A Gift of Knowledge, Art and Appreciation

Posted on November 22, 2007 by Dave Pollard
melisa christensen
© 2007 Melisa Christensen
My friend Melisa, an extraordinary artist and blogger based in NYC, has decided to forgo the usual Christmas gifts in favour of gifting knowledge. She is sending people copies of her favourite documentary films.

I think this is a brilliant idea, and an important statement. It conveys to the people you are sending gifts to that you care about the world we all live in, that you want them to know what you know, that you appreciate their intelligence and sensitivity to things that matter. It is a gift of art, and an appreciation of art. It is environmentally responsible. It is socially responsible and consistent with the Gift Economy — if you can afford to buy copies, the proceeds will go to great documentary filmmakers to help finance additional work, and if you can’t, well, your handmade copies may spur your recipients to support the artist by buying her/his other work. And it deprives the corporatists of the revenue they might otherwise get from sweatshop labour, fouling the environment, depleting resources and screwing the workers of affluent nations, if you’d bought some Chinese crap instead.

In the spirit of this, I asked Melisa to help me compile a list of great documentaries to consider. Her list is more political than mine, while mine skews more to naturedocumentaries with a message. Here’s our combined list:

The Corporation
Maxed Out
Koyaanisqatsi (Earth Out of Balance)
Jesus Camp
MicroCosmos
Who Killed the Electric Car?
The Take: Occupy, Resist, Produce
Ralph Nader: An Unreasonable Man
The Power of Nightmares
A Crude Awakening.
Winged Migration
March of the Penguins
Why We Fight
An Inconvenient Truth
Sicko

That’s 15 to start. What’s missing? If we get enough suggestions we’ll create a permanent list and put it on the sidebar.

(And for those who love documentaries, here’s a blog with links to dozens of free online documentaries)

Category: The Arts
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 21 Comments

The Politics of Monogamy

Posted on November 21, 2007 by Dave Pollard
my avatar
One of the things that has surprised me most about my recent voyage into polyamorous love is the effect it has had on my appreciation of music and film. As most of you know, I’m a hopeless romantic, and music and films about discovered and celebrated and lost love transport me.

But now I’m starting to look at these films, and listen to this music, with a completely different eye and ear. They are almost all about:

  • Couples making monogamous love work against all odds
  • Women rescued from loneliness or from loss of one monogamous love by a new, originally stupid and or selfish and or polyamorous love who eventually realizes that his purpose for living is to love only her
  • Songs declaring someone to be their one true love
  • Heartbreak over loss of one’s one true love, and the misery and emptiness and/or anger it leaves behind
  • The search for and discovery of one’s one true love (after much foolish misadventure)

So now I find myself hitting the fast forward to next song button on my mp3 player over and over to get past these really annoying songs about monogamous love being the one true way. What’s that about? How come I never noticed before that these seemingly great songs and seemingly heartwarming movies are actually political propaganda?

I don’t by any means think this is deliberate. This is just one more example of the “only life we know” phenomenon, by which we extol the virtues of the only way we know to do things, through good and bad, and laugh about how crazy it all seems to be.

It’s the same reason that books about entrepreneurship reinforce the deadly and dangerous myths about the only way to make a living, and the same reason that our political and economic and educational debate is all centred around how to tweak the existing systems (to the left or right, usually) when any fool should be able to see that the existing systems are hopelessly broken and that tweaking them or depending on them is simply being co-opted by them, a distraction from the essential work of imagining and creating wholly new models that can be tried when the old ones collapse.

We are, alas, our own propagandists, urging each other on to be ‘everybody else’ in an insignificantly and unhelpfully different way.

When will we start listening to the artists and the dreamers? They have been telling us this all along. Why can’t we,won’t we, hear them?

Category: Our Culture
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 11 Comments

Principles of a Polyamorous Natural Community

Posted on November 20, 2007 by Dave Pollard
polyamoryOf late, most of my conversations have been about love, about conversation and about community, specifically the creation of model intentional communities that are essentially polyamorous in nature (i.e. membership in the community is self-selected in such a way that all members of the community love each other, equally, with no pervasive pair bonds). My article Communities Based on Love has sparked quite a bit of discussion on this subject, notably the 16 natural capacities I suggested members in such a community should have:

  1. deep capacity for love
  2. passion for the community’s shared purpose/intention
  3. trust
  4. emotional strength
  5. sensitivity, openness, perceptiveness
  6. good instincts
  7. self-sufficiency
  8. honesty
  9. intelligence, critical thinking ability
  10. curiosity
  11. imagination
  12. creativity
  13. responsibility
  14. expressiveness
  15. flexibility
  16. tolerance

Many readers thought this long list too onerous and exclusive, but I sense that a Natural Community whose members significantly lack any of these qualities would be extremely fragile. I also believe we are all born with these capacities, and for most it’s just a matter of Letting-Oneself-Change to re-engender them.

I have already begun, with a woman I have met in Second Life who I will call Eve, to create one such community in Second Life to test whether all these capacities are necessary, and to test my hypothesis that such communities should naturally and advantageously be polyamorous. Eve and I are beginning to explore the operating principles that might govern such communities. I see these principles being fluid, emergent and co-developed by the community members, so what we come up initially with will be merely a first stake in the ground.

My recent obsession with love, conversation, polyamory and community has been such that I’ve also been talking with real-life friends (some of whom are physically close and others whom I have never met face-to-face but love nevertheless) about these principles. Some of these people I hope to invite to be part of our Second Life MPNC (model polyamorous natural community).

Here are some of the principles we’ve been thinking and talking about:

  • Intentionality Principle: The MPNC must have, and share, a common intention. The whole idea of creating community is to achieve some shared purpose, without which the glue of loving each other would probably not be enough to cohere the community (that’s why they’re called ‘intentional communities’). Our purpose in this first MPNC might be simply to test and prove the viability of this model of living together.
  • Self-Management Principle: The MPNC’s membership must be self-managed. This means, for example, that Eve and I must agree on who to invite next, and as we add members we must all agree on any additional members. This probably means size of the MPNC will be self-limiting. Self-management also means that all important decisions must be unanimous, achieved by consensus and not by compromise, pressure or ‘voting’ of any kind. The best real-life ICs have a well-practiced dispute resolution process built on love, deep mutual trust and respect, mutual support and strong, honest communication, that our MPNC needs too. Just as importantly, the MPNC’s members must know how to imagine and create their way our of problems and impasses. The best collectively self-managed groups I know are mostly women’s groups, and I think the MPNC needs to listen carefully and learn from our women members how to self-manage better.
  • Membership in the MPNC needs to be diverse and balanced. I’ve explained that the capacities of partners in a Natural Enterprise must be ‘on purpose’, and diverse and mutually exclusive (don’t want too many people with the same strengths and weaknesses), and collectively exhaustive (between them, the enterprise partners need to have all the capacities necessary to their shared purpose). I think the same applies to our MPNC: We want our members to be diverse, so that while we all love each other equally, we love each other in different ways and for different things, so that we move among the members in love and in so doing fulfill different parts and needs of ourselves and each other. If some quality is conspicuously missing from the members, it’s only to be expected that they will want to go outside the MPNC for that quality. To the (considerable) extent the love of members for each other is erotic, there needs to be balance between genders and sexual orientations too, so that there is no scarcity of any form of love, including erotic love.
  • There should be polyfidelity within the MPNC. As a perhaps controversial corollary of the above, to make the community safe and stable, members should commit to limit their romantic and erotic relationships to other members of the community. I think the difference between a polyamorous community and a group of promiscuous people is an important one. Commitment to community should be a deep commitment, and if a member is unable to fulfill their desires for love within the community, that suggests either the member lacks commitment or the community lacks members with certain needed qualities that would allow the member to find what s/he loves within it. Just like a business partnership, you agree on who’s in and who’s out, and commit yourself to making the partnership work. Because the love between the members of the MPNC is so deep, raw, and generous, its members are vulnerable to being hurt, and therefore the MPNC must be an emotionally safe place, one with an abundance of all forms of love accessible withing the community, so that jealousy and possessiveness don’t rear their ugly heads.
  • The members of the MPNC must feel, embrace and practice compersion and empathy. Compersion is taking pleasure when someone you love is with or expresses love for another partner (in this case, another member of the community). It is the antithesis of jealousy. I think this is the hardest thing to learn in a polyamorous community, even when there is an abundance of love within the community. I don’t know why this is, but I have experienced this myself in Second Life. It hurts a bit to hear someone you really love relating or demonstrating delight received from another lover. But when you get past this, it’s utterly liberating, as if you have finally ridded yourself of the worst vestige of our current society’s terrible scarcity of love. Likewise, empathy (the ability to perceive profoundly the emotional state of another) must come to replace subjectivity, selfishness and proclivity to judge others. Empathy is another capacity that in my experience most women are much better at than men, so the women of the MPNC probably will need to lead the learning of this practice. 

There may well be other principles, and perhaps we’ll find some of these principles are unnecessary or need to be changed. This is all about practice, and it is through practice, in Second Life, and paying attention to what works especially well and what doesn’t work well, that these principles will evolve into a set of principles that guide the flow of the community. And it is through practice that we’ll learn to become better community members, lovers and friends. There is, I think, no other way to make this work. And it is important, both to our broken modern society and to the generations yet unborn who may have to create a new society fromthe ruins of civilization, that we make it work.
Posted in Collapse Watch | 8 Comments

The Strategy Paradox

Posted on November 19, 2007 by Dave Pollard
hurricane wilma
I had the pleasure recently of meeting with Michael Raynor, author of The Strategy Paradox and co-author of The Innovator’s Solution. I wanted to try to convince him that the solution to the Paradox is designing for organizational resilience, an idea I’ve been exploring with Steve Barth. Michael wasn’t having any of it.

In a nutshell, the Paradox is that the more you plan and commit to certain strategies for your organization’s future, the more likely you are to achieve exceptional results, and the more likely you are to achieve disastrous results. The greater your commitment, the greater you opportunities and your risks.

The reason for this is that, by committing to particular strategies and executing based on those strategies, you will, if your expectations about the future prove correct, achieve competitive advantage as a result of that commitment. But, if your expectations about the future turn out to be very wrong, you will have over-committed your energies and resources to the wrong things, and will lose big time.

As a consequence, organizations tend to be shy to commit to strategies unequivocally. They’ll avoid both risks and opportunities. And their performance will be mediocre.

Michael’s solution is to do two divergent things:

  1. Get the executive office to manage strategic uncertainty and create strategic options. This means keeping doors open and being ready to commit to various alternatives as they emerge, and making small risk-conscious strategic investments, each of which will pay off if various future scenarios come to pass. This requires a long-term focus, scenario planning and balancing investments, committing a little to a variety of possible alternative possibilities, knowing most of them will not pan out.
  2. Get the operating divisions to commit fully to specific short-term strategies. These strategies need to be set by the executive office, and division management needs to be resourced to act on them fully and indemnified if the strategy proves to be the wrong one. 

This combination minimizes risk (by keeping longer term strategic options open) and maximizes return (by committing aggressively to shorter-term strategies). He argues that the reason the Paradox is so little understood in business is that most research on performance focuses only on successful companies, and ignores the lessons from spectacular failures.

The process of strategic uncertainty management or strategic flexibility therefore entails the following four steps for the executive office:

  1. Anticipate: build future state scenarios that suggest alternative ways future events could unfold and their consequences to the company.
  2. Formulate: create optimal strategies for each scenario
  3. Accumulate: assess what strategic real options are available and invest in them
  4. Operate: manage that portfolio of options (add, cut bait, exercise, commit operating divisions)

Michael argues that, because the future is so unpredictable, rapid changes cannot be adapted to (no matter how resilient the organization) and slow changes encourage incrementalism and expose the organization to disruptive innovations from competitors.

As a consequence of the lack of good strategic uncertainty management competence in most organizations, Michael suggests that the best investment strategy might be:

  • From all the companies in an industry or market, identify the ones that boldly commit to strategies. These will probably include those that guess right about the future (spectacular successes) and those that guess wrong (spectacular failures).
  • Because the outstanding performance of the spectacular successes will more than offset the poor performance of the spectacular failures, investing in a ‘bucket’ of these boldly committed companies will achieve a higher rate of return than investing in the non-committed companies, which are likely to achieve only mediocre performance.

I also spoke with Michael about Elliott Jaques’ Requisite Organization which argues that “managerial hierarchy is a reflection in post-tribal organizational life of discontinuities in the nature of human capability”. My regular readers will not be surprised that I violently disagree, and believe that such hierarchy exists because it’s essential to compel acquiescence and obedience of the majority of workers to mindless, meaningless, soul-destroying work. But that’s a subject for another article.

Michael’s newest project revolves around his organic view of business organizations whose essential purpose, he argues (contrary to The Corporation’s view of their essential pathological nature) is to secure its own survival. That requires, at least in a ‘perfect’ market, satisfying all stakeholders in a balanced way including maximizing their social welfare, even more than making profits. We discussed how market ‘imperfections’ (the ability to form oligopolies, the ability to externalize costs to other countries, the environment and future generations) distort this seemingly natural and evolutionary development in the real world. I’m not willing to concede that organizations are truly this organic. Just as unhealthy societies are perverted by scarcity, corruption, psychopathy, acquisitiveness, thirst for power, and greed, so too are corporations in a world where too many people are chasing too few resources and jobs. When this happens, agile social structures based on abundance and collective well-being are replaced by mechanistic, fragile ones based on deliberate perpetuation of scarcity, power and inequality.

Can organizations, at least non-hierarchical, responsible enterprises designed for sustainability truly be resilient? My experience, with much smaller companies than Michael has studied, is that they can. I believe that size, and the number of degrees of separation between an entrepreneurial organization and its customers, partners and community, is the real cause of lack of organizational resilience, which gives rise to the need for the complicated and counter-intuitive solution Michael proposes for giant monoliths.

There is no strategy paradox for Natural Enterprises — their capacity for and focus on excellent need-driven research, innovation, continuous improvisation and acting responsibly and responsively is their competitive advantage over the arthritic hierarchical giants, and the key to their inherent resilienceand sustainability.
Posted in Working Smarter | 6 Comments

Sunday Open Thread — November 18, 2007

Posted on November 18, 2007 by Dave Pollard
christer rosewell
Image by Christer Rosewell

What I’m Thinking of Writing (and Podcasting) About Soon:

Principles of Natural Polyamorous Community: I’ve found a remarkable woman in Second Life (or rather, we’ve found each other) who shares my vision for creating an intentional polyamorous community (we actually share a lot more). Like Noah, or Adam and Eve, we’re going to build it in Second Life, carefully adding one couple at a time we both love, who share our values, philosophy and lifestyle, and work out, together, the social principles by which it operates, all built on generosity and abundance of love. And I thought my life couldn’t get any better!

Coping With the Strategy Paradox: I met recently with Michael Raynor, who wrote The Strategy Paradox. He’s now looking at what else we can do to deal with this paradox, and he poked some holes in my argument that what we need is resilience, not planning.

The Evolving Role of the Information Professional: Since I listed the five major ‘products’ of my new employer, some people have suggested that this list might define the new role of the information professional in all sorts of organizations.

Gangs and the Malleability of Human Ethics: Observers of the now decade-long intractable genocides and civil wars in Darfur, Somalia, Chad, Zaire and other African nations describe the same gang phenomena repeated endlessly: Men horrifically tortured and slaughtered, women systematically and repeatedly raped, children kidnapped and forced into slavery and military duty, animals and other resources stolen, and villages burned to the ground. What is it about human nature that so many can perpetrate such atrocities for so long without remorse?

Vignette #7

Blog-Hosted Conversation #4: Inevitably, my fourth podcast will be about love and/or Intentional Community. Not sure who it will be with, yet.

Possible Open Thread Question:

What’s the most romantic song, and the most romantic movie, you know?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week — November 17, 2007

Posted on November 17, 2007 by Dave Pollard
CO2 plants
Map from Carma-Carbon Monitoring, via Cass

Allowing Space: Cassandra writes a profound and important article about art and blogging. “I risk losing you if I don’t post often. I risk losing myself, and the rests between my words, if I post too often.” This brought tears of understanding to my eyes. If you’re an artist, a blogger, or a lover, just go read it. Now you know, dear readers, why I reply to your comments and e-mails so rarely, though I read and savour every word.

If I Were to Do Only One Thing, What Would It Be?: La Marguerite explains why green activists need to simplify their messages, not dumbing them down, but prioritizing and customizing to engage and enable meaningful action.

Simple Formula for Change Through Conversation: Conversation as a Radical Act says it’s about finding the intersection between the important, appreciated issues (the what), the right, passionate, responsible, informed people with diverse ideas (the who), and the right methodologies and process arts to explore these issues (the how). Simple, and brilliant. Nancy and Nancy and Juanita and Amy, you’re on to something.

When the Spark in Your Relationship Has Flagged: A wonderful and deftly-written article by TherapyDoc with advice for women on how reawakening your libido starts with focusing on yourself. Should be compulsory reading for men, too.

Eat Food, Not Much, Mostly Plants: That’s the advice from food politics expert Michael Pollan in Grist. Thanks to David Parkinson for the link.

The US Drought Worsens: The Independent updates us on just how bad it is.

Thought for the Week: My own, for a change:

Ever since I began to learn and write about Natural Enterprise, I’ve become aware of how the propaganda of Hierarchical Business and Meaningless Work pervades everything in the information and entertainment media, teaching us that there is only one way to make a living.

Ever since I began to learn and write about Natural Economy, I’ve become aware of how the propaganda of Industrial Economy pervades everything in the information and entertainment media, teaching us that there is only one way to steward Earth’s resources.

Ever since I began to learn and write about Natural (Intentional) Community, I’ve become aware of how the propaganda of Disconnected Community and Dependent Politics pervades everything in the information and entertainment media, teaching us that there is only one way to live together

Ever since I began to learn and write about Unschooling, I’ve become aware of how the propaganda of Institutional Education pervades everything in the information and entertainment media, teaching us that there is only one way to learn.

Ever since I began to learn and write about Polyamory, I’ve become aware of how the propaganda of Monogamy and Nuclear Family pervades everything in the information and entertainment media, teaching us that there is only one way to love.

It’s only when we learn, discover, explore, or create another way that the current way of doing things appears ridiculous, outrageous, tragic,obscene.
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

love song 4 6

Posted on November 16, 2007 by Dave Pollard
parrot 2so we’re now all together, new lovers and friends
we’re creating the future on which earth depends
overwhelmed by these feelings, this chemical soup
and the pleasures of loving our whole little group

you’re my reason to be, love you each more than life
but our role is much richer than husband or wife:
we are all polyamorous, six into one
we love each other equally, we’ve just begun

to share everything we are, six bodies, six souls
in intentional community, sharing goals,
lost in deep conversation or trembling with lust
we gift each to each other a deep sacred trust

sensitivity, strength, laughter, passion and joy
as a girl loves a boy loves a girl loves a boy
we’re a generous hexagon, open and free
not possessive or jealous, just three upon three

giving love in abundance, to each one in turn
we connect and combine, come together and learn
we’re alive with the promise of communal bliss
we exchange and we laugh and we touch and we kiss

we intend to be amor and eros and zen
on this intimate journey of women and men
full of joy full of hope full of caring and heart
we are never alone we are never apart

oh i love you! i love you! i love you! we’re one
with the earth and the stars and the sea and the sun
so sweet friends sail beside me we’re soaring above
we’ve discovered the meaning of life is just LOVE

(the parrot is the symbol of polyamorous community); photo by jiri bohdal

Category: Poetry
Posted in Creative Works | Comments Off on love song 4 6

Why We Can’t Just Be Ourselves

Posted on November 14, 2007 by Dave Pollard

mask 3
This post is dedicated to my new friend, who I met just today, spontaneously, and who already has a place in my heart.

The journey to know yourself is the first step towards understanding how the world works and becoming truly yourself, which is necessary, I think, if you hope to ever make the world a little better.

As de Mello said, this journey is mostly about getting rid of the everybody-else stuff that has become attached to us as part of our social conditioning, and getting rid of this stuff is perhaps what ee cummings meant when he said the hardest thing is to be nobody-but-yourself when the world is relentlessly trying to make you everybody-else. From birth, we pick up all this everybody-else stuff that clings to us and changes us, muddies us. We are rewarded by society for doing so.

I find the ‘figments of reality’ thesis helpful in this hard work — realizing that our minds are nothing more than problem-detection systems evolved by the organs of our bodies for their purposes, not ‘ours’. That ‘we’ are, each ‘one’ of us, a collective, a complicity.

So our body is working away telling us exactly what to do to, and be, in the self-interest of our organs. And our culture is telling us to be everybody-else, to look like, be and do exactly as others do.

So when we fall in love, our body tells us to go for it, to love unreservedly, to make fools of ourselves if necessary, while our culture tells us to play it cool, to keep our heart out of sight. When are consumed with lust for someone or something, our body says pounce, take it, get it, now, don’t wait, while our culture says to show appreciation and attention but not to go too fast or appear too desperate — to play games. When we face unbearable stress, from provocation, violation, loss, illness or violence against us or someone or something we love, our body says fight or flee (and tells us which) while our culture tells us to control our temper. And now we live in the terrible modern world of scarcity of love and of resources, and horrific overcrowding unheard of in natural populations, so these provocations and stresses are chronic, frequent and intense.

Caught between the two, no wonder we make ourselves ill. If we lived naturally (which is,sad to say, no longer an option), we would face no such tensions. We could then be like all other wild cultures, uninhibited, spontaneous, direct, and resolve our passions and tensions quickly. No pretense, no artifice, no holding back. Raw.

Our culture however frowns on such behaviour as anti-social, weird, self-preoccupied, or arrogant. So we end up, I think, having to adopt a public persona that is, to some extent, not genuine, not ‘us’ at all. That’s hard. We have to pretend to feel what we do not, and pretend not to feel what we do. We have to pretend to be what we are not, and pretend not to be who we really are. So after awhile we begin to believe we are this other, this false and civilized persona, and cease to believe or understand who we really are. And finally we become this other, or as close to it as we can pull off. We become everybody-else.

It takes enormous strength, self-confidence and/or indifference to what others think of ‘us’, to resist this self-censorship, this willing inauthenticity. So when we do fall in love, or otherwise feel the intense emotion that makes us ‘us’, we are so masked and so unpracticed at genuine expression of feeling that, so often, it then comes out all wrong, repressed. We are rendered mute, incoherent.

Our model for how we should relearn to behave authentically is that of wild creatures and young children. We should relearn to be wild. To wear our hearts on our sleeves. Our responsibility as ‘civilized’ adults should not be to repress our feelings, but rather to express ourselves completely candidly, joyfully, genuinely, with only one constraint: we must do so in a way that does not hurt others.

This takes some time and permission to practice, some knowledge and awareness of others’ feelings, and most of all a deep knowledge of ourselves. Because most of us lack these things, we simply hide behind our persona — it’s easy, and it’s socially accepted. But it’s dishonest. It puts a veil between ourselves and others. And worst of all it makes us everybody-else.

I am beginning to learn that I can be nobody-but-myself even in the company of others who have become so much everybody-else that they will find me troubling. My Purpose in life is to provoke, to allow to emerge, Let-Self-Change in others. To do that I have to be a model of Let-Self-Change myself: open, honest, strong, yet sensitive. A year ago I would have said this would be impossible.

Now I am finding it easy, fun, natural. What’s more, it seems to be appreciated. Rather than being resented for being a little too raw, people seem to find me refreshing, curious, interesting, even infectious. As I become more and more nobody-but-myself, everybody-else I meet seems a little less determined to continue to be everybody-else.

Perhaps we can never just be ourselves, not in this world, not now. But if that’s true I’m convinced it’s because we have forgotten how, rather than because we would not be tolerated, accepted, loved.

Category: Let-Self-Change
Posted in Collapse Watch | 7 Comments

Future of the Corporation

Posted on November 13, 2007 by Dave Pollard
charles handy 1I‘m in Boston at a conference called Future of the Corporation. The issue of corporate social and environmental responsibility and sustainability is part of my mandate in my new job, so this trip was both personal and business for me.One of the speakers was David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World. Like me, Korten seems to vacillate between optimism and pessimism of the issue of corporate reform. He lamented that overconsumption and overpopulation were essential to unsustainable corporate success, and were fueling their power, and said corporate charters needed to change from a focus on private advantage to public responsibility. I spoke to him briefly at the cocktail reception, and he seems to have been co-opted into the prevailing worldview of US progressives that corporatism and its abuses can be reined in with sufficient collective citizen will. Though perhaps as a professor he has no choice — it may be just a brave public face.

The dinner speaker was Robert Kuttner, founder of American Prospect and a Boston Globe columnist. He confirmed my thinking about the vulnerability of the US dollar and the excesses of the deregulated financial markets. His position is well articulated in this article. Other interesting speakers included:

  • Craig Cohon of Globalegacy, which uses funds from big corporations to launch startups in struggling nations, and who tried to convince us that Generation Millennium has what it takes to fix what we’ve screwed up, and that business leaders had power to make change but were fearful to use it;
  • Henry Mintzberg, the Canadian management science guru, who called (in Boston) for “a new Tea Party”, saying that corporations are incapable of solving our major social problems and that they should be reined in, deprived of ‘personhood’ rights and refocused on the one thing they do well (efficient resource allocation);
  • Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO urged re-regulation of corporations to force them to disclose and accept costs that are currently externalized (pushed off to the taxpayer, the environment, other countries and future generations), and relearning to practice the vocation of management as a priority-balancing art (he’s one of many, many Americans who think ‘leadership’ is the problem and solution behind many of these challenges, which regular readers know I disagree with);
  • One of the attendees made an impassioned plea to recognize that government is now so weak that it cannot be expected to act to rein in corporatism or any of its consequences, and that citizens need to step in;
  • Michael Marx of Corporate Ethics International referred us to their website’s Corporate Strategic Initiative report calling for putting corporations back into the service of people, changing the market system through incentives and rewards in the public interest, and restoration of the public commons.

I also especially enjoyed conversations with John Elkington of SustainAbility, Andrea Moffat and Anne Kelly of Ceres, Majorie Kelly of Tellus Institute (event organizers), Christine Moore of Austria’s Credo organization, and Marc Le Menestrel of U Barcelona. As usual, the most value from the conference came from corridor and unscheduled discussions. Peter Senge co-hosted the meeting, but did not present; there was no mention of Presence at this session, nor were its principles particularly evident in Peter’s facilitation.

Highlight of the event, as I expected, was the opening address by Charles Handy (pictured above), whose writing has been so instrumental to my thinking about natural entrepreneurship. His comments focused on three main themes:

  • Nobody willingly gives up power: You need regulation, taxes, enforcement, rewards and mobilization of people to force a power shift;
  • Modern capitalism is profoundly anti-democratic: Its single goal is to increase consumption and the number of consumers, and the one-vote-per-share system and emergency of oligopoly are anathema to social equality, truly ‘free’ markets and longer-term thinking; and
  • Most problems are the result of great ideas with unintended consequences: Most people in corporations really mean well, and it’s the corporatist political and economic system (rather than extreme greed) that produces irresponsible and unsustainable behaviours, decisions and ‘short-termism’.

He was telling us, I think, to be aware of these realities and not be idealistic in understanding the challenges of achieving change (and the impossibility of ‘imposing’ it), and the importance of creating a level playing field to encourage corporations to self-reform without fearing competitive disadvantage when doing so.

I had the chance to give him the outline and set-up chapter of my upcoming book, so perhaps you’ll see his name on my book-jacket.

I don’t think many of the presenters and attendees really ‘got’ Handy’s points, which was a shame. There’s a terrible propensity I’ve noticed among US progressives to reassure each other instead of admitting how serious a problem is, to mistake consensus for action, and to overrely on the emergence of some ‘leader’ to take America out of the darkness of corporatism, conservatism, and irresponsibility. The non-US people I spoke to almost all seemed to note this, and felt the result was unwarranted optimism and a lack of substantial intention to actually do anything.

Notwithstanding that, it was a great networking event, and attracted an extraordinary mix of very bright and thoughtfulindividuals. Brain candy, and great promise.

Category: Corporatism
Posted in How the World Really Works | 7 Comments

What I’ve Learned About Love, and About Myself

Posted on November 12, 2007 by Dave Pollard

polyamoryI have learned an enormous amount over the last month from people I have come to love. I always get a kind of ‘high’ when I am learning a lot, and these days I’ve been walking around with a goofy smile all the time, and crying, both joyfully and empathetically, more than usual. I described the chemistry of this in a recent post, and my body these days is awash in love hormones. It’s a great feeling.

In some of last year’s articles I described my Let-Self-Change journey, the process of paying attention and appreciation, opening and letting go, loving, having fun, relaxing, focusing, slowing down, self-managing, exploring, improvising and being resilient — that allows you to learn, discover and self-adapt, to self-evolve in positive, healthy and evolutionary ways, to come to be who you really are.

In the process of loving and Letting-Myself-Change I have learned some important new things about love, and about myself. I don’t know if they are useful to anyone else, but I thought I would share them anyway. These are complex, subtle, paradoxical discoveries, so please think about them before you judge what I’m saying:

  1. I have learned that I tend to idealize the people I love, to make them larger-than-life. I imagine them to be astonishingly emotionally intelligent, sensitive, strong, perceptive, mature, wise, aware. If I have not met them physically I imagine them to be extraordinarily beautiful. I suspect this is because I want them to be these things. I’m a romantic, an artist, a dreamer, and kind of immature emotionally, and I do have an exceptional imagination, so perhaps this tendency is understandable. In any case I can’t seem to change it, to just see and accept people for what they really are, warts and all. So when they turn out to be different from what I’ve imagined I tend to be shocked, disappointed, disillusioned. This is not fair to them. I wonder if this tendency to idealize those one loves is common to all artists, and hence perhaps why artists are so difficult to love. I also wonder if this is why I’m so infatuated with Second Life — it enables and encourages me to idealize and romanticize the people I meet more than in Real Life.
  2. I have learned that it is who I imagine people to be that I really love, more than who they really are. This is a kind of corollary of the above. But I suspect it is rather more universal than the above. I don’t think we can ever hope to even begin to know who other people really are, so we can only know who we imagine them to be. When I watch two people in love with each other (even when one of them is me), I get a strong sense that their love is as much self-love as love-of-other. They can only really know themselves, so what they perceive the object of their love to be is largely a projection of what they know, what they can imagine, who they are or know they could be themselves. You may be surprised to learn that I think this delusion is very healthy, for two reasons: (a) It makes it easier for us to love others, and (b) It makes it easier for us to love and feel better about ourselves. Delusional or not, these are both good, aren’t they? But it’s a double-edged sword: when the person we love lets us down, it becomes harder for us to love others, and we also become disappointed with ourselves.
  3. I have learned that, despite appearances, women are usually the ones who precipitate both the beginning and ending of loving relationships. Although our society encourages men to make the first move, it is almost invariably women who decide whether a new relationship will be a loving one. The woman is the one who gives permission for love to begin. That’s an enormous responsibility, but it’s probably fortunate, because women are, I think, usually more sensitive and more connected with their emotions, so their judgement is likely to be better than the man’s. And because they are more in tune with their emotions, they also seem to know when love has run its course, when it is no longer healthy and the relationship should evolve or end. Ask the couples you know who have divorced, and you’re likely to find that regardless of who walked, it was essentially the woman’s decision. And when it seemingly was the man’s, that’s often because another woman recognized the relationship had failed and took him away. There are of course exceptions to this, but I think it’s usually true.
  4. I have learned that women are often extraordinarily generous and accommodating of men who they love or intend to love. Most men I know are intoxicated by love, self-preoccupied and selfish, and rather more demanding than women in loving relationships. It is up to the woman, usually, to adapt, to accommodate, to Let-Self-Change, to become more what he wants her to be, to love him more generously, to give him more room. I suspect this is nature’s way of encouraging stability and allowing love to flourish and endure when the circumstances are far from perfect. I don’t think this is a conscious willingness to adapt by women; it is just who they are.
  5. I have learned that most women are more monogamous than most men. A more precise term would be monoamorous (“loving intimately only one person”). This seems to be more a practical accommodation by women than something that is inherent in human nature. Loving relationships are difficult to manage, and it is women who usually (see discovery #3 above) accept the responsibility to manage them. The more relationships there are to manage, the more challenging this task becomes. When lovers lack maturity and experience, more complex relationships can get messy and their emotional fallout can be devastating. Our society as a whole frowns on such relationships because of strong cultural conditioning and religious dogma. Recently I’ve written about polyamorous (“the desire, practice, or acceptance of having more than one loving, intimate relationship at a time with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved”) relationships, as being more natural and healthy than monoamorous ones. I believe that a community of, say, ten women and ten men in a consensual polyamorous relationship with each other would be blissful — providing an abundance of love instead of the scarcity, jealousy, possessiveness and loneliness that pervades our current society and causes so much pain and violence. But if we’re to get there, I think women need to take the lead. I think this is possible, but will take a lot of effort and practice to make it work. The principles for such communities are known (polyfidelity, trust and respect, mutual support, communication and negotiation, compersion, empathy and non-possessiveness). I’ve written a story and a short play and a utopian fantasy about polyamorous communities to describe how they might work, and the challenges they present. But I think they would be worth it. I am increasingly convinced that the reason today’s Intentional Communities are so limited and fragile is because they are unnaturally monoamorous. And I believe the creation of successful models of Intentional Community is essential to the future of our species, so there is a lot at stake. And love underlies it all.

The lessons in this learning for me are pretty obvious. I need to learn to curb my imagination a bit and see and love people more for who they are, so I can be more accepting of them, and even more open to love without illusion or condition. I should recognize that love is inherently mutually self-delusional, but that that is OK, and that my attitude to love should be more playful and fun and not so terribly intense, once I acknowledge that it is abundant, unlimited. I should respect that women tend to control loving relationships for perfectly good reasons, and work with them to open them to the astonishing possibility of polyamorous relationships, and perhaps encourage them to be a little less accommodating of unreasonable and demanding males, and a little more selfish about meeting their own desires and realizing their own, more completely fulfilling, loving relationships.

A lot here. Does it make any sense to you?

Category: Being Human
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 13 Comments