Review: The leadership of civilization building–Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century

6 Star Top 10%, Change & Innovation, Cosmos & Destiny, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Information Society, Leadership

Leadership CivilizationAstonishing Powerful, Easy to Read, MUST Be Reprinted

February 2, 2008

Richard J Spady

This book was recommended to me by Joseph McCormick, former Army Ranger, world-class philosopher, and one of the founders of Reuniting America, 110 million strong and totally transpartisan in nature. We both agree with Peter Peterson's views in Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It. None of the political candidates today, with one possible exception, understand Epoch B Swarm Leadership (I cannot load images for out of print books, please see the four non-fiction images at this link: Managing the Nonprofit Organization), and even the exception keeps talking about one America, Democrats and Republicans together. This otherwise erudite man fails to understand that over half of the two parties' members no longer identify with the extremist spoils system; that Independents are fully unified as a third party; and that Libertarians, Greens, and Reforms are now a fourth slice of America that must be respected. This book is the ONE BOOK that I would recommend to anyone who wants to be a transpartisan leader and co-steward of America the Beautiful.

If you are completely unfamiliar with the broad literature on co-intelligence, wisdom councils, citizen councils, large-scale human collaboration, this one book is a superb overview and reflects over two decades of pioneering by the authors.

On the other hand, if you are fully or even partially familiar with the books I list below, this book is a marvelous tightly integrated yet smoothly presented stand-alone which won my immediate respect because of the thoroughness of the authors in respecting and citing other pioneers.

Since it is out of print, but I was able to get a perfect-condition signed copy from 6 Finches (5 stars, great deal), I want to point out that the hard-copy cover that does not appear on this Amazon page is world-class, and I believe this book should be reprinted in paperback and also offered free online.

The Foreword by Rev Dr William Ellington and William Cane of the Forum Foundation is alone worth the price of the book. It is a spectacular erudite and yet down to earth overview, and alone, captures the entire book.

This is a solution oriented book, one that represents the view that the meaning of life is social–interpersonal–the collective pursuit of happiness. The book calls for massive social innovation, and implicitly, addresses precisely how we need to deal with the fact that all three branches of the government are broken, the two political parties are craven and corrupt, and most of our other institutions, including the so-called forth estate of the media, are equally decrepit. To take just one example from another book, The New York Times wrote 70 editorials on Iraq, and never once mentioned international law or morality.

The book offers nine pages of quotes from others, and the first part of the book stresses–without any excessive verbiage–that the spiritual core of science was lost; that “science was not only not inevitably progressive but not even inevitably benign. Citing Eltron Mayo, material progress has retarded human collaboration. Further on: slogans, distorted news, and propaganda all undermine diversity of views and potential of human collaboration.

The book states clearly that the current top-down elitist system of government and corporate management is broken. Further on in the book they point out that authoritarian “rolism” denies and deprives the individual of the right to be heard; the right to participate in decisions about their life and the life of their community.

Throughout the book the authors stress that the ultimate source of power is the people themselves; that civic values and the ability to collaborate to discover and communicate and effect common good, is the heart of civilization.

They introduce the concept of Many-to-Many (MTM) communications, and the last half of the book is full of examples including protocols and forms that can be used for large scale deliberative democracy where human opinions are presented by machine and polarization-consensus visualized and returned to the human participants as feedback and inspiration.

This book is at root about enabling, leveraging, and effecting large-scale collaboration that is inherently moral and legitimate.

Below are concise snapshots of each of the main sections of the book.

Basic Attitude: respect, listen, accept or reject, modify.

Learning: damns our rote one-way (didactic) learning, calls for activating and challenging all children from the earliest age with social network and information sharing skills.

Leadership: decisions must be made at the lowest level at which BOTH sufficiency of information and sufficiency of resources can be combined. Centralization of leadership is BAD, dictators (we have 44 of them, 42 best pals of both Clinton-Gore and Bush-Cheney) will not prevail.

Authority: derived from the consent of the governed. Moral authority is the only authority impervious to legal authority that exceeds its mandate as Bush-Cheney and the doormat Congress have done these past eight years. Democracy in the ideal is inspired society in pursuit of happiness for ALL.

Politics: best if completely open, interactive, maximizing understanding, collaboration, and engagement across all boundaries at all levels. I agree, and this is one reason we need Electoral Reform legislation that puts both the Democratic and Republican party machines OUT OF BUSINESS.

Prophecy: Golden Rule, honesty, collaboration instead of pyramidal top-down mandate. Reuniting America uses the word “transpartisanship.”

Administrative (I prefer Stewardship): Diagnose, theorize, accomplish, and review.

Helping Professions: characterized by direct human interaction and the need to recognize and react instantly, build trust, communicate vision.

Zeitgeist: Spirit-of-the-Time, Group must find its soul and its collective understanding. Constant feedback, spirit of listening, vital. Must be impersonal in the good sense, symbolic dialog is rooted in moral authority. We must strive for common opinions, reflections, and interests. I am reminded of Native American councils focusing on total consensus (don't stop until achieved), seventh generation thinking, and the Great Law of Peace adopted by the Five Nations. The right to be heard, to participate in decisions affecting one, one's family, one's community. The ultimate challenge: how to activate and channel human responsibility.

Natural Factors: diagnosis improved, learning improved, peace prospects improved, power of values.

Civilization Theories: unified social field, social quantum mechanics, open societies herald a strategy for peace. Quote Wheatley, “Imagine ourselves as beacons towers of information.” Life is One; One from Many (Dee Hock's book title); Unity in Community.

MTM: communications up and down left and right, forward and back. This reminds me of Paul Ray's brilliant world on “The New Political Compass,” from which I derived a one-page summary of what some of us are now calling “the new progressives” (not to be confused with MoveOn.org's rather myopic assumption that the Democratic Party is the only source of progressive ideas. I certainly disagree, indeed my ideal ticket would be Huckabee-Obama trading places every four years for sixteen years; with Bill Bradley and Susan Collins and a transpartisan sunshine cabinet funded by Michael Bloomberg with Ralph Nader as Chief of Staff, all leading a national conversation based on an online balanced budget open to discussion by all.

Tools: the last part of the book is equally impressive, and the authors present Fast Forum for rapid large scale collaboration and deliberation; importance of mainstreaming reality; social resolution power, Symbolic Dialog as code for human opinions, machine visualization, feedback, and reentry into dialog. I note their phrase, knowledge is in books, wisdom is in minds. The end with hard but civil comments about a social conspiracy and bureaucratic inertia.

Applications: They outline, including illustrative documents and survey forms, how their ideas could be applied at the state, local, and social levels, and especially in education, where they recommend teaching social knowledge and networking from day one; gaming the curriculum with the students' active participation, exploring clean-sheet “how it might work,” and also exploring new forms of moral discussion in which “right or wrong” are set aside to allow for a full embrace of diversity.

There are a number of relevant appendices, the first of which discusses how government and corporate power today are neither responsive nor legitimate. There are conflicts of interest, and only a massive social innovation powered by citizens will break through into new modes of self-governance.

At the end I am introduced to the Dodd Institute for Social Innovation, and I am impressed.

This is a sensational book, and it should be reprinted or at least offered free online. Here are other books that I have found valuable. See also the four images from Earth Intelligence Network that I offer to help illustrate how the 24 co-founders of EIN have absorbed and now give back the kind of wisdom that this book represents. See also:

The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People

At Earth Intelligence Network, there are 52 tough questions with transpartisan answers; over 1000 book reviews sorted by threat, policy, or other aspects of achieving the goals that these two authors; and the first of three free books online, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.

Review: Getting a Grip–Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Culture, DVD - Light, Democracy, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
Getting a Grip
Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars Frances Moore Lappe for Vice President!

September 17, 2007

Frances Moore Lappe

Frances Lappe Moore has my vote for Vice President–2008 *must* see the Republic “get a grip.”

This book will be handed out to 250 individuals representing Foundations, United Nations elements, other Non-Governmental Organizations, and US military leaders who are focused on Stabilization, Reconstruction, Humanitarian Assistance, and Disaster Relief. I met the author in the process of putting the four-day program together, and feel very fortunate that she will be speaking to these leaeders who will be discussing nothing less than how to redirect 1 trillion plus a year through the creation of compelling decision-support on the ten destabilizing threats, the twelve policies from Agriculture to Water that must be harmonized, all to the end of helping the eight major players avoid our mistakes.

This is a brilliant Nobel Peace Prize level of work, and I note with interest that the author has received the “Alternative Nobel,”the Right Livelihood Award. She will be the first person to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Earth Intelligence Network and Transpartisan Policy Institute.

This book can read and appreciated at multiple levels from strategic to tactical. I list some other books below, but this book is now at the top of short list of books important for all time. If I could make a wish, it would be that every American voter read this book and share this book and enter into the active listening active dialog mode that the author outlines in clear terms. In combination with Reuniting American and with the Naitonal Initiative for Democracy, I believe that we have a real chance of taking about the power and implementing the author's program.

Frances Moore Lappe as Presideent, and The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen as Vice President, with a Transpartisan Cabinet that includes great leaders from all political parties; that produces a balanced sustainable budget before election, and that DEMANDS an Electoral Reform Act prior to November 20008, is in my view totally possible, totally credible, and quite certain of restoring America the Beautiful.

I've read and favorably reviewed other books by this author, and the supplemental readings I suggest below, but this specific book is a gift to all of us, and all the more likely to be appreciated now that we have all experienced the naked immorality of Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency and the complete ineptitude and lack of moral courage of the Democratic-led The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy) where every Senator and Representative is impeachable for Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders.

Other books I recommend:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
The Tao of Abundance: Eight Ancient Principles for Living Abundantly in the 21st Century (Arkana)
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People

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Review: Escaping the Matrix–How We the People can change the world

6 Star Top 10%, Change & Innovation, Democracy
Escaping Matrix
Amazon Page

Perhaps the Most Revolutionary and Liberating Book Going Into 2008,

May 12, 2007

Richard Moore

This book has jumped to the top of the transpartisan list. Together with All Rise and several of the other books on that list, it is an actionable practical formula for restoring the Republic and then spreading participatory democracy and moral capitalism–communal localized capitalism–to the rest of the world in a non-violent information-driven manner.

The “matrix” is the virtual unreality that governments and their corporately-owned media have manufactured to distract, imprison, enslave, and manipulate the majority of the public into dropping out of politics and failing to exercise their right to think, debate, vote, and oversee their representatives. I completely agree with Ron Paul when he says we need to dismantle this insolvent corrupt mess of a government, and reconfigure ourselves back to a Republic of, by, and for We the People.

Key themes in this world interconnectedness instead of separation; community sovereignty instead of federal sovereignty, distributed economics (no absentee landlords) instead of concentrated wealth, transformation and harmonization instead of adversarial, common sense judgments instead of special interest judgments, and finally, the reconstruction of social will to completely overpower, in a non-violent manner, the class war and globalized predatory looting of the commons that the central bankers have wrought on the planet.

This non-violent social transformation, according to the author, includes local empowerment, human liberation, participatory democracy, sensible economics, and cooperation on a global scale for mutual benefit of all.

The elite is fighting back, repressing dissent, even fully-funded logical dissent. ABC is deleting Ron Paul, who is winning his debates, and this is all I need to believe that we are winning. The revolution will not be televised, as Joe Trippi's book explains to well.

This is a transpartisan author who is quite correct when he says that history shows that we have a false manufactured reality being screened everyday, which is completely different from the real world. He also understands (see my list on Natural Capitalism) that predatory imperialism has deliberately kept the Third World poor and genocidal, with the explicit intent of looting their natural resources and getting as many of them as possible to die off–eugenics.

This author provides one of the finest summaries of how predatory capitalism has disenfranchised population, suborned governments, and “exploded the client” as Michael Lewis tells us in more detail in “Liar's Poker” and more recently, John Perkins' “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.”

He reviews the transition for competitive imperialism to collective imperialism, and has some very elegant detail on how the central banks have managed a succession of global “bait and switch,” successively destroying, at great profit, the gold standard, the petrodollar standard, and now the United States of America. The banks, he tells us, are “the house” and profit regardless of the misfortunes of others, indeed, because of the manufactured misfortunes, wars, stolen aid, botched humanitarian assistance, and so on.

He has two revelations in this book that for me, at least, are explosive. First, that FDR approved eight covert actions against the Japanese with the intent of forcing them to commit the first overt act of war against the US. Second, that Viet-Nam was a known “no-win” war with a known ten-year trajectory and a known 50,000 projected dead. It was used to militarize the US on a grander scale, while enriching a handful of banks and corporations, all as the expense of the individual tax-payer.

He offers fascinating perspectives of how WWI and WWII were deliberately started (I have read other books in this vein, I believe the author's analysis to be on target), and he accuses Henry Kissinger, a known war criminal, of being the cause of the Middle East problems in his constant mis-representation and manipulation of the views of different parties for whom he was supposed to be an honest broker.

Banking, Oil, Covert Action, and Overt Intervention are the four pillars of what Derek Leebaert called “The Fifty Year Wound” and Chalmers Johnson, “Sorrows of Empire.”

He tells us that in the 1970's the US elites concluded that managing consensus democracy was annoyingly complex, so they began moving toward police state capabilities with the use of big lies, among which I include 9-11, never investigated honorably. I believe that Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani and Larry Silverstein should be indicted, arrested, investigated, and interrogated with the same techniques they approved for use on others. Drugs and especially marijuana have been used to create a prison complex while the US Government has deliberately, as a covert action, imported drugs into the US for profit, using the drug czar to control the criminal competition. I am told that Ollie North personally supervised the loading of cocaine on to U.S. Navy vessels in Colombia, and this one of many leads I would like to see brought before a Grand Jury.

He tells us that the core elements of the elite plan are five: US-UK control of oil; neoliberal economics; WTO/IMF as economic assassins; police state powers; and the Pentagon as a big stick; on which see General Smedley Butler, “War is a Racket.”

Key point by the author: culture (and social will) are the missing ingredient for activating the bottom-up Epoch B collective leadership and will of We the People.

He says that reform must be all or nothing. I agree. He says that representative democracy is an adversarial system that must be replaced by a fully participatory bottom-up collaborative system. Adversaries take their differences as a given, collaborators take them as a starting point for dialog.

He is at one with the author of “All Rise” and with Reuniting America's transpartisanship vision of dignity for all, and inclusion of all. An opinion can be debated but a person is always valid and not to be denied or excluded.

We can do this. He concludes with the best annotated bibliography I have seen, as relevant to our challenge in 2008.

All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (Bk Currents)
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It

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Review: Society’s Breakthrough!–Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People

6 Star Top 10%, Change & Innovation, Consciousness & Social IQ, Democracy, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum)

Society BreakthroughRenaissance of We the People, Unifying the Young and Old,

April 27, 2007

Jim Rough

This is one of the most brilliant and compellingly comprehensive books I have read in recent time, and certainly one of less than 100, probably less than 25, and perhaps even one of the ten most important books available in English.

Everyone, including corporations, is starting to realize that Green is Good (see my list on Natural Capitalism), and that the Earth is at a tipping point. The ten high-level threats are Poverty, Infectious Disease, Environmental Degradation, Inter-State Conflict, Civil War, Genocide, Other Atrocities (e.g. kidnapping for body parts or child soldiers), Proliferation, Terrorism, and Transnational Crime.

What this author has done is pioneered the concept of Wisdom Councils at every level of society, a leap ahead of citizen involvement initiatives like Citizen's Councils formed in Denmark to study issues of national importance for legislative action. This book suggests a strategy for bringing “all” together as “We the People” where We assume our rightful role as intelligent top authority.

The author is acutely aware that we are fragmented, ignorant, inattentive, and ineffective as a collective at any level. He suggests that we got that way because we adopted a mechanistic system to govern us, where self-interest is the prevailing value, rather than dignity, sharing, open-mindedness, and so on.

He articulates a vision of a We-ocracy, a circle instead of a box, with a spirit similar to our Native American councils, where people seek what's best for all. And, he suggests a surprisingly simple social invention, not fully tested, that can make the vision real.

It was my great good fortune to meet the author personally at the Nexus for Change conference organized by Peggy Holman and others, and I found him to be one of the most sensible, down-to-earth, and focused individuals I have ever met. He told me there that collective problems require collective solutions, and I agree with him completely. It's about all of us, as well as each of us. Along with this book I recommend Tom Atlee's “Tao of Democracy” and the other books linked to below.

The author's conception of the Wisdom Council, which is now enjoying significant success and public appreciation in the Eco-topia of the Pacific Northwest, is one of a continuous Constitutional Convention with all of us as permanent delegates. It is a way “We the People” can come into existence and collectively choose topics, explore them and evolve consensus … possibly some sensible sustainable decision or policy that goes out 200 years (what the Native Americans called 7th Generation thinking).

It's a simple approach that bridges all eight of what I call the tribes of intelligence–government, military, law enforcement, business, academia, non-governmental organizations, media networks, and most importantly, all citizens in all civil societies including social advocacy groups, labor unions, and religions.

The book describes an innocuous-seeming Constitutional Amendment to the United States Constitution. But the author inscribes the book to me, ending with “we don't need an amendment, we are out doing it.” Now, there are experiments in cities and organizations in different countries, begun by ordinary citizens, proving that this strategy can work. (see www.WiseDemocracy.org) This is good news for those of us who care about society as a whole.

I recommend this book, and the three books below, to every citizen and especially to the 48% that do not vote. We get morons and thieves in power because we all do not vote and hence these charlatans are elected by a minority of dogmatic fanatics aided by less than honorable tactics such as Karl Rove has pioneered (see “Bush's Brain”).

But beyond the bits of power our system currently provides to “the people,” all-of-us-together can assert power over the system. This book, the books below, and the many books I connect in my varied lists, show us how. They are ammunition in our combat with the Republican and Democratic Party mafiosos. Unity08 is in my view a scam–a last ditch defense of the totally corrupt two-party “winner take all” and share the spoils system. Only the Center for Wise Democracy, Reuniting America, the Transpartisan Policy Institute, and a couple of other massive social networks now in formation, can transform political hypocrisy, corruption, and illegitimacy. Our government today, all three branches, is illegitimate. We can fix that.

We are long overdue for a popular uprising. This author, like Gandhi (see the DVD), provides for an informed non-violent revolution that is both inevitable, and unbeatable. We the People … what a great concept. Time to honor it again, with the Wisdom Councils and the strategy of full engagement that the author outlines for us.

Bush's Brain
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
Seeing the Invisible: National Security Intelligence in an Uncertain Age
Bush's Brain
Gandhi (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)
Don't Bother Me Mom–I'm Learning!

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Review: A Crowd of One–The Future of Individual Identity

6 Star Top 10%, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Democracy, Future, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum)

Crowd of OneMajor leap forward in understanding humanity and its future,

April 21, 2007

John Clippinger

As a long-time admirer of Kuhn's concepts on paradigms and how they shift (“The Structure of Scientific Revolution” I really appreciate any thought leader that puts us on the cusp of such a shift. John Henry Clippinger is there.

I will begin with his conclusion: we are in the process of a “Big Bang” in human identity that shifts us away from organizations and nationalities and races and religions, and toward the realization that we are all “one” in terms of fractional variations of the same DNA, and hence, the world is going to start to revolve around the human end-users, not the organizations that turned them into slaves, amoral components of the industrial system, or mindless fundamentalists party to intolerant religions. For a sense of how the industrial era introduced evil by killing the role of kinship in trust, see Lionel Tiger's “The Manufacture of Evil.”

In my view, this is one of three really great books on the coming revolution in human organization. The other two are Max Manwaring's “The Search for Security” and Philip Alott's “The Health of Nations.” As Alott says, we took a wrong turn at the Treaty of Westphalia, and the world is long over-due for a return to localized kinship and global responsibility.

Those who favor the transpartisan transformational model of earnest and honest elections and engaged citizenry must read this book. The author opens with a long discussion of why it is relationships that matter, not transactions. Indeed, I am reminded of Margaret Wheatley and Esther Dyson–make the connections, don't worry about critical mass.

I learn the term “social physics” for the first time, and read again about reciprocity (Tom Atlee taught me about reciprocal altruism). The author disputes the idea that violence is a given, and joins Jonathan Schell (“The Unconquerable World”) is stating that force is no longer a means by which to gain one's will.

The middle of the book discusses both the threat of technical progress when combined with more failed states, and the promise of digital modeling for accelerating our understanding and testing new paths forward. The author points out that we have no more than 20 years, having wasted the last six, with 2000-2025 being the tipping point period during which we can either go toward stable convergence or hyper-instability and cascading catastrophe.

Brilliant quotes on how the military must shift to soft preventive and remedial measures (General Al Gray, USMC and I called this “peaceful preventive measures in 1988), and how “Brute force is about to be rendered obsolete” at the state level (while flourishing at the gang level).

The author relates his thinking to terrorism in a very useful way, conceptualizing terrorism as a form of non-state parasite eating away at its host, and able to be more entrepreneurial than its bureaucratic adversaries, constantly changing the rules of engagement and winning the key terrain of the minds of the population, using perception in lieu of truth.

The heart of the book is on page 39: “But rather than being treated as peripheral to a primary military mission, well-articulated warfare doctrine and practices for the information, cognitive, and social domains could significantly reduce the need for more traditional methods of influence and control.” Robert Garigue, RIP addresses this in his technical preface to my third book, “Information Operations,” and I am writing my fifth book on how digital natives, serious games, and the way of the wiki are making our military obsolete and unaffordable.

The author attributes the US failure in Somalia (and one would add, Afghanistan and Iraq) to a complete lack of local knowledge and particularly knowledge about language, kinship, and the role of religion.

Key quote on page 44: “It would appear that the Americans and the Israelis are virtually alone in the world in not realizing that the rules and weapons of war have changed.”

The book draws to a conclusion with lengthy discussions of how the complexity of social networks both define the size of one's brain, and the potential success and prosperity of the collective. Language is described as “social grooming” (hence one must be concerned when fundamentalists and extremists hijack the language). The author cites Shakespeare in suggesting that the inability to comprehend complex social networks is at the root of many misunderstandings and attendant tragedies. My first book, “On Intelligence” points out how the US Intelligence Community, a $60 billion a year endeavor, is utterly incompetent at understanding ideas, minds, individual, groups, clans, gangs, and tribes. They are optimized for counting THINGS.

Notable observation that tracks with Michael O'Hanlon's research: when women are in charge, collaboration flourishes.

Long discussion of trust and reputation, listing and discussion of seven types of leadership: authoritarian, exemplary, visionary, gatekeeper, truth teller, fixer, connector, and energizer.

Fairness is the balance point of society.

Cites Michael Vlahos, one of my personal intellectual heroes, on how the radical Islamic movement is a study in the failure of group identity and the failure of the group's “story” to adapt and prosper.

Lists and discusses Cameron's seven laws for digital trusted identity (OSS automatically destroys all digitally signed messages that demand registration before one can respond–that stupid technology is NOT part of the answer).

Engagement, not isolation. The books ends quite properly with praise for STRONG ANGEL, pioneered by Eric Rasmussen and Dave Warner, and suggests that the end game is going to be when we can engage everyone, in their own language, in their own identity terms, in the greatest story YET to be told, that of creating heaven on earth.

I totally respect this book. It is a KEY building block for moving forward with an Open Source Agency and a global free online public education as public diplomacy endeavor. It validates my view that we need a reality based Earth Game with embedded reality-based budgets, immediately. See Medard Gabel, whom I hope will develop such a game.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Global Inc.: An Atlas of the Multinational Corporation
Energy, Earth, and Everyone
Where to find 4 billion new customers: expanding the world's marketplace; Smart companies looking for new growth opportunities should consider broadening … consultant.: An article from: The Futurist

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Review: All Rise–Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Consciousness & Social IQ, Democracy, Education (General)

All RiseManfiesto for Transpartisan Democracy and Moral Capitalism,

April 20, 2007

Robert W Fuller

Over the many years, roughly 3,000 books of which 850+ have been reviewed here at Amazon, with a few exceptions all of the authors at the top of their game, I have never encountered a book quite so straight-forward or quite so vital to our future. At 54, I simply did not understand the fundamentals of “all men are created equal” until this author pointed me to the one word I was missing: “dignity.”

This book is nothing less than revolutionary, nothing less than the manifesto for the new politics of transpartisanship and being developed by Don Beck and Jim Turner and Reuniting America (80 million strong and growing).

At the very highest level, the author suggests that “rankism” or the abuse of rank, not to be confused with the proper use of rank and authority for the good of the group, is an umbrella term that encompasses racism, sexism, fascism, and even (I add) fundamentalism that excludes “the others” and offers an almost cult-like sense of belonging to the “initiated.” We are all in this together, and with one word, DIGNITY, the author has completely shredded all excuses for abusing others, and opened the door for a new politics of one for all and all for one. The Republican and Democratic parties are, in my personal view, toast. Not their individual candidates, mind you, but the two parties, both of which violated their Article 1 responsibilities for keeping the White House in check, both of which have treated “the other” party as the enemy, with arrests, venomous attacks, slander, and other monstrous behavior.

Norman Cousins and his book, “The Pathology of Power” is still the best all-around dissection of the corrupt nature of unchecked power, but this book is in my view the single best lifeline for those who would seek to embrace bottom-up power, the power of the We, the Us, the collective intelligence of everyone from janitor to Epoch B swarm leader.

As an intelligence professional, and as an estranged moderate Republican who did what he could to oppose the war on Iraq based on lies from Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, I found the author to be utterly compelling and relevant when he reviewed how rankism silences or ignores dissent, and consequently leads to disaster. His examples are brilliant, from the shuttle disasters to nuclear power plant short-cuts that have almost led to Chernobyl-level melt-downs in the USA.

Bottom line: the dignitarian approach dramatically increases the chances that we will get a particular policy or budget or process RIGHT.

The author teaches us that insulting behavior from above is a precursor to exclusion, abuse, and I would add, genocide–see the work of Dr. Greg Stanton on the web. Isolating any one group is the first step in making them “sub-human” and thus acceptable as targets for mass murder.

I worked hard in the 1980's to shift the US Government away from its focus on military hardware geared to the Soviets and Chinese, and toward what General Al Gray, then Commandant of the Marine Corps, called “peaceful preventive measures.” I am warmed and impressed as this author makes the point that “dignity for all” is the ONLY “pre-emptive” strategy that will work both at home and abroad. See my reviews of “Class War,” “Working Poor,” “Rogue Nation,” “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” and “The Soul of Capitalism” for a broader understanding of how all that our American leaders are disgracing America and making us less safe.

The author tells us that DIGNITY respects every contribution at every level. From this I take dignity to be the foundation for TRANSPARTISANSHIP, which embraces all individuals while recognizing that “Unity08” like the takeaway of the debates from the League of Women Voters, is a thinly guised effort to keep the two-party spoils and pork system alive.

The author teaches us that dogma is neither dignified nor sacrosanct. It is the opposite of dignity.

The author devotes an entire chapter to the importance of creating new models of understanding, something that humans are uniquely qualified to both do, and communicate and discuss.

He teaches us that humility is essential to an open mind, and essential to successful leadership. I fear that I have been lacking in this area my entire life, but now I embrace this term and am moving forward.

The author equalizes the role of the experts (who we learn are wrong 45% of the time in “The Wisdom of the Crowd” and the end-users, the citizens.

The author brings together and simplifies an entire literature in four ideas: shared governance; 360 degree reviews and evaluations, collaborative problem solving, and–this is huge–CONSTITUTIONAL reviews every five to ten years. Henry Kissinger in “Does American Need a Foreign Policy” and General Tony Zinni in his most recent book both tell us that our current government is DYSFUNCTIONAL. In my view, the most dysfunctional aspect is the “winner take all” approach to both the Cabinet and to Congressional leadership positions. We need a COALITION government that restores both the balance of power and the balance of ideas.

The author tells us that when authority loses credibility, the ship of state is on the rocks. See Max Manwaring's “The Search for Security” and Will and Ariel Durant's “The Lessons of History” to understand why legitimacy and morality, respectively, are the non-negotiable foundation for our future.

The author provides 10 ways to combat rankism, and provides a 17 item conclusion as a guide for leaders. Finally, the author joins with the relatively recent declaration of the United Nations, to wit, that sovereign nations should NOT be allowed to violate human rights, a universal right. On this see Philip Alcott's extraordinary book, “The Health of Nations.”

The author errs in identifying only 1 billion in poverty. Not only is the number five billion. See C.K. Prahalad in “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.”

This author and this book save our Republic and the world with one word: DIGNITY.

The Pathology of Power
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
The Lessons of History
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits

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Review: The Great Turning–From Empire to Earth Community

6 Star Top 10%, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Information Society, Justice (Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Survival & Sustainment, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Great TurningPeople are the new super power–local resilience, global community,

January 28, 2007

David C Korten

I have mixed feelings about this book. It is unquestionably a five-star work of reflection, integration, and focused moral intent. On the other hand, while it introduced a broad “earth-friendly” literature that I was *not* familiar with, it does not “see” a much broader literature that I have absorbed, and so I want to do two things with this review: feature the highlights from this book, and list a number of other works that support and expand on the author's reflections for the greater good of us all.

Early highlights include the continued relevance of Dennis Kucinich and the emerging value of the Case Foundation and Revolution Health as funded by Steve Case, founder of AOL. The author posits early on the choice we have been a great unraveling and a great turning. He describes all our institutions as failing at the same time that we have unlimited potential. He concludes, as have many others, that centralized authority is not working, and suggests that we must confront that which does not work and devise new constructive alternatives (“for every no there must be a yes”).

In the middle of the book he describes the five levels of consciousness as magical, imperial, socialized, cultural, and spirirtual. I would have put socialized ahead of imperial, since the industrial era used schools to socialize us into both factory workers and conscripts for the armed forces. He concludes this section with a commentary on moral autism, which of course reminds us of nakedly amoral Dick Cheney.

The author moves toward a conclusion by pointing out that people are the new super-power, with the Internet and its many new features as the foundation for bringing people together and making people power effective.

A large portion of the middle section is a historical review of America, with its genocidal, slavery, and unilateral militant interventionist nature, and its extreme inequality now, which the literature on revolution clearly identifies (the latter, concentration of wealth) as a precurser to almost inevitable violent revolution).

The book ends with four strategic elements:

1) Awakening of cultural and spiritual consciousness
2) Resistance of the imperial empire's assault on children, families, communities, and nature
3) Form and connect communities of convergence
4) Build a majoritarian political base.

In parting notes he points out that the status of our children is the key indicator of our future, and that today one out of every two children is born into and lives into poverty (one reason why the High Level Threat Panel put poverty above infectuous disease and environmental degradation).

He ends by calling for local living economies at a human scale.

If you have the time to only read one book within the broad literatures of imagination, corporateism, and constructive prospects for the planet, this is probably that book. Below I want to a list quite a few that support this author's thesis, and for which I have provided a summative as well as an evaluative review within these Amazon pages:

The Corporation
WALMART-HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE (DVD/FF/FR-SP-SUB)
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

See also:
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
“The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past”
Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today's Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems
Deep Economy

There are many more should you wish to explore via my categorized lists, but the above both lend great credence to the author of this single book, and expand considerably on the reflections that he has distilled into this one book.

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