Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them
Ideas hate conference rooms, particularly conference rooms where there is a history of criticism, personal attacks or boredom
Ideas occur when dissimilar universes collide
Ideas often strive to meet expectations. If people expect them to appear, they do
Ideas fear experts, but they adore beginner's mind. A little awareness is a good thing
Ideas come in spurts, until you get frightened. Willie Nelson wrote three of his biggest hits in one week
Ideas come from trouble
Ideas come from our ego, and they do their best when they're generous and selfless
Ideas come from nature
Sometimes ideas come from fear (usually in movies) but often they come from confidence
Useful ideas come from being awake, alert enough to actually notice
Though sometimes ideas sneak in when we're asleep and too numb to be afraid
Ideas come out of the corner of the eye, or in the shower, when we're not trying
Mediocre ideas enjoy copying what happens to be working right this minute
Bigger ideas leapfrog the mediocre ones
Ideas don't need a passport, and often cross borders (of all kinds) with impunity
An idea must come from somewhere, because if it merely stays where it is and doesn't join us here, it's hidden. And hidden ideas don't ship, have no influence, no intersection with the market. They die, alone.
A letter to a community organizer and networker overwhelmed by the potential impact of global crises on his community.
Dear John,
You might consider something I'm thinking of calling crisis-fatigue. Like battle fatigue or compassion fatigue. I think its main ingredient is ambiguity-fatigue. It is exhausting to continually contemplate potentially massive threats from a place of radical uncertainty littered with certainties that blink on and off…
How does one respond to this in anything approaching a sane way? I struggle with this all the time. At least a few things have become obvious to me. These strategies are remarkably consistent with what you'd expect the requisites would be for living in a complex, chaotic, unpredictable system:
1) Let go of outcome. Since we're not in charge (and never really were), admit that what happens is much bigger than any of us. It seems we need to be willing to die, willing for everyone around us to suffer, willing to fail at every attempt to make the world better or to understand or to be understood, or to even grow and learn from all this. Let it all go. (I do not mean that we should expect, encourage or welcome such undesirable outcomes. I mean we can want or envision positive outcomes even as we appreciate the fullness of life with or without them. Honoring our desires without being controlled by them clarifies our minds and frees us to be fully present. I know of few forces more powerfully benign than passionate engagement without attachment.)
2) Come to terms with our own intrinsic participation in Whatever Happens. Not only are we not in control, we're not un-involved. Our role in Whatever Happens isn't something we can escape. (One consolation is we aren't alone. Everyone and everything is co-creating Whatever Happens.) This is hard for us to come to terms with because it looks so much like the guilt-based responsibility upon which our society is based (“Everything is not my fault!”); but it is a totally different thing.
Guilt-based responsibility is part of the linear cause-and-effect worldview. (“Who's responsible/ guilty/ blameworthy?” is the social equivalent of the scientists' question, “What's the cause?”) But blame can't fathom the complexity of What Happens in a living/chaotic system. Phenomena arise from the whole, from the system itself. Those who stand by when events happen are creating a context for those events to unfold in the way they do — even when they are miles away obliviously watching a sitcom. Even inanimate objects are participants: Roads are participating in the death of pollinators (by replacing trees and meadows, by enabling the transport of pesticides, by contributing to ozone depletion). Everything participates. It is pointless to point. The route to better conditions is through increased awareness of the whole, and a more radically expansive sense of all our roles. This includes the previous item — letting go — because co-creation means we're not in charge of outcomes, we're just vitally important participants in influencing them.
3) Look for positive possibilities and ways to partner them into greater probability. Meg Wheatley and David Spangler taught me about living in a world of possibilities. We could say, inspired by the poet Muriel Rukeyser, that the universe is made of possibilities, not atoms. They are everywhere. They are everything. Some say God (or the devil) is in the details. I say God (and the devil) are in the possibilities. Every moment is filled with them. Although we don't get to control how they turn out, they are very responsive to our actions, our beliefs, our caring. That is the edge of co-creativity where Life resides most vividly.
Phi Beta Iota: We respectfully urge one and all to contribute to the non-profit Co-Intelligence Institute. Tom Atlee is as close as we come to a Founding Father for a prosperous world at peace, beginning here in the USA.
Tom Atlee recently described the game changing potential of the Interactive Voter Choice System in the following terms:
“The participatory social-networking capacity of the Interactive Voter Choice System shifts voters' allegiance and attention from parties, ideologies, and political categories to the actual policies they want to see implemented. The system then helps them ally with others who want to see those policies implemented, regardless of their diverse political beliefs or reasons for favoring those policies. In the process, IVCS gives rise to an empowering, collectively intelligent, evolving, self-organizing political ecosystem which can enable citizens to do the following:
clarify and push for policies they want, creating their own personal “platforms”
network with others to form coalitions or ad hoc lobbying groups to push preferred policies
field candidates outside of the party system to promote the policies they want
create new political parties
work within existing parties to shape their platforms and performance
hold elected representatives accountable for their performance on favored policies
create parallel “shadow government” structures and policies
take over political parties and dissolve them and, through all of the above, to
ultimately move our politics beyond party politics and ideologies altogether.
“Imagine a politics where one hardly ever hears ‘liberal' or ‘conservative' or even ‘transpartisan', but only discussion of the issues. Imagine a politics where grassroots organizing is finally on a level playing field — or even favorable playing field — with the big money players. Imagine the already-surveyed popular preferences — like single payer health care and ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — readily becoming the official policy of our government.”I honestly think IVCS is one of the most important emerging forms of political leverage we have available. Of course it can only do its job if it is well-funded for software development, viral promotion, and political strategizing so it can launch with strong popular appeal, participation, and well-thought-out security safeguards to prevent its marginalization, subversion or co-optation. If that happens soon enough, the chances are extremely high that it will have a decisive positive impact on the critical watershed 2012 election and every election after that. It could be a total game-changer.”
When I read Tom's article, my immediate reaction was that he had explained IVCS and its game changing potential in the most compelling terms that have been written on the subject. So I shared the article with a number of people who have expressed interest in IVCS. Their enthusiastic response was that they got the big picture, but were still unclear about how IVCS actually works. They asked for a clear explanation of how it enables voters, not political parties or special interests, to determine the outcomes of elections. How can voters use the system to run and elect their own candidates? I have written this post to answer these questions.
Humble Beginnings
Sheer frustration caused the idea for IVCS to pop into my head in 2004 during a campaign event for Howard Dean during his presidential primary bid. While milling around with his supporters waiting for Dean to start a nationwide conference call, I realized that his campaign slogan “You have the power” didn't jibe with the powerless role supporters like myself were relegated to playing at the event.
The way it was structured made it impossible for me to do what I came to do, which was to pressure Dean to remain true to his initial opposition to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, an issue I felt he had begun to waffle on. I also wanted to see if I could get other supporters to join me in pressing Dean not to renege on his opposition to the war.
The absence of any way for me to press my concern, and rally other anti-war supporters, hit home to me a political fact that I had not fully appreciated before. It is that in U.S. politics, electoral candidates conduct their campaigns on a “take it or leave it” basis. I had been coming to this conclusion gradually over time, but attending Dean's event and seeing how much he and his modus operandi had changed since the first rally I had attended in the summer of 2003 brought it home in a very forceful and depressing way.
The main goal of most campaigning candidates, to my way of thinking, is not to find out what their prospective constituents want them to do if they are elected, but to get them to embrace the agendas the candidates think will get them the most votes. Although they often conduct opinion polls, their objective is to use the results to figure out how to frame their targeted mixed messages to re-interpret reality for voters, and cajole disparate voting blocs into voting for them for different reasons. Campaigns are about defining and interpreting reality for voters, and “imaging” the candidates so that they appear to represent the best solution to the problematic versions of “reality” the campaigns create.
This systemic duplicity is basically a reversal of the democratic theory that elected officials should represent the people. Candidates do not seek or run on mandates from their constituents. Instead, they get voters to vote for them by manipulating their perceptions of reality and their images of the candidates themselves. Once these disingenuous candidates get into office, they can turn democratic theory upside down and claim that the voters who voted for them gave them a mandate to enact the candidates' agendas!
Phi Beta Iota: At this time and in our view, despite the strong approval that Tom Atlee voices and which we respect, the system is trying too hard to force fit pre-written scripted choices onto cards. As Harrison Owen said at a luncheon recently with the sponsors of IVCS and Phi Beta Iota, it is trying way too hard and should just give the voters the Open Space needed to create an infinite array of choices and consensus. It also does not at this time provide for displaying “true cost” information of alternative options, or for engaging the reality of having to make trade-offs if one wishes to make choices within a sustainable budget that sustains the environment. It's a start–and the best thing we've seen to date. It has a long way to go and Electoral Reform might be more fruitful (but much harder to advance); so in terms of a first step, this is, as Tom Atlee goes to great lengths to articulate, the best thing going.
At waking up, this morning, the sun almost hitting the solar panels,’
a mandala of a shining star of grass in my third eye.
Happens whenever I pull weeds too.
Or trim the zumac tree.
Or in the old days, when I pulled the mustard after a rain.
Tons of mustard.
Went to mustard heaven at night and flew over fields of mustard.
Happens with grasses too—king’s grass.
Is this vegetable heaven?
Picking grass yesterday, wondering if each bunch of grass connected to its main root was one soul.
So many seasons. So many years. So many souls.
Mountains of souls.
Were there hierarchies of souls?
If there were too many souls for all the bodies extant now, do some of them go into grass?
When you drive all night and lie down to sleep, and see the cars still coming in the mind’s eye, just a repeat of what you saw on the road…
But I see such pure color, vibrant, shining rays of light in the the mind’s grass…
Picking up on collective consciousness of plants? Downloading the day at night with a niche collective consciousness?
I pulled grass out of the pebbled driveway for only twenty minutes yesterday, yet got these bursting green blades of grass shining in my closed eyes…
Am I now just hypersensitive and/or connected to the vegetable and mineral world, now from years of lending my energy to them–rather than reading numbers on papers in a board room? Is that why gurus prefer mountaintops to board rooms?
Downloading… but its not just down loading, its shedding the negative energy that has attached itself to the pure thing itself—when you download, you wash it off, and see it purely, its essence.
Downloaded “bad” experience is accepted as pure experience, and becomes part of the storage of experience to make wisdom… for instinctual right actions to prevail in the present: cognizant but not affected by them..
Also, this morning (somehow related) my old roommate, Thorstein Veblen’s grandson, like Barak Obama, schooled in governance at Harvard–not a co-joined teaching with economics as they do at Oxford—PPE–politics, philosophy and economics… Obama and John Veblen, unlike Thorstein, ignorant of economics and the history of economic theory.
So we get Americans like John Veblen and Barak, brilliant people who understand governing, negotiating, game playing but all within the envelope of politics, as they know it.
When faced with an economic problem of enormity, they turn to the best economists, e.g. Summers, Geitner… “best” being most “successful “in the [old failing ]system..
Just when we needed a President who had clear vision or comprehensive economic understanding of how the system must change in order to work.
We didn’t need Babe Ruth to hit a home run, we needed Abner Doubleday to change the rules of the game!
FDR was not a compromising black/white man intent of binding the nations wounds like Abe; FDR was a pure-bred Harvard philosopher king who reveled in being hated by banks and powerful oligopolies..
Like the undergraduate John Veblen, who made Thorstein turn in his grave, the brilliant Obama could never pick someone as an advisor who was outside the power box—Obama is a schooled power broker and speechifier..
But what was broken, is broken, is the system. Pack the courts, put an army of unemployed to work, tax the rich, redistribute the wealth, you can keep the balanced tension between capitalism and planning, but we need a heavy hand on the planning side of the scale. Like the Chinese or the Finns!
The victims of of the rich getting richer are the underclass who now want a Tea Party to help them commit suicide. Because they know nothing of what Adam Smith preached centuries ago—they have no idea they are a mob of crypto-Smiths.
Karl Marx (most readers will stop reading here) saw how capitalism would destroy itself (or at least 80% of the population)—it has already decimated our living in community with humanistic values. Materialsm has trumped nature and man.
I told my daughter back when Obama (a very smart man) was elected, to make sure she enjoyed her life and didn’t make plans too far in the future, because things will change, not necessarily for the better.
I told her the house was on fire, we need three buckets of water and this new handsome President is trying to compromise between the mercantile republicans who said we need one quarter of one pail (for the banks) and the “liberal” democrats who said we need half a pail (for the banks )–forget Robert Reich and Tom Friedman (“’We need a bigger boat!’ cried Roy Schieder to Richard Dreyfuss when he saw how big the shark was,” said Freidman way back, two years ago).
Top down, not bottom up, say Geitner, Summers and Associates. Where is our political Martin Luther! Post the 95 new rules on the doors of the government-military-industrial complex! The Government of the United States of America is a sales organization that sells indulgences. If not a revolution, we need a Reformation. A new game. Ten strikes and you’re out; two balls and you go to first.
We needed three pails to water the grass roots, not a big splash on the tree tops. And Obama was doomed. A brilliant man but ignorant of the variety of games that can be constructed—couldn’t someone point out that when basketball was getting boring, they added a three-point line!
Obama, like me in the fields of the spirits, is an ignoramus. I pouted on a website called beyondgreedandego.com back then. I also sent out an email to friends, explaining how this will happen, and explaining the way is being paved for a fascist craziness masking as populism.
How Voters Can Unrig the 2012 Elections with Transpartisan Voting Blocs and Electoral Coalitions
Voters did not get what they said they wanted from the 2010 elections. In fact, they got the opposite because the two major parties rigged the elections.
The parties have been rigging elections for decades by gerrymandering election districts and passing campaign financing and election laws that prevent third party candidates from beating major party candidates.
These rigged elections give voters no choice but to vote for one of the two major parties. So voters do the only thing they can do, which is to routinely kick out the major party incumbents in the futile hope that the new major party candidates they elect will not flout their will to the same degree. But regardless of which party candidates they vote for, they get roughly the same policies. These typically sacrifice voters' interests to the special interests that fund lawmakers' electoral campaigns.
Unless voters are empowered to put an end to rigged elections before the 2012 elections, using mechanisms like the one proposed below, the middle class and working Americans will be ruined financially by the lawmakers and special interests that are enabling the business and financial sector to take more than their fair share of national income.
Phi Beta Iota: We are in the process of identifying at least eight “modalities” that stand in sharp contrast to “rule by secrecy” as is characteristic of the axis of crime running from Wall Street to the Democratic-Republican “two-party tyranny.” We anticipate their all participating in a nation-wide series of citizen encounters on policy and budget, culminating in the Sense-Making Summit in October 2011. While the first summit is focused on Health in the larger context of the ten high-level threats to humanity and the twelve core policies, our intent from Summit '12 onwards, is to engage all citizens in addressing all ten threats across all twelve policies in the context of balanced budget, first in the USA, then in such other countries as might have a citizenry interested in Wise Democracy and Participatory Budgeting.
I was going to write about Legitimate Grievances today, but something more important has come up: Obama's Choice.
Context first. My friend and colleague for the past decade, Chuck Spinney was and remains a reformer. He was featured on the cover of TIME Magazine in the 1980's, and I am including that graphic here because I think it is very important for the public to understand that NOTHING HAS CHANGED since the 1980's. We still have the same two-party tyranny that has sold out to Wall Street, we still have the same Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) that moves wealth from the individual taxpayer to the top 1% of our citizens, who have hollowed out America without regard for the Constitution, the Republic, or the Commonwealth. Below is a note Chuck sent me, a short snippet and pointer to the New York Times article to which he refers, and my comments with a few links.
New options from the nomenklatura listed below is a silly oxymoron.
WASHINGTON — With critical decisions ahead on the war in Afghanistan, President Obama is about to receive an unusual opportunity to reshape the Pentagon's leadership, naming a new defense secretary as well as several top generals and admirals in the next several months.
It is a rare confluence of tenure calendars and personal calculations, coming midway through Mr. Obama's first term and on the heels of an election that challenged his domestic policies. His choices could have lasting consequences for his national security agenda, perhaps strengthening his hand over a military with which he has often clashed, and are likely to have an effect beyond the next election, whether he wins or loses.
That is all the more reason that Mr. Obama's choices are certain to face scrutiny in a narrowly divided Senate, whose Republican leadership has declared itself intent on defeating him.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said he plans to retire next year, while the terms of four members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are scheduled to end: Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman; Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman; Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief; and Adm. Gary Roughead, the chief of naval operations.
Phi Beta Iota: The current and prospective leaders being discussed and considered are all inter-changeable. They share the same paradigmatic views, the same commitment to the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC), and therefore, to suggest that changing out the guard is in any way an option, is to demonstrate profound naivete or a gift for deception. President Obama is truly at a historic fork in the road: he can go on with business as usual, bailing out Wall Street and carrying on with a global military cmapaign that is both ineffective and unaffordable-or he can reach deep down and come up with one startling insight and two serious options.
Startling insight: integrity matters. Doing the right thing is more important than continuing to do the wrong thing righter.
Option B: Hold an Open Space Technology event on the future of the USA in all its forms, in the Washington Convention Center, a no-notice open public event, with Harrison Owen as the facilitator.
Sadly, we are quite certain neither the startling insight nor either of the two options will be considered. The Titanic is sinking and the President is being asked to re-arrange the name cards for dinner…..thus does the Republic flail in the tar pit of history.
We predict, with a depth of despair, that Obama will choose to go along and eventually be as wealthy as Bill Bradley and Al Gore. He is one phone call away from greatness, and won't do it. He lives, we die.
