Shift Your Perspective And Be The Change

In each crisis, we are told, there is opportunity, and humanity is going to be facing some major crises, no question. Already we are seeing the convergence of disturbing economic and environmental issues. Human population is growing as our resources are diminishing. World peace seems ever-elusive. Terrorism, food security, climate change, global corporatism, unprecedented levels of species extinction...

Yes, 2012 is poised to be a pivotal year, but not for those misguided misinterpretations of the Mayan calendar...however, we cannot discount the seriousness our situation.

Laszlo's book is an urgent appeal and a call to action. A declaration for planetary consciousness. We will need to be smarter, more creative, more responsible and more accountable in the years ahead. So let's start now. The sooner the better.

Laszlo outlines the three "unsustainabilities" - ecological, economic, social - and proceeds to discuss how we can take action to create conscious change, through various levels of activism  - civic, media, business and personal.

Definitely worth a read, and a timely read too.

May 2012 be a year of enlightenment and positive change.

Peace & Joy to all.

Shaking the Watchman's Rattle...

means sounding the alarm...

"A Rattler is any individual willing to sound the alarm. Whether the threat comes in the form of terrorism, obesity, deteriorating education, nuclear proliferation, overfishing the oceans or climate change, Rattlers bring people together to overcome adversity and to effect long-lasting change."

The Watchman's Rattle

Coming to a Democracy Near You

Another book recommendation from my shelf...

This is not just a lament for his own nation, America, this is a warning for all nations, all democracies that become "chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staples of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop psychology."

Fair warning, Canada, we are not immune. The world is about to become one very large corporate state. Indeed, it already is...

More from Chris Hedges' brilliant, unflinching examination of a mass culture that has relinquished thoughtfulness and truth for illusion and entertainment:

The rise of the corporate state has grave political consequences, as we saw in Italy and Germany in the early part of the twentieth century. Antitrust laws not only regulate and control the marketplace. They also serve as bulwarks to protect democracy. And now that they are gone, now that we have a state run by and on behalf of corporations, we must expect inevitable and terrifying consequences.

As the pressure mounts, as this despair and impoverishment reach into larger and larger segments of the populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. The emergence of the corporate state always means the emergence of the security state.

The more we sever ourselves from a literate, print-based world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of ideas, for one informed by comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans, celebrities, and a lust for violence, the more we are destined to implode.

This book reveals just how deep the rot goes, and how, in a very real sense, we are currently living in a frightening global dystopia, the "brave new world" that early 20th century thinkers and writers presaged all those decades ago.

We, individual human beings as well as individual communities and nations, lose the power to control our destinies when we relinquish our birthright to think freely and to examine clearly, to analyze and to determine for ourselves what is right and wrong.

I am thinking now of Orwell, Huxley, and others. I was very young when I first began reading dystopian literature, but for the most part I've held onto a healthy trust in humanity and remained optimistic for our collective future, believing that those totalitarian scenarios could or would never come to pass, not after the lessons learned from the World Wars and the Holocaust.

How naive. Hedges' books articulate and document what has been systematically playing out over the course of the last few decades, revving into high gear in the 80s, when our leaders were pushing NAFTA and Free Trade - our power has been slyly wrested from us, and all the while we have allowed ourselves to be dazzled and entertained...

From my Shelf

Another year is winding down, so it seems like a good time to reflect on the books I've been reading these past eleven months. Not all of the books I read in 2011 were published in 2011. This isn't really a review of "new releases" then. Work keeps me busy, so I'm often late to the party as it were, and my reading wish list seems only to grow longer, never shorter. However, these books, I guarantee, are timely and relevant.

I've chosen only a few to feature, but they are so critically important to understanding the times in which we live that I feel compelled to talk about them every chance I get. I'm sure I drive my friends crazy.

So rather than a long-winded commentary from me, I'd prefer to let the authors speak for themselves. I'll just include a passage or two from each book. Maybe the quoted material will entice you to read more. There's also plenty on the Net about each one of them.

I'll start with Chris Hedges: Death of the Liberal Class, published in 2010.

In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. But the assault by the corporate state on the democratic state has claimed the liberal class as one of its victims.

….

The belief that we can make things happen through positive thoughts, by visualizing, by wanting them, by tapping into our inner strength, or by understanding that we our truly exceptional, is peddled to us by all aspects of the culture, from Oprah to the Christian Right. It is magical thinking. We can always make more money, meet new quotas, consume more products, and advance our careers. This magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity. It permits societies to transfer their emotional allegiance to the absurd―whether embodied in professional sports or in celebrity culture―and ignore real problems. It exacerbates despair. It keeps us in a state of mass self-delusion.

Occupy Your Life

I support the Occupy movement. Period. It's about taking our world back, one person, one community at a time, not with violence but rather with awareness, intelligence, ethics and hope - hope that a grassroots movement can catch on. But for a groundswell of change to catch on, a lot of eyes have to be opened, a lot of minds changed.

A good way to start the process for yourself is with Douglas Rushkoff's book, Life, Inc. It will give you a succinct (but never simplistic) history of how corporatism came to take over the world, and indeed our lives.

If you want an intelligent, informed understanding of what has really prompted and propelled the Occupy movement and why it is so important right now, then please read this book, if you haven't already. If you have, pass it on. Tell others. This book is not a rant, not a diatribe. It is a passionate yet reasoned summary that tells us why we must be very worried and why, in many ways, it might already be too late.

But despair is not an option. To Occupy the World we must first Occupy our Minds and by Occupying our Minds, we begin to take back Our Lives.

One enlightened, defiant person at a time.

Ruminations on Earth Day, Then and Now

Back in 1970 when the first Earth Day was declared, the flower children still walked the streets of San Francisco barefoot, spreading peace, love and good will. Even so, it wasn’t all sweetness and sunshine for the Gaians. Earth Day was largely viewed with some suspicion by a moral majority who thought the status quo was “just so” thank you very much. At the Continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington that week, a delegate from Mississippi, evidently equating environmentalists with communists, declared: "Subversive elements plan to make American children live in an environment that is good for them."

That seems laughable now, but never fear, there still exists today an extreme right-wing faction that not only dismisses the environmental movement as a fanatical fringe of bunny lovers and tree huggers, they do it gleefully and belligerently, both in front of the media and from within the media on a regular basis. We know who they are. Naming them only gives them more attention, more power. So let’s not.

Cue the enlightenment, then fast forward to Earth Day 2011 and generally you will find that the eco movement has grown and gained purchase. We are legion, but we still have a long way to go. We’ve made some progress; we’ve lost some ground. We have to put up with corporate greenwashing for one thing. In a way, the latter could be construed as a sign of our success. So much has public perception changed during the intervening decades on matters such as water and air pollution, waste disposal and energy consumption that the corporate powers that be decided they had better put a green face on their business practices or they could lose customers. (Now, it seems, the moral majority might very well be green.)

Sadly, most of those corporations are still selling us the same stuff, albeit with a green ribbon on the top. Our landfills are still filling up, we’re still shipping garbage elsewhere, and much of that garbage has been the spawn of the digital age—cast-off computers, peripherals, tech gadgets and handhelds that become all too rapidly obsolete. They have to go somewhere. True, there are recycling programs for everything these days. I dutifully take my ink cartridges back to Staples and I recycle batteries and other special items properly, like everyone else does, at least, I hope everyone else does…

Yet, walk into any grocery store, fast food franchise, cineplex or café and you soon realize that we are still making and producing—and throwing away—an awful lot of CRAP.

You know that French axiom, the one that goes something like this: Plus ça change, plus c’est pareil? Well, there’s actually quite a bit of truth to it. From that very golden year, 1970, when Earth Day was just a newly minted coin for our emerging republic of green and all things still seemed delightfully possible, here is a satirical little spoof on human folly from humorist Art Buchwald.

And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no further use. And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried: “Look at this Godawful mess.”

Plus ça change...

We Are Not Gadgets ... Yet

“If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless.”

If that paragraph resonates with you or intrigues you in any way, then Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget is the book for you.

Simply put, this is an intelligent critique of the direction the digital age has taken since the early, heady days when the internet was in its infancy and users were enthusiastically, democratically and idealistically embracing its potential in the (perhaps naïve) hope that it would transform our world for the better, through engaging, stimulating and intelligent interaction between peoples around the world, unimpeded by geography or circumstance.

Lanier posits that human interaction is not so much evolving as it is devolving under the Web 2.0 tidal wave of trendy technologies and software design, and that what is actually happening is the devaluation of what it means to be human.

Now that’s a reductive paraphrase concocted by yours truly, but there is nothing at all reductive or simplistic about this intelligent, thoughtful book. And you cannot accuse Lanier of being a Luddite either; his criticisms and insights come from the front line of the technocracy itself, because, if you recall, Lanier is the father of virtual reality, a Silicon Valley tech-wizard and visionary long before half of today’s Facebook users were even born. His critique comes from inside the temple, so to speak.

And the world beyond the temple gates would do well to listen up.

This is not just a cautionary tale, as the author himself indicates by calling this a “manifesto.” Actually, we are long past the point of caution. So much of the web’s current design is so firmly entrenched in the collective psyche that it’s just accepted as a given. (Case in point, the blogging template that I’m using to post this.)

This book is a wakeup call to people who love the internet; it asks us to see the situation clearly and to reflect upon the direction technological advancement has taken with healthy skepticism and all the intelligence we can muster. Because if we don’t, the type of society we will be creating (already well on our way to creating) will result in a new “dark age” (his words, not mine), a world in which quirky individualism, authentic creativity and even our understanding of “friendship” will be utterly distorted and devalued by the technical structures in which we have gleefully (and unwittingly) “locked” ourselves.

And if you want to contextualize your reading, the reviews Lanier’s book received are as fascinating as the book itself, revealing more about the reviewers than the book. There’s no shortage of pronouncements, from the facile critique found in the Globe and Mail to a blog post that raises “the review” to a high-level discussion, so thorough is the analysis from this independent researcher/ business consultant. True to our opinionated Wiki-world, everyone can weigh in—and everyone does.

But you should read the book in order to weigh in! As Lanier points out, sincere and individual expression is just one more casualty on the information highway, where drive-by anonymity and a mash-up mindset rule. The mob dynamic is alive and well on the net. You get condemnation by hearsay.

At the risk of becoming one more cyber-utopian, I welcome the fact that this book snapped me back to reality. Actually, I’ve been having some misgivings of my own lately, even as I enthusiastically tweet links to petitions that my twitter buddies might like to sign too. But I am not and never have been a fan of Facebook, and while I maintain a Facebook page, I really question why I bother.

As Lanier says, “…there is a new brittleness to the types of connections people make online.”

There is something insidiously insincere about the routine use of Facebook. Can anyone really have 6,976 friends, especially if 6,929 of them are beings you’ve never actually met or sustained a one-on-one conversation with?

Now if someone questions why I don’t like Facebook, I’ll just hand them Lanier’s book and not feel like an old fogey fuddy-duddy, which I know I am not. So thanks, Jaron. I feel somewhat vindicated on that score. I happen to love the internet. I wouldn’t know how to live without it. Literally.

You see, my cyber-utopianism has its roots in a very felicitous personal eureka moment. What seems like eons ago, when I first logged on the net from the privacy of my own home, I knew immediately that it could forever change how I worked and earned a living. I still get excited about that. It really has changed my life for the better. I have been able to connect with wonderful clients all over the world, and yes, some new friendships have come out of these connections. I don’t drive to work anymore, so I don’t wastefully burn up fossil fuel by sitting in morning traffic jams. And I really do enjoy being a member of the Free Agent Nation. But it doesn’t mean I have to put blinkers on and be blind to the more ominous implications of a digital-crazed world.

There is a both a beauty in this online world and a danger. What is incumbent upon us, as the creators of the technology, is to ensure that we maintain our individuality all the while respecting the individuality of others. We must always make sure that we bring our human intelligence, our kindness and our moral compass to bear on every decision we make and on every interaction and connection we engage in. We must never stop questioning and we must never be afraid to put the brakes on something before we have fully assessed its potential, for there is always the possibility that in the race to embrace our brave new worlds we could be doing more harm than good.

Human intelligence, that combination of logic and emotional insight, is still what must drive this world. We humans design the net. Not the other way around.

And don’t rely on this bleep from the blogosphere. Just experience Lanier’s book for yourselves.