how to save the world

Saturday Links of the Week – May 3, 2008

Posted on May 3, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Flickr Photo Download: Nancy White graphs Peter Blockís Presentation

Haven’t been browsing much during my three weeks away, so this week’s list is the articles that have been sent to me or have showed up in my RSS feeds since April 5:

Love, Conversation, Community:

Hands-on Survey of Intentional Communities: Three activists made a 7-month journey through 11 European intentional communities, to explore the question of whether intentional communities can actually make a difference or are just people running away from the ‘real’ world.

Peter Block on Engaging People in Community: Nancy White graphs (see graphic above) Peter Block’s process for finding and inspiring passion in partners in your communities. And more thoughts on convening from Block, from Holger Nauheimer’s blog:

Leadership is about convening capacity.
Substitute curiosity for advice.
There are no answers. Everybody who offers you an answer wants to sell you something.
Transformation is based on a platform of relatedness.
Ask groups not to report their findings but what strikes them.

Aussie Intentional Community Profiled: Jindibah reveals how it has learned to achieve consensus and resolve conflicts quickly and amicably, largely by teaching members to know themselves better.

Dave Smith on YouTube: My favourite serial entrepreneur summarizes the key points in his book To Be Of Use.

Preconditions for Collective Change: Geoff Brown lists 9 factors that are needed to convert collective agreement into collective action. And he follows it up with a great round-up from some of the world’s best blogs.

Ben Zander of the Boston Philharmonic on Leadership: Interesting speech on why people would rather be members of an effective team than its ‘leader’; thanks to Jon Husband for the link.

May 10 is Pangea Day: Get together with the whole world and watch; thanks to Patti Digh for the link.

Narrative and Storytelling:

Nine Productivity Tools for Writers: Nine free apps for writers compiled by Dustin Wax; thanks to my colleague Greg Turko for the link.

Preparing for Civilization’s End:

Carbon Con: Why carbon offset schemes don’t work.

A Billion Hybrids On the Road: How we get lulled into believing we’re making a difference in CO2 emissions when we’re not.

When Governments Prevent Citizens from Suing Corporatists: The Bush regime is trying to protect its corporatist friends from liability for their atrocities against citizens and consumers by granting blanket legal indemnity for negligence and fraud, industry by industry.

A Compelling Argument for Canceling the Olympics Permanently: It’s become a political, corporate-sponsored freakshow, with money, drug use, bribery and fraud determining the winners.

Female Victims of the Cycle of Violence: Central American girls willingly suffer horrific abuse just so they can belong — to a gang of killers.

Michael Pollan Urges Us to Grow Our Own Food: The famous sustainable, responsible food champion says foods from personal ‘victory gardens’ not only taste better and save energy, money and the environment, but help us become more self-sufficient as well.

Making Everyone an Environmentalist: Alternet provides 8 reasons we will all soon be environmentalists, like it or not.

More Chinese Poisons: A blood thinner used for dialysis and other medical purposes all over the world is tainted with toxins from — guess where — China again.

Another Condemnation of the US Institutional Education System: Uncompetitive, obsolete, and sinking fast.

Climate Change: Just Do Something.

Nukes are No Answer: It’s not if, it’s when the next Chernobyl will hit. And in themeantime, taxpayers will foot the bill in subsidies and guarantees for hundreds of insanely expensive, dirty and dangerous nuclear plants.

As Arctic Melts, Land Poisons Become Water Poisons: Mercury and other toxins are entering the arctic food system through melting permafrost.

April was, Apparently, Animal Cruelty Month:

Canadian Seal Hunt 2008: Another year of carnage, carefully hidden from public view, courtesy of the Harper government.

Torturing Animals for Botox: Lots of better ways to test chemicals exist, but US regulators prefer antiquated, brutal methods.

The Cost of Factory Farms: Subsidized CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) not only inflict horrific cruelty on animals, they cost taxpayers a fortune, and the externalized cost we’ll pay in the future is massive.

PETA Offers a Million for Humane Meat: PETA is offering a million dollar prize to anyone who can invent a way to clone meat commercially in test tubes.

Web 2.0:

Will Video Demand Collapse the Internet?: A British study suggests Web infrastructure is inadequate to support wide-spread use of video; thanks to David Jones for the link.

Thoughts for the Week: Richard Conniff suggests we stop calling what we pay for government services ‘taxes’ and start calling it ‘dues’. And David Abram explains The Ecology of Magic.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Knowledge Management in 2020

Posted on May 1, 2008 by Dave Pollard

It’s 2020. Trying times for the global economy and society, but we’re still hanging in there.

Madison S. is an information professional with Omni Consultants, a big global consultancy that is now focused (as are its competitors) on personal productivity improvement, facilitation, cultural anthropology, and design and communication skills development services for their clients. She has an MIS degree and is one of the highest paid of Omni’s employees, even though she provides few services directly to Omni’s clients.

She spends about 1/4 of her time producing business analyses based on environmental scans for Omni’s consultants. These analyses sort through the firehose of information coming into the organization and distill out ‘What It Means’ summaries — five-page point-form reports suggesting important trends, alarming developments, new opportunities, insights and implications for business, the economy and the society as a whole, rich in visualizations, with supporting data appended. These serve as powerful Talking Points Memos for Omni’s consultants to use in conversations with and proposals to clients.

Another 1/4 of Madison’s time is spent producing ‘What Might Come Next’ analyses. These are a combination of forecasts about the future of businesses and industries, based on her team’s research, and provocative proposals for action to capitalize on or mitigate these forecast events. These analyses are framed as future state stories, scenarios, showing how the suggested actions would lead to optimal outcomes. Omni’s consultants ‘tell’ these stories to their clients’ executives and project teams to help them visualize their future and develop and refine strategies to exploit or adapt to the changes forecast. Omni’s senior management, likewise, uses these scenario-based analyses in its own, internal strategy and risk management development.

This activity represents a dramatic change from the activities ‘information professionals’ had performed in the past. Omni’s managers came to realize that research is best done by experts in research, not by everyone in the organization, and that good IPs are able to add enormous value to the information they locate and distil, if given the opportunity, provided they are knowledgeable about the business and how it uses information.

Another 1/4 of Madison’s time is spent supporting collaboration and innovation teams in real time consulting assignments with Omni’s clients, and in real time internal project work. Her role in such projects is two-fold: To provide insightful synopses of relevant information prior to the start of the collaboration and innovation sessions, and to retrieve relevant information immediately that has been identified as essential to moving forward by the collaboration and innovation teams.

The rest of her time is spent in face-to-face ‘cultural anthropology’ sessions with Omni’s people, during which she observes them doing their jobs, identifies and suggests ways in which they could use information and technology to do these jobs better, and brings back to senior management reports on systemic ‘information problems’ that need organization-wide process changes or new technologies before they can be resolved.

Andrew R. is one of Omni’s consultants. Like most of his peers, he maintains a weblog of what he has learned and discovered, which many people inside and outside the company subscribe to. He also participates in community weblogs for six self-established, self-managed ‘communities of passion’ he belongs to. His ‘home page’ consists of:

a directory of all the people in his networks (showing their current online status, and real-time multimedia virtual presence contact information for them),
a list of the RSS feeds to which he subscribes (mostly blogs of other community members, plus the publications of Madison’s team), and
his calendar.

He can access this ‘home page’ from any computer or portable device.

He has no e-mail or voice-mail and does not use ‘groupware’ or other asynchronous technologies. He can almost always be reached by Instant Messaging, and his calendar of times when he is available for conversations and meetings is open for anyone to book. As such, most of his day is spent in physical or virtual real-time conversations and other collaborative activities focused on some specific objective.

The hard drive of Andrew’s computer is virtually empty — when he needs information, he gets it ‘just in time’ from the people in his networks via IM, by searching his RSS feeds, or by request from someone in Madison’s group. Mostly, his networks feed him just the information he needs each day, so he rarely needs to ask.

Andrew earns his money substantially by observing and listening to clients and telling stories that are relevant to their needs, drawing on his experience with other clients, his imagination, and the information from Madison’s group. He also earns money by facilitating his clients and networks to co-design and co-innovate solutions to their own problems collaboratively by sharing ideas, knowledge and insights, peer-to-peer, using Open Space and similar complex-problem methodologies .

Omni has no formal ‘website’ — just its collection of blogs and its interactive directory of people with their contact information. Since they started these and abandoned the traditional website, readership of their pages, and follow-up work, have soared.

Their big KM project for this year is Reinventing the Water Cooler, designed to find a way to replicate the opportunity for serendipitous, unscheduled conversation that the old water coolers once enabled.

This is all well and good for businesses like Omni that have the resources to distill and analyze information. For smaller organizations and individual citizens it’s a tougher challenge.

Kim L. is a partner in a small entrepreneurial venture called MacClothes, that produces portable sewing and embroidering machines that can be operated by the (now-ubiquitous) Macintosh 20/20 computers to allow users to create their own custom made-to-measure clothing. Until recently they did their own business research, or did without. But recently they’ve struck a deal to ‘subscribe’ by RSS to some of Omni’s research for a very low price, after a 90-day embargo period.

Individuals in 2020 generally use RSS subscription to craft their own personalized real-time ‘newspaper’ consisting of feeds from any of thousands of specialized and community-based e-newsletters and millions of blogs, plus filtered ‘Best Of Blogs’ feeds (“BOBLs”) on any of 7000 subjects maintained by information professionals as hobbies. The most successful of these BOBLs have millions of subscribers, including corporate subscribers who underwrite some of the maintenance costs. These ‘premier’ BOBLs maintain linkable archives of related stories to each story they feature, plus a ‘What It Means’ analysis and a ‘Possible Actions’ list that tells readers what they could/should do to act on the information in the story. Some BOBLs have become so popular that they have full-time paid specialist researchers and reporters on staff producing their own articles.

The main complaint from businesspeople and the public about information in 2020? This hasn’t changed since 2008 — it’s still information overload. But at least in 2020 the value of information intermediaries has been rediscovered — people who are skilled at (and have time to) ‘make sense’ of the raw information coming at us in unmanageable amounts. And as a result a little more attention is paid to the meaning, implications and possible actions that stem from all this information.

And, since all this information is viewable on highly legible, portable display devices, nomore trees need to be killed to disseminate and use it.

(Thanks to my KM colleagues Down Under for inspiring this post, especially Shawn Callahan, one of the brightest and most insightful people I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet.)

Category: Knowledge Management

Posted in Working Smarter | 1 Comment

What Are You Afraid Of?

Posted on April 29, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Joe Bageant makes the point in Deer Hunting With Jesus that the working class of the US (and perhaps of the world) are largely driven by fear. In explaining how and what they think he makes clear what it is they are afraid of:

Fears of the Working/Poor/Uneducated Class:

Unemployment: Not having, or losing, a job; not having enough; losing their home — When you live close to the edge, destitution is never far away.
Authority: When the authorities (the boss, the government, the police) treat you like you’re nothing, you learn not to trust them.
Illness: When you can’t afford to be sick, and can’t afford to look after loved ones if they’re sick, and you know what it’s like to be uninsured or trapped in a crappy long-term care or nursing home, the thought of illness is chilling.
‘Evil’ People: Evangelical preachers teach you that people are either good or evil, and that foreigners and liberals (who never give you the time of day) and people without ‘family values’ and people who aren’t ‘like’ you are satan’s pawns, and must be vanquished.
Being Ripped Off: The uneducated are prey for scam artists, and know how people can use money, coercion and influence to take advantage of them.
Crime: Most of the victims of crime are in poor areas, because that’s where the people desperate enough to be criminals are, and where law enforcement is most lax.
Losing Hope: When you’re constantly struggling, you can’t lose hope; when your country is mired in a hopeless war and the news is all about layoffs and crime, it’s easy to do so.

In Lakoff’s terms, these fears explain the conservative worldview pretty well. If you’re driven by fear, and these are things you fear, the ‘strict father’ approach to living, to raising a family, and to voting that Lakoff describes makes a lot of sense:

Promoting strict-father morality in general (good vs evil, rules to be obeyed, strict rules on right vs wrong)
Promoting the virtues of self-discipline, responsibility for one’s own actions and success, and self-reliance
Upholding the morality of reward and punishment (including preventing interference with the pursuit of self-interest by self-disciplined, self-reliant people, promoting punishment to uphold authority, and ensuring punishment for lack of self-discipline)
Protecting moral people from external evils and upholding the moral order (legitimate authority)

That got me thinking about the rest of us. If we’re not part of the working/poor/uneducated class, what class do we belong to?

Joe defines “working class” as those people who have no power/control over their jobs: what they do, when they do it, at what price, and how vulnerable they are to layoffs not connected to their work performance. The rest of us, other than the tiny elite of super-rich and super-powerful, he calls the “catering” class — because they cater/pander to the elite in return for a higher level of wealth and control than the “working” class receives.

So I guess that means that I (and I suspect the majority of readers of this blog) are members of the catering/affluent/educated class, most of whom, in Lakoff terms, are liberal-progressives with the ‘nurturing parent’ approach to living, to raising a family, and to voting that Lakoff describes:

Empathetic behaviour and promoting fairness

Helping those who cannot help themselves
Protecting those who cannot protect themselves
Promoting the virtue of fulfillment in life
Nurturing and strengthening oneself

Are we, too, driven to this worldview and these approaches to living by our fears? I’d like to believe we are less driven by fear than those in the working/poor/uneducated class, but I’m not so sure. In one sense, we have more control over our lives and more assets to protect ourselves with, and more marketable talents. But perhaps because we have more, we have more to lose, so we are equally driven by fears. What are those fears?

Having not done the kind of research that Joe has, I can only speak for myself, but I have a sense that my fears are pretty common among those I know. My recent period of self-reflection has made me a bit more aware of what my fears are, and they are:

Fears of the Catering/Affluent/Educated Class:

Recession: Because we own more, we are more vulnerable to declines in value of our assets, and because our work is so tied up in the modern global interrelated economy, a recession that makes our skills less valuable and basic survival skills more valuable threatens us more.
Responsibility: By virtue of having more control and say in our world, more authority, we also have more responsibility. But, although this is a controversial thing to say, I think we’re afraid of this responsibility, afraid of not being able to discharge it well, of letting people down. We long, many of us, for a simple, responsibility-free life. The idea that this is civilization’s final century is horrific not only because of the loss and suffering, but because of the guilt of what we might have done to prevent it.
Living in the Real World: Affluence allows us to cut ourselves off from the real world, to live in communities (and cars) where we are cut off from the rest of the world, to live inside our own heads, where it’s safe and secure. A brutal ‘real’ world where the majority love to hunt, accept cruelty and violence as normal, hate others, and are enthralled by movies and YouTube videos that show torture, rape and murder is terrifying to us.
Intimacy: This is probably a consequence of the fear above. Intimacy involves emotional vulnerability, and those of us who have been cocooned emotionally most of our lives and who have experienced, at least once, the anguish of being emotionally hurt when we have opened ourselves up, quickly become afraid to repeat the experience.
War: We know war never solves anything, never has a winner, and always makes things worse. Yet we see it everywhere, becoming bloodier all the time. Machetes used to kill neighbours in Rwanda, torture, rape, burning of villages, massive theft by gangs and enslavement of children in Darfur — we find these things unfathomable and unbearable, contrary to our notion of humanity.
Letting Go: I think educated people find it harder to just accept, to abandon themselves and their ideas, to let go of what control they have. We are inherently more anal than those who live close to the edge, by their wits. Contrary to all logic, Colombians are more happy than Americans, perhaps because they don’t worry about things they have no control over.

Those are the things I am afraid of, anyway. I suspect my fellow educated liberal-progressives will protest that they don’t fear most of these things, but my observations suggest most of us do. Or maybe I’m just judging my peers by myself. What do you think?

Joe talks about the “class war” that’s brewing in the US and, perhaps, everywhere. I think these different fears explain much of the basis for this “war”. It’s not so much we hate each other, as much as that we don’t know each other, we fear (and are driven by) completely different things (and each class to some extent epitomizes the things the other fears), and hence we can’t communicate with each other. And we don’t socialize between these classes enough to begin to understand the divide and start to bridge the gap.

The chart above, that I explained in my Fire & Ice article, shows (in bold) the qualities that are increasingly prevalent among Americans, especially the young (who are, mostly, children of the growing working class). My sense is that working class fears drive the propensities in the right quadrants, while the catering class fears drive the propensities in the left quadrants. What’s more, I think the disappearance of the US middle class (and consequent growth of the working class) explains why the ‘median’ profile of Americans is now in the lower right quadrant, and moving lower and further right, while the ‘median’ profile of Europeans, where the middle ‘catering’ class is faring somewhat better, is still in the centre-left.

And, for those who, in wondering why with all my new-found self-knowledge and opportunity to do anything I want to do, what’s holding me back, whatI’m afraid of — now you know.

Category: Our Culture

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 16 Comments

Photos from Australia and New Zealand

Posted on April 27, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Wellington NZ from the cable car

Back in Caledon after an amazing three weeks in Australia (Victoria State) and New Zealand (North Island). My photos are here and here.

Some suggestions for anyone planning a trip there:

If you can’t stay and/or travel with someone you know who lives there (always the best way to discover a new place), some of the B&Bs are amazing, and much better value than the hotels.
What is called a hotel there is not always what North Americans call a hotel. A hotel can be anything from a 4-room roadside inn to a tower that includes both permanent resident and guest units.
Getting used to driving on the left side, and the many roundabouts (including two-lane, double-loop roundabouts) takes some time. And some mountain roads are more challenging (and less likely to have guardrails) than most North Americans are used to.
Most of the roads, even small rural roads with hills and sharp curves, are posted 100km/hr (60mph). Pay close attention to the suggested curve signs and passing (“overtaking”) signs and road markings.
Recommended accommodations North Island New Zealand:

Songbird Gardens, Pohangina Valley (North of Palmerston North, NZ) – a delightful cottage with a spectacular view (thanks to Pohangina Pete for the recommendation, and the wonderful hospitality)
Abseil Inn, Waitomo NZ
The Cove, Taupo NZ
Oceanside, Mount Maunganui NZ
Best buy in the city, weekend special at CityLife Hotel, Wellington NZ

Recommended restaurants (remember I’m a vegetarian):

The Tearoom, Great Ocean Road, Lorne, Victoria, Australia
The Huhu Cafe at Waitomo Caves NZ
One Red Dog, Wellington NZ
The Airo Restaurant at the Melbourne Airport Hilton

Artistically and environmentally notable places:

Bruno Torfs’ amazing sculptures at Sculpture Garden, Marysville, Victoria
The Surf Coast, especially around Lorne and Aireys Inlet, Victoria
Drive through the Black Spur temperate rainforest, Yarra Valley, Victoria
Te Papa, the Wellington NZ museum, which also has an extensive and growing online KnowledgeNet for learning about Maori culture

The world’s best white wines (I’ve always been a red wine drinker, but these whites have changed my mind):

Just about any (I tried 7, all excellent) of the NZ Sauvignon Blancs, especially those from the Marlborough Valley such as Nobilo’s veryinexpensive Drylands

Milawa Valley Australia’s Brown Brothers Dry Muscat, the best-smelling wine I’ve ever sniffed — should be a perfume

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

A Terrible and Silent Crisis: The Destruction of the American Working Class

Posted on April 26, 2008 by Dave Pollard

North American society prides itself on being classless. Almost no one in North America calls him/herself lower-class or upper-class, and people who describe themselves as ‘middle-class’ (a class which really no longer exists in North America) do so hesitantly. Few even describe themselves as ‘working-class’, since that seems to imply it’s a place one resides for life (which is the case, but to acknowledge this fact would put the lie to the myth of social mobility). Despite the Great American (and Canadian) Dream (anyone can be President or Billionaire if they work long and hard at it), your chances of moving up even one quintile in the economic and social order are negligible, and dependent more on luck than intelligence, endeavour or education.

My friend Joe Bageant‘s book Deer Hunting With Jesus explains through personal stories his brutal assessment of just how strong the class system in the US really is, why the classes are and always have been at war, and why that plays perfectly into the hands of the right-wing political and economic interests there. These are stories about the people Joe grew up with and calls friends, and to write about their lives so bluntly and candidly is an act of incredible courage and honesty.

This is a society where poverty and illness are stigmatized as symptoms of laziness, ignorance and self-neglect, a society built on two-way class vs class fear of the unknown and misunderstood. The principal determinant of one’s class in America, and the hermetic worldview that comes with it, is education.

More than anything, Deer Hunting is a plea to those of progressive inclination to meet with their working-class peers, at a grass-roots level, to understand how they live, how they think, and why they think that way, and to find, as hard as it will be to do so, common cause with them against the corporatist exploiters and their right-wing political and religious handmaidens, and common cause for universal health care, quality education for all, a fair pension and a decent wage for a day’s work — the end of the “dead-end social construction that all but guarantees failure”.

I’d given away three copies of Joe’s book before I’d ready anything beyond the brilliant introduction — I just knew the people I gave them to needed to read the book more than I did. If you’ve read Lakoff, and kind of understand the huge divide between conservative and liberal worldviews, you have to read Bageant, so you really understand the chasm between the worldviews of the uneducated and educated. When you read Joe’s astonishing stories, all of a sudden what George Lakoff says makes sense. And, just as astonishingly, so does Bush’s 2004 win, and the terrifying prospect that Republican arch-conservatives could be poised to establish a dynasty in the US that will accelerate the Cheney-Bush regime’s project for endless war, bankrupting and dismantling government, and ending the separation of church and state, and which will last until that country’s final, ghastly unraveling occurs (I’m betting that will happen later this century).

I picked up my fourth copy of Deer Hunting With Jesus in Australia, which includes a little orientation for Australians not familiar with current US culture. This orientation was probably unnecessary for two reasons: Educated Australians (and Canadians and Europeans) probably know as much about current US culture as their American counterparts. And uneducated people from these countries, I strongly suspect, think much like their US counterparts (though less fanatically) — Joe’s description of uneducated Americans sent shudders up my spine, as I recognized in their stories and attitudes those of many uneducated Canadians I thought I knew, or didn’t care to know (and now understand much better).

There is so much wisdom in this book, and it is so important to read to achieve an understanding of the current predicament of the US (and hence of the world), that I would not presume to prÈcis it here. If you read only one book this year, please make it Deer Hunting With Jesus.

Some of the key lessons for me:

“Universal access to a decent education would lift the lives of millions over time…Never experiencing the life of the mind scars entire families for generations”. After reading Joe’s stories I have new respect for those who have taught themselves what they needed to learn to be informed, independent citizens, and an appreciation for how those without education are oppressed to an almost unimaginable degree.
At least 60% of Americans are “working class”, i.e. they do not have power over their work — when they work, how much they get paid or whether they’ll be “cut loose from their job [or self-employed labour dependent on big corporations] at the first shiver of Wall Street”.
The critical aspects of the “terrible and silent crisis” destroying working-class Americans are: (a) the working class’ own passivity, antipathy to intellect, and belligerence towards the outside world, (b) an economic, corporatist system that benefits from keeping them uneducated, fearful and debt-ridden (and hence holders of low-wage, nonunion, disposable, part-time, noninsured jobs), (c) a health-care system that is especially dysfunctional in working-class areas and whose few quality services are unaffordable to the working class, (d) their dreadful, fat-laden diet (which is all that they can afford) and the toll it takes on their health, and (e) religious and political leaders who prey on their ignorance and exploit their fears.
Almost as bad as the corporatists at exploiting the working class are the rich, uneducated entrepreneurial class who live in their neighbourhoods — realtors, lawyers, brokers, gas retailers, “downtown pickle vendors” and other “middlemen who stand on the necks of the working poor”. This “mob of Kiwanis and Rotarians” who dominate local politics help get tax breaks and regulation exemptions for big corporations, in return for financial favours.
As I read this book I realized that my book on Natural Enterprise, which was in part designed to help the chronically underemployed to find meaningful work, will be totally inaccessible to the working class — they don’t have the literacy or basis of understanding of how an economy works to even begin to understand its processes and messages. I can appreciate how working-class people, and their friends (like Joe) perceive “entrepreneurs” to be just the low-level agents of the corporatists, not a means for their liberation from wage slavery.
“Getting a lousy education, then spending a lifetime pitted against your fellow workers in the gladiatorial free market economy does not make for optimism or open-mindedness, both hallmarks of liberalism. It makes for a kind of bleak coarseness and inner degradation that allows working people to accept the American empire’s wars without a blink.” Joe tells how scourges like Tyson Foods and Rubbermade belittle, abuse, threaten and browbeat their workers into obedience, and acceptance of their lot in life. As a result, “the intellectual lives of most working-class Americans consist of things that sound as if they might or should be true” (e.g. that we should all “support our troops”), and what is engendered as a result is a “tide of national meanness”.
Rich Republicans still meet the working-class and small business class on their own turf, at community activities important to these people. Progressives don’t even visit, so no other voice is ever heard in the ‘red’ communities, and as a result “the left understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people…letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit”.
As a consequence of this numbing existence, “it is [a huge myth] that small towns are thrown into deep mourning when one of their young is killed in Iraq…There is growing dissatisfaction with the war, but it is because we are not winning, not because of the dead.”
The mortgage and banking industries exploit workers’ dreams of home ownership, supported by the corporatists who need continued growth and rising home prices to finance ever-increasing consumer spending, in the fragile house of cards which is now beginning to implode in the US. Gullible poor workers who buy mobile homes on rented property are essentially “buying large rapidly-depreciating vehicles and paying for space to park them”, the absolute antithesis of real home ownership, and a recipe for bankruptcy. But as long as workers are taught that “they are not worthy of a traditional house or decent treatment in the labor market or a living wage”, this is the best they can hope for and aspire to.
Probably the most eye-opening chapter for me was the one where he explains Americans’ zeal for gun ownership and fierce opposition to gun control (a view Joe himself shares). He provides credible data to support gun owners’ claims that (at least in a country as violent as the US) the mere possession of a gun deters more crime than gun ownership precipits. Progressives should look at the facts and realize that their passion for gun control is alienating them, and the parties they support, from 70 million gun owners for whom the issue is a pivotal one at the ballot box.
At the same time, Joe is concerned about the propensity of many Americans (which he later ascribes in part to their belligerent Scots-Irish heritage) to carry their enthusiasm for guns to a degree that makes them “devotees to lethality”. He worries about its explosive potential: “What happens when this country hits Peak Oil demand and the electrical grid starts browning down and even little things become desperately difficult or unaffordable? What happens if the wrong kind of president declares the wrong kind of national emergency? What will be the first reflex of those hundreds of thousands of devotees to lethality?” Joe is concerned that this belligerence and passion for religious fundamentalism is behind the passion for wars in the Mid-East and Asia and even a passion for a nuclear war. He analyzes the low-level perpetrators of Abu Ghraib like Lynddie England and finds their behaviour completely consistent with the pent-up anger, ignorance and willingness to follow orders that those of Scots-Irish ancestry, or influenced by that culture, exhibit around the world and especially in workng-class US communities.
Joe describes the leaders of the fundamentalist churches in the US as poorly educated breakaways from the lower ranks of other churches. Their lack of “fancy learnin'” is unrecognized by their equally uneducated followers. Fundamentalists now make up a quarter of the electorate, a segment that has recently and cynically been politicized by corporatists, and is overwhelmingly white, with a high-school education or less, and working-class. A growing minority of evangelicals are believers in replacing secular government and laws with Christian ones, and support what can only be called Holy Wars against non-Christian nations, to accelerate the prophecy of the second coming and the Reign of Christ. A majority believe in the Rapture, which means they could care less about the future of their nation or the environment.
Unlike public schools, and unlike health care and other civic organizations, fundamentalist congregations are still functioning, growing and open to all. And Christian education and Christian home-schooling are filling the void of a crumbling public education system, and helping to develop the cadres of right-wing believers in the future. They have already achieved astonishing penetration of the upper echelons of the Bush administration and many political establishments and educational institutions and NGOs. The product of this brainwashing by uneducated religious leaders is an electorate “with eyes, that is to say the camera to shoot what is all around them, but no intellectual software to edit or make sense of it all.”, victims of “an extraordinarily dangerous mass psychosis” that Joe predicts will outlast any brief respite in the 2006 and 2008 elections.
Joe points out the astonishing popularity of the most grotesque “entertainments” — videos circulating on and off the Internet showing the grisly deaths of both Americans and Iraqis in the Bush War — the ultimate reality shows. The former are used to whip up fury, indignation and xenophobia, and the latter are a spectacle of religious eye-for-an-eye retribution, applauded by Mel Gibson-style viewers as vengeance in God’s name. Joe is not surprised at this, or at the probability that many more Abu Ghraib type atrocities are occurring worldwide in US secret prisons, directed by the CIA and perpetrated by working class, uneducated, Scots-Irish troops many with streaks of religious zealotry. And he was not surprised at the monstrous animal cruelty at the Pilgrims Pride plant (workers reveling in stomping chickens to death), where Lynddie England used to work until she quit because management didn’t care about the atrocities that went on there. You come from violent stock, and get put down violently all your life, you tend to perpetuate the pattern. Violence, in the streets, in the workplace, in entertainment, and in theatres of war, defines the working class life experience. The rest of us would just rather not see it or acknowledge it.
There is a complicated and ironic explanation why huge not-for-profit (but very profitable) hospitals centralized in affluent communities are starving out smaller, local hospitals in poorer areas, to the point that health-care facilities in poorer communities are mostly now just places exhausted working class Americans are “discarded when they can no longer work”. Joe explains the perverse way many of these institutions are forced to operate, often treating long-term patients for illnesses they don’t have and worsening their condition. These facilities are now the largest cause of bankruptcies in the US, even though 2/3 of these bankrupts have health insurance (thanks to high premiums and deductibles and uncovered costs), and half of uninsured Americans owe money to health-care institutions.
Joe presents some alarming data on the health care and social security crisis looming especially for older women in the US. Two thirds of Social Security recipients are women, and 90% of them receive no other income, putting most of them below the poverty line at a time the Bushies are trying to cut, bankrupt and/or abolish the system entirely. Half of Americans depend entirely on the government for help when they get old. “Social security is the most important ongoing domestic story in America”, Joe asserts bluntly, explaining that it is destroying the social fabric of working class families as many face the dread of regularly visiting elder family members in horrific institutions, elders who paid much into the system and now plead desperately and hopelessly for escape from these terrible places, escape that never comes.

The bottom line of this vicious cycle is that half of Americans are functionally illiterate, and poor education, poor health care, poor nutrition, corporatist oppression and exploitation are creating a time bomb that, in the short run, vents itself in anger against pontificating liberals they never see and don’t understand, and in the long run could explode into bloody and nationwide violence. These people, living right in our midst but whom we never reach out to, simply don’t have the wherewithal to improve their own lot — “they are too uneducated, too conditioned to the idea that being a consumer is the same thing as being a citizen.”

Joe laments the fact that both affluent and poor are now being brought up with neither the capacity nor the need for self-recognition — for discovering who they are as individuals. Instead, they are given a ‘menu’ of lifestyles to choose from, each with its own defining brand names and ensembles. “Adult yokels and urban sophisticates can choose from a preselected array of possible selves based solely on what they like to eat, see, wear, hear and drive.” None of us can, any longer, “make up his or her identity from scratch.” The upper-middle and affluent suburban “catering classes”, those who support the corporatist centre (orange band in my chart above), are more to blame for its excesses than the working class because the catering classes at least have the education and power to see and resist it. When I published this chart a couple of years ago, it never occurred to me, in my liberal affluent comfort, that many or most of those living on the Edge are not at all able to see the centre for what it is, or to have any inkling that they need to pull further away from it, not aspire to become part of it.

We are all, Joe argues, prisoners of this corporatist political and economic system, caught, more or less, in its web. “America’s much-ballyhood liberty is largely fictional. Three million of us are [in prisons or on parole]…The rest of us are captives of credit, our jobs, our need for health insurance, or our ceaseless quest for a decent retirement fund.” What’s worse, “You never know you are in prison until you try the door”. And America’s working class in particular has been so systematically dumbed down that they can’t even see the door.

America, he says, cannot hope to stop messing up the rest of the world until it solves its own mess. “When social conscience extends no farther than ourselves, our friends, our families then Darfur and secret American prisons abroad are not [perceived to be] a problem”.

This book is about the horrific mess that is America in the 21st century, but there is nothing here for those of us living in other countries to be smug about. American culture is being embraced everywhere in the world (and not, for the most part, forced down anyone’s throats). And our cultures already exhibit many of the same qualities and propensities that are so magnified in the US and portrayed in such terrifying light by Joe Bageant.

So no matter where in the world you live, please buy several copies of Deer Hunting With Jesus and give them to people who do not understand why George Bush won the US election of 2004. This is important, and Joe has done all the hard work and research for us, in a courageous, personal and awesome portrait of the true nature of the most powerful country on the planet. We need everyone to hear this story, to understand what has been going on under our noses all along, that we never got quite close enough tosee.

Category: US Politics

Posted in How the World Really Works | 16 Comments

Eat Pray Love

Posted on April 16, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Image: Sculpture by Bruno Torfs from Sculpture Garden, Marysville, Australia.

(posted from Australia)

Elizabeth Gilbert’s extraordinary Eat Pray Love is a funny, poignant, brutally candid diary of a year in the author’s life following the painful ending of her marriage and an equally painful subsequent affair. Through insights and learning about herself, Ms Gilbert allows us to learn about ourselves, and about the nature of our species.

The diary covers three sequential four-month pilgrimmages, to Italy to discover pleasure (Eat), to an Indian ashram to discover spirituality (Pray), and to Bali to discover how to balance the two (Love).

More than anything, the voyage is one of self-discovery and self-realization:

David and I met because he was performing in a play based on short stories I’d written. He was playing a character I’d invented, which is somewhat telling. In desperate love, it’s always like this, isn’t it? In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place…

David’s sudden emotional back-stepping probably would’ve been a catastrophe for me even under the best of circumstances, given that I am the planet’s most affectionate life-form (something like a cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle)…I had become addicted to David…It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose…of thunderous love and roiling excitement…When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore — despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free)…

[Describing her depression:] When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost…Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it’s time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don’t even know from which direction the sun rises anymore…

I have boundary issues with men…I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything…my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog…everything…I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.

Sound like someone you know, or suddenly know now?

Ms Gilbert’s tale is a long, terrible, wonderful, personal story, and she is a master raconteur of small anecdotes and incidents with profound meaning:

“To find the balance you want,” [the ancient Balinese medicine man] Ketut spoke through his translator, “this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it’s like you have four legs instead of two. That way you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead.”…

When [my sister] Catherine told me about [a neighbour’s terrible personal tragedy] I could only say, shocked, “Dear God that family needs grace”. She replied firmly, “That family needs casseroles“, and then proceeded to organize the entire neighbourhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this is grace.

She intersperses her self-reflections and anecdotes with perceptive insights into Western culture: “Generally speaking, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure…Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one…Americans don’t really know how to do nothing.” Her description of Italian men’s post-football-game rituals is side-splitting. And she describes Yoga in an astonishing and refreshing way, as grappling with

…the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment…Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul yourself away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek instead a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise.

Faith, she says, is “walking face-first and full speed into the dark”. Our destiny, she asserts, is focusing attention on things we can control and accepting and adapting to those we cannot: “I can decide how I spend my time, who I interact with, who I share my body and life and money and energy with…And most of all, I can choose my thoughts… the same way [I] can select the clothes [I’m] going to wear…If you want to control things in your life…work on the mind…Drop everything else but that…Every time a diminishing thought arises, I repeat the vow. I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore.“

She describes her moment of Zen, of communion with God, painstakingly and passionately. Then, as she describes the balance she finds in Bali, she reports with astonishment: “I have so much free time, you could measure it in metric tons”. And finally, in retrospect, she says, of her bliss:

What keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years — I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue…

I have become…liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself.

Her journey represents the journey of all of us, to get rid of the gunk that prevents us from being, simply, naturally, ourselves. It is my belief that wild creatures do not need to make this journey. They know who they are, and they live in that “eternal presence” without the need to unlearn and relearn and achieve self-mastery to do so. We have moved out of that world, into our heads, and our “spiritual” journeys are all, to some extent, in search of that way home to that place where we are our authentic selves, where we belong.

It takes both great courage and exceptional self-awareness for an author to reveal herself so honestly that the reader can learn from her mistakes and her struggles. For that reason alone this book is a remarkable accomplishment, a profound and purely unselfish autobiography. Forget the self-help books — read this wonderful story and become, by association, a better, more focused, more aware, more directed, moreself-knowing, more sensuous, spiritual and loving person.

Category: Being Human

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

What’s Your ‘Big Question’?

Posted on April 15, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Image: Sculpture by Bruno Torfs from Sculpture Garden, Marysville, Australia.

(posted from Australia)

Edge magazine and several others have run articles on leading thinkers’ ‘Big Ideas’ — the revelation, the emergent understanding, the ‘aha! moment’ that has most provoked, inspired or changed them. I am not sure I have had any Big Ideas, just a few Miniature Truths.

But today we live in an age of such uncertainty, a world where our understanding is so tenuous and constantly evolving, that I think it is more interesting to learn what people’s Big Questions are. Your Big Question is the issue, doubt, problem or struggle that keeps you awake at night because you know you are still a long way from resolving it, and without doing so you cannot achieve your life’s purpose.

What interests me are the commonalities, patterns and collective approaches to dealing with these Big Questions. So lately I’ve been asking the people I meet what their Big Question is. I’ve found great similarities between the Big Questions of Canadians, Americans, and now Australians. But surprisingly, I’ve found signifiant differences between the Big Questions of men and women. Men’s seem to be more idealistic and conceptual, women’s more specific, practical and particular.

Recently I have been struggling with Big Questions of how to make better use of my time, of whether and how Intentional Communities can work and become models that are replicated, of whether and how I can love many people in ways that are useful and fulfilling to all of us (rather than constantly letting others down), and of how to live simpler. These big questions are, of course, all interrelated: Loving many people requires effective use of time, and is perhaps only possible in communities where they are all constantly close at hand. And living simpler probably also requires living in community.

So maybe the underlying Big Question for me is: Where Do I Belong? To what physical place, to what community, to what way of living and making a living? The biggest challenge with such a question is whether it is even possible to answer that personally, individually, intentionally — or whether such awareness, such discovery needs to emerge, evolve, collectively, with that of others, such that we (we the creatures in those places, the humans in search of their belonging, the communities-in-forming, the enterprises waiting to evolve in response to deep unmet needs) together, must discover them?

Several of the men I have spoken to recently have identified their Big Question as some variation of: Am I Doing This Right? In other words, is the process they are using to accomplish what they know they are intended to do, the right process, the best way of achieving it?

I confess I am much less sure that I know what I am intended to do, so I am not yet ready to acknowledge this as my Big Question.

The women I have spoken to recently have mostly said they don’t really have a Big Question, but rather a few or a host of specific, personal questions. What might this reflect: pragmatism, practicality, or resignation, unwarranted modesty?

They say that knowing the real question is half way to finding the answer. But if Where Do I Belong? is my Big Question, it leaves me bewilderingly unaware of what the answer might be, or even how to start down the path towards discovering it. Although I’m blogging from Australia on a trip that is half business, half personal, I have no great passion to start searching the world for the answer, as Liz Gilbert does in Eat Pray Love.

The number of people I love is substantial, but the number I have discovered who I know I would want to spend the rest of my life living with and making a living with is tiny, and not sufficient for a sustainable community or even a sustainable enterprise. Where does one start to find where one belongs, if it is not looking for the place that is, intuitively and unquestionably, home? And if, from over 2000 people whose company I’ve discovered I enjoy immensely I cannot assemble enough to make a sustainable community, even I could convince them all to come and share my home, or create an enterprise with me?

I think what makes discovery of one’s purpose so hard in our modern culture is that there are so many people, so many places, so many options and choices. In indigenous communities the choices were limited, but somehow, my instincts tell me, their members were vastly happier.

Perhaps I am too demanding of others, and of myself. That’s not uncommon among hopeless idealists. I remain a believer in intentional community and in a polyamorous lifestyle, though I am doubtful either is realistically viable. But I have no Plan B. The one positive is that, more than any time in my adult life, I am open to possibility. The life I am intended to live, and the place where I belong, are out there, waiting to be discovered.

Enough about my Big Question. What is yours? What is the issue, doubt, problem or struggle that keeps you awake at night because you know you are still a long way from resolving it, and without doing so you cannot achieve your life’s purpose?

Category: Let-Self-Change

Posted in Collapse Watch | 11 Comments

What Works and What Doesn’t

Posted on April 10, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Geoff Brown’s ‘Nancy White style’ Map of Our Conversation with Viv McWaters

(Posted from Melbourne)

This will be the first of a series of posts distilling ideas from a series of conversations, meetings and conferences I’m involved in during my current visit to Australia. I have been meeting with thought leaders in the areas of facilitation, Open Space, improv, knowledge management, education, cultural anthropology, conversation, sustainability, stories/narrative, social networking, communities of passion, complexity theory and collaboration.

I have met Viv McWaters (and Pete), Geoff Brown, Laurie Webb, Shawn Callahan, Michael Sampson, and Michael Nugent (and Trish), and a variety of participants in some of their remarkable projects. Although they have different areas of expertise and experience, the same questions (issues we’re all grappling with) keep emerging in our discussions:

What works and what doesn’t i.e. what are the enablers and preconditions for success in bringing about organizational change: changes in environmental sustainability, social responsibility, innovation, adaptation, process changes, new technology introduction, personal effectiveness improvement etc.?
What is (for each of us) the Big Question — the issue, doubt, problem or struggle that keeps us awake at night because we know we are still a long way from resolving it, and without doing so we cannot achieve our life’s purpose? What are the commonalities, patterns and collective approaches to dealing with these Big Questions?
How can bottom-up successes be scaled and/or replicated?
What are the preconditions for effective collaboration?
What will tomorrow’s knowledge management (or whatever we call them) systems look like?
What kinds of stories have the most power? How can we become better story-tellers?
How can we make space and time for serendipitous conversations, the kind that produce astonishing insights, connections, and idea transfer?
How can we make better use of our time, and get more accomplished?
How does one design effective learning systems when we all learn differently?
How can we make better use of metaphors in creating and finding meaning? (Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat Pray Love says: “I believe that all the world’s [religious, political and philosophical movements] share, at their core, a desire to find a transporting metaphor. When you want to attain [some major change in understanding or belief or appreciation of some startling new concept] you need some kind of magnificent idea to convey you there. It has to be a big one, this metaphor — really big and magic and powerful, because it needs to carry you across a mighty distance.”)
How can we become better conversationalists? And improvisationalists?
How can we be sane and happy and productive in an insane and misery-filled and dysfunctional world (letting go, finding peace, presencing and all that)?

What interests me most about the questions above, the questions we’ve been discussing so passionately all week, is that the ‘answers’ (to the extent we have brainstormed or agreed on them) are probably not as important as achieving consensus that these are the important questions we need to address in order to make this world a better place to live and make a living in. So while I plan to write about some of these issues in the coming days and weeks, I will also be refining and reposting this list of questions.

In answer to the first question (what works and what doesn’t in change programs), John Kotter has said there are eight preconditions to ‘leading change’ in organizations. The first and most important are (a) shared sense of urgency and (b) a guiding coalition.

My experience has been that real change in organizations rarely occurs by executive fiat. When ordered to do something new, people who aren’t ‘sold’ on the idea will tend to comply only to the extent and for as long as they absolutely have to. By contrast, those who are sold on the idea, who are passionate about it, will sustain the change.

Likewise, having a guiding coalition of people championing and stewarding a change through will help to achieve immediate compliance, but not necessarily enduring change. Like it or not, people tend to do, in the long run, what they think makes sense, to the extent they are able to do so, rather than what they are told to do. This streak of self-management is inherent in human nature, I think, and generally a good thing, except perhaps in armies, and even then I’m not too sure.

So in our discussions to date about what works and what doesn’t, the list of ‘what works’ is looking something like this:

What the people who have to implement it and sustain it have passion for (e.g. meets a need)
What is simple, easy, inexpensive and intuitive to do
What people can see works well (e.g. because it’s worked somewhere else)
What is fun to do (play, learning)
What, when done, has tangible, visible results (“we did that!”)
What the people involved believe they have the collective capacity to do well
What the people involved are ready to do (energy, time, resources, worldview)
When the people involved like and trust each other

And the list of what doesn’t work is looking something like this:

What doesn’t make sense to those who have to implement and sustain it (e.g. the war in Iraq)
What is conveyed with conflicting messages or conflicting sets of priorities
What you need to bribe or coerce people to do (in other words, the old argument that ‘what gets rewarded gets done’ no longer applies)

Do you know of any examples of astonishing, sustained change? What made it possible? How were the obstacles circumvented or overcome?

(PS: A possible 13th question, after hearing her name from four different people here in Australia already: Is there anyone in the world Nancy White doesn’t know and hasn’t worked with?)

Category: Collaboration

Posted in Working Smarter | 7 Comments

Friday Flashback: He Can’t Hear You Anymore

Posted on April 3, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Just before Christmas 2004 I wrote an article about homelessness and substance addiction. Not as a national and global disgrace, which it is, but as a metaphor for what civilization has done to us. Our modern ‘homelessness’ is our disconnection from place, from all-life-on-Earth, from living a natural life in a natural environment. Our modern addiction is to consumption and debt. It’s all so understandable, tragic, and intractable.

The next time you see a homeless person, or an addict, don’t be frightened, angry, or filled with pathos. You are looking in the mirror.

Read the full article.

Image of homelessness from the now-defunct Italian blog Moving & Learning .

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Unpopular Beliefs

Posted on April 3, 2008 by Dave Pollard

One of the challenges of being too far ahead is the push-back you get on some of your ideas and beliefs. My ideas and beliefs tend to fall into three categories:

Beliefs that were once unpopular but are now accepted by the great majority of people. Examples:

Gender and racial equality.
Abhorrence of cruelty to animals.
Evolution.

Beliefs that are still unpopular among conservatives but increasingly popular among progressives. Examples:

Homosexuality as a perfectly natural alternative to heterosexuality.
Universal, not-for-profit health care.
Allowing people to evolve their own cultures at the pace and the way they want, as long as they respect the ideas and beliefs of others, and respect acknowledged universal rights and freedoms; acknowledging as well that democracy and constitutional liberalism cannot be imposed.
Unschooling, letting young people learn in the community, their own way, at their own pace, the things that they need to learn to live and make a living productively.
War must only be a last resort, and never has winners. Humans are by nature peaceful, generous, and well-intentioned.

Beliefs that are still unpopular, even among progressives. Examples:

Communal ownership of property; the idea that we belong to the land, rather than it to us.
Egalitarian consensus decision-making, rather than hiererchical, role-based decision-making.
Polyamorism as being a more natural and healthy way to live than monogamy.
Encouragement of negative population growth, to naturally reduce human population below one billion, and commensurately setting aside most of the Earth’s inhabitable land as wildlands, uninhabited by humans.

In the progressive press, news that some people still haven’t accepted Category 1 beliefs is often reported dismissively, derisively, impatiently, even angrily. There is a sense that we’re past that, that we shouldn’t still have to deal with these issues.

In the progressive press, there is a lot of debate about Category 2 beliefs. The progressive point of view is advanced, articulated, argued vociferously. Other points of view are presented, in an effort to understand and refute them.

You will not find much in the progressive press, or anywhere else, on Category 3 beliefs. These are fringe thoughts, limited to the left-wing and anarcho-press. Some progressives may be sympathetic to these beliefs, but they don’t want to discuss them, be associated with them, have to defend them against the rabid antipathy of the mainstream. Some progressives may be completely unsympathetic to them, and consider them a betrayal, a distraction, ammunition to the other side.

I have always believed that things are the way they are for a reason. When I’ve held unpopular beliefs in past, I’ve remained suspicious of them, kept them mostly to myself, thrown them out not as my own but as ‘straw man’ ideas to be prodded, exposed, poked full of holes. Perhaps as a result, most of the unpopular beliefs I held as a young man I no longer espouse.

Or perhaps it is because it was more important to me to be accepted, popular, everybody-else. If you hold an unpopular belief too vociferously, you can be trampled, brutalized, ostracized, lynched. Just ask anyone who espoused Category 1 or 2 beliefs when they were still Category 3 beliefs.

As I get older, I am no longer as concerned with what people think of my beliefs, and I am modestly more competent at defending them, at least with those who are capable of listening. And while some of my youthful unpopular beliefs are no longer things I believe in, I have lots of new Category 3 beliefs, most of which I have aired on this blog at one time or another.

The response I have received to my articles about them, and my espousal of these beliefs, has been, for the most part, pretty hostile, and sometimes downright nasty. Sometimes I feel like just keeping them to myself. But then I ask myself: What if I had lived in a previous generation or more conservative country, and I had chosen to keep silent about then-unpopular beliefs that have since become (thanks in part to people who fought for them) Category 1 or 2 beliefs?

The four examples of Category 3 beliefs above are the ones I have received the most violent negative response to. Most of the people I know (and Americans in particular, for some reason) seem to abhor the idea that we don’t have a ‘right’ to ‘own’ and use the planet and everything that comes from our resources for human, personal purposes. They believe almost religiously that leadership and hierarchy are essential to a functional society, and that there is an inalienable human right to reproduce as many of our own kind as we choose.

There are times when I just shut up about my unpopular beliefs, because to some extent, as Daniel Quinn says, people will only listen to new ideas when they are ready. Arguing with people who are viscerally hostile to what you believe is a waste of time and energy.

But there are other times when I cannot remain silent. When I just have to stand up for what I believe in. “If at first an idea isn’t considered absurd”, Einstein said, “there is no hope for it.” Maybe I’m just stubborn. Or maybe I’m relearning to pay attention to and trust my instincts. If you don’t like what I say, that’s fine. I don’t want to argue. But I’munrepentent. My unpopular beliefs’ time is coming.

New Yorker cover by Charles E Martin from September 11, 1971

Category: Our Culture

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 11 Comments