Sunday Open Thread – June 10, 2007

What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

What This Blog is About: This weblog began as my vehicle for thinking out loud. It has evolved in part into an expression of my gift and passion (imagining possibilities) and of my purpose (provoking what I have come to call Let-Self-Change, in myself and others). I have had the opportunity to discover that the five most popular reasons for believing our civilization can and will go on as it has are either propaganda or wishful thinking. So some of my recent provocations have focused on disenchanting readers of five persuasions who believe that some human or super-human force will save us from civilizational collapse in this century:

• Economic salvationists who have faith in the ‘free’ market, and the responsiveness of our economy to the needs and demands of the planet’s citizens,
• Political salvationists who have faith in the power of democracy, and the responsiveness of the political system to the needs and demands of the planet’s citizens,
• Social salvationists who have faith in a great and spontaneous social movement of collective realization, understanding, raised consciousness and commensurate change,
• Technological salvationists who have faith in the unlimited power of human ingenuity, expressed through innovation and technology, and
• Religious salvationists who have faith we will be rescued, rapturously, by some higher power.

Those readers who no longer believe in any of these five miracles are searching, as I am, for another way forward. The best we have been able to come up with is a new self-managed society built on local, responsible, self-selected communities, living, and making a living, in natural (i.e. in balance with the rest of life on Earth), sustainable ways. It’s a very idealistic vision, one that will have to emerge right in the midst of our fragile, furious, exhausted civilization, based on many local experiments, evolving ‘working models’ that others can copy and adapt to their needs. These communities need to be autonomous and self-sufficient but also connected to learn from each other how to cope, together, with the crises that this century will present to us and the generations that follow.

One reader has called this “grasping at straws”. Perhaps it is, as the people who seem to be most knowledgeable about the state of the world and this community-based vision seem to believe efforts to realize that vision will be in vain, but are worth trying anyway. Our ‘success’ depends largely on recruiting more and more of those disenchanted with the five faiths above, and our ‘walking away together’ to improvise and emerge something completely different, a way of living and making a living that can work, at least for a few million years.

So upcoming articles will continue to provoke readers to let themselves change and learn and free themselves from the delusional faiths that are destroying our world, and to figure out, together, how to move forward.

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignettes #3 and #4.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. The first few will be practice podcasts, and may not make it to the blog. I plan to post some monologues first, readings of my own works just to try out the new medium, and perhaps, if I can get a copy of the recording, a podcast of my presentation last week at the SLA in Denver.

Paradoxically, the less faith I have in the established order and the ability of civilization’s well-intentioned systems to save us from ourselves, the more energized and exhilarated I become. How’s your mood? Is the Bush regime’s intransigence, and the Democrats’ equivocation, getting you down? If you’re more upbeat, or more depressed, than you were a yearago, or ten years ago, why?