Fighting the Muppetocracy

[hexayurt]

All that we have left from Gandhi… is the method of Satyagraha: truth-force.

I made a mistake in my early attempts to integrate Gandhi by sticking too close to his political and economic theories. That was a mistake because so much has changed in the 60ish years since Mahatmaji died that a lot of it just doesn’t make sense, and he died before much of the theory was tested, which means we don’t have his experience and learning about his own philosophies to learn from. His models constantly evolved, and we have no idea what he would have added, subtracted or changed about his theories given more time!

So I’ve had to go back and apply the method: first speak the truth, then live it. I’m not doing very well at living the truth - still tied to market capitalism, and hedging my bets with the military-industrial complex. I have not achieved ahimsa - I’ve got an intellectual understanding of non-violence, and the soul of a killer. I’m still working towards it, but it seems further away than ever: rage gets fast, easy, destructive results.

But that’s the key: I am where I am, and I tell the truth about what I know. The method is what counts from Gandhiji, not his results from the method.

We have very little hope of implementing his conclusions, but there is absolute freedom to implement his methods and reach our own conclusions. It’ll likely destroy everything we believe and most of our cherished assumptions along the way, but isn’t that the point: it cost Gandhi his racism, his caste privilege, his gender privilege and everything else as he went along coming to the conclusion that so much of his own native culture was abuse and lies, and polished layer after layer clear, abandoning each unsupportable prejudice within himself and within the world as he went.

Such are our demigods of the past.

Such may we become!

The only card I have left is to acknowledge that I am out of cards.

I really was listening to that old devil Bembo Davis.

[hexayurt]

All that we have left from Gandhi… is the method of Satyagraha: truth-force.

I made a mistake in my early attempts to integrate Gandhi by sticking too close to his political and economic theories. That was a mistake because so much has changed in the 60ish years since Mahatmaji died that a lot of it just doesn’t make sense, and he died before much of the theory was tested, which means we don’t have his experience and learning about his own philosophies to learn from. His models constantly evolved, and we have no idea what he would have added, subtracted or changed about his theories given more time!

So I’ve had to go back and apply the method: first speak the truth, then live it. I’m not doing very well at living the truth - still tied to market capitalism, and hedging my bets with the military-industrial complex. I have not achieved ahimsa - I’ve got an intellectual understanding of non-violence, and the soul of a killer. I’m still working towards it, but it seems further away than ever: rage gets fast, easy, destructive results.

But that’s the key: I am where I am, and I tell the truth about what I know. The method is what counts from Gandhiji, not his results from the method.

We have very little hope of implementing his conclusions, but there is absolute freedom to implement his methods and reach our own conclusions. It’ll likely destroy everything we believe and most of our cherished assumptions along the way, but isn’t that the point: it cost Gandhi his racism, his caste privilege, his gender privilege and everything else as he went along coming to the conclusion that so much of his own native culture was abuse and lies, and polished layer after layer clear, abandoning each unsupportable prejudice within himself and within the world as he went.

Such are our demigods of the past.

Such may we become!

The only card I have left is to acknowledge that I am out of cards.

I really was listening to that old devil Bembo Davis.

[lyne_robichaud]

clanging cymbal

I am sorry, I cannot follow you along this line of thinking. You are a clanging cymbal today, dear. Clear your mind. Chaos is a friend of mine. – Bob Dylan

In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.

Allies, THERE ARE. You don’t see them, but they exist. Maybe there is no army running behind you, but there is something. There is always something working to meet our desires. We have to allow time for the details, timing, and delivery to be organized.

See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin!

This does not mean to stop working. It means to stop W-O-R-R-I-N-G. We do things, and believe that our actions have no impact, but they do have one. Things are changing slowly - far too slowly for my taste - but I have no doubt they evolve. No doubt. Absolutely none.

Because I know that intention and desire, in the field of pure potentiality, have an infinite organizing power. What I want is obviously too large to be carried by one individual. But I want it anyway. I plant the seed of intent.

Instead of believing you played your last card, why don’t you aim to become a miracle worker.

Have a bit of faith in yourself and those around you. You are capable of great things, you know it. You are extremely talented. If you do not know what to do or how to do it, then stop moving for a while, do no-thing. Non-action. Let go.

[hexayurt]

No Faith.

Roughly a thousand children an hour die of malnutrition or preventable disease, Lynn.

I have no faith. We have taken no effective action to stem that tide in our generation.

That doesn’t mean that it won’t work out in the end, but it is not working right now, and the compromises we have made on realism to remain positive and remain active are destroying our operational effectiveness in analysis of the problem and action to prevent further damage to the world and the people.

It’s that simple: until we can admit that this is not enough, and not working, we cannot go further.

We have to admit failure, and do the analysis on what went wrong, before we can realistically move forwards to a strategy that might convert our good intentions into a global solution for all of us. It’s the tendency to minimize our failures, and not to count the dead among the poor, and the loss of species etc. which is betraying the accurate feedback loop which would bring us to the conclusion that we are achieving almost nothing.

It’s like protecting a single house as a city burns down and calling it victory because, well, we’ve saved one house. Perhaps it’s a museum or the center of government we saved, but the city itself is being abandoned to the fire, and our minor successes are hailed as great victories.

We need a desolation of the spirit which matches the desolation of the situation.

From that, if we are strong enough, emerges light. But we must go all the way to get to the other side, and not stop at the false hope which comes before dispare if we are going to figure out how to really affect the situation, because every piece of false hope we carry turns into flawed action, factors we did not consider in our analysis. And the worse the material is, the more likely we are to exclude it from our mental models, and the more critical actually planning to deal with it is.

We are biased to ignore the facts it is most vital that we include in our strategic and political models of the world.

We are biased to ignore the most powerful facts.

Overcoming this blindness is the most critical first step in giving a new birth to a realpolitik for the environmental age.

[inflector]

Faith Requires Truth

I too have travelled many paths to get to my current understanding that we have been deeply remiss in our care for the poor and we all face disaster unless there are fundamental changes in the very near future.

As time gets shorter, I have been impelled to switch my efforts from the traditional routes into a combination of preparation for dealing with the likely disaster combined with a parallel effort to find the right people to enact what we Americans refer to as a “hail Mary pass” from our football when your side is down so far that there is nothing to be lost by just throwing the ball as far as you can and hoping that someone from your side can catch it.

There is one thing, and one thing only as far as I can tell, that can save us from the global collapse and die-off that seems inevitable given current trends.

We must organize from the bottom up to take on power directly. Not through force but through economic warfare. Money controls the levers of power. Consumers and investors control money and profits through their actions. The right set of small changes can have large effects if done in a coordinated way. This must be guerrilla warfare, a frontal assault will only be crushed. That does not mean a centralized and controled way, nor does it mean that the coordination will not organic and bottom up. We just need the equivalent of Gene Sharp’s work for economic revolution.

There is much we can do.

But first the truth, the real truth, must out.

[alberto]

Voting with your time

Inflecto and all, I am interested in the bottom up approach. Which brings me back to the Edgeryders approach: not so much to duplicate existing broad-spanning conversation, however interesting, but finding out about what people are actually doing. The thinking is this: if young people in Europe are putting time, energy resources in trying to achieve something, it means they really care about it. Whereas talk, as we know, is quite cheap - especially on the Internet.

So, guys, there is a lot of intellectual firepower here, and I would be curious to find out exactly what you are up to. I know a bit about Vinay, not so much about the others. Would you be up for sharing with us what you are doing? It could fit on Share your Ryde, The Quest for Paid Work, your user profile or wherever you want, but it would be interesting!

[peter_dillon]

Humans and hope

I do tend to end up with a similarly bleak view of the world - it seems “rational” to end up with an analysis like this.  And I increasigly distrust my “rationalism” - it doesn’t offer solutions.

I have no idea how we resist the American monster.

I’m 52.  Even a few years ago I thought  I’d escape the main thrust of climate change in my lifetime.  I understand the exponential rate of change well enough to know I’ll se a lot of shit, more than we can hope to turn back.  0.8C in 150 years and 5 more in 90 years speaks for itself - the last 1 degree rise will take place over about 5 years.  All 19 high growth climate models show the arctic rise is 4 x earth average = 24C by the end of the century.  And we expected 2C ten years ago, 4C 3 years ago and 6C now…

Sense of time is important - we (working class) lived throuh shit for much of recorded history.  The bubble of the last 50 years has coccooned us from that reality (in the west) - most recently via the exploitation of anyone left in the world to enslave.  It doesn’t have to be like this and it is probably going to be a lot worse than this in future.  An ecologist could predict huge population collapse without having to do the maths.

However,  humans regularly surprise me and I never give up hope.

And I don’t wish to negate hope with dark stories - we need examplars to accompany the problem - possible solutions.  Make the examplars well known enough that the oppressors or muppets crush or mismanage that hope?

Structure drives behaviour to a large extent; the hope for individual actors to escape muppetdom is slim, if non-existent.  A charismatic “leader” might go the way of Gandhi.

Do we make great strides by somehow removing oligarchical media?  In what ways are new stories going to reach a critical mass without removal of this disease?  Distributed information and filter bubbles don’t seem to help there either.

We need to support each other with positive messages, as well as promoting awareness in others.

At the moment my default behaviour is to stay local and build whatever awareness and resilience I can.  It is a drop in the ocean - at once both a bounteous and hostile ocean.  If I think too hard I start sinking, if I dream I find the energy to swim

[hexayurt]

I agree, but not on positivity

I think it’s very important that we don’t disengage from the small steps - we don’t understand the structure of the problem well enough to know if one of those small steps will suddenly unravel the entire situation. It’s happened before: who could have predicted that The Pill (birth control) would turn out to be such an enormously critical part of social development in the last 50 years, not just for women, but for the whole of society as control of fertility turned into a key aspect of human freedom?

At the same time, I could not be more against positive messaging. We need realism about the situation, and we need the kind of bleak perspective which does not cause us to swallow our negative emotions about the fate of the planet and the state of our lives because without that bleak realism, we cannot be fully integrated.

How should members of the dominant species feel as they wreck what, as far as we know, is the only repository of Life in the entire universe?

Perhaps if we all felt that way, we would act differently.

This is my challenge: an emotional cartography of the human experience of being aware of ourselves killing the world, as a way of making change. I’m out here feeling the terrain as well as I’m able, in much the same way that I did for genocide, nuclear terrorism and pandemic flu, to try and know it emotionally well enough to act on it.

When I feel positively about it, the world will know.

Sorry if that seems bleak, but that’s my real state today.

[cocreatr]

yes, we need the call to action

and it may well be easier and faster to get people to collaborate against something than for something.

It is a big task to wean our econoy from oil, coal and other polluting technologies and to make progress with what we have. Lots of machinations to uncover. Some will go there and clear out the rat’s nest, others build a new economy.

“Who said renewables are not competitive?” Gunter Pauli

[cocreatr]

how did the duplicate happen?  sorry, deleted

[alberto]

Interesting thinking (but wrong campaign?)

Vinay, it says a lot about you that you would bring up global governance issues in a mission of the “Making a living” campaign! I would see this truly biblical “cry in the desert” more on other campaigns: given the nature of climate, one about common resources springs to mind. The point is legitimate, and we might want to bring it back with some force later into Edgeryders.

Me? I had in mind the individual scale; I still do. Allies are people (or non-human entities, such as institutions) that we can turn to for help as we angle for making a living with reasonable integrity. Maybe I am just petty; on the other hand, maybe not. One thing that I like to say in collective action debates - I would certainly use it if I were sitting in a conference and you were to deliver a speech like this:

there is no “we”

That is to say, there is no entity called “we” that acts in a coherent way in pursuit of its goals. “We did not do it for poverty” implies that this guy “we” has agency, and chose not to do it. But of course “we” has no agency, it is an emergent property of several things lower-level entities (people and organizations) do in a tightly interrelated world.

So, to figure out why the world looks the way it does, it makes sense to start at the lower level. Who can help you, or me, or any of the other Edgeryders in our quests (plural) for making a liing with integrity? Let’s resolve “we”, and figure out its componenet parts and their mutual interactions. Which brings us back, I guess, to “Bring on the allies”.

[hexayurt]

The Practical Side of Making a Living

I couldn’t agree more on There Is No We. I keep finding myself correcting other people, and making them name the “we” to which they refer - all sentient beings, all humanity, their social group, their family, just themselves. I refer to the hexayurt project as “we” sometimes, but it’s only really become a “we” in the last two years. First person plural, as @dymaxion often says.

For me, the bottom line is that I’ve had to structure my life around not being able to get paid for working on the real problems, because our institutions won’t admit they exist.

I can’t get hired to help save the world from the problem of broken institutions and failed global governance by those same broken instututions and failed global governance. There’s just never really been a place for me at the table in government because I’m ruthlessly insistent on dealing with the big problems, not the stuff inside of the four year electoral cycle, but the stuff on the same basic scale as the Policy of Containment, the long-haul intergenerational struggles for coherence and clarity in the face of our global threats.

So I’ve had to learn to make a living while working on the real problems outside of the government funding streams, and indeed, even outside of the academic funding streams -

• no place in government,
• no place in academia, 
• no place in industry. 

I've had friends in all three sectors who've helped me get by, but if we were actually getting on top of these problems globally, probably I'd run a department in some critical area inside of one of those three sectors: I'd be a director, not a starving political artist fighting a guerilla policy war from the trenches on the wrong side of town. My inability to get funded comes directly from the inability of even progressive funding institutions to understand the problem, and the color of money required to directly address it.

I live in the funding shadow, in the blind spot, in the cognitive dissonance of the State as it struggles to face these problems on behalf of all of us. It’s like riding in the wake of an enormous truck or ship.

[wolfbird]

“…probably I’d run a department in some critical area inside of one of those three sectors: I’d be a director, …”

And in the immortal words of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, what a waste that would be !

Havn’t we already got more than enough ‘directors’ ? If you get ‘inside’, you are already co-opted and next thing you’ll be worrying about your  status, the model of car you’re in, your tailors, advancement up the ladder towards your pension scheme. Much better to be lean, mean, hungry, fierce and free, and accept that your path will be unique, nothing like anything a careers adviser will have ever encountered in the history of the world…

And stop complaining, ffs, you seem to think it is your personal task to save all and everything, and reconstruct the human species, - in a way, it is - but the fact that it can’t be done by snapping your fingers and producing ‘the instant result’ shouldn’t be a surprise. Should it ? If it was easy, someone would have fixed everything by now. Doesn’t mean you are failing, means that the task is kinda BIG and weird.

You excell at analysis, Vinay. Help us all to understand how the machine works, teach us, explain how things are, so we can better see what to do. Stop worrying about your identity, you’re not THAT important, whether you are a gentle peace guru or a rabid killer, who cares ? do what you’re best at, delegate, spread the load out in ripples, so that people you’ll never know or meet hear and learn and understand. Ask for donations, set up a payment method, so others can assist you so that you don’t starve

[wolfbird]

Another thought…

It would

Another thought…

It would be a good start, before getting carried away with massive idealistic intentions, just to do the ordinary everyday stuff - well, I was going to say superbly, but just adequately and efficiently would do - for example, Vinay Gupta, if you are going to go to all that trouble to give a fine lecture to 20 people, why not get a decent video camera and set it up properly first, and do a sound check and lighting check before hand, so that the projections can be seen and read ? Then you can reach thousands, millions of people. The content of the lecture was superb, important, the delivery was professional and amusing, but the technical problems were pitiful, a school kid could do better.

Why aren’t there youtubes and transcripts for those ideas freely available and widely distributed ? because the technical quality was total crap ! that’s why.

[lyne_robichaud]

Separate self VS Oneness

I shake my head in disappointment when I read through this thread. To the point that comments here made me dream at night about missed planes.

I would certainly not waste my time to sit in a conference where someone would deliver a speech like this: “There is no We.” That would amount for me to a speech about “The earth is flat.”

Until now, there may not have been much ‘We’ conveyed by our institutions, because these are conducted by people who themselves focus on the separate self.

Life has taught me that a person’s identity is a “socially induced hallucination”. I found out that there is no such thing as a person. I realized that we are a localized expression of a unified field. “Every drop of sap contains the fullness of the whole tree.” (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)  Which means that in reality, there is only a bundle of consciousness constantly in flux. We perceive a separate self (Me). But it is an illusion. The real nature of beings is that there is only a We.

Deepak Chopra explains that the biggest challenge now is that most individuals of our society believe in the separate self. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at6d5yjFGeE

Bringing our attention to oneness inspires the gathering with a power or synergy that gives access to a field of possibilities. I’m not saying that all problems will fly away. But by making an effort to focus thoughts on oneness, it opens up possibilities.

Alberto Cottica suggested the other day that I think in a Paulo Coelho-like way. This is how Coelho describes separate self VS oneness:

“The vast multitude of humans (i.e., the sheep) know only the physical aspect of their existence. When an individual realizes his or her oneness, he or she sheds identification with the material world thereby raising consciousness higher to a purer realm.”

I like to think that this (raising consciousness to a higher level) can be applied to the economy and to governance. It gives me hope and faith in humanity. It self-motivates me to continue to raise awareness about open government principles.

To keep repeating that there are no allies, that there is no We, is to remain in a separate realm. If this concept is not internalized, I hardly see how to move to the next step, the next Edgeryders campaign, ‘We the people’.

[wolfbird]

crikey

I have some strong criticisms of Vinay’s position ( e.g. his naive anthropocentric, technocentric optimism, lack of understanding of the neo-primitivist critique, other minor matters ) but I greatly admire his courage, and that he gives his whole heart and soul to his struggle, and he’s actually achieved something worthwhile with his impressive hexayurt project. IMHO, we need a lot more folks like him who can face the bleak and bitter horror of the predicament we are all in, and lay it out clearly, honestly and fearlessly.

I think you are a bit confused, Lyne. ‘We’ is an abstracted concept, there can be hundreds, thousands, of ‘we’s’ and until the precise referent is defined, nobody can be clear as to whom or what is being talked about.

Likewise with the notion ‘we are all one’. That may well be the ultimate truth, in a religious or philosophical context, ( personally I believe it is ), but then to pretend that the distinctions and divisions don’t exist is ridiculous. Such airy-fairy polyanna nonsense isn’t going to solve our problems, is it ? It would be nice if everyone could raise their consciousness to a higher level, but what chance is there of that happening ? To build a strategy upon that premise is as unrealistic as planning your personal life upon the assumption that you will win the lottery.

You and I are separate beings, two, not one, and have individual self-centred interests and pursuits which may remain forever opposed. To pretend otherwise is delusion, isn’t it ? And so it is for all groups and entities.

To lump all humans into an aggregate of ‘we the people’ may sound good rhetorically, but it’s meaningless, it’s like saying ‘we the fish’, and ignoring the fact that some fish survive by eating other fish, some fish require niches that others do not, and so on.

I do believe that every single ‘thing’, that we distinguish as an independent form or entity, are all facets of the One, the greater Universe, sure, that’s not hard to grasp or even to demonstrate scientifically. And if, say, I’m walking in the countryside, that’s a great way to experience being. However, if I’m in a fight or conflict, I have very well-defined boundaries, where I stop and all the rest begins, and I’ll defend those boundaries, just as all the other living organisms do, with violence if necessary. Don’t blame me for that. I didn’t design the system. Great White Sharks and Orcas eat nice cuddly seals. Foxes eat chickens. They have to do it, not a choice. So, whilst everything is One, everything is eating everything else, all the time. We people are merely constituent parts of that system.

You can insist that there is no ‘you’. Okay, lay down and let the hungry tigress devour you, to feed her starving cubs. It’s your right and privilege to do that. It’s probably a generous and noble act, if it’s done with complete understanding. But to expect everyone else to have that attitude is delusion. Starving sailors adrift in tiny boats draw lots to decide who will be murdered and eaten so the others can survive.

When resources are abundant, wealth easily come by, then we can all be friendly and relaxed and generous. But in times of hardship, shortage, crisis, extreme competition, what happens ? Look at history. There are lessons to learn.

[caliandris]

The oneness of all

I think of the oneness of all things as a higher truth; I don’t insist that you share that belief, but don’t tell me it is a delusion.  Is separateness something that is working for the world?  I don’t think so.

I think of separateness as the real delusion, because the human race is like a bee hive - the lone bee can survive on its own for a while, but the only meaningful existence for a bee is as a part of the whole, which is the hive… the only meaningful existence for people is as part of the planet and acknowledging that we are all part of the same entity.

If this isn’t your truth, then I am sorry, because I think acceptance of the oneness of all is about the only thing which offers us a chance.  While people are still killing themselves to own things and stuff, or to push other people around, while we still see ourselves as separate from our neighbours and allow ourselves to “win” and someone else to “lose” - which, let’s face it, we are all doing in the first world at the expense of the rest - while we still do this, I don’t see that there is any chance that we will change things for the better.

We need to find out how to live our lives without exploiting and destroying others, how to preserve the earth we have been given without draining it of all natural resources.  We need to see the connectedness of all things to realise that the new car we buy today bears a part of the responsibility for destruction of tomorrow.

It works for me on many levels - a practical one, a philosophical one and a spiritual one.  Yes, the reality we are sold by the world is one of freedom as individuals to do what we want… but is that the reality?  I don’t think a complete separation of me and you has either a scientific or philosophical basis.  It’s an illusion.

In any case, setting all that aside, if you destroy my planet I am affected by that. If I save the planet you are affected by that. Things are losing the balance they once had, and we are all going to have to choose our sides quickly… it really does seem to me that we are faced with a situation which is beyond the vast companies and governments and their exceedingly slow grinding to respond to… it needs the wisdom of the multitudes to stand up and be counted and make the sacrifices that are necessary to make a difference.

Intention is all.  I don’t know what the intention of government might be - to retain the status quo?  The aim of companies is plain:  to make profit.  Maybe we need a new intention we can all sign up to.  Saving the world maybe.

[alberto]

“We” is an outcome

Lyne, we are not fighting an ideological battle here. Collective action is exactly what happens when the problem of sharing goals, aligning incentives, coordinating on means is taken on board rather than assumed away. “We, the people” is one of the possible outcomes of this process; anarchy is another; dictatorship yet another. A favourable outcome is to be actively pursued, never taken for granted.

If there were an entity called “we” that could decide what she wants and try to get it, your own story would make no sense. Open government, dear to your heart, is not uncontroversial: some people like it, a few people actively dislike it, most don’t care either way. The situation you describe is an outcome in which, at least in Quebec, it’s not happening. This could be looked at in various ways: for example, you could say that opengov did not happen because “we the people”, through a democratic process, decided we don’t want it enough to make the effort; or we could say it did nit happen because some people that dislike it or don’t care find themselves in a position of greater power than other people who do want it. I think the first description is misleading, because it erases the position of Lyne and others who actually do care; the second one is more accurate.

I don’t mean to diminish religious or phylosophical notions of oneness. I do imply that oneness - if it’s there - happens at an ontological level which is not appropriate to describing the very real political fractiousness Vinay is describing.

[lyne_robichaud]

Heart failures, political failures

The reality of today’s world is that all of our lives are entangled. Individualized worldview keeps us stuck in an outdated paradigm that just is not working anymore.

This is currently understood and assimilated by scientists. It’s actually the newest trend in this area. Science is rapidly gaining the capability to explore the nature of consciousness. It is becoming legitimate to talk of invisible forces. A whole new field known as quantum biology has sprung up, based on a true breakthrough - the idea that the total split between the micro world of the quantum and the macro world of everyday things may be a false split. These innovators are working on concepts that will likely be the new standard in 20 years from now. These are revolutionizing areas like health, and will probably contribute to reduce the heavy costs of health services. It is already in use, for example, among patients with serious heart problems. They apply this specific knowledge directly to patients (ex. the community http://proactivite.org lead by Nicole Goulet).

Heart failure is a chronic and progressive disease often characterized by severe symptoms, frequent hospitalization, and poor prognosis. Here is how progress in cardiovascular nursing contributes to adjustment of advanced heart failure: development of regret regarding past behaviors and lifestyles; search for meaning within the present experience of failure; search for hope for the future and reclaiming of optimism.

If it works well for heart failures, why not consider also testing it on political failures?

Many see that this capability to explore could also be extended to politicians.

Political fractiousness is very real.

Some individuals also perceive that oneness is very real. Many people - other than me - integrate these concepts to effective leadership. Different models of leadership would probably produce less political fractiousness.

‘Not appropriate’?

[lucasg]

Hacker Ethic

In one of Daniel Quinn’s books, probably in “Ishmael” (where a telepathy-enabled gorilla socratically teaches a man who wanted to save the world), there’s this idea of a comb and the teeth. The teeth are both separate (and that’s essential for the comb to do its work) and united at the base (also essential). Two ways to look at the same thing, etc. That’s philosophy.

People apparently “feel as one” in certain occasions: with music, working as teams in sports, possibly also in battle. I don’t know about meditation due to almost zero practice. That’s feeling.

In practical everyday muscle movement, what I feel matters more is whether we wait for others or not, and for how long. In this, consensus strategies seem to be at the “wait for others for as long as needed” end of the spectrum. The “show me the code” motto, from the computer hacker [1] ethics, is more at the “wait for others for as little as possible” end of the spectrum.

When you use your fractal microscope, it’s of course a messy world. Alberto, or whoever came up with the idea of EdgeRyders, had to wait for approval of the idea, but didn’t have to wait before taking whatever prior steps. I didn’t have to wait before starting the translation of his video, but I did have to wait (and gladly so) for him to correct my transcription.

The trick, I think, is in hitting many drums (each drum is a different project) in cyclic sequence. At each point, I ask myself: “what can I do without waiting for others?”. “Can I do something that will invite others to add whatever they feel happy and able to contribute?” [2] After trying many “getting things done” approaches, I’ve settled for a simple one: several pieces of paper, each with 1) one visualised goal and 2) one or more first steps that only depend on me.

In general, given the state of the world, I don’t think we have time to wait a lot, and in general I’d rather see more initiative than less. When in conversation with a fellow edge-ryder, and after listening, I think I’d basically say “don’t wait”.

---

[1] “Hacker” as in creativity, not as in breaking illegally into places, which is called “cracker”.

[2] We have ended up calling it “leave a rough edge”. This is an unfinished sentence, for you to