FootprintsintheWind.com

There is a hoary thread in the sci-fi genre that “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” (Isaac Asimov)

So we picture robots as machines with arms and eyes and voices which walk about stiffly doing our commands. We do not picture them as servers in the back office in Berne, moving money and credits about, bringing financial doom on persons on Main Street.

“Casino finance” is a term that is used by Capra, Luisi, Posner, Weyl and some others to talk about what happened in 2008, when these computers ran amok and did actual damage to humans. The easy answer is to program them to do no harm. The difficult question is how. The most difficult question is who will have the will to do so?

:- Doug.

So is there a way to cultivate life within the extractive? On the mundo level we can make the point that the air, the water, the earth, love is not owned and should not be, that the driving purpose ought to be life, not accumulation of money. What do we do on the day-to-day micro (individual) and meso (group) levels? Some of it must be to take a mundo level view into the micro and meso. We do better when we are aware of what we are doing.

A big part of what we are doing is caring and loving. This indeed is a larger view. If we as individuals see this larger picture, we can decide which of the “commands” of our “leaders” is legitimate. We can be like soldiers in wartime commanded to slaughter a village of innocents, who decline the illicit order. In a softer way, we can turn the order from extractive to include generative, giving both the profit motive and the loving motive breathing room. Nobody said it is easy. It will get easier as we find more ways.

:- Doug.

It is not us v them, generative models v extractive models: that dichotomy will not work, at least to start, because contra leads to contra and the deck at the moment seems to everyone involved stacked. We need to work together, work life within life, or perhaps even life within non life.

:- Doug.

Here the purpose is
To live well
Together
Where can we
Say this
See this
Today?

:- Doug.

Feminine nurtures; masculine goes out.

:- Doug.

Are you doing more than feeding a small group of maws?

:- Doug.

What boon have you brought back to your tribe from the larger world? This is the work on the man-hero.

:- Doug.

Time perceptions may be described by It, Thou, Us, Poetry and Do.

:- Doug.

Giving to our community may be key. Are you able? Do you? Give more than you get: the definition of a man; the definition of a human.

:- Doug.

What you love can lead you to right experience; years of experience may not make you best to help me if you do not love me.

:- Doug.

Are the conversations we see and grow primarily two dimensional or three? Global money flows there or here, north or east or west. Actually that is one dimensional. Products go out our doors and money flows in. Back and forth in one dimension. Compare that to a big room with many conversations and edges of conversations: here there are dimensions of dimensions.

:- Doug.

You seek fulfillment in expanding the reach of your business. You will not find it. Until you recognize that money and numbers are not real. The are stand-ins for the real. What you want most deeply. Community.

:- Doug.

Greed for water, oil, minerals
For what today we call wealth
Is war on our grandchildren’s grandchildren

:- Doug.

Climate change is a failure of imagination
Failure to imagine a better world
New ways to live with all others

:- Doug.

Washing machines, tangled brush piles, atoms—physical things—are easy to manipulate in our minds. Other things, especially actions—like conversations, relationships, movement—have many more possible interactions, and so are more difficult to grasp.

:- Doug.

We cannot solve the problem, nor the problems. We must first solve our way of thinking.

:- Doug.

Converse to see the converse.

:- Doug.

The problems today are so inter-knotted that untying one ties some other tangle. The response needs to be to change how we think. How hard that is! How hard is it? What can we do but converse?

:- Doug.

One of the base questions today is Do you eat or do I drive my car?

:- Doug.

As we grow wealth do we naturally grow poverty?

:- Doug.

Live to work or
Work to live?
Live to live!

:- Doug.

The leaves on the trees are now adolescents. They are large enough to start to fill out the shapes of the trees, yet there are gaps where I can see through the woods to the clearings beyond.

:- Doug.

We do not share everything with anybody. So there is always something new to unveil.

Even with our spouses, our children, our closest camerados, there is something new. Available. Can we make ourselves available? Even to these? Especially to these? Open tunnels for them to find us?

Reveal, unveil, open tunnels.

:- Doug.