Living Between Worlds #2.6: Reflections

This is the sixth in our series of calls, a series that I've called Living Between Worlds, because that's where we seem to be, between an old world and a new in so many dimensions. Environmentally, socially, politically, technically, human culture. A time of great uncertainty. This call in particular falls in the middle of the Jewish High Holidays, what are called the Ten Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which begins this evening. It's traditionally a time of reflection, and so rather than have a specific topic for this call, I actually want to use it as a time of reflection on some of the conversations that we've been having together. And what's on your mind. The name Rosh Hashanah usually is translated as New Year. It could also be translated as the beginning of transformation, which I find is a very nice name to put on this period of personal reflection and taking stock and returning to core commitments and dedication for the year to come. I shared with you last time this quote about 100-year-old quote from the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, who said, the old world is dying and a new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters. That resonate with anybody? Yeah, it's a time of great uncertainty. It's, you know, we're. We're what seems to be a historic moment. My friend Chauncey Bell calls it the end of an epoch. And I like to imagine. I don't like to imagine, but I imagine some historian 150 years from now writing about these times. And this will be a remarkable moment in human history. I suspect none of us know what they're going to write. That's imponderable at this point. But it's interesting to speculate and imagine what worlds might be possible, what might be emerging from this moment. Not. Not in the sense of trying to predict anything, but trying to shape what will unfold from our actions and our commitments. Now, there's a second quote that I shared with you last time. It's from the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, and I know many of you are familiar with this. She said another world is not only possible. She is on her way. On a quiet day. I can hear her breathing. That offers a different mood than what Gramsci did. It's actually not the complete quote. It's the part we always hear, but it's not the complete quote. And I'll come back to that a little bit later in the conversation. Pardon me. I've got to admit, people While we're doing this, In our previous calls, we've talked about systems change. We've talked about the structure defects of capitalism. We've talked about the moment that we're in with regard to climate and our relationship with the living world. We've talked about problem solving. And again, I'll quote Chauncey here, who decries the notion of problem solving. This is a disease of the modern mind, he would suggest, certainly disease of the west, but maybe of the modern mind. Because as soon as I say problem, what do you say? What's the next word that comes to mind? Feel free to unmute yourself and just pop off if you like. Solution. Nobody. Solution. There's something wrong, we gotta fix it. That's how our minds are organized. If the room is dark, I'm gonna flip the light switch and make it behave. Oh, I got it. Speaker. Speakers should work. System. Okay, somebody say something again. Hello? How's everything? Hello. There we go. Hi, Gil. Can you hear us now? Yes, Solving problems. There's a problem and it needs solution. Sorry, let me just kill a lot of other apps on here because something's making trouble. I apologize. Okay, so have you heard anything that I've been saying, or has it been all chunky? Yeah, we've been. We've heard everything you've been saying. You didn't hear anything we said? No, I didn't. So let me go to Mark and then Brad, and then I'll continue. Okay. So Buckminster Fuller taught back in. Well, he was at San Jose State in 1966 teaching comprehensive design science. And he taught how we go about dealing with this kind of complexity. And after taking his course later on, I found out about ecoregions and realized that we can design sustainable economies if we design within eco regions, which are consistent patterns of ecosystems that were mapped by World Wildlife Fund and National Geographic around 2001. So. So what just happened here, folks? Problem. Solution. It's automatic. We can't help ourselves when we do that. But, Mark, you know, you look at the complexity. I was trying to address that part. Yeah, I studied with Bucky 50 years ago. I got my start in this work there. Okay. And so I deeply respect that. But what I heard you say is we can solve the problem if we just design free, you know, ecosystem bioregions and so forth. It's a good thing to do, I would say, but it's not the solution to the problem. It's a strategy for a problem. And I want to invite us into a much more broad, broadly framed and patient conversation. Here, Brad, were you going to add anything to this point or were you just signaling me on sound? No, it was signaling. But also if you make me the co host, I can watch the people trying to enter and. And take that off your plate so you can focus. Thank you. I will do that right now. Brad Warren, co host. Great offer, Brad. Thank you. Waiting for it to tell me that I'm the co host. You are on. Okay. Thank you for that. Okay. Yeah, sorry. As some of you got the explanation, my producer, Jillian Lee was not able to be here today. So I'm running double duty with, you know, modest level of skill. So thanks for your patience and welcome everybody. So I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking and speaking with lots of different people lately. And one of the things I've been reading is a book called before your before European hegemony. 1250 to 1350. Not a time that we commonly think about. We tend to think about the modern era, starting with the Renaissance, late 15th, early 16th century. And that's where the modern world begins. And it's the world of European hegemony. It's the world of European, European dominance. But there was the world before that. It was a global world. It was not a parochial world. There were vast trade networks between China, India, Africa and Europe. There were rich civilizations in the Middle east and in Asia. In fact, they thought Europe was sort of a weird place. Pretty uninteresting, kind of backward, not very rich intellectually, culturally or financially. Was a very different world. We take for granted the history that we've grown up in. And we miss the complexity that's gone before. And I realized, one of the things I realized reading that book is that the world that I take for granted, the world of the past, let's say 70 years. I'm 72, but I'm also thinking about the post World War II era. What we think of as the modern era. I've always taken that for granted as kind of a norm in human history. It's a time of progress, integration, coordination, broader systems, more inclusion, more justice, more prosperity. But when you look at the sweep of 500 years or 2,000 years or 10,000 years, we see a much rockier ride and a and less confidence that the patterns that we've lived in for the past 50 or 70 or 100 years are going to continue for the next 50 or 70 or 100 or 200 years. It generates for me a very different mood, one that's partly somber, partly anxious, partly ambitious because the, the transition between old and New is not only a demise of certain things, it's an opening to new dimensions that we can barely imagine now. So that's kind of the mood that I'm in now. And, you know, the challenges are deep. The stack is deep. We've talked about this before. It's not just climate and Covid and late capitalism and the fraying of social fabrics around the world and the potential rise of fascism, technology disruptions, cultural changes, and so many dimensions, even if you go into just one of them. The COVID pandemic, which my teacher and friend Fernando Flores likes to talk about as the pandemic era. Not a particular pandemic, but a time in which we may see the rise and propagation of more pandemics in the world. The conditions that give rise to it, the increasing penetration of human settlements into wild lands, dissolution of the barrier between humans and other species, growing human scale and density, growing international transportation, arguably the decline of the human immune system in the face of what we are doing to the environment and to agriculture and our food systems. Decline of soils, decline of biodiversity. The list goes on. This is the stack of messes. These things can contribute to the rise of those circumstances. If you think we weren't ready for Covid, you need to think about maybe, are we ready for the next one or two or ten pandemics that we may see? What disruptions does that mean for us? And what opportunities does that open for us? Bucky, who Mark mentioned before, said years ago, when he looks at the world, it looks to him like it's completely touch and go. It could go either way. Each one of us, he said, can make the difference. That is why I do what I do, he said. And for me, that is why I do what I do. So, David, I see your hand. Let me say a couple more things, then I'll come to you. If you just bear with me for a moment. Just want to do a little bit more by way of setting this up. So all of us bring to the conversations that we have critical concerns, things that we deeply care about, and maybe we imagine critical paths to address those concerns. So just in the interest of disclosure and to kind of kick off the conversation, let me share with you mine. If I can get Zoom once again to behave itself. Hello, camera controls. Keep moving around. Let's go back to the screen here. We've talked about some of these before. So this is, you know, sort of the world that I'm living in. Some are fairly obvious. Most of my work over the past 30 years has been working with business Mostly with large corporations as well as small companies and cities. And the critical path that I see there, and this is showing up in work with our clients, is reducing the footprint, the physical footprint on the living world, reorienting strategy around purpose. And I would say climate and circularity become parts of that. Changing the way that we coordinate our practices in language, in organizations, and rethinking how we share the value and wealth that is generated by human economic activity. For me, that's the short list of all the business strategies that I'm looking at. Second, in the realm of policy, what we call the market lies. We need to get the prices right, and that means killing the subsidies, which, you know, vastly exceed our military budget, which is already pretty big. We need to face the defects, what I call the structural defects of capitalism, and those are the easy to see outside pieces, but also is, is how we, how we live with each other, how we live with ourselves, how we live with each other, how we live with living world. And this is a matter of relationships and conversations and listening. And we'll come back to listening more as we go. Surrounding or underlying this all is the living world. And this is not a question of being nice to the climate or taking care of the environment, but actually recognizing that we belong to a living world. We are living creatures in a living world, as Bruno Latour would talk about. That's a very different kind of relationship than we have lived in for at least, at least many centuries, if not longer than that. And in that, my work is increasingly coming to understand it is to be a trim tab. To trim tabs. This is another buckyism. The trim tab, for those of you who are not familiar with metaphor, is the tiny rudder at the back of the very large rudder at the back of a very large ship. You can't, you can't steer a supertanker by moving the rudder because the hydraulic forces that it has to push against in the water exceed the capacity of anything. We have to push that rudder through that mass of water. So we push a little rudder called a trim tab, and that moves the big rudder and that moves the ship. So all of you, in one way or another, are trim tabs. You do that in your lives and in your work. And I've realized recently that my job fundamentally is to be trim tab. To trim tabs is to help trim tabs be more powerful, more effective, more serene, more, you know, more at peace, and a kind of satisfied dissatisfaction in our lives. So that's my opening story for today. Let me open the mics to you and hear both what this provokes for you, what's your mood, what's on your minds these days in this moment? If you can use the raise hand function in zoom, it's easier for me to see you that way. And let's go from there. Sure. I think you're raising some of the critical concerns of the moment. And I think starting from this idea that we live in this ahistorical time is really important. When you were talking, I was thinking of an insight I got from the economist Brad DeLong. He was talking about measuring the history of civilization against the stature of the humans who inhabited it. And he made the remark that as far as we can tell archaeologically, first the first cities in the Tigris and Euphrates emerged 8 to 10,000 years ago. And the transition from hunter gathering to urbanized or semi urbanized or whatever we want to call the social organizations was accompanied with a massive loss in average skeletal height and weight, which he associates, you know, the food difference between having a rich and varied and abundant variety of foods to eat and the person that comes to it to being the majority of people being forced into a diet primarily of grain. So that I think that much of what we are facing with today has to look at ways we once were that were less destructive in all kinds of ways than were in harmony with the world in which we live. And I think there's something pretty important counter narrative about the value of civilization that has to be factored into, you know, what are the real things that are valuable in life and how do we really measure those? And one of them is civilization isn't always accompanied by progress. And I think that that was, I think the key point that brought home to me. And there are people who would argue, Josh, that agriculture was a wrong turn in human history. That's the subtext of his argument. Pretty clear. Well, that's the subtext and you know, but you can't go home again. We don't get to throw a switch and be 8,000 years ago, here we are now in a different dilemma of our own making. Not our own intention, but our own making. And so, you know, how do we move today? What do we do? Mark and then Eleanor. Thanks, Josh. So wait, am I muted still? No, I'm not muted. We hear you fine. Okay, good. So this goes right to the heart of what I've been thinking for a long time too. And I meant think I mentioned the ecosystems ecoregions idea because in ecosystems have certain resources in them. And Shoemaker back in the 60s, wrote a book called Small is Beautiful when he said, the things that we've destroyed, we need to come up with minimal technologies that are able to mitigate those losses, but we need to return to using and supporting what we have. There's another group. There's a thing called Rewilding Earth, which is on the Internet a little bit. And their permaculture is basically framed by looking at the different indigenous methods of growing food or harvesting food. And I have a permacultural friend who talks about arboriculture, who talks about growing food in food forests. He's not the only one. There are a lot of people saying that. So there, there. And there's things like Moringo Oleifera, so I got a whole stick about that. But. Well, let's. Let's not go into detail. I don't want to know. I want. I don't want to go into that. I want it. What I want to say is that the really big piece is stopping climate change. So we do need to switch off of fossil fuels. And somebody said we should do it. Somebody said we should do it by 2030, because then we could actually stabilize global warming by 2040. So that's what we need to do. But we need to work. We need to create, like, Bucky's geoscope kind of thing. And I think of that as a knowledge base and take all the threads that you're talking about today and weave them all together. But you're presuming that a shortage of knowledge is the problem. No, and I would say that it's not. I mean, here's the thing, you know. Yeah, so we've got, you know, we had this remarkable occurrence in human history just a few years ago with the Paris Climate Agreement. Almost every country on Earth committed, you know, in writing, with public explorations to this change of path. Unfortunately, hardly any company is meeting their commitment. Any country is meeting their commitments. Hardly any company is meeting their commitments. It's not for lack of knowledge. There's something else in the story there, but, you know, but you're. That story. It's. I would. I would. I would argue that it's, you know, for all the talk about climate change being the fundamental issue of our times, the existential issue that we face, it doesn't get to the root, because how we live in the living world, what we are doing to the soils that not only sustain us, but are a critical part of stabilizing the climate. You know, what we do about the biodiversity that we think has to do with Nice animals out there, but really has to do with the fundamental stability and well being and evolutionary capacity of ecosystems that sustain the human economy is going to, I predict, will turn out to be more of an issue than the climate issue on its own. Eleanor Lincoln, welcome. Good to see you. Yeah, thanks so much. Gil, can you hear me okay? Just fine. Wonderful. First of all, Gil, I want to thank you for bringing us together and salute your brilliance in addressing the major challenges of our time and salute your proactivity of bringing together thoughtful people to kind of share ideas on what we're experiencing and what we might do to move forward in a more positive direction at a time when, like you said, pretty much every sphere you look at is experiencing some kind of a systems breakdown, multiple systems breakdown. So how do we act and who are we and what do we do in the face of multiple systems breakdown that seem to put species and life at risk? Thank you for bringing us together for this important conversation. I wanted to suggest a reading and this could possibly be. I don't know how you select your topics and if there's reading material behind them. It's my first time on your group, but I recently read the book called Humankind A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman, which I highly recommend when you talk about. Yes, of course the climate crisis is critical and could threaten life on Earth, but that's not really the fundamental issue. A more fundamental issue is how we think of ourselves, how we organize our society, how we live together on the planet. I think this humankind book, it really goes deep into who are we as humans and how have we lived. And we have a conception that is based on some faulty logic and faulty evidence about humanity as essentially highly aggressive, highly competitive, highly destructive. And we organize an economic system, we organize our governance around that faulty assumption. The whole thing, the survival of the fittest is actually not accurate. It's more, you know, the innateness of people needing to cooperate to survive is actually a much more common experience in human history. So I would suggest not to get into all that right now, but I would suggest that we as a community here read the book Humankind and then in a week or two. Thank you. Would you put that in the chat so people track it down? I'll be adding a couple of other suggested readings later on. I invite any of you who have something that's been really compelling, life changing, disorienting for you. Share it with the rest of us, please. Thank you. Eleanor, Elena and then Bob hall and then John Duvall, and then we'll cycle back around to David and Jesse, see if we can get Elena. Welcome. Hi. And thank you. Can you hear me? Yep. I work a lot with Stafford Beer's viable system model. And one of the really important factors of functional management is to have a clear and coherent identity. And I think that the United States and the west in general is lacking the coherent identity that it needs to really sit back and address any of these issues. And the big problem with not having a coherent identity is you have no basis to make a plan for the whole system because you aren't talking about one system. You're talking about parallel systems that quite often contradict each other. And I see this happening in Brexit. I see this happening in various political realms. I even see this happening among people who are questioning basic public health advice that we need to be able to somehow come to a coherent identity or else we're going to be stuck with the piecemeal approaches that we have now, which basically lead to tragic consequences. A couple of Thursdays ago, I was supposed to travel from Washington to New York. I'm on the train. Well, her Superstorm Ida came through. They shut down the entire Northeast corridor. They shut down the Hudson line where I was supposed to travel up the Hudson. And more than 50 people were killed in that storm. And there was no coherent tri state approach that they could use. The communications didn't even hold up. And so I think we're really in trouble unless we can make it a priority to think about what identity we want to have and to basically make it happen. You've woven a number of threads together there, Lana. Let me see if I can just tease them apart a little bit. The notion of a common identity or common purpose is fundamental. We are in a world where that is fraying, where the social coherence and social fabric is fraying partly because of many factors. But one of the factors that's new is active attempts to shred that social fabric. Yeah, that I think is something new in the world, or at least the way that we're seeing it now. The breakdowns that you described in the Northeast weren't for lack of common purpose, but an ability to execute effectively around common purpose. So I would ask back to you for the work that you and Stafford have done with Bible Systems is what you know, where does that come from? How does it emerge? How do you cultivate common purpose in an organization or a culture where it may have been lost? What are the things that give rise to that? Well, in an organization, people tend to take folks off To a retreat, to hammer it out. We don't have that option. No, we don't have that option. But in the absence of that option, I think that that would be an area where the Internet could be used to, instead of supporting misinformation and division, could be used to try to form common communities that would, you know, basically try and support one another in a holistic approach. I wish I had a better answer. Well, here we are and a lot of others like us trying to do that. For me, it's one of the things at the heart of the matter. As I see it, we are in a battle now for the story of the world behind all the specific technical policy issues. That's what keeps returning to me. What is the story that we're living in and it's not clear and it's in dispute and so much hinges on that. That's a very different kind of battle than we've ever been used to. Thank you, Elena. Doc hall, thank you. And I think that the story of the world is a good way of putting it. Elena, if you could post in the chat one or two references to your viable systems work or Stafford's work, that would be very helpful to people. This is some of the richest systems frameworks and tools that I've seen in all my efforts in this realm. Doc hall, then. John. Thanks, Gail. You referred to complex problems. I refer to them sometimes as predicaments. And there are many, many other words. Sure. But a predicament has at best a temporary solution, something that has to be addressed all the time. If you grow things, you know exactly what's meant by that because nothing stays constant. And so if you move from there into, quote, the condition of the world, nobody knows what it is right now, a lot of people sense that the old order is collapsing and don't like it, are resentful and don't know why, maybe. But the old order is on the verge of collapse. It can't keep going. And so if we are to come up with something different, then you go deep. What is our intent? Why do we have to do this? And if you say that our mission is as best you can, the preservation of all life, that is a totally different idea of an economic system from anything prevailing today about the preservation and well being of all life. Add that and see, I may be naive, but I think that's something that a lot of people of very disparate backgrounds and perspectives can resonate to. Call me, call me naive. Thanks, Doc. John Duvall thank you, Gil. I, in discussions like this I have always so overwhelmed because you know, I could talk for hours about all this stuff. So what I'm going to do is just refer you to some of the. That's a challenge to this call because everybody here could do that and we all have to be really compact. So. Well, I just, I just want to. What I'm going to do here is just refer to three or four sources that I am aware of that other people can dive into if you so desire. I've got Ugo Barty's book Before the Collapse is a brand new book published last year. Barty is a systems thinker who is kind of taking up where the limits to growth left off and reinterpreting for our current state of affairs. He's an Italian professor. Richard Heinberg's book Power, which just came out this year, is a brand new book in which Heinberg talks about all different levels of power from energy to government to economics. A great article I ran across, which I posted in the chat, is an analysis of the potential for the formation of nodes of lasting complexity or persisting complexity, which it talks about where in the world, if you really want to survive the next century, where in the world should you be? Because a lot of places are simply not going to be sustainable or resilient in the face of all the bad. I've been playing that game a little bit and it feels like trying to time the market well. The other. Yeah, I understand. And the last thing I want to mention are the writings of Joanna Macy and Carolyn Baker who write about grieving. You know, they're not trying to solve problems or overcome predicaments. They're saying we're really screwed, we're heading down a very dark tunnel and it's a little bit like a cancer diagnosis. Our society has got a cancer diagnosis, all of us do. And it's just a matter of learning to live with that grieving, which is a very, very powerful emotional place to come from. So that's my contribution. Some of you know that my wife Jane, I think she's on the call here, got a cancer diagnosis seven, seven and a half years ago. And there was grieving and there was fear. And one of the things that we sorted out as our way to enter into this new part of our lives was what I called no anticipatory freak out. There'll be plenty to be upset about and be scared about and be uncertain about along the years to follow. But to stand there and whatever it was, February of 9th of 2014 and think we know what's going to be happening five years from now and be worried about that just sapped our energy and our focus and our ability to move. And so I just raised that because for me, there's a difference between grieving now for what we've already lost and what we're losing now. And being uncertain about what's to come. But I'm not with the folks who say that we are absolutely doomed to collapse because I know we can't predict the future and it might be worse than we imagine, it might be better, better than we imagine. It will probably be different in many ways that we imagine. And so that's not where my focus goes. That said, you know, I'm a Western male who avoids grief. I'd rather not talk about grief. I'd rather put on a happy face or look for the bright side or find the optimistic path through. So what you're saying and the work that Joanna's doing is deeply important to ground us in the present reality, without which we can't move into any kind of future. So thank you for raising that again. Reminder, people, if you want to share books, stick them in the post. Jan, I'm going to come to you in a minute. I want to go back and see if we can get David Shundran back in the conversation. David's been waiting for a while. And Jesse. Yes, I got you. Next, let's see if this is working. It's working well. Go ahead. Go for it. Great. I want to go into that darkness of the present that particularly men avoid. I believe that there is a discussion just like this one that has occurred at the level of the World Economic Forum where they set out a problem statement and decided that they were going to do something to make the world more sustainable, which essentially meant grabbing power and moving towards a much smaller population and control over that population. I have reason to believe that this pandemic is a planned effort on the part of these global elites that will end up as a global depopulation effort. I recognize that that's a radical thing to say in this context, but I want to point out the parallels to the topics that we've been discussing here. Problem solving, the rise of fascism, the pandemic, and the unsustainability of current population levels and current standard of living. And I believe that what we're seeing is an effort by global elites to solve these problems by disposing of many of us. David, I would. We can't go into that in detail here, but I would ask you if you can ground any of those assertions, you know, share references that people could look at if they're interested. That would be very helpful. Sure. I think that's something we need in this time. I don't know that this is a. I mean, I don't know if you're right or not. I don't know if this is a willful effort to destroy. But I think what is clear is what Bruno Latour talked about in his remarkable book down to Earth, which I highly recommend, is that we've seen a kind of rupture in human solidarity in which the elites are basically pulling up the ladders and setting out the lifeboats and saying, well, the hell with the rest of you. There's, you know, the game of a common game has been broken. And we see one example of that is the, you know, is zillionaires, you know, buying retreats or seastead communities or underground bunkers and the prepper mentality at different levels of society. There's this break of the common story, what Doris Lessing called the substance of we feeling in the remarkable Shikasta series. So it's hard to prove motive, but I think it's possible to observe that phenomenon of a divide in human interest at planetary scale that's worth very much talking about. Thank you for raising that, Jesse Henshaw, take off. Mute, Jesse, please. Yeah, there you go. So, yeah, I like the way you introduced the discussion with the analogy of the trim tabs. But for the trim tab to work, it's got to be in the water and connected to the rudder and use the water for leverage. And we don't know where to put our trim tabs, I think, is the general difficulty that's so frustrating. And I study natural systems as living organisms, essentially worlds that work as a whole. And when pushed to their limits, they tend to break down in every part at once because each part tries to compensate for the strains on others. And so you get what has previously. It's long previously been called a plague of plagues in a system that pushed to its limits and we see other signs of it, and how the economy is forcing people to produce more and more with less and less, as if bricks without straw. So I think this is something we've been telling stories about for a long time, and the cause is not compound growth per se, because all living systems begin with compound growth. And it depends on where you put your money into more growth after it's reached its limit, as we are at present, or into healing the earth. So in short order, there's a technical solution that we can't capture to move the investment of the profits of the Earth into saving the Earth unless we do some, some massive cultural transformation. Because interfering with prophets is sort of sacred territory. And, but we, that's what we need to do. So. Well, you know, the cultural change that would allow that is where we could put our. So Jesse, what's from your vantage point, what's your mood in this era? Oh, well, I'm happy to be finally engaged. I spent 40 years waiting for this point to come. I saw it coming a long way off that we would come to the collective crisis. And I have a couple of links I can put in the chat. One is to the top 100 global crises growing with growth. In case we don't have enough of them to think about that. Please do that. And then one, that and my, let's see, where did it go? Chat. Okay. And the other is to my journal, my research notes journal, where there's discussion of what I see as the, the cultural evolution that could, could turn us around. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, please do that. You know, you talked about the sanctity of profit and you know, we live in a world in which we take profit for granted and capitalism for granted. But capital capitalism is only, you know, 500 years old if that. You know, there's been commerce throughout human history. There was trade in commerce throughout human history. That's not capitalism. Capitalism is a new thing. And so it is therefore to my mind, not necessarily a permanent thing. And I mentioned before the, you know, the, the Jewish New Year. Starting now, we are entering into a seven year cycle, not known to most people, but a seven year cycle that makes this what's called the Shmita Year. And this is a year of return of, of not doing agriculture, of letting land lie fallow for an entire year, and of remission of death. Which is kind of a remarkable thing if you think about it. It turns out it was not unique to the Hebrews. This was a common feature of society in the ancient Middle East. Jane, if you could put the reference to Mark Hudson's book in the chat, that would be great. But there was a system that said in the interest of social stability and ecological stability, we need to periodically reset the economic system. So there was a sanctity that was different from the sanctity of profit. Now can we get from here to there? Don't know. There is talk about debt jubilee. This is certainly a part of the story of the economics of the so called third world, which is not so much underdeveloped as a noun as it is underdeveloped as a verb because of the relations of trade and economics in the world. So I want to especially thank you for flagging this thing that we call sacred. Let's have our antenna out for the things that we take that we think are sacred or that our society thinks are sacred and look explicitly at those. That's a place where there are clues for us because the sacred is a place of blindness. It's a place where we don't look and where we don't listen or don't listen well enough to hear what's behind that story. So that's a great, great insight, Jesse. Thank you so much for that. Let me go to Jan Ballard, Sandra Baer, Andrew Bulbulia, David Chasky, Jane Byrd. Okay. And that is probably all we're going to have time for this this day, but let's go at that. Jan, welcome. Yeah, just to start, I just want to say hi, Doc, it's been a long time. Great to see you on this call. And a lot of the themes today, Bucky, addressed in his last book, Grunch of Giants, which stands for Gross Universal Cash Heist. I spend my time as a reinventer of accounting. And the profit is a distraction from the cash, and it's the cash that's being stolen. That's just a side note to all these other discussions today. My main thought, I'd like to throw in a different approach to thinking about this, which I thought was very well opened up. And thank you, Jesse, for teeing this up so well with your comments last time. A couple of times, Chauncey specifically mentioned about the problem of language and how we understand each other and don't understand each other because of the way our worldviews are constructed through an internal language where we're using the same words for different things and different words for the same things. And the miracle that we understand each other at all, given the vagaries of language that Korzybski first defined in Science and Sanity, that where our perceptual apparatus are doomed to misperception a significant period of the time. And that, for instance, we make ourselves sick by having these thoughts about how we are like you were talking with you and Jane. And if you speak those thoughts, then you're reinforcing the disease state. So what if we language that slightly differently instead of saying you're doomed to misperceptions, saying that we inevitably live in interpretations. Yes, yes. Rather than in facts. And that's just a Given it's not good or bad, it's just what we do. But knowing, noticing that, right, and having a listening to our own interpretations and to what might be the interpretations behind what other people are saying starts to open something up. And that leads to my, my main point which when I was studying the systems of communication in the 70s, it just became clear to me that the issue in our world is that as small groups of people from say 2 to 6, we make shitty decisions all the time and we don't have a way of validating the truth of what one another is seeing versus what's the misdirection. I've thought a lot about that particular problem. I want to suggest a direction that runs parallel to a lot of the doing, which is actually to intentionally develop a shared language. I like Alexander's pattern language approach, even though of course his book Pattern Language was never reiterated. So it violated the fundamental principle of pattern language, which is it's always a tentative understanding. So I'd like to throw out an idea that I've been working on for many, many years which is to develop a, an index of all indexes and a new language. And I've actually. This could go very wise. Keep it. No, I'm just going to throw out a thought to people which is that we engage together in the co creation of an intentional language and we begin to develop a pattern language about this discussion, all the words that we're using here and that we begin to develop a way to know each other and ourselves a little differently by having patterns that we can all do in common. So I'm throwing out the idea here to this group that we could collectively generate a pattern language. And I would very much like feedback on this index of indexes that I've developed as a way of getting at that and I'm interested, if anybody else is interested, please give us a link in the chat and wait for people to reach you if they'd like out to find. Follow up on that. Okay. I would suggest, David, before I get to you for a moment, that whatever we do about, about developing languages, there's also the language that we're in and how we listen. And I would, I would invite you, this is from work that I've been doing with Chauncey and Fernando Flores and others, to listen both to the speech of others but also to your own speech. And notice the difference between when you make assertions and when you make assessments, between when you make statements that can be tested, grounded, verified against something external in the world and when it's something that is your interpretation or opinion, not that there's anything wrong with that. Those are very different kind of statements. I mean, one of the things that we deal with, I think anybody who lives with somebody else has had the experience of one person saying, it's hot in here and the other person saying, no, it's not. I'm actually cold. Well, what are those now? Those are assertions. Those can't be. What can be tested is that it's 68 degrees in the house. Let's make, let's raise it to 70. But I'm hot. I'm cold is entirely subjective, interpretive, not wrong. It's the real experience. But if you argue over is it hot, is it cold, you're not going to get anywhere. Exactly. It's a different kind of conversation. So listening for assertions and assessments and requests and promises opens up a new dimension in the language that we are living together every day while we're trying to construct other structures behind it. So, Jan, thank you for that. I'm sorry, David, I had Adam ahead of you. I missed that. Oh, no, I'm way back. Sandra. Adam. David. Jane, please, please stay focused and compact. Senator Goh. Thank you, Gil. First of all, thank you for hosting these meetings. You know, the thought provoking ideas you always bring are what we need to be inspired by. Second, I echo Eleanor's recommendation about humankind. I love that book. I think it would be a huge positive input for all of us. Everyone should read it. Third point is that I think we're in a convergence of crises, but now is the time, in my opinion, for transformation. I work with cities around the world, so I'm seeing opportunities that I've never seen before. So amidst the pandemic and divisive politics, social and racial injustice, and of course the climate crisis, I mean, all of these things are converging on us. My final point is that one of the things I've been doing with a business partner over the pandemic year of 2020 was start doing question storming. And I won't elaborate on it, it's on my website. The final point, Gil, is that question storming takes a very difficult question. We asked, how can we rebuild trust in a broken world? And then didn't allow people to answer it. We only asked questions. So I will send information about that to you, Gil, on a separate note. Thank you. Appreciate it, Sandra, thank you very much. Adam, you're up. Let me know if my Internet connection gets unstable. Thank you, Gil. I've been working on Heart centered revolution that I believe happens inside the human heart of each person and rolls out from there. It's about connecting to our heart and soul and then connecting with each other and then moving outward from there. And you know, to me that's what's missing is doing business out of all our relations, doing a science connected with the heart and humanity. And that's what I feel like is missing everywhere in our society and really needs to be addressed. Yeah, thank you, Adam. Appreciate that. It's missing everywhere except in the many places where people are trying to do that. That's part of the good news in the story. I mean, I opened with the darkness, but the. At the same time, we're in an explosion of creativity around the planet. People trying to bring these values forward, whether in cities or large companies or small companies or families or personal life. And it's, you know, it's challenging in the face of the juggernaut, but you can spend a lot of time cataloging deeply inspiring creative efforts. Many of you were involved in them. Paul Hawkins last book, God Blessed Unrest, did a great job on that. Paul, when he launched the book, Paul, when he would speak, would do a scroll of organizations scrolling on the screen behind him and at some point after it was running for half hour, he said, just the list that I have gathered could run for two days. So that's invisible to us. That's not the story that the mainstream media is oriented to tell us. So, Adam, thank you. David Shasta. One thing, can I just say one more? Yeah, please, Gil. The one thing that I think has not been done is we need to draw a boundary around rape, murder and torture and not allow it to happen. And I call this with sacred rage where we don't allow anything that comes between humanity to exist. And we do that with love, not with, not with divisive energy, not with, you know, but that's where I feel like, you know, we just draw a boundary and say no more together. Thank you. Worthy, Worthy. Goal Easier. One of many. That's easier said than done because we said we've been saying that for thousands of years, strangely enough. David Schatz, please. Hi, Gil. It's great to be reconnected with you. I was pleasantly surprised to receive this invitation and you'll be pleased to know that I'm compliant with your guidance not to jump to solutioning. I'm really just in a mode to share some feelings about it. I think like a lot of it's not so much my guidance as my challenge to you and to all of us. Well, I'm beyond solution and see what happens. Yeah, no, well, this is part of, stems from sort of how I'm perceiving the state that our world is in right now that I feel like it defies solutioning in some ways. Because the number of aspects of our world that are damaged or are under threat is overwhelming and they are interdependent. And therefore it's a time of unparalleled uncertainty, at least high uncertainty. Maybe it's parallel, that's why the solution is so challenging. And in that this kind of context, when the future seems less knowable than ever before and the solutions are so hard to grasp, it seems like the one, a standby posture is one where you emphasize agility and resilience. They seem to become more valuable than ever before. And these are attributes that we associate with youth who tend to be more relaxed about and open minded when facing big changes in the world that they're inhabiting than people of an older generation. And I think at times when the people in our generation, if I can use that term collectively, are a bit flummoxed about how to move forward, it can be tempting to say, well, the youth will figure it out. They have the energy, they have the agility, and some of them have the optimism. And I hope that's true. Although some of you may have seen a study that was just publicized in the last day or so that some half of young people around the world believe that humanity is doomed and they attribute inaction by governments. But the other half is not. And I'm hopeful that their energy and their optimism and their agility will help, will help us find a path forward. Thank you. Well, you know, the youth have a contribution to make. The elders have a contribution to make. Folks in between, everybody, everybody's got a part in this story. Gary Lepo's got a great song called All God's Children Got a place in the choir. Look that one up. Jane Bird. Oh, There's nothing wrong with silence. Sometimes I feel present at the. At the birth of some birth of a world whose mother is dying. And other days I realize that I'm present at a birth of a world whose mother is being murdered. And it's an anguishing. It's an anguish to take in the intentional as well as ignorant destruction of the biosphere and what's here. And I feel we really, at the human level, really have to build trust. People have lost trust in the efficacy of solutions for a long, long time. And. The world is watching the experiment with democracy in The United States. And I think an awful lot of trust towards our future depends on how the experiment in the United States goes. I can imagine that there's such distancing that human beings are capable of that the scenario that David Schonbrun brought to the table of intentional depopulating of people is entirely imaginable. It's entirely imaginable. We do that now in policy time. That's the terrifying thing about it, Jane, is not, not whether it's true or not or whether David can document it or not, but the fact that it lands with some credibility. Yes, that it's understandable and imaginable that people could be scheming in those ways. I can remember when Henry Kissinger was famous for referring to the useless eaters. And so the distancing in us as private individuals, I think can somewhat be overcome by realizing that the civilization that destroys its soil destroys itself. And we have the guardianship of the soil, of the biosphere, everywhere that we have it. I have a little patch in my life. Each one of you has some patch of soil that you can address yourself to in your city, local, state, BioRegion. Close to 40% of the planet right now is without plant cover and is going desert. And so we can heal the world through healing the hydrologic cycle of water and how water cools the world. Because I have been steeping myself in the lectures and teachings of this soil biologist and climatologist named Walter Yenne. J E H N E He's helped me understand that we've had a narrow focus on the carbon dioxide contribution to global warming because historically scientists thought the hydrologic cycle was just too diverse and complex to take into account. And currently that lack of understanding has been overturned. And there's an understanding now, an ability to model things have advanced so that recognizing that allowing forests to be planted and fostered and getting deep rooted plants and trees that breathe their little particles of bacteria into the air, that allow rain to fall around these little particles that nucleate the rainfall, that the water vapor is a much more potent contribution to the greenhouse warming effect on the planet than even the CO2 gases. So we've been misdirected. Not intentionally, but we have an opportunity to course correct now. And I think where we need to put our trim tabs is in understanding the hydrologic cycles and how the grassroots effort to heal and take care of soil wherever we are, is an enormous contribution to the speed of the healing of the biosphere. And it need not make us enemies of the ruling class and the Fact that governments that issue currency can never run out of money. That our money systems are screwed up in our thinking to the point where we think a government like the United States has to raise tax revenues to have money to spend when it in fact is the issuer of the currency. So we don't have to tax the rich to get the money to operate. We have to tax the rich for the moral authority it provides and to end the political gap of wealth disparity that generates political power, what we call political power and coercion. So we have a great future in dissolving these old lines of conflict that create needless enemies. And I really think we have to befriend the elite and help them gain an understanding that we don't need to threaten them and frighten them into their need to get rid of us. Deep breath, everybody. That's something we get to talk about over the dinner table tonight a little bit more. What strikes me, Jane, about what you said is just the shift in the mood in me from the anger and indignation over what the elites may be cooking up to us and the sense of just absolute wonder at the notion that bacteria emitted from the stomata of leaves and feed forests provide nucleating particles for the rain and. And the forest call in the rain. And the cloud cover. Wow. And the cloud cover and, you know, and what we see as cause and effect may not be right and may be missing important pieces. And we are here in this living world and one of the questions, as I said before, is, do we learn to belong to it? Not to manage it better, but to belong to it as living beings in a living world. If we just ask that question, what happens? What arises in you? What moods shift in you? So let me with that. I said at the top of the call that the Arundhati Roy quote, another world is not only possible. She is on her way on a quiet day. I can hear her breathing. You've all heard that before. I just discovered this week that that's the second half of the quote. Let me see if I can get Zoom to behave itself here. And. To me, this tells a slightly different story. The system will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling. Their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, underscore here their notion of inevitability. Remember this. We be many and they be few. They need us more than they need them. That's the setup. And then another world is not only possible. She is on her way. On a quiet day. I can hear her Breathing. For me, that was profound discovery. How's it landing for you, David? And then Musha. Yeah, I was just struck by the we and they language in a supposedly democratic society. It's concerning that this representative government and the elite that it helped create is viewed as something that is not our own creation. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Wow. Thank you, Gil, for the invitation to join us. This has just been unbelievable from my standpoint. You know, I kind of have a. Urgent optimism is my mood. And it really comes from, you know, the leading edge of cognitive science. And. And I love that maybe that maybe stepping back and taking a little rest here as humanity. And actually, maybe Mother Earth is pretty much alive here and can actually solve some of these problems in ways that are beyond our comprehension right now. And so I just want to say thank you. I really appreciated the flow of the comments and everybody that spoke, so thanks. Thanks, Moosh. And I appreciate the flow of the comments, too. And I like the phrase urgent optimism. Like it very much. Optimism may not be the ticket any more than pessimism is the ticket. You know, maybe we're not called on to either. Maybe our job is realism. Yeah. Well, if I can just make a comment that one of the reasons I have urgent optimism is because I'm so embedded at the bottom of the pyramid with indigenous people and they have not bought into the system. And so they really are, in my estimation, the innovators of the future, you know, in education and an Earth centric paradigm. Yeah. And who has the highest vaccination rate in the United States? The Indians? Indigenous populations, by far. Why? I suspect is because they still have something alive about mutual care. Yeah. Well, up here at Pine Ridge, they literally stop cars on the highway and they're very protective of their society. Thank you. Thank you. Carl says our job is to do what we can, regardless of whether we'll be here for the results. We don't know what the results of our actions are going to be. We get to do what we do with the greatest wisdom and sense of solidarity and sense of wonder that we can bring to the story. So let me. We're about 120. We have about 10 minutes left. Let me offer some resources to you all. First of all, just logistics. We will reconvene on October 20th. It's always the third Wednesday of every month at this time and slot. Please, if you would like, invite other people to enrich the conversation. The way I put it is people who are not like me or not like you, but bring a different perspective into this conversation. But share something with us so there's both a coherence and a diversity in what we're trying to do. Second, let me go to the third bullet first. I'm seeking partners in supporting and expanding this work. So if you or anybody else is interested in helping me produce and edit and more widely share this conversation and variations of it in other forms, would love to talk with you. And then here's this is a short list of books that have been profoundly affecting me lately. This is not the whole library, obviously I'll put the list in the chat as well. But these are some of the things that have been contributing to many of the thoughts and ideas that I've been sharing with you. And once again, I would invite you, all of you, if you'd care, to share what's affecting you with others in this community. We're not going to be sending out the chat as we have done before. So if you want to get a copy of the chat, use the three dots in the lower right hand corner of your chat screen and save it. That will give you everything that's in it. If you want people to contact you directly, put your contact information in there. I'm not going to share your emails with you because I don't have permission with you all, because I don't have permission to do that. But I will email you out probably next week, not this week, in view of the Jewish holidays. Both a link to the edited video and a survey for your reactions and your follow on thoughts to this conversation. WALTER Yenny's on YouTube. I think somebody a little bit earlier posted a link to Yenny. If you search for him, you will find a lot of richness and, and very challenging perspectives. Both, you know, as Jane said, saying, well, what you think is the cause, the primary cause is not the primary cause. That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is what a remarkable opportunity he and the people he's working with have opened up of how to think about inhabiting this living planet in terms of how we do agriculture and how we do forests and how we do the interrelationship between the vital beings on the surface of the earth, the atmosphere and soils that sustain us. So we're a little early, but I'm, I'm sensing, I'm sensing more reflection at this point than people wanting to add anything more to the conversation. So with a last call, I will, I will gratefully draw this to a close. Thank you all for being here. Both those of you who have spoken and those of you who are not spoken, I look forward to seeing you next month. I'm happy, of course, to talk with you all offline individually, whether in conversation or whether there are any ways that I might be of service to you or in service with you to the folks that you are in service to. So again, thank you. Have a wonderful day. Thank you for enriching my.