After much suffering, puzzlement and close observation, the harsh reaction to learning by a scientific approach now seems due to it not being sufficiently ideological. \u00a0 \u00a0Unfortunately\u2026 letting up on the ideologies we may use to stamp the world with is the very first rule for learning\u00a0from nature.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Finding that people both didn’t seem to know that, or to be willing to try, is an important lesson I wasn’t prepared to learn, especially that my own social network would respond as if attacked by my suggesting good creative ways to do it .<\/p>\n
Ideology is an artificial and inflexible but handy social substitute for reality.\u00a0 By definition ideologies are self-defined, built up as social affirmations in well connected networks.\u00a0 It makes them strong but also largely unable to adapt and respond. \u00a0 \u00a0 For people they provide mental comfort, useful knowledge of group habits, and a private coded language only understood in the network.<\/p>\n
How \u00a0ideologies can open up and become adaptive we often fail to notice, though, how often we naturally change from one to another in the course of a day or week as we engage with different networks. \u00a0 \u00a0We change ideologies much as if putting \u00a0on and taking \u00a0off clothes, often using a change of clothing to do it in fact.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0So,\u2026 it seems sensitive, but need not offend, to notice that ideologies need to be suited to situations and to grow and change with them, letting us try on different ones for fit.\u00a0\u00a0 Ideologies can be temporarily considered as \u201cnice outfits to wear\u201d, and need not be treated as contracts required of others for whom they don’t fit.<\/p>\n
Sadly, the dishonest words this viewpoint helps us understand are some of the favorites in the discussion of sustainability. \u00a0 \u00a0They’re ways of mixing honorific images of ever accumulating wealth and reducing our footprints on the earth: \u201csustainable growth\u201d, \u201cdecoupling\u201d, \u201ccircular economy\u201d, even \u201csustainable development\u201d.\u00a0 They\u2019re frequently used to compare “apples and oranges” and coming up with \u201cever increasing consumption without consumption\u201d. \u00a0 \u00a0With that usage our goal and purpose becomes to accelerate the \u201ctragedy of the commons\u201d, that is our whole discussion is about how to avoid.<\/p>\n
How you can tell that for yourself is by observing that putting the contradictory meanings of \u201cdevelopment\u201d together requires switching back and forth from one ideology to the other, with that switch not being mentioned.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It shows that people, in conversation, are adopting an ideology of hiding when they switch ideologies.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sadly that seems what we have socialized around doing, unaware of the consequence. \u00a0 \u00a0At present nearly anywhere in the global sustainability movement you go (and I\u2019ve really looked around!), you get strong pushback for even trying to bring it up.<\/p>\n Nature doesn\u2019t respond to artful ideology in the least, though. \u00a0\u00a0Not one little bit.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0What nature responds to is the growth of new organisms that change from expanding their conquests to then making their niches.\u00a0\u00a0 That succession is their (and our) door to joining the commons by making their (and our) homes in it.\u00a0\u00a0 Feel good euphemisms for the opposite, stitching together our true ideals into fig leaves for endless conquest philosophies like BAU, actually don\u2019t work.<\/p>\n Jessie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had found a cozy place to work on sustainability from inside the UN, but discovered the words holding the discussion together there had accumulated meanings that were deeply dishonest\u2026\u00a0\u00a0 so I\u2019m back on the outside. ___________ Over the past year I developed two rather wonderful scientific learning methods, as if school courses in \u201cNiche … Continue reading No need to take off our clothes in public\u2026 but dropping our ideological fig leaves at times seems required.<\/span> ![\"Natural](\"https:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/issues\/images\/NatDevl6.jpg\")
<\/a>No need to take off our clothes in public\u2026 but dropping ideological fig leaves at times
\nseems required for how we learn.<\/h4>\n