Chapter 5
Humanities’ Bad Habit

In my youth, I was taught that humans were puny and weak and, living in a world of tooth and claw, they had to develop big brains and social organization in order to compete and survive.

What a terrible Model and one that turns our to be totally false to fact. Apes and monkeys do not live their lives cowering in the jungle - nor does it seem to be the modis operandi of any animal I have seen - and all evidence of humans through the ages reveals a robust and growing community. Humans have few natural predictors and given some ropes, sticks and few of us there is no animal on Earth that is a match and there never has been that the record reveals. The puny man myth is simply a made up story for the greater glory of the Victorian era. The notion that evolution - physical, mental or social - is simple, linear or finished is an equally grievous idea that has also caused great damage. We sit here thinking that we are the apple in God’s eye and/or the epitome of evolution - take your pick - when it is clear that the path ahead is much greater than the one behind and there is nothing stable about our present situation. We are a work in progress if there ever was one.

Our chronic bad habit stems from the fact that we have long been the dominate species on this planet and able to recover from almost any calamity no matter its source. We blunder our way into crises, take our loses, learn, invent, fight the good fight, bury our dead, build a monument to the whole affair, create a school in the University to deal with like kinds of circumstances, elect whomever lead the charge as President - and go on.

Now we face a circumstance worthy of our creative capacities - ourselves.

We breed with abandon, reshape the Earth to serve our needs, kill each other when it seems expedient, invent new technologies which we deploy with little concern for ourselves let alone the rest of life and, in a truly marvelously manner, solve the problems that this agenda propagates once we decide to recognize a “threat.” That in doing so often promotes even larger and more complex situations is, apparently, for the future to sort out. So far, this “strategy” has worked for ten thousand years - after all, we are still here and growing. Now and then we do shed a tear for those who have been starved, murdered, turned to canon fodder, tortured and maimed. We even, as long as the economy is not too threatened, worry about a few of the tens of thousands of species we are exterminating and now - after a 100 years - Global Warming. These concerns are somewhat morally tainted by the viewpoint that we are sorry to see this species or that one go, because we will miss having them around, and that maybe we are threatened by Global Warming and will lose some of that nice beach front property in Florida. Little concern can be noted that perhaps all life is sacred and should not be exterminated carelessly without cause or need. This species-centric viewpoint, coupled with our now ingrained habit of thinking we can rise to any challenge once we decide it is time to pay attention to it, our growing arsenal of technology and population growth, is a prescription for failure. If we saw any animal population acting this way we would call them dumb beasts. When we act this way it is called rational economics and political expediency.

The solution to these circumstances is simple: give up the habit. It no longer serves us nor Gaia. The great untold fact of modern times is that we are growing bored. We turn to material acquisition in excess, what now passes for entertainment, games of power and control to ease the burden. Our genius is wasted. We need a great challenge. I propose that the Human Enterprise is worthy of our talents. Transformations in the past have come after years, even decades and centuries of chaos and loss. The one before us can even result in our demise. How about a new game? Lets see how graceful this transition can be. Lets bring all life along with us. Lets see how little blood we can leave on the street not build monuments to the most successful casualties and those who accomplished them. Lets promote life, honor Gaia, all living things and ourselves. Lets merge economics and ecology and make our technology come alive. What is pay-for-view, football, loveless sex and drugs compared to this?

Earth as a Garden for all life? Wow! If you like design challenges, this is one to grab your imgination, talent and dedication.

Chapter 6
The Way We Were

One way to understand the our present era is to look at it from the perspective of a future when the Platform For life is the prevalent paradigm. From this perspective my criticism of our present society explores examples where we meet the ideal articulated in the Platform, where we fail to and where, it seems, we act in every way possible to destroy this view of Humanity and our potential.

It is an enlightening exercise to imagine a future that meets our highest aspitations and then look at our times from this perspective. Many such exercises like this have had great impact on the evolutionary path of our society. It is not important if they turned out to be “true” or not. What is important is that they caused us to rethink the “present,” of a time, and to course correct as a consequence.

This Chapter will offer such a view and, from a successful future, look at 12 systemic hidden design assumptions, of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, that nearly destroyed our future. Fortunately, from the perspective of this scenario, we broke out of these as a limiting construct and re-framed them. It is not that The Way We Were is all bad or lacking its own charm. One can almost have a level of nostalgia for it. With all our flaws, there was beauty and many great deeds - all the greater given the obstacles in the way of their doing.

No, it is not so much the way we were that was the problem - it is that the way we were was believed to be THE way and we were all to ready to kill to make it so. As a society, we lacked imagination. We believed - profoundly - in scarcity and built our entire economy on it even as we created vast abundance. An abundance we did not know how to use nor enjoy.

We should honor the way we were because this moment in time was a significant waypoint along a long journey. And now, just a generation later, we are further from that moment and place as it was from the Dark Ages before it.

Chapter 7
The Consequences of the Platform

The consequences of the Platform are many and run deep throughout our society. Virtually everything we take for granted is effected. Most of the dominate patterns of our way of living and working require change. Yet, those qualities that we, at our best, believe to be quintessentially human will ring out and will remain.

To the jaded personality cult of today, this may seem like a boring reality. I claim that it is today that is boring and we attack this self-induced boredom with multiple assaults of titillation and violence as are imaginable to us - a true abuse of creativity, collaboration, innovation and media. A real life is not won this way. A life of value is build on contemplation - something that almost every social tool from time scheduling, to work, to what passes for entertainment, is specifically hostile to and dedicated to destroy.

While it is true that we face many attacks on our freedom, it is equally true that the great crime of our time is the abusive ways we have chosen to exploit our freedom in hedonistic and careless ways. I do not agree with their “solutions,” yet is is easy to understand the frustrations that many, who wish to politically curtail freedom, feel as they experience the excesses of our time. Many live in a time and place where they are not comfortable with their children walking down the main street of their town - or watching television, or going to a public school. One should have not to withdraw from society in order to live by their personal moral sense and esthetic sensibility. Nor, should one feel compelled to dominate society in the futile attempt to make it conform to a specific set of values and beliefs. Is it really a compromise of my freedom to be sensitive to others and their beliefs even if I do not share them? These are not personal issues, they are concerns of the social commons. Neither morals nor art should be legislated and established by the use of force. Nor is it necessary to offend whole segments of our human family in order to “express” freedom or creativity. A dilemma? Yes, in the world of law, decision making, organizational structures, and the social conventions of today. In reality, it is merely a design problem that can be solved with patience, mutual respect, GroupGenius and an effective means of collaboration.

There is no cause for the “clash of cultures” we are experiencing with increasing frequency and violence. Creating a Platform For Life - while not easy - will dissolve most of these seemingly “impossible” divisions. Employing the Platform as a social design process will resolve the rest if we are willing to do the creative work. TANSTAAFL.

Even when we have done this, we have to realize that new questions will arise. Each extension of life’s boundaries will do this. The rise of the clash of cultures is symptomatic of our time. It is one measure of our loss of requisite variety with the changes we ourselves are creating. The solution is not to slow down our creating - the solution is to pay attention to what we are doing and work our way through these issues in advance of their full scale application. This is impossible without an agreed upon framework - which is what the Platform For life is. It is impossible without an effective process that attracts full engagement of the many different members of our society which is the process of applying the Platform. The Platform - no matter how well written - is useless as dead text duly bound and sitting on a shelf.

The Platform, and the process, has to be recursive. This means adapted and applied to many levels of social architecture. A single set of rules cannot be imposed top down on all the many human cultures. This is precisely the mistake that is being attempted today. The Platform For Life is a set of principles to be applied - which means adapted - in many many different circumstances. In this regard, even the Nation State is too large. Bio-Economic Regions, with many sub-regions, may turn out to be the most common political scale in the near future.

Chapter 8
Learning Constraint, Living with Dignity, Practicing Art

For millennia, humans have been constrained by their environment. We thrived by pushing the limits of these constraints. Growth, exploration, invention and a relentless drive to compete and to succeed, in the material sense, were considered virtues by many cultures. And, over time, these were the cultures who came to dominate the planet. In the recent century our numbers and our technology have made humanity able to throw off many of historical constraints with apparent impunity. We are on the cusp of being able, in all practical ways, to throw them off completely. It is not that will not sufferer consequences if we do not learn to apply appropriate design principles. Nor, that the Planet and many of it inhabitants will not also suffer as a consequence if we continue our careless behavior. It is not, if we destroy ourselves as a species, that the planet will not go on with life. It is that it will become possible, soon, for Humanity to alter the rules of the evolutionary game on the scale of our planet.

This, as far as we recognize, is unprecedented in this planets history. For all practicable purposes, we are now the principle shapers of our evolution be it, in the end, this leads to a good scenario or bad. This poses profound ethical implications, as well as, technical challenges. For the first time, as a species, we have to consider not doing something just because we can. We have to learn this lesson without arbitrarily killing adventure, legitimate growth, innovation and exploration.

We have to discover - and invent - what being human truly means.

To think and act in these terms is to embrace a profound change. This is not the dominate logic of our times. It is not possible to do this in the philosophical, political and social gestalt as reported by media and experienced in our homes, places of work and shattered “communities.”

After millennia of pushing, it is time to reflect, act with care, balance individual wealth and common-wealth, invent with responsibility, respect others, grow in sustainable ways and embrace the true art of living life as an art.

Chapter 9
We have Been Here Before

This is not the first transformation in human history. It most likely will not be the last. It is, however, different in kind than has happened before and thereby significant. Also, this one is happening on our watch.

What is different about this transformation, from the discovery of agriculture or the shift to the industrial era - to name but two- is its scale, scope and time compression - all in combination.

Nevertheless, we can learn a great deal from the great transformations of the past. It is a sad and dangerous thing that the study of History, especially in the U.S., is considered a dull thing and not worthy of much attention. It is additionally disturbing when it is discovered how much the study of History is in fact the practice of propaganda - and not just in the “non free” countries. These remarks are aimed at history as taught in the schools and, in so far as is possible, avoided by students. On the bookshelves of your local bookstore another story is unfolding: a bounty of well researched and written books about an extraordinary range of topics. One could spend a lifetime just catching up with the past. Unfortunately, we cannot do this as armchair scholars. We have to take these hard earned lessons and apply them with action in our time. There are methods to create a synthesis of past, present and future and these will be presented in Section Three of this work: The Future of the Past. Appended is a 500 book reading list as supplement to this work. And yes, I do expect you to read these books and yes it is possible to do so without giving up too much of your time. Our schools, over the last 100 years, prepared us for the now-rapidly-vanishing Industrial Era. They neglected the future which is rushing down upon us. A future we have created by default. I have long told teachers that they are practical futurists. The “product” of their efforts grow to maturity and power a generation after their formal schooling. Whatever else our educational system and our teachers achieved that is good, as futurists they have been a dismal failure. It is difficult to imagine a generation so systemically incompetent to meet the specific challenges of their time.

There is growing and ample evidence that the great civilizations of the past, which we “know” of, were not the greatest nor the first. If true, this is an important arena to study. Have “we” blown it before? Are we capable of doing the same again? What can be learned from our ancestors? Should we assume that they were, compared to us, primitive and backward? What are the implications if, in some mostly hidden past, they were not? These are not trivial questions.

Chapter 10
The Nature of Transformation

Transformation is dying and being reborn in real time. It is structural - not abstract. It can happen in the blink of an eye with people hardly noticing. It can be a protracted and painful process. A social transformation is composed of millions of smaller transformations, region by region, culture by culture, ultimately, it involves each one of us. It actually starts with individuals and works its way to the scale of cultures, back to organizations, political units, to individuals and out again. It does not take a majority to reach a tipping point. When a significant number of individuals - who are broadly distributed in a system - change, the system itself changes state in what seems like an instant. And, given the “normal” rate of change of the system - whatever that is - it is an instant.

This same pattern exists in a single mind, a group, a species, society, a planet. When a part of an ecology - or a “system” - transitions to a new form and capability, the entire ecosystem does so in concert. Transformations can be spiritual, psychological, physical or all these in combination.

In the case of this transformation I expect that it will be planetary in scope and directly involve many species in addition to Humanity. Many new life forms will emerge. Many will commingle. Biological and machine will become far less distinct, shortly, and mostly indistinguishable in a matter of decades.

There will those of us who will embrace these changes. And those who will not. We have to honor and respect both and provide the space and freedom for all to be stewards of their own sense of life and physical/mental/spiritual path. To do less is to perpetuate a horror.

Humanity will birth new life forms. This is a given unless we choose to freeze change on a scale that is global an accomplished by indescribable means.

I expect we will become aware and share our space with life not of our making nor from our present space-time as we now understand it.

These are exciting and and, will be to many, frightening realities. It is clear that we are not prepared nor have we engaged in the necessary social dialog to begin to prepare for such realities. This future is, like it or not, being made today - everyday - as the sum of all our activities.

Chapter 11
Designing the Process of Transformation

By definition a transformation is emergent and cannot be predicted, controlled nor made to come out a certain way based on a preconceived prescription. Transformations are dangerous. The initial conditions which trigger a transformation have a wide range of possible outcomes. A process can be designed, and put in place, which significantly eases the experience while co-evolving with the system being transformed, so as to embed certain values into the mix in a way that facilitates the result toward a preferred set of characteristics. This is not a theory not speculation - tested methods exist that demonstrate doing this is possible.

A global transformation is taking place. We have no choice about this now. This Transformation was unleashed by actions taken long ago. There is nothing that will turn it off. How this Transformation plays out, however, is not given. What we we do, or do not do, will effect this outcome. In terms of human engagement, we are not requisite with this process. We are “designing” our future by default.

The process of effectively bringing our highest ideal of ourselves to the transformation - through a deliberate emergent design process - must involve the great majority of the Human Race - everyone, actually, in the way determined by their nature and interest. All other life other than human also has to be represented in this process as does Gaia as a Planet. Despite issues of nature and language, there are ways to do this as I will outline in the fourth section of this book. We have already built the tools necessary to do so it is just that we are employing these tools to perpetuate an already bankrupt game of tragic consequences.

The very act of taking this task on provides a “moral equivalent to war” and, as there is ample evidence in history, people working together to create things and circumstances of common value is the easiest and most long lasting way to end conflict and heal wounds that we know of.

The solution to our planetary problems is right before us. It is to simply to turn down another path and to start building the future we want.

Chapter 12
The Human Legacy

We are a bloody people and we have rendered upon on another, on animals and the planet, almost every atrocity imaginable. Unfortunately, these acts which are actually in the minority of Human activity, are what passes for our history and what dominates the evening news. It is as if we have to go on pounding ourselves with bad news in order to maintain the state of sleep that enables these unfortunate acts to be rendered with little question. The true story of Humanity is buried in the rubble of conflict, war, outrageous greed and exploitation perpetuated by a small minority but tacitly supported by the slumber of the majority.

Atrocity is not the story of Humanity.

In the simple acts of kindness, to the great works of art and invention, to the edifice of knowledge we have built - but somehow fail to use - the latent potential of our species can be found. This potential is trapped in our false image of ourselves yet it ever seeks release. Our great works are the times when this wondrous energy bursts forth, and for awhile, shatters the barriers we ourselves have erected. Rightly, we honor those who prevail, against great odds, in the doing of these works. We falsely assume these makers to be rare while we repress the genius of the majority of our kind. When Humanity and all life are free, we will witness and explosion of joy, beauty, community, invention, success and sustainable wealth that will make all ambitions of our present tooth and claw, materialistic culture look like poverty incarnate - which in fact it is.

We know how to do this now. This is the good news and the bad. Good because we can do it - we can build a planetary garden for all. The bad is we do not believe in ourselves and we are systematically educating our next generation to a lie. The lie is that free Human life in balance with Gaia is not to be had, that conflict is natural, that they will have to dominate or be dominated, that competition between people is the only way to success and that the “others” have to controlled or exterminated if necessary, and that all life on this planet - and the planet itself - is chattel for our use to be taken, violated and discarded without honor, thought or concern.

These are terrible design assumptions because they become self-fulfilling prophecies. It is one thing to believe these things when equipped with bows and arrows. It is quite another in our present circumstances and given the power provided by the mental and physical technologies we have created and spread throughout the world.

Humanity has two stories and thus two legacies. Which legacy you believe is Humanities’ real nature will determine what you do in this world in this time. The sum of what several billion believe - and act on - will determine the outcome of this “Great Turning.” It is time to choose. It is time to act on our highest aspirations not further manifest our most base fears.

Fear is the great corrupter of Humanity. Fear is based on a belief in vunerability. It leads to anger and violence. Violence to unnecessary destruction and death.

To reach our true self, we must learn not to fear and we must remove the basis for fear. This does not mean losing the ability to see a real threat and appropriately respond. It means not getting caught in the positive feedback loop and double bind of fear addition. If you cannot face death with calmness, you cannot face life with joy. A society that is addicted to fear and violence will soon extinguish itself.