I AM THE PRODUCT OF...

I AM THE PRODUCT OF...

Here are things I am profoundly grateful for in my life:

• I am the co-founder of a successful law firm in Boulder, Colorado, which fully supports a comfortable lifestyle for my family.
• I have a nourishing and vibrant marriage currently in its 12th year.
• I have two healthy and vital children.
• I have a wonderful "life/work balance." I enjoy my law and mediation practice, and have ample time for outside activities, including performing music regularly as a serious pursuit.
• My relationship with my kids is strong, and I am constantly opening up to new ways to parent them, treating them with respect and dignity while modeling a self-actualized life.
• At age 44 I am radiantly healthy, feeling better than I have ever felt. I eat clean and delicious foods. I exercise daily with a variety of running, hiking, biking, and yoga.
• I have a strong spiritual practice, meditating twice per day.

Now the important part: I think all of the above blessings are a product in some small way of my own genetic makeup and how I’ve chosen to use my natural talents and intellect, BUT I believe it is powerful for me to name and acknowledge that the above blessings are predominantly the product of the following circumstances of my life:

• My parents are white and were both born in the United States, where there is relative freedom of thought and action, where tremendous resources are located or have been gathered from around the world (perhaps often through economic/debt coercion or military coercion), and where many societal resources and avenues to wealth are available (especially to white citizens).
• I was born (and have lived almost all of my life) in the United States.
• On the foundation of the above circumstances, I grew up in a relatively safe suburban area.
• On the foundation of the above circumstances, my parents had sufficient resources and commitment to feed me the most healthful foods they knew about and had access to.
• On the foundation of the above circumstances, my parents had sufficient resources and commitment to push me to excel academically and to help me attend college and law school.
• I am white, which means I have had less barriers to entry to almost everything in the United States.
• I am what is referred to as a cis-gendered (non-trans) straight male, which means in part that many societal resources and avenues to wealth have been more easily available to me relative to females or other gender minorities.
• I am of average size, which means many things have been constructed for use by males like me.
• On the foundation of the above circumstances, I have always had sufficient resources (or access to credit) to invest in personal development, relationship development, spiritual development, and therapeutic programs supporting body, mind and spirit, and have lived in areas where such programs are easily available.
• On the foundation of the above circumstances, I have enjoyed the privilege of extensive world travel, including unique cultural experiences such as Burning Man.
• I had the ability to pursue a non-punitive avenue to correct for unfortunate or ill-advised financial choices and circumstances, via the bankruptcy laws of the United States.

I have tried to be thoughtful about what exactly to thank for my abundance in life, but please comment if you notice one or more missing elements.

The main reason behind this post is to model a thorough acceptance of the sometimes hidden factors of our station in life, and also to identify some of the fundamental things humans need to live abundantly, so that we can begin to work together to create a culture where everyone has access to these things.

Upon review of my list above, I flag these important ingredients for human abundance:

• Relative freedom of thought, action, and travel
• Sufficient monetary and non-monetary resources to build and exchange things and ideas, and to nourish the body (e.g., universal basic income)
• Communities free of coercive debt or forceful extraction of their local resources
• Communities free of unregulated criminal activity
• Tools that have been constructed for use by all kinds of different people
• Access to, and no unjustifiable barriers of entry to, good quality services, education, employment, clean and healthful food, etc.
• Laws and systems that allow for non-punitive correction of past mistakes or misfortune

There are surely more ingredients as well.

If this post resonates with you, I invite you to re-post and re-write using your own life as the basis for this exploration of what is required to produce abundance in life.

Thanks for reading.

Architecting the Great Web

The nation-state is too big. It’s a behemoth. Even our large cities have ballooned to a size many times too big for a healthy, dynamic community at a human scale. These social monsters are just that: monstrosities. What’s more, they’re dinosaurs. The evolution of natural systems (such as unfortunate dinosaurs) gives us a clue of patterns of organization that are effective to a point, but beyond that become cumbersome. Clunky. Inefficient. And soon, extinct.

An evolving system has no other scheme but to test the stress limits of itself and its own boundaries. We’ve tested those boundaries with our nation-sized communities, and I posit that these entities are not proving to be optimal. We’re starting to become aware of problems in a nation 300 million strong; the huge bureaucracy of the United States is unable to attend to the basics of human welfare or the infrastructural basics we need from our government. More than a few thinkers are realizing that the U.S. Constitution is already cracking under the size of this country. While the American tradition of federalism (shared political/legal power between states and the national government) is one approach to localized governance within a larger whole, I believe even American states are too big to serve as a human-scaled governments.

While things are arguably too big already, political science is currently grappling with how our organizational institutions can “scale up” even larger to cope with apparently inevitable globalization. Despite the seeming paradox, I am actually optimistic that some form of global government is possible that can protect normatively good things such as localized diversity of thought, while establishing a baseline of order and standards of human decency worldwide. The question I am interested in is how natural systems theory can help us predict, or even help us architect a new global order in harmony with human-scale communities.

With the disclaimer of my somewhat broad, but certainly limited awareness of the various factors at play, let me describe what I predict will happen. It is impossible to guess when or how exactly the transformation will occur, but I think we will soon begin to forge new forms of local governance within a larger system that I’ll generically call the “web.” I believe local communities will reflect a shrinking back down to human size, and will possess the following characteristics:

-- less than 100,000 people
-- relative self-sufficiency
-- interconnectedness/interdependence with nearby communities (forming the overall web)

Like a scalable network, the interconnected communities will form a web eventually encompassing the entire face of the earth, and still retain a coherence or unity. The local communities/cities will self-govern, but will also be governed by the powerful, normative practices or customs of the web/multitude/network. These cities will be sovereign and autonomous, but the web will serve as the foundation, embodying and enforcing principles that sustain itself. Longevity and continuance will be bellwether, and the social organization that sustains over time will simply prevail. This living web of cities will display amazing diversity within a larger unified framework. McLuhan’s “global village” will manifest as a collective sphere of media and communication (underpinning the global political norms), but no singular culture will dominate as a hegemony. Some form of representative democracy will likely be central to both local and global levels of governance, but I believe the operative foundation will reflect some kind of peer-to-peer autopoietic organization as opposed to a top-down enforcement of “voting rights.” I realize this sketch is too vague at present to be of much use, but there are many thinkers who are expounding on these ideas right now, and I have faith that innovative models will soon be testable and employable, if they aren’t already being tested right now.

Like any natural system, this web will surely be attacked and challenged. But the web itself will respond naturally and effectively. Like cancerous tissue may grow and threaten to harm the body, cancerous agents may poison parts of the web. But, cut off from surrounding cities, the “cancerous” regions will not represent an extreme threat. Like a lone individual cut off from food and water, rogue cities will not long survive without the sustaining network around them. This stands in opposition to the current situation where large nations have enough resources to sustain destructive activity for a frightening long duration. Inter-community conflict resolution mechanisms will probably surface and ebb as needed, along with some form of intermittent Congress to help give form to the evolution of the basic “sustaining” principles of the web.

Compared to the current structure, the web of cities will respond better to nearly all stresses. Climate disasters, for example—a catastrophe for nations with closed borders—should be easily tolerated by a distributed network of communities that can absorb populations easily, dispersed across a region. Populations will be stabilized through the creation of planned sister-communities, seeded as necessary to prevent overcrowding.

Certainly a topic of such scope as I have addressed here entails consideration of many factors. This text represents merely my preliminary thoughts and predictions about our collective future, about a global social body that has yet to be born. I for one believe the birth is near at hand. To the extent that active midwifery may assist in this birthing, I welcome any comments and reactions as to how, beyond working to purify and enlighten ourselves as individuals, we may facilitate this evolutionary process.

February, 2010
Boulder, Colorado

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelloggphotography/, used under a creative commons license.

Diversity In Unity

According to Chris Bache's description of Robert Monroe's "interlife rings," the bardo region between life and death is a place where our souls can choose to associate only with others like ourselves, or with others at a similar level of development. Bache indicates that this stands in counterpoint to the physical plane where we live, where we are forced to interact with myriad, different beings. Thus, the diversity of physical life encourages faster development at the soul-level. In this way, would such an "interlife" be a kind of heaven with a dark side, akin to gated communities where people choose to be insulated among others just like themselves? This model indicates a back and forth between resting (in unity) and growth (through diversity). But is such a one-at-a-time model the only way of thinking about how diversity and unity interact?

Perhaps a more useful conception, especially as manifested in a conscious organism, is consciousness as unity and community. The diversity of unique thoughts, the diversity of experiences and emotions -- these can be conceived of as analogous to a society. The single neurons in a human brain that can never experience what it feels like to act as a coherent body nevertheless comprise an overall system which "transcends and includes" them. Aren't these neurons a form of community? Moving beyond the concrete biochemistry of the brain, Genpo Merzel builds on the "Psychology of Selves" theory as he seeks the communal intelligence of our different conscious "Voices" to help us integrate Dual and Non-Dual reality. And even from the point of view of the unified ego-consciousness of a single individual, the diversity of experience as we age reflects the shifting of emphasis of different voices or perspectives of our minds.

However you want to conceive of our discrete inner-selves or voices, one can imagine our inner landscape to function like the shifting currents of cultural views (and vice versa). Like a peaceful transition of political power, perhaps each coherent individual repeatedly transitions as different inner voices align and become prominent, thus transforming our "singular" identity. "I" and "We" at the same time. Diversity and Unity, together.

In the outside world as we typically think of it, diversity is something that must be actively sought out, and embraced as the vehicle for growth that it is. But coherence must also be sought. Homogeneity, or hegemony, is not an evil, unless it is blind. If we are to evolve into a loving, unified culture, certain coherence of principles must be attained. Homogeneity with openness is a strong, evolving coherence. I believe this to be our destiny: Diverse but Unified.