{"id":3680,"date":"2018-06-28T11:33:58","date_gmt":"2018-06-28T16:33:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=3680"},"modified":"2018-10-02T09:52:35","modified_gmt":"2018-10-02T14:52:35","slug":"healthy-cultures-healthy-economies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/healthy-cultures-healthy-economies\/","title":{"rendered":"Only Healthy Cultures make Healthy Economies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Announcing the publication of<\/strong>
\n6\/28\/18<\/p>\n

Culture, Finance-for-Development & tPPPs<\/a><\/h3>\n

Jessie Henshaw*<\/p>\n

A less technical synopsis<\/strong>,
\n7\/12\/18<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been observing the UN SDGs as a natural systems scientist since 2013 when I saw with some surprise that the one topic both Country delegates and Civil Society groups could agree on was the wording of the ideals for global development.\u00a0 Even when the Co-Chairs, Ambassadors Korosi, and Kamu, began persistently asking for the discussion to turn to means and methods it never did.\u00a0 Ideals are wonderful, but the strains the SDGs are responding to are still growing, as the global disruption of human cultures by the growing intrusions of the economies of the world powers continues.\u00a0 That’s a problem not yet to be studied and discussed.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Partly to be “diplomatic” and partly not having a model for human cultures as living social organisms that carry all our shared ways of knowing living.\u00a0 \u00a0Still we need a way to discuss the rapidly growing strains on human and ecological cultures caused by accelerating economic growth, a global cultural sickness.<\/p>\n

As growth presses the limits of the earth and challenges the world to ever faster rates of change, the damage to nature and human society is more and more lasting. \u00a0\u00a0That\u2019s a conclusion you can reach from many directions I think. \u00a0The communities the SDGs aim to help seem mainly deeply rooted old cultures that are now \u201cfailing to thrive.\u201d\u00a0 That is a living systems problem, not a numbers problem, as the SDGs were designed to solve.\u00a0 Failing to thrive is more like a \u201clack of meaning in life\u201d dilemma, requiring a different approach. \u00a0It\u2019s also a symptom that one can use to map the problem worldwide and begin to look at its real dimensions.<\/p>\n

Our accumulated ways of knowing and living\u00a0 are stored only in our cultures<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Failure to thrive seems to hit both indigenous cultures worldwide and communities within economies where \u201ccreative destruction\u201d is leaving lasting scars, like rural flight or outsourcing that hollows out a region.\u00a0 One example is the deeply alienated culture giving support to Donald Trump in the US, distressed by the world changing so much around them.\u00a0 There are also non-thriving local cultures in North, Central, and South Africa, as well as in the Middle East and North, Central, Southern and Eastern Asia, as well as in Oceana, Australia, North and South America.\u00a0 It\u2019s not \u201cthe same old thing,\u201d but a truly accelerating global plight, seeming to be of all the cultures that didn\u2019t welcome or were disrupted by the intrusive growth of the world powers.<\/p>\n

Human cultures are truly the crown jewels of humanity, though, where most of our gifts come from and are on display.\u00a0 They are the unique individual species of the human ecology. \u00a0If you think about it, there is no other place on earth for the safekeeping of all our ancient accumulated ways of knowing and living. Each culture either crafts its separate way of knowing and living or branches off from another.\u00a0\u00a0 They are our most important gift, evidently now absorbing a great deal of abuse.<\/p>\n

With each culture being its own \u201cknowledge system\u201d it keeps people from making sense of any other culture, or even our own.\u00a0 \u00a0If you trace the evidence, it does check out.\u00a0 We get the large part of our ways of understanding things during early childhood, by what you might call \u2018osmosis\u2019. \u00a0Some say it\u2019s \u201ctoo close for us to see,\u201d or that our mental way of seeing is functionally like a camera and its lens, that are never visible in the pictures they take. \u00a0Cultures also have a deceptive \u201ccellular design.\u201d\u00a0 Their ways of knowing and living are internally shared, and not experienced from the outside.\u00a0\u00a0 Even with extended immersion, an outsider does not develop a native feeling for another culture\u2019s roots.<\/p>\n

The great challenge we face today is that growth is an ever faster process of expansion and change, *doubling* its demands on the earth and humanity every 20-30 years.\u00a0 \u00a0That radical rate of increasing demands is what eventually overwhelms the adaptability and resilience of people and the earth.\u00a0 Living things are being pushed to keep mechanically doubling<\/em> numerical returns for culture-blind investors, as if the earth was unoccupied.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how the English occupied North America, a hundred years after the first settlements rapid expansion began with importing slave labor then a wave of settlers swept across the rest of the continent, as if it were unoccupied.\u00a0 Elsewhere the economic powers built systems for globally harvesting resources, placing overseers where needed to manage their access, as if there was no one else there.\u00a0 Today it continues with how global capitalism still relates to the world, measuring its success in rates of accelerating expansion alone, as if no one is here.\u00a0 What\u2019s most surprising perhaps, is how very effective our cultural blinders are in hiding our blindness to our own and other cultures from us.\u00a0 That is, hidden until you have an indicator like the glaring disruptiveness of ever more sudden change.<\/p>\n

So what would relieve our fast growing societal distress?\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0There\u2019s a new business model expressly for responding to it, to use biomimicry for how nature builds thriving ecologies. \u00a0\u00a0If interested there\u2019s a longer discussion article on how healthy cultures are the foundations of healthy economies and the business model for nourishing our cultures, that I refer to as “True Public-Private Partnerships” (tPPPs) discussed more in the essay\u00a0\u00a0Culture, Financing for Development and tPPPs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The new business model begins like any business, organism, or culture does, with a period of innovating<\/em> and vigorous growth, making profits to expand its systems.\u00a0 When the environment responds with increasing resistance or stiffening competition, the new strategy is to choose when and how to switch from maximizing profits for growth to maximizing long-term profitability to pay it forward.\u00a0 That\u2019s done by refining<\/em> systems to operate in smooth harmony with each other and their world.\u00a0 It\u2019s a more gradual process but would produce more integrated development and be more profitable in the end, to combine human ingenuity and natural design.<\/p>\n

______________<\/p>\n

Do comment<\/strong>\u00a0if this gives you questions or ideas!<\/p>\n

______________<\/p>\n

[*] Jessie Henshaw<\/u> consults as HDS natural systems design science<\/em>, sy@synapse9.com, offering insight into nature\u2019s processes of negotiating change.\u00a0 She uses natural systems thinking strategies (NST) with \u201caction research\u201d (AR) and architectural \u201cpattern language\u201d (PL) methods of collaborative developmental design.\u00a0 The start is from recognizing that organizational processes in nature follow a familiar arc, beginning with bursts of innovation<\/em>, and then refinement<\/em>, leading to a final release<\/em> (IRR).\u00a0 That is not unlike how we all do home or office projects, in stages of immature then maturing growth then release, also seen in reproduction.\u00a0 The system produced is first \u201cframed out\u201d with innovations then \u201cfilled in\u201d with refinements and \u201cdelivered\u201d as the release <\/em>when ready.\u00a0 Her current related research article is on how our Systems Thinking co-evolvolves with our Systems Making<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

JLH<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Announcing the publication of 6\/28\/18 Culture, Finance-for-Development & tPPPs Jessie Henshaw* A less technical synopsis, 7\/12\/18 I\u2019ve been observing the UN SDGs as a natural systems scientist since 2013 when I saw with some surprise that the one topic both Country delegates and Civil Society groups could agree on was the wording of the ideals … Continue reading Only Healthy Cultures make Healthy Economies<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,6,7,8,9,10,15,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-among-best-2","category-teaching","category-mail","category-econn","category-theory","category-policy","category-pop","category-trans","category-whattodo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3680"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3765,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3680\/revisions\/3765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}