kittens playing: photo by artistlanas

In my last article I advocated re-learning to play, the way wild creatures do, both as a means of increasing the joy and resilience in our lives, and as a means of creating a context, a behaviour model, that will allow us to talk with others about the terrible truths of our current way of life and the inevitable crises ahead, without being dismissed as ‘doomers’ (or worse) by the incredulous, the hopeful and the deniers.

My sense is that if we could regain this capacity of playfulness in everything we do, it would positively colour our whole worldview, change how we see the world and our attitude and approach to everything we do, and hence positively affect our relationships with others. But that will only happen with practice (if it were easy we’d already be doing it).

And that change in perspective must be genuine, not forced. We must be true to ourselves. This playfulness and joy has to be an emergence of what we already are (albeit well-buried by years of cultural indoctrination), rather than an affectation or attempt to change ourselves into something we are not.

How then might we go about this? In my last article I suggested:

• studying wild creatures and following their example,
• practicing keeping ourselves ‘open’ to wonder and possibility (constantly asking: how can I make what I’m doing more joyful and engaging?), and
• ‘presence’ practices to get ourselves into a space of being both relaxed and aware.

Here are some additional thoughts I’ve had about this since I wrote the earlier article:

Are We Brave Enough to Play?: I think conscious playfulness requires a certain degree of courage. Not in the sense of recklessness or insensitivity to the situation or to others, but in the sense of a childlike willingness to try something without being held back by fear of being thought foolish. For example, one of the most playful things you can do, I think, is flirting. This can be hazardous in a society in which many of could mistake your behaviour as aggressive, immature or worse, and respond with hostility. Wild creatures invite play by taking a submissive posture, and opening themselves to rejection. If we’re going to flirt as a form of play, we’re going to have to shrug off inappropriate responses, and persevere until we find willing and mature ‘playmates’. Likewise, we are going to have to be clear that this is play, and not (when it is playfully reciprocated) try to make it something more serious ourselves. Likewise, to be playful with others at a time when they are feeling sad, anxious, angry or fearful runs the risk of being seen as callous or insensitive.

Can We Be Playful and Pessimistic At the Same Time?:  I think this playful, joyful attitude and approach is totally consistent with a very bleak view of the current state of the world and a very pessimistic view of the future. It is, I think, all about giving up hope and just being, in the moment, focused on making the best of now, rather than worrying about a future you cannot control, predict or prepare for, or compelling yourself to do what your’e not prepared to do, or beating yourself up for not doing it. The underlying worldview, the ‘new story’ driving this attitude and approach is that life is an ever-present moment of amazing, joyful, playful being. That worldview does not negate the terrible knowledge of what is and what may come to be, but neither is it precluded by that knowledge. It is, however, easy to get caught up in our negative or unduly hopeful stories about the future, lose our sense of presence, and hence our capacity for playfulness.

How Can We Disable Our Ingrained Tendency to Keep Score?: Some things best to avoid in play, I think: competitiveness, objectives, scorekeeping, heavy thinking, complicated structure, and prescriptive or constraining rules. Many modern games are not play at all, but rather self-tests; we have more than enough of those in our lives already.

How Can We De-Structure Our ‘Play’ Time?:  Some semi-structured types of play we engage in, even as adults, include role plays, improv acting, music, crafts, and exploration of wild places. But our modern world is so competitive, so measured, and so directed that it is hard to keep such activities joyful, and undertake them purely for their own sake, and let go of performance scores, outcomes or intentions. At the same time, some games can be attention-consuming distractions and diversions from the reality of the moment — the opposite of real play, which is inherently present, alert to what is, and relaxed.

How Do We Learn to Let Go, As a Prelude to Becoming More Playful?: Since it’s almost impossible to rid our lives of stress and sadness, what approach can we take, and who can we learn from, to accept anything that happens with equanimity, to adapt instead of trying to control?

How Can We Self-Manage Without Becoming Less Playful?: For a number of years I’ve (occasionally) practiced an approach to dealing with complex and difficult situations that I summarize as SSUQIOC: Sense, Self-Control, Understand, Question, Imagine, Offer, Collaborate:

•    Sense: Observe, listen, pay attention. Reflect. Be Open. Perceive. Intuit.
•    Self-control: Don’t judge, expect or jump to conclusions. Stay calm. Focus. Self-manage. Breathe. Let go.
•    Understand: Assemble the facts. Appreciate the context. Know why. Sympathize. Accept. Keep learning. Let come.
•    Question: Ask. Challenge. Think critically.
•    Imagine: Picture, hear, feel what could be. Envision a better way. Suggest possibilities.
•    Offer: Consider. Give. Explain. Demonstrate. Mentor. Facilitate. Help. Make it easier/ more fun.
•    Collaborate: Co-create. Recreate. Let evolve. Yield, shift, build on, bridge, adapt.

But how can we practice this type of self-management and still be open to play, free from self-censoring? How can we be self-aware enough to keep ourselves constantly playful, without that self-awareness (and the accompanying sense of responsibility) making us anxious and inhibiting us from that very playfulness?

Prehistoric humans did not have to ‘work’; even the collaborative browsing for food in the rainforest was a playful, easy, highly pleasurable activity. Is it even possible to be playful when so much of ‘civilized’ life is serious, stressful, difficult, and not at all fun?

There is some evidence that wild creatures spend most of their lives in ‘Now Time’, mostly in play. When a stressful situation arises they shift immediately into ‘Clock Time’ — the wary, fight-or-flight state of readiness that we humans live almost all our lives in. Might there be an approach to playful self-management in low-stress ‘Now Times’ that corresponds to the composed high-stress ‘Clock Time’ self-management approach represented by SSUQIOC?

If there is, I think it might be something like the ‘HCCPEP’ approach shown in green on the right side of the chart above: Heal, Celebrate, Connect, (Be) Present, Engage Others, Play:

•    Heal: Rest, recover, recuperate.
•    Celebrate: Notice beauty. Wonder. Stop thinking and just Be.
•    Connect: With your emotions, instincts, senses, and all-life-on-Earth.
•    Be Present: Relax. Be aware and open to possibility. Let go of goals, hopes and outcomes. Get rid of distractions.
•    Engage Others: Invite. Flirt. Initiate.
•    Play.

So, to the extent that I can avoid stressful events, I could use the HCCPEP approach to become more playful, and when stressful situations arise I would switch over to the SSUQIOC approach.

Of course, this is all easy to say, and to some extent runs counter to my recent assertion that we should learn to accept ourselves for who we are, and not try to become ‘better’, or what we’re not.

But this isn’t really a self-improvement program. It’s really a reflection, I think, of who we humans are naturally when we’re not exhausted, anxious, consumed with grief, anger or fear, or distracted, or otherwise ‘off our game’. This, I believe, is how wild creatures behave — and underneath the veneer of civilization we are all wild creatures. This is really a program for re-becoming ourselves, getting out from under the schmutz — the gunk that has been layered on us that coercively tells us what we should be and should do, to the point we disconnect and cease to be ourselves.

Having said that, I think for me to follow this approach effectively will require an enormous amount of practice. We’ve forgotten how to do all these things, and they no longer come ‘naturally’ to us as they seem to do to wild creatures. Following this two-pronged approach will also require an enormous amount of presence, self-knowledge and self-awareness.

But as a framework for coping with stressful events, and for relearning to play, it has great appeal to me. So I’m going to try practicing it. I will let you know how it goes. The practice will probably not make me a ‘better’ person, but maybe it will help me re-become that amazing, alive, feral human creature I was in my preschool years — that being that I always have been, and have missed ever since I learned, miserably, so many years ago, to become everybody-else.

We are all pattern recognizers. Our worldview, what we believe, depends on how we have organized what we’ve seen and heard and read and been told (by those we trust, and those we don’t) into patterns. It’s the process by which we make the enormous volume and complexity of knowledge at our disposal sufficiently manageable to understand and act upon.

I have always prided myself on my ability to synthesize large volumes of information, and to imagine interesting and useful possibilities arising from it, seeing connections and patterns others cannot. So it’s been dismaying and humbling to discover that much of the ‘wisdom’ I’ve obtained from observing, synthesizing and musing on my knowledge and experience is neither comprehensible nor very palatable to others. I think I finally understand why.

When I served as an advisor to entrepreneurs for some thirty years, what my clients told me they valued most from me were the leisurely breakfast meetings I’d have with them, during which they would talk about what was keeping them awake at night, and I would respond by telling them what some of the other organizations I had served or studied had done in similar situations, and/or speculating on how something I’d heard, or seen, or read, often in an unrelated context, might present a unique opportunity for them.

I thought that it was my synthesis of information, and my imagination, applied to their business ‘problems’, that they valued. But now I’m coming to realize it was actually my stories that they valued — stories of other business’ successes or failures or experiences, and stories about what I had read, relevant to their situation. I now suspect that the ‘lessons’ I embedded in or attached to these stories were mostly politely (perhaps even unconsciously) ignored by my clients, as they internalized my stories through their worldview and belief systems. They drew the conclusions on what my stories meant, and how they were actionable to them, and did not want or expect me to do so. My value, perhaps my only real value for most of my work life, was as a story-teller. Of course, my ability to select the right stories to tell them was important, as was my ability to articulate them well. But still.

My book, Finding the Sweet Spot, is likewise the synthesis of what I learned from all those clients. I am now wondering if it would have been more useful, and more successful, if it had contained a lot more stories and less of my own synthesis of what those stories meant to me, the patterns I recognized.

The elders and tribal leaders of First Nations peoples knew the power of stories. They didn’t tell the others of the tribe what to believe or what to do. They knew that a good story that each listener could interpret and make their own was more compelling, and unarguable, and hence, in most cases, more effective at influencing beliefs and behaviours.

But surely people want to be told synthesized truths, nuggets of wisdom, and what they should do to benefit from them? How else can we account for the mountains of self-help books published every year, some of which are astonishing best-sellers that make their authors fantastically wealthy, famous, even revered?

And then it struck me:

People don’t want to be told what they should believe or what they should do. They want to be told what they want to believe and what they want to do. They want it to be simple, easy, and fun. They want stories that convey and support those beliefs and actions. In short, they want to be reassured.

Take, for example, one of my most popular articles, Ten Things to Do When You’re Feeling Hopeless, which was picked up by several of the social ‘news amplifier’ sites and ultimately republished in Utne Reader. It is short, breezy, provocative without being heavy, and kinda fun. The first item in the list is sufficiently in-your-face to be worth thinking about and perhaps passing along to others, without being really unsettling, while the rest of the list are mostly easy, fun things to do — things most of us want to do. So the list is harmless, if not terribly useful. It’s reassuring, though, which is what most of us want — especially when we’re feeling hopeless.

I’m not belittling this. There’s a reason we want this, and it is because this is how we learn and cope. This is nature, and not just human nature. We look for patterns, and once we find them, we tend to dismiss ‘outliers’ that contradict the pattern, and we uncritically accept evidence that supports it. The brain evolved to help us make quick optimal decisions, and large amounts of contradictory data does not help us do that.

And we loathe complexity, because it paralyzes us: our scientists can’t bear the thought that time and space are infinite and infinitely complex, unknowable, not subject to any simple ‘rules’. Leaders of large organizations religiously pursue strategies and employ decision-making methods that are absurdly oversimplified, and preposterously overestimate how much control and influence they have over the organization’s success or failure.

We much prefer the comfort of simple models of cause and effect, and systems that are intuitively understandable and which we can fully predict and control. Alas, those models are usually oversimplified to the point they are only useful within very narrow constraints and short human time spans. The technologies built on such models, such as our underground water systems, our nuclear power plants, and our antibiotics, almost invariably create more long-term problems than they solve, and prove to be ill-conceived ideas. And the only systems that are truly predictable and controllable are trivial, fragile, or fictitious, and hence of almost no practical use.

No matter that simplistic models and solutions and symptoms rarely work: Still, we want books that tell us we can lose weight easily in 7-10 days, or that we can geoengineer our way out of climate change. We want to believe what we already believe, or at least what we want to believe, or, in cases when there is overwhelming evidence that those beliefs no longer make sense, we want to believe what we are ‘born-again’ ready to believe. And, likewise, we want to be told that what we ‘should’ do is what we are already doing, or what we want to do, or what we are at last ready and willing to do. Until then, we are deaf, and there is no point arguing with us.

Take a look at the poster above, the Holstee Manifesto from a cool recycled clothing manufacturer that the smart folks at the knowledge synthesizer (heh) BrainPickings love so much they keep it on their sidebar. And what’s not to love? When I first saw it I thought about putting it on my sidebar. But then I thought: It’s reminding me of what I already believe, and telling me to do what I am already doing and/or want to do. Even if, in some cases, in my heart I know I am not going to do it. It makes me feel good, mostly, and perhaps that’s enough.

Two of the truths that emerged for me from decades of pattern-seeking and pattern recognition are what I have come to call Pollard’s Laws:

Pollard’s Law of Human Behaviour: We do what we must (our personal, unavoidable imperatives of the moment), then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. There is never time left for things that are merely important.

Pollard’s Law of Complexity: Things are the way they are for a reason. If you want to change something, it helps to know that reason. If that reason is complex, success at changing it is unlikely, and adapting to it is probably a better strategy.

I keep citing them on this blog because I keep discovering how consistently true they are, primarily with reference to my own situation, but also from what others tell me, or describe. I could have worded them as advice on what to believe or what to do, and put them in a nice poster. But the truth is that not very many people like them. They’re messy and complex, and the advice that they imply (don’t try to be what you’re not; if you’re a procrastinator your only hope is to try to find some way to make what you don’t want to do easier or more fun; nobody knows anything and no one is in control, so stop expecting governments and leaders to make anything better, ever; stop trying to change the world and accept that no matter what we do we’re more-or-less fucked) is not what people want to hear. So they choose not to listen.

I get that. I’m not an evangelist for my beliefs. Daniel Quinn advises “People will listen when they’re ready to listen and not before.” I’m not privy to any knowledge that others can’t obtain with a bit of research, but I don’t expect many people to read what I have read in doing my research because the messages are not those they want to hear — they don’t jibe with their worldview. They didn’t jibe with mine for a long time, and it’s only by accident that they did, at exactly the time I was ready to listen to them.

Fortunately, I don’t have my heart set on writing a self-help book. And I’m not particularly concerned that over the years the readership of this blog has dwindled by more than half as its messages have become more complex and more grim.

Likewise, unlike many business leaders, new age gurus and alternative culture humanists, I don’t believe you can change a culture (except, as a few business and political leaders have discovered, by exterminating the existing members and bringing in ‘believers’ to replace them). Changing a culture entails changing what most of its people believe, and most people will believe only what they want to believe, regardless of its veracity. And even if through relentless effort you can succeed in forcing them to change their beliefs, that won’t cause them to change their behaviour; it will just make them unhappy and resentful. Stalin and Mao, between them, caused the deaths of 140 million citizens of their beleaguered and accursed countries in their attempt to change their cultures, and in the process changed nothing.

So, having argued for the foolishness of offering advice, here is some advice: If you want to be popular, at least for a while, tell people in a clever way to believe what they already believe (or are finally ready to), and to do what they are already doing (or at least are ready to, or want to do). If you want to be a true friend, don’t proffer advice at all — just listen and empathize and accept them for who they are, what they believe, and what they are likely, and unlikely, to do.

And if you want to really influence people, though in ways you cannot ever predict or control, tell them good stories. But please, if you do, beware of stories’ subversive power, and don’t tell lies or carefully-edited myths. Like the best woods, the best stories are unsynthesized and unvarnished.

I‘ve just finished reading Moonwalking with Einstein, the book by Joshua Foer (little brother of Jonathan Safran Foer, the guy who persuaded me to go vegan). After researching the techniques used by the world’s memory ‘grand masters’, Joshua ended up preparing for, competing for, and winning the US memory championship.

The techniques he used date back millennia, and were used before the printing press and even before written language. Although there are some new, more powerful techniques used by memory champions, the underlying techniques are unchanged, and entail the use of powerful images, and familiar locations (our brain remembers images and sequential locations much more readily than ‘un-placed’ facts) that are ‘connected’ to what the learner wants to memorize. Without the use of such techniques, not even memory champions can keep more than 5-7 facts in their ‘working memory’ at a time.

You are probably familiar with them since hundreds of ‘self-help’ books have described them:

1. The memory palace: Committing to memory a journey through a familiar place (a childhood home, say) and then associating each item in the list you’re trying to memorize with a sequential point in that journey. To do that, you have to conjure up a memorable image (the more prurient the better) that you can connect with each item in the list, and then ‘place’ that image in the next place in the sequence in your journey. Then as you retrace the journey the images will immediately come to mind in the correct order.
2. The Major System, Person-Action-Object (PAO), and Chunking: This entails first breaking a long string of data (like a phone number) into several pieces and memorizing each chunk instead of each datum. To memorize numbers, the Major System converts the numbers 0-9 into the following consonants: 0=s, 1=t/d, 2=n, 3=m, 4=r, 5=l, 6=sh/ch, 7=k/g, 8=f/v, 9=p/b. Vowels can be inserted anywhere to make the results intelligible. So the number 3219 can be remembered as man (playing) tuba, or Manitoba. A more sophisticated system, the PAO, converts every two digit sequence from 00-99 into a memorized image of an unique person performing an unique action on an unique object. Then any 6-digit sequence can be memorized as the person (from the first two digits) performing the action (from the second two digits) on the object (from the third two digits) — one image to remember 6 consecutive numbers. Card counters and card memorizers use the same technique except with 52 unique P-A-Os instead of 99, allowing them to memorize any 3 consecutive cards with one image, and a whole deck with 18.
3. For memorizing prose and poetry, first read a set of lines to get the gist of it, then create an image that captures the essential ‘memes’ of that set of lines, and place each in a memory palace. Some people assign an image to each line or phrase, others to every word (they use a set of memorized ‘stand-in’ images for the 200-or-so commonest words like pronouns and conjunctions). Some people make their images intellectually stimulating, while others recall the emotion that the words provoked. Many use puns, mnemonics or rhyming words as part of their images. Even the best memory champions struggle with learning text — because of its complexity it’s the hardest thing to memorize.
4. All of these techniques take considerable practice to learn, until they become second nature. If you want to get really good at memorizing, you need to push yourself to memorize more, faster, each day, or your improvement will soon level off.

Although Joshua confesses his memory for unstructured information (like where he left his car keys) is no better now than before he learned the techniques and became a memory champion, and that a lot of structured information (like schedules, ‘to do’ lists and contact information) is easier to keep in a written list or other external place than taking the trouble to memorize it, he does make a compelling argument for practicing the art of memorization on the following grounds:

• It’s good mental exercise as you age, and the social advantages of remembering people’s faces and names and one or two really important (to them or you) things about them is enormous.
• It’s a good practice for becoming more attentive, more mindful, more present in the moment every day.
• You only really ‘know’ a great piece of writing when you’ve committed it to memory.
• “How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember … Our memories make us who we are.” That includes “our ability to find humour, to make connections, to create new ideas, and to share in a common culture”.

I was sufficiently persuaded to decide to practice. The obvious starting point is some of my own stuff — favourite stories, poetry, some of the things I would like to be remembered for, perhaps the ‘signature posts’ on my right sidebar. To be able to stand up before a group and say something that was well-written verbatim without notes is a very powerful capacity, and I’d like to learn to do that.

So that’s where I’m starting.

But then what? What should I memorize after that? If I get into the practice of spending just 15 minutes a day practicing memorizing, what material should I work on besides my own? What’s worth memorizing?

Here are some of the things I’m considering memorizing, for various reasons — they’re succinct and compelling, they’re entertaining, they capture important and essential truths that are often and easily forgotten, they are things I believe and care about so deeply that by memorizing them I feel I might become more truly myself:

• TS Eliot’s Four Quartets
• The lyrics and chords for 20 selected songs I am learning to perform
• The Dark Mountain Manifesto
• The first chapter of John Gray’s Straw Dogs

Thinking about this also, to my surprise, got me thinking about what I want to write next on this blog. What are the most important things I have learned in the nine years since I started writing this blog, which now extends to some 7,000 pages of material? How can I distil them and say them in some memorable way, that I can ‘perform’ when the opportunity permits, to audiences of one or a hundred, in poetry, in prose or in song?

What about you, dear patient reader of my clumsy, verbose and often circuitous writing? What have you memorized, and what to you is worth memorizing?

Bowen in Transition, like many global Transition Initiative communities, is already doing several short-term small-step activities — learning about and (at a personal level) applying permaculture principles, obtaining and acting upon home energy audits, compiling a list of local experts in sustainable food, energy, building etc., holding awareness events etc. But as I noted in my recent Preparing for the Unimaginable post, I am concerned that we need to start thinking about longer-term, larger-scale, community-wide changes if we want to have a community sufficiently competent, self-sufficient and resilient enough to sustain ourselves through major and enduring crises.

I have read some of the “energy descent plans” of some of the leading Transition communities, and they strike me as being long on ideals and objectives and short on credible strategy — how to get there from here. And while my original thought was to draft a “Transition and Resilience Plan” that would include current-state data, scenarios, impact analyses and detailed action plans by community segment (food, energy etc.), I have come to realize that our future is so “unimaginable” that strategic planning is impossible — we cannot begin to know what we must plan for, and if we guess, we will be almost certainly so wrong that our plan will prove mostly useless.

Instead, I wondered if it made sense to have what Don, Rob and Robert called a “Working Towards” plan — specific ideas for helping us (1) build community and increase collaboration and sharing, (2) reduce dependence on imports and centralized systems and increase self-sufficiency, and (3) prepare psychologically and increase resilience for whatever the future holds. The idea was to start doing this within our 40-person Bowen in Transition group, and then engage others, until a majority of Bowen Islanders have acquired this knowledge and these capacities, and Bowen has become a real community. “Working Towards” these three objectives — community, self-sufficiency and psychological resilience — seemed to be something we could all agree on regardless of our ideology.

The more I thought about this ambitious goal, the more skeptical I became. Even if we could get our 40 Transition-savvy members to collectively model this behaviour (when we can’t get most of them to even show up for meetings), how could we possibly scale this up to a couple of thousand people?

As we talked, it was clear that each of us was sufficiently passionate about Transition to stay involved in it to some extent, focused mostly on short-term payback actions in the areas each of us cares about — for Don that includes water, waste management and well-being, for Rob it includes renewable energy, conservation and sustainable technology, for Robert it includes learning and education, and for me it includes livelihoods, transportation, ecological sustainability and self-governance. But as Rob pointed out, most Bowen Islanders are so busy (and stressed) looking after (and out for) family, homes and careers they have no cycles left to do more than vote, sign petitions, and attend occasional information meetings. Transition, even for the aware, is mostly in the “important but not urgent” category.

How do we make Transition urgent, or, if not urgent, at least easy or fun to be involved in in some meaningful way? Robert talked about the value of stories in getting people to a common understanding, which might be a way to create a sense of urgency. He said most Bowen Islanders came here from elsewhere, and their story is mostly about why they came here and what they consciously gave up to do so.

Our story, he explained, reflects and drives our values, and those in turn determine what we think is important to do in the world. Combine that with Pollard’s Law (we do what we must — looking after personal imperatives and addressing the needs of the moment; then we do what’s easy; and then we do what’s fun — what we love doing) and you get something like the graphic above. It explains (left side) why 40 Bowen Islanders gave up a day of their time without much convincing to take our crash course in Transition; it also explains why it’s so difficult to get them/us to do much more.

I talked a bit about Resilience Circles — the new movement that Tree told me about and that Transition US is working with. A resilience circle is:

A small group of 10 – 20 people that comes together to increase personal security during these challenging times. Circles have three purposes: learning, mutual aid, and social action. The economy is going through a deep transition, and economic security is eroding for millions of people. We’re worried about our financial security and about the future we are creating for our children. Many of us aren’t part of communities where we can talk openly about these challenges and fears.

Tree’s group in South Eugene, Oregon, that I mentioned in my post on Building Local Social Capital, exemplifies resilience circles (although it does not call itself that and did not follow the Resilience Circle process). Could such circles be the model that might allow us to bootstrap community to a community-wide scale? One presenter to Transition US suggested that a converging of the Transition and Resilience Circle “methodologies” might allow us to do just that.

The challenge with doing this is that I don’t think you can just go about setting up resilience circles in a coherent and organized way. These are substantially self-organized groups. And unlike Transition groups (which tend to have local champions that coordinate and hold them together), resilience circles appear to be more collectively-managed, with no one particularly in charge or depended upon for their continuance.

The four of us discussed the “magic” of such small “sticky” groups that keep going without a leader or end objective. We each had some experience of such groups — mine was (is) a group that meets monthly for breakfast in Toronto, that I co-founded and which is still going strong without me more than a decade later. It has no leader, and sending out reminders is unprompted and self-organized. It has often had guests, who occasionally join the group, and has had a few larger-group and longer events, but it has generally had about eight members at any one time, of whom usually 5-7 show up each month. Is there something magic about this number, we wondered, as Christopher Allen has suggested (his research suggests ideal size of a working group is 5-7 people and ideal size of a “community” is about 50 people)?

If he’s right, then perhaps instead of trying to create and sustain an Island-wide Transition group we should be looking to create Resilience Circles in each immediate neighbourhood in which one or more of our 40 Bowen in Transition members lives. What would happen if each of us were to call up, out of the blue, our immediate neighbours (whether we know them or not), invite them to a “block party”, and gauge whether there is sufficient interest among them to self-organize a Resilience Circle? This kind of “cellular organization” has worked well for others.

Then, instead of the primary role of Bowen in Transition being Island-wide awareness-building and member recruitment as it is now, it might evolve into a much simpler role of visiting on a rotating basis the 20 or 30 Resilience Circles on the Island, during their get-togethers, suggesting Transition-related activities to them  and sharing “success” stories between/among the different circles. If we could link and network, say, 25 Resilience Circles of a dozen people each, that would be 300 people in the Bowen in Transition network, instead of 40.

The question is whether such a network of circles could evolve into a true model “community”. That raises the question What exactly is a “community” anyway? If we mean it in the sense that we need to “build local community” to be able to take on additional responsibilities when local crises hit and central authorities are no longer able to respond, and to be able to collaborate and share and make decisions in our collective interest, and support each other, then I would say a community is a group of people (around 50 if Christopher is right) who collectively have these attributes:

1. They know and care about each other, and help each other actively and voluntarily rather than out of a sense of obligation or contract.
2. They collectively have the capacities to make a life together in a relatively independent, self-sufficient and self-managed way, and to support each other.
3. They care about the same things. That may be shared values, or shared longer-term objectives, or may be just the result of being thrown together to cope with one or more shared crises.
4. They live in a geographically contiguous area and have a shared sense of place and connection to the land. (I know this proviso will be controversial among “virtual community” fans, and I am not saying that virtual groups can’t do some of these things well, but they can’t do all of them, especially if the crises at hand take from us much of today’s taken-for-granted technology, which I think they will.)

So today 50 people in an area of 500 people could constitute a community, if it was not too far-flung. And then if and when we find ourselves in a world of multiple crises or total social collapse, these 500 people could re-form into ten communities of 50 people each, with 5 people in each of the new communities having already learned how to live in community, and hence able to show and teach the other 45. They would make natural community “federations” of 500 people, and these federations might, as with indigenous confederations, be granted responsibility and resources from the individual communities for doing certain things that are impractical for a group of only 50 to do.

How many circles, then, does it take to make a community? If a circle is 5-7, it would take 7-10. If a circle is 15 (as in the Resilient Circles model) it would only take 3-4. We can’t prescribe it — it needs to evolve to suit the needs and culture of the people and place, and will probably vary.

But I’m intrigued about the possibility of creating a viable, self-sustaining and intimate Resilience Community from neighbourhood cells up instead of from municipality down. And I’m intrigued about the idea of “Working Toward” Transition not by compiling a plan, but organically by developing commitment, compassion, capacities and a sense of urgency in small federated groups, and allowing their collective wisdom to percolate across, until, in our collective wisdom, we are ready for whatever we, and coming generations, must face in the years and decades ahead.

top drawing by Nancy Margulies

The word ‘tragedy’ has a wonderful etymology. It literally means ‘song of the satyrs’ (the first ‘tragedies’ were ‘satyres’ of the human condition in which the players dressed in goatskins). Although it has come to mean a play with an unfortunate ending, it began as a story of the human condition, using satyrs (raw ‘uncivilized’ creatures), as a safe way to reflect upon (satyr-ize) our own species.

A way to bring out truths about us, and our society, that we might not want to hear if we thought they were really about us.

This blog has in recent years been trying to discuss such truths, without the art and subtlety of a true tragedy, with two major story arcs — who we really are, and how the world around us really works. Our story has all the elements of a brilliant tragedy — we could not ask for a better, more devilish script:

1. Our satyric protagonists, Mr and Ms Sapiens, are torn between instinctive loyalty to their bodies, and learned/imposed obedience to their culture. Their bodies — their visceral selves –  are telling them to live a wild, easy, fun life for the moment, in the moment. Their internal chemistries have addicted them to love, to sex, and to a variety of intoxicating substances and activities.
2. But their new satyr culture frowns on such frivolity, and inundates them and their peers with propaganda calling for them to work hard, to conform to rigorous and repressive rules of conduct (including strict romantic and sexual monogamy), to obey without question those in authority, and to fight and even give their lives in defense of their culture and its fierce ideologies.
3. The tension between these two opposing forces is paralyzing, debilitating, and the Sapiens have become ill, physically and psychologically, trying to reconcile them.
4. So as the viewer of this play, on the one hand you sympathize with the Sapiens’ desire to be free, unencumbered by their culture, but on the other hand you also appreciate that without that culture and its inventions the Sapiens’ satyr species would be long extinct.  The Sapiens are so immersed in and dependent on that culture they cannot escape it. They know no other way to live.
5. So we watch as they vacillate between trying to go back and trying to go forward, and as the culture steals their souls and covers them with its gunk, its imprint, to the point they forget who they are and become “everybody else”, automatons in toil and violence and desperation. Until they are “steeped in blood so far that returning were as tedious as going o’er”.
6. Soon, the Sapiens’ lives become a relentless cycle of doing what they must, until they are so exhausted that whatever brief and precious time they have left is spent not in finding a way out of the hellish life they have created/fallen into, but in activities that are easy and fun, that provide a few stolen moments of peace and joy.
7. Their culture and their world have become so complex as to be no longer fathomable. They long for simple answers, and many proffer them, but they know too much to find any solace in any of these false promises and explanations, these “witches’ prophecies”. And they see this culture, inexorably and relentlessly destroying the world, out of control, and are filled with grief and a sense of terrible dread, anger, sorrow and shame for what it has done, and a sense of helplessness and hopelessness knowing in their hearts it will all soon end, badly.
8. As the play reaches its climax, our protagonists find themselves unable to act, unable to simply be, and unable to be happy. What will they do? How will this dark tragedy resolve itself? Suicide? Violent struggle? Magical salvation?

A great story indeed. Fortunately it is only a satyre, an acting out of how another culture, such as the Easter Islanders or the Anasazi, or the fauns and satyrs of the primeval forest, might have faced existential crisis.

It could never be our story.

Michael’s view is that, in the first place, the damage done in previous generations was just as great — the extent of alcoholism, incarceration of the “mentally ill”, and the consequent abuse these previous generations have in turn inflicted on ours, all attest to that. The fact that it’s more visible today, he thinks, is due to the evolution of our society in recent generations from a “producer” society to a “consumer” society. My parents’ generation was expected to work hard and produce, and were assessed by their peers (and probably self-assessed as well) by how successful and effective they were at producing. There was considerably less tolerance for or consideration of behaviours of conspicuous consumption, or in fact any “weak”, unproductive, unexemplary or disobedient behaviour. One was expected to behave oneself, and, when one felt bad, buck it up, for the good of all.

By contrast, we are now judged largely by what we consume, and it is relatively unimportant how we came by the means to consume it (hard work, theft or inheritance). As a result, a much broader range of visible behaviour is tolerated, and responsibility for what we do and how we act has been substantially left to our discretion (or lack thereof). The “insane asylums” and hospitals for the poor have mostly been emptied and closed, their previous residents for the most part thrown into the streets. From schools to workplaces to religious observances, our culture has been socially deregulated, and the result is that our personal and collective trauma is on display, untreated (for better or worse), unconcealed and made our own personal responsibility. It is even, when sufficiently entertaining, celebrated, in an endless orgy of schadenfreude on Reality TV.

We are left to heal ourselves, and our homes and communities have now become the prisons and hospitals in which we seek to do it. Mental illness has become a huge and profitable industry for Big Pharma to exploit; giant pill-pushing corporations now relentlessly press us to “ask your doctor if X is right for you” (and challenge him or her if the answer is “no”).

I think Michael’s explanation is very plausible. I have my own theories (related to population stress and some unintended consequences of our adaptation to previous sudden climate change) about why abuse and trauma are so rampant in our modern civilization, despite our material affluence and knowledge. Whatever the causes of this epidemic, we have, for the most part, never coped with it well. Now that we are no longer socially obligated to work hard and believe and do what we’re told from cradle to grave, we are “free” to try to heal from all the damage this infectious violence-mad culture has unintentionally done to us.

Michael’s book From Terror to Love deconstructs the myths that we cling to and try to live by — that the world is inherently good and just, that violence can be redemptive, that we are progressing and the future will inevitably be better, that technology and innovation will solve everything, or that we will be saved by some magic or miracle of rapture or collective global consciousness. Michael and I agree that none of these myths is particularly sensible or useful, and belief in them is neither healthy no comforting. We both believe that the social and material disintegration of our civilization culture is now beyond halting or reforming.

So we talked instead about acceptance, about letting go of what cannot be fixed or undone, and about what that means for how we “are” in the world. In his book Michael describes an alternative myth/worldview he calls “the love myth… the only myth…that escapes nihilism‘s grasp, the only myth that can preserve our humanity in these waning days of our civilization”. He writes:

Only love, only the ability to perceive deep beauty within the world, within other people, within ourselves, the ability to commit ourselves to nurturing and protecting and celebrating others, only this can save us from despair, only this can redeem our dignity and salvage our courage. Love alone can free us from the terrors of the ego, from the all-consuming panic of self-preservation… Since the tribulations of the coming age will make monsters of all of us, let us try to become monsters of love, monsters at home among the ruins of dreams, in the wilderness of our broken civilization.

We concluded our discussion by exploring how one might make this practice of love and acceptance collective. For many of us, this attempt to reach a state of acceptance (and self-acceptance) is carried out through personal practices — meditation, yoga, martial arts, personal healing and self-therapy programs of one kind or another. Their principal goal, aside from self-healing, is, in Michael’s words, mindfulness. Close to what I have been calling (and seeking) presence. The idea, I suppose, is that once one becomes mindful, present, while on one’s own, one can then call on this mental state of alertness, awareness, acceptance, letting go, openness, etc. when in the company of others, and help ourselves and them and our whole society to function more effectively as a result.

But, I wondered, are there some collective mindfulness practices, some things that we can do purposefully together peer-to-peer-to-peer to help achieve and sustain this highly functional state? A highly functional collective state? How can we practice being better together?

There are of course mentoring and group therapies, group meditations, and collective techniques (e.g. Open Space) designed to help us do better together. And the Group Works card deck my colleagues and I have just produced is designed to help facilitators and participants in group deliberations achieve their intended goals more effectively. But I am not talking about ways of improving the productivity or effectiveness of groups. I am talking about ways of improving the collective mindfulness of groups. Not what they do or how they do it together, but how they are together.

I’ve been thinking and taking about this a lot since my meeting with Michael, and those I have spoken with have suggested the following possible Collective Mindfulness Practices:

1. Ask open, interesting questions, and enable the group to explore them without expecting to find answers.
2. Bohm/Bohmian Dialogue:
   • “Bohm dialogue is a way of being together in a group. Twenty to forty participants sit in a circle, for a few hours during regular meetings, or for a few days in a workshop environment. This is done with no predefined purpose, no agenda, other than that of inquiring into the movement of thought, and exploring the process of ‘thinking together’ collectively. This activity can allow group participants to examine their preconceptions and prejudices, as well as to explore the more general movement of thought.” (Thanks to Seb Paquet for this link)
   • Participants of such Dialogues (the etymological meaning of the word is ‘speaking among’ and the ‘dia-’ means ‘across or among’ not ‘two’ as many think) are urged (a) to suspend judgements and expectations, (b) not to make any group decisions during or at the conclusion of the dialogue (the process is emergent), (c) to practice total honesty, openness and transparency, and (d) to build on rather than challenging or contradicting what has been said before.
   • Rather than being action-oriented (although some users of the approach have coopted it for making decisions and agreeing upon actions), this approach seems to be all about increasing understanding of who we (collectively) are, and appreciation of how our thoughts align and differ, our worldviews and belief systems overlap and diverge, how our minds work, imagine and create, and how we “change” our minds.
3. Karl Weick’s Simplicity Beyond Complexity Sense-making approach:
   • Encourage unstructured conversations to enable shared meaning and understanding to emerge.
   • Enable people to move beyond fixed self-identities, to learn about themselves and see themselves differently and more empowered, more flexible.
   • Appreciate that we often act even before we “make up our minds” and then rationalize what we did, and facilitate a deep understanding of what actually underlies our actions and decisions.
   • Encourage suspension of decisions and avoidance of confirmation bias (hearing what we want to hear and disregarding what doesn’t fit with our worldviews and beliefs).
   • Help people understand that complex processes are dynamic and ongoing and that rigorous analysis, forecasts, predictions, causal certainty, defined goals, ends and mandates are inherently simplistic and unrealistic ways to deal with them.
   • Dig deeper beyond what seems to make ‘perfect’ sense, with the knowledge that the truth is always more profound and complex than we can every fully understand.
   • Iterate and try lots of “safe-fail” explorations and experiments to avoid being locked in to one way of thinking or one course of action.
4. Make music, art, theatre, quilts, or barns together, improvisationally and cohesively.
5. Nature walks, watching the sunrise/sunset/storm/stars, and similar unstructured shared observation and exploration experiences. By this I mean peaceful, silent, reflective activities, not White Mile character-building or cult indoctrination activities. I also don’t mean watching movies or theatre together — such activities, like reading (even while in each other’s arms), take our attention away from the others we attend with, instead of engaging us together as part of a larger whole.
6. Playing together, either collaboratively or, if not, then without intense competition or keeping score. Role-playing games, cooperative board games, ultimate frisbee — it doesn’t really matter what you play.
7. Eating together, without outside distractions.

Going back to Michael’s definition of the behaviour of people in love with each other and with the world: Can we say the above practices exhibit our collective “ability to perceive deep beauty within the world, within other people, within ourselves, the ability to commit ourselves to nurturing and protecting and celebrating others”? Question-posing, Dialogues, Sense-making, Improv, Shared Observation and Exploration, Play, Eating Together — are these really acts of collective love, mindfulness, attention?

The answer, I think, is that they usually are not, but they could be if they were practiced properly, mindfully. The challenge is that we have become so locked in to mind-less collective practices (especially in the workplace, and other hierarchies) that it would take a huge effort and great deal of patience for a group to relearn to do these things mindfully. Posing questions normally leads, Trivial Pursuit-style, to a competition to come up with the first correct or best answer. Dialogues we are familiar with are focused on reaching decisions on who will do what by when. Sense-making is too often a process for reassuring ourselves that what we already believed was right. Improv creativity, when it happens at all, can lead to ego wars and separation and individuation of tasks. Shared observation and exploration, and eating together, will generally cause some to “space out” and retreat inside their heads and others, unable to cope with the silence, to engage in banal conversations or actions (e.g. checking e-mail). Playing together very often leads to competition and even to violence.

We are just not very good at being mindful together, at just being together, attentive, perceptive, responsive, protective, nurturing, appreciative, relaxed and at peace in each others’ company. I can remember observing a group of dogs sitting on a hill at sunset a few years ago and they absolutely exemplified this collective mindfulness. I can’t remember seeing it in any human assemblage of more than two. If we hope to make a practice of this (and if we expect to be able to create cohesive communities to cope with the serious crises we will face in coming decades we will have to), we will need a lot of practice. To do so we will, I think, need to do five related things:

1. Know and love and be comfortable with ourselves as individuals and as intimates with the others in the collective, to the point we can unequivocally consider ourselves a coherent ‘tribe‘. (thanks Venessa for outlining what this entails)
2. Evolve a collective sense of ourselves as a collective. Not who we are made up of, not what we do, but what is our collective identity, the thing we are all a part of.
3. Learn how to do nothing, how to just be still, in the moment, how to just be, alone and together. No nattering, no checking gadgets, no distractions. Eventually we can evolve to be fully present, and to facilitate others to just be, but to start it will be enough to just be relaxed, attentive, here, now, together.
4. Learn to respect and love and trust those who are in our tribe who (for a variety of good reasons) we don’t particularly like or agree with. We are used to creating and belonging to groups uniquely made up of people we like and think like, and abandoning the groups when others we don’t like or think like get involved. This will be a hard habit to break.
5. Relearn how to play. Riff off and build on what others in the tribe start. Overcome our modern society’s horrific imaginative poverty. Create our own entertainment. Have fun without manufactured products or rules. Smile more, laugh more, give more, try new things more, experiment more. Work is doing. Play is being.

Eventually we will get good at this, when our civilization culture crumbles and we no longer have any other choice. I’m wondering if I’m ready to let myself be adopted into one of the local ‘tribes’ here on Bowen Island. And wondering why I still find the idea so scary.

(Image above is one of 91 cards in the Group Works deck, developed jointly by more than two dozen experienced facilitators over 3 years to help facilitators and participants to design and enable better meetings, conferences and group collaborations. To learn more about the deck, or get your copy, please visit groupworksdeck.org . [Full disclosure: I am a member of the core team that developed the deck.])

chart of fears, from this earlier post

Nick Smith recently pointed me to a short article by Turil Cronburg, which in part read:

The way I’ve found real safety, even while being held captive in jail and in homeless shelters (run almost like a jail) and mental institutions (again pretty much like a jail) has been a combination of realizing that safety is really all about freedom, and finding clarity of my own purpose in life. And by freedom I mean freedom to be oneself. To react to life’s complications in a way that is honest and true to what one’s deepest self is – one’s highest ideals of what one wants to contribute to the world, one’s purpose in life.

If I am trapped physically by a violent individual or group – the shelter system, “legal” system, or “health care” system or any other forceful agent – I might not be especially free in a physical sense, which certainly sucks, and is something a healthy society will avoid at all costs, but on a deeper, more meaningful sense I am very much free to make at least some choices about what I do and say such that they help me make progress on my life’s goals…  Real safety comes from finding the most effective way of expressing your true self – what you want and what you have to offer – in every situation you come across in your path.

This is what ee cummings was saying when he wrote about how hard it is to be “nobody-but-yourself” in a world where everyone (the media, advertisers, peers, others trying to influence and/or control us, and even that small self-critical voice inside us) is trying to make us “everybody-else”.

The day after I read, Turil’s post, Mireille Jansma pointed me to this TedX talk by psychologist Brené Brown, in which Brené says something quite similar:

Whenever we’re on the verge of bliss, we picture something horrible happening… I blame this in part on the media… This is a symptom of an issue that is both universal and profoundly dangerous, and that is: We are losing our tolerance for vulnerability, which we see as synonymous with weakness, and which is at the core of our fear and anxiety and shame and other difficult emotions, but which also is at the core of joy, love, belonging, creativity, and faith.

When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding, disappointment, disconnection, perfectionism, [political, religious, and ideological] extremism, and most of all self-numbing, [mechanisms by which] we try to protect ourselves. What is driving this intolerance for vulnerability?… [I think it's] scarcity. We live in a culture that tells us that there is never enough [time, money, security etc. and] that we cannot ever be good enough. [We are inundated with hugely exaggerated messages of ubiquitous danger.]…

We numb vulnerability. We are the most addicted, the most medicated, obese and in debt cohort in human history. And we stay busy, so that the [feared] truth of our life can’t catch up. What are the consequences of numbing ourselves to vulnerability? You cannot selectively numb emotion. When we numb the dark emotions — vulnerability, fear, shame of not being good enough — we by default numb joy.

After this intriguing diagnosis, alas, Brené falls victim to the tendency of most ‘experts’ (and self-help book writers) to prescribe a cure for the malaise they’ve just identified.

How do we embrace vulnerability? Practice gratitude… Honor what’s ordinary about our lives… Play… [Appreciate] nature… We want more guarantees. We we want to believe that we we’re not going to get hurt and that bad things aren’t going to happen and they are. But if we don’t allow ourselves to [fully] experience joy and love we will definitely miss out on filling our reservoir with what we need when those hard things happen.

“Practice gratitude” is a nice phrase, and maybe whatever it means it works for her, but it’s not at all clear how this is supposed to help us “embrace vulnerability”. The advice, in any case, violates the corollary to Pollard’s Law: Things are the way they are for a reason. If you want to change something, first be sure you understand why it is the way it is. To tell us essentially the way to overcome our fears is “don’t be afraid” is not useful, or actionable, and the struggle in vain to try to follow this advice is likely to lead to even more feelings of “we can never be good enough”, and more retreat to numbness.

I am a fearful person, and I have become as a result of trying to cope with these fears and anxieties somewhat emotionally flattened, if not numbed. But I have come to accept myself: We cannot be other than who we really are. I aspire to liberate myself from civilization culture, and hence become less fearful and more present, more “nobody-but-myself”. But I acknowledge that this will take lifelong practice and may well be a fruitless pursuit.

As a result, a far more interesting approach, I think, would be to ask ourselves these questions, and come up with our own answers, coping practices, and self-acceptances:

1. Who is “nobody-but-myself”? If I lived in a cultureal that didn’t try to make me “everybody-else”, what would I be like? What’s holding me back?
2. What am I afraid of, and why? How do I cope with these fears (avoid, vent, condition/desensitize, learn, accept, detach/let go)? Why aren’t these coping mechanisms fully effective for me?

The ultimate question stemming from these is What can I do with this self-knowledge? And the answer may be: nothing. It may be enough just to understand ourselves a little better, to know why we are the way we are.

This is another in my series of articles exploring the basic existential questions of who we are and what motivates us to do what we do. For those puzzled about what that has to do with “saving the world”, my answer is that if we hope to be able to organize with others to make the world a better place, and deal with the huge crises we are now beginning to face, we are going to have to be cognizant of the truth of human nature, and specifically these existential questions. There is no point hoping millions or billions of people are going to change their beliefs and behaviours if such change is just not in our nature. And, as regular readers of this blog know, I am inclined to believe it is not in our nature, though I’m open to evidence to the contrary.

My friend Dale Asberry has been writing about “human cognitive failures” and put me on to this article in the extraordinary Less Wrong wiki, about whether what we want and what we like are different, and if so how and why. At the same time, my contacts who are members of Quora, a collective brainstorming site on deep philosophical questions, have been pinging me about the threads related to the existence (or non-existence) of free will.

As I wrote last year, my position on who we are and the existence of free will is as follows:

1. The cells and organs of our bodies evolved our brains as a feature-detection, protection and mobility management device for their purposes. The ‘existence’ of our minds and identities as ‘individuals’ is therefore a self-deception. Our minds are nothing more than processes carried out for the benefit of our cells and organs — they are their information processing system, not ‘ours’.
2. Like most species, we are social creatures that have evolved codes of behaviour that enable us, as part of the larger organism of all-life-on-Earth, to collaborate, share and keep our numbers in balance with the local ecosystem — these are all evolutionary selected behaviours, since they enable us to adapt and fit well into these ecosystems. These learned codes of behaviour are called cultures.
3. In times of stress, due to overcrowding, natural disasters, climate change or the exhaustion of local resources, cultures can intervene to act in adaptive ways that would be unneeded in normal times, including war, migration, adoption of new diets, new tools and new ways of living that are better suited in evolutionary terms to the changed environment. At some point some of our species chose to leave the trees of the tropical rainforest where we lived a leisurely life as vegetarian gatherers for a million years, and struggle to survive in other environments. We evolved weapons to kill other animals, enabling us to live as carnivores, and discovered ‘catastrophic’ agriculture, enabling us to live where there was insufficient food growing naturally. These new tools, however, required settlement and a very different kind of culture — civilization culture — to sustain.
4. Civilization culture requires sacrificing a great many freedoms for the survival of the collective membership, and requires vastly more work, personal sacrifice, hardship, suffering, and vulnerability to catastrophe than other cultures. To keep people from obeying their cells’ and organs’ natural tendencies by just walking away from this culture, it is of necessity inherently coercive, using hierarchy, violence, threat of imprisonment, propaganda and other means to ensure obedience and conformity of the group.
5. Whereas our cells and organs had nearly full control of our (their) minds before civilization culture evolved, the new culture was able, through language and coercion, to influence and seize control of a significant part of our minds. There has been a continuing and escalating war for control of our minds ever since. Our culture persuades us that we have ‘free will’ to ignore what our cells and organs impel us to do and instead do what it (our culture) wants us to do — that we have an ego, an identity, and a responsibility to conduct ourselves according to the rules of civilized society, or we must face the social consequences.

So ‘we’ are, essentially, helpless witnesses in an endless struggle between our cells/organs/bodies and our culture for control of ‘our’ minds, and our beliefs and behaviours reflect who has ‘won’ each battle in that struggle. By contrast, our close cousins the bonobos (yes, I know they aren’t perfect either) are at peace — there is no inherent conflict between what their bodies and culture want, no scarcity, no imposed responsibility, almost no aggression, no monogamy or jealousy, no hoarding. And their only real stress is caused by our brutal, cancerous culture, which is extinguishing theirs.

Where does ‘liking’ versus ‘wanting’ fit into this model of who we are? Things we like (such as being in love, being in nature, listening to music, play, learning and helping others), according to the Less Wrong article, are different from things we want (such as sex, addictive foods and other substances, attention, appreciation, and acquisition of shiny objects — all things that in our modern culture are usually scarce). When we do or get things we like, we are happy. When we do or get things we want, we are often not happy — just (for a time) satisfied. Wants are cravings; likes are joys. Needs are another matter entirely — none of the “wants” listed above are really needs, the way that nutritious food, water, warmth, and social contact are — things we cannot live without. Wants could be seen as the midpoint of a continuum between likes and needs. Some things may be both wants and likes — beauty, for example, may be something we crave (especially if our world offers little of it) but is also something we derive genuine happiness from.

An example to explain the difference: For many years I hosted and organized monthly neighbourhood poker games. The game was small stakes with strict limits, couples and total novices were welcome, and we played “dealer’s choice”, developing over the years a list of some 100 variants, some of them really silly. Really serious poker players who had to win to consider the event a success, generally dropped out after one or two months. Much of the game was about learning, sharing, showing, and inventing new games. It was fun, and generally people were happy, win or lose. But everyone sometimes got unhappy if they lost too many times in a row, or lost a large pot by a very close margin. At these points, when tension rose, liking to play became wanting to win. Joy became addiction to the ‘high’ of taking risks and winning big. The nights I liked best were the ones where I came out ahead, but not too far ahead, and not as a result of any one person’s loss. Yet I know there is a gambler in me, someone who wants to win more than he likes to play. When I get stressed, I distract myself with video games (including poker against computer opponents) and I want to win (and get upset when I don’t, even though there is no ‘real’ money involved).

Scientists now say that the chemical reactions in the body when we ‘want’ something (dopamine-based) are different from those when we ‘like’ something (endomorphin and enkephalin based). Why would this be so?

My hypothesis is that this different chemistry evolved to suit different requirements: Our wants take precedence in times of stress or scarcity, while our likes take precedence in times of peace and abundance. When we can “afford” it, we do what we like; the rest of the time, we do what we want. This does make sense in the context of wants being more urgent and closer to needs.

Creatures in the wild, according to some biologists, spend most of their lives in “Now Time” — present, blissful, unaware of the passage or even existence of “Clock Time”. During this time they are happy (that’s in the best interest of the perpetuation of the species) and their lives are seemingly eternal. Their body chemistry in this state is driven by endomorphins (not to be confused with endorphins) and enkephalins, which create a feeling of bliss.

In times of stress or scarcity, however, wild creatures snap into “Clock Time” (the instantaneous time-sensitive state that most humans spend their entire lives in), and hormones are produced to equip the body for fight-or-flight. They are driven then to satisfy immediate needs and wants (safety, food, victory over a predator or enemy etc.), and their body chemistry in this state is driven by dopamine — which immediately flushes the body when a craving for one of these needs or wants is satisfied. Not the same thing as happiness at all. When the crisis has passed, the creature returns quickly to Now Time, and the endomorphins and enkephalins again take charge of the body, seeking happiness.

Except for the few humans who are able to set aside the constant and chronic stressors of modern civilization culture (through meditation or other relaxation/awareness/presence practices), we humans spend all our lives charged up and seeking the satisfaction of our endless needs and wants, the dopamine “rush”. And our industrial civilization culture, which now depends on a constant growth of consumption, encourages this by creating additional “needs” and anxiety about scarcity and inadequacy. We’re never really happy, only temporarily satisfied.

My guess is that the emotional and erotic response stimuli shown in the Chemistry of Love chart above, are primarily “want” chemicals, while the aesthetic, sensual and intellectual response stimuli in the chart are primarily “like” chemicals. Science remains almost entirely clueless on this, however, so this is only a wild guess.

This is part of the reason, I think, that we humans have become so utterly disconnected from Gaia, from the land and place where we live, from all-life-on-Earth. That biophilia connection is a “like” connection, which only few humans, rarely, really feel, so deeply are we buried in the chemistry of unfulfilled needs and wants. Yet our instincts, I think, still “know” and long for this connection, and every once in a while, in those still, peaceful moments of deep relaxation and awareness, we become present, shift into Now Time, and start to resonate with the ancient and delightful chemistry of what we really like, beyond wants and needs.

That is why I believe that the essential preparation for the coming economic, energy and ecological crises, culminating in the collapse of our exhausted civilization, is re-acquiring those essential capacities that will lift us out of the culturally-created illusion that our world is one of endless conflict and scarcity, full of unmet needs and desperate wants, and move us into the real-ization that a better, simpler life is possible, one almost entirely without wants or needs, one where we are free to enjoy what we really like — being in love, being in nature, listening to music, play, learning and helping others, all things that are and have always been free.

Only then can we realize that our civilization culture cannot be reformed to provide what we want and need (in fact its purpose is to create more and greater wants and needs). And by its very design, it will never make us happy.

This is another post in my ongoing personal exploration of ‘who we (human beings) are’, how we got that way, and how, at the individual level, we might learn to better heal, better adapt, and better prepare ourselves for what’s to come.

I‘m a pretty fearful guy. I spend a lot of time trying to work up the courage and/or energy to do important things, and not much actually voluntarily doing anything important (I’m comfortably retired from paid work, so I am fortunate to not have to do anything).

At the risk of appearing to rationalize my unproductivity, I have a theory for why I am this way: Our culture wants us fearful and (emotionally) flattened. Here’s my thinking:

Back when there were only a few million of our species, we had no real need for culture. When I observe wild creatures, I see them living “in the now”. They will do what is needed to help the flock/herd/group in the moment, and most wild creatures are a lot more generous and altruistic than we might think. What they are not is anxious or fearful about the future, or in thrall to their collective culture. That’s in part because they ‘know’ they have no control over the future, so there is no evolutionary point in them imagining it or worrying about it. Their fears are immediate, and require a quick fight/flight response, after which the anger and/or sorrow they felt when the fear was realized, is discharged, and they return to living joyfully in Now Time. That’s not to say they don’t feel grief at the loss or suffering of a loved one — just that they are not fruitlessly consumed or debilitated by these feelings.

Wild creatures have cultures (read Bernd Heinrich’s works on corvids if you want to learn more about avian cultures), but these cultures are simple emergent properties of the reality of their lives; culture is not necessary to their evolutionary success and does not impose itself on individuals in the group. Wild creatures do what they do because their instinctive, intellectual, sensory and emotional ‘knowledge’ guides them. They may scrap with others in their group, and may not always get what they want, and they are able in the moment to collaborate brilliantly to achieve a shared goal, but ultimately they make their own culturally-unencumbered decisions.

When human populations started to outstrip the carrying capacity of our ecosystems (the reason why we did so is a subject for another essay) it became necessary for our species to ‘settle’, and to create new political, economic and social systems just to survive in unnaturally large numbers and concentrations. Democracy and personal freedoms don’t scale well, especially in situations of horrific and unnatural overcrowding, so as these human systems grew larger they had to become ever-more coercive — we had to be forced to conform, to obey others and cultural “rules”, to “settle” for less than what our wild selves had always been accustomed to, and will always yearn for.

As our human numbers accelerated and soared past a billion, the levels of human violence and oppression have ratcheted up commensurately. So have the numbers physically imprisoned — in jails, ghettos, camps, and (in Gaza for example) even whole nations.

But physical violence and physical constraints have not been enough to keep us in line. To submit more and more of the ever-increasing plague of human numbers to the necessary levels of restraint and suppression of our natural behaviours, psychological violence has been required as well. What I see, all over the world, are two now-endemic forms of psychological violence invoked to keep seven billion people in our culture’s thrall:

1. the social construction and constant triggering of a new set of crippling fears via learned helplessness, and
2. the emotional flattening of the human spirit through social prohibitions and inurement.

To inure is “to habituate to something undesirable, especially by prolonged subjection” or acculturation. If you are subjected to something long enough and often enough (e.g. spending time in slaughterhouses or jails or emergency wards or factory farms or “old age” homes or street gangs or torture prisons or refugee camps or ghettos or the armed forces or police forces, or living with an abuser, or watching violent “entertainment”) you become habituated to it. You become unable to feel the strong negative emotions and visceral revulsion that you would if this were a rare or brief event. You cannot. You emotionally detach, disengage, dissociate. No one can sustain that intensity of emotion indefinitely. The emotion gets suppressed, turned inward, and eventually the chemical reaction that occurs no longer has the same effect. You become emotionally flattened, numbed.

From the perspective of a massive human culture that is trying to get all seven billion of its members to work hard without anger, grief, outrage, or complaint, such emotional flattening provides a huge evolutionary advantage. If you can be inured to not care, or to not care to know, you can be made to do anything. Or, in the face of continued cultural atrocities, to do nothing.

But there is an even more powerful tool that can be brought to bear to wield control over billions of people — fear. Fear is a natural phenomenon — most creatures have evolved instinctive fears of injury, and of being trapped, and of imminent harm happening to their loved ones, and these instincts have helped them survive.

Humans, however, thanks to our exceptional imaginations and memory and our invention of “Clock” Time, are capable of whole sets of additional fears about things that are either outside our control or are about the future. It doesn’t matter whether we are able to do anything useful with these fears. If they are invoked, we will fear nonetheless — and groups that are able to invoke widespread fear among others can capitalize brilliantly on it. Here are some of the things we humans fear (the taxonomy is mine, and is not intended to be complete or scientific); the ones on the right are those fears our culture has added to our instinctive repertoire, and thence exploited mercilessly and relentlessly to keep us in line:

Fearful and flattened. That’s what our industrial growth culture wants and needs of its members, now that it is a global monoculture strained to its absolute limits. Unless exercised in a culturally-approved way (such as “competitive” sports, wars, or abuse of one’s work or social “subordinates”), or locked away behind closed doors where there is plausible deniability, anger is now met with quick and violent suppression. Peaceful but angry demonstrations are met with heavily-armed stormtroopers. Anyone who even discusses angry resistance to the ecological desolation of our planet, to the theft and pillaging of Earth’s resources for the benefit of a tiny rapacious 1%, or to wars over oil or ideology, is branded a “terrorist” and subject to “disappearance”, extraordinary rendition to torture prisons, and/or indefinite imprisonment.

Likewise, feelings of debilitating grief, which I think are perfectly normal in our terrible world, have been pathologized and are now treated with large doses of anti-depressants or, failing that, ostracism and/or incarceration or other institutionalization. Our industrial culture teaches us to self-victimize. We are to blame, we are told, for our own unemployment and poverty (due to personal laziness or lack of moral fibre). We are to blame, too, for our own chronic illnesses (due to our poor eating and exercising habits). Suicide is, of course, treated not only as a sign of irresponsibility, but as a crime.

Our culture employs propaganda not only to divert responsibility for our anger and grief to ourselves, but also to keep us fearful. The propaganda machine creates a worldview of danger and scarcity, consuming us with fear of attack, of failure, of loss (especially loss of love), of uncertainty, of not fitting in and “not having enough”. And, of course, of death.

Because of our brain’s vulnerability to these future, unpredictable, easily-exaggerated and unactionable fears, our culture can exploit us by playing on our anxieties — re-triggerable dreads that precede fear and subside when those fears are not realized. Anxieties are conceivable fears. Any fear that can be conceived — terrorists, foreigners, rejection, threats of all kinds — can be blown up and exploited and used to control us and our behaviour, and even to immobilize us.

This cultural immobilization runs deeper than most of us ever realize. People on their death-beds, asked what they most regret in their lives, overwhelmingly cite things they regret not doing rather than things they did, and most of those ‘inactions’ are the result of cultural constraints or personal self-constraints, self-censorship of action, rather than the result of never having the opportunity to do those things. Daniel Gilbert‘s research shows that (thanks to our cultural programming) we have a tendency to overestimate the impact of current and future events and decisions on our future happiness, and this makes us timid and risk-averse in making those decisions, and overly preoccupied with the future instead of our current happiness. And many people’s reaction to Derrick Jensen’s relentless urging of us to act on our instincts in defence of our suffering and dying planet, is resentment at being pushed to do what is culturally-prohibited, rather than anger at the culture that is, with our own complicity, holding us back.

There are two cycles, which I think are unique to our species (or at least to large-brained species), that can be provoked with appropriate propaganda, as shown in the diagram below.

Because our brains create stories (mental representations of what is, was, may be or will be, and of who we are and why we are that way), we can and do constantly ‘re-enact’ situations which caused us pain and suffering — what I call the grief/inurement cycle. We feel the pain, we create a story to explain it, that story is so vivid and memorable that recalling it re-invokes the pain, and so on. We can become incapacitated by such suffering, until enough cycles have passed that we begin to forget these stories and heal. This aids a coercive culture in two ways: through the initial debilitation that prevents us from acting against the perpetrator of the outrage that produced the pain, and through the inurement that comes when we become so desensitized to the outrages, and the pain and suffering, that we begin to accept them as normal, the only way to live.

And then there’s the feedback cycle from anger and sorrow to chronic anxiety, as our brains imagine situations in which the atrocity that caused our pain could recur again and again, to the point this anxiety begins to immobilize us, and makes us pliable to cultural forces that promise to relieve us of or protect us from the things we have learned to fear. As Robert Sapolsky‘s research has shown, this anxiety/fear/pain/anger/grief feedback cycle is an emergent property and unintended consequence of our brain’s exceptional ability to imagine and recall, and the anxiety, especially in situations where events are outside our control, is unhealthy and useless — except to the culture that wants to use it to control us. This cycle also produces “learned helplessness” — the invalid but propaganda-reinforced sense that there is nothing we can do, except hope and trust that our ‘leaders’ can ‘save’ us.

Those who presume to be able to tell us how to deal with and ‘overcome’ our fears suggest six broad approaches to doing so. None of them is simple, or else we would all be using it. But the harder approaches (at least, harder for me: your experience may be different) seem to me to offer more effective ways of interrupting the vicious cycle of suffering, grief and inurement, or the vicious cycle of chronic anxiety and learned helplessness. Here’s a table that shows these six broad approaches to dealing with fear, and my personal assessment of their potential efficacy (again, your experience may be different):

The first, and obvious, approach is to try to avoid situations that give rise to fear or anxiety in the first place, but I’m learning that this is futile. The more you try to protect yourself, the more vulnerable you become to events and situations you could not avoid, and in the process you can incapacitate yourself to the point you become afraid to do anything.

Another common approach is to try to discharge, through physical means or through conversation therapies or other behavioural techniques, the emotion that the fear gives rise to. Many people believe wild animals do this when they “shake off” their emotion after averting danger. The theory is that this “discharging” cuts off both the grief/inurement cycle and the anxiety/fear/pain/anger/sorrow cycle by preventing the pain from being constantly revisited and reimagined and dwelled upon. But I would argue that we are incapable of having that much control over our memories and imaginations, and that while discharging might provide temporary relief, in the long term it is more likely to lead to addiction to the act of discharging (especially dangerous if that discharging is expressed as violence or unrestrained anger against others), than to any relief from either pain or recurring anxiety.

A newer method of dealing with fears is conditioning. For those with fear of flying, for example, the idea is to have the fearful person experience many safe flying experiences gradually, so that the mental connection between the experience and the feeling of pain is broken, and eventually the anticipation of the experience arouses no anxiety. I know some people for whom this has worked (and others for whom it has not). The danger is that you can end up being desensitized to real risks based on limited experiences. What happens if you are conditioning yourself to overcome fear of flying and your plane has an emergency landing? Trauma, I would think.

A fourth approach is learning and preparation. The more you know about what you can actually do if a fearful situation arises, in theory the less anxious you are likely to be about its potential occurrence. You are, in effect, combating the learned helplessness by giving yourself something (knowledge and experience) that gives you more control over a potential future experience. The danger here is that you may think you have more control than you really have, and that self-deception may lead to underreaction or complacency when the risk is real.

Now we come to the two methods I’ve been working on most recently. I think they’re connected. The idea of “letting go” of our stories about what might happen (our anxieties) to the extent they are beyond our control is extremely difficult, and I appreciate the skepticism of those who assert we can think ourselves out of our pain and anger and sorrow and fear. But our anxieties and fears and stories about things we cannot really know and cannot control is a ‘learned’ behaviour, so it should be something that, with practice and self-awareness and self-knowledge and self-management, can be unlearned.

And the sixth approach, of simply Living in the Now, and rejecting the stories our minds (and our culture) tell us about ourselves and others, and about what is and was and will be (or may be) in the future, before they even become part of our belief system and worldview, seems to me likewise a means of living more naturally, of being more present. I have had moments when I feel fully present, when I am simultaneously very aware (and self-aware) and very relaxed (and hence more competent and resilient in the moment), and in such moments I feel legitimately fearless. I want that feeling to last forever, and sense that this is the way most wild creatures, unencumbered by diabolically imaginative and past- and future-oriented brains, live their whole lives (except when danger is imminent), joyfully, naturally, and arguably more sensibly than we.

So my sense is that this practising of presence, this learning to live in Now Time and to let go what I cannot predict or control, is what I must pursue with increasing energy and commitment. I see it as being part of rediscovering who I really am, this feral, nobody-but-myself, me. And I think this is essential to cultural liberation and hence to the emotional flatness and fearfulness that is so much a part of the “everybody-else” me I have been acting as for so many years.

Maybe this is what we must all learn to do if we want to be able to do the essential work of preparing ourselves, our loved ones and our communities for the terrible crises ahead, when our industrial-growth civilization culture collapses and loosens its well-intentioned hold on the rest of us. Maybe that preparation is nothing more than this learning, this becoming ready to live without dependence on and coercion by culture. So that when it happens, we will know, as liberated, wild creatures, exactly what to do, in the moment.

Our perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps what I am seeing as the dark constraint of and the emotional imprisonment by our culture, is just my own projection, my own neat and convenient story for my own inaction, now. I don’t know. I’ll let you know if I figure it out.

image from free-desktop-backgrounds.net

Today, after months of hearings and deliberation, a BC judge ruled that the Canadian federal law making “polygamous union” a criminal offence in Canada was needed and defensible notwithstanding the fact that it does violate freedom of religion and other provisions in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In a 300+ page judgement he ruled that the charter right to freedom from the threat of harm, particularly to women and children, outweighed religious charter rights. He also asserted that the law violates the charter’s right to fundamental justice when it is applied to minors, and as such the law cannot legally and should not be used to prosecute minors.

This means that actions taken under this law against leaders of an allegedly misogynist and child-abusing fundamentalist Mormon cult group in the village of Bountiful BC, which were thrown out on constitutional grounds, can be reinstated. It is unclear whether the decision will be appealed (to the Canadian Supreme Court), which would delay prosecution.

The West Coast Legal and Educational Action Fund (LEAF) argued that the law needed to be rewritten and narrowed to cover only situations involving “minors, exploitation, coercion, abuse of authority, a gross imbalance of power or undue influence”, an argument the judge rejected, claiming that the information presented to him made it clear that polygamy is inherently harmful and that “there is no such thing as ‘good polygamy’”. The Civil Liberties Association argued, also unsuccessfully, that the law should simply be ruled unconstitutional and not used, since by criminalizing polygamy it merely drives it underground, increasing rather than reducing the vulnerability of affected women and children. All of the opponents of the argued that there are many existing laws against child and spousal abuse, unlawful confinement, exploitation and similar crimes, and that recourse to an ancient anti-polygamy law is unnecessary to bring perpetrators of such crimes to justice.

Where does this leave those of us who are poly — who have more than one loving, adult, respectful, egalitarian, consensual relationship in our lives? The Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association argued that if the polygamy law were upheld, it would jeopardize the rights of poly people and throw us, and our families, into a legal limbo where we could be harassed, threatened, charged and jailed for living a healthy, natural lifestyle.

The judge said a number of things to try to reassure us that the law is not intended and won’t be used to prosecute those in consensual, adult relationships:

“For polyamorists, the ability to live in a family with the people they love is essential… Each party must know of and consent to both the possibility and the reality of other relationships within the group. This need for openness and consent at all times necessitates considerable self-awareness, communication, conflict resolution and emotional processing on the part of all members…

“While polyamory has been a largely secular phenomenon to date, the evidence indicates that some polyamorists do favour religious ceremonies. Criminalization of these ceremonies significantly impairs the ability of polyamorists to experiment and innovate in this regard. As such, s. 293, as interpreted by the Attorneys General, directly infringes the religious liberty of polyamorists.”

The judge fell short, however, of saying that s. 293 (the polygamy criminalization law in question) should be amended to clearly exempt polyamory ceremonial unions. As a result, according to John Ince, lawyer for the CPAA,  the judgement “rules that the lifestyle of polyamorists as practiced in Canada is not illegal and we’re pleased with that.” Ince added that marriage is “not really an issue in the polyamorous community”, and concluded that “[multiple] common law relationships are clearly not prohibited. Polyamorists who are dealing with immigration or family custody issues for instance now need no longer worry about being considered to be criminals”.

CPAA spokesperson Zoe Duff cautioned however: “The decision still criminalizes a segment of the polyamorous community if they have a marriage ceremony… Polyamorous Canadians are responsible citizens who work toward sustaining healthy, loving, egalitarian relationships and it is wrong for Canada’s laws to continue to criminalize any of us. The number of people in any given relationship is not the issue. The health of the relationship and family is the issue.”

What does all this mean? The judge’s ruling is an interpretation on the constitutionality of the existing 120-year-old law. He ruled that the law violates religious rights and freedoms under the constitution but that notwithstanding this, the law is justified because the charter-protected right to freedom from harm or threat of harm (to the victims of coercive polygamous relationships) outweighs religious rights and freedoms.

A large part of the judgment is spent clarifying the judge’s conclusion that despite changes in both formal and informal relationships since the law was written 120 years ago, and despite changes in the definition of terms such as “marriage”, the law pertains only to multiple relationships sanctioned and recognized by marriage or comparable “conjugal union” ceremony. Specifically, he describes the ceremony that sanctions and recognizes a second marital relationship of any individual (subsequent to or simultaneous with the first) as a “capital M Marriage”, and asserts that this particular law applies to and allows prosecution of all (adult) marriage partners of the person or people in that/those “Marriage(s)”.

This is a particularly tricky bit of reasoning. It means that if you have multiple relationships sanctioned by a marriage ceremony, even if they are all with adults and all parties have consented to them, you are guilty of polygamy, and subject (for that reason alone) to harsh criminal punishments (up to 5 years in prison) under this Canadian law. But if you have multiple relationships not sanctioned by marriage ceremony, even if they are coercive or abusive, you are not subject to this law (though you may be subject to other Canadian laws). [Just as an aside, to show how arcane this law is, the very next section of the law prescribes up to 2 years in prison for "solemnizing or pretending to solemnize a marriage without lawful authority".]

I’m not sure that such a legal definitional nicety would pass scrutiny in an appeal. It seems to me discriminatory to apply a law to groups that hold religious ceremonies sacred, and not to those that don’t (and as you know I’m not a big fan of organized religion or ritual). Convenient in the case at hand, but pretty shaky as a precedent-setter.

What’s worse, though, is that I don’t think the subtlety of this distinction (which the judge takes many pages to draw) will be appreciated by law enforcement agencies that will, if this ruling is not appealed, see “polygamy is illegal” as justification for endless harassment and prosecution of poly people. It will be tempting for law enforcement agencies to make the following argument, for example:

1. Under Canadian laws, if you cohabit with another person for a certain period of time, or if you have a child with another person, and/or if you “register your union” with an appropriate provincial authority (generally for purposes of claiming rights to jointly-registered property), you are deemed, for most legal and tax purposes, to be “equivalent to married”, and have most of the rights and responsibilities of a marriage party. So, if you do any of these things with more than one partner, law enforcement officials would have some justification for saying you are “equivalent to married” to more than one partner.
2. Equivalent to married to more than one partner = polygamous = arrested and carted off to jail, possibly because your neighbour or one of your kid’s school-mates doesn’t like you. I wouldn’t want to have to try to explain to some misanthropic pepper-spraying beat cop the subtleties of the distinction: “No, really, officer, the law only applies to religious people who are officially married! We’re just poly! Read the whole twelve-page section of the ruling that explains that here.”

Just in case anyone misinterprets what I’m saying: I think people and leaders of cults that brainwash, exploit and abuse children and the weak, and who intimidate, threaten, harass and imprison ‘members’ who try to break free, should be put away for much longer than five years. We don’t need a law that restricts rights to and criminalizes assembly and association to do that. What we need is better whistle-blowing legislation and protection, better services for those living in fear to get help and find safety, and a much more responsible and less laissez-faire and less privacy-obsessed attitude towards what goes on behind closed doors and walls by all of us.

There’s something very wrong with our laws when, in order to shine a light on and bring justice to remedy outrageous and ritualized abuses ruthlessly perpetrated on the weak, while the bully perpetrators rely on “privacy rights” and “personal property rights”, we have to rely on a flimsy and inadequate 120-year-old statute that makes it illegal to have more than one “conjugal union” at a time.