Last week N. Arthur Coulter told us we were caught in THE MACHINE. Held there by powerful protodynes and sociodynes. A protodyne is a strong unconscious belief that a human individual holds. This belief is programmed deep into the mind by one’s life experience. For any individual a protodyne is “real”. We humans will act as if these beliefs are true whether they are or not. An acrophobic believes that being in the open is very dangerous. They will not leave their homes. They cannot be convinced that it is safe to go out into the open. The root word “-dyne” is from physics it means force. Strong unconscious beliefs held by individuals that force them to behave in specific ways are called protodynes.

The opposite of synergy is dysergy. Dysergy is working against. If we are to escape from THE MACHINE AND DYSERGY PRIME, we must break the trance that our individual and collective memes–that our protodynes and sociodynes–hold us in.

Breaking the Trance!

Jivan Vatayan

The success of humans on Earth has been won by consuming the life of the natural world. We are co-opting the energy of ecosystems that once allowed for a resilient and thriving biotic community. The collective and individual human “part” of life’s existence resolutely chants the mantra of growth for the continuation of this ongoing plunder – even as we become informed that we are reaching the limits of said plundering. We have been hearing Cassandra’s cry of catastrophic consequences to the living matrix – stories of the life support system undergoing unprecedented deterioration. Yet we take this information in passing as if it mattered of little consequence. The blizzard of entertaining distractions and sensations of modern day life soon overtake the few voices of warning. Sooner or later we tune these jeremiads out as irritants. Our day to day awareness reduces the eco-catastrophe to an incidental epi-phenomena in a world committed to consumption.

For those more attuned to the reality of ecological catastrophe it appears that a radical change in human behavior is needed. A lone voice or two calls for a vast effort of co-operation of the whole human world with the whole natural world. But the voice passes in the wind and the human world goes on in the same old way. It is understood that extinctions, poisonings, and the plundering of ecosystems must not and will not stand in the way of Progress. As long as the economic incentive system keeps paying-off, the Death of Nature is denied and the human juggernaut rolls on.

There is an almost gravitational pull toward putting out of mind unpleasant facts. And our collective ability to face painful facts is no greater than our personal one. We tune out, we turn away, we avoid. Finally we forget, and forget we have forgotten.

 –Daniel Goleman

The central predicament facing contemporary American society: how to live a “normal life” in a society that requires that we all “not know” what most of us do know -namely, that the world is deeply screwed up and that we are keeping it that way by playing along as though nothing could possibly be different, even though deep down we know everything could be very different.

–Michael Lerner

We keep this civilization narcotized, for otherwise it could not endure itself. That is why its sleep must not be disturbed… 

–Stanislaw Lem

Instead of advising others that “we must change”, perhaps it is more to the point to ask why we stay asleep, as if in a spell, collectively hypnotized, drugged to the trance of normality? Even if normality brings with it, the death of nature, how is it that we dare not break this Trance? How is it that we so easily surrender to this collective hypnosis?

Investigating the nature of this Trance, its varied manners of hypnotic control, and determining if there is a way to “Break the Trance” appears to me as an essential key to real change in the human ability to respond.

The ongoing Trance induction appears to have many strong components. It appears to be grounded in the nature of the human psyche – in the genetic legacy of our primate conditioning, as well as arising from the long history and conditioning of “progressive” culture.

 You are always in some state of hypnotic trance, for hypnosis does not mean to be asleep or an unresponsive object of manipulation. It means that your mind and body function in a particular way dictated by what you think and believe.

–Walter Orlowski

If trance is defined as fixated thinking, then nearly all human activities create some type of trance. The bounded circles of thinking that keep us in trances are countless. The entire “ordered universe” is a trance. But there is an escapists pleasure in remaining in trance and a deep human fear of the chaos which can result if there were no trance “order” to life.

–Dennis R. Wier

 

The Trance as “Schema”

In “The Story of Stupidity” James F. Welles describes the fixated trance-like thinking as “schema” that can lead to dysfunctional behaviors. For Dr. Welles, a schema is much more than a worldview.

(A) Schema (a system of belief), (is) a master cognitive plan by which each person organizes information. It is both a mental set which provides a context for interpreting events in the perceptual field and a program for behavior. The schema plays a role of binding groups of people together. It is not only a behavioral/belief system for an individual; it also acts as a unifying force for society. Stupidity (dysergy) is induced when linguistic values, social norms, groupthink and the neurotic paradox promote a positive feedback system which takes schematic behavior to extremes unjustified by and often at odds with external conditions.”

Language functions not only as a communication system for a group but also as a value system which defines the mental life of the members and thus is a prime contributor to stupidity. It appears that the verbal nature of our schemas shapes human perception by blurring the boundary between unwelcomed fact and desired fancy. Perception is actually quite an active process in which the perceiver selects certain aspects of his environment as worthy of his attention. Many important events may be simply ignored because they are not deemed significant or interesting.”

We each really build our own reality by this process of sorting out perceptions into categories. These are our own schematic constructs based on our specific language group. These constructs then determine each person’s psychological world, the rules of tongue used to assign percepts to the given categories and the hypotheses created to explain how various events and objects perceived relate to one another.

People commonly have dysfunctional beliefs because their conscious schemas are shaped by the verbal values of their reference group-i.e., their nation, religious organization, professional association, etc. With everyone using the same biased language, it is unlikely that members could develop original, self-correcting ideas. Hence, it is difficult for an insider to form and usually stupid of him to offer an objective, critical analysis of his reference group, whatever it may be. Any attempt to do so would most likely be regarded as heresy and the critic shunned or dismissed as a threat to group integrity. (In fact, the only thing more aggravating to a group than a critic is an idealist who lives up to its stated creed.)

To the extent that conformity is induced by both language and norms, objective criticism is inhibited and stupidity induced when people strictly adhere to forms of thought and behavior which are irrelevant to the problems at hand or self-defeating for those involved.

The development of the cognitive norms of socially approved ideas and shared illusions that interfere with critical, analytical thinking can also promote group cohesion. However, when this process goes to the extreme, reality testing is suspended and the condition of “Groupthink” leads members to overestimate their collective power and righteousness.

People indulging in groupthink find themselves not only invincible but invariably right according to their own standards. This presumption of inherent morality usually means that no one in the isolated group will question its basic beliefs. Thus, members are likely simply to ignore ethical and moral consequences of their acts, since they assume they are right and what they are trying to accomplish is obviously good.

Basically, groupthink is a way for closing the minds of members of a cohesive unit. Policies are rationalized rather than scrutinized; data conflicting with such policies are ignored rather than evaluated; warnings of impending or possible failure are dismissed rather than discussed. By such means, the group schema is maintained intact, which is obviously the most important thing of all. Whether or not behavior is appropriate or successful is a distinctly secondary consideration to the maintenance of group image and ideology.

In this context of an inability to learn, life may be viewed as a dynamic imbalance. Social life, particularly, is often a compromise state between goal achievement and group survival. Either may be sacrificed for the other but usually with results deemed stupid by anyone judging according to the criteria of the function sacrificed.

Judgment is shaped not only by the viewpoint of the perceiver but also by the time scale used to evaluate effects. In this context, stupidity’s most reliable ally is the “Neurotic paradox”-a self-destructive learning pattern that occurs when an act is reinforced with an immediate short-term reward although its long-term consequences will be maladaptive.

During this process, incoming information is likely to be dismissed or misinterpreted if it conflicts with and cannot be adjusted to fit the existing belief system.

In either case, the resultant mental set is a function of our biological heritage and cultural environment.

In “The Future of Life” biologist E.O. Wilson describes how he sees the neurotic paradox as hardwired by evolution in the human psyche.

The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense.

Why do they think in this shortsighted way? The reason is simple: it is a hardwired part of our Paleolithic heritage. For hundreds of millennia, those who worked for short-term gain within a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring–even when their collective striving caused their chiefdoms and empires to crumble around them. The long view that might have saved their distant descendants required a vision and extended altruism instinctively difficult to marshal.

In a recent lecture, Richard Dawkins agrees and emphasizes the trance-like neurotic paradox is a basic part of our genetic legacy.

The values of sustainability are important to all of us here, and I enthusiastically include myself. We therefore might hope that these too are built into us by natural selection. I shall tell you today that this is not so. On the contrary, there is something profoundly anti-Darwinian about the very idea of sustainability.

From a Darwinian point of view, the problem with sustainability is this: sustainability is all about long-term benefits of the world at the expense of short-term benefits. Darwinism encourages precisely the opposite values. Short-term genetic benefit is all that matters in a Darwinian world. Superficially, the values that will have been built into us will have been short-term values, not long-term ones.

Humans are no more selfish than any other animals, just rather more effective in our selfishness and therefore more devastating. All animals do what natural selection programmed their ancestors to do, which is to look after the short-term interest of themselves and their close family, cronies and allies.

Psychologist Robert Ornstein reflects upon the hardwiring of this schema in his book “The Evolution of Consciousness”.

The mind evolved great breadth, but it is shallow for it performs quick and dirty sketches of the world. This rough-and-ready perception of reality enabled our ancestors to survive better. The mind did not evolve to know the world, or to know ourselves.

He says that we are biologically equipped to detect and react to a leopard looming in the cave mouth, but not to the global changes that threaten us today.

The assumption that we easily and simply change our minds and rationally respond to the oncoming die-off also fails to take into account the most recent findings about  human awareness as posited by neuroscientists.

To be continued…

 

Earlier this week, I introduced the newest version of Ortegrity a mechanism to create win-win relationships in organizations. Pioneers in synergic organization already exist. Synergic economist Wayne Perg, Ph.D recently told me about a North American company that was very successful at empowering their employees and building win-win relationships.

Lincoln Electric of East Cleveland, Ohio (a rustbelt company with 2700 employees), welding equipment and electric motors – To glean more innovative suggestions from employees, Lincoln instituted a lifetime guarantee of employment in 1959 – so employees would not fear innovating themselves out of a job. Lincoln has not had a layoff since, though their workweek ranged from 55 hours a week to 32 over a two-year period in the early 1980s and has made several shorter trips below 40 since then. Lincoln has a 3-year mutual approval period before they give a new employee their lifetime employment guarantee, in return for which they ask three things:

1. acceptance of the principle that everyone sacrifices together, starting at the top

2. willingness to accept job reassignment

3. complete cooperation (no unions)

Lincoln Electric reinvests massively in its products and its employees. It distributes to employees a huge merit bonus annually. Lincoln employees have the highest productivity and morale and the most pay of any rust-belt employees in the world. Lincoln has not had a layoff since 1959 when the lifetime employment guarantee was extended to the entire company after 8 years of testing. Read a brief history of Lincoln Electric

Pioneering Synergy
The Lincoln Electric Company

Debra Sherman
Foundation for Enterprise Development

Company Profile

• Company founded in 1895
• Business: manufacturer of arc welding products; major producer of premium quality industrial electric motors, robotic welding systems, environmental systems, and plasma and oxy-fuel cutting equipment
• Worldwide operations employ 6,300
• Headquarters: Cleveland, Ohio
• Annual sales: over $1.1 billion in 1997
• Registered on the NASDAQ (LECO – voting, LECOA – non-voting)
• Employee ownership since 1925
• Over 90% of stock owned by employees and Lincoln family members

Company Background

The Lincoln Electronic Company is considered a leader and innovator in its industry due to its dedicated and talented workforce, superior technology, worldwide manufacturing capability, commitment to quality, strong distribution and customer service, and an incentive performance system.

Pay For Performance Compensation System

The incentive management system has been in place at Lincoln Electric since the early twentieth century. It has resulted in one of the oldest “pay for performance” systems in the country, frequently used for benchmarking by other businesses and studied by academics around the world. Lincoln Electric operates on the belief that two key elements – responsibility and recognition – must be present for people to be productive.

Employees have three major responsibilities:

• Responsibility #1 – Attendance
  If employees do not come to work, they are not paid and they are penalized.
  
  
• Responsibility #2 – Earning Power
  Production workers are paid on a piecework basis. They must guarantee the quality of each piece they produce. If the piece is not good, they are not paid for it.
  
  
• Responsibility #3 – Self-management
  The foreman-to-worker ratio at Lincoln Electric is one-to-100. The company feels that all workers must manage and all managers must work.
  

Recognition includes several items diligently attended to by the company. Promotion from within is combined with an open door policy. Employees who have performed outstanding work are invited to meet with the chairman and president of the company and participate on an employee advisory board. The board meets with the president and chairman on a bi-monthly basis to discuss topics that can help improve the company’s operations and performance. The minutes of the meetings are published and posted so employees are well informed about company affairs. Lincoln Electric also has a quarter century club for employees who have been with the company for 25 years or more.

The Incentive Management System in place at Lincoln Electric features the following:

• An elected advisory board for direct and open communications with senior management. This advisory board has been in existence since 1913.
• Piecework incentive rewards for all productive work. Pay is directly based on output. Employees are merit rated every six months; they are rated on the quality of their work minus days of absence; the quality of their work minus customer rejections; dependability; and on their ideas and cooperation. In addition, there are daily incentives for all production workers. Employees are paid the average rate for a worker of that skill type in the Cleveland, Ohio area; but with the daily incentive, they can potentially earn in excess of $100,000 a year.
• A profit-sharing bonus plan for employees paid annually at the discretion of the Board of Directors.
• Guaranteed employment after three years of service. The company has not laid off an employee since 1948.
• A 401(k) plan offering employees a variety of pre-tax investment options.
• Competitive compensation and other benefits.

Through this well-defined group of incentives, Lincoln Electric encourages and compensates individual initiative and responsibility, motivating employees to work together to reduce costs and improve quality. These individual and cooperative efforts create a more profitable company, where each person shares in its success according to his or her own contribution and ownership.

Stock Ownership System

Lincoln Electric’s stock program is based on restricted stock, whereby the company has the right of first refusal on the sale of company stock. The company has never failed to exercise that right. The price of Lincoln Electric’s extremely liquid stock is based on book value. When employees wish to sell stock, the company generally buys it within 24 hours. In addition, employees are permitted to borrow from the company up to 65% of the value of their stock and generally can have the cash in hand within one day. Over 90% of the company’s stock is owned by employees and Lincoln family members (a small amount is traded on the public market).

The company’s gain-sharing program, where production employees receive piecework incentives for all productive work, is unique in this industry and has been extremely successful. Employees are paid competitive wages within the industry, but can earn significant annual bonuses based on receiving merit bonus points. Bonus points are earned based on attendance, quality, and production quotas as well as on individual merit. The more points the employees earn, the greater the bonus. If anyone is absent from work for any reason, bonus points are reduced. If a customer rejects a product due to production quality, all employees who worked on that product have bonus points taken away. Through this incentive system, employees can earn bonuses equal in value to their annual pay.

The employee ownership and incentive management system has allowed Lincoln Electric to be extremely successful over its 100 year history. Including 1997, when the company recently completed four consecutive years of record sales, earnings, and earnings per share. Although difficult to manage, their system works, as evidenced by the fact that Lincoln Electric employees are among the most highly compensated, productive, and skilled work forces in the world.

More on Lincoln Electric

The Primacy of Cooperation

Jivan Vatayan

In doing some research on cooperation, I came across a very interesting book by Alfie Kohn entitled No Contest. Kohn’s work gives us a very different picture of human evolution than the usual treatises that focus on conflict and competition.

“NO CONTEST, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other — at work, at school, at play, and at home — turns all of us into losers.

Contrary to the myths with which we have been raised, Kohn shows that competition is not an inevitable part of “human nature.” It does not motivate us to do our best (in fact, the reason our workplaces and schools are in trouble is that they value competitiveness instead of excellence.) Rather than building character, competition sabotages self-esteem and ruins relationships. It even warps recreation by turning the playing field into a battlefield.

NO CONTEST makes a powerful case that “healthy competition” is a contradiction in terms. Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable, we will have to restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our society. For this [1992] revised edition, Kohn adds a comprehensive account of how students can learn more effectively by working cooperatively in the classroom instead of struggling to be Number One. He also offers a pointed and personal afterword, assessing shifts in American thinking on competition and describing reactions to his provocative message.”

See Alfie Kohn’s book

Another article by Alfie Kohn titled “Teaching About September 11th” was rejected by several leading education publications that have often published his writings. No one challenged the accuracy of anything in the piece, according to Kohn. Rather, it was argued that there are times when its not appropriate to say things even if they are true. Kohn was also disinvited as keynote speaker for the March meeting of the California League of Middle Schools (CLMS) conference. Apparently, someone on the CLMS board saw a copy of this essay (which had appeared only on Kohn’s website) and convinced the executive director to break the contract with Kohn, even though his planned talk had nothing to do with Sept. 11.

The article ends with this paragraph:

“Ultimately, though, the standard by which to measure our schools is the extent to which the next generation comes to understand – and fully embrace – this simple truth: The life of someone who lives in Kabul or Baghdad is worth no less than the life of someone in New York or from our neighborhood”:

Links to more articles by Kohn
Visit Kohn’s website

Other interesting articles on cooperation include: 

 

 Primate Research Says Competition Not Driving Force

Two American primatologists are challenging the current and dominant theory that competition is the driving force of social behavior in primates, both human and non-human.

In place of the “aggression-competition-reconciliation model” of primate sociality, the researchers offer a new theory that recognizes cooperation and affiliation as the species’ primary social behaviors.

Their data also indicate that rates of aggression are “extremely low, normally less than 1 percent of the activity budget.” “Affiliative” behaviors, on the other hand, are 10 to 20 times more common.

Read the full Article

 

Humans may not be as aggressive and competitive as thought

Boston, Feb. 15, 2002 — Is it human nature to be competitive? Aggressive? Violent? Popular and scientific literature says yes. An anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis who studies primate behavior says no.

Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and a colleague found that affiliated behavior — or friendly behavior like grooming and playing — is probably a hundred times more frequent than aggressive behavior in primates, and that aggressive behavior constitutes less than 1 percent of primates’ activities.

Read the full article 

Good Morning, I had a great weekend. I managed to rewrite/reformat my description of the organizational tensegrity. I have shortened the term to Ortegrity and the newest version is now available. I also linked all the articles describing a Synergic Future. This is the description of my world of “ought to be”.  Speaking of “ought to be” you can read my series all about the “Dual World” based on our newest understanding of human intelligence.

The following address was delivered to the Sixth Annual Rice University Environmental Conference in Houston, Texas on February 14, 1998.

Protecting the Environment: Whose Business is it ?

Daniel Quinn

Once upon a time in a certain city it was noticed that pre-adolescent children were beginning to throw themselves off the roofs of tall buildings with alarming frequency. No one wondered for a moment whose business it was to deal with this alarming development. The city council met and quickly drafted some regulations requiring the erection of guard rails on the roofs of tall buildings. Denied this means of suicide, however, children began to throw themselves off of much lower buildings, and soon all buildings of more than three storeys were required either to install guard rails or to block access to roofs. The expense was enormous, but of course what is outgo to one person is income to another, so the economy continued to flourish as before.

Unfortunately, however, the pre-adolescent suicide rate did not decline. Instead of throwing themselves from buildings, children were now drowning themselves in the river that ran through the city. This was even more perplexing, because no one could think of any practical means of making the river inaccessible to would-be suicides. At the same time, no one wondered whose business it was to stop these drownings. The city council met and finally decided to erect watch towers every five hundred meters all along the river’s edge. Unfortunately, the effect of this was merely to move the suicides from daytime hours to nighttime hours, when the watchers were blinded by darkness. Of course, it was totally out of the question to install searchlights to cover such a wide area. Instead it seemed sensible to institute a curfew for children under fifteen. So, between the watch towers manned during the day and the curfew maintained during the night, self-drowning came to an end — but, alas, not the suicides in general. Children began to hang themselves. Civic leaders saw immediately that they needed parental cooperation to control this new development, and so initiated a massive education program to show parents how to reduce hanging opportunities in their homes and neighborhoods. Ropes were put under lock and key. Belts, ties, and suspenders vanished. Bedrooms were routinely searched for evidence of braiding projects.

As hanging opportunities declined, however, children found other opportunities in bottles, jars, and boxes in medicine cabinets, potting sheds, and garages. With these means, they succeeded in rendering themselves sick, blind, comatose, brain damaged, and indeed very often completely dead. New educational programs were put in place, and the city expanded the activities of its poison control center to include home visitations and inspections. The hospitals soon noticed a decline in pre-adolescent patients who were merely sick, blind, comatose, or brain damaged — but a dramatic increase in those who were just plain dead by poisoning. A reporter on the local paper soon discovered the explanation. As poisons became unavailable in the home, teenage entrepreneurs began to make up the shortfall in the school environment. Not only were poisons readily available there, the market pressure of competition assured that they were of high quality, which is to say that, unlike products found randomly in the home, these were reliably lethal.

Naturally law-enforcement officials ordered a crackdown on the playground poison trade. And naturally this didn’t end the trade, it just drove up prices. The incidence of crime among pre-teens soared as youngsters scrambled for funds with which to buy oblivion. Then one day an armed eleven-year-old was gunned down by law enforcement officials at a robbery site. This was a revelation for would-be suicides, for they suddenly realized that it was now much easier to find death by way of a policeman’s bullet than by conventional means, which the city had gone to so much trouble to put out of reach. Overnight a fifth of all the city’s pre-teens were running amok to make themselves into attractive targets of lethal force.

The city council hastily met to address the crisis. The police commissioner was on hand to demand safety for the public. The head of the police union was on hand to demand safety for law enforcement officers. The head of the controller’s office was on hand to explain that there were no funds left anywhere in the budget to throw at this problem. The school superintendent wanted special patrols for classrooms and hallways. The head of the teacher’s union, on the other hand, argued for an early school closing. The city attorney proposed developing an early-warning system so suicidal youngsters could be locked up for their own good. The head of the prison department informed him that the jails were already full to overflowing with would-be suicides, with a shocking number of them condemned to sleeping on the floor.

A member of the general public — an ordinary citizen — at last managed to gain the floor to make a statement. “Instead of spending all this time, energy, and money to prevent children from doing what they want to do,” she said, “why don’t we spend some of it to find out why they WANT to do it in the first place? What is IMPELLING them to self-slaughter? We need the answer to that question, and when we have it, we need to do something about it. Then we won’t HAVE to patrol the river and guard the roofs and lock up our neck ties and all the rest.” Well, this statement shocked the assembly into a long moment of silence. Then a wave of baffled looks and shrugs traveled round the room, and the council members resumed their former conversation at precisely the point at which it had been interrupted.

The question is: Why? Why was this upstart citizen ignored? It was because she was not going along with the idea that pre-adolescent suicide is government business. We all know what the business of government is. The business of government is making and enforcing regulations. Governments approach ALL problems as problems of making and enforcing regulations. They reduce all problems to things about which regulations can be made and enforced. This upstart citizen was trying to propose an approach to the problem that had nothing to do with regulations, and so she was ignored — and rightly so, from the point of view of the city council.

This brings us, clearly enough, to the theme of this conference: Protecting the Environment: Whose Business Is It? Well, to answer this question, we naturally have to begin by asking what is this thing called “the environment”? You can help with this answer by taking out a moment to point to it. Does anyone here know where this thing called “the environment” is to be found? This is not a trick question. Where is “the environment”? Please help me out by pointing to it. That’s right, “the environment” is something out THERE. It extends deep into the earth and high up into the sky. It encompasses trillions of cubic miles of earth, air, and water.

Now if we define our problem here as “protecting” trillions of cubic miles of earth, air, and water, whose business is it going to be? What agency could imaginably take on such a task? Or maybe it would help to describe what means could possibly be employed to protect trillions of cubic miles of earth, air, and water. I’ll start with a suggestion. The only conceivable way to undertake protecting trillions of cubic miles of earth, air, and water is to MAKE REGULATIONS and ENFORCE THEM. So now guess whose business it is to “protect the environment.” As far as I’m concerned, protecting the environment is a conceptually equivalent to regulating EVERYTHING. And whose business is it to regulate everything? For those of you who answered “The Government,” give yourself a perfect score of one hundred.

The upstart citizen who interrupted the city council meeting refused to define the city’s problem as a problem only governments can handle. And I refuse to define the problem WE face as a problem only governments can handle. It’s true that only governments can realistically “protect the environment” (and those three words are in quotes). But I refuse to accept “protecting the environment” as a meaningful description of our problem. In fact, I think it’s a lousy description. In fact, I think that “protecting the environment” is probably a description that was invented by a bureaucrat in order to preempt the problem and let everyone know that this is government business, and ordinary citizens should butt out.

My book Ishmael begins with a famous want ad, which reads “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world.” The ad does NOT say “Must have an earnest desire to protect the environment.”

You laugh because you see that there is simply a titanic difference between these two ways of perceiving our problem. Protecting the environment is not nearly enough. Protecting the environment is just something bureaucrats can manage. What WE want is what that upstart at the city council meeting wanted. She didn’t want to make it difficult for children to kill themselves. This is something bureaucrats can manage. She wanted to keep children from wanting to kill themselves!

Our situation is the same. Personally, I am not in love with the environment. The environment is just an IT. It’s a collection of STUFF, a conglomeration of physical and chemical processes. Has anyone here ever fallen in love with trillions of cubic miles of stuff? Has anyone here ever had an ecstatic experience with “the environment”? Has anyone here ever gone for a picnic in “the environment”? Has anyone here ever taken the kids out to spend an afternoon in “the environment”? No, I confidently believe that the only person who could really LOVE something called “the environment” would have to have the heart of a statute-writer.

But I do love the world. And I do have an earnest desire to save the world, and this is something I share with hundreds of thousands (and probably millions) of other people. People seem to have in common an intuitive understanding of what saving the world means. The world is our HOME. It’s not just “the environment.” Saving the world means our children will have a place to grow up — and their children — and their children. Failing to save the world means our children will grow up (or fail to grow up at all) in the land of nightmare and catastrophe.

The fable I began this talk with has a second point. What the dissident told the city council was, “Why work only to PROTECT our children from their suicidal impulses? Why not find out what’s BEHIND their suicidal impulses and deal with THAT? In other words, why not deal with the CAUSE of the problem instead of perpetually dealing with its effects?”

By adopting a strategy of “protecting the environment,” our leaders are adopting the same reactionary strategy as the city leaders of my fable — but for slightly different reasons. The officials of my fable were merely stupid. Our leaders aren’t stupid, they’re just acting in accordance with the fundamental mythology of our culture, which represents humans as intrinsically and hopelessly destructive. This being the case, the only conceivable course for them is to (quote) “protect the environment” — from us, of course. Who else? The environment doesn’t have to be protected from shellfish or owls or rattlesnakes or elm trees. It has to be protected from those intrinsically and hopelessly destructive beings who are US. The pre-teens of my fable seemed to be impelled to self-slaughter, but it never occurred to city officials to wonder WHY. We seem to be impelled to destroy the world, and it similarly never occurs to our governmental protectors to wonder WHY. What they’ve learned from infancy is that humans are just NATURALLY destructive. So, for anyone under the spell of our cultural mythology, all ANYONE can do is . . . “protect the environment.”

In THE STORY OF B I made the following statement: “If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs, it will be saved by new minds with no programs at all.” With these words, I’ve redefined our task. Our task (if we hope to avoid extinction on this planet) is not to “protect the environment” but rather to change minds. “Protecting the environment” is not enough and will never be enough, because it is essentially reactionary, essentially defensive. It WAITS on bad things to happen. It WAITS on — DEPENDS on — our destructiveness. “Protecting the environment” is an invitation to develop programs, one after another, FOREVER, to combat our destructiveness — as “Preventing suicide” in my fable was an invitation to city officials to develop programs, one after another, FOREVER, to combat their children’s self-destructiveness.

“Protecting the environment” is the business of those among us who never expect to achieve more than stalemate with the forces that are rendering our planet uninhabitable. We must have more than that. Stalemate is just not good enough. And that’s the very first mind-change we must make — getting rid of the notion that “protecting the environment” is the very best we can hope for.

Protecting the environment is for bureaucrats and vote-getters. We can safely leave that in their hands to screw up in the usual fashion. But saving the world is different. Is anyone here waiting for Bill Clinton and Al Gore to save the world? No, saving the world is too important to leave to them. Saving the world is for upstarts and lovers. Saving the world is for the rest of us.

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I am in the process of writing a new book based on the synergic analysis of human evolution and history. My book begins approximately 200 million years ago. Most of my research for this book was completed a few years ago, but I always keep by eye open for new or additionally sources. Yesterday after lunch, my daughter wanted to stop by the bookstore. As always, I wandered over to the science section where I noticed a small book by Elaine Morgan entitled The Descent of Woman. It was subtitled “The Classic Study of Evolution”. I had never heard of Elaine Morgan so I purchased the book. It turns out she is the leading proponent for Sir Alister Hardy’s hypothesis that we humans were remolded by a ten million year holiday at the seashore. First proposed in 1960, the Aquatic Hypothesis of Human Evolution has been controversial since its inception. Hardy was told not to talk about it or it would ruin his career. He did stop talking about it and it is not even mentioned on the website celebrating his long and distinguished career as a marine biologist. In 1972, Elaine Morgan became excited by the idea and remains its strongest proponent to this day.

By the Sea

Elaine Morgan

Scientists find it easy to explain why we resemble the African apes so closely by pointing out that gorillas, chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor.

It is much harder to explain why we differ from the gorilla and the chimpanzee much more markedly than they differ from one another. Something must have happened to cause one section of the ancestral ape population to proceed along an entirely different evolutionary path.

The most widely held theory, still taught in schools and universities, is that we are descended from apes which moved out of the forests onto the grasslands of the open savannah. The distinctly human features are thus supposed to be adaptations to a savannah environment.

In that case, we would expect to find at least some of these adaptations to be paralleled in other savannah mammals. But there is not a single instance of this, not even among species like baboons and vervets, which are descended from forest- dwelling ancestors.

This awkward fact has not caused savannah theorists to abandon their hypothesis, but it leaves a lot of problems unanswered. For example, on the question of why humans lost their body hair, it has been argued at various times that no explanation is called for, or that we may never know the reason, or even that there may not be a reason. These attitudes seem to be not merely defeatist, but fundamentally unscientific.

The Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT) offers an alternative scenario. It suggests that when our ancestors moved onto the savannah they were already different from the apes; that nakedness, bipedalism, and other modifications had begun to evolve much earlier, when the ape and human lines first diverged.

AAT points out that most of the “enigmatic” features of human physiology, though rare or even unique among land mammals, are common in aquatic ones. If we postulate that our earliest ancestors had found themselves living for a prolonged period in a flooded, semi-aquatic habitat, most of the unsolved problems become much easier to unravel.

There is powerful geological evidence to support this hypothesis, and nothing in the fossil record that is inconsistent with it. Some of the issues it raises are briefly outlined in the following pages.

The naked ape

Humans are classed anatomically among the primates, the order of which includes apes, monkeys and lemurs. Among the hundreds of living primate species, only humans are naked.

Two kinds of habitat are known to give rise to naked mammals – a subterranean one or a wet one. There is a naked Somalian mole rat which never ventures above ground. All other non-human mammals which have lost all or most of their fur are either swimmers like whales and dolphins and walruses and manatees, or wallowers like hippopotamuses and pigs and tapirs. The rhinoceros and the elephant, though found on land since Africa became drier, bear traces of a more watery past and seize every opportunity of wallowing in mud or water.

It has been suggested that humans became hairless “to prevent overheating in the savannah”. But no other mammal has ever resorted to this strategy. A covering of hair acts as a defense against the heat of the sun: that is why even the desert- dwelling camel retains its fur. Another version is “to facilitate sweat-cooling”. But again many species resort to sweat-cooling quite effectively without needing to lose their hair.

There is no known reason why an ape should suffer more from overheating than the savannah baboon. And, especially for a savannah primate, there would be a high price to pay for hairlessness. Primate infants are carried around clinging to their mothers’ fur; the females would be severely hampered in their foraging when that no longer became possible.

One general conclusion seems undeniable from an overall survey of mammalian species: that while a coat of fur provides the best insulation for land mammals the best insulation in water is not fur, but a layer of fat.

Fat

Humans are by far the fattest primates; we have ten times as many fat cells in our bodies as would be expected in an animal of our size.

There are two kinds of animals which tend to acquire large deposits of fat – hibernating ones and aquatic ones. In hibernating mammals the fat is seasonal; in most aquatic ones, as in humans it is present all the year round. Also, in land mammals fat tends to be stored internally, especially around the kidneys and intestines; in aquatic mammals and in humans a higher proportion is deposited under the skin.

It is unlikely that early man would have evolved this feature after moving to the plains and becoming a hunter, because it would have slowed him down. No land-based predator can afford to get fat. Our tendency to put on fat is likelier to be an inheritance from an earlier aquatic phase of our evolution. It is true that some apes, especially in captivity, may put on weight, but we still differ from them in two important ways. One is that they are never born fat. All infant primates except our own are slender; their lives may depend on their ability to cling to their mothers and support their whole weight with their fingers. Our own babies accumulate fat even before birth and continue to grow fatter for several months afterwards. Some of this fat is white fat, and that is extremely rare in new-born mammals. White fat is not much good for supplying instant heat and energy. It is good for insulation in water, and for giving buoyancy.

The other difference is that in our case the subcutaneous fat is bonded to the skin. When an anatomist skins a cat or rabbit or chimpanzee, any superficial fat deposits remain attached to the underlying tissues. In the case of humans, the fat comes away with the skin, just as it does in aquatic species like dolphins, seals, hippos and manatees.

Walking on two legs

Human beings are the only mammals in the world that habitually walk on two legs. (The only other creature with a perpendicular gait is an aquatic bird, the penguin.)

It is not surprising bipedalism is so rare. Compared with running or walking on four legs it has many disadvantages. It is slower; it is relatively unstable; it is a skill that takes many years to learn, and it exposes vulnerable organs to attack.

We have been doing it for five million years and in that time our bodies have been drastically remoulded to make it easier, but it is still the direct cause of many discomforts and ailments such as back pains, varicose veins, haemorrhoids, hernias and problems in childbirth. It would have been far more difficult and laborious for our ape-like ancestors; only some powerful pressure could have induced them to adopt a way of walking for which they were initially so ill suited.

One hypothesis used to be that they first developed big brains and began to make tools, and finally walked on their hind legs to free their hands for carrying weapons. But we now know that it was bipedalism that came first, before the big brain and tool-making.

However, if their habitat had become flooded, they would have been forced to walk on their hind legs whenever they came down to the ground in order to keep their heads above water. The only animal which has ever evolved a pelvis like ours, suitable for bipedalism, was the long-extinct _Oreopithecus_, known as the swamp ape.

Today, two primates when on the ground stand and walk erect somewhat more readily than most other species. One, the proboscis monkey, lives in the mangrove swamps of Borneo. The other is the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee; its habitat includes a large tract of seasonally flooded forest, which would have covered an even more extensive area before the African climate became drier.

Both of these species enjoy the water. It is interesting that the bonobos often mate face-to-face as humans do; in our case it is explained as a consequence of bipedalism. This mode of mating is another characteristic very rare among land animals, which we share with a wide range of aquatic mammals such as dolphins, beavers and sea otters. What we have in common with them is a mode of locomotion in which the spine and the hind limbs are in a straight line, and that affects the position of the sex organs.

Breathing

The human respiratory system is unlike any other land mammal’s in two respects.

The first is that we have conscious control of our breathing. In most mammals these actions are involuntary, like the heart beat or the processes of digestion.

Voluntary breath control appears to be an aquatic adaptation because, apart from ourselves, it is found only in aquatic mammals like seals and dolphins. When they decide how deep they are going to dive, they can estimate how much air they need to inhale. Without voluntary breath control it is very unlikely that we could have learned to speak.

The other human peculiarity is called “the descended larynx”. A land mammal is normally obliged to breathe through its nose most of the time, because its windpipe passes up through the back of the throat and the top end of it (the larynx) is situated in the back of its nasal passages. A dog, for example, has to make a special effort to bring its larynx down into its throat in order to bark or to pant; when it relaxes, the larynx goes back up again. Even our own babies are born like that.

A few months after birth the human larynx descends into the throat, right down below the back of the tongue. Darwin found that very puzzling because it means that the opening to the lungs lies side by side with the opening to the stomach. That is why in our species food and drink may sometimes go “down the wrong way”. If we had not evolved an elaborate swallowing mechanism it would happen every time.

This arrangement means that we can breathe through our mouths as easily as through our noses. It is probable that this is an aquatic adaptation, because a swimmer needing to gulp air quickly can inhale more of it through the mouth than through the nostrils. And we do know that the only birds which are obligatory mouth breathers are diving birds like penguins, pelicans and gannets. As for mammals, the only ones with a descended larynx, apart from ourselves, are aquatic ones – the sea lion and the dugong.

Other differences

It is impossible in a brief outline to discuss all the physical features distinguishing us from the apes, but a few are worth mentioning.

For example, we have a different way of sweating from other mammals, using different skin glands. It is very wasteful of the body’s essential resources of water and salt. It is therefore unlikely that we acquired it on the savannah, where water and salt are both in short supply.

We weep tears of emotion, controlled by different nerves from the ones that cause our eyes to water in response to smoke or dust. No other land animal does this. There are marine birds, marine reptiles and marine mammals which shed water through their eyes, or through special nasal glands, when they have swallowed too much seawater. This process may also be triggered in them by an emotional excitement caused by feeding or fighting or frustration. Weeping animals, apart from ourselves, include the walrus, the seal and the sea otter.

We have millions of sebaceous glands which exude oil over head, face and torso, and in young adults often causes acne. The chimpanzee’s sebaceous glands are described as “vestigial” whereas ours are described as “enormous”. Their purpose is obscure. In other animals the only known function of sebum is that of waterproofing the skin or the fur.

The most widely discussed contrast between ourselves and the apes is that we have bigger brains. A bigger brain may well have been an advantage to early man, but it would have been equally of advantage to a chimpanzee: the question is why one of them acquired it.

One factor may have been nutritional. The building of brain tissue, unlike other body tissues, is dependent on an adequate supply of Omega-3 fatty acids, which are abundant in the marine food chain but relatively scarce in the land food chain.

AAT is the only theory which logically connects all these and other enigmatic features and relates them to a single well attested historical event.

The time and the place

It is now generally agreed that the man/ape split occurred in Africa between 7 and 5 million years ago, during a period known as the fossil gap.

Before it there was an animal which was the common ancestor of human and African apes. After it, there emerged a creature smaller than ourselves, but bearing the unmistakable hallmark of the first shift towards human status: it walked on two legs.

This poses two questions: “Where were the earliest fossils found?” and “Do we know of anything happening in that place at that time that might have caused apes and humans to evolve along separate lines?”

The oldest pre-human fossils (including the best known one, “Lucy”) are called australopithecus afarensis because their bones were discovered in the afar triangle, and area of low lying land near the Red Sea. About 7 million years ago that area was flooded by the sea and became the Sea of Afar.

Part of the ape population living there at the time would have found themselves living in a radically changed habitat. Some may have been marooned on off-shore islands – the present day Danakil Alps were once surrounded by water. Others may have lived in flooded forests, salt marshes, mangrove swamps, lagoons or on the shores of the new sea, and they would all have had to adapt or die.

AAT suggests that some of them survived, and began to adapt to their watery environment. Much later, when the Sea of Afar became landlocked and finally evaporated, their descendants returned to the mainland of Africa and began to migrate southwards, following the waterways of the Rift Valley upstream.

There is nothing in the fossil record to invalidate this scenario, and much to sustain it. Lucy’s bones were found at Afar lying among crocodile and turtle eggs and crab claws at the edge of a flood plain near what would then have been the coast of Africa.

Other fossils of Australopithecus, dated later, were found further south, almost invariably in the immediate vicinity of ancient lakes and rivers.

We now know that the change from the ape into Australopithecus took place in a short space of time, by evolutionary standards. Such rapid speciation is almost invariably a sign that one population of a species has become isolated by a geographical barrier such as a stretch of water.

Chararacteristics	Humans	Apes	Savannah	Aquatics
Habitual Bipedalism	Yes	-	-	-
Loss of body hair	Yes	-	Yes	Yes
Skin-bonded fat deposits	Yes	-	-	Yes
Ventro-ventral copulation	Yes	Yes	-	Yes
Dimunition of apocrine glands	Yes	-	-	Yes
Hymen	Yes	-	-	Yes
Enlarged sebaceous glands	Yes	-	-	Yes
Psychic tears	Yes	-	-	Yes
Loss of vibrissae	Yes	-	-	Yes
Volitional breath control	Yes	-	-	Yes
Eccrine thermoregulation	Yes	-	-	Yes
Descended larynx	Yes	-	-	Yes

The Aquatic phase took place more than 5 million years ago. Since then, Homo has had five million years to re-adapt to terrestrial life. It is not surprising that the traces of aquatic adaptation have become partially obliterated and have gone unrecognized for so long. But the traces are still there as the table indicates.

The “Yes” in column 3 refers to the bonobo; in column 4 the rhinoceros and the elephant.

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“An aquatic Ape is a likely ancestor of humans in terms of primate behaviour, marine ecosystems and geophysical timing.”
      – Prof. Derek Ellis, Dept. of Biology, Uni. of Victoria, Canada

“All other theories about the origin of our species have reached an impasse.”
      – Dr. Michel Odent, author of ‘Water and sexuality’

“An aquatic hypothesis offers far simpler explanations.”
      – Dr. Chris Knight, author of ‘Blood Relations’

“It is difficult to see how all the points assembled to back the Aquatic Theory can be explained away.”
      – Dr. Desmond Morris, author of ‘The Naked Ape’

A graduate of Harvard Medical School and Professor Emeritus of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Dr. N. Arthur Coulter is a synergic science pioneer. He began searching for a better way for humanity over 50 years ago. The following was originally published in 1976. The readers of this site are quite familiar with the term synergy. Synergy means working together. The opposite of synergy is adversity. Adversity is working against. The scientific term for this is “dysergy“.

THE MACHINE AND DYSERGY PRIME

N. Arthur Coulter, MD

Every human being is enmeshed in the vast and intricate world-wide system that I call the Machine. The Machine is a network consisting of a large number of social, political, military, economic and cultural components. I call it the Machine because its mode of operation is so very much like the smaller machines man has produced in such abundance. The essential characteristic of machine is repetition—it repeats a sequence of movements over and over again, always the same, though differing perhaps in speed or force produced. The pistons of an automobile engine move up and down, up and down, endlessly. The wheels of a locomotive turn around and around. A printing press goes through the same complex sequence of movements, over and over again. To mechanize a process is to organize it to repeat itself as exactly as possible.

So it is with the World Machine. It imposes on each human being a variety of patterns that he or she is expected to follow repeatedly. Get up, make breakfast, wash the dishes, make the beds, go shopping, come home, fix dinner, wash the dishes, watch TV, go to bed, etc. etc. etc. —patterns we repeat again and again, patterns we follow exactly lest we be punished. The Machine rules us all. We are only cogs spinning around and around.

Each of us was drawn into the Machine the minute he or she was born. None has any choice in the matter. True, there are moments in our lives when we do have a choice between alternatives; but the alternatives that are available are almost always those defined by the Machine, they are seldom our own. Even here, more often than not, the Machine exerts subtle pressures upon us, manipulating us with carrot and stick to choose the alternative preferred by the Machine. Having the illusion of choice, we then feel more committed to the path we have “chosen.”

How did this Frankenstein’s monster arise? And why do human beings so meekly submit to it?

What follows is admittedly an oversimplification and involves some speculations that are difficult to prove or disprove. A far better analysis is provided in the works of Lewis Mumford and other writers. But it does provide a simple, clear picture that is, I believe, not in contradiction to what is known; a picture that clearly shows how we are chained to the Machine. Some might call it a fable, the Fable of the Machine. But it is a fable that rings true.

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 It began a long time ago. Some say about 8000 B.C.

Some unknown genius, probably a woman, discovered or invented agriculture and, at about the same time, animal husbandry.

The ways of human kind were revolutionized, never again to be the same. For the first time, humans had a reasonably assured food supply. No longer were they forced to live a nomadic existence, hunting, fishing, and picking and eating wild fruits and vegetables. No longer did they have to move from place to place, always going to where the food was. No longer were they entirely dependent on the vicissitudes of weather, climate and animal competitors for the available food supply.

Humans could grow their own food in abundance. And “civilization” became possible.

Many humans became farmers. But at this point another element entered the picture. Farmers were able to produce more than they themselves actually needed. In other words, a surplus was possible. This meant that not all humans had to be farmers.

Moreover, a farmer was necessarily tied to the land. He could move about, of course; but he always had to return to the farm where his crops and animals were, and he had to spend most of his time there. This left him vulnerable.

And since not all humans had to become farmers, some did not. Those who did not were those who naturally preferred to hunt and to fish and those who were good at it. Those were the ones with the weapons.

And so the hunter became the warrior. He killed the farmer and stole his food or forced the farmer to give him food under threat of death.

And in due course, some warriors were better users of weapons than others, and, true to their kind, they forced the lesser warriors to do their bidding. And they organized the warriors into armed groups. Such groups were far superior to individual warriors.

And so the warrior-kings emerged. And they took control of the land. They let the farmers continue to farm, provided they obeyed the warrior-kings and gave each king and his generals and his warriors food.

And the food the warrior-king took was called “taxes.” And the orders of the warrior-king were called “laws.” And the farmers and other subjects obeyed the laws “or else.” And they paid the taxes “or else.”

And as time went on, the warrior-king became more clever, not only in using weapons and in organizing armies, but in persuading people to obey him. He learned the warriors could be conditioned to obey (this is now called military training). After a period of this conditioning, the warrior learned to obey orders instantly, that to question them was to die. And he was given a false image to live up to—the image of the Hero, the Fearless and Brave. And, of course, the warrior-king was the Great One, the Champion of His People, the Superhero. Sometimes he claimed to have Supernatural Powers—to be a god.

And the same methods of conditioning were applied to farmers. The warrior-king, who had actually seized power by force, claimed that he had it by Right. And he gave the farmer another image to live up to—that of the Loyal Subject, the Obedient Citizen who faithfully obeyed the Law and paid the Taxes. And he was taught to revere the warrior-king (this is now called patriotism), who was his Protector (against other warrior-kings), and who settled his disputes with other farmers Fairly and with Justice.

And since women were physically weaker than men, but necessary for the pleasure of men and the production of new warriors, it was only fitting that women become the property of men. And so it was decreed that women belonged to their fathers or their brothers or their husbands. And the men agreed that this was Fair and Just.

Now the warrior-king was the Greatest One among his people. And this made him very happy. And since happiness equals Greatness, he naturally reasoned that he would be even happier if he were still Greater. But to do this he had to overcome another warrior-king to prove he was Number One.

Thus war was invented.

To prove his Greatness, the warrior-king invented The Enemy—another warrior-king and his soldiers and subjects.

The Enemy is always less than human, capable of murder, torture, rape, and the most unspeakable crimes. Moreover, he is out to get you—the Good Guy, the Hero. So you have to kill him first, before he kills you.

(Of course, the other warrior-king is doing the same thing with his young Heroes. To them, you are The Enemy—less than human, capable of murder, torture, rape, and the most unspeakable crimes.)

And so Warrior-King A—the Good, the Wise, the Just, the Protector of His People—orders his young Heroes to a place where they must kill the Enemy—the young Heroes of Warrior-King B. And lo! It is true! The Enemy is trying to kill the young Heroes and therefore he must be Evil, less than human, and everything the Warrior-King has said.

And so the young Heroes come to hate The Enemy. And the parents and sisters and younger brothers and grandparents of the young Heroes learn to hate The Enemy even more. And the Warrior-King is satisfied, because hasn’t it been proved that what he said was Right and True? And doesn’t this prove that he is Wise and indeed the Protector of his people? And doesn’t this prove that The Enemy must be murdered or tortured if he is captured? And doesn’t this prove that The Enemy’s women, who are less than human—deserve to be raped by the young Heroes,  etc. etc. etc.?

And so the young Heroes become what they hate.

But there is one thing worse than The Enemy without and that is The Enemy within, the Traitor.

For it happens that, ever so often, a person sees through all this nonsense and refuses to take part in it. But this means that he has Disobeyed the King—the Wise, the Good, the Great. He who is not With Us, the Good Guys, is Against Us. He is one of Them and therefore less than human. Worse, he has deceived us into trusting him, pretending falsely to be one of us Good Folk.

Punish the Traitor! Kill him! Kill! Kill! Kill!

And so it went. The Warrior-King was able to expand his territory and kill so many of the other Warrior-King’s soldiers that The Enemy was subdued. Thus, the Warrior-King brought Peace to his people.

And since all the people wanted peace, and never really wanted to hate and kill in the first place, they were grateful to the Warrior-King. For didn’t he Protect them from The Enemy? And hadn’t he ended the War and brought Peace?

Thus it began 10,000 years ago. This is the way kings and laws and taxes and governments were formed. And the people were conditioned to believe that all these things were Good and Right. And so they taught their children, who in turn taught their children, and so on down the generations until it was our turn. And we accepted it, too.

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Let us pause, for a moment, and analyze the Fable of the Machine, as told thus far.

First, just as it was useful to make a distinction between individual and group consciousness, so it is helpful to distinguish a third form of consciousness, the consciousness of a person when he thinks of, himself as a member of a large social unit such as a nation. I call this social consciousness. When an individual’s social consciousness turns on, he or she may become aware of, and subject to, contents that go back many years in history. These social contents are not part of his individual consciousness and may be a source of dysergy for him.

Second, an important feature of the individual’s social consciousness is his perception of the social consensus. This perception may be mistaken, but as long as he holds it, his actions and communications and interactions are influenced by it. These actions, communications, and interactions with others in turn help to determine the (actual) social consensus. A cyclical process is thus established, which may continue indefinitely.

Third, the Mode Ladder may be applied to social consciousness. This means, among other things, that certain processes of social consciousness may be Identic or Reactive in mode. I call such processes, and the patterns that govern them, sociodynes.

A protodyne is a strong unconscious belief that a human individual holds. This belief is programmed deep into the mind by one’s life experience. For any individual a protodyne is “real”. We humans will act as if these beliefs are true whether they are or not. An acrophobic believes that being in the open is very dangerous. They will not leave their homes. They cannot be convinced that it is safe to go out into the open. The root word “-dyne” is from physics it means force. Strong unconscious beliefs held by individuals that force them to behave in specific ways are called protodynes.

When a strong unconscious belief is held by a group of people or a nation of people, it affects the whole group or the nation. Sociodynes force groups of people or nations of people to behave in specific ways. Coulter coined these terms in the late 60s and early 70s. Independently of Coulter, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Meme is today a much better known term than protodyne although it has a similar meaning. —TKW

Sociodynes, clearly, are a major source of dysergy. This dysergy is of two main kinds: social dysergy and individual dysergy. Social dysergy takes the form of wars, crime, political and economic strife, racism, poverty, etc. The individual dysergy produced by sociodynes results from the Patterns-of-expected-behavior they impose on the individual.

A sociodyne is much more complex than a protodyne or a chronic reaction, so much so that it requires a major study to characterize one in detail. For our purposes, it is sufficient to identify a sociodyne and perhaps to indicate a few salient features.

In the Fable of the Machine, we can identify at least three: the war sociodyne, the state sociodyne, and the male chauvinist sociodyne.

From the standpoint of social synergetics, clearly a long-term objective is to eliminate all sociodynes from the social matrix. Desirable though this may be, it is equally clear that this is a formidable task; one that would probably require many decades to accomplish. For sociodynes have been accumulating since the dawn of history and probably long before then.

From the standpoint of the individual, the patterns-of-expected-behavior associated with sociodynes are of interest. Two responses to these patterns are worth noting: the individual may accept the pattern or he may react to it.

When he accepts the pattern, his response is primarily Identic in mode; when he reacts to the pattern, his response is primarily Reactive. In either case, the response is dysergic. And in both cases, he can clear the dysergy by eliminating his own identifications and reactions.

This process is called neutralizing the sociodyne. Please note that neutralization does not clear the sociodyne from the social matrix. Also, it does not eliminate the problems and difficulties the individual may encounter in dealing with the sociodyne in its social and group aspects. But the individual does have the power to neutralize sociodynes, and when he does so, he feels better and can achieve more.

Let us now return to the Fable of the Machine.

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As we have seen, the Machine was born when agriculture was invented. And since farmers were able to produce a surplus, not all people had to be farmers. Some became warriors, as we have seen; and the warrior-kings emerged and established the State. Others became carpenters, weavers, smiths, masons, etc. producing goods and services that people needed or wanted. At first, these were traded by simple barter. Later, money was invented as a medium of exchange and a measure of value.

By and by another group of people began to emerge. Workers and farmers were very busy working and farming. They had little time to take their goods to people who needed them or to find where these people were. So some people saw in this an opportunity. They bought the goods cheaply from the farmers and workers who produced them, and they stored them or took them to people who needed the goods and sold them for high prices. These were the traders.

Now some traders realized they were performing a service and charged for that service only what they needed to buy their fair share of the goods and services that society as a whole produced. But others didn’t worry about this. They had no qualms about cheating or deceiving the people they bought from or sold to. Buying cheap and selling dear enabled them to keep the difference, which they called “profit.” And some traders became very rich this way.

One day, a rich trader got the idea of bringing all the workers, together in one place called a manufactory. This made it easier for the trader, who could organize the workers so they produced more. And since the trader was very rich, he could pay the workers for the goods they produced, only now he called this payment wages. And since the. workers now had to get wages in order to buy food and other things they needed, they pretty much had to do what the trader wanted. In this way, the trader became a boss.

Some workers remained free, of course, at least for awhile, producing things themselves and selling them. But free workers could not compete in the long run. Because things were organized in the manufactory, goods could be produced a lot more efficiently and sold at a lower price than the goods of the free worker, even though the trader-boss still made a large profit.

Meanwhile, science was invented. A scientist is a funny person who is smart in some ways and dumb in others. Scientists began to find out more and more about nature; and one day they discovered how to make machines run by natural energy.

The trader-bosses were delighted about this. Being very rich, they paid the scientists to design machines for their manufactories; and they paid workers to build the machines. With machines, workers could produce a lot more than they could before. And so the manufactories became factories. And the trader-bosses became even richer.

Some of the trader-bosses were generous and kind and tried to help the workers to make things easier for them. But to do this cost money and reduced their profits. So the trader-bosses who were most ruthless, buying the workers’ labor cheap and selling their products dear, made the most profits and soon drove the generous traderbosses out of business.

Sometimes a factory became so efficient that it produced more than people wanted or could afford to buy. When this happened, the trader-boss would lay off workers in order to keep his profits.

The trader-boss didn’t mind this, because it made sure that the workers he kept on would work harder and not get any radical ideas.

And the trader-bosses saw the value of machines and the scientists who were smart enough to design them. So they hired scientists (who were then called engineers) to design more and better machines. And most of the scientist-engineers didn’t mind this, because they loved to do research and design machines, and the trader-bosses paid them well. They became workers, bought and paid for like any other thing by the trader-bosses. But most of them didn’t realize this.

Trader-bosses were constantly trying to figure out new ways to buy cheap and sell dear. Some of them noticed that money could also be treated as a commodity to be bought cheap and sold dear. They also saw that farmers and workers needed a place to keep their money, temporarily, until they spent it.

So these trader-bosses became money-bosses. They stored the money of the workers and farmers in a safe place called a bank. But they realized that on any given day farmers and workers would draw out only a small fraction of their money; the rest of the time the money-bosses could use it as they pleased. So, they loaned it out, mostly to other trader-bosses, and charged interest for it. And in this way they became very rich.

Now the trader-bosses and the money-bosses and the modem-day warrior-kings (who are called politicians) are not evil men. They are just doing what their roles tell them to do. If they don’t perform according to their roles, the Machine causes them to lose, and they become workers or farmers or unemployed.

---

The Fable of the Machine could be continued indefinitely; but enough has been told to provide a basis for understanding how this Frankenstein’s monster arose. Let us now consider the second question posed at the start of this chapter: Why do human beings so meekly submit to it?

A simple answer would be: Because we have no choice. But this may immediately be modified to: Because we believe—we have no choice. And this leads to another question: Why do we accept this belief?

Whenever the Machine permits us the illusion of choice, it always defines the alternatives in terms favorable to it. Catch 22. In the case of submission to the Machine, the choice offered is submit or perish. You need food, which only the Machine can provide. And, for almost everyone, this is true. But there are other alternatives, which become clear once we refuse to limit ourselves only to those stated by the Machine.

But there is more to the problem than this. Let us probe more deeply.

The human mind is so organized that when a pattern occurs that “works,” the mind tends to use that pattern again in a similar situation. This is the Identic mode in operation. There is no discrimination or awareness.

The warrior-king established the original pattern of the state with laws and taxes. This same pattern prevails today, despite the fact that, to many thinking persons, the nation-state has become an anachronism, and despite the fact that the original warrior-kings used brute force to seize power and to keep that power. Whatever was, is right and it will be repeated, over and over again, till the end of time.

The endless repetition of the Machine is nothing more than the projection, upon the screen of social consciousness, of the Identic mode of function.

This insight provides the basis for understanding why the Machine has such power over us. It is because we unconsciously give it that power. It is as if the Machine were under the control of a pseudomind, operating entirely in the Identic and Reactive modes. Like the Freudian Id, which imposes its protodynes to control the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and actions of the individual consciousness, this pseudo-mind imposes its sociodynes upon our social consciousness.

It will be useful to give this pseudo-mind a name. I call it Dysergy Prime because it is a primary source of dysergy upon the planet earth.

To understand how Dysergy Prime. controls us, let us once again consider the distinction between individual and social consciousness. When you are alone, doing something you enjoy and do well, your consciousness is your own; it isn’t shared with anyone else. The contents of your consciousness are your sights, sounds, ideas, etc. Your will, too, is your own—you do as you choose, selecting from alternatives you yourself formulate, not those of the Machine.

But when you become a member of a group, your consciousness subtly changes. The contents of your consciousness are no longer purely your own, but are selectively focused upon those contents that you perceive to be occupying the consensus-attention of the group. Moreover, you tend to perceive those contents the way the group consensus perceives them, which may differ from the way you would view them through individual consciousness.

The same thing applies to your will. You are limited to alternatives that you perceive to be acceptable to the group, indeed, that are expected by the group. You may, on occasion, choose; but you do so as a member of the group, not as an individual.

Now, in addition to membership in a group, an individual also has one or more roles in the group and a certain status in the group. If your role happens to be one of leadership, you may imagine that you have power to shape things as you choose and, to a limited extent, you do. But power attracts power seekers like garbage attracts flies. You soon find yourself surrounded by flies clamoring for attention or cleverly massaging your ego so they can wield some of the power in your name. And in your role, you are expected to manage every crisis that comes along. Your consciousness again is not your own, but is governed by your perception of the contents occupying group attention, modified by your perception of what-you-are-expected-to-do.

If your status is low in the group hierarchy, your image of yourself is profoundly affected. Instead of seeing yourself as you actually are a unique individual with unique potentials and unique needs—you view yourself in terms of your status, your perception of how-you-are-regarded-in-the-group, You feel inferior, inadequate; and because this is unpleasant, you may try to compensate by covering it up, by taking it out on someone else whose status is even lower than yours or by finding something outside yourself to glorify. As for your will, your lowly status insures that you end up doing the scut work that nobody else wants to do.

Generalize this to include all the groups to which we belong, and to society as a whole, and we see that we become absorbed in a social consciousness that to a considerable degree governs what we perceive, the way we think, the way we regard ourselves, and the actions we take. Each of us assumes a False Identity that is a kind of average of his various memberships, roles, and statuses, while the real “I” is submerged, confused, and impotent.

But this is not the whole story. From social consciousness that occupies our minds there emerges a new entity whose existence and reality are determined by collective agreements. This entity is Dysergy Prime.

Dysergy Prime may be defined as the set of sociodynes that have accumulated since the beginning of humankind, controlling us through patterns-of-expected-conduct associated with our memberships, roles, and statuses in various groups and other social entities. The Machine serves Dysergy Prime, not individual human beings. The Machine itself is only a machine, and could be made to serve us if Dysergy Prime were destroyed.

How can Dysergy Prime be destroyed?

In principle, the solution is easy. Dysergy Prime exists because we unconsciously believe in it. If all of us, collectively, became fully and knowledgeably conscious of Dysergy Prime and of the ways it controls us, and collectively decided not to believe in it any more, Dysergy Prime would disappear.

(All we have to do is change our minds. —TKW) 

Unfortunately, this has to be a collective decision. One person, discovering the truth, can stop believing in Dysergy Prime; but his social consciousness discloses that everyone else still believes; and their collective belief so influences their perceptions, thoughts, and actions that his individual consciousness is overwhelmed. He must continue to deal with the reality of this collective belief.

In the movie “Forbidden Planet,” a human scientist, Dr. Morbius, spent many years studying the remains of an advanced civilization whose citizens had mysteriously disappeared. The resources of the planet had been harnessed by a technology far in advance of that of man, and this technology continued to function automatically. Ultimately, Morbius discovered that the vanished race had been destroyed by an Id creature produced by their collective unconscious, a creature that drew upon the inexhaustible energies of that technology.

Let us hope that a similar fate does not await humankind.

Good Morning Future Positivists, I am pleased to announce that Jivan Vatayan is joining the SynEARTH.network as a contributing editor. I have found his writing both wise and beautiful. You can read samples here: Population Consumption and the Banality of Evil  or Meditation — A powerful response to social problems. You may have followed our GAIAN dialogues. A reader sends a note commenting on those dialogues.

To Timothy Wilken and Jivan Vatayan:

I must say I’m thoroughly enjoying this dialogue. It is rare to find a “place” even on the Web, where thoughtful and reflective Gaians can debate these basic issues in such depth, and with such insight.

A few comments:

(1) about names: It seems that many of us (and I don’t exclude myself) are caught up in inventing our own idiosyncratic languages to describe insights into reality that the conventional (dualistic) language of our dominant culture seems to miss altogether. Jivan has created, and is attached to, “The Ecodiversity Lifeform” as his term of choice for what Timothy and I (and most others in this emerging field of inquiry) call “Gaia,” in deference to the seminal insights of Lovelock and the ancient Greek myth and metaphor underlying it, while mainstream scientists might prefer to call it simply “the biosphere.” But these concepts are essentially interchangeable, so I prefer to stick to the one with the widest currency and (for me) greatest metaphorical resonance–”Gaia.”

Similarly, my invented name for what we all agree to be the Cancer of the Earth is “Glomart” (short for “Global Market Economy”); others have used a wide variety of coinages for this money-based socioeconomic monstrosity within which we all coexist–I’ve seen “IndCom”(for “Industrial-Commercial”) as well as simply “the global corporate elite” or whatever. But despite our idiosyncratic choice of names, it is clear that we’re all talking about the same thing–the fundamental incompatibility of our man-made self-maximizing order of money with the finite, self-optimizing order of nature (which, of course, both engendered and sustains us).

(2) about the evolutionary role of humanity on Gaia: Timothy envisions a noble role for humanity, where we somehow metastasize from the terminal Cancer of Gaia into the central nervous system of the next evolutionary phase of Gaia–and I hope he is right, but I haven’t the slightest notion of whether this is true. Others consider humanity an evolutionary dead-end, doomed by the invention of language and the discovery of fossil fuels to enter a boom and bust cycle, like any other invasive exotic that has no natural predators–only this time the “bust” will be global, and catastrophic not only to humanity, but also to the diversity and resilience of Gaia. Again, I don’t know which view is right. Maybe both, or neither.

But I think we need to guard against carrying the organismic model too far. Gaia is an aggregate (loosely coupled) system like an ecosystem, not an integrated (tightly coupled) system like an organism. As Tyler Volk, a leading Gaian scientist, has put it, “Cells are cells; organisms are organisms; and Gaia is Gaia.” In other words, analogies only go so far. Gaia, as an aggregate system, needs no “central nervous system”–although we (the global human community) might well need one, to keep from consuming one another in bloody, internecine tribal warfare. Gaia can do perfectly well without us, but we cannot do at all without her.

–Tom

John Champagne also views a role for humanity in the emergence of GAIA. 

GAIA’s BRAIN: Integrating Humanity and the Biosphere

John Champagne

An obvious trend throughout the history of life on earth is the nearly continual, albeit unsteady progression from simpler, small-scale organization to more complex and large-scale organization. Simple entities elaborate themselves into more complex forms in response to changes in the environment; changes that are often brought about by the very life processes of those simpler entities. They accomplish this transformation by integrating elements of their environment into themselves. [Alberts, et al]

Mitochondria were once free-living cells in symbiotic relationship with one another, (much as animals and plants are in symbiosis), which, over time, developed such intimate connections with one another that the relationship evolved from that of separate, interdependent organisms to that of interdependent entities within a larger organism. This transition appears to have been triggered by the accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere. Oxygen is a highly reactive gas, and would have been poisonous to most of the early life on the planet. This accumulation was caused by living things. They changed their environment, and so were compelled to change themselves, or die. [Ibid] What were at one time separate organisms have integrated to form the eucaryotic cell. This transformation represents an early example of a meta-system transition wherein interacting systems become subordinate to and come under the control of a larger scale emergent system. [Turchin]

Multi-cellular organisms, or meta-organisms, continue the progression toward higher levels of complexity by extending the function of a prototypical eucaryotic cell, (e.g.: protozoa), to a community of cells, in communication with and cooperation with one another. Each cell specializes and concentrates on performing one function, or a narrow range of functions, out of the many functions of the prototypical eucaryotic cell. Each cell receives products and benefits from its neighbors and, likewise, provides products and benefits to its neighbors.

Development of Societies

Members of societies share information about themselves and their environment with one another, and through this sharing are able to act as an integrated entity, cooperating in the exploitation of their environment, as if the society itself were a single organism. The social insects, (ants, termites, bees), are a classic example of this phenomenon. Howler monkeys, (or any primate), also illustrate this point: A call from a single individual can cause the whole troupe to move in a particular direction, either toward food, or away from danger.

Development of Language and Culture Allow Elaboration of Mental Models and Social Structure

Human society and culture represent yet another level of this phenomenon of entities organizing themselves into communities to form entities of a higher order. Culture is the product of humans’ language and tool-making abilities. It represents a quantum leap in the ability of hominid society to share information among its members, and to transmit that information through time, and so it greatly expands humans’ ability to organize as a single entity and exploit their environment. The Tribe became the newest form of the meta-organism.

Language allows naming things; and it allows elaborate mental models of the environment and of social relations to develop. Bringing information about an environment into an entity–a human being or human society–in the form of mental models or social structure, is a step toward integrating that environment with that entity. Integration of interacting systems always involves the transfer of information between those systems. [Turchin]

Language and Culture Allow Living Beyond Means

Culture has enabled human society to expand into virtually every ecosystem on the planet. As we expand into an environment and change it by interacting with it, we adapt our methods, so that our ability to extract wealth persists, even as we exceed the carrying capacity of the environment. This habit of living beyond what is sustainable, with innovations in culture and technology driven by the challenge of adapting to a degrading environment, even as our numbers increase, points to the need for new feedback mechanisms that will enable the human supra- organism and its members to exist within the limits of the biosphere at large.

An ancient city can be seen as a multi-organism organism: City walls are the skin, the grain stores are the stomach, the systems of commerce, roads and sewers are the circulatory and digestive systems, the soldiers are the immune system, and the protocols of behavior that mediate interactions among the various citizens–the records of grain ownership and tax liability, the mythology, the beliefs about the intentions of the gods and what the citizens ought to do, people’s sense of possibilities–make up the nervous system. Civilizations rise and fall because they lack the feedback mechanisms that would enable them to moderate their growth and achieve a dynamic equilibrium with their environment. The supra-organism consumes its resource base and either dies, or finds a new resource base to exploit in another location.

The most complex entity that has yet to arise on the planet–the global human society, civilization–is utterly transforming the environment that sustains it. There is now an urgent need to integrate the entity with the environment, the economy with the ecology–to prevent the one from destroying the other. We need to learn how to live, how to interact with our environment in a way that promotes our well-being while also preserving the health of the larger living community. The health of the ecosystem, economic health and personal health are all inextricably linked.

Money, in combination with other inventions, such as agriculture, pottery, road systems, writing, etc., makes cities possible. When combined with certain bookkeeping tools and economic and governmental institutions, money makes capitalism possible. Money makes it possible, too, for economic actors to exert pressures that may harm the environment. Such pressures can be felt even half way around the world. When people buy hamburgers, they exert economic pressure that induces ranchers to cut forests. Soil erodes and biodiversity is lost forever. We now have a world full of people who are spending money in ways that are exerting unsustainable pressures on the natural systems that are the very basis of our survival [Brown]; but there is not a mechanism whereby economic actors can get information, feedback, at the time of purchase, about the ecological consequences of their actions. A system of feedback that provides pertinent information at the moment of decision and in a form that all will pay heed to would be most effective.

Introducing Mechanisms for Taking Account of Environmental Impacts

Our challenge, possibly the greatest challenge that human beings have faced since we learned to stand and walk and talk, is to reconcile our ability to extend ourselves into the environment–with ever increasing impact on the environment–with the inherent limits of that environment to withstand such impact. We must learn to interact with our environment without destroying it. We face a choice either to allow our actions to continue to produce ecologically destructive pressures across the globe, until we experience catastrophic collapse, or remedy this problem with our economic system. We can solve this problem by incorporating a measure of the ecological pressures of human activities into the price of goods and services produced through those activities, with the aim of discouraging those harmful impacts, to reduce them to acceptable levels.

Ecology and Economy are Integrated: Creating a Sensory Nervous System for Earth

We can show ecological costs in the price of goods and services by attaching fees to the use of natural resources. This would cause the price of things to reflect the ecological pressures or cost associated with their production. We would be deterred from doing certain things which are harmful to the biosphere by the fact that these things would cost more.

The historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, writing more than a hundred years ago, described the movement of civilization across the continent as a nervous system in the process of growth and development. If we follow this analogy, we see that Turner’s nervous system is a nervous system of the earth, and that, as of yet, it lacks an essential element of a healthy nervous system in a healthy organism: sense nerves. The proposed fees on resource use and pollution would correct this defect by causing information about injury to earth, or stress to the biosphere, to be conveyed to economic actors through the prices of goods and services in the marketplace. Thus, the resource fees would constitute an autonomic or sensory nervous system for the earth, conveying information about injury or imbalance in the earth organism to society, (the neural network), and causing a change in society and in the behavior of individuals that would tend to reduce the injury and restore balance.

Any corporate entity can be seen as subordinate to the larger planet organism, just as mitochondria are subordinate to the cell. Part of the function of a healthy cell is to monitor the productions of its mitochondria, and ration resources according to the needs of the larger organism for those products. From the perspective of the cell, or the larger earth, what goes into and what comes out of the subordinate entity must be closely monitored, while what actually goes on in the sub-entity is of lessor concern.

Implementation Strategies Invite Democratization in Economics and Politics

We must decide how much the earth’s ecosystems can sustainably take from us in the form of wastes, and what they can provide to us as resource. But we do not know the answer to this question. No one does. So we begin by recognizing that we cannot be certain of the numbers. Let us resolve to err on the side of caution; that is, to be conservative and err on the side of preserving and restoring ecosystems for the benefit of our grandchildren and future generations.

We could issue permits for various pollutants, according to how much of each pollutant we would allow, and auction them in the free market. Likewise for the taking of valuable resources. Thus, those industries which are most successful at conserving resources and cleaning up processes will have an advantage in the market, while those industries which continue to emit large amounts of waste and/or extract large amounts of natural resources will have to include these high costs to ecosystems in the price of their products. [Sharp, et al]

Because nearly everyone will have a different opinion regarding the levels of pollutants that would be safe and sustainable, and because we are committed to democratic principles that allow all voices to be heard, the actual amount that we decide on will be a summary of the opinions of all the world’s people. And, because many of us are not able to make an informed decision about appropriate levels of some or all pollutants, we may choose to delegate our vote to someone whose opinion we respect. For example, if I believed that it is safe to release 100 million tons of fossil fuel carbon dioxide into the environment, and that no level of chlorinated hydrocarbon emissions (e.g.: CFC’s, Heptachlor, DDT) can be called safe or sustainable, but I had no opinion or knowledge about safe levels of other pollutants, then I might refer to lists of people who share my views on CO2 or chlorinated hydrocarbons to see what their opinions are regarding other pollutants–either to inform my own opinion, or to find a knowledgeable and responsible person to whom I could delegate my ‘emissions allowance’ vote. If I were convinced that the level of emissions that I regard as sustainable could not be achieved immediately, I might want to structure my vote in the form of a percent reduction per year, toward a specific target.

Gaia Brain Provides the Tools for Sculpting Society

Virtually everything we do that impacts the Commons, every way that we apply technology to exploit our environment, may need to be measured and rationed, according to the method outlined above or some other method. Human behaviors and lifestyles would have associated with them economic costs which would reliably reflect the perceived environmental costs of those behaviors. Economic forces, which all people respond to, will induce us to make changes in habits and lifestyle that are compatible with the interests of the larger living community, and with the interests of future generations of human beings.

This concept of assigning fees to the use of earth’s natural resources and waste removal services can be applied to other areas. We could apply gaia brain methods to the management of the use of non-human animals by human beings. Someday, perhaps soon, we may completely eliminate the systematic enslavement and exploitation of non-human animals in industry and agriculture [Singer], but until that time, we may wish to create a system whereby industry and agriculture are subject to economic costs in some proportion to how much suffering they inflict on the animals they use. This will give them an incentive to reduce both the numbers of animals they use and the amount of suffering inflicted on each one.

We could attach or increase a fee on anything that we would like to see less of in the world. We could contribute a portion of our share of the proceeds of natural resource fees toward those things that we would like to see increased. We could say: “Less asphalt”; “Less advertising billboards”; “Less outdoor lighting, and more stars in the night sky”; “More city parks”; “More libraries”; and the economic incentives that would accompany our expressed wishes would result in real change, so that our wishes would be born out in reality. Alienation, in the Marxist sense of living in and creating through our actions and interactions a society which we would not choose, would be eliminated, or at least dramatically reduced, because society would evolve to reflect our expressed wishes.

Impact of Paradigm Shift on Institutions and Society

This model of human society as meta-organism, and as nervous system of the gaia organism would transform the educational process. Children can understand the concepts of ‘organism’ and ‘interaction with environment’ because they themselves are organisms. They eat and breathe. They can observe protozoa. This gaia brain model would invite early introduction of ideas about social interaction, and would invite the active involvement of children in the collection of opinions among community members about appropriate levels of pollution and use of natural resources, and about perceived community needs; and it would invite their involvement in the assessment of actual conditions. A question is a linguistic device for directing one’s attention onto a topic [Minsky], therefore, just the act of asking people about pollution, natural resource use, and community needs will cause them to think about these issues more. The fact that the questions might be put by children will do much to remind all concerned who it is that will be most affected by the answers: the children who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions for many years to come. Students, as assessors of actual conditions and of the accuracy of reports issued by industry, would be involved in the protection of resources that will sustain them in the future, and they would gain valuable knowledge and insight into the workings of society in the process.

Students might cast their own mock votes about what kind of world they would want to live in and what human impacts on the earth ought to be deemed permissible. If they did so with a clear explication of the why behind their votes, adults in the community may want to honor their careful research and serious consideration by copying the students’ votes–in effect, delegating their own votes to those outstanding students.

The Gaia brain/pollution fee system will so transform the global economy and society, we probably ought to think in terms of an elimination of government as we know it. With the introduction of significant pollution fees, conventional taxes would be difficult to support financially. And we may decide that they lack philosophical foundation: we may see that a fee according to our use of the earth’s natural resources is well founded on philosophical principles of fairness, while taxes on income or sales do not seem on the face to be eminently fair.

The proceeds of the pollution fees and green fees would be a monetary representation of the value of earth’s air and water, minerals and biota. As these resources can reasonably be said to belong to all, the proceeds of these fees probably ought to be shared equally among all the people of the earth. This could be the basis of a guaranteed minimum income. Perhaps we could contribute half of our share toward programs that address perceived community needs and use the other half in whatever way we choose. If everyone had access to such an account, no one would live in abject poverty, community programs would be funded according to the priorities of the people, and low income people would have basic social services available.

This new source of economic security would cause the psychological rewards of work to become more prominent as an issue of concern, while job security and pay would become somewhat less important. This would give both employers and employees more freedom to end relationships that they find unsatisfactory; which, in turn, would give them more freedom to enter into relationships that look promising, as there would not be any need for the burdensome legal obligations that often accompany the decision to hire, (although binding contracts would remain an option). A more fluid job market will make it easier for both employers and employees to find what they are looking for. This direct democracy, capitalism-communism synthesis that is gaia brain theory would make it easier for all people to follow their bliss.

The pollution fee/gaia brain concept applies ancient principles to today’s challenges. All things are connected. We must live in accord with nature. We must give something back in proportion to what we take. We are the stewards of this planet. The greatest challenges that life presents are those which must be met to ensure the very survival of the organism. The difficult but life sustaining task before us is to transform ourselves from cancer cells of earth to brain cells of earth–to make a healthy, properly functioning world brain; to create anew our global society.

More by John Champagne

Jivan Vatayan has explained elsewhere that we humans are often (always) distracted from what is important by what is urgent. “The busy-ness of this world allows very little available energy left (in most people) to consider a complete change in the way the entire species views, lives and behaves on Earth.” This “busy-ness” prevents us from viewing reality clearly. In this morning’s article he offers us an approach that might be helpful.

Meditation — A powerful response to social problems

Jivan Vatayan

One of the great benefits that I have realized through certain “meditations” is in breaking the habituation to thoughts. There is a potential to disidentify and slow or stop many of the habits of the ego and the yammer of the inner conversation. Once the disidentification habit becomes strong enough to stop the habit of identification an interesting perspective developed in me.

First, one’s past behavior and the past behavior of others appear to be extremely robotic – we appear to be largely conditioned animals addicted to stable memes.

Second, a new potential for individual change seems possible by bringing this awareness to the normal (sleeping) state of perceiving “reality”.

Third, this potential appears to be persistently unrealized for the following (possible) reason.  As I/we come out of the state of no-mind the tendency is always to pick up the old script and old conditioning and go back into the old behavior patterns or other inappropriate behaviors.

These inappropriate behaviors include many or all of the supposed deeper spiritual scripts.  There is the unfortunate tendency in the spiritual world not to acknowledge the default storymind that is engaging reality. The “new age” world of spirituality tends be carried away with using meditation in service of the ego or to be in denial of the limited spiritual world views that it is propounding (i.e.-  denial of deeper body of nature). The potential for bringing the freedom experienced in meditation is squandered.

I have asked myself -  what can be done about this?

Part of looking deeply at the resistance to change is witnessing this very behavior.  From the clearer, less scripted state of undifferentiated awareness I jump back into the comfort of the same old used-to-be and I/we stay in the addiction to the frozen past. What and why am I picking up this old conditioning and what are the real disadvantages and advantages to these pick-ups? It appears that the effort to keep this identifying desiring ego engaged with the entrancement of cultural reality is stressful and unsatisfying. I am not nurturing my deep EarthSelf by most of the spinning wheels of cultural reality and thought.

I have seen that there is potential in group work to combine meditation with de-hypnosis to break individual and cultural habits. I would love to see this approach brought to the destructive cultural habits which we appear to be addicted to and/or habituated.

I have experienced this potential of combining meditation with deep spiritual questioning, intensive group therapy and bodywork and from that I see that real change is possible. That change must be a community supported effort designed to deal with the deepest and darkest social and ecological questions in the most penetrating and potentially loving way for the benefit of all beings.

The clarity of no-mind (undifferentiated awareness) must inform our deepest being (bodily awareness, feeling awareness, moment to moment storymind awareness, and the deep mythical/mystery awareness of wholistic consciousness).

These areas of our being must address the deep questions of the mystery of reality. Such questions include:  What is the prime value?,  What is the nature of the self?,  What compromises the real community?, What is the relationship of  humans with respect to the more comprehensive  natural community? and What are the appropriate methods to engage in these questions?.

It is not likely that such an effort will be attempted or organized. But, if it were, it would allow a comprehensive, wholistic re-evaluation of what we are doing to the Earth with the best that meditation seems to offer.

Oxygon, a reader of this site writes:

I am having trouble understanding what GAIA is… Dictionary says it a goddess or something to that effect…  Do you think there is a goddess…

Is GAIA the collective will or the direction things are going anthropomorphised…?  You know, what works works and what doesn’t  doesn’t kind of thing? Evolutionary type synergy? I know that some things work in synergy like bees and plants but what is this GAIA having anything to do with it?

Any help will be appreciated… I get somewhat lost whenever someone brings her up… is that right? Everbody refers to “her”… is this a mis-understanding?  Thanks…

Gaia Theory: Science of the Living Earth

David Orrell

Here is a brief introduction to Gaia theory, as developed by Lovelock, Margulis and others.

In the early 1960’s, James Lovelock was invited by NASA to participate in the scientific research for evidence of life on Mars. His job was to design instruments, capable of detecting the presence of life, which could be sent on a spacecraft to Mars. This wasn’t straightforward, since it was hard to know what to test for: any life forms on Mars may be radically different from those on Earth.

This led him to think about what constitutes life, and how it can be detected. He decided that the most general characteristic of life was that it takes in energy and matter and discards waste products. He also reasoned that organisms would use the planet’s atmosphere as a medium for this cyclic exchange, just as we breathe in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide. He speculated that life would therefore leave a detectable chemical signature on the Martian atmosphere. Maybe it could be detected from Earth, so it wouldn’t even be necessary to send a spaceship.

To test his idea, he and a colleague, Dian Hitchcock, began to analyse the chemical makeup of Mars, and compare it with that of the Earth. The results showed a strong contrast. The atmosphere of Mars, like Venus, was about 95% carbon dioxide, with some oxygen and no methane. The Earth was 77% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and a relatively large amount of methane. Mars was chemically dead; all the reactions that were going to take place had already done so. The Earth, however, was far from chemical equilibrium. For example, methane and oxygen will react with each other very easily, and yet they are both present in the atmosphere. Lovelock concluded that for this to be the case the gases must be in constant circulation, and that the pump driving this circulation was life.

Lovelock began to look back at the history of life’s interaction with the atmosphere. He noted that about three billion years ago, bacteria and photosynthetic algae started to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, producing oxygen as a waste product. Over enormous time periods, this process changed the chemical content of the atmosphere – to the point where organisms began to suffer from oxygen poisoning! The situation was only relieved with the advent of organisms powered by aerobic consumption.

It was life processes, the cumulative actions of countless organisms, that were controlling the atmosphere. And viewed from outer space, the mass effect of these processes was that the Earth itself appeared as a living entity – especially in comparison with its dead neighbours. Lovelock had a sudden realisation that the Earth could best be described as a kind of super-organism:

“For me, the personal revelation of Gaia came quite suddenly – like a flash of enlightenment. I was in a small room on the top floor of a building at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. It was the autumn of 1965 … and I was talking with a colleague, Dian Hitchcock, about a paper we were preparing … It was at that moment that I glimpsed Gaia. An awesome thought came to me. The Earth’s atmosphere was an extraordinary and unstable mixture of gases, yet I knew that it was constant in composition over quite long periods of time. Could it be that life on Earth not only made the atmosphere, but also regulated it – keeping it at a constant composition, and at a level favourable for organisms?” (1991)

On a stroll with his novelist neighbour William Golding, Lovelock described his idea, and asked advice for a name. Golding suggested Gaia, after the Greek Earth Goddess. The Gaia Hypothesis was born.

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Gaia: Science, Metaphor, or Myth?

Marcia Bjornerud

Few ideas have ignited more contentious debate within the modern scientific community than James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis — the proposal that the Earth can be viewed as a superorganism with the capacity to regulate its internal environment. Lovelock, an atmospheric chemist employed in the 1960s by NASA, first proposed the Gaia concept to account for the anomalous composition of Earth’s atmosphere relative to those of neighboring Mars and Venus. The peculiar mix of gases that envelope Earth and support life on the planet, Lovelock argues, is created and maintained by Life itself. The composition of the atmosphere, in turn, profoundly affects Earth’s climate, which has remained favorable for life for at least 3.5 billion years. Lovelock’s thesis, then, is that organisms have collectively acted throughout the history of the planet to make the global environment hospitable for the biosphere as a whole.

In the three decades since ‘Gaia’ (named for the Greek goddess of Earth) was first posited, the reactions the idea has evoked from mainstream scientists have ranged from polemical opposition, to interested skepticism, to acclaim as a new scientific paradigm. Gaia has also found its way into popular culture, where it has been embraced by both environmentalists and anti-environmentalists as well as advocates of woman-centered spiritualism.

Is Gaia a testable scientific hypothesis or little more than a metaphor? If only a metaphor, does it still have a role in scientific discourse? To what extent is Gaia an expression of modern environmental consciousness? An affirmation of ‘female’ values of community and cooperation (vs. ‘male’ values of individualism and competition)? Can an idea with profound religious implications be credible in the scientific arena? If Gaia is an accurate way of viewing Earth, what are the implications for human stewardship of the planet?

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GAIA search on google

Yesterday, I published an article at CommUnity of Minds that suggests September 11 will mark the official start of  Worl War III. This article is frightening, but when examined closely seems to genuine. The focus of Future Positive has been to encourage humantiy to transcend our neutral-adversary strategies. It is time to grow up humanity. R. Buckminster Fuller gave his last public statement on February 14, 1983.

“Human integrity is the uncompromising courage of self determining whether or not to take initiatives, support or cooperate with others in accord with “All the truth and nothing but the truth” as it is conceived by the divine mind always available in each individual.

“Whether humanity is to continue and comprehensively prosper on Spaceship Earth depends entirely on the integrity of the human individuals and not on the political and economic systems.

“The cosmic question has been asked–

“Are humans a worthwhile to universe invention?”

-R. Buckminster Fuller