how to save the world

I have a foot in both camps. I see Second Life as a remarkable imaginative tool: You can create worlds that don’t (or even couldn’t) exist in reality. You could (theoretically anyway) film a group’s spontaneous experiences in Second Life and edit it into a movie that would be unlike anything you could do in real life. For those who, because of difficult personal circumstances or disabilities, are restricted in their ability to seek or have deep, loving, personal relationships, Second Life is exactly what its name implies, a second chance to live a healthy, normal life.

On the other hand, it can be a place of escapism, aggression and addiction. The degree to which some people obtain gratification from dominating and humiliating another person, and to which others are willing to subjugate themselves just to be “loved”, is very troubling. Many of the places in Second Life are precise and banal imitations of real life, except with vastly more conspicuous consumption and private ownership. The poor play at being rich, with massive private mansions and torture chambers filled with expensive playthings (you need pay nothing to have fun in Second Life, but some people spend enormous sums of real money buying land, clothing and toys for their avatars). In a world that needs no hierarchy, there is a lot of it. In a world where “physical” violence is very difficult to perpetrate, there is a depressing amount of psychological violence.

In today’s complex world we all have (for perfectly practical reasons) multiple identities, and I’ve written before about the challenges of moving between identities (and the media that tend to keep them separate) as relationships evolve and the communities we are each a part of bump together and overlap. My identities as business executive, as family member, as friend, as colleague, as writer, as speaker, as student are each different. They are all authentic, but they emphasize and de-emphasize (or even hide) different aspects of my history and personality, of who I really am.

In addition to identities we also have multiple personas. These are public roles that we assume or display, that we play. Many of these roles are assigned tacitly or explicitly, through a job title, a screenplay, a team roles list, duty roster etc. People who are insecure or unsure who they are will muddle their personas and identities: They will act, for example, how they think a father is supposed to act, in the presence of his children, rather than authentically. In some cases, when they’re really messed up, this can actually be a good thing, but for the most part it’s dangerous and confusing to others. It’s hard to trust someone when you know (and people know when what they are seeing is a persona and not an identity) that it’s only an act, a role-play.

Some personas are authentic, while others are utterly and purposefully false. Some of them are protective colouring that is designed to make it easier to survive in a crowded, judgemental and often intolerant world. Sometimes the gunk of our personas sticks to us so closely that, like some theatre makeup, it is very difficult to take off afterwards. After enough time and practice playing a role we may not even realize that many aspects of our persona are not authentic, not really ourselves at all. We ‘become’ our role, our job, to the point that our true identity is lost.

In many human activities, from the workplace to the theatre, we also recognize archetypes (from the Greek = original model). Archetypes are recognizable symbols or patterns, which may be simplified (stereotypes) or exaggerated (caricatures) to increase their recognizability. Humans are, after all, pattern recognizers, and putting a label on a certain type of character or behaviour enables us to think and communicate with others about it in a meaningful way. If we say Obama acts presidential in the same way that Kennedy did, for example, we are establishing Kennedy as an archetype. The clichÈ about “they broke the mold after they made her” likewise identifies someone as an archetype. All similar people thereafter “in the same mold” are merely copies.

Much use is made of archetypes in the writing and criticism of literature, in art, and in psychology. Many of the gods of different religions are archetypal — intended as models to study or follow. The cards of the Tarot deck, especially the major arcana, are also archetypes, handy in the search for patterns of people and behaviours necessary to tell fortunes.

Three years ago I wrote about one of those Tarot archetypes, The Fool or Jester, and specifically the interpretation of one Australian writer of the card’s meaning:

In the earlier article I wrote about cats as exemplars of Playing the Fool: “I have seen cats of all ages, cats of amazing wisdom and style who otherwise show themselves to be cunning and astonishingly self-sufficient, chase a piece of string dragged by a child around the house for an hour or more, indefatigably and with enormous concentration, creativity and energy. What is the purpose of this unexpected playfulness? Is this the cat’s way of discharging the tension and anxiety that preoccupies her more sombre and sober moments? Is it her way of teaching the child (or the adult, since I get great pleasure from such games, until usually some intrigued child coaxes the string away from me to learn more about this magic trick) important lessons about instinct, about reflexes, about strategy, about the need for play, and a hundred other lessons we are too besotted with WeltSchmertz (sadness over the evils of the world) to appreciate?”

I got to thinking, after reading Chris Corrigan blogging cryptically about learning the value of Playing the Fool at OSonOS, about whether the injection, into an Improv session or an Open Space session, of someone Playing the Fool or some other archetype, as a role, a persona, might be beneficial in getting new perspectives and breakthroughs for the group. The Fool is, after all, the naive seeker of knowledge and self-knowledge. Could someone Playing the Fool ask just the right “stupid questions” to get a group grappling with a complex problem out of their thinking rut? How about someone playing The Magician, the powerful, self-confident master who knows, and shows, that all he and others thought was true is just illusion?

The Magician card reversed is the Juggler, the indigenous Trickster, a conjurer who shows how illusions can wreak real magic (like the colourful butterfly wing that contains no pigment, whose rainbow of hues is the optical deception created by the way the wing’s molecules are layered). What value could be achieved by having someone adept at biomimicry delighting and inspiring the group with nature’s own tricks to overcome adversity, as they struggle with an intractable human problem?

Or how about planting a Hanged Man in their midst, one who is willing to let go of everything he has always been told is true, to look at the world from a fresh and inverted perspective, and trust his instincts and subconscious? Or the Hermit, the one who keeps bringing everything back to reflection, self-organization, self-sufficiency, adaptation, when the group is clamouring for the politicians or management to fix the problem, or calling for a committee, or a revolution?

And of course, we could always plant the Devil. Imagine the creative conflict and friction that might come from having a Devil’s advocate in the room, arguing, just for the sake of challenging all conventional wisdom and the propensity for groupthink.

Dave Snowden has warned me that for such mischievous plantings to work in Open Space and other types of event whose group dynamic is based on trust, the provocateurs would have to be Actors, clearly identified as such, wearing the appropriate ‘mask’ or accoutrements of their persona. To have someone within the group do this surreptitiously, he suggests, would be a betrayal of the group’s trust and throw the authenticity of everything in the event into doubt.

I’m not so sure. I’ve played the Fool and the Devil and other archetypal roles in meetings, not dishonestly but just to stir things up when I felt that stirring up was needed. I’ve seen other people move into these and other roles, and the effect on groups is astonishing, perhaps for the same reason that self-deprecation is so powerful in Improv comedy sessions.

Those of us who are continuously learning have all of these archetypes within us, and for them to emerge as personas is, I think, the most natural thing in the world. Kittens and puppies playing together take turns in the dominant (Magician) and submissive (Fool) role, and this is how they learn about complexity, about how to solve problems, and ultimately, about their own identity.

Perhaps what we need is to give each participant in a problem-solving or brainstorming event a set of cards representing all the common archetypes, and have people self-identify and ‘wear’ the card which represents the persona that has emerged for them, that they are playing, at any point in time during the event. We might learn as much about ourselves as we do about the challenge the event is about. I think de Bono used something like this in his Six Thinking Hats creativity sessions. Some of the more sophisticated emoticons (e.g. the wink) serve a similar purpose, of giving the listener context for “where we’re coming from” in this.

Some of the desktop videoconferencing tools allow participants to put up an emoticon indicating how they feel about what they’re hearing (happy, unhappy, excited, confused) so speakers who can’t ‘see’ the audience can get feedback that way, without interrupting the event.

In Second Life we’ve been using the Talking Stick and a Placeholder to encourage group listening and manage the order of conversations, and to ‘park’ subjects to be discussed once the current one has run its course.

It would be interesting to see whether, in real-time, face-to-face events like Open Space, and in real and virtual conversations and group discussions, we could develop a whole set of “where I’m coming from now” emoticons and archetypal symbols, that we could each display and change on the fly, so that we could accurately ‘read’ all of the other participants as we spoke and listened. A new, unspoken, supplementary language.

I suspect that animals in the wild, wild children, and perhaps some indigenous peoples, have no need for such artifacts — they can sense what is not said much better than we can, and they probably have less ‘gunk’ preventing them from knowing themselves well enough to signal and read accurately “where they’re coming from” without the need for artifacts. But we’ve largely lost that sensing capacity and that deepself-knowledge.

Anyone up for inventing, and learning, a new language?

Women Deserve Better: Just go watch this stirring performance art from social activist and poet Sonya Renee. Thanks to Emily and Daisy for the catch, from feministe.

Six Important Trends in Learning & Education: Nancy White and Josien Kapma have co-authored a paper on how education is shifting from local courseware to global conversation, which identifies six major trends:

Is America (and the World) Becoming Mean-Spirited and Nihilistic?: Jim Kunstler thinks so, seeing the latest Batman movie as reveling in this spiritual anomie. I’ve written before about Michael Adams’ assessment of (especially young) Americans’ rejection of both liberal and conservative worldviews in favour of an anti-authority, survivalist, fatalistic one (the lower right quadrant of the chart at top of this post, with the values of Americans on the upswing shown in bold. These characteristics are, according to Edward Hall’s research, typical of animals under enormous stress, preparing to reduce their numbers through hoarding, extreme violence and to-the-death competition for scarce resources, until there is once again enough to go around comfortably. Thanks to Michael Wiik for the link.

…And Is Suicide Rising As a Result?: Barbara Ehrenreich reports on suicide as the ‘solution’ to debt, unemployment and despair. In the past decade 150,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide because of unpayable debts. As the NYT story below shows, this same desperation is now reaching affluent nations. Is suicide any answer to debt? Ehrenreich’s biting answer:

Understanding the YouTube Phenomenon: Rob Paterson points us to anthropologist’s Michael Wesch’s presentation on YouTube and Participative Culture. Long, but thought-provoking, background to his remarkable work. Those of us who write to express ourselves need to understand that this is how those who don’t, are learning to express themselves and connect with the world. He also echoes Lawrence Lessig’s warning that much of the YouTube content includes copyrighted material, and is hence really illegal, and that the effect of a whole generation getting accustomed to breaking the law with much of their online activity is corrosive. In short, YouTube is much more than cover versions of music and skateboarding dogs. Last year I wrote about several of Wesch’s videos:

37 More Days: PS Pirro writes what she would do today if she had only 37 days to live. Look now before it’s gone. And if you can’t accept not knowing what could happen, or not happen, during those 37 days, try changing your verbs.

Forgive Yourself: Beth T brings us some great advice from Maya Angelou:

B Corporations: Environmentally Sustainable & Socially Responsible: You can now qualify your company as a B Corporation, which the founders hope will soon become a certification every customer and shareholder will look for before investing money in a company or its products. You must pass a questionnaire test, and reform your corporate charter to include environmental sustainability and social responsibility, to qualify for a B Corporation seal. Thanks to Gil Friend for the link.

Nicholas Kristof Becomes an Animal Rights Advocate: The esteemed NYT op-ed columnist and economist, champion of victims of human suffering all over the world, has “drawn the line at animals being raised in cruel conditions”. “The tide of history is moving toward the protection of animal rights, and the brutal conditions in which they are sometimes now raised will eventually be banned. Someday, vegetarianism may even be the norm.” A bit tepid, but it’s a start. Suffering farmed animals need a champion with the clout of someone like Kristof.

Stuck Between Euan Semple and Stowe Boyd: Both friends, and a pretty good place to be on a list of the Top 40 Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 bloggers prepared by Bill Ives.

Live in the Toronto Area and Interested in Intentional Community?: If so, e-mail me and I’ll send you details of a new group I’ve joined that is exploring setting up a new IC, no limits on where it might be.

Just for Fun: Beth Patterson has pictures of what a family in Alaska who’s just built a playground for their children saw, to their astonishment, when they woke up the next morning.

Thought for the Week: Isn’t it funny how, our whole lives, we seek permission to discover who we are and to be ourselves, first from our parents, then from peers and lovers and spouses, and even from our children, and then, again perhaps, from our parents when they are coming to depend on us, and we are still, in their embrace and their shadow, asking them if it’s OK to leave them for awhile just to be ourselves. Thanks to Cassandra, for inspiring this strange thought. From the online journal that she is co-managing editor of, qarrtsiluni, here’s a photo entitled Brooding (by Edith Oberley) and a short story (by Kelly Madigan Erlandson) both on the subject of Water:

Deep Subject

The boy has learned to fish without catching, an evolution from catch and release. The technique involves reeling the lure back to himself furiously after the cast, faster than the fish can swim. He explains that this way he can see them jump and chase, but doesnít have to face the daunting task of releasing them from the barbed hook.

While he casts and reels, I tell my brother-in-law about my extra well. I am still new to this property. I know where my new well is, out behind the house, with its clean white stem protruding from the ground. But there is another well, west of the garage, covered with planks. A month ago a friend and I pried a board up and with the aid of a flashlight peered into the circular brick structure reaching down into the dark. The flashlight beam reflected back up to us from the waterís surface.

My brother-in-law was raised here, born into a family that has owned the land nearby for over a century. He tells me this was the old well, probably hand dug during the early part of the twentieth century and abandoned when it ran dry or went bad. It poses a problem. Under normal circumstances, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides would be filtered by twenty to fifty to seventy feet of soil before joining forces with the groundwater, but an open chute offers a straight shot. Old wells should be capped.

Peering down from the top, we canít see how deep this tunnel reaches. The waterís surface, maybe fifteen feet below us, reflects the surrounding brick walls. At his suggestion we get a chain from an old porch swing, and tie it to a brick. I hold the light while he lowers the brick, hand over hand, down the well shaft and into the water. He reaches the end of the chain and the brick has not reached the bottom. We add on a rope, and then a second rope, before it does.

His son comes up from the pond as we put the board back in place. We know what it would mean to fall into a well in this remote valley, where one cannot be seen from the road, a road on which few vehicles travel anyway. Even if you could swim, there would be no place to swim to, with the surface of the water several body lengths below the rim. We warn the boy away from the danger.

My husband says his father told him men in the bottom of wells could see stars in the daytime. My brother-in-law has heard this, too, that the walls of the well block out sunlight sufficiently to make stars visible. Itís a story with a long reach, recorded by Aristotle.

Later, I tell him and his son a poem called ìIn the Well,î about a boy being lowered down to the water to retrieve a dead dog. Itís dark now, and the whip-poor-wills are calling. The boy and his dad head back over the hill for home. My nephewís desire is to fish but do no harm, and I am not sure I can bring myself to seal this circle of stone. Maybe after it has been drained, when I can climb down into it, Iíll see something from the bottom that wasnít visible in the brightness ofdaylight.

I know what I would not do: work, travel, or party. I’ve done enough of these things to realize they are substitutes to fill an empty space in us that is better filled with simpler, more generous, more thoughtful, instinctive, joyful and sensuous activities. As you can see from the graphic reproduced with yesterday’s article, I’m pretty organized (perhaps even anal) about what I do and intend to do with my time. As long as I believe I have more than 37 days, I will continue to do these things I now know I am meant to do, in a disciplined and well-paced manner:

This, I’ve finally come to understand, is who I am.

Perhaps this is who we all are. When I study the behaviour of wild creatures, when I read about how the most knowledgeable and intelligent and admired people in the world live, when I listen to and read the advice of indigenous people, people connected to all-life-on-Earth, it seems to me that this is what they all do. It has just taken me, poor disconnected and confused civilized human, a lifetime to discover what they knew all along.

Recently I’ve been focused on “love, conversation and community” as the means to make the world a better place and to find meaning and purpose to one’s life — to be of use, as my friend Dave Smith puts it. I try to be of use, every day, and to work towards creating what I call “working models” of a better way to live and make a living. Hence my recent passion for identifying and assisting in the creation of Natural Enterprises (self-managed places where people work together responsibly, sustainably, joyfully, and meaningfully) and Intentional Communities (self-managed places where people live together responsibly, sustainably, joyfully, and meaningfully). Natural Enterprises in a Natural Generosity Economy built around Natural Communities. And within these communities, I try to let-myself-change, to adapt and be more authentically myself, and to help others do the same.

But if I had only 37 days to live I think I would suspend these important activities, these model-building and model-being projects.

My father is not well, and he has been told that he may not have long to live. He has always been my model, and I am like him in many ways. He has, for the last year or so, been “setting his lands in order”, as Eliot puts it in The Waste Land just after he describes the thunder fable of the Upanishad: Datta, dayadhvam, damyata — giving, sympathy, self-control. The fact that these three ancient thunders parallel so closely my modern love, conversation, community mantra gives me pause. When I was younger and learning to write poetry my father stepped me through The Waste Land to explain what it meant. He taught me well.

But when it is time to set one’s lands in order, it is also time, I think, to suspend love, conversation and community activities, in favour of quieter, more solitary pursuits. To try to jam a lifetime of such activities into a 37 day orgy of frenzied living, to the point of self-exhaustion, would I think be selfish, futile, and unfair to those left behind to pick of the pieces.

Given only 37 days, there is not enough time to love. Not fairly anyway, for those who would then lose that love. When I started thinking about Patti’s question I thought at first I’d like to spend the time with all those I’ve come to love. But then I concluded that was self-centred and cruel. Love is a drug, after all, for better and for worse, and a co-addictive one. And I’m not really sure I know what love is, anyway, and to try to find out in 37 days strikes me as, at best, ungracious. The words of the Joni Mitchell song Amelia came to mind:

This mingled retelling of the Icarus legend and the more modern legend of Amelia Earhart is, in a way, as much my soul song as Neil Young’s Will to Love, the song about a salmon swimming upstream through much hardship and danger to find the one he knows he’s meant to love. Idealists like me are, most of the time, all talk and no action. Give us what we say we really want and we wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Too late anyway. With only 37 days there is no time for such addictions, or to find what I’ve “never really” been or done.

Likewise, I wouldn’t travel to any of the faraway places on my list of places I’d like to see. Too far away for just a short visit, and besides, there are plenty of beautiful, undiscovered places right here.

My father thinks the wild animals have it right. When you know your time has come, your instinct and your responsibility is to go off by yourself, rest, contemplate, and be at peace with the world.

And that’s what I would do. With 37 days left, I would go off into the forest near where I live, by myself, with a comfortable tent and a bed to sleep on, good walking shoes, practical clothing (as little as necessary), my guitar, vegan food, drinking water, pencils and paper. No electronic or communication equipment except a camera, and no books. I would compose and play and sing songs, and write poetry and a few stories. If I had any wisdom I wanted to impart I would do so in creative writing, through stories, not writings like this. I would invent games that could be played in the wild, without leaving a footprint. I would pay attention with all my senses and all my instincts and all my heart, and fall under the spell of the sensuous, Gaia’s spell. I would run and dance and swim. I would meditate, and I would fast. I would breathe deeply, and explore and learn and discover the miniature truths of the forest. I would sleep soundly. I would be nobody-but-myself.

I would not count the days.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: Jen Lemen, powerfully affected by her recent visit to Rwanda, is going through a huge, and moving, personal change, and she’s putting it all out there on her blog. Only nine sentences, so just go read this.

Loving Where You Are: PS Pirro puts those of us claiming to seek the place “where we belong” in our place: “Loving where you are means relinquishing all those comforting contingency plans that spare you the work of local affection ñ those plans that allow you to leave half your life packed in boxes in the garage or the attic, half your heart tucked away, and half your imagination wandering the map in search of a better place.  Loving where you are means calling your imagination home and putting it to work right where you are: learning the names of the people and trees and plants and birds and creeks and flowers, and letting them speak to your heart ñ your whole heart — and show you what needs to be done, right here, right now.” Wow.

Audacity Yes, Change Hardly: A political expert writes to Joe Bageant about why the powers that be are quite happy at the prospect of an Obama victory:

Do Not Go Gently: Cassandra explores the subject we all, in the final analysis, fear most, when it gets close to home. Our turn is coming.

Discovering Patti Griffin: Karen Crone introduces us to a remarkable new singer-songwriter, Patti Griffin, who reconnects us to our childhood.

Harrison Owen on Where Open Space is Going: Geoff and Viv recorded Harrison Owen’s latest speech about how the world is self-organizing and uncontrollable at OSonOS.

Preparing for a Post-Carbon Future: Rob Hopkins suggests some significant but worthwhile lifestyle changes:

1. Organize a screening of The End of Suburbia (or similar Peak Oil education video)
2. Insulate your house (and why not introduce renewable energy sources while you’re at it)
3. Get out of debt
4. Start a garden
5. Become more aware of your surroundings
6. Take a permaculture design course
7. Buy less
8. Take a look at your work situation
9. Form community
10. Celebrate your successes

Hire an Organic Gardener: A brilliant example of Natural Enterprise is planting and maintaining an organic garden for homeowners in their own yard.

The Suicide Kit: There are many people in the world wanting to end their lives because of great and chronic physical or mental suffering. Some of them, apparently, have been buying veterinary euthanasia drugs (notably pentobarbital) from Mexico — the peacefulness and effectiveness of which I’ve observed personally. Of course, it is illegal to buy these drugs; no dignity in death for humankind. Exit International, the organization educating people how to end their own lives peacefully, has published a book The Peaceful Pill Handbook, that is sold out internationally, but will soon be available in e-book form. It is banned from sale in Australia. Watch for this issue to heat up in coming months.

Mapping Your Networks: Valdis Krebs has mapped his twitter network, in the graphic above. Mine would be more complex, I think, and would have to capture my f2f, IM/VoIP, blog and Second Life networks. My Gravitational Community (including all of these networks) listed at right has 70 people in 8 networks (a network map would show all the connections between them, which are considerable). My Blogroll has several hundred people in some 30 networks, with even more connections. It would be interesting to see the whole map. I suspect it would show that most of my networks are well connected internally with each other (cliquish?) and that, while men on the whole have more connections, women have more diverse connections. It’s been interesting to see my twitter readers ‘talking’ to each other across my networks, making new and unexpected connections.
Koehler Calls Out Obama: Bob Koehler describes the New Yorker cover cartoon he’d really like to see:

The Atrocity of Cluster Bombs and Bush’s Refusal to Stop Using Them: Another great editorial from Bob Koehler shows that cluster bombs have one purpose — to intimidate, maim and kill civilians. Yet Bush won’t sign the treaty calling for an end to their use.

Was There a Red Flag Signaling Bear Stearns’ Troubles?: An interesting employee satisfaction survey suggests something was very wrong with Bear Stearns a year before its collapse from reckless lending practices. Anyone looking at Lehman Brothers?

Wordle of Siona Van Dijk’s personal profile (top) and mine (lower)

Just For Fun: Jin the border collie is one amazingly talented dog. Thanks to Cheryl for the link. Also, for those who liked the Norbert Rosing photos of huskies playing with polar bears, here’s a video of this behaviour. And, in the graphic above, Siona’s profile, and beneath it my ‘about the author‘ page, are portrayed as worldles. Hey, I thought I was the one advocating Love Conversation Community as the key to addressing all problems! Mine really shows who I used to be, when I was so much older.

Three Thoughts for the Week: From Umberto Eco as quoted in the New Yorker in 1995: