Photo of an electrical storm that formed in the plume of the erupting Chilean volcano Chaitén. Photo (c) Terra Networks taken by Carlos Gutierrez for UPI. Thanks to Our Descent Into Madness for the link.

Is EndGame's Inevitability Beginning to Dawn on Us? -- Another brilliant essay by my friend Joe Bageant suggests that we're all getting chronically depressed for a very good reason -- a Dark Age is imminent. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.

How to Ground Yourself -- Forget anxiety drugs and behavior mod: Recalibrate yourself. Thanks to Lugon for the link.

Meditation for Beginners -- At last, a simple, intuitive approach to meditation that doesn't seem harder than it should be. I've ordered the book, and it's also available on CD. Thanks to Beth for the link.

Ideas by Podcast -- CBC has put some of the best episodes of its once-great Ideas program on podcast. Thanks to Christopher vanDyck for the link.

How Not to Do Intentional Community -- A guilty Wall Street millionaire environmentalist has created an IC for millionaires, by destroying and 'privatizing' wilderness.

As Food Emergency Deepens, Big AgriBusiness Fights Change -- The NYT muses: "The developing world needs to develop its own ability to feed itself. For that to happen, American farmers will have to be weaned from American food aid. There is more that Washington must do. Especially with corn and oil prices as high as they are, the time has come to put an end to subsidies to transform corn into ethanol." Finally they get it. Still, no one else is listening.

Nicholas Stern Says He Underestimated Climate Change Dangers and Rate -- "Emissions are growing much faster than we'd thought, the absorptive capacity of the planet is less than we'd thought, the risks of greenhouse gases are potentially bigger than more cautious estimates and the speed of climate change seems to be faster."

Investigative Journalists Still Face Death and Worse Every Day -- "As long as I live, I will continue to write and writing will keep me alive." says Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho Ribeiro (45), laureate of this year’s UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize. Thanks to Barbara Dieu for the link.

Ontario Finally Acts on Animal Cruelty -- After two federal governments knuckled under to the factory farm and pharma labs, the Ontario provincial government has had the balls to advance a reasonable anti-cruelty law. Let's hope it passes.

The Last Lecture -- If you haven't seen/heard this yet, don't miss it. Thanks to Matt for the link.


Thoughts for the Week:

• from Barbara Dieu (in answer to my Big Question "Where Do I Belong?") -- You belong to yourself man!
• from Patti Digh: Maybe life is very simple. Very, very simple. And to make it more interesting we complicate things. We seem to love to impose laws (marriage laws, for example) that do nothing more than allow us to abdicate our personal responsibility.

From an article I wrote in September 2004:

Metaphor is a comparative device used to assert substantive equivalence or similarity between something that is somewhat complex and abstract, and something that is much simpler or more concrete. Examples:

• Business is war or sport; business is 'organic', information has an 'ecology'
• A leader is a country or a company ("Russia says...", "The White House responded...", "ExxonMobil believes...")
• Collectively, the documents of an organization are its 'corporate memory'.
  
• The change needed in human culture and behaviour is a metamorphosis from today's larval stage to the future butterfly adult stage.
• America under Bush is like a family that has been repeatedly brutalized by a drunk father.
• Ideas and beliefs and behaviours can spread like viruses, 'infect' others and even lead to 'epidemic' change.

We use metaphors to make difficult concepts easier to understand. We misuse metaphors to oversimplify and to distort.

George Lakoff describes how the inability of our brains to conceive things that are not manifested, directly or metaphorically, in the 'real' world, explains the attraction and necessity of metaphor:

When Mark Johnson and I [studied] the cognitive sciences in detail, we realized that there were three major results that were inconsistent with almost all of Western philosophy (except for Merleau-Ponty and Dewey), namely: The mind is inherently embodied. Most thought is unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

The differences [when you approach philosophy from a cognitive science perspective] are differences that matter in your life. Starting with results from cognitive semantics, we discovered a lot that is new about the nature of moral systems, about the ways that we conceptualize the internal structure of the Self, even about the nature of truth... We are neural beings. Our brains take their input from the rest of out bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit. Metaphor appears to be a neural mechanism that allows us to adapt the neural systems used in sensory-motor activity to create forms of abstract reason. If this is correct, as it seems to be, our sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped by, made possible by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our embodied interactions in the world.

Read the whole article.

Herman Daly is recognized as a pioneer in Environmental & Social Economics, and I've reviewed his work in these pages before. Recently he submitted a paper "Toward a Steady-State Economy" to the UK government's Sustainable Development Commission outlining and explaining the 10 public policy steps needed to achieve such an economy. The whole paper is essential reading for those wanting an understanding of the current economy, why it is not sustainable, and what is required to make it so. The 10 steps in a nutshell (I've altered and added to his words to explain technical terms):

1. Use cap-auction-trade systems for basic resources (energy, wood and other raw materials). Set caps according to source (scarcity of resources) or sink (waste produced in using the resources and loss of carbon absorption) constraint, whichever is more stringent. In other words, cap the maximum amount of usage of each natural resource at levels that are sustainable, and then allow the market, by auction, to determine how to allocate that maximum amount of usage by setting the price where the demand is greatest.
2. Institute ecological tax reform—shift the tax base from value added (labor and capital) and on to “that to which value is added”, namely the entropic throughput of resources extracted from nature (depletion), through the economy, and back to nature (pollution). This internalizes external costs and raises revenue more equitably. It prices the scarce but previously unpriced contribution of nature. In other words, tax 'bads' (depletion, pollution and waste) not 'goods', by lowering social and income taxes and taxing extraction and pollution instead.
3. Limit the range of inequality in income—set a minimum income and a maximum income. Without aggregate growth poverty reduction requires redistribution. Complete equality is unfair; unlimited inequality is unfair. Seek fair limits to inequality. The minimum, he argues, should be sufficient for a comfortable life; the maximum probably not more than 100 times the minimum.
4. Free up the length of the working day, week, and year—allow greater option for leisure or personal work. Full-time external employment for all is hard to provide without growth. In today's automated world, there is no need for everyone to work all day every day to produce a comfortable living for everyone. I have argued before that one day a week, or one hour a day, should be all that is needed; most of our labour is wasted in bureaucracy, hierarchical politics and the production of junk.
5. Re-regulate international commerce—move away from free trade, free capital mobility and globalization, and adopt compensating tariffs to protect efficient national policies of cost internalization from standards-lowering competition from other countries. This is not an argument for reducing trade, but rather for eliminating the component of trade that exploits weak social and environmental standards and unsustainably low long-distance transportation costs.
6. Reduce and amend the authority of the IMF-WB-WTO, to something like Keynes’ plan for a multilateral payments clearing union, charging penalty rates on surplus as well as deficit balances—seeking balance on current accounts, and avoiding large capital transfers and foreign debts. Instead of being an ideological force for globalization and deregulation at any costs, it would become an arbiter and a check on reckless and unsustainable national policies.
7. Move to 100% reserve requirements instead of fractional reserve banking. Return control of money supply and purchasing power to governments rather than private banks. This step is designed to curb irresponsible lending and borrowing practices, speculation and currency devaluation, and allow elected bodies to manage fiscal and monetary policy, not private sector parties with an inherent conflict of interest.
8. Move all remaining publicly-owned natural capital (the 'commonwealth' of land and resources) to public trusts 'priced' at their true value, while freeing from private ownership the 'commonwealth' of knowledge and information, making it free. Stop treating the scarce (natural capital) as if it were non scarce, and the non scarce (intellectual capital) as if it were scarce.
9. Stabilize population. Work toward a balance in which births plus immigrants equals deaths plus out-migrants.
10. Reform how we measure and manage national well-being—separate GDP into a cost account and a benefits account. Compare them at the margin, stop 'growing' the economy when marginal costs start to exceed marginal benefits. Never add the two accounts. This reflects the fact that many economic activities (e.g. the clean-up of the Exxon Valdez disaster) actually add to GDP, and that hence GDP is not in any way a meaningful measure of economic prosperity or well-being.

It's an interesting list, but Daly has acknowledged that he's not optimistic that governments and those who would have to cede power to achieve these policy changes will ever voluntarily agree to such economic (and political) reforms, or that they could collaborate and do so even if they were so inclined. I share his pessimism. People with wealth and power simply don't give it up without a fight, and I know of few governments that would have the heart for such an 'unpopular' fight.

Nevertheless, even though it's probably impossible, it's interesting to know what we would have to do, top-down, to achieve a truly sustainable global economy.

Category: Alternative Economies

Regular readers know that I'm infatuated with the idea of Intentional Community, and that I believe the only way we're going to make major positive changes to our unsustainable culture is by creating 'working models' of a better way to live and make a living.

An Intentional Community is a group of people with shared values and shared purpose who agree to live together to further those values and realize that purpose. Around the world there are hundreds of ICs, but the large majority of them are very small (smaller than the average struggling-nation family) or very short-lived. For awhile I doubted that ICs had enough urgency and commitment to compel most members to stick them out when times got tough or disagreements arose. Joe Bageant's son's argument that 'communities are born of necessity' is pretty compelling. And in Second Life the turnover in 'communities' is enormous -- many people change their 'home' as often as they change their clothes.

But while 'accidental communities' may outlast intentional ones, the evidence is that most of them are not happy places -- nor are they sustainable in a modern world quickly running out of room, resources, and the essentials of life. We've left community formation up to accident, and we got what we deserved -- greedy real estate developers telling us where we can and cannot live, turning the Earth into unnatural wasteland.

My study of indigenous, 'tribal' communities suggests that, while they are sustainable (at least they were until our civilization encroached irrevocably and dramatically into their habitat), they are not necessarily happy places, especially for non-conformists and especially when they abut other such communities (this seems to trigger an endless cycle of inter-tribal violence).

I have a perhaps idealistic view of the communities of wild creatures, which are not nearly as violent as the makers of sensationalist nature films would have us believe. From my studies of birds in particular, I've learned that life for other creatures in the wild is mostly joyful, peaceful and care-free. I've also learned that Gaia, the complex self-regulating system of all-life-on-Earth, is graceful, respectful, honourable, and astonishing.

If all-life-on-Earth can figure out how to live as responsible, sustainable, joyful and mostly peaceful life, what's wrong with us? Are we really a rogue species, unable to fit into the ecosystem that has evolved so effectively for millions of years? Or are we just going about the business of belonging to Earth all wrong, and, if so, what do we need to learn (or unlearn) and show to get us back on the right track?

My fall-back, if I cannot find a way to join with others to be a model in community, is Radical Simplicity, a model of a personal way of living devoted to:

• leaving the Earth as we found it, unhampered in its ability to sustain itself indefinitely
• consuming as little of the Earth's resources as we need to be fully ourselves
• measuring our 'success' not by material wealth or GDP but by the quality of our lives ('our' meaning that of all creatures we share our ecosystems with) -- health, well-being, happiness, learning, love
• relearning to listen to the Earth, to pay attention, and to live in harmony as a part of it

Perhaps because I've lived a prosperous, materially comfortable life, yet not found in it the happiness or health or well-being that I have always intuitively sought, it is easy for me to shrug off material measures of success. I can appreciate how those who have struggled for basic necessities all their lives would find my quest elitist, disconnected from the reality of the modern human condition. What good is a model of a better way to live if 90% of the people on this horrifically overpopulated planet will be completely unpersuaded of its value, even if they could afford to emulate it?

Yet I can't shake my fascination with the idea of Intentional Community. In theory it still makes sense. For the same reason, I'm also still fascinated with the idea of polyamorism, the idea that we're not meant to love or be loved by just one person, and that monogamy demands so much of us that we end up losing ourselves to compromise, or fracturing. I hear the two common objections to polyamorism: That it's a self-indulgent and absurdly unrealizable fantasy of middle-aged males. And that it's fearful, an attempt to insulate ourselves against the loss of love, against commitment, against responsibility, against being hurt. Maybe so.

(listening to House in the background -- a woman says to her new lover, one of the House doctors, after he indulges her: "I need you to do what you want. I can take care of me...I need you to take care of you.")

All of this internal debate inside my own head is, perhaps, the crux of the problem. I need to learn to let go, not to be afraid to be truly human, truly myself, to live in the real world. Not to be afraid of intimacy or responsibility. To be fearless. To try not to try too hard.

I need to think. I'm such a slow learner.

Or maybe I think too much. Maybe what I'm lacking is data. Maybe I spend too much time thinking and not enough time being. Before I can decide where I belong, perhaps I have to try belonging somewhere outside my own head.

Or maybe I should lock myself in a lab and learn biology and invent some dust that, spread from above the Earth, could halve the probability of women everywhere becoming pregnant. Or invent a meat, tasty as the finest on the planet, that could be grown in a test tube, in anyone's garden, and spare the world's creatures the outrage and misery of factory farms, and the horror of famine and hunger.

If not Intentional Community, then what?

I have no idea. I know it's not political or social reform, or 'free' markets, or new technology, or revolution, or spiritualism. We've tried all these things for ten thousand years, and they've only made matters worse. And I know that there is no going back, that there are no noble savages, that history has many lessons but no better models of how to live.

When I know myself a little better, when I know who I really am and start to have an inkling where I might belong, maybe I'll have some answers, some possibilities that make more sense. If so, you'll be the first to know.

Image: Erskine Falls, Australia, photo from my Picasaweb collection

Category: Let-Self-Change

Flickr Photo Download: Nancy White graphs Peter Block’s Presentation

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


Love, Conversation, Community:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Narrative and Storytelling:

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


Preparing for Civilization's End:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate Change: Just Do Something.

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

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


April was, Apparently, Animal Cruelty Month:

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

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

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

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


Web 2.0:

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, since all this information is viewable on highly legible, portable display devices, no more trees need to be killed to disseminate and use it.

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

Category: Knowledge Management

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

Fears of the Working/Poor/Uneducated Class:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Empathetic behaviour and promoting fairness
• Helping those who cannot help themselves
• Protecting those who cannot protect themselves
• Promoting the virtue of fulfillment in life
• Nurturing and strengthening oneself

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

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

Fears of the Catering/Affluent/Educated Class:

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

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

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

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

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

Category: Our Culture

Wellington NZ from the cable car

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

Some suggestions for anyone planning a trip there:

• If you can't stay and/or travel with someone you know who lives there (always the best way to discover a new place), some of the B&Bs are amazing, and much better value than the hotels. 
• What is called a hotel there is not always what North Americans call a hotel. A hotel can be anything from a 4-room roadside inn to a tower that includes both permanent resident and guest units.
• Getting used to driving on the left side, and the many roundabouts (including two-lane, double-loop roundabouts) takes some time. And some mountain roads are more challenging (and less likely to have guardrails) than most North Americans are used to.
• Most of the roads, even small rural roads with hills and sharp curves, are posted 100km/hr (60mph). Pay close attention to the suggested curve signs and passing ("overtaking") signs and road markings.
• Recommended accommodations North Island New Zealand:
• Songbird Gardens, Pohangina Valley (North of Palmerston North, NZ) - a delightful cottage with a spectacular view (thanks to Pohangina Pete for the recommendation, and the wonderful hospitality)
• Abseil Inn, Waitomo NZ
• The Cove, Taupo NZ 
• Oceanside, Mount Maunganui NZ
• Best buy in the city, weekend special at CityLife Hotel, Wellington NZ
• Recommended restaurants (remember I'm a vegetarian):
• The Tearoom, Great Ocean Road, Lorne, Victoria, Australia
• The Huhu Cafe at Waitomo Caves NZ
• One Red Dog, Wellington NZ
• The Airo Restaurant at the Melbourne Airport Hilton
• Artistically and environmentally notable places:
• Bruno Torfs' amazing sculptures at Sculpture Garden, Marysville, Victoria
• The Surf Coast, especially around Lorne and Aireys Inlet, Victoria
• Drive through the Black Spur temperate rainforest, Yarra Valley, Victoria
• Te Papa, the Wellington NZ museum, which also has an extensive and growing online KnowledgeNet for learning about Maori culture
• The world's best white wines (I've always been a red wine drinker, but these whites have changed my mind):
• Just about any (I tried 7, all excellent) of the NZ Sauvignon Blancs, especially those from the Marlborough Valley such as Nobilo's very inexpensive Drylands
• Milawa Valley Australia's Brown Brothers Dry Muscat, the best-smelling wine I've ever sniffed -- should be a perfume

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the key lessons for me:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Category: US Politics

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

(posted from Australia)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound like someone you know, or suddenly know now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Category: Being Human

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

(posted from Australia)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Category: Let-Self-Change