We have power, we have power, we have so much power.
How many rooms I have been in, full of beautiful minds not listening to one another. Like this one I'm in now.
How many neighborhoods I have been in, every one, with so many beautiful minds, hearts and wills and resources, people doing so much work, coming together only to fall asleep at the droning lecture or to clash in difference of opinion. Like this one.
A part of us knows that, if we could orchestrate these energies in some different way, somehow the outcomes could be so different. Our meetings could be joyous, our neighborhoods beautiful. Life could be musical. The dirty, empty street would undoubtedly be shaded with trees, lined with benches full of people talking.
The question for me then is: how do we disentangle the mess? How do we unlock the power in the room, the power in the neighborhoods, the power in the nations?
Look at a computer. Look at the extraordinary delicacy of its components and microcomponents. Open up a microchip. Look at it with a microscope. You will see hundreds of thousands of tiny filaments, all exquisitely organized, like the plumbing of a house all orderly, only on a much finer and more complex level, exquisitely orderly.
But scramble just a few of these filaments and the whole thing breaks down. It's a heap of junk. Toss it.
Or take an analogy with a software application. Miles and miles of delicate code, all working towards one unified purpose! But introduce only one tiny bug, or the smallest bit of "corruption," and programmers and users alike are sent into paroxysms of frustration.
That’s how it is with humans and our society. Each of us is a fine filament of power. If we could only align with one another, what we could do together would surpass any supercomputer on earth. We could transform the planet so that every neighborhood was a marvel of truth and architectural beauty, of human friendliness and celebration and love and wonder.
That's the sort of imagining, no doubt, that gets dictators to salivating. It's true, a lot can get accomplished when some Generalissimo commands all to be soldiers and to line up in one, same direction. The trouble with the bargain is that all the soldiers have to sell their minds and souls, which unfortunately means they are liable to do the unthinkable. Another, related, trouble is that this arrangement puts the single Generalissimo at the top, where he and his counterparts issue the commands, and then others are arranged to occupy successively lower layers, one above the other all the way to the bottom, where someone has the job of scraping horrid things off the floor. This likely creates resentments and imbalances and unfruitful ambitions to climb upwards over the backs of others.
The more beautiful dream, instead of this, is for all the parts to coordinate with one another in a marvelous dance. The way to realize this is to create the conditions of the self-organizing dance, where all the parts find room for their individual vibrations to resonate with the larger whole. This admits of much more complexity and creativity. Over the long run, more productivity and efficiency is likely, though it may be less visible due to the overwashes of surplus power spilling out everywhere sloppily and extravagantly, causing consternation for some.
The poor woman working to clean toilets today is someone’s grandmother with the most delicate imaginings and a heart and stories to tell that could make us weep. I spoke to a woman in my neighborhood - at the gathering we organized on our street - and learned that she had come here from El Salvador during the war, years ago. She had found work and had struggled to get by, saving whatever money she could along the way. Little by little she had saved enough to bring her whole family to be here with her. And there with us across the table sat her aged mother, silent, not knowing the language, deferential to me, feeling out of place, dressed in her indigenous costume.
I marveled at what this woman had accomplished with few resources, with determination, love, commitment. And yet I was struck too, by how little she expected to be noticed, how she had become used to not being seen or noticed in our community, at least by the likes of myself. Her avenues of power were her own, hidden, not written up in books, developed in an immense underground labyrinth that our "public world" does not know how to acknowledge or embrace. In the caves and tunnels of poverty are beauties and powers we do not know how to discover.
Why don't we seek to invite the love, skill and knowledge in these hearts so that it flows into our communities? Why do we not have a way to unleash the productive, loving energies that abound in our world? We are locked into a system of scarcity that does not know how to open up our inherent abundance.
So many fine filaments, conduits of electrical energy, yet tangle up a only a few of them, or just one, and the whole thing is junk. That’s like us. We are such finely wrought instruments, and yet ... often it only takes one person in a room with a gripe, a loud voice, an angry insistence, to stop a meeting cold.
We are so finely wrought that our potential to clash is great. We prefer to dumb down our system rather than risk unleashing energies that we fear uncontrollable.
Our whole culture is such a messy tangle, because of its extraordinary diversity and also its everywhere connectedness. We are a very bad mess of spaghetti knotted up. Everyone is everywhere and nowhere. Everything is in motion and change. It is so complex. To act, we need to simplify. We need moments to coordinate. We need the patience to listen largely. We need to make room for all to show up, before we impose our impatience to act.
Each strand needs room and appreciation.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Policy follows Practice - Shifting from Mammon to Maman!
“Policy follows Practice – Shifting from Mammon to Maman”
The written law always takes its meaning from the actual practices of the people, i.e. gets “interpreted”by the going system to reflect and support the workings of that system — the “real” U.S. Constitution is not the document written in 1789, but the actual systemic workings of the beast that actually is US culture. (This means that trying to effect change through mere “policy” reform is pretty much futile, although that’s not my focus at the moment).
In fact, understanding the “real” constitution as the underlying system of practices and not its representation is how the notion of a political “constitution” was understood prior to the writing of the US document. It was Montesquieu, I believe, who coined the term “constitution” to refer to the system of governance of Britain, which was not based on a written document, but had grown up out of historical practices into a balanced system of powers of King and Parliament. When Montesquieu said “constitution,” he meant the practices, not a piece of paper. In England, there was no such piece of paper, no written constitution.
Following this logic, the “actual” US Constitution in the era of the Founders (i.e. the system of actual practices, i.e. the operation of the people in a system of express and unexpress coordinated intentions) was what “produced” the document we know as the “written” Constitution. This accords with what Benjamin Franklin always said: that the real “American Revolution” occurred before the revolutionary war ever started.
It has for a long time been a belief of mine that what is great about "America" — the waif of democratic spirit that still wafts elusively in the air somewhere, still attracts the hopes and dreams of people everywhere around the world, a small kernel of honesty, uprightness, goodness and liberty — this was established and grew in actuality for a while around this time preceding the American Revolution until about 1830 or so (when Emerson reached maturity). Yes, it grew amid a wood rife with evil elements like slavery and patriarchy, yet still it grew; our work is to distinguish the gems in the junkpile as well as the fetid bits. In my dissertation, I wrote about Emerson as living on the cusp of change when the old America and its era of “classical” politics was left behind and something new arose, the era of industrialization, the market economy based, in part, on money created by private banks.
For a long time I didn't at all understand — what I still want to understand more deeply -- the significance of this war of Andrew Jackson's on the establishment of a national US bank, a war Jackson finally lost in 1830. Why was Jackson and so much of the American public at the time so hot about this issue of banks?? Whenever anyone talked about money and banks I got sleepy. Yawn. I looked elsewhere. For some reason, I just couldn’t get myself to look at it. Now I am getting a hint that understanding this sleepiness, this deep-seated restless inability to look, is key to understanding what I and everyone else in our culture is suppressing. It is the great spell upon us. We have inhaled the scent of the poppies that overcame Dorothy, the Lion and the Tin Man.
As I awaken, as I regain my ability to stand and look at what seemed so inherently lacking in interest, I start to understand more clearly how much money and public power — democracy — are related. Money is simply agreement, and the power of a culture to agree is its power to create law that works and that rarely needs to be "enforced" because it is willingly supported by all in daily practice, and reflects popular awareness, thought and desire. This kind of law is not a stick to corral and beat people with, but a reflection of community harmony and wisdom. A glint of the possibility is contained in words like "We the people" and the inspiring sentiment that attaches to them.
One of the ways of stating the problem is that money, as it exists today, is something that all of us use all of the time, but that none of us has a hand in creating; hence by using money we become parties to a pseudo-agreement of which we are not fully aware, which is the perfect picture of what psychologists call "co-dependency." We are hoodwinked and asleep to what is going on. We remain as children being told what to do, and we do not realize that the choice of what to do is our own! All of the money in the system and then some is owned by private banks when money is properly a public power.
According to the monetary view of American history as told by Ellen Brown in this video link (or rather as I see the implications of that history), the American invention of paper money during the era of the Revolution reflected the “classical” or “American Revolutionary” spirit of liberty, the public good, and popular sovereignty; then, in 1830, when the private central Bank on the model of England’s National bank established itself in this country, America got hooked back into the privatized, debt-based money scheme, and non-exploitative prosperity began its great decline.
The most painful part of this decline has occurred with the displacement of "third world" farmers and indigenous cultures around the earth (displaced so that "natural resources" could be taken). This "offshore" exploitation made possible the gradual shifting of Americans themselves from a small-town agricultural to an urban industrial and financial economic basis, in a process that was not here painful, as elsewhere, but was conducted with happy consumerist glee enabling wide popular buy-in to the new system. A home and two-car garage with electric appliances for all! became the new American dream, pushing aside older dreams about democracy, liberty and heavenly communities on earth, dreams that had even given names to some of our cities and towns, such as "Concord" and "Philadelphia" (City of brotherly love). Thereby changes slowly occured in the "actual" practices and relationships underlying our "written" Constitution, ultimately usurping that constitution and the system of popular governance it imperfectly established.
Ellen Brown (5 part series -- I haven’t watched the whole thing yet): Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_ZbEVfKJ1w&feature=related
Once the banking system was taken over, the people who were independent and free started to line up for the money that the banks controlled. (Get in line! All the money is over here. Want a job?) Everyone was, slowly, over time, forced to get into the cue. More and more the public lands and the prevailing quasi-public** distribution of land into the hands of many, many, many, many independent self-sufficient individual farmers (at that time 90% of the population), came under the control of fewer and fewer individuals. Landless folks were brought over by the boatload to help speed up the transformation, importing hierarchy and competition here instead of exporting liberty elsewhere.
And here, there was a great, slow sucking towards one central drain: the drain being the growing money power. This drain was in effect a hole punched into the container, the closed system of the American way of life, and the spirit began draining out the hole. This hole coalesces finally with the hole that I identified in my dissertation: in the cosmos of walking distances and direct sensual enjoyment, with sky above, friends and trees at our sides, and earth beneath our feet, a rip was torn open, and the attention of the people was directed to other scales for organizing life: the microscopic and the macroscopic, relations of distance and alienation based on thought-representations. As stated in the poem Louis sent me recently:
Seen from
outside creation
earth and sky
aren't worth
a box of matches.
When we devalue our own direct experience relative to representations of outside authority, we lose our power.
The great danger expressed in these spare poetic lines is the danger of general conflagration: if a culture continues to live for too long on the earth as if it were far, far removed -- for example, from the distant perspective far away in space from which the earth looks to us as round -- we risk developing some powers (e.g. technological, coercive, warlike) and losing others (e.g. moral, communal, relational, loving) that could lead to our blowing the whole thing up. If you lose touch with what you love and where you came from, you may regretfully strike the match that burns all bridges.
Money is a human creation. How we create it, however, makes all the difference in how we experience money, how we view it, what emotions we associate with it. Turn the diamond just a little left or right, and the light refracts and a sparkle lights up. Money is sort of like that. We can make it a mixture, as it is today, of golden light and success for some, and ugly debt, misery and failure for others, or we can make it into a source of ever-increasing light. Money is something like that image that the gestalt psychologists liked to pass around, the one where you can see the same drawing as a beautiful woman or an old hag depending on how you focus your perspective. Money is mammon, a god of greed and gluttony, or maman, a loving mother that brings the best out of everyone.
I don't see how to get to this loving place except through a new conversation. Every moment that any of us can spare from the daily grind, from urgency and necessity, to think and reflect together in a loving spirit -- that is an instance of the conversation that we need to have. Right now, one of my main projects in the world is to create the conversation we need to have so that we can align with one another to discover and deepen, step by step, where all of our hopes, desires and energies can align with one another -- i.e. I am creating action-oriented conversations that bring together the full diversity of affected and relevant stakeholders in order to (1) create a shared big picture in which every perspective sees itself fully acknowledged and (2) discover values and goals that absolutely everyone agrees upon.
When and where all perspectives coalesce into shared understanding and agreed-upon directions, that is where any group is ready to take its next steps together in a direction that includes everyone. Everyone. And, each time we take those steps, no matter how small, each step enlarges our capacity to increase the depth and breadth of a group's agreements, of its inclusivity, which in turn enables the next steps to emerge. With each step, our embrace widens.
That is what I want in this world, and in ourselves, and what I believe each of us wants for the world and for ourselves -- each of us wants that capacity to love everyone. Someone who truly loves everyone, someone who truly loves even me, that is a person that I will love, truly love. Imagine being such a person yourself, in a world of such people.
These system-wide agreements, this widening embrace, goes by the name of Trust; more than that, I am talking about an expanding Public Trust. Public Trust is the basis of all good Law and good Money and good Works and happy Community.
A system to build Public Trust and Public Direction is a system of Governance.
Let us shift from a System of Mammon to a System of Maman!***
[**This notion of the quasi-public is very interesting to me: it is the state of affairs that happens when everyone is an uncompromised individual. It is like the start of a future search, the condition for establishing a shared framework. Why I call it quasi is because I distinguish between everyone in “actual fact” being accorded uncompromised independence of living (e.g. A country of Jefferson’s “self-sufficient farmers) and the actual acknowledgment and recognition of this fact by all participants to create an agreement in the public mind to preserve that state of affairs, which transforms the quasi-public object into a true and veritable public object.]
*** Tree Fitzpatrick - When this thought showed up, I thought of you, Tree, and the thoughts you've shared with me about mother love and systems change.
The written law always takes its meaning from the actual practices of the people, i.e. gets “interpreted”by the going system to reflect and support the workings of that system — the “real” U.S. Constitution is not the document written in 1789, but the actual systemic workings of the beast that actually is US culture. (This means that trying to effect change through mere “policy” reform is pretty much futile, although that’s not my focus at the moment).
In fact, understanding the “real” constitution as the underlying system of practices and not its representation is how the notion of a political “constitution” was understood prior to the writing of the US document. It was Montesquieu, I believe, who coined the term “constitution” to refer to the system of governance of Britain, which was not based on a written document, but had grown up out of historical practices into a balanced system of powers of King and Parliament. When Montesquieu said “constitution,” he meant the practices, not a piece of paper. In England, there was no such piece of paper, no written constitution.
Following this logic, the “actual” US Constitution in the era of the Founders (i.e. the system of actual practices, i.e. the operation of the people in a system of express and unexpress coordinated intentions) was what “produced” the document we know as the “written” Constitution. This accords with what Benjamin Franklin always said: that the real “American Revolution” occurred before the revolutionary war ever started.
It has for a long time been a belief of mine that what is great about "America" — the waif of democratic spirit that still wafts elusively in the air somewhere, still attracts the hopes and dreams of people everywhere around the world, a small kernel of honesty, uprightness, goodness and liberty — this was established and grew in actuality for a while around this time preceding the American Revolution until about 1830 or so (when Emerson reached maturity). Yes, it grew amid a wood rife with evil elements like slavery and patriarchy, yet still it grew; our work is to distinguish the gems in the junkpile as well as the fetid bits. In my dissertation, I wrote about Emerson as living on the cusp of change when the old America and its era of “classical” politics was left behind and something new arose, the era of industrialization, the market economy based, in part, on money created by private banks.
For a long time I didn't at all understand — what I still want to understand more deeply -- the significance of this war of Andrew Jackson's on the establishment of a national US bank, a war Jackson finally lost in 1830. Why was Jackson and so much of the American public at the time so hot about this issue of banks?? Whenever anyone talked about money and banks I got sleepy. Yawn. I looked elsewhere. For some reason, I just couldn’t get myself to look at it. Now I am getting a hint that understanding this sleepiness, this deep-seated restless inability to look, is key to understanding what I and everyone else in our culture is suppressing. It is the great spell upon us. We have inhaled the scent of the poppies that overcame Dorothy, the Lion and the Tin Man.
As I awaken, as I regain my ability to stand and look at what seemed so inherently lacking in interest, I start to understand more clearly how much money and public power — democracy — are related. Money is simply agreement, and the power of a culture to agree is its power to create law that works and that rarely needs to be "enforced" because it is willingly supported by all in daily practice, and reflects popular awareness, thought and desire. This kind of law is not a stick to corral and beat people with, but a reflection of community harmony and wisdom. A glint of the possibility is contained in words like "We the people" and the inspiring sentiment that attaches to them.
One of the ways of stating the problem is that money, as it exists today, is something that all of us use all of the time, but that none of us has a hand in creating; hence by using money we become parties to a pseudo-agreement of which we are not fully aware, which is the perfect picture of what psychologists call "co-dependency." We are hoodwinked and asleep to what is going on. We remain as children being told what to do, and we do not realize that the choice of what to do is our own! All of the money in the system and then some is owned by private banks when money is properly a public power.
According to the monetary view of American history as told by Ellen Brown in this video link (or rather as I see the implications of that history), the American invention of paper money during the era of the Revolution reflected the “classical” or “American Revolutionary” spirit of liberty, the public good, and popular sovereignty; then, in 1830, when the private central Bank on the model of England’s National bank established itself in this country, America got hooked back into the privatized, debt-based money scheme, and non-exploitative prosperity began its great decline.
The most painful part of this decline has occurred with the displacement of "third world" farmers and indigenous cultures around the earth (displaced so that "natural resources" could be taken). This "offshore" exploitation made possible the gradual shifting of Americans themselves from a small-town agricultural to an urban industrial and financial economic basis, in a process that was not here painful, as elsewhere, but was conducted with happy consumerist glee enabling wide popular buy-in to the new system. A home and two-car garage with electric appliances for all! became the new American dream, pushing aside older dreams about democracy, liberty and heavenly communities on earth, dreams that had even given names to some of our cities and towns, such as "Concord" and "Philadelphia" (City of brotherly love). Thereby changes slowly occured in the "actual" practices and relationships underlying our "written" Constitution, ultimately usurping that constitution and the system of popular governance it imperfectly established.
Ellen Brown (5 part series -- I haven’t watched the whole thing yet): Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_ZbEVfKJ1w&feature=related
Once the banking system was taken over, the people who were independent and free started to line up for the money that the banks controlled. (Get in line! All the money is over here. Want a job?) Everyone was, slowly, over time, forced to get into the cue. More and more the public lands and the prevailing quasi-public** distribution of land into the hands of many, many, many, many independent self-sufficient individual farmers (at that time 90% of the population), came under the control of fewer and fewer individuals. Landless folks were brought over by the boatload to help speed up the transformation, importing hierarchy and competition here instead of exporting liberty elsewhere.
And here, there was a great, slow sucking towards one central drain: the drain being the growing money power. This drain was in effect a hole punched into the container, the closed system of the American way of life, and the spirit began draining out the hole. This hole coalesces finally with the hole that I identified in my dissertation: in the cosmos of walking distances and direct sensual enjoyment, with sky above, friends and trees at our sides, and earth beneath our feet, a rip was torn open, and the attention of the people was directed to other scales for organizing life: the microscopic and the macroscopic, relations of distance and alienation based on thought-representations. As stated in the poem Louis sent me recently:
Seen from
outside creation
earth and sky
aren't worth
a box of matches.
When we devalue our own direct experience relative to representations of outside authority, we lose our power.
The great danger expressed in these spare poetic lines is the danger of general conflagration: if a culture continues to live for too long on the earth as if it were far, far removed -- for example, from the distant perspective far away in space from which the earth looks to us as round -- we risk developing some powers (e.g. technological, coercive, warlike) and losing others (e.g. moral, communal, relational, loving) that could lead to our blowing the whole thing up. If you lose touch with what you love and where you came from, you may regretfully strike the match that burns all bridges.
Money is a human creation. How we create it, however, makes all the difference in how we experience money, how we view it, what emotions we associate with it. Turn the diamond just a little left or right, and the light refracts and a sparkle lights up. Money is sort of like that. We can make it a mixture, as it is today, of golden light and success for some, and ugly debt, misery and failure for others, or we can make it into a source of ever-increasing light. Money is something like that image that the gestalt psychologists liked to pass around, the one where you can see the same drawing as a beautiful woman or an old hag depending on how you focus your perspective. Money is mammon, a god of greed and gluttony, or maman, a loving mother that brings the best out of everyone.
I don't see how to get to this loving place except through a new conversation. Every moment that any of us can spare from the daily grind, from urgency and necessity, to think and reflect together in a loving spirit -- that is an instance of the conversation that we need to have. Right now, one of my main projects in the world is to create the conversation we need to have so that we can align with one another to discover and deepen, step by step, where all of our hopes, desires and energies can align with one another -- i.e. I am creating action-oriented conversations that bring together the full diversity of affected and relevant stakeholders in order to (1) create a shared big picture in which every perspective sees itself fully acknowledged and (2) discover values and goals that absolutely everyone agrees upon.
When and where all perspectives coalesce into shared understanding and agreed-upon directions, that is where any group is ready to take its next steps together in a direction that includes everyone. Everyone. And, each time we take those steps, no matter how small, each step enlarges our capacity to increase the depth and breadth of a group's agreements, of its inclusivity, which in turn enables the next steps to emerge. With each step, our embrace widens.
That is what I want in this world, and in ourselves, and what I believe each of us wants for the world and for ourselves -- each of us wants that capacity to love everyone. Someone who truly loves everyone, someone who truly loves even me, that is a person that I will love, truly love. Imagine being such a person yourself, in a world of such people.
These system-wide agreements, this widening embrace, goes by the name of Trust; more than that, I am talking about an expanding Public Trust. Public Trust is the basis of all good Law and good Money and good Works and happy Community.
A system to build Public Trust and Public Direction is a system of Governance.
Let us shift from a System of Mammon to a System of Maman!***
[**This notion of the quasi-public is very interesting to me: it is the state of affairs that happens when everyone is an uncompromised individual. It is like the start of a future search, the condition for establishing a shared framework. Why I call it quasi is because I distinguish between everyone in “actual fact” being accorded uncompromised independence of living (e.g. A country of Jefferson’s “self-sufficient farmers) and the actual acknowledgment and recognition of this fact by all participants to create an agreement in the public mind to preserve that state of affairs, which transforms the quasi-public object into a true and veritable public object.]
*** Tree Fitzpatrick - When this thought showed up, I thought of you, Tree, and the thoughts you've shared with me about mother love and systems change.
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