1 The false duality of mind & nature is clear, in how events for each begin with bursts of self-organization and energy use, “eventfully”. ;-)
2 More revealing is how the eventfulness of mind and nature doesn’t occur in theories, relying on defined relationships not discovered ones.
3 Operating the earth as an equation, by our rules rather than natures, we go mad hoping our bursts of self-organization can be made infinite.
4 We misplace reality as what’s in our models, missing the eventful world still undefined they point to, not what we see but what we look at.
5 First language was created to express feeling, then split by using facts, needing models with controlled relationships, and unfeeling.
6 That’s why we are destroying the earth, and see but don’t feel it, relying on models that blind us to the meaning of what they help us do.
7 3Step Process of Learning to Work With Nature (not a theory, but a method of finding meaning in the facts of life). http://www.synapse9.com/signals/2013/07/03/a-3step-process-for-working-with-nature/ …
8 So, since models inherently can’t tell us the meaning of change, we now need our hearts to learn how environments work, to find what to do.
This Mar 2013 proposed “Ideal Model” for steering the economy toward making us a good home on earth led to a Feb 2014 proposal for implementing it, a World SDG . It’s a global application of the general principle, that we all are responsible for our shares of the abuses of the economy as a whole … in proportion to our owning, investing in and using it. What that provides is an Inclusive Accounting that is close to unarguably fair and even handed. It ALSO avoids the arbitrary faulting of businesses where impacts are observed even though always paid for by someone else, an actually dishonest way of accounting for responsibilities that also omits huge categories of impacts that are not traceable that way.
The World SDG uses a method of calculation for any person’s or business’s share of world GDP, for estimating their total share of responsibility for world economic impacts as “users” called “Scope-4 Accounting“. The legal view of responsibility is different from “cause and effect” in that, legally, both the people paying for, benefiting from or authorizing a tort harm may all be held as equally responsible as the person actually doing the harm, as familiar for hiring others to commit a crime.
This “Ideal Model” is a concept being considered by CAUN and the NGO Commons Cluster. It’s “a big idea”, with lots of emergent possibilities, basically asking how might the world work if economic decision makers (us) had much better information, now that scientific and technological advances make it potentially possible.
It’s intended as a contribution to the conversation on UN’s Sustainable Development Goals as seen on its SD Knowledge Platform site. It proposes a new kind of “Information Dashboard” for steering the earth (to make that concept much more of a reality), an idea I’ve been toying with since helping a couple years ago to design the 4YG Transformation Dashboard. …
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Principles, Funding and Methods,
for Empowering a Multi-Stakeholder Commons, to create and follow an SDG Dashboard for the Earth
The ideal
It would be ideal if the UN, mandated by the world governments, were to facilitate the creation of communication networks so everyone would get good information on their choices for making the earth sustainable.
Stakeholder communities would work together following global principles to create value by finding their own sustainability solutions. They’d be aided by “Information Dashboards” with coordinated scientific, economic, cultural and strategic screens, showing benefits and liabilities for all to see. It would bring funding to all levels of sustainability, as the best source of information on which governments, individuals and institutions could base their investment policies and decisions. Let’s do it!
Start with combining the scientific and economic information on real profits and liabilities, getting the financial community working for us and our future (!!) and so decision makers can see the real choices.
That approach would “put the ball in the right court” and let the UN do more of what it does best, as host and facilitator for the stakeholders of the world solving their own problems. Perhaps the world’s governments would give the UN that mandate, to facilitate stakeholder collaboration involving all of civil society. For the SDG’s it favors 1) goals that fit local talents and problems 2) solutions that can be implemented efficiently in the self-interest of the participants, 3) coordinated with the needs of of society, 4) avoiding intractable wrangling between people with different ideas, and 5) as only possible when keeping the focus on everyone’s common interests. Continue reading the “Ideal Model” – SD Goals & World Commons Economy→
It’s hard to make a mass movement out of working with others you didn’t invite to share your environment,
but it’s a mass happening on earth these days.
The famous “tragedy of the commons” is about partners in using a common environment who let their self-interests destroy it, for not knowing how to see or work toward their common interests. As people keep pressing the limits of the earth, nature is setting up the same challenge for us, asking us to work with accustomed partners, and learn how to work toward common interests, to not destroy the environments we share on earth.
These accustomed partners seem ‘odd’, both in seeming 1) to need the same ecological space we might feel is our own, and 2) each appearing to speak different languages. It turns out that needing to learn unfamiliar languages is the real reason “perfectly nice people” create tragedies in their commons. If you can’t learn enough to “get along”, it lets self-interests amplify till a commons is destroyed.
Everyone listens in a different language too
The following emails discuss some of the very interesting details of the human ecology that would enable “the commons approach” to work. Nature is already challenging us to learn how to get along with strange partners… like new kinds of global development demanding the same resources as others have used, and rapidly changing local communities in many cases too. So this discussion would also help you recognize where people are already learning to focus on common interests in getting along with different kinds of partners.
It came up in discussing how to communicate, in my response to Barry’s observations on a lack of response on a forum had asked about.
JLH 3/8/13
Barry,
Thanks, your response seems particularly helpful, and to add to a discussion on the same subject with Helene in the Commons Action group, extending the thinking we found talking with you and others in Systems Thinking World. The subject of learning styles has come up as we try to understand how to communicate the idea of what commons are and how to make them work.
One interest is in the five “modes of hearing” described in the work of social scientist Barrett Brown as well as similar concepts of others including Carl Jung. Brown has a table in that article describing five types of ecological self-awareness ethos, roughly: romantic, heroic, manager, strategist & idealist. It’s not clear, but I think Gordon Parks’ observations you bring up, that people are either receptive to ‘serialist’ and ‘holist’ learning, may apply to all of Brown’s categories to different degrees. What is clear is that we can identify personality types that greatly influence what sorts of messages are “music to your ears”. Continue reading Wholes and parts in unaccustomed partnership→
A group email on how to connect the mind’s concept language with nature’s process language, earning one “KaShu!” from Alanna.
To get things to connect it really does help to first see how they are disconnected. People put no particular value on where their money comes from or goes to, for example. As that is a major pathway for our own accumulative effects on our world, nature cares about that a great deal! People also quite ignore small % changes over time, even though they naturally result in exceeding large scales, complexities and rates of change, inevitably pushing the limits of stability for whatever physical system is doing it. People just tend to see no association between accumulative causes and their dramatic effects, though. I indicates “something funny going on”.
So to get a reliable grasp on how different a conceptual world is from the natural world, you need personal examples of where you notice “something really missing” to go back to it again and again to reground your own thinking on the disconnect between thought and nature. What I go to are times and places when I could observe growth producing lasting change, making it obvious it’s not in my head but happening where I’m seeing it happen. There are any number of different kinds of “pregnancies” where bursts of growth large and small develop in isolation. Continue reading Thinking a natural world Into Being→
Helene and Steven had raised the need to include finance in the narrative of “the commons” and Myra had said about my reply “Jessie, This is your clearest writing by far on the new financial commons. ” … so I hope it’s of use here. (The discussion was part of a follow-up to a CAUN Commons Action for the UN conference call with Barrett Brown, on the different kinds of “thought leaders” he had identified setting the course for the sustainabilty movement, using social science methods, reflected in his Fall 2012 article in Kosmos. fyi)
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Learning to speak nature's language
I. On Feb 4 2013 Jessie responded
Helene & Steven,
Great to have someone bring up the need to work on having a new financial commons. We need to map out how to transform finance, so that it acts to care for the earth as its main objective rather than to squeeze it dry as fast as it can, as at present. So we’d need to understand things that people already do that contributes to steering finance in one direction or the other, kind of unusual territory for social organizers…
So what we need to do is get our social language to somehow recognize nature’s process language.
Posts to the UN NGO Thematic Consultation on Educationon how to measure and improve education for the Post2015 UN development goals. My series of three comments focus on the tools a student needs to create their own educations… NOT on measuring the productive value of their educations for business. We did that already, and overdid it. It would do both students and society a great deal more good to look at the basic competencies offered, to see if students are getting the tools they need for exploring the world, like having competence in math, reading, and understanding ‘relationships’.
Productivity is often the assumed purpose of education, but has produced an unsustainable spoiling and depletion of the earth’s resources, now straining all its human and natural ecological systems. So it’s our students who need the tools for guiding their own educations, to take us out of that dilemma created by the poor learning of their parents.
Schools and teachers should mainly be judged by their own peer and served communities, only measuring achievement in core competencies, and create a new core competency in “relationships“. Understanding relationships is a new essential competency for living in a world thrown into disarray by rapidly changing relationships of all kinds, caused by our prior vast misunderstanding the relationships between ourselves and the earth.
1. Based on my understanding of quality of learning, the indicators used to measure learning outcomes should be:
… kept simple. We should only use unambiguous measures giving confidence in what is being measured, like “numeracy”, “literacy”, “understanding relationships”, “understanding design”, i.e. rudimentary life skills. Continue reading It’s the student that creates the education→
There are a great variety of reasons to organize people
Sometimes it’s to discover something or to accomplish somethingSometimes it’s to connect people who share their views Sometimes for people who share a common world from different views… (but have remarkably different talents and views)
If you know of good examples or methods not mentioned here,
please post comments
It’s Collaborative Work between groups of stakeholders that often “don’t speak the same language”. It takes art, patience and a sound method to get them to immerse themselves in the environment of the problem or opportunity that they need each other to respond to as partners.
A way to respond to experience we’re unable to articulate.
There are lots of cases when what attracts us to a theory is its sort of “spooky” truth. “Urban myths” often contain them, and science can often be the source of them, as well as cultural sayings and religion too, of course. The value is that they give you, a way to respond to experience we’re unable to articulate.
For applying them to real world problems, however, it’s rather important to “do the work” of finding real examples you can study and articulate. What’s NOT needed is “spooky action” for real problems… ;-) So here are a couple notes on how to find real examples to help you apply curiously attractive metaphors and “spooky theories” to decision making about the real problems, such as our groping with finding our place on earth. jlh
“spooky theory” then becomes a metaphor for something real you understand well enough to use as a guide.
Piercing the Veil: Markovich. Painting In Oil On Wood, 2006
1. for Greenleap 9/23/12 – “Spooky biomimicry” as “what to do”
Richard – Ultimately “what to do” is a communal process somehow, as we’re in communal trouble. Lots of people are seeking new directions of learning, but I can tell are often still using the blinders of the past to guide them… and not wanting to hear about it at all. All you can offer them a more authentic way to search for new learning, hoping they’ll see it as fun.
Natural systems are the complexly organized and behaving “creatures of nature” that by definition operate without our thinking about them, or knowing anything about them, or doing anything, and are largely invisible to us. That’s by definition “spooky nature”. It’s also the source of all our mysterious stories about unanswered questions, and all our mysterious experiences. What we can do with “spooky ideas” that situations suggest to us is then find an example that isn’t spooky, that we can then use as a real guide to how complex systems work and how to interact with them. – ed jlh
On now to recognize the somewhat universal responses to system and relationship overload, as strains resulting in loss of resilience and a risk of sudden disruption; replying to Helene on Systems Thinking World on her “UN Call for Revolutionary Thinking” thread.
The most general pattern is resilient relationships becoming rigid, like the surface of a balloon does *before* it can be easily pricked by a pin, or as people become rigid before losing patience. I think that comes directly from resilient systems generally being organized as networks of things that share their resources, and when all the parts run out of spare capacities to share at once the system can’t be flexible, and is then vulnerable to sudden failure.
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@Helene – Thanks for the reminder. Here are some principles for detecting and responding to the inflection point. Mathematically it’s “passing it’s point of diminishing returns”, when increasing benefit of expansion starts to decrease. Long successful habits of expanding a system become a liability, and strain their internal parts and environments.
It means about the same thing for a whole economy as for a little girl outgrowing her only party dress. Ignoring strain on one’s limits brings an unexpected end to the parties. The problem for systems operated by abstract rules of thinking, is that responding to change isn’t in the rules. So there’s a need to revive common metaphors for responding to the unknown, like for “overdoing it” or “crossing the line”, as strategic signs of externalities needing close examination.
Overload is a surprisingly common feeling, with visible effects
The most common signs of “overdoing it”, and needing new strategy, are formerly stable and flexible sub-systems
becoming “unresponsive”,
developing “the shakes” or “become rigid”
A crowd sourcing proposal. Suggested to WNYC as a new form of news coverage
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From a natural history view, how the US news media reports on what’s happening of public importance is, well, entertainment news, that misses most of what’s actually happening and how it’s connected. Even Public Radio mostly giving us six shows a day of talk about all the same things that “everyone” is talking about. It tracks how the discussion is changing, but misses almost entirely how the world itself keeps complexly and dramatically changing by itself.
