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I believe we are failing to address some fundamental assumptions about the situation that this planet faces. It is a responsibility of all who are attempting to change the world to address every assumption and to refuse to build a new world on assumptions that have not been followed through to their conclusions.
I am currently a student on an MA course in Sustainable Development Advocacy. During the initial month of the course I repeatedly raised what appear to be to be two major unchallenged assumptions about forms and scales of human organisation, human ecology, and their relationship with sustainability. This was in the context of a range of dependent but easier questions. And of course you guessed it, the assumptions were generally stepped over in pursuit of the easier questions: let’s build our new house without any foundations for now since they are the hard part – we’ll somehow find a way to squeeze them in later!
So let me try to get these assumptions out:
Civilisation is good – the Ascent of Man. Err, I don’t agree. It could be good or bad depending on what is to be achieved with it. Let’s talk further before reaching conclusions.
Human organisation in terms of civilisation’s strongly hierarchical socio-economic structure is inviolable. Err, no. such hierarchies must continue to grow or they will naturally collapse (Jeff Vail – Hierarchy Must Grow and is Unsustainable). This is not only true of capitalism which is also strongly hierarchical (economists understand that infinite economic growth is essential to capitalism) but the whole of our socio-economic organisation. In fact it is intractably a partner of the population problem so lets give it the same prominence and discuss it as such!
Agrarian life is a ‘hair shirt’. Not today it ain’t. With or without books and internet human society has enough knowledge now that we could live comfortably in a permacultural existence if – no group is permitted to source staple resources outside of its bioregion and if – non-hierarchical principles of organisation are applied (e.g. locally legitimate authority and distributed democratic processes such as anarcho-syndicalism). Why are we accepting the ‘hair shirt’ assertion so very easily?
An urban, techologically based way of life is what we desire and its absence – a non-civilised life – is a “war of all against all” and thus “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Well, civilisation achieves these descriptors with its ever increasing dependency, through war driven by those at the top of the hierarchy and hence most dependent, on imported resources from other peoples’ communities. And those who live outside civilisation, peoples who never experienced The Fall, those in no need of salvation, would not understand what Hobbes was saying. Hobbes point of view came from within the culture of civilisation (which IMHO due to the lack of natural population control is the cause of bellum omnium contra omnes!). Such classical perspectives on nature and man were built on civilised culture making assumptions and misinterpreting Judeo-Christian history of the birth of civilisation and Eden: a misconception of Genesis in the bible itself – See Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Those premises have clouded our view of what civilisation is for millennia. Hobbes, a product of classical culture, would not understand the perspective of a pastoral or hunter-gatherer culture. Let’s continue to discuss!
Unless we challenge such fundamental assumptions, in particular assumptions about what civilisation is and what it does, assumptions that seem to many people to be set in stone, then we are not going to solve the sustainability problem but will simply whitewash over the core problem so that future generations, and Gaia, have to deal with them. We must take responsibility for the hard questions, today.
In the area of social sciences in which I am specialised we tend to view some global macrosphere events such as the credit crunch and general economics as a wild area in which the unpredictable can sneak up and wipe out long-term gains overnight. We call this the 1:106 problem: How do we predict the one in a million, but highly significant and potentially catastrophic, event in a wild world?
My area of specialism is on people’s state of situation awareness or SA in dynamic real-world situations of scale variability. One of my current areas of research (2001-) has been to develop ways of teaching people strategies for maintaining better SA or for enhancing the way in which a group develops shared SA – and my conclusions so far (congruent with Taleb, 2006) are that SA depends on principles of attention switching across modes (contexts), intuitive-rational interplay, and mental simulation, all within a process of suspending drilling-down or action until the most appropriate moment. That most appropriate ‘moment’, in psychological-social terms, seems to be perceptible from relationships between patterns of data rather than from the particular patterns themselves – joining the dots; systems thinking – holistic thinking? This can be most appropriately called ‘ecological thinking’ where it is the links and relationships that are key rather than the specifics, whether those be abstracted means or abstracted concepts of attractor-nodes; both of which are not properties of reality but properties of the mind making sense of the world.
In any given situation some of us are more aware of current events and likely future events than are others. Experts tend to have better SA, but only certain kinds of experts have the best SA; these appear to be the experts who have both the knowledge and the know-how in a wild world rather than in an assumed world of central tendencies and discrete ‘things’ (C.f. Taleb, 2006 who predicted the banking crisis). These experts can respond automatically and with a high degree of accuracy in building advantage against a complex environment in some required context, and can also come out of the automatic when attention must be effortfully redirected to some certain focus or context for such advantage.
Such experts’ experts can also experience strong processes of psychological flow and unflappable relaxation as they maintain ‘metacognition’ while switching between conscious and unconscious processing. I feel that what psychologists mystically call meta cognition is really a way of alluding to a lack of distinction between consciousness in the person and consciousness in the world when a person is able to read the reality of the external world; learning to ride the world as a benign master between limits of equilibrium but to maximise benefit wherever possible to the self within the limits of the self – in the knowledge that eventually the advantage will be lost but for the present a game is won.
The experts’ experts are good at sitting in the waiting room of uncertainty and holding their water until the right confluence of factors emerge for a desired win. The context can be the global situation, or sub-contexts, or even ‘out-of-the-box’ new perspectives – a thinking style that relates more closely to structures seen in network theory, Mandelbrotian maths, and their consequent narratives rather than with Gaussian measurement methods. Real experts are up at the edge of the competition-cooperation paradox looking over the horizon to glimpses of true reality. They have what we tend to call wisdom, they are closer to mystics than professors, they know that their main task is not to manage the known and mundane but to be vigilant in order to identify the unknown unknowns that are waiting around the corner with a sting in the tail.
You never truly get there
Those unknown unknowns can be predicted to emerge when certain processes occur in linkages between patterns. I am currently working on artificial intelligence (AI; connectionist modelling) processes that highlight such changes and bring them to the attention of a system operator either in real-time simulators, real system control, or in data mining techniques such as social network analysis. But it is only a way of maximising cumulative advantage, squeezing the tiniest extra bit of cognitive performance out of the computational machine. Somewhat odd since I am not a competitive person myself; I hate playing to win. But we will never get to 100 percent, not in the lifetime of this universe with its physical laws, even set as beautiful and elegant as they are.
Experts try though. They are dynamic, they continue to scan the data, system, airspace, society, for emerging risks, whereas novices lock-on to the most salient current risk and do not move their cognition effectively across events in order to see emerging patterns from different perspectives. The best experts are always scanning, interpreting, tracking events from past to present and back again, consciously and unconsciously, and they do not have firmly fixed ideas about the future. The best experts are round not square. They are looking for salient relationships between events, not the events themselves, for areas of risk to be attended to. In my models the maths are nothing spectacular but what is novel is configuration to measure dynamically changing contexts and relationships between contexts – a combination of connectionist modelling and iterative multi-dimensional scaling is the basis of the method.
Free your mind
Fixed ideas and the search for certainty are very much the domain of classical thought not the realm of wholistic nature and certainly not at the supra-atomic scale. The reifying of Kantian categories, that are more likely emergent properties, into theories of human nature is one area in which classical thought has been misapplied from physical sciences to more complex behaviours of nature such as those found in social science.
Our heritage, and partly innate use, of classical thinking in order to reduce uncertainty means that we are increasingly living in what Taleb calls Mediocristan, in which the world appears more predictable and certain than it is due to the projection of classically derived theory and logical positivism onto the real world. In reality Taleb argues that we live in Extremistan where unknown unknowns abound free of measurement. We are only looking at what is measured-classified!
Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan makes the argument in the context of theory development in social sciences (particularly areas like economics) that we should avoid drilling down in focus when our classical thinking bias has directed us to look at the current most-likely event. This is because in a real, complex non-linear world the current most likely event is just that – both current and measured. Without knowing what is unmeasured (because we have no context from which to measure other than unknown!) we cannot predict the impact of future low probability events in a dynamic complex wild system.
We need to maintain nuance, and a sense of uncertainty, about the conjunction of present events and our anticipation of future events. This is the true expert who flies by the seat of his/er pants while keeping their sharp mind flashing across concurrent multiple contexts. Taleb’s book is well worth a read, I agree wholly with its thesis regarding how best to stay aware and ahead, it offers the reader some tips (applicable to individuals and shared cognitive settings) on how to achieve this state of action-decision-action mental equilibrium.
So what has this to do with sustainability?
Well, almost everything. It appears that our education system, our institutions of action and thought, our governance, our overall systems of civilisation, are based mostly on processes of classical thinking. This has resulted in the notion that if (apparent) problems are isolated and then solved sequentially then the Ascent of Man will continue unabated. This has resulted in the notion that Leviathan is infallible, the only alternative to the untested, and hence the only option despite its crumbling foundations. Institutional processes adhere very strongly to this kind of information processing.
If the economy is understood and fixed in isolation, then economic growth will continue, despite the sciences based around ecological understanding and physics telling us that the problems of economics cannot occur in isolation. Economists are in charge at present and their theories about the interplay of the individual, society, and environment are therefore in the foreground – we are all being invited at present to drill-down into the problems of the economy to the neglect of many many other contexts. The true experts and the wise among us will be standing back and joining the dots – looking at the big picture and seeing that the problem is far more complex.
However, unlike Taleb I am of the mind that experts, social science experts who look at multiple contexts and interactions holistically, can help by identifying and targeting multiple nodes in the system that are critical to the overall problem. For me the problem is one of specialisms driven by reified classical ideas versus broad ecologically driven complex process thinking. I predict that it is within the habitat of institutions that you will find the former and in the wild leftfield ecology where you will find the latter.
If there is such a class of people known as the Illuminati elite then this is what they will be doing right now: scanning the Big Picture, looking at its nuances and emerging properties for opportunities – and rigging the game, constructing the ludos from first principles of incremental and cumulative advantage. Such advantage is anathema to grass-roots empowerment and human diversity – get this one point – we all end up following the classically predicated standards set by the leaders, we can all end up playing the game created by the leaders’ rules.
Likewise but on the inverse, ecologists and sustainability thinkers-actors (philopraxists) are trying to draw society’s attention to the interaction of problems and how those interactions can be broken or remedied as appropriate. In the latter case there are no rules, no standards, no qualifications or best methods, no specialisms, just interconnections and qualitative interpretations. However, few want to step outside the comfort of conformity into this alternative world of ecological-economic-social uncertainty.
Ecological thinking then is the ability to switch contexts in pursuit of patterns that are interconnected across contexts. Walking through wild nature our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have done just that, people from non-developed or primitive societies tend to do just that.
It’s our Western educated population that has been entranced by the certainties of classical (Taleb calls it Platonic) thinking after the tradition of Platonism vs. aPlatonism and the emergence of what appears to be a Mediocristan-of-certainty but which is really an Extremistan of stacked-up political-economic power but riddled with potential catastrophes (e.g. the banking crisis that Taleb predicted) and opportunities that are only seen by the few – i.e., the freemen elites versus the counter-culture subversives – who are empowered to step outside that thinking mode.
Furthermore, in my view classical thinking has led to the idea that there is a best way in any specialisation – standardisation – and hence the growth in socio-economic hierarchy based around economic and social centralisation. We are a monoculture – our eggs are in the basket called society and culture (Derrick Jensen’s Culture of Make Believe) and it is becoming ever less diverse. This economic centralisation is a highly fragile and the eggs are becoming ever more tasteless. The Culture of Make Believe is almost synonymous with Taleb’s idea of Mediocristan.
We can define the other way of thinking, the non-classical mode of thought, non-theorising imaginative use of attention and creative problem solving, direct perception, as eco-thinking. It is an imperative for the coming Ecological Age. It is supported by the experiences of the eco-therapy movement: take people out of the context of Western institutionalised social structures and put them on farms and amid nature and their mental-physical state improves; and they see the world more holistically and from the bottom-up. They are back in their natural environment where they can exhibit their natural tendency for eco-thinking, perceiving the natural world and their self as an interconnected whole rather than as a set of categories or variables.
Somehow we all need to shift to this mode of thinking if humans and planet are to be reconciled.
We are in the midst of a historic revolution, a time of great change. Bob Dylan identified it in 1964:
…admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
Little did he know then of global warming. His point was a social one. But he was nevertheless right on both counts: in order to stop the waters rising we have to start swimming for our own lives socially. We need to connect with others and head in the right direction, not the direction that culture has mapped out for us. We need to turn 180 degrees from consumption, 180 degrees from selfishness born of powerlessness.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
That old road is the social order of the past, the hierarchical order in which everyone ‘knew their place’. The hierarchy was thought to be the only way in which the diversity of human states of being could be managed: Only a few could be entrusted with controlling our societies, only a few could be entrusted with the self-actualisation that is the objective of education, only a few should be entrusted with the empowerment that this brings. We now live in a new order of self-actualisation and empowerment for all, brought about by our human right of freedom.
The internet, specifically the accelerating evolution of mass peer-to-peer communication, is enabling this new order to blossom. It began with the freedom for all to engage in telecommunication in the twentieth century, and the transition will not stop.
As hierarchy melts away rhizome is taking its place. Knowledge dispersal across the internet offers the potential of self-empowerment for all, for the benefit of all. The human network that we are creating for ourselves is breaking down the barriers of control, power, and illegitimate authority. Inner authority is on the ascendant, the revolution that is the Ascent of Man is now exploding into colour. Embrace it and network, network, network the new rhizome together:
Decide to Network
Decide to network
Use every letter you write
Every conversation you have
Every meeting you attend
To express your fundamental beliefs and dreams
Affirm to others the vision of the world you want
Network through thought
Network through action
Network through love
Network through spirit
You are the center of a network
You are the center of the world
You are a free, immensely powerful source of life and goodness
Affirm it
Spread it
Radiate it
Think day and night about it
And you will see a miracle happen the greatness of your own life.
In a world of big powers, media and monopolies
But of [six] and a half billion individuals
Networking is the new freedom the new democracy
A new form of happiness
(Muller, M., Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations.)
Be aware of the Network. We live by a network of connections and links. Your connection to yourself, to your intimates, to your place, to the collective, to the planet, to the Infinite. (Each is a distinct connection.) Equally powerful are the collective’s connections to you (not at all the same as yours to it), to groups of intimates, to itself, to the planet, to the Infinite. Finally, the connections of groups of intimates to one another, to the collective, to the planet, to the Infinite. All these levels and connections interweave. All are equally important.
All the links or connective points of this network (call them the acupuncture points of our universe) both take and generate energy. Any link out of sync weakens the others. (The West, for instance, has concentrated too much on the individual; the East, too much on the collective; both approaches have been catastrophic on every level of the network.) This network, from you all the way to the Infinite, is a living while, ceaselessly changing. Some of these changes take millions of years. Some happen instantaneously.
May the links of the network shine.
(Ventura, M., 1993. Solutions to Everything.)
I believe that the days of centralised power are numbered, and that a re-tribalisation of society is an inevitable, if sometimes painful, process. The applied theories of politics, economics and industry have made a sick society; it is time for new approaches. We live in the post-industrial world, and have an immense amount of sophisticated information and technology which enables us to exchange information while living in a village situation. -Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture (1991)
Villagisation
Swadeshi. A simpler, more spiritual, communal life… is rooted in the village. Swadeshi is that spirit in us which requires us to serve our immediate neighbours before others, and to use things produced in our community in preference to those more remote. So doing, we serve humanity to the best of our capacity. -M.K.Ghandi
Staring us in the face is an unpalatable and awesome fact, one which encompasses Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and a whole lot more besides. To use an apt metaphor civilisation is like a supertanker heading towards the arctic. Sometime in the near and predictable future the inevitable iceberg will loom out of the darkness. The collapse of our civilisation in its current industrial-military-exploitative form is certain. In many ways it is to be welcomed in order to stop the killing and suffering that civilisation consciously inflicts. See Stan Goff’s Civilization War Rant.
Complexity increases fragility and the potential for system collapse. This principle tells us one thing when applied to human society: we are heading into very risky territory. There is a real potential for us to go straight back to the stone age after a near extinction. This is staring us in the face. Such a process could occur over a period of a few years and involve war, civil war and starvation the like of which has never been experienced before.
A solution, one which may already be occurring through a process of evolutionary self-organisation of the human species is known as rhizome. Rhizome is the antithesis of the foundations of civilisation, hierarchical power. Think of collaboration, networks of networks, My Space, Wikipedia, Open Source Software, intentional community networks, think of terrorist cells. Jason Godesky makes this point with great clarity so I won’t attempt to replicate it.
My point is simple: we can decide either to cling to outdated notions of centralised power and hierarchical civilisation or we can localise power in our immediate communities. Communities can be physically localised or information communities localised by common information context. Open Source Software is a fundamental example since it provides each user with a copy of the same solution to a problem and each user has the ability to input improvements to that solution.
We now have the tools to act locally – to go back to Aristotle’s fundamental unit of human society, the village – while communicating directly and globally under shared information contexts. Here is the practical solution to acting locally and thinking globally, and it is beginning to happen. For the those who cling to conventional civilisation the future looks bleak, but those whose choose to become part of the solution are looking at a potential renaissance of human life in sustainable form. Sustainable because in the village we must all take responsibility for our actions, since the effects our our actions are immediate: what goes round comes back round to us immediately.
The power of the rhizome is that it is, like a virus, able to adapt and outwit centralised attempts to kill it. Centralised power cannot compete and will either collapse under its own complexity or evolve into rhizomatic organisation. We are already witnessing the beginning of that collapse and the potential end of all that is wrong with conventional society, capitalism, social hierarchy, and war.
What we are looking at is anarchy. Not anarchy in its pejorative sense, that is hierarchical civilisation’s propaganda against its worst enemy. True anarchy is not chaos but balanced self-organisation: distributed control rather than centralised control. A self-regulating human society. The question is whether we can adapt quickly enough to rhizomatic organisation before centralised civilisation collapses.
Time to wake up everyone. Optimism and denial are not solutions to the coming reality. The following article is written for Americans but it applies to Europeans equally. Read more…
The Roman Empire overstretched itself. It had no real culture of its own, tending to borrow from other cultures. To the extent that the Romans had a culture it was characterised by warfare, violence, slavery, and empire building. The widely distributed nations that the Romans assimilated then turned on Rome, and despite the Romans’ great power the empire collapsed due its own lack of resilience. This process took hundreds of years. Today the process can happen so much quicker due to faster communications; the internet and transportation being two examples.
Empires are highly fragile because they are rigid hierarchies controlled from the centre. Centralism aggregates power. It is a dangerous process of putting all your eggs in one basket which is destined to failure one way or another. It emerged with the birth of agriculture and capitalism some 10 millennia ago. This is how empires work, but it is also their fatal flaw in that they cannot adapt and they burn out under their own rigidity; resilience, strength, and robustness as rigidity is a particularly Western classical fallacy. We have learned nothing from the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, from Eastern philosophies, or from nature. Rome’s adversaries were distributed groups, each struggling against Rome in its own way based on its own strengths, and that is how nature works. The same is true of all biological systems, and whether we like it or not we are part of those systems. In a survival of the fittest scenario, ultimately natural ‘winners’ (who are always destined eventually to lose again anyhow) always emerge from the milieu, from the bottom upwards. Winners have never been constructed by man, and probably never will be. We are subject to the laws of nature, evolutionary processes, not our own anthropocentric ideas. Evolution will win out eventually, and the more we try to hold it off as nations in warfare, or in laboratories, the stronger will be its eventual response.
The US would be wise to heed lessons from history and from nature, and take on board the proven superiority of distributed autonomous agents. Autonomous agents can be groups but internally they are highly integrated. Autonomous agents may appear to be aligned with each other but they act individually. When they are challenged by another entity they may respond alone but they do share a common purpose: to compete with or cooperate (3) with the other entity. It may initially appear that centralised might is stronger than an unorganised ‘rabble’, but when that rabble have common aims they are far stronger and more resilient against the power of a single centralised system to act adaptively against them. The idea of autonomous agents is emerging now in the business world as a viable way to be more adapted in an uncertain world, and a reasonable prediction is that politics will also have to adapt to the realities as individuals continue to arm themselves with the power of communication. Despite the apparent tendency for politicians to be concerned only with amassing power they are also intelligent beings who have survival instincts too. Along with modern communication abilities the natural principles of self-organisation mean that the more enemies the US makes around the world the more likely those adversaries will emerge and adapt to exploit its weaknesses. Each adversary will struggle for its own reasons in its own ways. Those adversaries need have nothing in common except the ability to adapt to their own particular context; using their localised strengths against the US’s localised weaknesses. If politicians are smart enough they will adapt their systems to create a more distributed state which will be more resilient overall.
Centralised power is not a very intelligent approach in the 21st century, given the way individuals now have such strong communication power. The situation in Iraq for example, where the US is aiming to ‘destroy’ its broadly defined ‘terrorist enemy’, is likely to lead to even more recruits rallying to the cry of ‘death to America’. Every family who loses a loved one, whether just or unjust, is likely to hold a grudge for at least a generation. So in effect the US is empowering its self-defined enemy. The politicians and generals seem to have learned nothing from Lao Tzu’s Art of War: One must cooperate at the same time as competing; war is a synergic interaction in which there is no winner or loser. If a power thinks they have won a war then they have lost it.
The US seems unaware that its linear attitude of destroying the enemy to become the winner is a purely Western fantasy. It may believe that it holds the best hand, but its nuclear arsenal and mutually assured destruction (MAD) is no deterrent against a distributed threat; in their adversaries’ distributed mind each as an individual has a better chance of surviving a global nuclear Armageddon than the does the US empire. Their enemy thinks in a natural way based on the lowest common denominator: ultimate survival at the lowest hierarchical level. The US cannot think in that way and its hand will be forced if challenged to MAD.
The same arguments apply to Western world’s, and increasingly the developing world’s, attitudes to the ecology of which we are all a part. There is a Western myth, based on linear logic, that we can plunder natural resources and interfere with ecosystems using intensive agriculture and genetic modifications, interfere with natural biological processes like disease using Western medicine, and eat ‘foods’ which have been processed and adulterated beyond our bodies’ ability to properly recognise them as food. This is all part of the same delusion that we have power over nature, but we do not have such power. We are part of the ecosystem, and by killing it we are killing ourselves. We are also part of humanity, and by killing another person we are also killing ourselves (John Donne; a Western philosopher). We are all interdependent, all species, and all people. Sooner or later the rest of nature will bite back, whether it be via people or rainforests or climate.
The lesson is a simple one. Fail to heed the principles of nature and you will be eliminated you from the ‘gene pool’. Unless the US accepts that distributed power is far superior to centralised power then they are doomed to fail at whatever they are trying to achieve. By asserting itself around the world the US is making the same mistake that Rome did. In today’s world changes occur much faster than they did 2000 years ago. This increases the fragility of a centralised control system and reduces uncertainty for a distributed system. The more the US fights the more its distributed enemies will resist, for a multitude of reasons and with a multitude of unpredictable tactics, as did the resistance to Rome.
The US is following a path that the rest of us should avoid. It is highly vulnerable to the overall emergent property of its ‘enemy’ which is more adaptive and more suited to the distributed environment than is the US with its centralised control. The EU and other regions would be wise to learn the lessons of Rome and of nature and distribute their power hierarchically downwards among nations, regions, and give autonomy to local communities in order to remain resilient in a rapidly changing world. They should remove as many controls as possible in order to allow strengths to emerge from the ‘bottom upwards’. This runs counter to classical thought and even challenges the idea of the nation state, and it is radical to that extent (1). Self-organisation is a radical idea for the Western mind but this does not affect its validity. The time has come to take on board this entirely natural concept and embrace its superior anarchistic (2) forms of self-governance, and hence bring about a true democracy and greater global stability where power is shared between all. The ideas I have expressed here are not new. They have been handed down for thousands of years, and they exist in many books and increasingly are expressed in columns like this one across the internet. See Jeff Vail’s book A Theory of Power http://www.jeffvail.net/index.html
Autonomy and anarchy (2) are ideas promoted by sixties radicals and embraced by terrorists ever since. Autonomous teams are already being used in the business world, and one can only hope the politicians will take on board some of these ideas before the human race consumes the ecosystem and itself through centralised power. Small tightly integrated communities (networked into a wider global distributed system) in which individuals feel the immediate effects of their actions, but with the benefits of knowledge through communication with the rest of the human race, are a solution. If the individuals within those communities harm each other or the environment the feedback is immediate and they learn to act sustainably. If a community harms another community, or the environment, or gets out of line in some way that threatens others then the networked communities around it will take action to rebalance the disease. The power of distributed systems is natural and sustainable. Healthy distributed human systems, human societies, tend to be characterised by an organic bottom-up culture, in contrast to Western society’s current romance with capitalism, consumption and self-gratification which further feeds the destructive cycle. Centralised power is a flawed Western concept which is nearing the end of its life, one way or the other.
To take these ideas further, as an example have a look at Derrick Jensen’s website http://www.derrickjensen.org/
- The term ‘radical’ is used here in a neutral sense. To be radical is neither a positive nor negative value in itself, unless of course one views conformity as a positive value.
- Anarchy is used here in its true sense, meaning the absence of centralised control.
- Competition and cooperation are Western concepts which tend to be over abstracted and used inappropriately. Others do not necessarily see them as distinct processes; interdependence or synergy are better terms
The writer provides the above as opinion, and takes no side in the ‘War on Terror’. Nothing in this commentary is intended as support for terrorism or violence, nor is it against the American people. It is an argument against the deluded Western mind. The comment is made with concern for global peace, sustainable economics and society, true democracy, and ultimately for human survival – including the American people.
