Is Mexico About to Fail?

Posted on July 17, 2007 by Dave Pollard
zapatista sign
The sign (erected by Zapatista rebels in MÈxico) says “Here the people lead and the government follows.” It prohibits the sale of arms, drugs and unlicensed logging and concludes “No to the destruction of nature”. Image from Wikipedia.

Over at the Oil Drum, Jeff Vail has been predicting that MÈxico, as a functioning nation-state, may not survive the year. He cites the collapse in that country of oil production (a Peak Oil phenomenon), attacks by anti-government forces on oil infrastructure, growing poverty and inequality, inability of the state to provide for the essential needs of the nation, growing power of organized crime, corruption and desertion of police forces, the assassination of judges and officials with impunity, and the growing bankruptcy of farmers due to the distortions of subsidized globalization and phony ‘free’ trade.

 
Jeff argues that the very existence of functioning nation-states (in contrast to non-functioning, nominal nation-states like Afghanistan) depends upon their ability to meet the needs of the people, to a degree sufficient for the people to continue to support (with their political and military allegiance, their willingness to respect and uphold the law, and their willingness to pay taxes) the nation-state.
 
Nation-states that are struggling to do so will often try to create a need, and a sense of urgency, for the nation-state to continue, by conjuring up an imaginary crisis (e.g. weapons of mass destruction) or an imaginary enemy ( e.g. immigrants, or unstable or covetous neighbours). If the people are sufficiently ill-informed, governments of nation-states can keep the country together, and ravage its wealth for the personal gain of themselves and their supporters, for a long period of time by doing this.
 
It is much easier to create a sense of urgency for self-defence, especially as the world becomes geopolitically and economically smaller every day, than it is to create a sense of urgency for, say, decent health care or equitable distribution of wealth, particularly in large nation-states where the lack of the latter can be blamed on ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘inefficiency’.
 
As Jeff points out, nation-states don’t collapse suddenly. They erode, bit by bit, until you wake up one day and find that you live in a country where:
  • almost all the wealth and power is held by a small, powerful elite that uses propaganda and political muscle to keep it that way
  • voting and other acts of citizenry don’t make any difference
  • the majority of people say they want much less government, even if that means much less, or no, government services
  • the corruption of the police and politicians is rampant, to the point neither is any longer interested in upholding the law or looking after the needs of citizens, but rather their own self-interest, financially, security-wise and/or ideologically
  • organized crime is rampant, to the point it has and exerts more power at the local level than does the government
  • the government is under enormous pressure to devolve authority to regional and/or local governments, in the probably naive hope that this will lead to greater effectiveness and responsibility
  • acts of sabotage, suicide and/or attempted secession are on the upswing
  • what is keeping the nation-state together is mostly manufactured fear of some outside enemy
We have reached the paradoxical point where the nation-state has probably outlived its usefulness, but we face global challenges that dwarf anything we have had to face since civilization and the idea of the nation-state began.
 
Those who have not paid attention to the lessons of history would have us believe the answer is one global government, that will take away the manufactured outside enemy because there will no longer be an outside. There is no reason to believe that a single global nation-state would succeed any better than the balkanizing, mostly struggling nation-states of today. In fact, without an outside enemy (and, no, we cannot convince people that global poverty or global warming is the enemy; we’ve tried that), it is unlikely such a global nation-state would last as long as it would take to put it together.
 
Devolution of power to provinces, counties, or regional states has also been tried, and while it generally has the advantage of ethnic, linguistic and/or cultural homogeneity of population (and hence less likelihood of civil war), there is no history or reason to believe it can be any more responsive and able to meet the needs of the citizens than larger nation-states, and there is every reason to believe it will be less able to cope with any real outside enemy, should one emerge (and because of the growing inequality of wealth and resources between regions, and general overpopulation, ecological devastation and resource scarcities, they are more than likely to emerge).
 
That leaves us with more old-fashioned alternatives: anarchy or self-managed communities. These models both worked for millennia, but we have long forgotten how they worked. It took centuries and staggering bloodshed for us to make nation-states work, in some places, for awhile. Downshifting to anarchy or self-managed community models is likely to be just as tumultuous. For one thing, most of the world no longer has genuine communities, and to create them would require a lot of large-scale musical chairs as people sought others with whom they could hope, and want, to create community.
 
In areas that have, or can find, real community (including, as I reported yesterday, some areas of MÈxico), this model is already working to some extent, and can work in more places, especially if and when nation-states and their regional surrogates collapse for lack of support from the people that once made them work, and give up trying to suppress community-based ‘independence’ movements.
 
I am less optimistic about anarchy (by which I mean not the propagandized version of endless chaos and violence, but the libertarian ideal of no government at all, where people agree to get along with, and work with, their neighbours because it is in their interests to do so). My pessimism is due in part to the fact that such a model takes a lot of practice to get right, and in part to the fact that it takes a lot of room and other abundance of resources, to preclude our all-too-human predilection to resort to gang behaviour and banditry at the first sign of resource scarcity. There are just too many of us, and we have used up too much of the Earth’s abundance, for this model to work.
 
And although I am also pessimistic about the re-emergence of community as the primary social, political and economic unit of our society, just because of the enormous amount of re-learning and practice (and making monumental mistakes) it will entail, I also sense that we have no other choice.
 
When the circumstances described in the bullet points above prevail in more and more countries (and this is well underway), I think Jeff is right to predict that we will see the (agonizingly slow, but steady and irreversible) collapse of the nation-state, and in the vacuum that this collapse produces, the only viable ‘re-placement’ for conducting social, political and economic activity I can foresee are self-managed communities. Jeff even wryly suggests that this relocalization may help us cope better after the End of Oil.
 
The process of getting there, alas, is not going to be pretty.

And I wonder what the collapse of MÈxico means for NAFTA and the SPP?

 
Posted in How the World Really Works | 13 Comments

Towards a New Process for Learning What is Important

Posted on July 16, 2007 by Dave Pollard
  
Critical Life Skills
What is the purpose of education? Those of liberal bent tend to assert it is to allow us to become what we were intended to become — fully capable individuals and members of community. Conservatives are more inclined to believe it is to acquire the essential survival skills of modern society, efficiently. And there are practical souls who think its purpose is to learn how to make a living.
 
How would we ‘score’ the current formal education system of affluent nations on its ability to achieve these purposes? I would grade it rather poorly:
  • Enabling us to realize our full capability — D
  • Enabling us to acquire modern survival skills, including how to make a living — F
Institutional education has no time, ability or flexibility to help us realize our full capability. Besides, its methods — teaching in the abstract in classrooms disconnected from the ‘real’ world, to bums on chairs — are not effective because this is not how we learn. As Gustavo Esteva says, we learn better when no one is teaching us, by doing and observing, not by being told.
 
The survival skills we need in a modern society are not addressed by the teaching of obedience, numeracy, literacy, and ‘management skills’. As the chart above indicates, to survive we need to learn how to learn, we need to understand how the world works, we need to learn to think, critically, creatively and imaginatively and adapt, how to work together, and how to self-manage — to take care of ourselves and each other. Formal school systems teach us none of these things. Because they are so artificial, inflexible, and predicated on 1-to-n knowledge transfer, and because they depend utterly on the passivity of students, they cannot possibly hope to teach us these things.
 
My book on working naturally, in Natural Enterprises, has the daunting task of giving readers — in the context of guiding and facilitating them through a process for learning how to make a natural, responsible, sustainable living — enough survival tools to do this effectively and successfully. And much of the book aims to give readers the courage to learn how to use these tools.
 
But no book or classroom can teach people how to use these tools. You learn how to understand your strengths and passions, how to find partners for an enterprise, how to do research on what people need, how to innovate continuously, how to imagine possibilities, how to collaborate, by doing, by practicing, by discovering what works and by making mistakes.
 
Our formal education system has no time for practicing and allows no room for making mistakes. In this system, practicing is remedial work for those not competent enough at rote learning and not blessed enough with native skills to get it right the first time. And in this system, making mistakes is fatal, carrying the unbearable stigma of failure.
 
It doesn’t matter that Inc Magazine discovered that the only attribute that correlated strongly with exceptional entrepreneurial success was previous business failure. These ‘exceptional’ entrepreneurs had either the good fortune to fail quickly and inexpensively, or the inherited wealth to be able to bounce back from ‘failure’.
 
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the proponents of our education system that if students aren’t succeeding, it is the teachers who should be given a failing grade.
 
The greatest critics of the formal education system — people like Ivan Illich, John Holt, and John Taylor Gatto  — would have us believe that the designers and proponents of this compulsory system deliberately conspired to make students helpless and dependent (incompetent to make a living for themselves, and hence frightened and compliant to the point they will put up with the drudgery of wage slavery). Whether or not this is true, the reality is that now, thanks to automation and other technology, we no longer need that fear and obedience to keep the industrial economy humming along.
 
In fact, that complacency and incompetence has now become a liability. The rich and powerful need increasing masses of dumbed-down ‘consumers’ (brilliantly defined by Jerry Michalski as “gullets who live only to gulp products and crap cash”) to buy their junk and keep their ROI growth up to shareholders’ expectations. But since those consumers are (mostly) no longer needed in the industrial economy and since (even in times of low interest rates) creditors will only subsidize mindless consumption so far beyond the consumers’ earnings, the corporatists have had to turn — for new production and new consumption — to globalization. This lets them externalize (leave taxpaying citizens to pay for) the social and environmental costs that enable them to buy cheaper from struggling nations and to sell to new consumers in those same nations.
 
The works in affluent nations, deliberately cowed and dumbed down by the education system, have become increasingly useless, worthless, expendable.
 
What’s to be done with them? With us?
 
The answer, I believe, is entrepreneurship — relearning how to make a living for ourselves.
 
My book, and entrepreneurial programs and networks (like BALLE) can get us started. Those who have the innate critical and creative thinking skills, sufficient self-confidence, the time to find appropriate business partners, and to make mistakes, and to understand themselves well (their Gifts, their Passions, their Purpose) will be equipped to succeed at this, on their own terms.
 
They will become models of working naturally and Natural Enterprise that others can follow. But will this be enough to transform our dysfunctional and unsustainable economy? I’m not sure it will, unless we also work to replace our education ‘system’ with something that works in post-industrial society.
 
What might this replacement look like? How do we learn, naturally, or as Illich says, convivially?
 
Illich would tell us that this replacement would not contain experts, or institutions, or processes that commodify learning. Gatto would tell us it would not have teachers, or classrooms, or curricula. Esteva, sounding a bit like Bucky Fuller, would tell us it is hopeless to try to fix, re-form the existing system — we need to create an entirely new learning process, and let the old system crumble.
 
I suspect this new learning process would have these attributes:
  • It would be a self-managed process, both at the individual and at the community level. We would trust people to do what they want, to learn. Esteva found that in Mexican ‘radically de-schooled’ communities, young people quickly grew bored of mindless activity and began to pursue the natural inclination to learn. When I was in my last year of high school, we were exempted from classes if we attained certain test grades, and by the end of that year we had learned to learn from each other and from the real world, away from classrooms and teachers, so well that our ‘de-schooled’ group won almost all the scholarships.
  • It would be based on apprenticeship (which literally means ‘grasping’, ‘understanding’), learning by observation of those acknowledged by the learner as having exceptional capability, and on practice (literally, ‘becoming better’).
  • It would be playful, joyful, fun.
  • Skills like literacy and numeracy would be learned in the context of apprenticeship and practice, not as separate ‘subjects’.
  • The entrepreneurs and artisans from whom we learn would not be paid, but would know that they would eventually be rewarded for what they showed others, what Esteva calls receiving a ‘cooperaciÛn’.
  • The role of those who care about learning would be creating tools that make learning easier and more powerful.
  • The activities of selected mentors would be primarily listening, facilitation and, when requested, coaching.
  • A key objective of the process would be achieving autonomy, freedom from dependence, self-sufficiency.
  • Another objective would be cultural regeneration — relearning local (connected to place) skills that have been forgotten.
  • The process would be improvisational and evolutionary, not planned or designed.
  • It would be based on growing hopefulness, not raising expectations or achieving goals.
  • It would entail renouncing those technologies and other obstacles that impede true friendship, which is essential for collaboration and learning to make a living together.
But this describes a process that is local and community-based. What about cities and other places that have no real community? Such places lack what Esteva calls the ‘conditions for apprenticeship’ and the cohesion that allows collective learning (rather than 1-to-n teaching).
 
Perhaps the reason that the most successful experiments in rediscovering this kind of learning process have been in small, relatively ‘uncivilized’ places in struggling nations is that these are places where true community still exists. For those of us in anonymous cities, and in ‘modern’ places where we think community has something to do with shared goals or interests, it may be frightening to discover that deep community is a precondition for true learning, and that, without such learning, an entrepreneurial, natural economy may be unachievable.
 
Lots to think about.
Posted in How the World Really Works | 2 Comments

Sunday Open Thread — July 15, 2007

Posted on July 15, 2007 by Dave Pollard
hibble deep field
Long-term exposure photo by the Hubble telescope of a tiny fragment of the sky, showing about 1500 galaxies. Wow!

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

Learning in Community by Apprenticeship: More on Ivan Illich’s friend Gustavo Esteva’s article about how institutional education is hopelessly dysfunctional and how self-managed, community-based, learn-by-doing apprenticeship is the most effective way to learn to make a living. I’m thinking about this in the context of working naturally and Natural Enterprise.

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignette #5.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. Still not ready for this: just recording a reading of blog articles is lame, and conversations need a lot of work.

Open Thread Question:

What is the one thing you most want to accomplish before you die? Are youactively working to achieve it? If not, what’s holding you back?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Saturday Links for the Week – July 14, 2007

Posted on July 14, 2007 by Dave Pollard
LeeLee Sobieski
Leelee Sobieski photo from imdb. The local cable movie channel has been showing Drew Barrymore chick flicks all weekend, and I’m a total sucker for them. Leelee was in the one I just watched, Never Been Kissed.

What’s Important This Week

Scrapping Institutional Education in Favour of Community Apprenticeship Learning: A long but brilliant article by Gustavo Esteva, Oaxaca Zapatista adviser and friend of Ivan Illich, explains why sustainable intentional communities and self-managed community-based learning go hand in hand, and why the latter is needed before the former is possible. More on this next week. Thanks to Andrew Campbell for the link.

The Impeachable Dick Cheney: Henrik Hertzberg in this week’s New Yorker describes WaPo’s recent revelations about Cheney’s execrable record and explains why the US can afford to wait no longer to get him out of office (before he attacks Iran).

The Power of Prediction Markets: Wisdom of Crowds guru James Surowiecki, also in the New Yorker: “The collective intelligence of consumers isn’Äôt perfect’Äîit’Äôs just better than other forecasting tools. The catch is that to get good answers from consumers you need to ask the right kinds of questions.” When will business start tapping this wisdom?

The Lost Cause of Afghanistan: Still in the New Yorker, the US has taken the War on Drugs to the country that has defied all attempted reformers and occupiers for centuries — Afghanistan. And Jon Lee Anderson explains that this war within a war is another unwinnable disaster.

The Delusion of Ethanol…: Tad Patzek in the Energy Tribune explains the political and economic insanity of ethanol as a solution to global warming and the end of oil, showing cellulose is no better than corn. Thanks to Charles Hall for the link.

…and the Bankruptcy of Nuclear Energy: Meanwhile, Rebecca Solnit in Orion Magazine explains why nuclear energy as a ‘solution’ to global warming and the end of oil is also insane.

The End of Oil as the End of Health Care: Friend and HtStW reader Daniel Bednarz, also in Orion, explains how the End of Oil threatens our health care systems, and how, if we abolish two-tier systems and refocus on prevention instead of treatment, we could make everyone healthier and moreresilient to oil’s decline.
Posted in How the World Really Works | Comments Off on Saturday Links for the Week – July 14, 2007

If You Were the President

Posted on July 12, 2007 by Dave Pollard
fir coneA colleague asked me the other day, what I would do if I were, magically, the Prime Minister of Canada, with a supportive legislature. I thought it was an interesting question, since I keep saying I’ve given up on the political process as a means of achieving meaningful change. My answer (after having some time to think about it):
  1. Tax Reform to Drive Economic Reform: I would replace the entire current system of taxes, duties, ‘free’ trade agreements and subsidies with a progressive but simple system of high taxes on all unsustainable and socially irresponsible economic activities (use of non-renewable resources, pollution and waste, transportation of materials and goods over long distances, imports from countries with low social and environmental standards etc.), designed to achieve a 100% cradle-to-cradle economy; plus a substantial excess wealth tax. I’ve written about this before, and it’s revenue neutral, and would allow us to end across-the-board income, payroll and sales taxes that punish sustainable behaviours, and to steadily reduce wealth disparity.
  2. A Wilderness Trust: Creation and nurturing of a national Wilderness Trust, beginning with all existing tracts of Crown and government lands in excess of 10 contiguous acres, expanded by purchase of sensitive and high-biodiversity properties, all to be set aside in perpetuity for zero development and natural stewardship. There would be special incentives for donation of additional parcels to this Trust.
  3. Democratization of the Political Process: As I described in my recent post on reforming government, this would involve replacing the current electoral system with a Single Transferrable Vote proportional representation system, and creation of online sites where proposed legislation would be posted for discussion and amendment, with all electoral candidates and parties legally required to commit before the election to which proposed legislation they would introduce or support if elected.
  4. Reform of Canada’s Defence and International Aid Mission: Requirement that all activities of our defence forces be for the defence of our country and for unambiguous peace-keeping in countries where there is peace to keep (not impossible or ideologically-motivated missions like Afghanistan), and including the commitment of a significant portion of annual government revenues for humanitarian, infrastructure and social aid programs in struggling nations.
  5. Land and Resource Ownership Reform: Limitations on how much land can be owned by one individual (directly or through corporations). Prohibition of owning land or natural resources in municipalities in which you do not live. Standards for environmental stewardship of privately owned land.
  6. Experimental Autonomous Communities: Encouragement of communities to take full responsibility for the well-being of everyone living in their community, and for its self-sufficiency, and, subject to oversight and acceptance of certain principles, granting of full autonomy to those communities.
  7. Education Reform: An aggressive program to replace institutional education with autonomous, community-based, self-managed, life-long learning and apprenticeship initiatives, leading as quickly as possible to the elimination of compulsory education.
  8. Volunteer Force: The encouragement, celebration and support of full- and part-time volunteers to self-organize and apply themselves to any social activities they have passion for.
  9. Integrated Health & Welfare Program: Establishment of universal access to and minimum standards for food and water quality and public healthcare, including the precautionary principle, permaculture, sustainable agriculture, and a prohibition on exporting water. Programs to enable and encourage prevention, self-diagnosis and self-treatment of illness. Decentralization of healthcare bureaucracies to enable autonomous, community-based healthcare that meets specified high standards. 
  10. Anti-Sprawl Land Use Standards: Encouragement of brownfield redevelopment and prohibition of ‘greenfield’ development. Programs to repurpose developed land for a mixture of commercial, industrial and residential uses to eliminate the need for commuting.
This is a great priority-setting question for a Friday, so I’m going to ask you, dear readers, the same question:
 
If you were suddenly elected the President or Prime Minister of your country, and had a supportive legislature for your reforms, what are the ten most important changes you would make?

Conditions: They have to be revenue neutral (you can’t finance more programs with less money, and you can’t just say you’re going to eliminate government ‘inefficiency’). You cannot presume that governments in any other country will support you, or align their programs and laws with yours. And your proposals need to be specific, not just principles or broad objectives.

 
What would you do?
Posted in How the World Really Works | 7 Comments

The Coming Pandemic: What the Experts Say

Posted on July 12, 2007 by Dave Pollard
influenzaThis week I had the opportunity to attend a global conference on disaster management, one ‘track’ of which was focused on health emergencies. There is certainly no unanimity about what we should be doing to prepare for and cope with a future pandemic (a pandemic is an infectious disease outbreak that is both virulent — i.e. deadly — and highly transmissable human to human), but over the course of the conference a consensus became apparent. I think this consensus reflects a growing sense of maturity and awareness of the lessons of history and our limited ability to anticipate or predict events in complex environments.

 
Here are what I think were the twelve most important areas of expert consensus about the next pandemic:
  1. Most people cannot be expected to plan ahead or prepare for it: It is not in our nature to plan for eventualities until and unless we are convinced they are virtually certain and imminent. We can send out all the information we want on emergency preparedness and emergency kits. Most people will ignore it until it is too late.
  2. Public expectations of what government will do to prevent, mitigate and manage a pandemic are substantial, growing and largely unrealistic. This is another instance of the phenomenon of learned helplessness, and it’s exacerbated by governments that are prone to overpromise things to assuage gullible voters. After Katrina, we should know better.
  3. Isolation of communities won’t work: We are all too interdependent today to be able to cut our community off from the rest of the world for any length of time until a pandemic is over.
  4. Closing borders and air routes won’t work: Pandemics spread very quickly and easily and use multiple alternate routes to ‘work around’ blockages. Short of an immediate, very early, complete shut-down of all long-distance transportation (which is impossible — no one has the capacity to engineer this), a true pandemic will become global.
  5. Except for expert professional users, masks won’t work: The use of masks and other protective equipment requires a complicated series of steps to be rigorously followed. Even health professionals, who are trained in these procedures, often miss a step and get infected.
  6. It is the duration and recurrence of a pandemic that will wreak the most havoc, not its virulence or transmissability: Pandemics can easily last 18 months or more, and can recur in ‘waves’ after life has almost returned to normal. We can all manage extraordinary procedures for a short time. Few of us can cope when these situations become chronic.
  7. The economic consequences of a pandemic will be much more severe than the health consequences: A pandemic will likely drastically curtail both business operations and consumer spending on non-essentials. It could precipitate a recession or even a 1930s-style depression. It is harsh to try to compare economic costs with human ones, but, as with 9/11, costs and losses in the trillions, by most people’s standards, dwarf deaths in the thousands.
  8. The codependence of telecom and electrical systems poses a huge vulnerability in a pandemic: Information flows, and the continued functioning of health facilities, are critical to mitigating tragedy during a pandemic. Maintaining our telecom systems now depends on maintaining electricity — most phones are now digital and powered by the grid. Blackouts caused by storms, sabotage or simple equipment failure will take much longer to recover from because of personnel shortages, and repairs require a functioning telecom system to report and coordinate information.
  9. The tools that will work in a pandemic are those that are (a) simple to use and maintain, (b) intuitive to understand, and (c) available at the point of use: So, for example, satellite phones will be needed when regular cell phones are disabled, but most people don’t know where to get them, or how to use them, or that they only work out-of-doors. Emergency generators are hard to learn to use and require frequent proper maintenance. Antivirals need to be administered according to a strict, complicated regimen. Every complication, every extra step, reduces the effectiveness and value of tools that could otherwise save lives. And surveys indicate most people will be looking at simple sources — TV and newspapers, not the Internet — for pandemic information.
  10. Resilience, practice and improvisation skills are more critical than good planning in a pandemic: Redundant systems, people who have been through emergency situations or rehearsals, excellent, evidence-based decision-making skills, trained facilitators who can make effective ad hoc use of volunteers who have natural immunity, and people with the competence to adapt to quickly changing circumstances, have been shown to help in emergencies far more than having a detailed plan. Plans can’t predict what will happen in complex situations, so they’re only useful when scenarios play out ‘according to plan’, which they seldom do.
  11. Science and technology will not reduce the certainty of a pandemic: Viruses and bacteria evolve faster than science can invent ways to defeat them, and as we get better at creating antimicrobials we actually accelerate the evolution of immune microbes. We can never catch up. There will be a pandemic, and it will be soon.
  12. Antivirals and vaccines will be of limited use: Antivirals are complicated to use, have a short shelf life, have side-effects, and may not be effective against novel disease strains anyway. Vaccines take months to develop, by which time most of the damage may already have been done. Due to a phenomenon called cykotine storm, those with strong immune systems may be the most vulnerable to pandemic disease (this happened during the Spanish Flu in 1918, and happens in H5N1 poultry flu). What will most determine who lives, who gets sick and who dies is the natural immunity of each individual to the particular virus, and its virulence. And if it turns out you have natural immunity, you will be needed (see point 10).

Are you ready for this? What do you think most people will do — panic and overload the phone lines and help lines, or stay calm andrise to the occasion?

Category: Science and Health
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 10 Comments

Vignette #4: Overheard on the Subway

Posted on July 11, 2007 by Dave Pollard
subway
These days I’m on the TTC, the Toronto subway system, fairly often. In accordance with my resolution to practice paying attention, I often eavesdrop on conversations in the subway, which, since patrons go to such pains to act as if they’re the only people in the subway car (even when they’re pressed up against a dozen other passengers at rush hour), are often surprisingly candid.

Here are some of the more memorable excerpts of conversations I have overheard, with the imponderable, banal and cryptic content edited out. For some reason, which I will leave up to others to speculate on, women seem to converse more on the subway than men, and their conversations are generally more interesting.

A woman, probably late twenties, talking to an older woman: “God, I’m glad I’m not a man. It’s waaay too complicated.”
 

Two very well-dressed women, probably early thirties, laughing: “He’s OK, but serious self-esteem issues. (Pause, almost whispering) He doesn’t show well.”
 
Man, probably in his thirties, talking to an obviously unhappy, considerably older man: “I think [Canadian conservative Prime Minister] Harper is an asshole, and I swore I’d never vote Conservative, but of the three party leaders he’s the only one I know well enough to know exactly how little he can be trusted.”
 
Two teenage girls with shopping bags from trendy stores: “Her Dad is, like, Psycho Dad, he doesn’t let her do anything. She’s like a complete prisoner in her house. One day she’s just going to blow.”

Two guys in suits, probably fathers in their late thirties: “It seems as if young girls are supposed to dress to show off everything but still act like angels, while young guys act like studs but dress like monks — layers of clothes that reveal nothing. What’s that about?”  

 
Two older women, clucking: “She bought herself flowers afterwards. How pathetic is that?” Reply, after long pause: “I buy myself clothes. They last longer.”
 
Young lovers; she’s drinking milk from a carton and has her other arm around his waist, and he’s avoiding her attempt to kiss him: She (laughing): “Why won’t you kiss me?” He (very low voice): “I don’t want to show off. It’ll make everyone else crazy.”
 
Two women, probably thirty-something, conversing quietly in French (my translation): “How come all the guys (gars, people?) who take the subway are ugly?” Reply: “The good-looking ones are still ( toujours, always?) in bed.”
 
Two guys, probably fortyish, short sleeves and ties: “He earns twice what I do, but I wouldn’t trade places with him for anything. Not just the hours. Your self-respect has to be worth something.”
 
Two young black women: “I love you ‘KD’ but I don’t know why you do that. You and Trish are always saying these (nasty?) things about each other, behind each other’s back. That’s just messed up. And I’m caught in the middle.” 
 
Man, thirty-something, to younger woman, perhaps a date: “I became a vegetarian last year. Now I only eat chicken… and sometimes fish and chips.”
 
Two young women, with Goth clothing, piercings and tattoos: “Well, yeah, he’s promiscuous, but he doesn’t start it. Girls are always coming on to him. You can’t really blame him.”
 
Man, indeterminate age, to similar-looking man (brother?): “She’s so demanding. I don’t want to be needed that much. It’s great to be appreciated, but I’ve already got a full-time job — I don’t want another one when I go home.”
 
Woman, probably twenties, watching a young guy leaving the subway car, shaking her head, to another woman of about the same age: “Guys shouldn’t be allowed to dress themselves.” “Except gay guys.” “Even some of them.”

Woman, probably early forties, to younger very slim woman who has been raving about meditation: “I don’t want to know my inner self that well. I’m afraid of what I might discover.”

.     .     .     .     .

After one of my subway trips I’m waiting in a second floor boardroom of an office tower for the rest of the invitees to show up. I’m looking out the window. There’s a daycare centre with a big picture window on the main floor of the building directly opposite, and I’m watching the little kids playing. One little boy is crawling around pushing an enormous red plastic dump truck full of yellow plastic ‘bricks’. The truck is half as big as he is.

Suddenly, a little girl holding a doll, who has been watching, seats the doll in a high chair at a nearby table, wrenches the truck away from the boy, dumps out the yellow plastic ‘bricks’, and walks away.

The boy sits for a moment, staring at the yellow ‘bricks’. Then, unperturbed, he retrieves the doll, lies her on her back, and uses her arms like cranes to lift the yellow ‘bricks’ one by one onto her stomach. When they’re all ‘aboard’, he raises the doll’s arms and legs up to hold the ‘bricks’ from falling off, and ‘drives’ the doll, with her full payload, along the paddedfloor to her unloading destination.

Category: Short Stories
Posted in Creative Works | 4 Comments

Stewing in Our Own Sewage

Posted on July 10, 2007 by Dave Pollard
food supply chain
Big Pharma, and the misinformed media, would have us all believe that medicine can cure every disease, and that as a result, we might one day achieve immortality. Hardly a week goes by without reports of some genetic ‘marker’ for some cancer or chronic disease, with the implication that this genetic ‘imperfection’ might be remedied by the miracles of modern medicine, and the disease eradicated forever. Or that a virus or bacteria ‘suspected’ to be involved in some infectious disease has been discovered, with the implication that, by eradicating the microbe, we can be free forever from the disease.

We have, to be fair, made significant headway in the fight against infectious diseases. That is, we have recently (in the last century and a half) identified that most infectious diseases are caused by viruses or bacteria, learned how these microbes spread, and discovered or invented vaccines, antibiotics and antivirals to kill many of them.

That doesn’t mean we are winning the war against infectious diseases, however, or that this war is even winnable. Viruses and bacteria can evolve much faster than we can ever hope to invent vaccines and antimicrobials to keep up with them. That’s the reason heath experts are so worried about pandemic influenza — antivirals like tamiflu may not be effective against it (and the regimen for using it is involved, expensive and carries risks of complication), and vaccines need to be tailored to the specific form of the virus, which can take months. In addition, the endemic use of antibiotics and antivirals in modern society is encouraging the more rapid mutation of viruses and bacteria which are resistant to most or all antibiotics and antivirals. And some infectious diseases (like Mad Cow) are spread by prions, which are not treatable with antimicrobials of any kind.

So infectious diseases will continue to threaten us, and, as we run out of effective antimicrobials, they could easily become once again as great a scourge as they have been throughout most of the centuries since civilization began. Nothing suits bacteria and viruses better than creatures crowded into close quarters who travel quickly and extensively across communities.

Diseases that are not infectious are called environmental or chronic diseases. These are the illnesses (physical and mental) that are growing at epidemic rates, especially in affluent nations. It is simply not true that the staggering increase in these diseases is largely due to better detection, better reporting, or an aging population. We have our suspicions about the reason for the increases, but we cannot prove it.

What we do know is that such diseases only seem to emerge when three prerequisites are present:

  • Genetic predisposition: some people are naturally more immune to some environmental diseases than others.
  • Exposure to environmental poisons: chronic exposure to and ingestion of dangerous levels of toxins.
  • Situational catalyst: a trigger that ‘sets off’ the disease in the presence of the two factors above (usually that trigger is stress).

Our natural stress-responses are fight-or-flight adrenal responses, and as suited as they were to gatherer-hunter culture, they are maladapted to modern forms of (mostly psychological) stress, and to the chronic, relentless stresses that most of us face.

I believe that all three of these prerequisites are becoming increasingly prevalent. In recent centuries (and still today in many struggling nations) a larger proportion of the population has each had a large number of children. Since then, our temporary victory over many infectious diseases has slashed infant and child mortality rates. In Darwinian terms, many people who would not have been born, or would not have survived, have entered the gene pool, to the point that genetic weaknesses have inevitably increased in the population at large.

We have more toxins and untested chemicals in our food, water, air and soil than we have ever had before, and we live longer than we have since civilization began, so over a lifetime we surely ingest more poisons than previous generations. Even if we wanted to change this, through the precautionary principle applied retroactively, we could not — our economy depends utterly on the ‘efficiencies’ that poisonous production makes possible. We could not sustain even a fraction of today’s human population with healthy, careful, expensive production methods.

And we unquestionably face more chronic stresses than previous generations. We can talk about methods to mitigate our stress reactions, but many of these are visceral, subconscious, not in our power to control.

So, in short, there is nothing we can do to stem the current surge in chronic diseases. At a personal level, if we can afford it, we can try to eat and drink healthier, and try to find places not afflicted by poisoned air, water and soil. And, if we have the luxury of time, opportunity, awareness and self-knowledge, we can try to self-manage to minimize our stress reactions. But at a societal level, we are literally stewing in our own sewage, and in a weakened condition to start with.

Of course, the big polluters, their political and media handmaidens, a big chunk of the medical fraternity, many religious groups, and the Big Pharma oligopoly would have you see it differently. They’d have you believe it’s your fault: not taking care of yourself, having bad genes, suffering for your sins, being too lazy and hence too poor to afford good food anddecent medicine.

And guess what all that guilt and self-blame does to those who believe it?

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

On the Nature and Value of Leadership, Collaboration and Expertise

Posted on July 9, 2007 by Dave Pollard
NJ Devils
I‘ve been chatting with Jeremy Heigh about leadership and the role of the expert. Jeremy knows a lot about capital, and, like me, he wants to see entrepreneurs succeed. He is, I think, a natural entrepreneur himself — he wants to take charge, and teach and show people how to organize and run an enterprise effectively. With the right partners, I think he’d be great at it.

I used to want to do that, but I’ve come to realize I am better suited to be a facilitator, an enabler of other people’s success.

My idea of leadership has evolved extensively since my youth:

  • In my 20s, I was a director — I told my staff (and anyone else who would listen) what I thought they should do and how I thought they should do it, in the belief that my instructions would be followed.
  • In my 30s, I became a leader-by-example — I showed people what I thought they should do, in the belief that my model would inspire them. 
  • In my 40s, I became a coach — I advised people, based on asking questions, what they might find would improve their personal effectiveness, in the belief that my understanding and reflection might help them.
  • And now, in my 50s, I have become a facilitator — I listen to and observe people, in the belief that by offering tools and removing obstacles from their path, I might make their work easier.

This evolution has reflected in part my own maturity, and in part a self-realization of what I do best and what effect my work has had on others, especially those working ‘for’ me. From telling to showing to advising to observing, offering, running interference and staying out of the way, I have become humbler and intervened less, yet I, and those I work with, seem to accomplish more.

Some of this reflects the nature of work itself in the 21st century. As Peter Drucker pointed out, most workers now know how to do their jobs better than their boss, because jobs have become so specialized, and because the bosses, often, have never held the jobs that now report to them. It’s pretty hard to tell or show people what to do when you’ve never done it yourself!

I’ve also come to believe that most people do their best in the workplace (in part out of self-interest and in part out of personal pride), so it makes more sense to help them do their work the way they want to, than to tell them to do it differently. I have seen many ‘change management’ programs fail, not because the front line people couldn’t change, but because they knew that the changes proposed would make things worse, not better. What is fascinating is that these people will bend themselves into pretzels to find workarounds that will let them do what they know is best, while appearing to do what they’re told.

There are, of course, exceptions. There are deadbeats who ride the coattails of more diligent and conscientious workers. There are antagonists who will perversely undermine and sabotage, out of jealousy, fear, or spite. What I have observed, though, is that in most groups entrusted to self-manage, these people will be outed by their peers and will usually leave when they can no longer get away with their behaviour, because their peers simply refuse to put up with it. And schism between ‘management’ and ‘front line’ cannot arise if there is no distinction between the two roles.

The most difficult problem with this approach is dealing with people who are dysfunctional because of factors outside the workplace — people who have been traumatized, depressed, or warped into psychopathy. I have not found an answer for how to make such people effective and energized in the workplace.

Some conservatives think this whole approach is naive. The Lakoffian ‘strict father’ approach that pervades the way most conservatives bring up their children often carries over into the way they treat their ‘subordinates’. Perhaps I’ve just been fortunate to have co-workers who respond better to a progressive ‘nurturing parent’ approach, but I doubt it. My observation is that domineering managers and “tell me what to do and how to do it” employees seem to find each other, and enter into a kind of co-dependent relationship. The work environment of such groups is efficient, but in my experience it is also uninspired, untrusting, inflexible and relatively ineffective. That’s why we invented robots.

The role of facilitator, as I try to practice it now, entails the following:

  • Pay attention, listen, and understand why things are the way they are now.
  • Probe to discover what the obstacles are to co-workers’ work effectiveness, and work to remove those obstacles.
  • Imagine ideas, suggest frameworks, co-develop visions, and create tools, that might make things easier. Offer them, demonstrate them, as experiments, and then let the group do what they will with them — evolve them, adapt them, or fail them. Let what works work, and let what doesn’t work go.
  • Appreciate — thank your co-workers and show you appreciate their work and their ideas.
  • Collaborate when you are invited to do so. Invite others to collaborate to solve important workplace problems.

Strictly speaking, a facilitator stays on the sidelines, is objective, and does not offer ideas or suggestions — such intervention is more of a coach’s role. But I’m not a purist, and since my ‘genius’ (as I’ve often written) is imagining possibilities, I think it’s foolish not to offer them. Effective facilitators often have a genius, or expertise, that can gently fit into their role without impairing their value as facilitators. And I think good facilitators are essential to good collaboration.

This seems to work better than the approaches I used in my 20s, 30s, and 40s. But ask me again in another ten years. When it comes to ‘leadership’, collaboration and expertise, I’m stilllearning.

Category: Collaboration
Posted in Working Smarter | 3 Comments

Sunday Open Thread — July 8, 2007

Posted on July 8, 2007 by Dave Pollard
stress response
Our stress responses

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

Leadership: I don’t have a very high opinion of self-professed leaders and so-called leadership programs. But we still live in a society where there seems to be almost a co-dependence between followers (“tell me what to do and how to do it”) and leaders whose self-esteem is based on the subservience and adulation of others. How can we free them both from their addiction?

The Long-Term Cost of Stress:  Our natural stress-responses are fight-or-flight adrenal responses, and as suited as they were to gatherer-hunter culture, they are maladapted to modern forms of (mostly psychological) stress, and to the chronic, relentless stresses that most of us face. I think this damages us from a very young age, and probably accounts for most modern chronic physical and psychological illnesses.

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignettes #4 and #5.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. I’ve recorded some practice podcasts, readings of my own works just to try out the new medium, but I’m not happy with them. I’m also unhappy with the quality of recent Skype calls — too many dropped calls, lost sentences and strange audio artifacts to make a pleasant listening experience. Need to find a better way. Still working on this. 

Open Thread Question:

If you’re really happy at work, why? Is it because you’re doing what you love? Because you’re doing what you’re good at? Because you’re working with people you love? Or because you’re appreciated? How important iseach of these four factors?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments