, imagining possibilities (including some with that really hot girl over there), conversing with those I love, learning new things, listening to good music, walking in the forest, playing with cats, watching the birds, dancing in the moonlight. Hmmm… no time left today for that first list of seven important things. Well, perhaps tomorrow.

There are many assumptions, intractable problems and fears that underlie that first list. These are massive, almost unfathomably complex problems. What would make these problems must-do’s for me? I think if I were really present with these issues, if I were to go out into the world and realize the consequences of my inaction on them, it would break my heart. I would ‘real-ize’ that these are more than ideals, more than good things to do: my failure to act on them makes me complicit in the horrific suffering, the squandered opportunity to avert or at least mitigate ghastly forthcoming crises, the tragic mind-numbing waste of human life, energy and enthusiasm, the massive, devastating crimes against nature (mostly out of ignorance), the consequences of our dumbed-down society’s dreadful imaginative poverty.

One of my favourite posts is called No Noble Savage, and it describes some of the atrocities going on in the world, right now, always and everywhere. Maybe I should witness them now, in real time, real space. Despite my vivid imagination, visualizations are not enough to break my heart. It is too easy to turn away. I know people who are fighting these atrocities every day, and they tell me the reality is a hundred times worse than anyone could imagine.

The question is: Am I prepared to give up my comfortable life, and my paralyzing, reality-distorting fictions? Am I prepared to acknowledge my complicity, through inaction, in everything I rage about? Am I then prepared to let go of everything I have, and parse my time even more finely than I do now, in order to act, meaningfully, beyond just writing about them, to make the world a better way in at least some of the seven ways in my list above?

Perhaps for the first time in my life, I think there is a 50-50 chance that my answer to these questions is yes. As much as it breaks my heart to admit it, there are millions of writers out there, many of whom can write about the things I know and care and have ideas about, better than I can. Yet even as I say this my instincts, my nature, tell me that I am happy now and plunging into these important and complex tasks will make me less so, and how much of a difference can I make anyway?

I’m tired. I’m hungry. There’s something else I want to write about. And hey, is that really hot girl over there looking back at me?

Category: Human Nature

Comments (8)

July 21, 2009

The Colonization of our Hearts, Minds, and Bodies

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 15:54

This past weekend I had a lovely visit with Wendy Farmer-O’Neil from BC, and in the process of exploring some of my ideas about the “two me’s” I wrote about yesterday, she mentioned the concept of the colonization of our hearts and bodies. It’s a great metaphor about the struggle to be nobody-but-ourselves. If we aren’t nobody-but-ourselves, if we are everybody-else, how did we get that way? What is the process of colonization?

That process is obviously social. It is a process of violence and violation, and it’s essential to the survival of our civilization. We just couldn’t have seven billion humans going around being nobody-but-themselves. That would be anarchy, and it would have collapsed as soon as civilization began 30,000 years ago. I would argue that, just as the indigenous societies of much of the world were invaded, colonized and in the process substantially damaged or destroyed, so too have the forces of civilization, with their codes of acceptable behaviour and their punishments (including the worst — imprisonment and banishment) invaded, colonized and damaged us in order to make us weak, obedient, and conforming to their deemed collective needs, always justified as being for the greater good.

A dramatic over-statement? Perhaps, although I would say that every colonization has been masked by a surface appearance of bargain, or treaty. We were offered something in return for having our hearts and bodies colonized — security, mostly, a place in the hierarchy. But there was never really any choice. These false bargains are always variations on the Hollywood standard — do business with us, pardner, or die. Colonization is perhaps the most insidious form of imprisonment.

So which quadrants of our being are colonized by civilization culture — and by its nasty henchmen, the politicians, the lawyers, the bosses, the religious ‘leaders’, the teachers, the corporatist ‘leaders’, the gang ‘leaders’, the propagandists, the schoolyard bullies, the police, the brutalizing spouses and parents and the whole fascist brainwashing psychopathic mob who proclaim they are acting “for the people”, or on behalf of God? If we look at Jung’s quaternity of our being, pictured above, as a terrain, what starts as four territories that are together nobody-but-ourselves, quickly become four battlegrounds. Some areas are closed to trade and become disconnected, dissociated from the others, or the whole terrain gets blockaded and no one is permitted to enter or leave. Resistance is met by acts of violence by the soldiers, or sometimes the soldiers commit acts of violence anyway, just because they can, and because someone once did it to them. Diseases are introduced, accidentally or deliberately. What had been built is razed. The inhabitants are coopted, imprisoned or killed, after they’re tortured for information and to force compliance. The invaders’ flag is raised, security forces are left behind to “keep peace”, anything of value is stolen or destroyed, and the invaders withdraw, with threats to return if the victims of the conquest are not obedient. It has always been so, since our civilization began.

The consequence is what Wendy describes as an ethos of “relationship as property”. You become a possession. You are John’s child, Joe’s wife, Tom’s homey, America’s chosen, God’s flock, Wal-Mart’s trainee, Happy Valley’s newest resident. You are passed along. If you are not anyone’s property, if you don’t belong, you must be weird, a loner, a loser, not good enough.

The colonization of our minds starts early, and the indoctrination is subtle and relentless. We quickly become, in every sense, branded – by our affiliations, by what we buy, by what we purport, from a limited menu of choices, to believe in. Most of us wear our brands with pride. The propaganda never ends, even when we wear so many brands there is no room for more.

The colonization of our hearts, our emotions, stems, I think, largely from colonization of our minds (the emotions we feel are often automatic consequences of what we believe, of the stories we are told and tell ourselves about our past, our future, ourselves, others and the world), and of course from experiences of trauma. We may be filled with grief, with self-doubt, with self-loathing, with shame, with anger, with hope, with despair. Many of these invasive feelings are not our own, they are imposed on us by the colonizers; we have no choice in the matter. And even when these feelings are the consequence of stories we have come to believe, they are mostly not our stories, we have not written them and we have no control over their scripts.

The colonization of our bodies is, of course, much worse for many women, but men and women both suffer from a subtler form of somatic colonization. That is the restrictions on what we can do with our bodies, which is not what our bodies would, free to be themselves, do. Most diabolically, our bodies are addicted early to substances that we then crave for a lifetime, substances that nature endowed us with a liking for because in nature they’re essential and, in small quantities, good for us. We can’t live without fat. But now we need more and more of increasingly unnatural substitutes that addict us, make us prisoners to the colonists’ highly-priced products. They know we’re hooked. To feed our addictions we drag our tired, unwilling bodies off to do meaningless work, until we’re too tired to do any of the things that nobody-but-ourselves once found joy in, too tired to do what’s important. Too tired to fight. It is not accidental that our jobs are called “occupations”.

The colonization of our instincts is a harder business, which is why the colonizers prefer separation and destruction to coopting of this territory. Our instincts tell us what to do, what a million years of learning has coded in our DNA as being wise for survival and health. The colonizers don’t want us doing these things, which are not in their best interests, so they merely cut us off from this territory, so we can’t hear these messages anymore. Our instincts, in the colonists’ regime, are kept under permanent house arrest. We have no idea even if they’re still alive.

What can be done? Can we free ourselves from the effects of colonization and renaturalize ourselves, become again nobody-but-ourselves? Wendy cites K. Louise Schmidt:

I am talking about a conspiracy of love that cannot be bought, controlled or regulated. With each other, between our closest co-worker or friend this calls for a boundless openess. It is learning by heart the potential of an undivided self. Can we begin again and again by looking for a spaciousness of self wherever we can find it? That spaciousness of heart which dissolves the enemy-based consciousness internalized in our own political movement?

Very subversive language, that. “The enemy-based consciousness internalized in our own political movement” — When we’ve been colonized, we close ourselves off, become suspicious of others and their motives. Our own political movement is how we self-govern, and it is in the colonists’ best interest that we be hesitant to see others as allies in that self-governance process, since that prevents us from organizing against them.

There are stories about how animals imprisoned or restricted long enough will continue to respect the boundary of their imprisonment even after the walls, fences or electronic circuitry of imprisonment have been removed. Is it possible that the gates the colonists put around the terrain of our self-being are unlocked, or perhaps not even there? Have we been “occupied” so long we have forgotten what it is to be free? Can we find other victims of the colonists we can trust enough to “conspire” with to liberate our territories, reunite them, liberate ourselves, and learn to become, again, strangely, paradoxically, with others, nobody-but-ourselves?

This is all very early thinking on this subject for me. I’d welcome your thoughts on this new “conspiracy theory”, and I thank Wendy for seeding it in me.

Category: Our Culture

Comments (9)

July 20, 2009

An Incessant and Dissonant Whispering in my Ear

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 22:07

There are two “me’s” warring for control of my body and my mind. They’re getting farther apart in what they think I should do, and be. Just when I think one of them is getting close to winning out, the other roars back.

It would probably be more accurate to say there is a multiplicity of “me’s” that are aligned into two contingents and (just to add to the confusion and noise) there is no unanimity within either camp. Each “me” is more like a complicity, a scheming, an incessant and dissonant whispering in my ear.

One of these “me’s” is the visceral one, the one whose knowledge draws on what is coded in my DNA. It is attuned to the millions of bits of subconscious information my body processes every second. Its territory is the sensory and instinctive quadrants of Jung’s quaternity, our four aspects of being — earth and fire.

The other “me” is the social one, the one whose knowledge comes from the stories I’ve learned, and now the stories I tell, my-self, and the feelings these conjured thoughts provoke. Its territory is the intellectual and emotional quadrants of my being — air and water.

I trust the visceral “me” more, but the social one is very persuasive, and its territory (including my brain) is favourable. Here is what each “me” looks like:

	VISCERAL “ME” (A product of biology)	SOCIAL “ME” (A product of culture)
What I want to do (my Passions)	Less. Have fun. Look after myself. Eat well, sleep soundly, make love often. Play. Listen to good music. Walk in the forest. Dance in the moonlight. With kittens.	Imagine possibilities. Write. Converse. Demonstrate how to do things I do well. Explore. Learn.
My public manifestation (Persona)	Comfortable. Lazy. Hedonistic, Playful. Somewhat introverted (INTP).	Anxious. Intentional. Intense. Earnest. Somewhat extroverted (ENTJ).
My worldview	Pragmatic. Accepting.	Idealistic. Outraged.
My reaction to stressful situations	Tighten up. Get inflamed, ill. Wonder why the stress doesn’t go away quickly.	Rise to the occasion, for awhile. Then tire, lose heart, when the stress doesn’t go away. Then feel anger, fury, grief, self-dissatisfaction, resentment, despair.
What I care about (my Purpose)	Eating. Sleeping. That really hot girl over there. All-life-on-Earth, especially cats, dogs, wolves, birds, trees. The people I love, whose company stirs my chemistry.	Helping people cope with civilization’s collapse. Obsolescing industrial agriculture. Helping people find the right collaborative partners. Deschooling society. Helping people learn about sustainable community. Helping people learn to deal with complexity. Helping people discover the work they’re meant to do. The people I love, whose company stirs my mind & imagination.
What I want to be	Warm. Naked. Rested. Alert. Comfortable. In love. Alternatively alone and in stimulating company. Free to be nobody-but-myself.	Present. Calm. Humble. Graceful. More self-knowing and empathetic. A better communicator, story-teller, fiction writer. Free to be nobody-but-myself.
Where I belong	Warm, abundant wilderness.	Loving, stimulating community.

When I wrote recently about What I Want, I mentioned that I’d developed my What do you want to be? list by creating a future story, painting a portrait of what I imagined myself being as I continued to grow and explore and learn about myself. Some readers asked to read that future self-portrait. I now confess that I wrote two self-portraits, and they’re what’s depicted in the chart above.

The challenge, of course, is to reconcile these two “me’s”. Several readers told me it’s impossible for me to do all the things in my What I want to do list. They’re right. Some of the things in the first, fifth and six rows of the table above won’t get done. What’s more, I think if I asked either of my two “me’s” What’s holding you back? their answer would be: The other “me”! I think this conflict is behind much of my ambivalence, procrastination and hesitation. As each of these “me’s” speaks up, the other challenges: Is this really what you want to do? Each time I think I know what I want, the other voice says: I don’t think so.

the 2 me's

The things either-me wants to do (my passions) are shown in green above, and the things either-me cares about that are needed in the world are shown in purple, on the Sweet Spot chart above. It occurs to me that, if I really want to discover what I’m meant to do, I should probably find some way to make writing (my gift and passion) something that’s needed more in the world. And at the same time I should find a way to make conversation and demonstration (passions of mine that are needed in the world) into gifts as well (by becoming better at them, which I intend to do). Then I’ll have three things I love to do in my Sweet Spot instead of just one (imagining possibilities).

Then the question is, what aspects of the 7 things I care about am I both gifted and passionate about? With the right partners, could one or more of these be the foundation for my Natural Enterprise or activist venture, what I’m meant to do to? Hmmm.

And if I can figure that out, then maybe I’m ready to write my new story, a story that reconciles the passions, persona, purpose and intentions of both the visceral and the social “me”. That would be quite a story. Without the incessant and dissonant whispering in my ear from these sparring “me’s”, what would I start to hear? Perhaps the voice of Gaia, who’s been speaking softly to both-of-me all these years, in the whispering of the wind and the gurgling of the water, welcoming me home?

Category: Self-Knowing and Let-Self-Change

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July 18, 2009

Links (and Top Tweets) of the Week(s) — July 18, 2009

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 22:50

This is a collection of links and tweets since the start of the month (I’ve been away), so it’s much longer than usual. Hence abstracts are short, and I’ve tried to index them roughly by subject.

antrim caskey orion magazine
Pro-coal billboard in W.Virginia by a mega-polluter involved in mountaintop removal. Photo by Antrim Caskey in Orion Magazine. Catch the irony of the billboard underneath it.

SAVING THE WORLD

Jim Hansen Says Climate Talks Dead, Inadequate: The world’s most outspoken climate scientist, NASA Director Jim Hansen, says the Markey-Waxman “American Clean Energy and Security Act” (ACES) is a sham, worse than nothing, and the cause of the collapse of the G-8 pre-Copenhagen climate discussions last week. What he has revealed in the last month (besides how easy it is to get arrested when you dare to protest coal mining practices in the US), is that we cannot rely on governments anywhere to take even the feeblest of steps to avert climate change, and specifically to get atmospheric CO2 down below the 350ppm precipice. There is not even a modicum of political will in North America for a significant revenue-neutral carbon tax. Obama doesn’t get it, and the political system globally is so hog-tied by corporatist interests that the likelihood of significant concerted political action is zero. That means we have to take matters into our own hands. Or just give up. Time to become much more radical, my friends. (If you want to know why ACES is so bad, Dennis Kucinich, America’s most underrated politician, adds up the reasons. Another anaysis explains why mega-polluter Duke Energy liked the bill so much.)

Paul Hawken’s Amazing Commencement Address: The former technophile and global-consciousness-is-rising fantasist grows up and tells graduates that the world is fucked and they have to work to make it better anyway. “If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data.” Brilliant writing. Thanks to Tree for the link.

The Future of Permaculture and Transition: Rob, the founder of the Transition movement responds to Sharon Astyk’s insightful analysis (Part One, Part Two) of how the permaculture and transition ‘movements’ must work together, be honest about expectations, and be prepared to support people when suffering reaches huge levels due to the combination of climate change and the end of oil. Thanks to Eric L for the link. Sharon’s conclusion resonates so powerfully with my own thinking:

I don’t think we have a Plan B. Ultimately, most of our plans – and I’d include Pat Murphy’s Plan C, Transition, Resilient cities, etc… come down to the same basic stuff, much of which has come, for better and worse, to live under the rhetorical rubric of “permaculture” and “Transition.” Get smaller fast. Get allies fast. Do everything at once – build new economies, grow food, fix the ecologies, help the hungry, the poor and the cold, help prevent more hungry poor and cold, stick your finger in the dike and watch it turn blue, hold back the water with your arms and all the force you’ve got. And the reality is this – on some measure what ever strategies we use will fail. But there is failure and failure, there are small floods and large ones. All that matters is that the work gets done, as well as possible, that the floods are as small as we can make them, and that the suffering is as little as possible. That’s honestly all I care about.

Bucky Fuller’s 1981 Prescience: Back in 1981 — nearly 30 years ago — Bucky Fuller published a book called Grunch of Giants that spoke of the dangers of globalization, corpocracy and the end of oil. The whole book is free online. Thanks to VJ Srinath for the link. Some excerpts:

In making these observations in regard to inanimate corporations we do not infer antisocial attitudes on the part of the corporate officers. A corporation’s executives are elected by its board of directors. The directors are elected by the number of shares of stock as voted directly by their holders or as voted by the holders of their share’s proxies. This voting is not on a democratic one stockholder/one vote basis but on an as-many-votes-as-sharesowned basis. This being so, the corporations’ lawyers have no alternative to reminding any altruistic, socially concerned executives that the corporation is committed by law only to making money for its shareholders, and therefore that any socially concerned, altruistic proclivities of any corporate executive must be realized outside the corporation and at the executive’s own expense.
In the affairs of the supranational corporate giants, real quality of product, consciously sustained, has given way to packaging-allure and advertising-proclaimed “quality” as commensurate only with the best interests of corporate moneymaking. As already mentioned, heads of great corporations are elected by the stockholders’ directors, who in turn are chosen by those controlling the majority of voting shares, who make their choices only on the basis of greatest earnings performance. Operating only as abstract, global-magnitude legal entities, all the unknown-owned-and-controlled supranational corporations have no human-community consideration other than as potential customers, consumers, or fighting-force conscriptees.
The now-gone-supranational corporate giants have always known that the fossil fuels can and will become exhausted … First and foremost, however, the power monopoly would have to have accomplished their “public service” atomic energy objective; first, of becoming contractors to operate government atomic facilities; second, of siphoning off from the U.S. government all the latter’s atomic scientist personnel and all the invisible know-how to develop world-around atomic-energy plants to feed into their wired and metered energy-monopoly system as the petroleum source diminished and approached depletion.

Jimmy Carter’s 1979 Prescience: Two years before Bucky Fuller’s book, then-president Carter delivered what was probably the most remarkable presidential speech of the half-century. “We’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” A year later Americans voted in the most reactionary president of the half-century, Reagan. Thanks to Eric L for the link.

Watching Whales Watching Us: The astonishing intelligence of whales, and their newly-discovered curiosity about humans. Thanks to Dave B for the link.

Bill McDonough, Green Guru Gone Wrong: An extensive expose praises the Cradle to Cradle architect, and then reveals why his ego and desire to lock up all his ideas as revenue-generating intellectual capital have doomed to failure all efforts to bring any of his brilliant ideas to fruition. Thanks to my colleague Lisa French for the link.

Where is the New Vision to Unite Us?: “That the only grand narrative on offer is so terrifying – of a world rapidly running out of the natural resources required to sustain extravagant lifestyles and burgeoning population – that it disables rather than empowers us to achieve political change. Terrified, we retreat into private stories of transformation – cosmetic surgery, makeovers of home and person – because we see no collective story of transformation we can believe in.” Thanks to Bee for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS:

Into the Inferno: India Tries to Copy US ‘Democracy’: Arundhati Roy chronicles the ruinous cost of India’s foolish attempt to create a capitalist democracy as extravagant and wasteful as that of its new idol, America.

Everything that Happens in Afghanistan is Based On Lies: A new film shows how hopeless the occupation of Afghanistan really is.

The Ridiculously High Cost of Nuclear Power: $10,000/kw, plus environmental risks and costs, and radioactive waste that will outlast us all.

The Organic Monopoly: How industry giants are undermining the organic movement with meaningless unverifiable feel-good product descriptions like “natural” and “sustainable”.

Two Minutes of Hate: A daily compilation from MM4A of the day’s worst hate- and fear-mongering by the right-wing MSM. Depressing.

Putin Lays off 400,000 Casino Workers: The intriguing question is — why close every casino in the country? Was the threat to his power from organized crime greater than the threat of nearly a half million angry unemployed workers? Or is Russians’ addiction to gambling even a greater threat to its social fabric than their horrific addiction to Afghan heroin?

CULTURE AND HUMAN NATURE:

Zen Meditation Instructions: All you ever wanted to know about posture, breathing and process, on one page. Thanks to Martin Roell for the link.

Summary of ACT: An overview of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (acknowledging and becoming objective about your stresses and anxieties instead of trying to ‘fix’ them). Thanks to John G for the link.

In Praise of Death With Dignity: Beth Patterson tells a moving and inspiring story about a friend who chose to end her own life.

gaping void hierarchy
Business card cartoon by the inimitable Hugh McLeod.

BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY:

Making Business Relationships Work: Michelle Neujahr presents 12 ways to strengthen your relationships, and a great Margaret Wheatley quote: “Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals who can go it alone.” Thanks to David Zinger for the link.

Chris Anderson vs Malcom Gladwell on the Future of Free: Gladwell reviews Anderson’s new book, and argues that Anderson takes the Future of Free too far. I hope this turns into a debate, because these guys are both brilliant, and the implications for business are huge. And besides it’s the first time I haven’t agreed with Gladwell. Thanks to Sheri Herndon for the link.

Teens Don’t Twitter: Goldman Sachs is blown away by a report from a 15-year-old UK intern that tells them what any 15-year-old could have told them about social networking and its use by GenY. Thanks to Dale for the link.

FUN AND INSPIRATION:

He Was Me — a short film by Peter Reynolds about the child in each of us. Thanks to Patti for the link.
Improv Drumming — amazing group of Malaysian drummers
Chris Thile — possibly the world’s premiere mandolin player and an extraordinary singer/songwriter to boot:

It’ll Happen — with The Punch Brothers
Doubting Thomas — with Nickel Creek
The Hand Song – with Nickel Creek
Bach’s E Major Prelude — wow

THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:

From Dave B:

Like the Guantanomo prisoners, I too weave coded messages into my poems, layers of meaning without which they would cease to be poems — or indeed to convey anything of the truth, which is usually complex, often paradoxical, and always inimical to the interests of the powerful. Though I don’t often mention it, figuring that surreptitious campaigns have a greater chance of success than open ones, I am engaged in a battle of ideas with those who believe that War is (or can ever lead to) Peace and the rest of it. Like the indefinite detainees, I resort to poetry because without it I believe I would go mad or commit suicide. I am an enemy combatant.

From Naomi Shihab Nye: YELLOW GLOVE

What can a yellow glove mean in a world of motorcars and governments?

I was small, like everyone. Life was a string of precautions: Don’t kiss the squirrel before you bury him, don’t suck candy, pop balloons, drop watermelons, watch TV. When the new gloves appeared one Christmas, tucked in soft tissue, I heard it trailing me: Don’t lose the yellow gloves.

I was small, there was too much to remember. One day, waving at a stream—the ice had cracked, winter chipping down, soon we would sail boats and roll into ditches—I let a glove go. Into the stream, sucked under the street. Since when did streets have mouths? I walked home on a desperate road. Gloves cost money. We didn’t have much. I would tell no one. I would wear the yellow glove that was left and keep the other hand in a pocket. I knew my mother’s eyes had tears they had not cried yet, I didn’t want to be the one to make them flow. It was the prayer I spoke secretly, folding socks, lining up donkeys in windowsills. To be good, a promise made to the roaches who scouted my closet at night. If you don’t get in my bed, I will be good. And they listened. I had a lot to fulfill.

The months rolled down like towels out of a machine. I sang and drew and fattened the cat. Don’t scream, don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fight—you could hear it anywhere. A pebble could show you how to be smooth, tell the truth. A field could show how to sleep without walls. A stream could remember how to drift and change—next June I was stirring the stream like a soup, telling my brother dinner would be ready if he’d only hurry up with the bread, when I saw it. The yellow glove draped on a twig. A muddy survivor. A quiet flag.

Where had it been in the three gone months? I could wash it, fold it in my winter drawer with its sister, no one in that world would ever know. There were miracles on Harvey Street. Children walked home in yellow light. Trees were reborn and gloves traveled far, but returned. A thousand miles later, what can a yellow glove mean in a world of bankbooks and stereos?

Part of the difference between floating and going down.

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July 17, 2009

What Do You Care About?: Presentations About What Matters

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 22:57

Wednesday I listed the things I want to do, and one of them was “to become better at conversing, presenting and demonstrating”. To that end I’ve been watching videos of great presenters (like Garr Reynolds and Clay Shirky) and reading articles (like Jay Lehr’s Let There Be Stoning for Bad Presenters). A number of truths about good presentations emerge from this:

Good presentations move quickly and are polished, showing that they have been well-rehearsed and practiced. This is, after all, unlike writing, a real-time performance art.
Good presentations are never read, and are never amplifications of displayed bullet points. What’s on the screen enhances and reinforces rather than summarizes what is being said; it is content that cannot be simply said. It is therefore usually graphical, always interesting and readily graspable, and never a distraction from what is being said.
Good presentations are dynamic, enthralling, and provocative. It is not enough that they just provide information (that can be done perfectly well using other media).

In order to meet these three criteria, you have to invest considerable time, effort, thought and energy into preparing your presentation, and you must be, as the word ‘presentation’ implies, present. For that to happen you have to really care about your subject and your message. For that reason, at conferences I usually skip presentations made by ‘experts’, politicians and celebrities, since these are often self-aggrandizing, sloppy, and written by others.

One of the exercises I’ve set for myself is to craft and practice short ‘elevator pitches‘ on subjects where I am attempting to bring about change. They have two overarching objectives:

To answer the question in the intended audience’s mind “Why should I care about this?”
To be sufficiently memorable that the audience won’t be able to get it out of their minds until they’ve acted upon it, and will be able to re-tell it coherently.

It would be nice if they were also persuasive, imparted new information, and were effective enough that people would remember not only my message but also me, thus enhancing my reputation, but these are much less important. All I really want to do is get them to care about the subject, and pass along their new-found passion to others. Just help them get started, as Patti Digh says. This is the essence of viruses: it’s when hundreds and thousands of people start to care about something that they can do something about, that change occurs.

The best way to get people to care about something, in my experience, is to show them that you care about it, and why. The key to doing this, in almost every case, is to tell a story.

Watch the best TED talks, speeches of change advocates, and even technical talks, and you’ll find most of them answer the two questions above by telling a compelling story enthusiastically, memorably and in a way that provokes further conversation and action.

Critical Entrepreneurial Skills

My first exercise is to revamp my bio from a story of what I’ve done to a story about what I care about. First step is to answer the question What do I care about? (that others can do something about). The difficulty I have with this is that most of these things are complex — they’re not easy to explain in an elevator pitch. Some examples:

I think our globalized, growth-economy based, oil-dependent, unsustainable, unresilient civilization is going to crash in this century, no matter what we do, and our descendents are going to suffer monstrously when it happens.
I think industrial agriculture (and animal factory farming in particular) is a horrifically cruel and wasteful system that contributes massively to climate change, deforestation, impoverishment of soil and loss of biodiversity.
I believe that the greatest challenge we face in this century is finding the right partners to collaborate with, in our personal lives, in enterprise, in political activism and in community.
I believe we need to de-school our society, and relearn the process of self-directed learning focused on developing critical knowledge and capacities such as understanding how the world really works, acquiring self-knowledge and self-understanding, learning how to discover what we are meant to do, and learning how to deal with complex issues.

When I think about trying to prepare a cogent, concise story that conveys why I believe each of these things, and that imagines some ways we could effectively act on them, I despair. These beliefs are the results of years of thoughtful study, research, discussion and reflection. Am I not, as I keep saying, “too far ahead” of most people to ever hope to find a point of connection with them on these very contentious beliefs? Wouldn’t I be better just telling people I believe these things and associating and collaborating with those who are at the same point in their learning and self-discovery journey that I’m at?

Maybe, for a start, it’s sufficient that when people ask me to say something about myself, who I am or what I do, I reply instead by saying that what I do is driven by the four profound, controversial, considered beliefs above, and that these are the things I really care about. And when I’m asked for my bio, I do the same: Instead of trotting out my work experience and credentials, I tell them that once I learned enough about what is really happening in the world, I had to stop living my comfortable, acquisitive life and start to take action on these four core beliefs.

But, beyond that, I’m going to try to write an elevator pitch on each of the four issues above, a pitch that meets the two criteria above, that actually impels my audience to at least consider the validity of these beliefs and to think about how they might act if these beliefs are valid. You’ll read these pitches here first, and I’ll be looking for you to help me hone them into the core of great presentations.

I’d be interested, in the meantime, about what you care about that others might be able to act on, and how you have conveyed your passion for these causes and beliefs effectively to others.

Category: Communication & Story-Telling

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