Consciousness & Social IQ – Page 40 – Public Intelligence Blog

Ideal Starting Point–Bigger than Neuropsycholoy,

February 25, 2007

Jim Robbins

EDIT of 6 Julk 09 to point to related new book, Musicology: The Key Concepts (Routledge Key Guides)

I got this book from another person who felt that biofeedback has matured to the point that it is vastly superior to medication for children with attention-deficit disorders, or adults with anger or impatience issues.

Although it was published in 2001, I agree with the reviewers that say this is an ideal starter book. I am so impressed by the very balanced, methodical presentation that this author provides, that I am scheduling a
biofeedback evaluation session to see for myself.

Other reviewers have done a superb job on the meat of this book, so my usual summative review is not necessary. Instead, I want to emphasize the relevance of this book to the future of the planet. As with another book I reviewed over a year ago, on the emergent integration of psychology and neuroscience, I have become convinced that macro-neuroscience (belief systems of entire cultures or grops) and micro-neuroscience (individual issues now responsive to learned biofeedback) are going to become the PRIMARY science ofthe future. We have to cut health care costs in the USA by 75% over the next ten years–there are only three ways to do that: preventive medicine, alternative medicine, and an end to price gouging by big pharma.

The US Government is wasting trillions of dollars on a heavy-metal military that is not only not going to win in Iraq, but is making the problem worse by being an occupying power and by inspiring jihadists worldwide. At the same time, the US Government is talking the talk about Public Diplomacy, Strategic Communication, and Information Operations–a more substantive variation of Psychological Operations (PSYOP), but they are NOT walking the walk. Funding for the understanding and remediation of evil belief systems is non-existent, and funding for ensuring that our own children receive the best and most innovation education is also not there. We should be melding psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, political and economic science, and so on, and we should be thinking, as Howard Bloom does in “Global Brain” how to bring to bear the full resources of our Nation on creating an educated stable population capable of creating infinite wealth.

This book is therefore, in my opinion, the very tip of the iceberg on what could become the “American Way of Peace” in the 21st Century. First we have to take our government and our military away from the neo-cons, and restore our reputation as America the good. Getting biofeedback introduced very early into all our schools would be an excellent place to start.

This book made a believer out of me, and I am relatively certain that once I experience biofeedback for myself under supervision, I am going to want to adopt it as a personal tool.

Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
World Brain (Essay Index Reprint Series)

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2007/02/172009/12/04

Review: The Seventeen Traditions

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Civil Society, Communications, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Diplomacy, Education (General), Leadership, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

A Gift to Newlyweds of Decency and Traditional Values,

February 17, 2007

Ralph Nader

This is an absolute gem of a book, and the PERFECT GIFT for newlyweds.

I read it in an afternoon, and I confess to it's being a long afternoon of nagging dismay, as I reflected on how many of these lessons we have not taught our three cyber-era teenagers.

The seventeen lessons cover listening, family table, health, history, scarcity, equality, education, discipline, simple enjoyments, reciprocity, independent thinking, charity, work, business, patriotism, solitude, and civics.

While very heavily leavened with autobiographical reflections, this absolutely beautiful, moral, intelligent, well-written book is a gift to us all. For many of us it is too late–if I were starting over my kids would be banned from computers much of the time, and I would have refused the grandparents gifts of a personal TV to each child.

Bottom line: this is a keep-sake book with an enormous amount of common sense and tranditional values with none of the pontifical sanctimony usually found in such books. This is a first rate piece of work and reflection, ably presented in elegant language, and the absolutely perfect gift for all newlyweds you know. Buy ten copies. This kind of decency does not come available very often.

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2007/01/302009/12/04

Review: Why Societies Need Dissent (Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures)

5 Star, Censorship & Denial of Access, Consciousness & Social IQ, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Education (General), Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Philosophy, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Essential Contribution to Democratic Dialog,

January 30, 2007

Cass R. Sunstein

It took me a couple of years to get to this book, but I am glad I did. Interestingly, it is dedicated to Judge Richard Posner, who has become quite a celebrity in writing and talking, from a legal point of view, about secret intelligence, in addition to his many other works.

The author's position is not completely new (see for instance Elizabeth Janeway's 1987 classic, “IMPROPER BEHAVIOR: When and How Misconduct Can be Healthy for Society”, and the more standard but still seminal “The Social Construction of Reality.”

The author rises beyond the law to embrace sociology, psychology, and philosophy, and in that vein, reminds me of Norman Dixon's classic work, “The Psychology of Military Incompetence.”

The core of the book addresses what the author names the two influences (most people get most of their information second-hand; and the general desire for good opinion of oneself) and the three phenomena (conformity, social cascades, and group polarization).

He notes that pluralistic ignorance is dangerous; that groups and systems work better when there are incentives for sharing information openly; and that “free speech” requires BOTH legal protection AND cultural acceptance.

He discusses the superiority of the more adaptive and open democratic decision making to that of totalitarian societies, but his description of their pathologies, ideas hatched in secret and for which no opposition will be accepted, sound starkly like Dick Cheney's Standard Operating Procedure–facsist control, lies to the public with impunity, and no tolerance for flag officers, including flag officers like Tony Zinni and General Shinseki, who have the courage to say that invading Iraq is not only nuts, it will be a disaster. For deep insights into Cheney's impeachable suprression of dissent, see “One Percent Doctrine,' “VICE: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency,” and “Crossing the Rubicon”–and of course the various books on impeachment (see my list).

The author concludes with a special focus on the role of Judges and Senators as dissenting voices, and I am reminded of Senator Robert Byrd's courageous and erudite opposition to the illegal war on Iraq, with his speeches available to all in book form as “Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency”).

The author concludes with a very disappointing section on education and affirmative action, and in this section, spoils an otherwise superb book by focusing on the banalities of affirmative action. Like George Bush and Hillary Clinton, he is toying with the cosmetics and avoiding the deep–the really deep–need for a complete recasting of education to fully integrate distance and self-paced online learning, multi-cultural learning, deep historical and cross-cultural understanding; a draconian Manhattan Project to improve desktop analytic tools and the need for an Information Economy Meta Language (IEML) such as Pierre Levy is creating (see his “Collective Intelligence”), as well as life-long learning, the localization of everything, and so on. I beg to emphasize this: it is the agricultural era school schedule (summer off) and the industrial era rote learning rigid structured program, that is killing the creativity of our kids while locking them up in a program that is nothing more than advanced child care with a semblance of prison population, the “club med” aspects for cheerleaders and jocks not-with-standing. Our HIGHEST national priority should be to churn education so that our kids are liberally and broadly educated and armed with all of the tools for thinking that the Central Intelligence Agency still does not have today because it too is a vestige of the Soviet era of gray desks and dumb telephones.

Thomas Jefferson had it right: “A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.” Cass Sunstein is arguably, with Lawrence Lessig, one of the greatest lawyers of our generation, but in the final section, he plops quietly.

Never-the-less, a five star book.

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2007/01/282009/12/04

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

People 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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2007/01/282009/12/04

Review: One from Many–VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Consciousness & Social IQ, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Public)

Innovative Capitalism,

January 28, 2007

Dee Hock

Edit of 30 Dec 07 to add comment and links.

New comment: something big is happening, in both politics and business. Moral green open transparent memes are in overdrive. See links.

I read a lot, a solace and a life line out of the madness of today. I finished up my week-end with this most unusual gem, and it is with some emotion that I put it down and take the time to write this review.

In my lifetime, there have been fewer than four individuals able to understand me and manage me, and Dee Hock now joins that number, sight unseen. This is one of the *good guys*! If he and Bill Bradley and Jim Turner (Transpartisanship) can come together, we can remake the world.

The book benefits from a Foreword by Peter Senge, who notes that VISA as it emerged was a disruptive concept that threatened traditional powers. Senge also notes the importance of distinguishing between enabling technologies, such as the Internet, and what is enabled, such as democracy or equitable wealth creation and sharing. Finally, Senge observes that global complexity requires distributed democracy, to which I and the author would both be quick to add: “and moral capitalism.”

The book is at root about the failure of all of our instititutions, and the need to find a third way between over-bearing centralization and anarchic decentralization. The author coins the word “chaordic” to deswcribe an even-handed and often-changing balance between the two.

Dee Hock is a philosopher-king, and I am reminded of “Voltaire's Bastards” and “Consilience” as I read his denouncement of the Western concept of separability and his own understanding that complexity is about never-ending and alway-changing relationships. In one example with the US Army, he explores how rules-based organizations waste 45-85% of the time and value of their employees. He specifically notes that human ingenuity is the ultimate resource and is abundant, but too often constrained if not crushed by schools, armies, corporations, and so on.

The author's morality shines forth as he describes non-monetary exchanges of value as the best possible foundation for what others call reciprocal altruism. At one point he observes that “leadership is not necessarily constructive, ethical, or open.”

The entire book is about the creation of an organization in which participation is the primal element, agreement is dynamic, and trust and tolerance are the prevailing values. He states that organizational heaven is purpose, principle, and people. Purgotory is paper and procedure. Hell is rule & regulation.

He realizes early on that fraud and theft are major challenges, and that information is, as he quotes Gregory Bateson, “a difference that makes a difference.”

I have a big note: this is a smart, ethical, practical, inspiring person–one of the good guys!

The author is deeply and empathetically aware of the discord between our industrial era understandings and perceptions, and the bio-cultural realities of the Earth and all its processes. He sees clearly what the “true cost” or natural capitalism literature seeks to teach.

A line jumps out, in which the author is lamenting that we have such a wealth of information, yet have drifted into “collective madness.”

He clearly sees that our current form of predatory immoral “bandit” capitalism specializes at the socialization of cost and the capitalization of gain, which is fancy wording for looting the commons and stealing the profit. He also points out that we are putting the debt on to future generations.

He clearly describes the current form of corporations as inimical to the commons.

The book concludes strongly, lionizing the will to succeed when joined with the grace to compromise, placing VISA on a par with the Internet and LINUX as an organizational model for the future, and noting that growth comes from failure.

On page 284 he lists the following ten attributes from a living organization in Spain that represents the best of the chaordic model:

01 Open membership
02 Democratic organization
03 Worker sovereignty
04 Instrumental subordinate nature of capital
05 Participation in management
06 Wage solidarity
07 Cooperating between cooperatives
08 Social transformation
09 Universal nature
10 Education (he might have added, life-long, unconstrained, free of the prison-rote we now suffer, and teaching sharing as well as learning)

He ends with the story of his recall from his wanderings in the wilderness, to explore examples, models, the intellectual foundation, and organizations by which we might save the Planet and our species, to include the necessary means of mind-crafting for the future.

I actually had goose-bumps as I put this book down. I felt, very strongly, that I had been within the aura of a great leader, a gentle person, a world-class humanitarian, a capitalist Dalai Lama if you will (don't laugh–this author strikes me as quite amazingly special).

I cannot say enough about this book. It joins the very short list of books I have posted on moral leadership through open source intelligence, and it places Dee Hock up there with Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Wheatley, Robert Buckman, and a tiny handful of Senge's and Druckers.

I hope I meet him one day. Right now, he joins Bill Bradley as one of just two people I'd be willing to leave my mink-lined bunker to follow into battle. This book and this author's mind and clarity of communication have simply blown me away.

See the two images I have loaded here to illustrate concepts that I share with this author. You can see other images at Earth Intelligence Network, where you can also use the Amazon Base Page to get access to my 30 lists of books for each of the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers. I am also creating Amazon discussion pages for each of these.

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2007/01/232009/12/04

Review: The Starfish and the Spider–The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Consciousness & Social IQ, Democracy, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

Amazon Page

Compelling and Sensible, Offers Hope in Face of High-Level Threats,

January 23, 2007

Ori Brafman

I like this book very much and recommend that it be read in conjunction with “Wikinomics” and “Infotopia,” or at least read my reviews there. Each of these three books has its own perspective and the combine well. There are other books, such as Kevin Kelly's and Howard Rheingold's that were ten to fifteen years ahead of what is now “conventional wisdom” and it is important to give credit to the true pioneers.

From a business and governance perspective, the book is valuable in emphasizing that any endeavor based on information will improve with decentralization–more dots will be captured, shared, understood, and acted on in a timely fashion. I have been saying for over a decade that in the age of distributed information, central intelligence is an oxymoron, something the Central Intelligence Agency, my former employer, simply refuses to believe.

I listened to Al Gore last night on Global Warming, in Boise, Idaho–10,000 people who gave him multiple standing ovations, and I plan to listen to George Bush on Iraq tonight. Al gets it, George does not. Centralized systems cannot defeat decentralized systems. Al Gore is leading a massive global campaign to get all of us to change the planet from the bottom up, while George (or Dick Cheney, depending on who you think actually runs the place) is deepening America's loss of global standing and moral stature at the same time that he is bankrupting the treasury and destroying the Armed Forces–and planning a conventional attack on Iran at the same time. One of these guys is sane, the other is a nutcase. The good news is that decentralized morality can triumph over centralized corruption, and that is the back story on Al Gore's emergence as a virtual Earth Leader.

The authors offer us a number of gems and conclude with ten rules I will list below.

The key point is that a distributed brain or organization is more resilient and more likely to pick up weak signals. Distributed consensus is both scalable and sustainable, while centralized coercion is neither.

The authors place great emphasis on the importance of a spiritually-compelling ide[a]ology as the glue that helps decentralized organizations adjust to external and internal challenges much faster and with greater precision (as well as fewer resources) that any centralized system can manage. The “catalyst” model (Al Gore) is compared with the “commander in chief” model (George Bush) and there is no doubt at all which is the superior model for addressing today's complex high-level threats.

Indeed, it may be that between state secessions and popular boycotts of corporations using the federal government to pick people's pockets, that the Internet could create a form of global self-governance that makes the Federal government largely irrelevant, while re-directing funds from waging war to waging peace. That is the next big step. The authors specifically say that the price of software is declining toward zero. It will be content, sense-making, and what IBM calls “services science” that will add value and be marketable.

The authors describe Amazon and E-Bay in very favorable terms, and as hybrids with a centralized infrastructure for delivering services, but a vast decentralized network of customers who are also “prosumers” (Alvin Toffler's term) creating value on the network with their reviews and buying patterns. The authors' phrase “decentralized creativity and centralized consistency” jumped out at me.

The ten “rules” (better described as guidelines) are:

01 Diseconomies of scale
02 Network effect
03 Power of chaos
04 Knowledge at the edge
05 Everyone wants to contribute
06 Beware the hydra response
07 Catalysts rule
08 *Values* are the heart of any organization or network
09 Measure, monitor, and manage
10 Flatten or be flattened

Overall, this is a very fine book. I also recommend the emerging literature on the “true cost” meme and on natural capitalism, demonstrating that a proper understanding of the true and long-term costs of any product or service actually makes businesses more profitable and more sustainable.

I have added an image I created in the 1990's when I first started advocating Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), today I am focused on a non-profit, the Earth Intelligence Network, whose objective is to empower individuals and communities with public intelligence in the public interest. This book gave me hope, gave me a sense that we can indeed come together as a global network, and displace the authoritarian and corrupt governments that have been bribed by corporations to loot our commonwealth.

2006/10/032010/01/13

Review: Human Scale

5 Star, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Intelligence (Public), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Secession & Nullification, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Should be Re-Issued, a Seminal Publication Relevant to Governance

October 3, 2006

Kirkpatrick Sale

I am finding that books written in the 1970's and 1980's a making a comeback and people realize that certain of those authors were a quarter century ahead of their times. Richard Falk is one, Kirkpatrick Sale is the other. This book could usefully be read with Leopold Kohr's “The Breakdown of Nations,” Joel Garreau's “Nine Nations of North America,” and Philip Alcott's “The Health of Nations,” on why sovereignty and the Treaty of Westphalia should be overturned in favor of more localized governance with more universal rights and protections.

The bottom line in this book is crytal clear half-way through the book: at a specific point of scale, variable depending on natural resources, technical and cultural sophistication, etc, an individual's share of earned income goes MORE toward “power” goods and services of common concrn than to their own benefit. It is at this point that “the state” has outgrown its utility and becomes a burden on the individual taxpayer.

It merits comment in this context that there are 27 seccessionist movements in the United States of America, and at least 3 in Canada. As we look at the idiocy of the elective war on Iraq, and the very real prospect that the German Pope has cut a neo-fascist deal with the Karl Roves and Otto Reichs of this world–all descendants of Nazi war criminals admitted to the US under espionage cover, we have to contemplate the possibility that our big states are *out of control* and need to be chopped back to more “human scale.” This is a Nobel Prize kind of book, quite extraordinary.

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Category: Consciousness & Social IQ

Review: A Symphony in the Brain–The Evolution of the New Brain Wave Biofeedback

Review: The Seventeen Traditions

Review: Why Societies Need Dissent (Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures)

Review: The Great Turning–From Empire to Earth Community

Review: One from Many–VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

Review: The Starfish and the Spider–The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

Review: Human Scale