Robert Paterson: Renaissance

Burning Man - Fun! Maybe we should all be Pagans?

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 11:18:30 GMT

I find it interesting that the Burning Man idea has taken off - see link to great pics by Xeni - The Burning Man is one of the oldest festivals that we have as humans. In the Horticulture period that filled the gap between the Guy's world of Hunting and the Guy's world of Farming, we had the time of the Goddess.

The King would have to die at the end of the season so that the land could rest and a new male energy could emerge to ensure a good harvest next year. In the time of his rule - he had a great time. Other versions of this had the King being torn into shreds by the women. Later versions substituted prisoners. The Druids did this and the Romans sacked the sacred grove on Angelsy to stop the practice.

On reflection most of our important festivals are linked to our past as worshippers of the natural cycle. Christmas - the winter equinox. Easter the spring equinox. Canada day or July 4th as near as to the summer equinox. Labour day close to the fall equinox. We don't need to "believe" in a story or abide by the teachings of a "book" if we link our life to nature. The reality of the cycle of nature reminds us all the time of where we are and how we fit - if we look up and notice.

If we immerse ourselves in nature, life becomes rich and juicy again - please have a look at the pictures and you will see what I mean. Much of our fear about death leaves us as we can observe how birth, growth, endings and death are part of the cycle of all things and that all things are connected. Much of our fear about being too small and insignificant goes away when we look up at the night sky and observe that we are part of this limitless universe.

We casually use the word pagan to describe a love of nature. If more of us were "Pagans" we would have a better world I think

Blogging and Society

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 14:14:24 GMT

500 years ago the communications system in the west was owned by one organization - the church. If you wanted something in writing a monk transcribed it. Few knew how to read as a result of books being so expensive. Your network news was delivered from the pulpit. The system supported the status quo of the power of God's elect, the King and his henchmen the aristocracy and above supported the most powerful multinational enterprise the world had yet seen the church itself. The church was the largest landowner in the west at a time when land was the basis of all wealth. The barriers to competition were impossibly high.

I am sure that when Gutenberg built his first press that there was a lot of chatter about font types, about gearing and pressure and inks and about the best type of paper - the kind of geek talk that is central to all new things. This is where so much of the discourse is today about blogging - RSS etc. But the true power of the printing press was something else that went way beyond how it worked. It was how it was used that was to be important.

Within a hundred years huge numbers of people could read. It was possible to run off broadsheets - personal publishing very cheaply. So what happened as a result of this use of the new technology?

The reformation in Europe, the dissolution of the monasteries in the England the the redistribution of all that wealth to secular hands, the civil war and the end of the idea of monarchy being God's anointed. The modern world was created where new ideas based on observation - such as a new vision of the universe - could not be held back by the establishment in spite of persecution.

So this is what will happen with blogging. What blogging is, is an end run on the strangle hold of our conversation and on our mindset that the corporate and institutional world has established. Until now the costs of having a human voice were set impossibly high. Only Rupert Murdoch or a government could play. But now communication costs are ridiculously low compared to the mainstream media and communications in corporations and government. Not only are the costs low but the interactive element of blogging is so much more powerful than the broadcast technique owned by the institutions. Any one of us can have a voice and groups can have power.Institutions are frightened of this voice and will fight it because it means that they will die as a result.

As at the time of the reformation - the general adoption of blogging tools will lead to the overthrow of the corporate and the institutional mind. In so doing it will release the vast treasure that it locked up in the costs of corporate and institutional life. It will free men and women from being peons in a feudal state where they had to live as liege men and offer fealty to their overlords.

We are not only oppressed by those in power in institutional life, we, like medieval peasant, are complicit. We know of no other life. Knowing no other life, like those in Plato's cave, we cannot imagine what freedom from institutional life might be like. We fear freedom because we see no alternative to bondage.

Even simple blogging can help here. It offers for the first time to each of us the potential to find our voice. At first maybe to tell the world what we had for breakfast or to recall some work idea. But I have found in myself a huge change in the last year in my inner voice and in the confidence as I discover that I am not alone in how I think.

Until now people who think as I do have struggled alone. We are by nature are not joiners. Fewer of us every day work in institutional life and cannot use that voice. What "organ" do we have to speak with a human voice? Blogging By finding so many of us out there, we grow in confidence and our voice becomes less hesitant. I feel wonder as I read new blogs every week and see how close our thinking is. This is how power is created

Technical talk is helpful. It leads to better tools. But let's talk more about how we will use blogging to change our world. It is not about making the corporation better - this type of discussion would be the same as a group of monks talking about how printing was going to help the church. It is about how to we take the institution out of our lives.

(Thanks to Dave Pollard for getting me going this week)

Marriage - Another Ptolemaic Construct?

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 11:46:38 GMT

As the debate about Gay Marriage builds, I wonder what is the "natural state of marriage". Much of what I read in our local paper righteously informs me that Jesus, God and the church determine what marriage is all about. In short in this view, marriage is a union of one man and one woman whose role is to have children.

Just for fun, let's explore the history of the union of adults a bit further than the few thousand year perspective that the CW allows for.

For most of the 4 million years that humans and our predecessors have been around, our primary social unit has not been a union of two adults of opposite sex but a small tribe of between 15 and 25. 25 appears to be the optimal size with the right threshold of complexity for survival. These tribes were in turn linked into their surrounding tribes into "nations" of about 150. These in turn were linked into federations of around 500-600. Why these numbers?

The Math of Genetics - There is also a genetic link to group size and Magic Numbers.

A person living alone has a "half life " of about one year. Set ups of one lose half their number in one year, half in the next and so on. Living alone is a very weak strategy in a natural environment where there are many risks and challenges. Today the power of the state is encouraging us to live this way - the state is the dependency creating family and its not a healthy relationship.

The half life of a group of 5 is a generation or about 20-40 years

The half life of 25 people is 250-500 years. 25 seems to be an ideal blend of comfort and complexity. A company that lasted 250 years would be a remarkable organizations. In a tribe about half a group of 25 would be adults - say about 8 men and women - now we see the core underlying magic number revealed. It is the ideal single sex work group derived from the ideal familial work group, the tribe.

The 500 person group is the ideal "marriage gene pool" Incest taboos prevent breeding in the 25 person tribe. Wives and husbands have to be found outside this group. But not too far outside. After all we don't want our daughter to mary a stranger or worse someone who cannot add wealth by his connections. We also want them to speak the same language and worship the same Gods. So being close means that we can enter your wife's family hunting ground and that it creates the potential to have large scale group hunts on occasion. 475 people = the ideal gene pool of 19 x 25 member bands.

Dave Pollard writes eloquently about how great it would be to live/work in a group whose sole aim would be mutual support - this is what this tribal set up was all about.

The reality is then that for most of human time, we lived not in units of two adults but in social units of 25 that include about 8 adults. The purpose of this tribal unit was obviously to raise the next generation but to do so in the context of doing all of the related work as a large team. This was above all a social and economic unit.

There was no clear line between work, play and society. No Work/Life balance issues here. Belonging to the tribe and having a tribe that functioned well was in every member's survival interests. No individual was safe on their own. No child could depend solely on her natural parents. They needed the power of the larger group. If we are honest with ourselves, this issue of safety and the need for a support group has not changed. The game can disappear - we are fired. Partners and children die. Our kids need a job. We get injured or sick. In our diminished social world, we now look mainly to the state or to insurance companies for the benefits of the protection of the group. The most important unit in our history was not the "family", it did not exist, but the tribe.

Ah but you have left out the best bits you say. So what about men and women and sex? Any study of primal people tells us that there are many arrangements for how sex was accommodated. There are tribes where the big man has most access to most women. There are matriarchal tribes where the power and the choice is in the hands of the women. There are tribes where most of the sex is homosexual and where mating for children is a by product. In most tribes your own gender is where your primary social and affection relationships reside.

My point? The tribe is sacrosanct - sex and sex partner rules are diverse. The point of the tribe is to raise children not simply to produce them. No two parents in a tribe focus on only their own offspring. They look after all the children as do all the other adults. With all property belonging to all members, there is no need to make a strong link of who was the father.

So where does this leave us now?

The reality is that most so called families are now one adult organizations lead by a woman. This is as small and as vulnerable a unit as is possible. Even with two parents, most are so stressed out at work that they have little energy for their children. We see the results in grade 1 when 30% of the kids have behaviour problems that are so overwhelming that they are unlikely to make it through school. Many families are blended but are so hooked into the CW that they blame the other for the breakdown and have little or no contact. So the children can be cut off from Grandparents and are shuttled between warring parents. Many blended families have the potential to be tribes if only the warring parents could see through their anger and see the potential.

Our view of jobs has meant that work and social life have been split apart and we vainly try and find a balance. Our social structures have been destroyed. In desperation we turn to the state or to the company benefits plan or help for those times when we as individuals cannot help ourselves. .

What marriage really means now is a legal construct by which the benefits of the state and from insurance companies, pensions etc, can pass from one party to a related party. This is what most Gay couples want - legal recognition and access to the state and company tribal benefits.

The church is fixated on sex. No surprise that this is its own weakness. The church assumes that we organize around sex which makes the conventional marriage the central organizational unit. BUT the observed fact is that humans do not naturally organize around sex - we organize around work and survival. Human social organizations are not built for procreation but to raise children so that they can take over the leadership of the tribe. Sex is not why my Gay friends want the recognition of their union. They want the protection of the state tribe. Most importantly, they want to be able to raise children so that they too have the ultimate benefit of dying in the knowledge that they have raised good people who will remember them as their ancestors.

Social Capital - Are we at the edge of a Copernican revolution in OD?

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 10:41:14 GMT

A theme of my posting is to examine why so many people today are so deeply unhappy about their work life. Recently I have been looking at our need to have a higher purpose and at our need to have a more collegial relationship in the hierarchy.

I have posted two great articles by Ross Mayfield below because it seems clear to me that we have another basic flaw in how we organize - except for the military who have never forgotten - we are mainly are ignorant of the inherent numbers and structures that facilitate the optimal human relationships.

I bet also a dinner that there is not a text book on HR that talks about natural networks as opposed to formal departments and which then includes the theory of magic numbers for optimal relationships. My bet is that organizational theory today is an artificial construct just like the Ptolemaic view of the Universe. What is really on the table here is another Copernican revolution for organization based, now as then, on observation of reality that we are humans rather than acceptance of a doctrine based on the hope that we are machines. .

Magic Numbers and Social Organization Is there a science here?

Sun, 13 Jul 2003 17:54:21 GMT

I am reading Simon Singh brilliant book on Maths "Fermat's Enigma". (See link) Fermat's problem is based on the one equation that even the most dunce maths brain such as my own understand - in a right angled triangle, the Square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the two other sides. - Fermat's problem is based on this simple equation. But that is not my point today. My point is that Pythagoras was struck by how the natural world, such as music and so on, was run by a series of numbers. Numbers can be found at the core of most natural phenomena and relationships. Did you know that you can calculate the actual length of a river by multiplying its crow's length, the point to point, by Pi (3.14)? How weird!

My aha for today is that, why should not human relationships be also governed by numbers? If so, we are underplaying the importance of magic numbers. Why are nurses so unhappy? Might it be that they go to work as groups and not as teams governed by the rules of magic numbers? Why is there bullying at school? Might it be that we do not organize them by using magic numbers? Why do many of our social and work organizations need so much bureaucracy? May it be that we do not use Magic Numbers. Why do all armies have the same core organizational structures of 8 - 15 - 35 -150 and 500-600? Might it be that they have found out intuitively that these sets work best under stress. Why are all HG groups functions of 15 and 35.? Why are larger tribal groups not more than 500? Why is 150 such a perfect number for getting complex work done?

I am beginning to feel that much of the inhumanity and stress in our work place is the machine culture that pays no attention to these hard numbers.

Sat, 12 Jul 2003 21:16:06 GMT

Project Management and Horses.

Project Management and Horses.

Spotted this gem on Anders site:

The tribal wisdoms of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that 'when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount'. However, in many companies as well as in the UN and NGO community a range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Changing riders

2. Appointing a committee to study the horse ...

It just gets better from there.

[High Context]

It does.

[McGee's Musings]

And we think that we are so civilized and clever!

Blogging and becoming Human

Thu, 10 Jul 2003 21:43:05 GMT

I was being interviewed today by a PHD Student who is working on the topic of Communities of Practice. We had a bit of an aha that I wanted to share

It appears that the corporate model that most of us work in now squeezes out our humanity. We develop machine relationships - even odd corporate voices - not simply a use of lanaguage that is not human as described in Cluetrain, but a manner of speaking a "dead sound" where our real personality has been excluded as has emotion and feeling.

This machine world is causing us to become ill and depressed. I speculate that as we assume this corporate personality that it takes over our whole life and affects our marriages and our relationships with our children.

No wonder marriage is failing and our children are in such trouble. We act in this impersonal and unreal way in our whole lives. We even act like this to ourselves and no longer have a real relationships with ourselves.

How can we learn and experience being human again? What is the essence of being human? It is surely to hear our real voice. What does blogging do? It allows many of us to develop this voice. Blogging can enable us to become human again.

Not a small issue.

Are we neanderthals? How can social software help?

Sun, 06 Jul 2003 16:12:24 GMT

I wonder - have we become trapped in a type of culture that has turned us into Neanderthals? What do I mean by this weird statement?

I wrote yesterday

"Remember that we think that complex language was an adaptation to hunting on the savannah and hence was our start as homo sapiens - the tool maker. Our new ability to learn across tribes and across time, rather than only directly face to face in present time, gave us the ability to adapt to changes in the environment by using culture not biology.

Neanderthal did not innovate. In 200,000 years his tools' set did not change much. He could not cope with the invasion of Homo sapiens and was extinct within 1,000 years of first contact. With no complex language he could not communicate ideas in the abstract. He therefore could not cross tribal barriers. With no complex language he could not recall the past nor imagine the future. He could only work in the context of the present.

We are like that today.

In the modern organization there is no allowance for cross tribal discussion. Instead of looking across, we look up and down. This is also true of our learning organizations such as Universities. University departments are trapped inside their disciplines and find cross disciplinary work very challenging. Yet we know that the breakout in human potential came as a result of using complex language to look across boundaries. Innovation seems to demand a diverse perspective. As one human tribe found a new way to make a tool - the horizontal links drove not only adoption but improvement. Recursive loops between tribes accelerated the improvements.

In the modern organization, and in political life, we live in a fixed present - the life cycle of a CEO or an administration. There is a denigration of the past. We puff up our selves by dismissing the work of the predecessors. Because we do not look to enough to the past, we fail to see the patterns available there that tell us why and how we are in the present. Consequently, we cannot see the systemic causes of current problems. So, instead, we look for simple cause and effect - a view of causality that does not exist in the natural world. We not only do not look at the context of the past, but we seem incapable of imagining the future. Our days and minds are filled with the crises of the present. So we, like Neanderthal, are trapped in the present unable to move .

We have been trapped by a cultural meme that has turned us into Neanderthals.

So what is the way out? I think that social software will be like complex language. It offers us the chance to cope with our challenges by once again opening up the context of the past so that we can see the patterns. It re-attaches us to the power of the future to pull us forward. How does it do this? By opening up the horizontal channels and by opening up time again.

Is blogging an evolutionary tool?

Blogging or Social Software - an evolutionary step?

Sat, 05 Jul 2003 11:26:11 GMT

The great leap: "60,000 years ago humans were on the brink of extinction. An evolutionary eyeblink later, there are over 6 billion of us. How did we do it?" [Guardian Unlimited > [ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]] [Universal Rule]

More and more evidence is emerging that something unusual happened with humans about 60,000 years ago. I'm waiting for the movie. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

The breakout 60-40,000 bc is the tipping point where man left the world of animals. More and more the thesis behind this shift has been that complex language appeared at this time. A blind alley for research has been the search for a mechanical adjustment in the body - the throat/larynx area. Soft tissue does not last - hence "proof" of language as a product of mechanical adaptation cannot be found.

More progressive researchers think instead about mindset and culture as evidenced in rates of innovation in tools and art which can be observed. There is no doubt that the rate of innovation becomes exponential for homo sapiens at this time. Poor old Neanderthal has almost no innovation. Art appears to explode fully realized at this time "Lascaux"

The theory that appeals to me is that early man could speak even Neanderthal. But early language as with say highly evolved apes and monkeys was not merely vocal but used a wide range of visuals. Alarm calls, food calls, are all part of the language of many primates. This language is by definition trapped in the present. "Hungry" "Back off" "I want you" I'm sad" etc My mother in law still lives in this world of the emotional present. It is a language of self - we see the world only through our eyes and only in the now. There is no future. The driving force is emotion. This mindset does not allow us to imagine a future and hence there can be no speculative innovation. You can only learn by observing the work of another directly. It is very hard to to exchange ideas outside of a tribe. I bet the vocal apparatus evolved in this prolonged era of mother in law world view. So the tools were ready for a different application.

So how did we speak in anew way that enabled us to think of a future and to learn indirectly?

Robin Dunbar suggests that complex speech evolved for man from the primate habit of grooming. All Primates groom. The reason is to keep up emotional health in a hierarchy. Grooming enables you to form and sustain your protective political alliances and community within the tribe that keeps you safe from internal aggression. You get the protection of some alphas and you support each other when you have been put upon by a higher person. We do this at the office but today we use words and we call it gossip. Human society like all primate society is highly political and hierarchical. Think of high school! The cool set - cliques etc.

This is Dunbar's aha! As we moved onto the Savannah where we had to hunt in an organized manner - unit size had to grow so that there were at least 8 adult males. This drove a tribal size of about 40 with perhaps 8 adult females and 15 youths and children. As the unit size grew there was a conflict between the grooming time needed to hold the structure together and the time needed for other activities such as hunting and food preparation. You can only groom one person at a time but you can gossip with many - especially is you are a woman and you are sitting by the fire working on skins with the other women while looking out for the kids. So we started to chat! Getting my drift?

Might social software act as a chat/gossip amplifier? Might it be a driver for an extension of mindset and consciousness that gossip drove 60,000 years ago?

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - A quick Review from PEI

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 11:02:58 GMT

This was the scene at the Bookmark in Charlottetown on the stroke of midnight as we were thronging to buy our copies of the new Harry Potter Book. What an event!

I finished the book last night (Sunday). Rowling has pulled it off and has turned in another page turner. I can hardly imagine the pressure that she must be under to keep up the standard. Only two books to go. Like much of what is popular today, the book dwells mainly on the split between the corporate and the magic world. The Matrix and Lord of the Rings also speak to the inhuman aspect of the corporate/bureaucratic world and our longing for freedom. In this book, the split is deepened beyond merely the Muggles and the Wizards to include the invasion of Hogwarts by the Bureaucrats from the Ministry of Magic. Rowling uses Dickensian names just to ensure we don't miss the point. The ever so political and self-inflated Minister is called Fudge and his bureaucratic and poisonous Heydrich is called Umbridge. The conflict is between those who know what is really happening - Harry and Dumbledore - and those that will pay any price to keep the uncomfortable truth from emerging - the Ministry and the bureaucratic world.. The real evil, Voldemort, lurks in the shadows for most of the book. There is a Munich feeling about the appeasement group who feel that identifying the threat is worse than the threat itself.

As I read my words it sounds boring - I assure you that it is not. The conflict between being human and being a robot is central to our time and Rowling exposes our Matrix with extreme vividness. This, like the Matrix, is a very revolutionary work and will set up millions of children to "see" the true face of the evil that exists in our world - the mind that cares only about the institution versus the people. The action races along and the tension is built cleverly throughout the 766 pages. Knowing that one main character dies provides a poignancy as we interact with the characters. The characters also build. Harry is becoming a Neo like reluctant hero who like Frodo is becoming aware of his true burden and how it separates him from all others. The lines between good and bad blur further. Is Snape all that bad? Was Harry's father all that good? Why is Dumbledore so un-supportive of Harry?

Sex is entering the story as is the mystery of girls for boys - especially sensitive boys like Harry. Rowling has a real touch here and I suspect that the later books will build on Harry's growing sexual as well as emotional maturation. Anger is a major element of Harry's life now. Understanding it and controlling it again portends to be a development feature.

Rowling works on many levels. On the surface, the book is an adventure story like the Odyssey or the Matrix. You can read it just for that and have a great time. Below the explicit adventure is a drama - a drama of our time about the struggle to regain our humanity in a machine world where magic has been all but extinguished. Where Muggles can't see the wizards all around them and where the Wizards' own bureaucracy is working to extinguish magic. Below this, as in the Lord of th Rings and in the Matrix. is an epic. The epic is the development of an innocent into a true hero - reluctant, modest, confused who has no idea of the greatness of his real powers. Who finds out who he is by the process of ordeal. Who in the end, while supported by a fellowship, is alone and now understands his destiny is to stand alone and to confront our greatest threat - the loss of our humanity.

I find it ironic that many of the so called religious right claim that Harry Potter is a dangerous book because it brings us back the world of magic, nature and evil. How they fear our true humanity! It is now clear to me that Harry embodies what we know of the life of Jesus. A reluctant hero who likely thought of himself as only a carpenter but who was called to a mission. Who was confused for a long time in the desert. Whose ministry was aimed at exposing the inhumanity of the establishment. Who understood what this attack on the establishment meant. Who provoked them beyond their limit and in the certain knowledge of what this would mean.

Is not this true heroism? To take on your own society and expose its institutions for the self serving, faceless prisons that they tend to become?

Great artists communicate great ideas so simply that we take on the revolutionary idea without even knowing that a Trojan Horse has entered the walls of our mindset. Rowling is such an artist. The Wachowski brothers are as well. They use the mechanism of adventure to warn us of our peril. They use their ability to be popular to plant a virus of "seeing" the world as it is in our children. In so doing they prepare our society for change.

Cultural Transformation - The Tipping Point - Another View

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 14:55:54 GMT

Here is a graphic from the Cultural Creatives. It shows the passage from equilibrium to transformation. We see the signs or harbingers of change as the swings in the state of equilibrium increase in amplitude. Instability in weather, in markets, in mood in any modality are all signs of impending system change. Then come the point of "criticality" or the Tipping Point. You die, fall back or breakthrough.

Example - Air Canada's response to the discount threat. Will AC die, fall back and die or breakthrough. This is the choice we all have at these times. Will your organization see the turbulence for what it is - a harbinger of structural change - or ignore it and merely try harder to keep on the old track. Will Robin and I miss the signs of what Cancer offers us or also fall back. Not small stuff when you take it off the abstract and think of your own life!

Art - The Caves at Lascaux

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 13:50:19 GMT

A simply brilliant website that I found by accident while seeking to find a link to "Art" after the Language Revolution. It give the viewer a sense of the deep mystery of how a person might discover the symbols of his beliefs and his people as he was initiated into adulthood

Tribal Life - The Fast Runner

Sat, 31 May 2003 00:07:51 GMT

What was life like in our tribal past?

I watched "The Fast Runner" last night. A film set 1,500 years ago in the time of Inuit legend. I was stunned by the film maker's achievement to take us back in time and culture - I link to a great review.

The New Renaissance - Chapter 1 - The Gift - Moving from Scarcity to Abundance

Fri, 30 May 2003 15:49:59 GMT

Chapter 1 - The Gift

Here, in the 12th Chapter of the Gospel of Luke, beginning at the 22nd verse:

"Jesus said to his disciples, 'Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies: they neither dye their hair nor inject Botox between their eyebrows, ( a great sermon) yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not adorned like one of these.'"

In tribal society there might be periodic shortages, even famine, but the overarching mindset is of a world filled with opportunity for the skilled hunter and gatherer. With no property as a core idea, I cannot fear that you might take my property away from me. In the tribal world, nature is brimming with stuff.

Let's explore this for a while and then look at how these tribal views fit into how modern science now sees the world and how the emerging new economy also fits the tribal model of the Gift.

Tribal people inhabit a world of relationships and energy. With few possessions, things are of little value. Tribal people know that everything that they think or do has an effect on the universe itself! They know that they are integrated into the world.

So every thought and act ripples out every where and has the potential to effect everything and everyone. When a hunter kills an animal for food, he sees the act as a "gift". In his mind, the animal allows itself to be killed by him. No matter what his skill - the hunter works hard to be grateful. The act of killing for food is a sacred ritual. The animals must be propitiated before, during and after the hunt.He knows that his energy and his relationship to the animal are critical to his success and hence to the survival of his tribe.

In a tribal setting, the bottom line for the survival of the individual is the survival of the tribe. This is why hunters and gatherers share what they hunt and find. Your reputation as hunter is dependent on two aspects: your success in hunting and your generosity in sharing. As a gatherer you share your wisdom about where food may be found and how all material brought into the camp can be converted into food, tools and clothing. Women in tribal life are responsible for the manufacturing side of the economy. Men for tools, for protein and for defence. The survival of the tribe depends on the skills being passed on well to the next generation.

So, at the heart of tribal life then is the social interaction that transfers all this knowledge into doctrine and onto the next generation. tribal survival depends as much on the sharing of knowledge as in the sharing of food. Sharing is not a fantasy about being nice, as we teach kids in kindergarten to share their toys, but is a survival strategy enabling a small and physically weak primate compete with all other animals and all the varied environmental conditions that nature can inflict. TBA

The Support Economy - The core idea

Fri, 30 May 2003 13:50:59 GMT

In my first scan of the book (Rob) The essence of the book is the idea that only when the deep structure changes do we have a true revolution. Until now we have been rearranging the deckchairs.

Their perception is a shift from the value being in the transaction (therefore inside the organization who has by definition an adversarial relationship with the consumer - think of buying a car! )to the value being in the relationship embedded in the individual

A review from Amazon

A New Framework for Business, December 31, 2002

Reviewer: harry wedstrone from new haven conn

This is a book of two parts. The first is a detailed examination of why managerial capitalism has reached the end of its useful life. Zuboff and Maxmin say that because the system is out of date it cannot serve the needs of todays consumers. They also say that its inward focus results in scandals like Enron because managers think the company is there to serve their needs, Managers are at the center of the system and value is inside the company. All of this was ok for making things but failed to deliver good service because it was not designed to do this. It used technology to reduce cost and depressed the impact of the internet. The net result is that we as consumers have changed, management has not and we suffer. WE seek help and only get a bloody nose.. The second part of the book follows the logic of the demise the management system Here value goes outside the company and rests with individuals ( it is distributed) To achieve alignment everything else ( control systems, ownership etc ) becomes distributed and wealth is realized by allowing people to live life on their own terms- by providing them with ' deep support" Here the technological and organisational vision is revolutionary. You need to forget all you have learned and think about capitalism from the ground up. The authors envision using digital platforms to provide common data and service. They suggest this will take 30% plus out of todays cost. These platforms will be base for new services and levels of support ranging from the fully automated to the personal. Here are advocates who navigate the world on your behalf. This is a whole new function ... they provide the ultimate range of support . They represent federations whose sole purpose is to provide different levels of support leveraging off the digital platforms. Federations obtain products and service from enterprises which come together and break apart .The whole concept is unique and extremely challenging. The idea is to create debate not to be proscriptive. The story of the family used to illustrate the meta-principles of distributed capitalism is great. It makes you understand how different things can be and need to be. Zuboof and Maxmin have convinced me not only that change is necessary and inevitable but there is a new future to write. Some people may dismiss their ideas as too radical but look at their track records- they know what they are talking about. The world needs more creative and visionary thinkers like this-people who are not afraid to embrace the future and challenge the status quo-- we should all applaud them

The Support Economy - Our School System

Thu, 29 May 2003 09:29:50 GMT

I lied about no posts - could not resist this one from the Support Economy which I am reading now.

On our school system - "By the late 1920's these new mass organizations, schools, workplaces, unions and associations - were fully established and had taken up much of the responsibility once lodged in the family, for teaching the new behavioural norms of modern life and enforcing conformity to those norms. According to one historian, "the establishment of schools was the disestablishment of domesticity". It was in school and work that sons and daughters would be whipped into shape and moulded for the orderly new worlds of production, administration and consumption"

The book is about the end of the mass market idea and the birth of an the individual. A nice trend is the growth of homsechooling. The US Dept of Ed concludes that Homeschooling in the US is on the rise. By 2000 between 1.0 million and 1.7 million kids or 6-12% of kids of school age had participated and a huge new supprt industry is building up around this.

The Support Economy

Wed, 28 May 2003 21:36:42 GMT

I am about 50 pages into this wonderful book - I wish I had written it myself - so far I am more than impressed. This is the first OK link that I have read. It is too soon for me to comment - any other good links out therre? Any views already formed?

The Blogging Experience!!! Joining the Tribe?

Wed, 28 May 2003 11:47:15 GMT

REALITY CHECK FOR TEACHERS, LOVERS, WRITERS, AND LOVERS OF LANGUAGE.

A thoughtful and provocative quote from educator John Holt (1923-1985) from How Children Learn:

We teachers - perhaps all human beings - are in the grip of an astonishing delusion. We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working knowledge of something, constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning that model into a string of words, transplant it whole into the mind of someone else.

Perhaps once in a thousand times, when the explanation is extraordinarily good, and the listener extraordinarily experienced and skillful at turning word-strings into non-verbal reality, and when the explainer and listener share in common many of the experiences being talked about, the process may work, and some real meaning may be communicated.

Most of the time, explaining does not increase understanding, and may even lessen it.

[How to Save the World]

As an educator? teacher? I am increasingly disturbed by our idea that learning is about shoving models and words into children's heads. But then here I am using an online course where we are restricted to words. I tell myself that this is OK because the course is set up as a conversation. However, I am still not sure. I spoke yesterday to a colleague who teaches environmental studies. Don Mazer asks his students to spend up to an hour a day in nature reflecting.

His experience is that this is best done in the same place so as to deepen the connection and to see how, in just a small place, things constantly change. I find this when I mow - it takes me about 3 hours twice a week - we have a lot of grass (another project) - I see all the weeds cycle though, the leaves bud bloom, mature wither and die. I feel every bump and see every twig and branch that has fallen onto the ground. Mowing even exposes me to the seasons and the larger system. The Zen of the Ride On?

This brings me to how we learn about blogging and all the recent great posts about what it is. Dave is an exemplar in this field.

So what about blogging? For me the issue is my experience.

No matter how much I attempt to explain it - see all the posts from you all on my site that help me see it in words - nothing beats doing it. Not merely the technical aspects but the growing social aspects. How can I explain how it feels to become Known - even only as fringe player? How can I explain my excitement when I see that Dave, or someone else like Richard, Chris or Stephen that I follow, has posted another gem? How can I explain the feeling that I have when a, then stranger, such as Critt Jarvis offers technical help out of the blue? How can I explain how it feels to be talking to someone who then tells you that she regularly reads your blog?

It is this experience that deepens my own sense of connection. Blogging is changing my life in a way that no other technology has. Email allowed me access to my existing friends but blogging offers me a chance of extending my community to many that I never would have met. It constantly enriches my life and hence is addictive.

I wonder if being known to a community - where you have earned your place - is not the greatest desire that we as humans have. It is surely the feeling that Tribal people have and why expulsion fro the tribe is its most terrible punishment.

New Renaissance - Seeing Nature 1 - The Wolf - Photo by Jean Boulay

Mon, 26 May 2003 12:31:38 GMT

The Wolf - A friend, Paul Hickey, once told me that he thought that all human art was an attempt to reproduce what nature does all by itself. As I get to see more of Jean Boulay's work, I am starting to understand what Paul meant.

The tribal eye "sees" the spirit world all around him. There is nothing inanimate in the tribal world. Every tree, rock and stream is invested by the spirit world. All it takes is the right eye to see it. Jean has this eye. Can you see the wolf? Now of course you can say that it is only a distortion but then that is the point. The point is what meaning do we take from our daily exposure to the natural world? If we look for spirits, we will find them. If we assume that nothing is there we will find nothing but a barren landscape.

New Renaissance - Old Age and Death - Walk in the Sand or Snow - Pictures by Jean Boulay

Mon, 26 May 2003 11:59:42 GMT

Yesterday we got a phone call from a long time friend to tell Robin and I that she had been diagnosed with Cancer of the Pancreas and the Liver. There is no reprieve from this. For much of last night I was thinking about how I would react to such a diagnosis myself. It was this time last year, almost to the day, that Robin herself was diagnosed with breast Cancer. What is happening to me is that I am starting to break through the illusion that my own death is somehow avoidable. Is this not the illusion of our time and culture? If my death is a certainty - don't laugh until you have checked in for yourself as to how you feel - then are most of my worries in life secondary?

In tribal times, death was seen as an integral part of our lives and was connected to the ongoing process of birth, death and renewal. As I write, the leaves are just coming out on our property after 6 months of "death". Tribal spirituality, places great emphasis not on the resurrection of the body but on the permanence of the spirit. The spirit is surely the energetic remnant of each person as incorporated into the place and into the group memory of the tribe. So your reputation in life would have an impact on your spirit as it is recalled by your descendants. This type of belief needs no leap of faith but is confirmed by observing nature itself. Does not my father live on in our stories? Is it only his genes and some of his looks that I share - what about my mannerisms and my world view that not only I have but also my son and my daughter?

Maybe also, not having the strong link to property, tribal people did not "see" life as something that they owned and as such had to be defended as we do. My friend can at best expect a year. In this knowledge how do we then live? In our culture, we can spend the year fighting the inevitable. Or we can choose to live more deeply and to savour every aspect of life. We can worry about leaving our daughter and husband. Or we can think more about ourselves.

Jean's picture informs me. Alone, we can walk bravely to our end. There is a remarkable dignity to the woman as she climbs the dune. She is in charge of herself and she strides out to the edge of the dune. She is not passive. She is prepared - she even has her handbag. How we accept our end gives us power and gives those who love us the strength to accept our leaving the corporal world for the world of the spirit. The world of dreams where we continue to interact with those who have left the day world. The world of dreams where it is possible to transcend corporal time and to walk in eternity.

We moderns hardly dream any more - we are too sleep deprived. Tribal people place enormous value on dream time and the dream world. Why should the world of dreams not be "real" after all we spend 1/3 of our life there. Those of us who live by creating "know" that that hour before rising is often the golden hour when we are floating between the two worlds when ideas, and visions of what we can do in the corporal world cross the barrier of the dream world into our conscious mind.

New Renaissance - Context for Stephen Dulaney

Sat, 24 May 2003 11:42:28 GMT

Stephen Dulaney, Of Social Dynamix fame (FM Radio) and I have been talking by email about Social Capital. He asked me today what my interst has been and here is my reply. Isn't it great to have people in your life you ask you to dif deeper. Thank you Stephen

Hi Stephen
Thank you for your kind note.

My interest in Social Capital is that I am writing a book - on my blog -
about the possibility of a return to a more tribal hunter gatherer set of
relationships.

I think we lost these when we took up settled living and agriculture. They
were lost even further when our machines shifted from those that were direct
extensions of the human body to those that had a life of their own. We like
the Matrix became machines as well. But 4 million years of living in tribal
settings is pulling us back to our more "natural" set of relationships where
we feel most comfortable.

The industrial revolution made us into cogs of the machine. Our Matrix. We
can only imagine institutional and power relationships now. We have
introduced these into every aspect of life including schools and now child
rearing where most kids are raised in daycare. Going out away from home to
work is a critical part of the deep separation that we are suffering from
ourselves and the natural world.

Erik Erikson puts it this way:

"Primitive tribes have a direct relation to the sources and means of
production. Their tools are extensions of the human body. Children in these
groups participate in technical and in magic pursuits. To them, body,
environment , childhood and culture may be full of dangers, but they are all
one world

In our world, machines, far from remaining extensions of the human body,
destine whole human organizations to be extensions of machinery; magic
serves intermediate links only and childhood becomes a separate segment of
life with its own folklore.

The expansiveness of civilization, together with its stratification and
specialization force children to base their ego models on shifting,
sectional and contradictory prototypes"

Ironically it is the new technology that may help to pull us back. The PC is
bringing back the tools of the economy to the home. The PC is an extension
of my mind - my principal hunting tool.

What I am seeing is that millions of us are in effect "hunting" again. I
bet that you are really. We are using our symbolic skills to go out there
with a small band of intimate associates who could not really be described
as employees. Look at Matt Mower and Paolo. We, as in hunting bands live or die together. Our hunting
grounds are not a sure thing, but we have enough skill and we have enough
collective skill in our band to cope with most problems and threats.

Our work and our play blend into each other. Our work and our family blend
once again into each other. Most 2 year olds can access our primary tool.
Many 8 years olds are expert. The child and the adult are reconnected with the PC..

We are also friends and co workers. The family is no longer separated from
resource gathering. In my case my children are involved as is my wife. We
are a true band in that we are a combination of social and economic unit.
New members earn their place as a result of finding us and us them via tools
like weblogs..

New tools such Groove and Blogs keep us attached over distance. The PC and
the Net enable us to form tribes through time and space based on mutual
trust and shred values. Most of us could never be farmers again.

Social Capital is I think at its heart all about these types of horizontal
relationships. People like Putnam are beginning to be able to measure it and
show how it affects all sorts of outcome. Bottom line where the
relationships are most non tribal (read most broken by industrial models)
i.e. top down such as in the South of Italy or the deep south in the US, all
outcomes are worst - health, crime , learning etc.

I can link you to Doug Wilms work here who is looking at family functioning.
Families with authoritarian and with permissive cultures have poor
behavioural and learning outcomes. Families with authoritative cultures (
who have rules but who also listen and empathically react) do very well.

This is true in the workplace as well. Marmot's work on organizations shows
the same. Nearly 20% of the payroll costs of a traditional organization are
now lost to health and absence costs driven by misery. Organizations with
managers who listen and support do much better.I am finding a large body of
scientific evidence for our worldview being at the heart of most of our
problems today.

This is why I have such hope for Groove and for making blogging simpler - we
are desperate for real human relationships. These tools encourage this.

Too much to say in an email. I will put some more links to the research on
my weblog.

Please also keep up your great work of enabling these links for all the
muggins like me who need simple tools. The big breakthrough will come when
the most techno illiterate can do a lot easily.

You ask what would be some new things. I struggle to customize my home page.
I fiddle with code to add a blogroll and to add categories. I would love to
add my picture and to do these types of things without using code as I can
do with picture on FM but not with Radio itself.

I don't need you to do these things for me but for you to have a strategy to
make radio really easy for the dweeb would bring you lots of customers I
think.

UPEI - Societal Immune Systems and Memes

Fri, 23 May 2003 10:39:20 GMT

Is resistance to ideas natural? Are the Agents in the Matrix really the white blood cells that a society uses to protect itself from new ideas that may upset the current system?

The New Renaissance - Marriage and Relationships 3- What you can expect from this book

Thu, 22 May 2003 15:06:12 GMT

What is the essence of relationships in Hunter Gatherer society? What lesson can we take from this and apply to our own relationships - to friends, to spouses and to our children.

At the heart of all our modern relationships is the need for control. Our school system is all about control. Institutional life is all about control. We seek to reform our wives and husbands. Our friends and children become improvement projects. We seek to control our own lives.Why - because the idea of property and hence the fear of its loss is our driver.

The most important piece of property that we hang onto is our life itself. The Western ideal is to cure death itself. None of this fear of the loss of property and hence control applies to a hunter gatherer. The HG has no property. A reason I believe why the native Americans were so bemused by the white man's need to negotiate treaties for land. Who could conceive of owning land in a Hunter Gatherer society. You would have hunting grounds that you would defend but you did not own and hence control the land itself. How could you, as a HG, imagine that you could control nature?

Security is still an issue but the HG finds security through working smartly with nature and relies on the collective wisdom of the group, or tribe, to tackle this difficult task. In this context then, the essence of the HG worldview is the need to develop the types of wisdom and personal value that will contribute to the survival of the group or tribe. They accept that the world out there is more powerful than they are. They know that they cannot control it - that they can only "access" it. To access its bounty, they have to understand it. To understand it they have to understand themselves and they have to be in harmony with the group so that its collective wisdom can be tapped in a timely way. So personal growth and trusted connection to the group and so to its collective wisdom is the core survival process. They depend on the community for their security up to a point but not on any individual. They take charge therefore of their own lives. Their purpose is not the illusion of happiness but of growth and integration. Power in the group comes then not from the application of force but comes to those that are the most spiritually developed and the most integrated.

Facilitation is a core skill. You act as a spiritual midwife to the growth of those in relationship with you and they return the favour.

So in this world, your spouse is your key partner is developing your self and him/her. Your job as parents is to ensure that your children have the range of experience that will set them on their course for the maximum development and hence the security of the tribe. The entire tribe participates in the raising of all the children. Your friends are part of the social and economic unit, the tribe, that gives you all the best chance of coping with a dangerous and uncertain world. Knowing that life is fragile, death has not the fear for the HG as it does for us. So paradoxically they enjoy life more. This lack of fear is not rooted in a belief but in their observation. Being students of nature, they can "see" that life does not end irrevocably but is transformed within a great cycle of death and renewal.

So how can this knowledge help us?

Since the dawn of agriculture and settled living, we have lived in a growing illusion that we can succeed in controlling the world around us. Even our new Gods have set us apart and in control over nature. For us, controlling nature is our Destiny. In small areas we applied technology and it looked as if we would conquer nature. Today we are seeing the cracks. Disease such as AIDS and SARS. Breakdown in the food system - mad cow. Weather anomalies. In our institutions we spin the wheels harder and harder but we accomplish less and less. Many loyal and hard working employees are getting laid off and cannot see why their deal with the company has failed. Most families today are one parent. Marriage is failing as a concept that we can live with. More than 30% of our children are failing in school. Many have to be drugged to stay in school. Addiction to things, to sugar and to escape is rising. Look at what we are watching on TV now!!!! Health care cost, especially drug use are out of control.

The illusion of our being able to use technology to control our world is cracking.

Controlling what cannot be controlled is exhausting - Hunter Gatherers show us that there is a societal model that we can apply again which at its heart is built on one idea which we can replicate. That one idea is that we cannot control others, or the world. There is only one person that we can control and that is ourself. In this world of accepted uncertainly comes a new security. This security is based on the power of a group to solve complex problems and to understand the world so that they can cope with it.

Our security come with earning a place in such a group. In tribal life there are no handouts.

Such an idea does not require us to wear skins and go back to hunting in the classic sense just as the ideas of the greeks and the Romans did not require men in the 14th century to put on togas. Many of us are starting to accept that we cannot control others or the world. Many of us are already earning our place in social and economic tribes. Web-logging itself is I think an important agent in this process. Many of us are now self-employed in an new way and if we look carefully are in fact "hunting and gathering". The world of the Hunter Gatherer - the world of wild and not domesticated humans - our home for 4 million years is I think re- emerging from a 7,000 year experiment with domestication where the HG thought he was domesticating plants and animals but ended up domesticating himself!

For me, this book written in public is a voyage of discovery - I have some ideas already but they will become clear to me and to you as I write more. It would be fun to have you along for the voyage.

I have an old map found after 15 years of reading. Here is where I intend to go. I will look at work itself and how the economy in HG terms could be adapted to our circumstances. Inside this part we will look at the ideas of the Gift and of a world view of Abundance. We will see how the Hunter Mindset fits the emerging world of the Free Agent Nation. We will look at how HG groups governed themselves. We will look at their relationship to food, water and the spirit. We will see how they dealt with the issues of health and education and how they used the power of the community to have the most important impact on both. We will look at art as a functional world of participants rather than voyeurs. We will examine the world of the spirit and how the HG made the connections to the universe and to the natural world and integrated this into his being. We will look at how gender operated as two distinct worlds that came together as opposites to offer the power of the whole. We will see the difference between property and place. Place being the intensely understood piece of land where all was known about and where the soul resided for all time. We will look at the needs for us to fit into not only place but into a social scale that enables and supports community and growth (Magic Numbers) We will reconsider time and discover once again the access points to dream or non linear time. We will look at the stages of life, their gateways from child to youth to man to sage, We will look at death and finally we will look at purpose and how Hunter Gathers find meaning in their lives.

Welcome to this journey

The New Renaissance - Marriage and Relationships 2 - moving from should to self

Fri, 16 May 2003 13:19:28 GMT

What is the basis for the Tribal view of human relationships and hence marriage.?

Our environment and our interaction with it shapes our culture or world view. The critical difference between a traditional tribal culture and our own is the concept of how we get our food - or the economy.

Preagricultural society was always on the move. They did not control their food source, they interacted with it. These two strands, mobility and integration with nature, form the base of their culture. Being on the move meant that Hunter Gatherers could only have a very small number of physical goods. The idea of property, central to a settled world view, is an unknown idea. being settled the first thing we do is to begin to accumulate goods and things. Also with agriculture and herding control of property is critical. With a settled food source - land and fixed herding grounds with "owned water" property ownership and its protection and control becomes the overwhelming worldview - So for us control has become hardwired. For the HG, property and control is unknowable ideas. Share my pot, I can always make another one. How does one control game? How does one control the weather, drought or flood?

My sense is that these ideas of property and control are the main differences between the modern world view and the HG world view. As such theory affect all aspects of the two cultures.

The HG parent does not seek to own or control her children. Discipline is not a feature of HG child rearing. Children learn by watching and experiencing. The HG husband and wife are partnered in a life and death challenge to keep the tribe, the larger unit of the two of them going. They know that their survival and future depends on the success of their interrelation with the group as a social and economic unit. They do not see their role as the reformer of the other. Nor do they own the other. Nor do they have to be solely responsible for ... still drafting more later

The New Renaissance - The Matrix - What world do we live in?

Thu, 15 May 2003 23:17:22 GMT

No one who watched "The Matrix" with even 10 percent of his or her brain engaged could have missed the fact that, at least potentially, it was a social and political allegory of tremendous resonance. Predictably, the major media coverage of the film, in 1999 and subsequently, has focused on its technological marvels and understood its more radical, even dialectical dimension as some kind of smug, ironic gamesmanship. The Wachowskis' real innovations, conventional wisdom holds, came in the "Bullet Time" sequence or in their appropriation and expansion of John Woo's action-movie vocabulary. The apparently contradictory fact that this same big-budget action movie, distributed by a gigantic infotainment conglomerate, suggested that our entire culture was an illusion and that we had been hopelessly enslaved and cut off from real life by our own technology was conveniently overlooked.

From Salon