what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label Dave Pollard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dave Pollard. Show all posts

Sunday, January 22, 2023

Our Fate is not in our hands

Why do I keep banging on about Strathclyde Region’s social strategy? Basically because I got a decade to ensure that it was firmly embedded – which is 5 times longer than any other strategy I handled. To be fair, I’ve been responsible for only 4 strategies in my time – in Scotland, Azerbaijan, Krgyzystan and Bulgaria

I did start what was to be a 4 year project in 2010 in China but resigned after only a few weeks because I couldn’t cope with life in Beijing – expressed in this (short) paper Lost in Beijing – the loneliness of a long-distance consultant which, in offering the various reasons for my departure, also argued the importance of fitting people properly to context.

Most of us like to think that we are, at least, partially responsible for our “lucky breaks” although I have increasing respect for the view of my fellow-blogger, Dave Pollard who has, in recent years, taken to the argument that denies there is any such thing as Free Will. In a recent post he explained

Caitlin Johnstone got to the heart of why we continue to tolerate the massive dysfunction, corruption and inequality of wealth and power that characterizes our political, economic and social systems. She wrote:

People say “I’m free because where I live I can say, do and experience anything I want!” But that’s not true; you can’t. You can only say, do and experience what you’ve been conditioned to want to say, do and experience by the mass-scale psychological manipulation you’ve been marinating in since birth. You can do what you want, but they control what it is that you want.

It appears that we can, on the one hand, appreciate that we have no free will — that everything we believe and do is strictly the result of our biological and cultural conditioning, given the circumstances of the moment — and, on the other hand, rail against stupidity, greed, incompetence and the thousand other sins that, somehow, ‘shouldn’t’ be allowed, or ‘shouldn’t’ be. As if we had some choice in the matter. So the questions that Caitlin’s remarkable paragraph raises for me are:

    1. She says we are conditioned by “psychological manipulation”. By whom? Just the rich and powerful control freaks? Or everyone we meet, read, and otherwise interact with?

    2. She says they control what we want. I might agree, but that depends on who they are. Again, just the rich and powerful they? Or everyone?

    3. Presumably they control what we want through persuasion, manipulation, propaganda, censorship, advertising, PR, misinformation, and otherwise feeding into our conditioned beliefs and desires. Don’t family, friends, co-workers, writers, artists, scientists, philosophers, neighbours, acquaintances, community-members and just about everyone else we interact with basically do the same things? And don’t they often have more influence than the miscreants Caitlin principally seems to want to blame?

    4. Where exactly do the miscreants and other influencers who condition us get the ideas, beliefs etc that they try to push on us? Aren’t they just conditioned the same as we are?

A few years ago, another writer made the same point - Raoul Martinez’s Creating Freedom – the lottery of birth, the illusion of consent and the fight for our future (2016)

British artist and documentarian Martinez makes his literary debut writing on a theme taken up recently by writers such as economists Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz, journalist Bob Herbert, and activist Ralph Nader: inequality, injustice, greed, and entrenched power have undermined democracy and threaten the common good and the future of our planet. Because the forces that shape identity act so insidiously, individuals may feel they have freedom of choice; however, as the author insists, freedom is a delusion. 

In reality, we are manipulated by capitalism, which indoctrinates us to be consumers; the media, controlled by wealthy owners who make sure their own self-serving views are promoted; an electoral system hijacked by big donors and lobbyists; and an economy that benefits the wealthy with access to better education and resources. Our idea of freedom, Martinez argues, has been “expertly moulded to suit the interests of those with the power to shape it.” He devotes a third of the book to examining limits on “innate freedom,” which include the economic and social conditions into which a child is born, early nurturing and education, and “variations in genes and experience.” 

In Part 2, “The Illusion of Consent,” Martinez examines limits on political freedom from government institutions and policies, economic theories that endorse capitalism, and media that have spun “webs of deceit and secrecy” throughout society. To the author, “free market” is an oxymoron. His final section proposes ways “to change the game.” The arts, he says, can help us imagine a better future; equally important are individual “acts of courage, generosity and compassion.” Drawing on a wide range of sources, including political theory, philosophy, and the social sciences, Martinez argues earnestly and densely for an alternative to our “impoverished vision of humanity.” The choir to which he preaches, though, is likely to want more than a well-intentioned manifesto of familiar ideas; it will also want concrete suggestions for change.

Saturday, October 31, 2020

The Blog which keeps on giving…

Most of the mail I receive is from impersonal feeds – mainly from journals.

A letter from friend or family makes the day worthy of celebration. 

But every now and then there is a welcome post from one of my favourite bloggers eg Michael Robert’s Blog; or Mainly Macro – both of which specialise in economic commentary which I tend to skim very quickly – and another 4 I picked out for special mention in a recent update of my blogroll also focus on specialised subjects – as do, indeed, 99% of the blogs I know about…… I’ve occasionally wondered about this – once in 2014 and again last year in the post A Musing Decade when I asked 

What exactly do I mean when I say the blog is one of the longest-running “of its “kind”? Simply that the majority of blogs specialize in a particular topic - whether political commentary (yawn), book reviews (a popular subject), economics (ditto), Brexit, EC Law etc

Mine, however, darts like a butterfly to a variety of flowers. 

One blogpost which arrived this morning is always worth a close read – namely Canadian Dave Pollard’s powerfully-named “How to Save the World” and indeed is one of the very few other blogs which defies classification and which could be grouped in the “perennial” category I tried this week to claim for my own blog.

Having said that his blog defies specialisation, I then found myself immediately putting Pollard into categories by calling him both a “survivalist” and “radical non-dualist” (admittedly the phrase he uses to describe himself) And his blog certainly encourages such a labelling by grouping the people he follows into “others who write about collapse” and “radical non-dualists” 

His latest post was a typically thoughtful one sparked off by a recent interview with Frederic Laloux whose book “Reinventing Organisations” (2014) I summarised some years ago.

I would normally be pretty cynical about books with such titles – after the fiasco of the “reengineering movement” in the 1990s - but Laloux’s book looked to be a sober taking of stock of the literature on organisational excellence. And, unlike most business books, it clearly rated the notion of self-management very highly…..Laloux has been fairly quiet in the 6 years since his book was first published but, as this site and videos show, he has actually been very active   

Pollard’s post poses ten important questions which Laloux is now raising for the 2020s 

Frédéric is now asking himself and others to consider ten “revolutionary” questions to deal with the terrible crises now facing us, and the growing likelihood of large-scale collapse. All of these questions apply at both a personal and societal level:

·         Accepting unhappy truths: How can we recognize the wilful blindness we each have to “inconvenient” truths, and how can we re-train ourselves to appreciate and accept what is true even if it is not what we want to believe? It takes some intellectual courage, honesty, openness and patience to move to such a mindset.

·         Sitting with not knowing: How can we learn to admit we don’t know, and that there are no simplistic answers, so that we can then create a safe space to just sit with not knowing, with incomplete understanding, with uncertainty and ambiguity, and let possibilities emerge as we learn more, think more, and interact more, instead of rushing to resolution?

·         Admitting our powerlessness: How can we allow ourselves, especially if we’re in positions of authority, to admit that we are simply unable to solve the complex predicaments we are facing — that they are larger than all of us. That also entails breaking the co-dependency between “powerful” decision-makers (parents, bosses, preachers, and presidents) who thrive on that power and the fame and self-satisfaction it provides, and the “powerless” rest of us (who are often content to let the “powerful” shield them from any sense of obligation to make any decisions or take any actions to address what is happening).

·         Moving to blamelessness: How can we train ourselves not to blame complex predicaments on others’ actions or inaction, and to acknowledge that we’re all doing our best and that no one (and no group) is “responsible” for the crises we face? This requires letting others, and ourselves, off the hook before we start to work to address these crises. And it requires the terrifying acknowledgement that firing the boss, or the president, will not fix the predicament that has seemingly arisen under their watch.

·         Overcoming the fear of failure: How can we enable ourselves to push forward and not be paralyzed by the fear of what could go wrong and the potentially awful consequences? This need not require either exceptional courage or indemnification, but rather a collective shift in what we define as failure and how we assess others’, and our own, value, intentions and actions.

·         Giving ourselves permission: How can we move past waiting for the permission of “authorities” to take whatever action we (individually and collectively) feel must be taken to address big scary issues we care about?  [And do that while still recognizing that others are scared, conflict- and confrontation- and risk-averse, and that’s OK.]

·         Appreciating that waking people up isn’t enough: Now that many people are aware of the existential crises facing us, what more will it take to get all of us actually working on addressing these crises? It’s been a decade since Al Gore showed us beyond all doubt that merely waking people up to the reality of an “inconvenient truth” is not sufficient to lead to any meaningful action.

·         Understanding what we long for: Personally and collectively, how can we come to a better appreciation of what really matters to us, what on our deathbeds we will be most proud, or rueful, about, and why it matters, so that we can’t not act on achieving it?

·         Consciously and continually reassessing our role and purpose: How can we keep considering, every day, what else we could, individually and collectively, be doing right now that would be more useful, more joyful, more “on purpose” than what we’re currently doing? And, of course, then, why aren’t we doing that?

·         Reimagining our future as the journey of a lifetime: How can we overcome our resistance to thinking and acting on plans for a better future, when it seems so scary and hopeless, and see our future instead as a great adventure? If we’re inevitably into the sixth great extinction of life anyway, why not approach it with gusto and give it everything we’ve got? What have we really got to lose? What’s really holding us back? 

Asking these questions, first at a personal level, and then collectively, in our communities, in our workplaces, and as citizens of a world in collective peril: It’s a lot to ask!

We might well add an eleventh, meta-question: How can we learn to craft great questions? Great questions can help us, personally and collectively, engage in the conversations (the word conversation literally means “turning with”) needed to help the system (at whatever scale/scales possible) to self-correct. In other words, sometimes it’s enough just to ask the right question. 

You can listen to the interview itself here.

Sunday, August 16, 2020

The Pandemic as a Warning Shot

The last post ended with a suggestion that how we behave in a crisis is a mark of our character and that all of us should feel under a moral microscope in times of crisis. A post last autumn had made the point that
Nobody seems to want to talk any more about “character” – perhaps it has shades of “self-discipline” and “self-control” when the spirit of the age continues to encourage the self to flourish?So it took some courage for David Brooks to produce in 2015 a book entitled “The Road to Character” consisting of profiles of 8 people whose life demonstrates “character” including Dwight Eisenhower, Samuel Johnson (!), George Marshall (of Marshall Fund fame), St Augustine (!), the american woman behind Roosevelt’s New Deal (Francis Perkins), the charity worker behind “The Catholic Worker” (Dorothy Day) and George Eliot, the British writer.
I idly googled the Ngram user for "character" to discover that useage of the word "character" has fallen in the past decade to almost zero!
No wonder that I followed up that post by wondering whether our social DNA was changing

Some months back I referred to a vimeo encouraging us to use lockdown to conduct more meaningful conversations . It invited us to consider the following questions -
- what we found the most difficult thing about the lockdown?
- how we reacted to it eg fears and hopes?
- what we were ”bringing” to the experience? eg characteristics/strengths
- which of a range of ”spheres” (work, family, friends, personal development, health, finances, wider community) we actually spent time on?

This was part of what was called the Adventus Initiative  which went on to consider, coming out of Covid19,
- what sort of changes (if any) we might we want to make in our priorities?
- for example in the time we devote to each of those spheres?
- what our first action would be?
In many ways, however, this reflects the privileged world which global warming should have us questioning - with both Extinction Rebellion  and Bill McKibben upping the ante

The Canadian blogger Dave Pollard has a great post today which imagines that we are almost at the end of the 21st century - with "civilisation" as we know it today having completely broken down and our lives lived in small communities - generally in primitive form of wars with one another. His "retrospective" covers 11 points - and I have selected the last three to give you a sense of his argument
9 We have had our share of crises, of course. The Great Earthquakes devastated America’s west-coast cities, though by then the big cities were already starting to be depopulated. We’ve had six pandemics that killed about 400 million people between them, though that number is highly imprecise, since the most recent ones, after the production of vaccines ceased in the third decade of the Long Depression, were uncontrolled and our information systems could no longer gather much reliable data on their impact. The latest one was extremely virulent, but since long-distance travel has pretty much ceased, its effects were severe but localized. We figure it’s likely to be like that going forward. The loss of the great forests to fire and insects has caused a whole cascade of ecological crises, as has the death of the oceans that preceded it. That has caused the hot deserts of the tropics and the cold deserts of the boreal areas to expand enormously, and they’re largely uninhabitable now, as are the semi-arid areas of western North America, central and east Asia, and southern Europe that have grown unbearably hot and have long ago run out of water.
10 And water, always our most precious resource, is now probably the biggest factor driving our population down and our continuing migrations to areas where it is still available. It was the cause of the last great wars, in the northern parts of North America and Europe, and across Asia. When the Long Depression eliminated the capacity to create and maintain pipelines to transport water long distances, those wars ended in a whimper. But with the Long Migration, even that water is in danger of running out, especially as the climate collapse worsens.
11 You might be surprised to learn that, despite not having man-made pharmaceuticals, vaccines, or hospitals, our life expectancy is about the same as it was in 2020. We apparently eat much more nutritious food than people did then — less of it, almost entirely plants, and no processed food — and we of necessity exercise more, as we live without most of the electrically-powered equipment that made lives in 2020 dangerously physically inactive. And I’m not sure why, but we seem less obsessed about dying than people back then were. Maybe it’s because we see it when it happens, whereas in 2020 it was always hidden, in institutions, behind closed doors.
The pandemic tells us, surely, that the sort of modern life we had taken so easily for granted is now over....Some aspects of normality may return - but our easy reliance on air travel, mass tourism and imports will surely reduce significantly. 
If we are to be able properly to anticipate and prepare for our new future, we will all need a strong shot of imagination ...

Resource on global warming
What is wrong with us?
Facing Extinction