Despite its elegance and how beautifully it’s portrayed, I think Mark’s model is incomplete. It seems to me that, whether we’re talking about marketing effort or political activism, “purposeful effort” is driven by more than our hearts and minds, and the tools at our disposal. What’s missing is our instincts, the subconscious processing that makes most of our decisions for us long before we rationalize them intellectually or justify them emotionally. Our instincts, our visceral selves whose identity is coded in our ancient DNA and fluttered by pheromones and dreams and all the things we never notice, are what cause us to fight or flee, what shape our worldview and capacity to accept ideas and change, what drive us to behave “irrationally” and “immorally”. A ton of studies show that “we” make up our minds before we make up our minds, and that it is our visceral selves that make the decision.

That’s not to say that this decision can’t be overridden, or stalled by analysis paralysis. We are complex creatures, and while most of our information processing is subconscious, our emotions are very powerful, and our intellects, while feeble, are strategic and, in modern cultures anyway, trusted more than either our instincts or our emotions.

I’ve argued before that we have multiple “selves” locked in a kind of awkward dance inside us, and that this schizophrenia has been selected for in nature because it serves us quite well. I’ve portrayed them in the sketch above using the cute hugging salt and pepper shakers Geoff showed me. These three “selves” are: the visceral self that internalizes information subconsciously and draws on our genetic programming to make sense of it; and the intellectual and emotional “selves” that internalize information consciously and then process it back and forth semi-consciously.

For example: When we’re choosing a house to buy, we have a set of criteria in mind, which we attempt to apply with some rigour. What actually happens, however, is that, as we “sleep on” the decision, our visceral selves process a ton of information that we have absorbed subconsciously, and they will (whether we realize it or not) make the basic decision for us — that house, that we thought we loved and which best meets our criteria, somehow has something not quite right that we can’t quite put our fingers on. We will justify, any way we can, not buying that house, and putting in the offer on this house instead, even though it was only our third choice based on our criteria. What made us choose it, rather than our second choice, was our emotions, which always outweigh intellect in any buying decision. In fact, the only place our intellect really comes into play is actually negotiating the terms of sale: once we’ve made our decision, we can dig up and cite to the vendor the factors that had caused us to only rank it third on our list, and possibly beat down the asking price. Or at least, it will cause us to pause if we determine logically that we can’t really afford this house, and if interest rates spike we’re screwed. Or so we hope, anyway.

From all this I would like to posit this theorem on how and why we act:

Another example: You are looking for a new partner. You have written a personal classified describing what you are looking for and what you offer. After your last disastrous relationship you are determined that this next partner will share your interest in X. But when you actually talk with and then meet with potential partners your body will in fact make the decision for you, using its own, unknown criteria. You will attempt to justify your interest in the person your body has chosen. “The chemistry is really good,” you will say. Your emotions will have a say, but not in the same make-or-break way as your body. They will be a tie-breaker if your body likes two candidates, unless you are poly in which case you will attempt to make both relationships work. You will find a way to rationalize the fact that neither candidate has the faintest interest in X.

Once your body has decided and your emotions have weighed in, your intellect will be encouraged to manage the relationship. You had better wish it luck, because it’s going to need it.

I am exaggerating a bit, but not much. I have seen this over and over.

The reason I care about this is that I’m beginning to understand the knowing-doing disconnect, and how we are often paralyzed when it comes to doing what we “know” or “think” or “feel” we should do. Specifically, I’m interested in understanding why there are probably millions of people who understand, at a visceral and/or intellectual level, that our industrial civilization is disastrously unsustainable and that we should be doing something about that, before it’s too late. Yet those millions of people do nothing, and in fact don’t even behave, in their day-to-day work and personal lives and social activities, as if there were anything wrong with the industrial civilization that underlies all of those activities. On the surface it would seem a form of madness. But here’s what’s really happening:

• We are culturally programmed to distrust both our instincts and our emotions. Anything we do we must socially justify to others intellectually, rationally.
• It is utterly impossible to rationally justify your instincts or your emotions. Theirs is not a logic of words.
• So while we may feel this overwhelming, unbearable grief for Gaia, in the unspoken screams of trillions of suffering creatures all over the world, penetrating us to the bone, we are paralyzed, because we cannot rationalize this feeling.
• Likewise, while there are lots of intellectual arguments about our civilization’s unsustainability, our civilization, being a social and ecological system, is massively complex, and therefore those arguments are always easy to cast doubt on. And once you start talking in intellectual terms, you drain all the blood out of the discussion, and your emotions disengage. We cannot care about something as abstract as atmospheric gases, or “the environment” that is somehow “apart”, separate from us. We cannot.
• So we shut up and suffer. And/or we really start to want to believe those who tell us our instincts and intellectual knowledge are wrong, to the point we leap at any argument made by anyone with the faintest shred of credibility (even when that person is bought and paid for) who will assure us that everything is all right, that the market or technology or the Rapture or some other deus ex machina is going to fix the problem, if it even existed in the first place. Even though we know there is no such easy fix.

While this frailty of human social nature is easy to exploit by those committed or addicted to our unsustainable civilization, there is no great conspiracy going on here. We do this to ourselves, because the “logic” in the bullet points above, that leads to this madness, is fundamentally flawed.

Here’s how we should be thinking (and feeling, and intuiting, and then, to get back to Mark’s model, acting):

1. Trust your instincts. You don’t have to explain how you know that our industrial civilization is unsustainable and is causing immense suffering all over the world. You just know. The fact that you cannot translate that knowledge into an intellectual argument does not invalidate your knowledge. When someone takes an unexpected swing at you, you just know to duck. You just know. There is no conveying how you know in feeble human languages. There is no shame, no intellectual failure in saying: I just know. Of course that will not persuade anyone else. As Daniel Quinn explains in Beyond Civilization, that is not your job, and would be a waste of time. Others will understand when they’re ready, and not before.
2. Find others who share your instincts, by telling others what your instincts are saying to you, period. Not why or what to do about it, just what they’re telling you. What you just know. Read Keith’s short Message for Humanity in my weekend post or here, as an example. If that says what you know, then Keith and I are people who probably share your instincts. If this isn’t what your instincts are telling you, then find others who do share your instincts.
3. Get in touch with your emotions. Reconnect with them, and with the world. Our society teaches us to ignore and suppress our emotions, but we feel emotions for a reason. Until you give yourself permission to feel what you feel, you will not be able to act. You will not be able to be yourself. The word emotion comes from the Latin word meaning to move. Let your emotions move you to action.
4. Using your collective intellect to guide you, act in collaboration with others who share your instincts and are moved to act. To restate: The decision on an action is rooted in instinct and driven by emotion. The actual strategy used to carry out that action is often best guided by intellect.

My newfound zeal for activism has come from the belated discovery of these four simple (well, simple if you have the courage to be nobody-but-yourself) steps. Until very recently I was paralyzed by the vicious cycle of the five bullet-points above. Now I am moved to act. Not to go out and blow up pipelines or SUV dealerships in a fit of rage. But instead, to meet with people who have reached the same understanding that I have, who just know what I know, and who have been moved to act, and to use our imagination and creativity and ingenuity and innovation skills and critical thinking skills and capacities and collective wisdom and shared tools to identify ways to dismantle our industrial civilization, cleverly and dispassionately. We should be able to find ways to measurably do so (e.g. achieve a drop in GDP, atmospheric CO2 and Gini ratio and a commensurate rise in indices of well-being) without extravagant and unproductive PR stunts (our purpose is to reduce damage to the planet, not to persuade people by getting media coverage), without violence and without causing suffering, by honing in on their vulnerabilities (e.g. their need for massive amounts of low-interest investment, government subsidies, and insurance against risks).

We can do this. We must do this. We know we must act. We just know. And we are moved. And together, there’s no limit to what we can do.

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

An Uncivilized Solution: Keith Farnish has written the book (free download, or published next month by Chelsea Green) about why industrial civilization is unsustainable and headed for inevitable collapse, and how to help dismantle it to reduce the damage and suffering. His book and blog explain why the activities of environmental climate activists like Greenpeace and PETA are mere PR exercises which not only accomplish nothing (except a modest increase in awareness among people who will do nothing about the problem anyway), but which are easily coopted by greenwashers and other corporatists. Here is Keith’s simple message for humanity:

The Fallacy of Climate Activism: Adam Sacks writing in Grist explains eloquently why climate activists are misunderstanding and misrepresenting the core problem causing climate change: it’s not greenhouse gas emissions, it’s our entire industrial civilization that needs to be stopped. Thanks to Endgame for the link.

On the Road to Extinction and In Denial: Robert Jensen in Alternet, from a speech last year in Vancouver: “The agricultural revolution set us on a road to destruction. The industrial revolution ramped up our speed. The delusional revolution has prevented us from coming to terms with the reality of where we are and where we are heading. [And] there’s still overwhelming resistance in the dominant culture to acknowledging that these kinds of discussions are necessary.”

Quietly Passing the Tipping Point: Sharon A talks about the quandary of saying publicly that we’re already too late to prevent catastrophic climate change and the collapse of our civilization. Excerpt:

Oblivious to the Long Descent: John Michael Greer on our willingness to deny the laws of thermodynamics. Excerpt:

LIVING BETTER

We Have Nothing to Lose But Our Shoes: Ever since Jason G at Anthropik wrote about how to walk barefoot even in the city, I’ve been suspicious that the sneaker industry has been conning us on what we should wear when we run. Now, there’s an award winning running shoe that offers no unnatural ’support’, just a thin ultralight vegan layer of protection from broken glass and other urban hazards. (I wore moccasins for much of my childhood.)

Five Measures of Real Community: Mushin draws a mindmap of his sense of what gives real communities their value, that echoes what Peter Block said in Community. What do you think is missing?

1. Hospitality: welcoming and openness (and perhaps love, energy and passion)
2. Generosity: giving without expectation of commensurate value in return
3. Possibility: imagination and appreciation (”we are a community of possibility, not problems and needs to be ’solved’”)
4. Social Capital: relationship, collective knowledge, capacity, insight and perspective; and diversity
5. Co-accountability and Co-commitment: personal and collective responsibility
6. Conversation: connection and collaboration

A Manifesto for Slow Communication: The argument is that when communications are more measured, face-to-face, and context rich, the benefits far outweigh the additional time and cost of the communication. Thanks to Larry Dressler for the link.

Greeen Burial: You can now get a simple burial (no headstone, no polluting emissions, no chemical preservatives, no old growth coffin) that is more environmentally friendly than cremation. Thanks to my colleague Malik for the link.

Where Are Your Keys? The Language Fluency Game: Watch these videos and discover a completely different and powerful way of learning, based entirely on play. “We seek fluency, not knowledge…From a fluency perspective, we only measure your competence, not your intelligence. We measure it in many ways.  By the grace in which you do things, your comfort in challenging situations, and by your sheer curiosity. The more questions you carry around inside you, the shinier the glint in your eyes as they dance around, the more respect we have for you as a thinker and doer. Notice the distinction there; in our modern culture we mostly value the amount of facts you carry. In a fluency-based learning culture we value the amount of questions.” Thanks to Jason G for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL
Moyers on Corporate Ownership of the Democratic Party: Glenn Greenwald summarizes Moyers’ chat with Bill Maher about how the US has become a two-party corpocracy and links to the program video (NB: the video links, unlike the feeds from the mainstream media, work outside the US).

Obama to Continue Rendition: Obama announced this week he will continue the Bush policy of secretly kidnapping and smuggling suspects off to foreign countries with a history of torture for “interrogation.” What did they do with the Obama who ran for the presidency last year?

A Petition With an Optional Threat of Civil Disobedience: The protest against coal in the UK has been creatively ratcheted up from simple petitions. Thanks to Andrew for the link.

Explaining the US Health Care Problem on the Back of a Napkin: Dan Roam uses his “back of the napkin” approach to explain how the US healthcare system is broken and why, and what the current options are. Thanks to Valdis Krebs for the link.

Addicted to Oil: An addiction counselor says our consumer addictions are no different from those to drugs or gambling: We need treatment, and laws to reduce the power of the drug dealers (oil companies, advertisers etc.) that pander to our weakness.

First Nations Join Alberta Tar Sands Protest: But they had to go to the UK to get an audience.

THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:

In my most recent article on the subject I argued that what we must do, as individuals, and as members of communities and organizations, is to become more adaptive and improvisational, because the important challenges we will face in this century do not lend themselves to political or economic or planned solutions, and they will introduce permanent shifts, not the temporary and cyclical ones we’ve been accustomed to. We are long past the stage of controlling our own destiny — nature has come to bat, and we are about to see our ephemeral ‘victory’ over her disappear quickly and utterly. But she has never been our opponent. She is just here to clean up the mess we couldn’t clean up ourselves. We’re on her team, and it’s time we helped her get the job done.

So what do we do? How do we, as activists, creatively and humanely obstruct, disrupt, sabotage and stop these and other organizations that are killing us and ruining our world, now?:

• the big carbon polluters: mining, mountain-top removal and burning coal, the tar sands, offshore shale, the auto and road-building industry, the oil exploration companies (especially in the arctic), the aircraft and airline industry, the military, the cement industry, the air conditioning industry
• the nuclear industry
• the toxic industrial agriculture industry (especially factory farm operators and other huge users of water and oil-based chemicals)
• the building industry (making cheap crappy houses and energy-wasting shopping malls)
• the politicians who wage unwinnable and devastating wars (including fucking Obama in Afghanistan)
• the forest industry, especially clear-cutters, tropical and old-growth forest destroyers
• the industrial fishing industry
• the multinational corporations, arms dealers and other gangsters in affluent nations who mindlessly exploit and desolate struggling nations for the profit of a tiny elite
• the politicians and other corrupt corporatists who systematically exploit and brutalize the weak, the poor, the sick, the disenfranchised and the vulnerable (manifested by our prison system, our treatment of the mentally ill and the uninsured, and a ‘justice’ system that punishes victims and rewards perpetrators)
• the financial industry that funds all of the above, and which plays brinksmanship with our economy by incurring grotesque and unrepayable debts that will be left, along with the other toxic products of our industrial growth economy, to be dealt with my future generations
• the mainstream media whose propaganda machine absurdly oversimplifies what it reports, and fails to report what is really important
• the education industry which dumbs us down, beats individuality, creativity and autonomy out of us and pounds us into believing that the way we live is the only way we can live
• the pharma and insurance industries which exploit illness and ignorance and fear and obstruct the delivery of needed health products and services to those who really need them because they aren’t profitable

We have tried the demonstrations and the petitions and the blockades and the gentle forms of sabotage, and all they accomplish is to get us killed, jailed, tasered, blacklisted, brutalized and labeled as terrorists, using their political cronies, thuggish police and security agencies, and compliant media to paint us as the criminals.

We need to organize and get more creative. We need to use technology to organize in virtual ways, networked and collaborative not orchestrated, so we cannot easily be infiltrated and rounded up. We need to use imagination and ingenuity to disrupt and dismantle the operations of the corporatist criminals in ways that don’t get caught until they’re too late, and in ways that don’t get us caught. We need to hit them from a million points at once, coordinated but independent, so they are so busy trying to deflect us and deal with our successes that they simply never get operational again. Understand, they’re massively centralized, and hence enormously vulnerable. It’s a hugely fragile system they’re maintaining at enormous cost, one which is falling apart by dint of its sheer massive and unwieldy size. If we’re smart, we can stop them. We need to find and exploit their points of weakness — they are utterly dependent on cheap reliable power, oil, water and telecommunications for example. We make make them so frustrated that they give up, take their enormous nest-eggs of money and just quit.

We have to stop fighting them on their terms, and stop grandstanding for the media, which gets us nowhere. The measures of our success will be a consistent drop in GDP and a commensurate rise in more relevant indexes of genuine well-being, and in equitable distribution of wealth. And, of course, a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions.

This will be a raw movement, an improvisational one, one where we say and act on what we care about, what we feel. We’ll get terrible PR, because the corporatists run the media and have all the money, but we’ll have to put up with that, and keep working to get the job done. We have to keep asking: What kind of a world do we want, and want to leave as a legacy for future generations, and what do we have to do to achieve it? That will guide us, tell us, without need for central direction, exactly what we need to do.

This is just a seed I’m planting. It feels right. It feels like it’s time for it.

I feel I am finally ready to break free of what has been holding me back, what has had me sitting on the ledge for two years, urging myself to act but not acting. I think the breakthrough was when I realized that in order to really change, to really move, you have to let your heart be broken. You have to stop living in your head, inside those stories, thinking yourself to death, and ask yourself: What do you feel? What do you really care about? And then you let those feelings pour out: The anger. The rage. The loathing of those who keep fucking up this world. The self-loathing of realizing we’re doing nothing to stop them, that we’re actually part of the problem. The grief over the sixth great extinction, Gaia’s suffering.

I’m ready to let the world see my broken heart.

When people break, it happens by surprise.

Several readers pointed out that this is a marked change from my previous attitude towards stories. I did acknowledge that stories are powerful (even subversive), effective, context-rich, memorable, useful in visualization, and compelling, so shouldn’t I be distinguishing, they asked, between ‘good’ stories and ‘bad’ stories?

My change of heart on stories began when I began to realize the dangers of idealism (my own and others’), and began to question whether knowing and writing about what is really happening in the world (and how we might make it better) is really enough — a distraction from actually doing anything about it. I’ve come to realize that the proportion of the world who believes that we can change the world bottom-up through education or incitement is very small (though it probably includes a disproportionate number of bloggers and blog readers). 

Derrick Jensen has been hammering this point for years, most recently in his blistering articles in Orion. Corporatists know this and count on it: It’s easier and cheaper, and just as effective, for them to greenwash than to actually be responsible. You can demonstrate and write angry letters to politicians all you want, and they’re delighted: It’s a safety valve that gives you the impression you’re acting, so it makes you feel better, and believe things are getting better, when in fact they’re getting much worse, every day.

So what does have enough power to lead to real change?

My answer: Organized, collective action. More specifically, action that produces actual results, not just stories. 

Action is different from story.

• Stories are addictive. They oversimplify complexity to the point we become complacent that we know what is really happening and that all the alternatives have been identified and considered, so that intelligent, reasonable people can know what needs to be done. We have no idea what is happening, in areas of complexity such as climate change and the end of oil, and we have no idea what needs to be done. No one knows, and the climate scientists who know most are the most pessimistic and most terrified.
• Stories are manipulative. They are readily subject to spin, especially on complex subjects about which there can never be absolute or certain knowledge. And they are subject to censorship and the crime of non-reporting, which the mainstream media do constantly to avoid depressing or confusing their audience or upsetting their corporate sponsors and advertisers.
• Stories give us false hope. When we live our lives dreaming of winning the lottery, or finding that perfect partner, we become complacent, malleable, content with what is, for now.
• Stories lead us to live inside our heads instead of in the real world. They are ultimately escapist, whether they’re a novel about the past or the future, or ‘future state visions’ by some think-tank or corporatist apologist, describing what might have been or what might be. They are not real, and allow us to abdicate responsibility for what is happening in the real world, right now.
• Stories are excuses for inaction. Somehow when we get worked up about a story, we mistake that for actually doing something about it. And we are all too willing to be reassured by stories that everything is really OK, or will be soon, when our leaders or technologies apply themselves to fixing what’s broken.
• Stories are only stories. When children get upset about a horror story, we console them, tell them “it’s just a story.” The true horrors are not just stories.

Action is different from story. Whether you want to create a new community or a new enterprise or a better world, you don’t tell a story; you act. The process for acting to co-create any of these things is:

• Find collaborators who share your purpose, principles, intentions and sense of urgency.
• Research what is needed.
• Together, innovate approaches that meet that need.
• Keep experimenting and improvising, trying these approaches until you succeed in meeting that need.

So if your purpose and sense of urgency is about climate change, step 2 (the research) has already been done for you — George Monbiot’s book Heat describes precisely what we need to do to stop it. If you haven’t read the book, here’s a summary of what is needed, put a little less delicately than Monbiot does, and supplemented with some additional ‘musts’ that have come to light in the three years since Heat was written (Monbiot today is much more pessimistic than he was then):

• We need to immediately and completely stop burning coal, abandon the Tar Sands and all other forms of dirty energy, and invest several trillion dollars in a complex set of new energy generation and carbon emission reduction methods (electric cars using electricity from wind farms and natural gas, carbon scrubbing etc.)
• We need to immediately cease all oil exporation and start rationing the use of known oil reserves, because just burning what we already know exists will push us far past the 350ppm tipping point that will unleash massive and debilitating climate change (loss of the world’s forests, massive desertification, constant devastating storms, sea level rise engulfing a billion people, waves of pandemic tropical diseases to humans, crops and food animals etc.)
• We need to immediately ground all aircraft, since no foreseeable technology can significantly mitigate its huge impact on atmospheric emissions
• We need to substantially shut down and completely reengineer the retail and cement industries which are responsible for a large percentage of CO2 emissions; most retail business would be replaced with delivery-to-home alternatives, with substantially all packaging of consumer goods eliminated or replaced with simpler reusable packaging
• We need a moratorium on nuclear energy development, and huge investment in waste storage, security and decommissioning of existing sites, because nuclear power brings with it immense risks of accident, sabotage and long-term toxicity
• We need to require all buildings everywhere to be built (starting immediately) or retrofit (over a short time horizon) to much higher standards of construction and insulation (heat, light, windows, appliance, water heaters, smart metering to ration use of air conditioning etc.), and much higher standards of inspection and enforcement of these standards
• We need to immediately begin researching and then reengineering the electrical grid from alternating to direct current to reduce electrical energy loss
• We need to replace our extravagant, toxic, nation-destroying industrial agriculture system with one based on local, organic production (and move to become vegetarians)
• We need to shut down expressways to auto traffic and substitute high-speed, high-amenity bus/train service in all urban, suburban and exurban areas (much of this technology remains to be invented)
• We need to give up believing in impossible solutions: carbon capture and storage, cap-and-trade systems, local energy co-ops, personal wind turbines, the hydrogen economy, and biofuels; and also in the belief that telecommuting and home-based businesses can replace more than about 15% of our economy

That’s what’s needed, now. Forget about simply using compact fluorescent bulbs, taking the one tonne challenge, recycling and composting more.

How are we going to do that? Not by telling stories. Not by petitions and letters to politicians and to the editor. Not by writing policy papers for the local Green Party.

We have to do what Jim Hansen, one of the world’s most renowned climate scientists, has started to do. We have to act in a collective, organized way. We have to find new, ingenious ways to blockade and sabotage (without risking health or safety) the developments above, until we stop them. Our planet, our civilization, our descendants’ future, depend on it. We may never get governments with the courage and will to spend the trillions needed on infrastructure and technology that Monbiot describes above (which would have to be paid for entirely by the rich, not fobbed off as additional debts on future generations or funded through cuts to essential services). We can’t wait for governments to do what they inevitably must do. But we can damned well stop what is destroying our planet now.

But only if we stop believing in stories.

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

Finally It’s OK to Talk About Civilization’s Collapse: This blog is mostly about preparing for the collapse, later this century, of our fragile, unsustainable and overwrought civilization. It took me awhile to be honest about this, because you won’t hear any debate about this in any of the mainstream media, or even in most of the alternative media, and it’s certainly not polite conversation at the dinner table or the political rally. But slowly it’s becoming respectable, if still a bit eccentric, to argue that we’re too late to save the world (if it were ever possible) and to start to talk about what comes after civilization. The Transition movement deserves much credit for this. This week, there’s an astonishing dialogue in the Guardian between George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth about whether civilization’s impending collapse should be mitigated (Monbiot) or encouraged (Kingsnorth).

conception of art after the collapse of civilization culture by afterculture

Artists Begin to Document the Story of Civilization’s Collapse: The aforementioned Paul Kingsnorth has started a movement — the Dark Mountain project — of writers and artists to tell the story of civilization’s current demise, and to imagine possibilities for the world that will follow, a world with a much smaller, Uncivilized human population. Thanks to Vera B for the link. Here are the project’s 8 Principles of Uncivilisation:

1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.
2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.
3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.
4. We will reassert the role of story-telling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.
5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.
6. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.
7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.
8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

500sf home above was built using local, healthy, natural materials into a woodland hill in Wales

The Challenge of Building Community: Sharon A, referring to her reluctance to act on what she has written about organizing communities for transition to post-civilization society, writes: “Why was I so reluctant?  Well, because organizing people and setting up models, administering groups and training people to enact models are all things I don’t want to do.  I like writing from home in my pajamas.” She continues:

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Obama Approves Tar Sands Pipeline: If anyone had any reason to believe Obama planned on doing anything real about climate change, you can give it up now. Another capitulation to the oil industry and the corporatists. Guess it’s up to us now.

US Municipalities Sell Overdue Tax Receivables to Corporate Vultures: Miss a payment on your local taxes and you may find that instead of owing the town money, you now owe it to a brutal corporate moneylender who will charge usurous interest rates and penalties and would sooner evict you than try to settle, because it’s more profitable for them.

Changing the Corporation: Why we urgently need to rein in corporate power, and why we will never do so.

Why Progressives Lost the Health Care Debate: George Lakoff does a great study of how incompetent progressives are when they come up against the brilliant PR strategists of the extreme right. This lengthy and smart “it’s not too late” memo is directed right at Obama and says we need to reframe the debate in these terms:

• An American Plan, not a “public option”
• A Health Care Emergency, with people dying for lack of insurance and health care
• Doctor-Patient Care, which is what the plan is really about
• Coverage is Not Care: insurance companies are in business to profit by denying care, rationing care
• Private Taxation, by insurance companies that govern our lives
• Doctors Care, Insurance Companies Don’t
• Insurance Company Bureaucracy: they are inefficient, run by bureaucrats

A Nuremberg for Guantanamo?: The idea of an international tribunal for detainees of the US’ offshore and secret torture prisons has merit, provided the US can stomach acknowledging to the world that it has flagrantly violated international standards of law and decency for eight years.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy, You’re in the Army!: Psychologist Martin Seligman (Authentic Happiness guru) has been hired by the Pentagon to counsel the military rank and file on mental stress so fewer of them will commit suicide.

photo taken in bc interior by viktoria haack

HOW TO SAVE THIS BLOG

The End of Salon Blogs, and the Story of Julie & Julia: Alas, Radio Userland, once a credible player in the blog market and the platform on which this blog has sat for six years, is folding December 31, taking with it Salon Blogs, all my articles, and reader comments on the comments server that never worked right. So watch for a new home for this blog later this year. We were quite a community when we started in 2003 — a couple of hundred of us commenting on each other’s blogs and wondering if anyone else would ever read them. Then there was a breakout success — Julie Powell’s Salon Blog containing the story of her attempt to copy all the recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook. The rest is history.

David spoke about the work of Alan Seale (it’s about finding your “soul mission” and your “life vision”) and how more and more of us are coming to believe that the key to much of what we seek so fervently — what we should be doing, and where, and with whom, and how we can make the world better, for a start — comes down to knowing ourselves, and to paying attention.

He described a three-stage model of intentionality: the first stage is autonomy (self-knowledge), the second is ‘mastery’ (learning to do something well) and the third is purposefulness (applying that self-knowledge and mastery to something that is needed and useful). I had two responses: I prefer ‘practice’ (”there is no mastery; there is only the practice”) instead of ‘mastery’; and it seemed to me that rather than three sequential stages these three are iterative processes, each of which inform the other two.

As I thought about it, it occurred to me that these three processes mapped to some extent to the three components of the Sweet Spot that I describe in my book: Practice maps to Gifts (what we do uniquely well), Intention maps to Passions (what we love doing), and Autonomy (kind of) maps to Purpose (what’s needed in the world that we care about). I sketched out the drawing above as a kind of map of self-knowledge. Here’s what it says:

1. Practice is doing what we have the capacity and competency to do, what we can do.
2. Through Practice, we come to know what we can do. This knowledge in turn helps improve our Practice.
3. Through Practice, and knowing what we can do, we discover our Gifts, those things we are uniquely good at doing.

4. Intention is doing what we want to do, what we love. The word is from the Latin meaning “stretching toward”. It’s starting to do it, not just resolving to do it.
5. Through Intention, we come to know what we want to do. This knowledge in turn drives our actions, our Intentions.
6. Through Intention, and knowing what we want to do, we discover our Passions, those things we love to do, that we expect we would love to make a living doing.

7. Autonomy is being nobody-but-yourself, as ee cummings so eloquently described it.
8. Through Autonomy, we come to know who we are. This self-knowledge helps us to be more authentically ourselves, less inclined to be everybody-else.
9. Through Autonomy, and knowing who we are, we may discover our Purpose, why we are here.

10. What we are meant to do lies at the intersection of our Gifts, our Passions and our Purpose. 
11. Our Practice and Intention also inform our Autonomy; they teach us more about who we really are.
12. Our Practice and Autonomy also inform our Intention; this self-learning teaches us more about what we want to do.
13. Our Intention and Autonomy also inform our Practice; this self-knowledge teaches us more about what we have the capacity and capability to do.
14. Likewise, as we discover our Gifts, our Passions and our Purpose, each of these discoveries suggests what might be part of the other two, and possibly what might be in the Sweet Spot.

In my book, I suggest a series of exercises you can use, iteratively, to discover your Gifts, Passions and Purpose. I make the point that many of us go through life doing what we’re expected to do, or told we must do, or told we are good at, so that we never really acquire enough experience at doing other things to know what our true Gifts, Passions and Purpose are. And for many of us, we haven’t the time or in some cases the critical and creative thinking skills to recognize them even if we stumble over them.

The Practice-Intention-Autonomy model suggests what might be a more intuitive and active way towards such discovery. Instead of a conceptual knowing approach to discovering what we’re meant to do, this model provides an experiential doing approach. Instead of doing skills inventory self-tests to think through what your Gifts might be, just start doing things, and you’ll find out what you’re uniquely good at. And at the same you’ll discover what you love doing. And perhaps even what you’re meant to do, and who you really are.

For many years my Sweet Spot was helping entrepreneurs by imagining possibilities that addressed the issues keeping them awake at night. Most of these possibilities were sparked by what I had learned from other entrepreneurs, their stories, which I could re-tell in useful ways to other entrepreneurs facing the same challenges. Other possibilities were sparked by my broad and serendipitous reading and having the time to imagine how the things I learned from this reading might have practical application in other areas. I initially took on this work, this Practice, reluctantly, and without it I probably wouldn’t have discovered my Gifts.

Likewise, in my final year of high school (my Unschooling year, when I was freed at last from the classroom and curriculum) I discovered my Passion for writing through sheer Intention, and Practice. I just wanted to write, and I worked hard at writing, long before I realized that this was something I really loved doing. Through Practice I became competent at it, through Intention it became a life goal, something I wanted to do for a living and then came to love.

So I know that Imagining Possibilities, and Writing, are for me both Gifts and Passions. My success as an advisor to entrepreneurs, and more recently as a writer, suggests these things have been in my Sweet Spot. But what has been missing, for me, is the self-knowledge, the Autonomy, to begin to discover my Purpose. Without knowing that, I can’t know what is now, really in my Sweet Spot, what I’m meant to do. I think that is what has me so paralyzed now, when I can afford to ‘retire’ from paid work and do whatever it is I’m really meant to do, because if I am really honest with myself, I have to admit I’m not sure what that is. I feel to some extent I can do almost anything, and at the very least I have a significant number of capacities and competencies that, with Practice, could become Gifts. And I know many things that I love doing, both alone and in collaboration with others; I’ve written about these Passions at length.

Of late I have been focused on discovering my Purpose, and on self-awareness and self-knowledge, as steps perhaps towards Autonomy — self-direction, self-control, independence. But Autonomy is notably different from Practice and Intention, which are about doing what we can and what we want. We all know more or less how to do things. Autonomy is, by contrast, about being. I would argue, now, that it is not about becoming, since while I think we can change what we do, we can’t change who we are. We don’t become something by volition, contrary to all the self-help books out there. Autonomy is about real-ization, about understanding what is, what we are. And then authentically being just and fully that.

Much more difficult than it sounds. Recently I attempted a self-portrait in words, as an exercise in real-izing who I am, or might be, now:

I think this is a reasonably accurate portrait. Does it make me “autonomous?”

The term autonomous means independent, self-directed and self-controlled. It doesn’t mean capacity to live alone and it’s not about survival skills. It’s about self-awareness and self-knowledge sufficient to know what you can and cannot do competently, what drives you, how you think and how you feel, and why. It’s about independence from the influence of others, who are, as cummings said, trying their best, day and night, to make you everybody-else.

How does one become autonomous, in this sense? I believe it’s very hard. Cummings puts it this way:

“To feel and work and fight till you die.” That’s the process to start to achieve Autonomy. To let your heart be broken, and to let the world see your broken heart. To challenge everything, critically and imaginatively. To refuse to let those who would make you everybody-else — a wage slave, a respected citizen, an obedient employee, a faithful adherent to an accepted code of beliefs or behaviours, a ‘nice’ person, a team player, someone dependent on the affection, appreciation, attention and largesse of others — make you what you are not.

And, at the same time, the process of moving towards Autonomy includes an appreciation of your interdependence, your a-part-hood of all-life-on-Earth and of the communities whose members are fighting alongside you. A fearless love of others, while still remaining free of the gunk they (well-meaningly, I think) try to attach to you. An indefatigable love for this terrible, suffering world.

Practice. Intention. Autonomy. Doing what you can. Doing what you want. Being who you are. And letting the knowledge of these three things show you what you are meant to do. Not who you are meant to be — you already are that.

Can you imagine that? This is hard. I’m a lazy bastard, but I’m ready for this. I can’t do anything less. I won’t be anyone else.

.     .     .     .     .

David’s thoughts on stories were similarly inspiring. I’ve been reading and writing a lot about stories — their power to inform and persuade, their memorability, and the damage they can do when you get trapped by them — buried in regret or nostalgia over stories about your past, distracted by grief or false hope about your future, consumed by self-loathing over stories others have told you, or you have told yourself, about yourself, and terrified or traumatized by stories you have come to accept about others and the world as it is today.

So we end up with this love-hate relationship with stories, both of which stem from their power. Stories, it seems to me, are tools — like any tool they can be useful if applied to a problem, or dangerous if misapplied. There has been a lot of writing and preaching, in recent years, about rewriting our own story, but in today’s discussions with David it occurred to me that we can get so caught up in chronicling our lives that we forget to live them. If our lives are, in fact, stories that are like movies unfolding in real time (if there is such a thing as ‘real time’), then we might be led to think metaphorically about whether we are directors and/or actors in our own film, or about who is writing (with daily rewrites) the script. But are we then making ourselves a prisoner of this metaphor, and allowing stories to trap us even more? Are some (heroic) stories beneficial and others (that belittle us) damaging? Are some of these stories ‘true’ and others ‘fiction’? Or are they all fiction, artifacts of an invented past and invented future that merely distract us from living in Now Time, where there are no stories?

I am coming to believe that all stories, from the unactionable dumbed-down crap that we’re fed by the mainstream media, to the preposterous ‘history’ they pass off as ‘fact’ in so-called institutions of learning, to the regurgitated tripe from Hollywood, to the mountains of lies of corporatists in their greenwashing and advertising, to the formulaic and emotionally manipulative fiction to which we escape from our brutal and mind-numbing lives — are propaganda. They are meant to keep us in our place and distract us from discovering what is really going on in this world. Stories, I am beginning to think, are just more of civilization’s gunk that gets layered on us (some of it self-inflicted) from the moment we acquire the dreadful skill of human language, stuff that prevents us from being nobody-but-ourselves, and from understanding what is really needed, now, what we have to do, with all of our hearts and our minds and our senses and our instincts.

So: damn stories. If one is inclined to “rewrite one’s own story”, perhaps it’s time to give up fiction, turn off the projector, get out of the theatre and improvise living in the real world, where there are no scripts, just work that needs to be done and actions that need to be taken, if only we can readjust our eyes to the light. The director, it turns out, is a mannequin with a pre-recorded playback device in his megaphone, and the script was written by a machine using lines selected with a random-number generator.

And the part that each of us has been playing was actually written for someone else. The set is empty, the props are all falling down and blowing away in the wind. All that is left is Now.