Archive for November, 2005

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Wednesday, November 30th, 2005

Development & Sustainability

Fritjof Capra

In its original meaning, “development” identifies a fundamental characteristic of all life. Over the past twenty years, a scientific understanding of life has emerged at the forefront of science, clarifying the roots and basic dynamics of the process of development.

One of the basic characteristics of life is that living systems are open systems. They need a continual flow of energy and matter (air, food, water, etc.) to stay alive. The detailed dynamics of this flow of energy and matter have been studied in great detail over the past two decades, leading to a very important discovery. Living systems generally remain in a stable state, but every now and then an open system will encounter a point of instability, in which there is either a breakdown or, more frequently, a spontaneous emergence of new forms of order. This spontaneous emergence of order at critical points of instability (often referred to simply as “emergence”) is one of the hallmarks of life. It has been recognized as the dynamic origin of development, learning, and evolution. In other words, creativity—the generation of new forms—is a key property of all living systems.

This new understanding shows us that development is a fundamental property of life. All living systems develop; life continually reaches out to create novelty. What is created depends on the systems’ internal structures. And since these internal structures change in the process of development, the path of development when new order emerges is a path of ongoing structural changes.

Development and Growth

The life sciences teach us that the development of living systems includes periods of rapid physical growth—e.g., the period of a young organism, or the early (“pioneer”) phase of an ecosystem that is characterized by rapid expansion and colonization of the territory. This rapid growth is always followed in organisms by slower growth, maturation, and ultimately decline and decay, and in ecosystems by so-called succession.

When we study nature, we can see quite clearly that, although growth is a central characteristic of life, indefinite and unrestricted growth is not sustainable. For example, cancer cells grow rapidly, but the growth is not sustainable because the cancer cells die when the host organism dies. It is important, however, to realize that there can still be development without physical growth, because there can be learning and maturing.

Economic Development

Contrast the concept of development as it is used by corporate economists and by politicians. The first thing we notice is the different grammatical use of the verb
“develop.” In the life sciences, “develop” is used as an intransitive verb: All living systems develop living organisms develop; people develop. There is a sense of unfolding, of realizing potential.

Economists, by contrast, use the verb “develop” as a transitive verb: “People develop things.” There is a whole category of business people who call themselves developers, and they go around developing things—real estate, land, office blocks, etc.

The concept of Southern or “Third World” development rests very uneasily between those two meanings. First of all, it is a very recent concept. Before the Second World War no one would have thought of development as an economic category at all. But after World War II, it was almost always used in a transitive sense. People would go out and develop the Third World, without any perception of the power relations involved in that concept, which shows the most extraordinary lack of respect.

I’m sure that if anyone came up to you and said, “I’m going to develop you,” you would be suspicious of their motives, apart from wondering what they had in mind. Yet that is precisely what Third World development entails: people with power going out and developing other people.

The other extraordinary phenomenon is the categorization of the entire world into a single dimension. Countries and people are “developed,” or they are
“developing,” or they are “underdeveloped.” It’s like a soccer league table, with the rich countries (first and foremost the United States) at the top, and the poor countries at the bottom. Never mind that 25 percent of children in the U.S. now live below the poverty level, that we spend more on prisons than on higher education, and that we are the only industrial country that has the death penalty.

The huge diversity of human existence is concentrated into a single dimension called “development,”which is very often measured simply in terms of income per capita. It is absolutely staggering that we, as intelligent people, living in this extraordinarily diverse world, have allowed such an intellectual construct to become so powerful.

When we look at the concept of economic development in more detail, we can identify three basic characteristics:

(1) Development is a Northern concept. The league table—”developed/developing/underdeveloped”—is arranged according to Northern criteria. Those countries that are “developed” are those that have adopted the Northern industrial way of life. It is a profoundly monocultural concept. To be a developing country means to be succeeding in the aspiration of becoming more like the North.

(2) Development means economic development. No other social aspirations or cultural values are allowed to get in the way. If they can coexist with that development, okay; if they can’t coexist with it, they are overridden.

(3) Economic development is a top-down process. Decisions and control rest firmly in the hands of experts, managers of international capital, bureaucrats of state governments, the World Bank, the IMF, etc.

The Rules of Development

This narrow notion of economic development is enforced by stringent rules, set up by the WTO and the other global financial institutions. These “free trade” rules assure that trade is not free, but is a one-way street, where the Southern countries are forced to open their markets to the North, but are often prevented by steep trade barriers from successfully exporting their goods.

The global economy is a network of computers programmed according to these rules. Underlying all the rules is a single fundamental principle, the principle that money should take precedence over anything else—human rights, democracy, environmental protection, or any other value. But the same electronic networks of financial and informational flows could have other values built into them. The critical issue is not technology, but politics.

The Global Civil Society and an Alternative View of Development

At the turn of this century, an impressive global coalition of NGOs formed around the core values of human dignity and ecological sustainability. This coalition is known as the global justice movement, or the global civil society. At several worldwide gatherings, known as the World Social Forums, civil society leaders have proposed a set of alternative trade policies, including concrete and radical proposals for restructuring the global financial institutions, which would profoundly change the nature of globalization. Their proposals embody a notion of development that includes the values of human dignity and ecological sustainability.

The alternative view of development proposed by the global civil society sees development as a creative process, characteristic of all life, a process of increasing capability, in which the most important thing one needs is control over local resources.

In this view, the development process is not purely an economic process. It is also a social, ecological, and ethical process—a multidimensional and systemic process. The primary actors in development are the institutions of civil society—NGOs and other associations based on kin, on neighborhood, or on common interests.

Because people are different and the places in which they live are different, we can expect development to produce cultural diversity of all kinds. The process whereby it will happen will be very different from the current global trading system. It will be based on the mobilization of local resources to satisfy local needs, and it will be informed by the values of human dignity and ecological sustainability. Living sustainably means recognizing that we are an inseparable part of the web of life, of human and nonhuman communities, and that enhancing the dignity and sustainability of any one of them will enhance all the others.

Dr. Capra is a physicist, systems theorist, and a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, which promotes ecology and systems thinking in primary and secondary education. This paper is adapted from a 2004 presentation at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Capra is on the faculty of Schumacher College, an international center for ecological studies in England, and frequently gives management seminars for top executives. He is the author of several international bestsellers including The Tao of Physics, The Turning Point, and The Web of Life. His most recent book, The Hidden Connections, was published this year. He also co-wrote the screenplay for Mindwalk, a film based on his books. This website includes Dr. Capra’s resumÈ and full bibliography.

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Friday, November 25th, 2005

From the SynEARTH Archives. … Remember the sixties? I sure do. I started college in 1963 and graduated from medical school in 1970. This essay on the impact of the 1960s was written in December 2002.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Fritjof Capra

The 1960s were the period of my life during which I experienced the most profound and most radical personal transformation. For those of us who identify with the cultural and political movements of the sixties, that period represents not so much a decade as a state of consciousness, characterized by “transpersonal” expansion, the questioning of authority, a sense of empowerment, and the experience of sensuous beauty and community.

This state of consciousness reached well into the seventies. In fact, one could say that the sixties came to an end only in December 1980, with the shot that killed John Lennon. The immense sense of loss felt by so many of us was, to a great extent, about the loss of an era. For a few days after the fatal shooting we relived the magic of the sixties. We did so in sadness and with tears, but the same feeling of enchantment and of community was once again alive. Wherever you went during those few days — in every neighborhood, every city, every country around the world — you heard John Lennon’s music, and the intense idealism that had carried us through the sixties manifested itself once again:

You may say I’m a dreamer,
but I’m not the only one.
I hope some day you’ll join us
and the world will live as one.

In this essay, I shall try to evoke the spirit of that remarkable period, identify its defining characteristics, and provide an answer to some questions that are often asked nowadays: What happened to the cultural movements of the sixties? What did they achieve, and what, if any, is their legacy?

Expansion of Consciousness

The era of the sixties was dominated by an expansion of consciousness in two directions. One movement, in reaction to the increasing materialism and secularism of Western society, embraced a new kind of spirituality akin to the mystical traditions of the East. This involved an expansion of consciousness toward experiences involving nonordinary modes of awareness, which are traditionally achieved through meditation but may also occur in various other contexts, and which psychologists at the time began to call “transpersonal.” Psychedelic drugs played a significant role in that movement, as did the human potential movement’s promotion of expanded sensory awareness, expressed in its exhortation, “Get out of your head and into your senses!”

The first expansion of consciousness, then, was a movement beyond materialism and toward a new spirituality, beyond ordinary reality via meditative and psychedelic experiences, and beyond rationality through expanded sensory awareness. The combined effect was a continual sense of magic, awe, and wonder that for many of us will forever be associated with the sixties.

Questioning of Authority

The other movement was an expansion of social consciousness, triggered by a radical questioning of authority. This happened independently in several areas. While the American civil rights movement demanded that Black citizens be included in the political process, the free speech movement at Berkeley and student movements at other universities throughout the United States and Europe demanded the same for students.

In Europe, these movements culminated in the memorable revolt of French university students that is still known simply as “May ’68.” During that time, all research and teaching activities came to a complete halt at most French universities when the students, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, extended their critique to society as a whole and sought the solidarity of the French labor movement to change the entire social order. For three weeks, the administrations of Paris and other French cities, public transport, and businesses of every kind were paralyzed by a general strike. In Paris, people spent most of their time discussing politics in the streets, while the students held strategic discussions at the Sorbonne and other universities. In addition, they occupied the OdÈon, the spacious theater of the ComÈdie FranÁaise, and transformed it into a twenty-four-hour “people’s parliament,” where they discussed their stimulating, albeit highly idealistic, visions of a future social order.

1968 was also the year of the celebrated “Prague Spring,” during which Czech citizens, led by Alexander Dubcek, questioned the authority of the Soviet regime, which alarmed the Soviet Communist party to such an extent that, a few months later, it crushed the democratization processes initiated in Prague in its brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia.

In the United States, opposition to the Vietnam war became a political rallying point for the student movement and the counterculture. It sparked a huge anti-war movement, which exerted a major influence on the American political scene and led to many memorable events, including the decision by President Johnson not to seek reelection, the turbulent 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Watergate scandal, and the resignation of President Nixon.

A New Sense of Community

While the civil rights movement questioned the authority of white society and the student movements questioned the authority of their universities on political issues, the women’s movement began to question patriarchal authority; humanistic psychologists undermined the authority of doctors and therapists; and the sexual revolution, triggered by the availability of birth control pills, broke down the puritan attitudes toward sexuality that were typical of American culture.

The radical questioning of authority and the expansion of social and transpersonal consciousness gave rise to a whole new culture — a “counterculture” — that defined itself in opposition to the dominant “straight” culture by embracing a different set of values. The members of this alternative culture, who were called “hippies” by outsiders but rarely used that term themselves, were held together by a strong sense of community. To distinguish ourselves from the crew cuts and polyester suits of that era’s business executives, we wore long hair, colorful and individualistic clothes, flowers, beads, and other jewelry. Many of us were vegetarians who often baked our own bread, practiced yoga or some other form of meditation, and learned to work with our hands in various crafts.

Our subculture was immediately identifiable and tightly bound together. It had its own rituals, music, poetry, and literature; a common fascination with spirituality and the occult; and the shared vision of a peaceful and beautiful society. Rock music and psychedelic drugs were powerful bonds that strongly influenced the art and lifestyle of the hippie culture. In addition, the closeness, peacefulness, and trust of the hippie communities were expressed in casual communal nudity and freely shared sexuality. In our homes we would frequently burn incense and keep little altars with eclectic collections of statues of Indian gods and goddesses, meditating Buddhas, yarrow stalks or coins for consulting the I Ching, and various personal “sacred” objects.

Although different branches of the sixties movement arose independently and often remained distinct movements with little overlap for several years, they eventually became aware of one another, expressed mutual solidarity, and, during the 1970s, merged more or less into a single subculture. By that time, psychedelic drugs, rock music, and the hippie fashion had transcended national boundaries and had forged strong ties among the international counterculture. Multinational hippie tribes gathered in several countercultural centers — London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Greenwich Village — as well as in more remote and exotic cities like Marrakech and Katmandu. These frequent cross-cultural exchanges gave rise to an “alternative global awareness” long before the onset of economic globalization.

The Sixties’ Music

The zeitgeist of the sixties found expression in many art forms that often involved radical innovations, absorbed various facets of the counterculture, and strengthened the multiple relationships among the international alternative community.

Rock music was the strongest among these artistic bonds. The Beatles broke down the authority of studios and songwriters by writing their own music and lyrics, creating new musical genres, and setting up their own production company. While doing so, they incorporated many facets of the period’s characteristic expansion of consciousness into their songs and lifestyles.

Bob Dylan expressed the spirit of the political protests in powerful poetry and music that became anthems of the sixties. The Rolling Stones represented the counterculture’s irreverence, exuberance, and sexual energy, while San Francisco’s “acid rock” scene gave expression to its psychedelic experiences.

At the same time, the “free jazz” of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, and others shattered conventional forms of jazz improvisation and gave expression to spirituality, radical political poetry, street theater, and other elements of the counterculture. Like the jazz musicians, classical composers, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany and John Cage in the United States, broke down conventional musical forms and incorporated much of the sixties’ spontaneity and expanded awareness into their music.

The fascination of the hippies with Indian religious philosophies, art, and culture led to a great popularity of Indian music. Most record collections in those days contained albums of Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, and other masters of classical Indian music along with rock and folk music, jazz and blues.

The rock and drug culture of the sixties found its visual expressions in the psychedelic posters of the era’s legendary rock concerts, especially in San Francisco, and in album covers of ever increasing sophistication, which became lasting icons of the sixties’ subculture. Many rock concerts also featured “light shows” — a novel form of psychedelic art in which images of multicolored, pulsating, and ever changing shapes were projected onto walls and ceilings. Together with the loud rock music, these visual images created highly effective simulations of psychedelic experiences.

New Literary Forms

The main expressions of sixties’ poetry were in the lyrics of rock and folk music. In addition, the “beat poetry” of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and others, which had originated a decade earlier and shared many characteristics with the sixties’ art forms, remained popular in the counterculture.

One of the major new literary forms was the “magical realism” of Latin American literature. In their short stories and novels, writers like Jorges Luis Borges and Gabriel Garc“a M·rquez blended descriptions of realistic scenes with fantastic and dreamlike elements, metaphysical allegories, and mythical images. This was a perfect genre for the counterculture’s fascination with altered states of consciousness and pervasive sense of magic.

In addition to the Latin American magical realism, science fiction, especially the complex series of Dune novels by Frank Herbert, exerted great fascination on the sixties’ youth, as did the fantasy writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and Kurt Vonnegut. Many of us also turned to literary works of the past, such as the romantic novels of Hermann Hesse, in which we saw reflections of our own experiences.

Of equal, if not greater, popularity were the semi-fictional shamanistic writings of Carlos Castaneda, which satisfied the hippies’ yearning for spirituality and “separate realities” mediated by psychedelic drugs. In addition, the dramatic encounters between Carlos and the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan symbolized in a powerful way the clashes between the rational approach of modern industrial societies and the wisdom of traditional cultures.

Film and the Performing Arts

In the sixties, the performing arts experienced radical innovations that broke every imaginable tradition of theater and dance. In fact, in companies like the Living Theater, the Judson Dance Theater, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, theater and dance were often fused and combined with other forms of art. The performances involved trained actors and dancers as well as visual artists, musicians, poets, filmmakers, and even members of the audience.

Men and women often enjoyed equal status; nudity was frequent. Performances, often with strong political content, took place not only in theaters but also in museums, churches, parks, and in the streets. All these elements combined to create the dramatic expansion of experience and strong sense of community that was typical of the counterculture.

Film, too, was an important medium for expressing the zeitgeist of the sixties. Like the performing artists, the sixties’ filmmakers, beginning with the pioneers of the French New Wave cinema, broke with the traditional techniques of their art, introducing multi-media approaches, often abandoning narratives altogether, and using their films to give a powerful voice to social critique.

With their innovative styles, these filmmakers expressed many key characteristics of the counterculture. For example, we can find the sixties’ irreverence and political protest in the films of Godard; the questioning of materialism and a pervasive sense of alienation in Antonioni; questioning of the social order and transcendence of ordinary reality in Fellini; the exposure of class hypocrisy in BuÒuel; social critique and utopian visions in Kubrik; the breaking down of sexual and gender stereotypes in Warhol; and the portrayal of altered states of consciousness in the works of experimental filmmakers like Kenneth Anger and John Whitney. In addition, the films of these directors are characterized by a strong sense of magical realism.

The Legacy of the Sixties

Many of the cultural expressions that were radical and subversive in the sixties have been accepted by broad segments of mainstream culture during the subsequent three decades. Examples would be the long hair and sixties fashion, the practice of Eastern forms of meditation and spirituality, recreational use of marijuana, increased sexual freedom, rejection of sexual and gender stereotypes, and the use of rock (and more recently rap) music to express alternative cultural values. All of these were once expressions of the counterculture that were ridiculed, suppressed, and even persecuted by the dominant mainstream society.

Beyond these contemporary expressions of values and esthetics that were shared by the sixties’ counterculture, the most important and enduring legacy of that era has been the creation and subsequent flourishing of a global alternative culture that shares a set of core values. Although many of these values — e.g. environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, global justice — were shaped by cultural movements in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, their essential core was first expressed by the sixties’ counterculture. In addition, many of today’s senior progressive political activists, writers, and community leaders trace the roots of their original inspiration back to the sixties.

Green Politics

In the sixties we questioned the dominant society and lived according to different values, but we did not formulate our critique in a coherent, systematic way. We did have concrete criticisms on single issues, such as the Vietnam war, but we did not develop any comprehensive alternative system of values and ideas. Our critique was based on intuitive feeling; we lived and embodied our protest rather than verbalizing and systematizing it.

The seventies brought consolidation of our views. As the magic of the sixties gradually faded, the initial excitement gave way to a period of focusing, digesting, and integrating. Two new cultural movements, the ecology movement and the feminist movement, emerged during the seventies and together provided the much-needed broad framework for our critique and alternative ideas.

The European student movement, which was largely Marxist oriented, was not able to turn its idealistic visions into realities during the sixties. But it kept its social concerns alive during the subsequent decade, while many of its members went through profound personal transformations. Influenced by the two major political themes of the seventies, feminism and ecology, these members of the “new left” broadened their horizons without losing their social consciousness. At the end of the decade, many of them became the leaders of transformed socialist parties. In Germany, these “young socialists” formed coalitions with ecologists, feminists, and peace activists, out of which emerged the Green Party — a new political party whose members confidently declared: “We are neither left nor right; we are in front.”

During the 1980s and 1990s, the Green movement became a permanent feature of the European political landscape, and Greens now hold seats in numerous national and regional parliaments around the world. They are the political embodiment of the core values of the sixties.

The End of the Cold War

During the 1970s and 1980s, the American anti-war movement expanded into the anti-nuclear and peace movements, in solidarity with corresponding movements in Europe, especially those in the UK and West Germany. This, in turn, sparked a powerful peace movement in East Germany, led by the Protestant churches, which maintained regular contacts with the West German peace movement, and in particular with Petra Kelly, the charismatic leader of the German Greens.

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985, he was well aware of the strength of the Western peace movement and accepted our argument that a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought. This realization played an important part in Gorbachev’s “new thinking” and his restructuring (perestroika) of the Soviet regime, which would lead, eventually, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the end of Soviet Communism.

All social and political systems are highly nonlinear and do not lend themselves to being analyzed in terms of linear chains of cause and effect. Nevertheless, careful study of our recent history shows that the key ingredient in creating the climate that led to the end of the Cold War was not the hard-line strategy of the Reagan administration, as the conservative mythology would have it, but the international peace movement. This movement clearly had its political and cultural roots in the student movements and counterculture of the sixties.

The Information Technology Revolution

The last decade of the twentieth century brought a global phenomenon that took most cultural observers by surprise. A new world emerged, shaped by new technologies, new social structures, a new economy, and a new culture. “Globalization” became the term used to summarize the extraordinary changes and the seemingly irresistible momentum that were now felt by millions of people.

A common characteristic of the multiple aspects of globalization is a global information and communications network based on revolutionary new technologies. The information technology revolution is the result of a complex dynamic of technological and human interactions, which produced synergistic effects in three major areas of electronics — computers, microelectronics, and telecommunications. The key innovations that created the radically new electronic environment of the 1990s all took place 20 years earlier, during the 1970s.

It may be surprising to many that, like so many other recent cultural movements, the information technology revolution has important roots in the sixties’ counterculture. It was triggered by a dramatic technological development — a shift from data storage and processing in large, isolated machines to the interactive use of microcomputers and the sharing of computer power in electronic networks. This shift was spearheaded by young technology enthusiasts who embraced many aspects of the counterculture, which was still very much alive at that time.

The first commercially successful microcomputer was built in 1976 by two college dropouts, Steve Wosniak and Steve Jobs, in their now legendary garage in Silicon Valley. These young innovators and others like them brought the irreverent attitudes, freewheeling lifestyles, and strong sense of community they had adopted in the counterculture to their working environments. In doing so, they created the relatively informal, open, decentralized, and cooperative working styles that became characteristic of the new information technologies.

Global Capitalism

However, the ideals of the young technology pioneers of the seventies were not reflected in the new global economy that emerged from the information technology revolution 20 years later. On the contrary, what emerged was a new materialism, excessive corporate greed, and a dramatic rise of unethical behavior among our corporate and political leaders. These harmful and destructive attitudes are direct consequences of a new form of global capitalism, structured largely around electronic networks of financial and informational flows. The so-called “global market” is a network of machines programmed according to the fundamental principle that money-making should take precedence over human rights, democracy, environmental protection, or any other value.

Since the new economy is organized according to this quintessential capitalist principle, it is not surprising that it has produced a multitude of interconnected harmful consequences that are in sharp contradiction to the ideals of the global Green movement: rising social inequality and social exclusion, a breakdown of democracy, more rapid and extensive deterioration of the natural environment, and increasing poverty and alienation. The new global capitalism has threatened and destroyed local communities around the world; and with the pursuit of an ill-conceived biotechnology, it has invaded the sanctity of life by attempting to turn diversity into monoculture, ecology into engineering, and life itself into a commodity.

It has become increasingly clear that global capitalism in its present form is unsustainable and needs to be fundamentally redesigned. Indeed, scholars, community leaders, and grassroots activists around the world are now raising their voices, demanding that we must “change the game” and suggesting concrete ways of doing so.

The Global Civil Society

At the turn of this century, an impressive global coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), many of them led by men and women with deep personal roots in the sixties, formed around the core values of human dignity and ecological sustainability. In 1999, hundreds of these grassroots organizations interlinked electronically for several months to prepare for joint protest actions at the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. The “Seattle Coalition,” as it is now called, was extremely successful in derailing the WTO meeting and in making its views known to the world. Its concerted actions have permanently changed the political climate around the issue of economic globalization.

Since that time, the Seattle Coalition, or “global justice movement,” has not only organized further protests but has also held several World Social Forum meetings in Porto Alegre, Brazil. At the second of these meetings, the NGOs proposed a whole set of alternative trade policies, including concrete and radical proposals for restructuring global financial institutions, which would profoundly change the nature of globalization.

The global justice movement exemplifies a new kind of political movement that is typical of our Information Age. Because of their skillful use of the Internet, the NGOs in the coalition are able to network with each other, share information, and mobilize their members with unprecedented speed. As a result, the new global NGOs have emerged as effective political actors who are independent of traditional national or international institutions. They constitute a new kind of global civil society.

This new form of alternative global community, sharing core values and making extensive use of electronic networks in addition to frequent human contacts, is one of the most important legacies of the sixties. If it succeeds in reshaping economic globalization so as to make it compatible with the values of human dignity and ecological sustainability, the dreams of the “sixties revolution” will have been realized:

Imagine no possessions,
I wonder if you can,
no need for greed or hunger,
a brotherhood of man.
Imagine all the people
sharing all the world…
You may say I’m a dreamer,
but I’m not the only one.
I hope some day you’ll join us
and the world will live as one.

The above essay is reposted from Fritjof Capra’s website. Dr. Capra is a physicist, systems theorist, and a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, which promotes ecology and systems thinking in primary and secondary education. Dr. Capra is on the faculty of Schumacher College, an international center for ecological studies in England, and frequently gives management seminars for top executives. He is the author of several international bestsellers including The Tao of Physics, The Turning Point, and The Web of Life. His most recent book, The Hidden Connections, was published this year. He also co-wrote the screenplay for Mindwalk, a film based on his books. This website includes Dr. Capra’s resumÈ and full bibliography.

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Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005

Gift Economy

This single page contains words and links related to the gift economy that have been posted here at Future Positive and at CommUnity of Minds. Also see: GIFTegrity, Read the Scientific Basis for the GIFTegrity, and the Specifications for a GIFTegrity.

The Hacker Milieu as Gift Culture

by Eric Steven Raymond

To understand the role of reputation in the open-source culture, it is helpful to move from history further into anthropology and economics, and examine the difference between exchange cultures and gift cultures.

Human beings have an innate drive to compete for social status; it’s wired in by our evolutionary history. For the 90% of that history that ran before the invention of agriculture, our ancestors lived in small nomadic hunting-gathering bands. High-status individuals (those most effective at informing coalitions and persuading others to cooperate with them) got the healthiest mates and access to the best food. This drive for status expresses itself in different ways, depending largely on the degree of scarcity of survival goods.

Most ways humans have of organizing are adaptations to scarcity and want. Each way carries with it different ways of gaining social status.

The simplest way is the command hierarchy. In command hierarchies, allocation of scarce goods is done by one central authority and backed up by force. Command hierarchies scale very poorly; they become increasingly brutal and inefficient as they get larger. For this reason, command hierarchies above the size of an extended family are almost always parasites on a larger economy of a different type. In command hierarchies, social status is primarily determined by access to coercive power.

Our society is predominantly an exchange economy. This is a sophisticated adaptation to scarcity that, unlike the command model, scales quite well. Allocation of scarce goods is done in a decentralized way through trade and voluntary cooperation (and in fact, the dominating effect of competitive desire is to produce cooperative behavior). In an exchange economy, social status is primarily determined by having control of things (not necessarily material things) to use or trade.

Most people have implicit mental models for both of the above, and how they interact with each other. Government, the military, and organized crime (for example) are command hierarchies parasitic on the broader exchange economy we call `the free market’. There’s a third model, however, that is radically different from either and not generally recognized except by anthropologists; the gift culture.

Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods. We can observe gift cultures in action among aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant food. We can also observe them in certain strata of our own society, especially in show business and among the very wealthy.

Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.

Thus the Kwakiutl chieftain’s potlach party. Thus the multi-millionaire’s elaborate and usually public acts of philanthropy. And thus the hacker’s long hours of effort to produce high-quality open-source code.

For examined in this way, it is quite clear that the society of open-source hackers is in fact a gift culture. Within it, there is no serious shortage of the `survival necessities’ — disk space, network bandwidth, computing power. Software is freely shared. This abundance creates a situation in which the only available measure of competitive success is reputation among one’s peers.

This observation is not in itself entirely sufficient to explain the observed features of hacker culture, however. The crackers and warez d00dz have a gift culture that thrives in the same (electronic) media as that of the hackers, but their behavior is very different. The group mentality in their culture is much stronger and more exclusive than among hackers. They hoard secrets rather than sharing them; one is much more likely to find cracker groups distributing sourceless executables that crack software than tips that give away how they did it.

What this shows, in case it wasn’t obvious, is that there is more than one way to run a gift culture. History and values matter. I have summarized the history of the hacker culture in A Brief History of Hackerdom ; the ways in which it shaped present behavior are not mysterious. Hackers have defined their culture by a set of choices about the form which their competition will take. It is that form which we will examine in the remainder of this paper.

The Joy of Hacking

In making this `reputation game’ analysis, by the way, I do not mean to devalue or ignore the pure artistic satisfaction of designing beautiful software and making it work. We all experience this kind of satisfaction and thrive on it. People for whom it is not a significant motivation never become hackers in the first place, just as people who don’t love music never become composers.

So perhaps we should consider another model of hacker behavior in which the pure joy of craftsmanship is the primary motivation. This `craftsmanship’ model would have to explain hacker custom as a way of maximizing both the opportunities for craftsmanship and the quality of the results. Does this conflict with or suggest different results than the `reputation game’ model?

Not really. In examining the `craftsmanship’ model, we come back to the same problems that constrain hackerdom to operate like a gift culture. How can one maximize quality if there is no metric for quality? If scarcity economics doesn’t operate, what metrics are available besides peer evaluation? It appears that any craftsmanship culture ultimately must structure itself through a reputation game — and, in fact, we can observe exactly this dynamic in many historical craftsmanship cultures from the medieval guilds onwards.

In one important respect, the `craftsmanship’ model is weaker than the `gift culture’ model; by itself, it doesn’t help explain the contradiction we began this paper with.

Finally, the `craftsmanship’ motivation itself may not be psychologically as far removed from the reputation game as we might like to assume. Imagine your beautiful program locked up in a drawer and never used again. Now imagine it being used effectively and with pleasure by many people. Which dream gives you satisfaction?

Nevertheless, we’ll keep an eye on the craftsmanship model. It is intuitively appealing to many hackers, and explains some aspects of individual behavior well enough.

After I published the first version of this paper on the Internet, an anonymous respondent commented: “You may not work to get reputation, but the reputation is a real payment with consequences if you do the job well.” This is a subtle and important point. The reputation incentives continue to operate whether or not a craftsman is aware of them; thus, ultimately, whether or not a hacker understands his own behavior as part of the reputation game, his behavior will be shaped by that game.

Other respondents related peer-esteem rewards and the joy of hacking to the levels above subsistence needs in Abraham Maslow’s well-known `hierarchy of values’ model of human motivation. On this view, the joy of hacking is a self-actualization or transcendence need which will not be consistently expressed until lower-level needs (including those for physical security and for `belongingness’ or peer esteem) have been at least minimally satisfied. Thus, the reputation game may be critical in providing a social context within which the joy of hacking can in fact become the individual’s primary motive.

The Many Faces of Reputation

There are reasons general to every gift culture why peer repute (prestige) is worth playing for:

First and most obviously, good reputation among one’s peers is a primary reward. We’re wired to experience it that way for evolutionary reasons touched on earlier. (Many people learn to redirect their drive for prestige into various sublimations that have no obvious connection to a visible peer group, such as “honor”, “ethical integrity”, “piety” etc.; this does not change the underlying mechanism.)

Secondly, prestige is a good way (and in a pure gift economy, the only way) to attract attention and cooperation from others. If one is well known for generosity, intelligence, fair dealing, leadership ability, or other good qualities, it becomes much easier to persuade other people that they will gain by association with you.

Thirdly, if your gift economy is in contact with or intertwined with an exchange economy or a command hierarchy, your reputation may spill over and earn you higher status there.

Beyond these general reasons, the peculiar conditions of the hacker culture make prestige even more valuable than it would be in a `real world’ gift culture.

The main `peculiar condition’ is that the artifacts one gives away (or, interpreted another way, are the visible sign of one’s gift of energy and time) are very complex. Their value is nowhere near as obvious as that of material gifts or exchange-economy money. It is much harder to objectively distinguish a fine gift from a poor one. Accordingly, the success of a giver’s bid for status is delicately dependent on the critical judgement of peers.

Another peculiarity is the relative purity of the open-source culture. Most gift cultures are compromised — either by exchange-economy relationships such as trade in luxury goods, or by command-economy relationships such as family or clan groupings. No significant analogues of these exist in the open-source culture; thus, ways of gaining status other than by peer repute are virtually
absent.

The above essay is taken from:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/

I highly recommend carefully looking at Eric Steven Raymond’s other writings. His most relevant papers are collected here:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/index.html

This paper is now available as a book, it is one of the best explanations of open source software development:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

Towards a Gifting Culture

Timothy Wilken, MD

Yesterday, I posted Eric Steven Raymond’s article The Hacker Milieu as Gift Culture as a preface to a series of articles on Gifting, Gifting Networks, Gifting Exchanges, Gifting Economys, etc..

As children we all taught that it is better to give than to receive. Certainly, that seems like an excellent philosophy for making close relationships and living in the social world.

“It is Better To Give Than To Receive”

Early Christians lived in a world far different from ours. Lots of people, in and out of the church, suffered on a daily basis without any “safety nets” between them and poverty. But Christians were especially susceptible to deprivation since discipleship took away any last vestiges of help due to the alienation from family and nation. One of the worst financial decisions to be made by anyone could be that of becoming a Christian. Yet it is from this crucible of suffering that Luke draws one of the greatest themes of the Book of Acts: benevolence. New Testament Christianity forever becomes our model of a people who took care of its own, who breathed life into the teaching of Jesus that

“To whom much is given, much is also required.” (Luke 12:48)
“But by an equality, that now at this time your abundance may be a supply for their want, that their abundance also may be a supply for your want: that there may be equality.” (Golden Text: 2 Corinthians 8:14)
“Our Lord Jesus Christ started this Faith and this Work, i.e. the establishment of one common purse. Therefore, wherever the children of God are found, there should also be established one common purse, the proceeds of which should be distributed to all, that there may be equality. That is the Kingdom of God; and it is what I have brought to the world.”

This very old idea, all but abandoned in our modern capitalistic world, is beginning to again draw the attention of those working for the Synergic Evolution.

Synergic scientists are telling us that life forms have needs and that to meet those needs they must take action. For an interdependent form of life, this requires givers and receivers. Without receivers there can be no givers.

Humans are an INTERdependent class of life.

Interdependence is the human condition. All humans need help unless they wish to live at the level of animal subsistence. Interdependence means some times I depend on others and sometimes others depend on me. Once we acknowledge our interdependence and accept our dependence on others, then there are only three ways that we can get help.

1) Adversary Help – We can make others help us.

This is help obtained with coercion – force or fraud. Those providing the help are losing. When you force others to help you, they do the least they possibly can. Because the helper is hurt, adversary help is low quality help.

2) Neutral Help – We can purchase help through the fair market place.

This is help purchased from others. This is the way most of us living in the free world get help today. We hire it or we buy it in the market place. When I go to McDonald’s, I pay them five dollars to feed me. The focus in the neutral market place is on a fair price. Because the helper is ignored, neutral help is average quality help. … Or,

3) Synergic Help – We can attract help by helping others.

This is help attracted by helping others. When other individuals understand that by helping you, they will in turn be helped, they will automatically help you. When others understand that when you win, they will win, they will support and celebrate your success. This is the power of the win-win relationship. Show those who can help you, how they will win by doing so. Show them how they will be helped by helping you. Because the helper is helped, synergic help is high quality help.

** If we are FORCED to help, this is ADVERSARY – (1+1)<2

I was forced to help him. Slavery, indentured service, tenant farming, and child labor are examples of adversary help. The criminal makes you help him, when he steals your money. The government makes you help it, when it forces you to pay taxes. You are forced to help others anytime you are given an ultimatum. An ultimatum is a choice between losing a little or losing a lot. Which do you want a broken arm or a broken leg, you are free to choose.

Adversary relationships are hurting and negative experiences. The helper experiences a loss. He is less after helping you than before. When you force others to help you, they do the least they possibly can.

Adversary relationships are hurtful. The parties in these relationships experience loss. They struggle to avoid the loss – conflict. In an adversary relationship, one individual plus another individual are less after the relationship. In other words (1+1)<2, and often much less than two. Adversary relationships are marked by high conflict, low effectiveness and poor productivity.

When you can make others help you, coercing them with force or fraud, the helper loses and will typically give you only the lowest quality help.

** If we are PAID to help, this is NEUTRAL – (1+1)=2

I was paid to help him. Macy’s, Sears, Mervyn’s, Penny’s, Costco, K- Mart, Circuit City, etc., etc. – malls, stores, markets, shops, and restaurants – are all examples of neutral help. The yellow pages in the telephone book are lists of places where you can purchase help. Capitalism’s fair market is where you purchase neutral help. You buy help in the open market place at a fair market exchange price. This is the modern free world where help is sold as products and services.

In the fair market, the helper experiences a draw and will typically produce average quality help.

Neutral relationships are ignoring. The parties in these relationships experience no change. They barter to insure that the exchange is fair––to insure that the price is not too high or too low – to insure that neither party loses. The open market of free enterprise generates a zone of neutrality which markedly reduces adversary relations. Neutral systems gain a marked production advantage over adversary systems. They are significantly more productive. However, this is primarily because they are not adversary. In a neutral relationship one individual plus another individual are the same after the relationship: (1+1)=2. Neutral relationships are marked by indifference with fair effectiveness and only average productivity.

Neutrality is that place where I work just hard enough to avoid getting fired, and, my employer pays me just enough to keep me from quitting.

How average is my help going to be?

Neutral relationships are ignoring and static experiences. The helper experiences a draw. They are the same after helping as before. When you ignore those who help you, you will get only fair help.

** If we are HELPED for help, this is SYNERGIC – (1+1)>>2

I was helped for helping him. Examples of synergic help in today’s world are much less common. We do flnd them in family businesses and within some partnerships and small business groups. Synergic relationships more often exist in start up businesses, where the originators work together sharing in the risks and the rewards equally.

If you wish to attact synergic help you must insure that when individuals invest their help with yours, they are also helped. Then they will automatically reinvest with you. When others understand that when you win, they win, they will support and celebrate your success. Synergic relationships are helping, positive experiences. The helper experiences a win. They are more after helping you than before. When you help those who help you, you get the most help. When you help those who help you, you get excellent help.

Synergic relationships are helpful. The parties in the relationship experience a gain. They operate together to insure that both parties win. They negotiate to insure that both parties are helped. In synergic relationships one individual plus another individual is more after their relationship than before: (1+1)>>2. Synergic relationships are marked by low conflict with high effectiveness and enormous productivity.

We humans have the option to use synergic organization which is unavailable to the plants and animals. We can attract help by insuring that those who help us are also helped, then they will provide the highest quality help. They will further seek to invest their action with ours, for a share of the cooperators’ revenues. They will understand that when you win, they win, and will support and celebrate your every success.

In a synergic future, relationships will be helping, positive experiences. The helper will experience a win. They will be more after helping you than before. You will attract others help by insuring that those who help you are also helped. You will do this by working together.

When we begin to conceptualize a synergic future, we have to begin by thinking outside the box. We are moving into a new paradigm. This means that many of our assumptions are wrong. But the real difficulty is not so much with these wrong assumptions, at least we are aware of them. The bigger problem is those assumptions that are unknown or unspoken.

Humans are INTERdependent. They must exchange food, things, and “knowing” in order to effectively meet their needs. What is changing is not the need for EXCHANGE. It is whether the exchange is adversary, neutral, or synergic.

Our goal then, is to develop a prototype for a synergic exchange. In a truely synergic exchange where all members are humans committed to win-win relationships, there is no need for accounting. You give to the GiftingNetwork based on your talents and skills, donating whatever action, “knowing”, things, or food you can create. You take from the GiftingNetwork whatever you need. Because all members are committed to having only win-win relationships, the system will work and there will be excess and abundance for all.

However, today we live in a world in transition. MOST HUMANS ARE NOT SYNERGIC. Many humans are not even neutral.

The committed ADVERSARY will simply take from the GiftingNetwork, by force or by fraud. They are not welcome members.

The committed NEUTRALIST will view the GiftingNetwork as just another market.

Towards a Gift Economy

Ways to strengthen local, community, state, national or regional economies

by Win Wenger, Ph.D.

Reportedly, several major cities in the northeastern United States, among them Ithaca, New York, have used such computer-coordinated bartering systems to restore prosperity where poverty was dominant—and apparently with less concept to guide the process than you find in this one brief. Here is how the system they’ve been using reportedly works:

One puts into the system whatever one wants to, for whatever others in the system are willing to pay for it, and draws from the system whatever products and services one desires within the systematized price of the values one has put in. In the deepest inner cities, I’ve been advised that at times and in some neighborhoods the U.S. dollar currency has in many instances become only a secondary basis of economic activity, people having managed to build enough value from what they’ve put into the system to trade wherever they please to advantage.

All this simply means that, based on the competence of the software and the prevalence of networked computers, and the competence and integrity of the people supervising the largely automatic system, a kind of electronic currency under whatever name has grown up to provide a more even playing field to the participants than they had been finding from accumulated disadvantage in the national and world economy.

Most of the existing companies engaging in barter appear to have “global” in their names but not in their operations. (Nor am I in a position to evaluate adequately the relative merits of the existing companies currently pursuing some sort of barter system.) You may need to pull people together locally to comprise your own system in order to appropriately address local needs and resources, whether or not you link up with one of the existing companies to give your exchange capabilities greater clout. This is a system which, like conventional currencies and national economies, can be abused and can damage people. This first of the “five-fold paths” seems simple in principle and actually is, but also may require the utmost attention in terms of how well you select the people who will supervise it initially, and who and what will comprise it.

Even if most of the information on this one path, as compared to the other paths, has yet to be developed, one thing is clear: this bartering approach allows even the most poverty-stricken or recession-stricken region to focus, not on what it doesn’t have but on what it does have, and so can immediately start building from there. Again: what’s crucial in a down economy is not what people don’t have but what people aren’t doing. Get people doing, get them producing things, and the economy heads upward.

A computer-coordinated barter system allows people a potentially far wider range of options wherein to pursue their most productive value and to exchange some of that for other things they desire.

There are certainly problems to overcome, the main one that of safeguarding the system and the values it will contain. But it allows people to no longer have to depend upon the systems and institutions which have left them at cumulative disadvantage. As wealth is created, they can re-enter the main system but from strength instead of from dependent weakness.

You can get away from what you don’t control, by refocussing from what you don’t have, to what you do have and thus do control. What you do control, you can do things with immediately. When you don’t control, it can take you a long, long time to achieve desired things.

Your local economy doesn’t have to have “money.” You do have to have people producing—producing what they can do well, and exchanging for what they need. In a marketplace, money and barter are two alternative methods. Throughout the world, there are some regions where money is effective and appropriate … and there are all those places in the world where it is not. But there is no need for poverty to prevail there. In all those places where money is inadequate, a good barter exchange system is another way to steer people and resources to productive and more productive uses.

Read the Full Article

Benevolence

by Tom Roberts

Beggars are an uncommon sight in America. Though it is true that we have problems with the homeless, unemployed and poor in our nation, there are the safety nets of food stamps, shelters, welfare support and multitudes of charitable and religious organizations that operate twenty-four hours a day and three hundred sixty-five days of the year. Many countries of the world today have a different attitude and less concern for the poor, permitting beggars to roam the streets and scavenge a living as best they can. Some religions, such as Hinduism, even incorporate “karma” into their justification for a lack of charity, advocating that one’s position in life is the just payment for evil deeds in a past life. Thus, one who is poor and needy is getting “justice” for past sins and society should not interfere. These poor are simply ignored and left to their destiny. I suppose it is better to be needy in America than in a Hindu state, if one must be needy at all.

Not all beggars are welfare cheats and deadbeats. There are times when world events trigger calamities such as wars, refugees and famine. Nature on the rampage has been known to destroy homes, crops and the necessary amenities so that disease and pestilence spring up and affect millions. Dramatic social changes (revolutions, programs, etc.) often force many into destitution. Many of us have been so protected by insurance, retirement plans, savings, governmental programs such as disaster relief or by civic orders such as the Red Cross that we can scarce imagine the total devastation others have experienced. However, take away these benefits and we might learn first hand what many in the world today know about being in need. Imagine, if you can, that you have no job, no food in the house for today’s meal, no bank account, no retirement funds, no government help, no welfare protection, your home is taken from you and your family has absolutely nothing between them and starvation. I know that such thinking is foreign to our affluent way of life, but try to put yourself in that disparate situation and then ask, “What do I do now?” We might learn what it means to be in need beyond our control.

We might even learn what it meant to be a Christian in the first century.

“It is Better To Give Than To Receive”

The High-Tech Gift Economy

Richard Barbrook

During the Sixties, the New Left created a new form of radical politics: anarcho-communism. Above all, the Situationists and similar groups believed that the tribal gift economy proved that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. From May 1968 to the late Nineties, this utopian vision of anarcho-communism has inspired community media and DIY culture activists. Within the universities, the gift economy already was the primary method of socialising labour. From its earliest days, the technical structure and social mores of the Net has ignored intellectual property. Although the system has expanded far beyond the university, the self-interest of Net users perpetuates this hi-tech gift economy. As an everyday activity, users circulate free information as e-mail, on listservs, in newsgroups, within on-line conferences and through Web sites. As shown by the Apache and Linux programs, the hi-tech gift economy is even at the forefront of software development. Contrary to the purist vision of the New Left, anarcho-communism on the Net can only exist in a compromised form. Money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis. The ‘New Economy’ of cyberspace is an advanced form of social democracy.

Read the full article

Cookies, Gift-Giving and the Internet

Hilliary Brays and Miranda Mowbray

This paper arose from a question: why are there so many connections between cookies and the Internet? We describe some of these connections. Cookies appear in contexts that have to do with giving and sharing. We explore the larger social context of cookies as food, as a gift for children, and as a symbol of sharing, and also the relationship between women and giving. There turns out to be a connection between the Internet gift economy, the U.S. tradition of giving cookies as a present, and the future of the Internet. We describe this connection and its implication for Internet strategies.

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a decentralized architecture for gift economies

J. Carrico

In contemporary society, we are accustomed to islands of abundance within deserts of scarcity, islands which must be defended against a constant pressure. Western ideas about economics are founded on this assumption, that there is not enough to go around. Something is considered to be valuable in the degree to which it is scarce, therefore an unlimited resource has very limited value. But this directly contradicts the basic nature of digital products – any sequence of bits can be copied any number of times. And so we are witnessing an enormous effort to prevent computers and networks from doing what they’re particularly good at: copying and distributing information. This contradiction can only be resolved by abandoning the idea that scarcity is the only measure of value.

A potlatch is a gift festival, a practice of native societies of the northwest coast of North America, and the foundation of the social and economic systems of these tribes. This institution evolved under conditions in which the basic necessities of life were available in great abundance (eg. salmon, cedar bark, etc.) The public display of generosity, rather than private accumulation, was the measure of social standing. These displays were often competitive in nature, challenges dependant upon the reciprocal nature of the potlatch: to maintain status, each gift must eventually be repaid.

By showing us a working economy based on abundance, gift, and reputation, the potlatch provides us with a valuable reference point as we try to imagine a society in which we don’t need to artificially restrict the infinite supply of digital goods in order to ensure that the creators and providers of those goods are properly rewarded.

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The Gift Economy

Gifford Pinchot

The first step toward a sustainable sense of success is taking pride in the value of our contributions to others rather than taking pride in the value of our possessions. By extension this means striving for quality in the use of whatever power we have rather than working to get more power over others as an end in itself. In this view, profit and wealth may help us to contribute, but they do not themselves constitute business success.

If we went to the grave with riches gained by gutting the pension fund, or selling pesticides we know cause more harm than the insects they control, would we count our business lives successful? On the other hand, what if we stewarded a small company that repeatedly introduced more ecological ways of doing things? Maybe other larger players who quickly copied the ecological innovations gained much of the material reward. If we barely made ends meet, but clearly made the world a better place, is that a success?

Defining success by what one gives rather than what one has is neither a new practice nor an overly idealistic view. It is rooted deep in history and human nature, and is more basic than wealth or money.

In the potlatches of the Chinook, Nootka, and other Pacific Northwest peoples, chiefs vied to give the most blankets and other valuables. More generally, in hunter-gatherer societies the hunter’s status was not determined by how much of the kill he ate, but rather by what he brought back for others.

In his brilliant book The Gift: The Erotic Life of Property, Lewis Hyde points to two types of economies. In a commodity (or exchange) economy, status is accorded to those who have the most. In a gift economy, status is accorded to those who give the most to others.

Lest we think that the principles of a gift economy will only work for simple, primitive or small enterprises, Hyde points out that the community of scientists follows the rules of a gift economy. The scientists with highest status are not those who possesses the most knowledge; they are the ones who have contributed the most to their fields. A scientist of great knowledge, but only minor contributions is almost pitied – his or her career is seen as a waste of talent.

At a symposium a scientist gives a paper. Selfish scientists do not hope others give better papers so they can come away with more knowledge than they had to offer in exchange. Quite the reverse. Each scientist hopes his or her paper will provide a large and lasting value. By the rules of an exchange economy, the scientist hopes to come away a “loser,” because that is precisely how one wins in science.

Antelope meat called for a gift economy because it was perishable and there was too much for any one person to eat. Information also loses value over time and has the capacity to satisfy more than one. In many cases information gains rather than loses value through sharing. While the exchange economy may have been appropriate for the industrial age, the gift economy is coming back as we enter the information age.

Read the full article

ScottPromise:

Scott McCloud is a cartoonist who is writing/drawing about micropayments as an alternative to our present market exchange economy. You can read/view his first cartoon article here. He followed that with a second installment. Since then he has written/drawn more and it is stirring up quite a reaction. As reported at Potlatch.

“Seems like Scott McCloud walked into a bit of a hornet’s nest over his latest micropayment manifesto, exemplified by this wickedly sarcastic parody. The complaint? Apparently, he is rhapsodizing something that doesn’t actually exist (yet) – and we wouldn’t want our creative types advancing crazy theories and getting our hopes up now would we. Scott’s rebuttal to the pitchfork-wielding villagers is here.”

Thanks to Potlatch

For-Giving

Genevieve Vaughan

Nature offers her abundance free to satisfy the needs that nature and culture have created. Humans have altered this process by depleting the abundance, cornering what remains, and using it to manipulate other humans, keeping them on the edge of survival. This process derives from exchange, which is giving-in-order-to-receive, and is ego oriented, while the need satisfying process, when practiced by humans, is other oriented. Capitalism is based on exchange and socializes us into its ego oriented values of competition and domination which also often coincide with the values involved in the male gender identity. Communism places a different emphasis on the collective but has so far institutionalized patriarchal hierarchies, often promoting individual and collective tyranny.

In contrast to patriarchal economic systems, the free satisfaction of needs is still visible in the relation between mothers and children, because children cannot “give back” anything in exchange for the nurturing they receive and they have to receive free goods and services from their caregivers.

The free gifts of nature depend upon the capacity to receive of those who have the needs. The receivers’ capacities can be enhanced or diminished by the presence of absence of gifts during socialization. Indigenous peoples often allowed everyone free access to the abundance of their environment, and considered themselves stewards of nature’s gifts. They also often had societies in which women were respected.

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37 Ways to Join the Gift Economy, Now!

YES! Magazine

You don’t have to participate in a local currency or service exchange to be part of the cooperative gift economy. Any time you do a favor for a family member, neighbor, colleague, or stranger you’re part of it. Here are some ways you can spend time in the gift economy, where you’ll find fun, freedom, and connection.

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STEWART BRAND an interview

FRONTLINE

“Generosity means on the net the nature of how it’s grown over 25 years is, is basically a gift economy. It hasn’t been an economy with money changing hands up til now. But it’s a thriving world of 30 million people. What are they doing, they’re giving each other information so that’s the nature of transaction on the net now. For a company or business to get into the net, they need to join that way of doing things and so typically it means giving away software as the people that are now in netscape did by originally giving away mosaic. It means often giving away content. Many authors now reporting full chapters or even all of their book on the web and this is treated as advertising so then what actually do you get paid for? You get paid for other things that emerge later. Personal relationships, authentication, follow up support, some kind of thing that happens outside of the net that is a transaction. So if I put part of a portrait I’m writing on the net and people are intrigued by that, they may go to a book store and buy the actual finished book.”

Read the full interview

The Internet and the Future of Money

Howard Rheingold

The Internet might be more than a new kind of marketplace and a new medium for exchanging money as we know it. If Bernard Lietaer and others are right, the Internet might lead to a radical change in the nature of money. Lietaer, fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources at the University of California at Berkeley, was a central banker and currency manager in Belgium, with twenty-five years of working with governments and banks. He believes that money as we know it is due for a radical change; right now he’s working on a book, ‘The Future of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity.” He is one of a number of people around the world who have been working on the idea of ‘alternative currencies’ or ‘local money’ that keep resources recycling within communities, instead of draining money out of communities. These efforts predate the Internet, but Lietaer sees the Net as a vehicle for accelerating the changes that he and others have been foreseeing for years.

Money, according to Lietaer, can be defined in several ways: ‘Money is information about the way we exchange energy,’ he says. ‘Money is an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange. The agreement can be conscious or unconscious, coerced or free. Most of us don’t consciously choose our money. We have an opportunity to change that. The Internet is a space where that is possible to do. I expect a flourishing of money systems in the coming years. 95% of these experiments will fail. But the 5% that succeed will change the world.’

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Internet Currencies for Virtual Communities

Bernard Lietaer

Virtual communities today are ‘communities’ because social bonds have sprouted up around a ‘gift economy’ of open information exchange. Even the word ‘community’ itself (deriving from the Latin “to give among each other”) reveals the key relationship between gift exchanges and community building. Just as traditional communities have unwittingly suffered from the competition-inducing process built in to our ‘normal’ national currencies , communities on the Net similarly may be torn apart if the new payment systems developed for the Internet rely exclusively on these types of currencies.

A recent survey on values and priorities in the US has revealed that an astounding 83% feel that our top priority should be to “develop and heal our communities”. While most people appear to recognize the importance of healing communities, few seem to understand exactly where the rifts dividing us came from – or what to do about them. Even some of the people who created virtual communities have not always been aware that the secret of their success relates to the fact that they had created a ‘gift economy’ on the Net. “I’ll help you today, and someone else will help me if needed some other day” has been the common pattern in the spaces wherever successful virtual communities have sprung up.

As the Net becomes home to the growing number of commercial enterprises, those who value the Net as community space may want to take some precautions lest virtual communities meet the same fate as almost all the gift economies that preceded them. The time to become aware of this connection has come because all signs point to an imminent change in the way the Net will operate. For instance, Business Week’s ‘Special Report about Internet Communities’ (1). points out that “Today’s push is to turn the age-old appeal of community into cash”. And there seems to be little awareness either in business or on the Net that unless some precautions are taken in the way this is done, we may kill the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs, and virtual communities will simply disappear as have most traditional “primitive” communities operating on the basis of “gift economies”.

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Giving Is Receiving

Marrinel Harriman

I learned about giving in the slow human way. Because my mother was a skilled seamstress, I was a well dressed child. It may have been guilt or it may have had something to do with “the joy of giving” that prompted me to deliver several of my most stylish dresses to a less fortunate little girl, who lived with disabled parents.

After thanking me gratefully, the little girl offered me the only party dress in her closet. Puzzled, I tried to refuse, but my mother guided me. She complimented the girl and told her how happy I would be to wear the dress. I came away knowing a little bit more about human pride and who gives what to whom. My greatest gift to the girl was acceptance of the gift she offered me.

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A Religious View of Giving and Receiving

World Scripture Anthrology

When we give to one another, freely and without conditions, sharing our blessings with others and bearing each other’s burdens, the giving multiplies and we receive far more than what was given. Even when there is no immediate prospect of return, Heaven keeps accounts of giving, and in the end blessing will return to the giver, multiplied manyfold. We must give first; to expect to receive without having given is to violate the universal law.

Read the full anthrology

Reciprocity

A book review by Bill Ellis

“THE FABLE OF L’HOMO ECONOMICUS is destroyed by Dominique Temple and Mireille Chabal in: La RÈciprocitÈ et La Naissance des Valeurs Humaines (…ditions L’Harmattan, 5-7 rue de L’Ècole Polytechnique, F-75005 Paris FRANCE, 1995, in French).

Modern Economics and the EuroAmerican culture are based on the assumed reality of homo economicus. That is, that the only motivation of humans is material self-interest. This book examines all cultures throughout history, including our own modern culture, and demonstrates that human motivations and human values have been distorted only in the last couple of hundred years, and more vehemently in the last few decades, to become based on values which are destroying the humanity and life on Earth. Reciprocity is more fundamental and more friendly to both humans and nature.

Reciprocity is the antithesis of exchange or selling. Reciprocity, or “gifting,” has taken on many forms in different cultures. In some it is imbedded in religion. People produce and distribute goods and services in celebration of their spiritual beliefs. Their work is a gift to the gods, to the Earth, and to humanity, without thought of material return. In other cultures production is for the common good. That is, people see themselves imbedded in their families and communities. They exist only because of their relationships to other people and their bioregion. And these relationships depend on the productive role they play — how much they can support and give to society. In still others, material welfare is paramount; but one gains insurance of her or his material well-being by giving to others. “To him who gives shall be given.” Each person gains prestige in society by how much s/he gives. That prestige demands reciprocity to the giver and to the family of the giver. The more one impoverishes himself in betterment of the community the more the community is beholden to the giver.

This reciprocity on which almost all cultures are based is uniquely vilified by neoliberal economic theory which refuses to recognize that production and distribution can be based on anything but greed and exchange — giving up something only to gain something else. This distorted economic theory of exchange goes well beyond just “the market.” Economic reasoning has invaded sociology, education, politics, ethics and the law. Homo Economicus is believed to base all values and judgments on economic exchange values, what one can gain materially. It is only in this distorted Western society that reciprocity has been subjugated to the concept of exchange.

Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Levi-Straus, Marcel Mauss, Marshall Sahlins and other anthropologists have shown the deep roots of reciprocity; Aristotle, Homer, Hobbes, and other political philosophers trace reciprocity from the Greeks as the base of our Western society; and Hegel, Adam Smith, Durkheim and Polanyi and other economists, describe reciprocity’s relevance to the age we are in. But it’s the future which really concerns Temple and Chabal. Money, exchange, and globalism have replaced the human values inherent in reciprocity with motivations which are leading to social, ecological, economic and political destruction. Reciprocity exists deep in ourselves, our families, and our communities; but it is suppressed by our belief system and its resulting social institutions. We see reciprocity in President Bush’s “thousand points of light”, in the burgeoning NGOs around the world, in volunteerism, in our familles, in our communities, and in many grassroots social innovations. Our future can be assured only if we release this constructive force of reciprocity.

Or as the authors end this book, “Si l’esclave veut etre libre, il ne lui faut pas seulement diffÈrer la mort, mais dominer sa propre vie par le souce de celle d’autrui, maitriser la vie avant qu’elle ne le condamne a mort.”

Downsizing, another word for out of work!

Compassion

Most individuals entangled in the horror of corporate downsizing and restructuring respond with moral outrage. There is a general consensus among the victims and potential victims that mechanisms should be employed to minimize the personal impact of such processes. Usually, the general perception is that the corporation instigating the action or the government should take action to assist the newly unemployed. The impulse behind this perception is based upon beliefs concerning power relations and perceived wealth combined with the belief that the stronger, by ethical reasoning, should help the weaker.

While the rational anarchist can agree that it would be ethically positive for the stronger to help the weaker, the rational anarchist cannot endorse the belief that the stronger must help the weaker. The forced assistance of the weaker by the stronger would reduce the stronger to a means to the ends of the weaker. This arrangement is classical exploitation. Whenever one set of individuals is reduced to a mere means to the ends of another set of individuals exploitation is attained.

Victims of downsizing and restructuring should reject the notion that the ethical onus to help in times of need falls only upon the shoulders of the stronger. Instead, such victims should place this onus upon their own shoulders.

Individuals who wait for the grace of others to relieve their disenfranchisement foolishly surrender their freedom and agency to those with a demonstrable disregard for the interests of the former. The only noble and dignified response to disenfranchisement is self organization. The victims and potential victims of downsizing and restructuring, collectively, have it within their potential to become their own means to mutual support. Political philosophies that place the disenfranchised into the role of noble beggar fail to acknowledge the potential for mutual support within the ranks of the disenfranchised themselves. The implementation of a gift economy is the logical first step in the elimination of dependency. Through the elimination of dependency, the disenfranchised can create their own structures of mutual support.

Read the full article

The Internet is still a Gift Economy

by Gift Economy, where the philanthropic gestures of large institutions compete for attention with a blizzard of more idiosyncratic and independent movements. Those more idiosyncratic and independent movements, fueled by obsession, frustration, or love, are where life on the nets resides.

You wouldn’t know anything was happening unless you were hooked in, unless you were participating, offering something yourself. It would be overwhelming or meaningless if you weren’t oriented by informal networks, links, and email. As far as most are concerned, there is a blizzard, a white-out, of information on the nets. All but the most intrepid are numbed by this blizzard of information. You won’t even go out into the blizzard unless you fancy yourself some kind of Admiral Perry or unless you have cohorts or maps, unless you are a native.

Professionalism hasn’t come to the nets just yet, much to the chagrin of the institutions and the entrepreneurs. The New Philanthropists, the would-be commercial presences, are the missionaries of the nets. The incorrigible natives are now accepting well-crafted hand-outs from the missionaries. The missionaries are hoping that the natives will learn the value of their brands, hoping that the natives will begin to participate in a money economy of sorts. Professionalism will follow charity.

These natives of the nets are particularly incorrigible because they “tribalized” the nets in an attempt to escape the emptiness of their own advanced money economies. We know the story only too well, never mind the catchwords we use to describe “the context of no context.” Instead of replaying the over familiar story of plebeianized, rationalized, and now completely tautologous, advanced money economies and their media, I just want to touch on the possibility that thoughtful writing on the nets is a gift economy. A difference.

June 2, 1997

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The Gift Must Always Move

Barbara J. Pescan

Trobriand Islanders of the South Pacific have an elaborate ritual way of passing gifts of necklaces and arm bands made of shells. The shells themselves are nicely wrought into the items that become the gifts. But, it isn’t the intrinsic value of the item that gives the gift its importance. It is the ceremony attached to how the gifts move from island to island, and from person to person.

It is important how the next receiver is chosen to receive the gift. It should be someone who has not had the necklace or arm band for some time. Arm bands get passed one way around the islands, and necklaces move in a circle in the opposite direction. These objects are carried from island to island by canoe. And the journeys take much preparation and take several days and cover hundreds of miles.

The current owner carefully plans when and how he will give the object to someone else. The one who is to receive the object waits and wonders when it will come. The whole thing goes on with great decorum and with particular valences attached to how long one person keeps one of these necklaces before passing it on. People’s reputations are made by how they participate in the giving and receiving ritual. It may take two to ten years for the object to make the rounds of the islands.

The important thing with the Trobriand people is that to possess is to give—“someone who owns a thing is expected to share it, to distribute it, to be its trustee and dispenser.”

In the world of the gift, you not only can have your cake and eat it, too; you can’t have your cake unless you eat it, that is, unless you distribute it, consume it, use it up by giving it to someone else.

Read the full article

The Gift – Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

A book review by Eric Nehrlich

After reading Trickster Makes This World, I went back and picked up this earlier book by Lewis Hyde. Again, his mastery of mythology amazes me. I used to read myths and think they were pretty stupid stories. Hyde makes them come alive, expressing the philosophies and beliefs of their tellers.

In this case, he follows the culture of the gift, which will have its value disappear if not passed on. However, if given away freely, it will come back to reward the giver many times over. He brings in many myths to support this, such as the several where a poor peasant gives away their last bit of bread to someone in need, only to have it turn out that the recipient was a god or a king in disguise, who then rewards the peasant for their generosity.

Hyde studies this culture from the viewpoint of an artist trying to find his niche in the modern world, where everything has a price. In a ultra-capitalist economy, how does one value art? By exploring the gift economy, Hyde demonstrates that there are areas where the market economy does not apply, where the gift economy must take precedence. Again, he supports his viewpoint with several myths where the greedy merchant tries to buy something that must be given away, and ends up with rocks instead of gold.

Eric Nehrlich’s WWW home page / nehrlich@alum.mit.edu

The Gift of Generalized Exchange

Ira Nayman

In times of hyper-capitalism, where everything is naturally seen as for sale, the idea that anybody does anything without expectation of financial compensation is considered absurd. Where examples exist, they are first explained away, then, if possible, brought into the market economy. To the extent that exchange happens outside the money economy, it detracts from economic efficiency (and the carefully calculated numbers of economists). The Internet is an example of this problem. Many writers, graphic artists, designers, programmers and others create things that are shared without money changing hands. What motivates them to do this?

Ego, say traditional economists: they can show off their intellectual abilities, or, perhaps, that they are good people who know how to share. Not so, say others: the Internet is an example of a gift economy. Howard Rheingold, in Virtual Communities, was one of the first writers to make the connection between digital communications and gift exchange; since then, it has been repeated in the popular press so often, the connection is taken for granted. We freely circulate information on the Internet in the expectation that we will benefit from the information freely circulated by others.

There’s only one problem: gift economies don’t work this way. In traditional anthropological studies, gifts are given on ceremonial occasions to members of one’s tribe, or the tribe of somebody else to which one wants to affiliate. At weddings, to take one example, there can be a complex arrangement of gift giving between various members of the two families involved. Although somewhat altered, gift giving at occasions such as weddings and birthdays remains a common practice.

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Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow’s Economy

J.Bradford DeLong & A. Michael Froomkin

Governments and societies that bet on the market system become more materially prosperous and technologically powerful. The lesson usually drawn from this economic success story is that in the overwhelming majority of cases the best thing the government can do for the economy is to set the background rules – define property rights, set up honest courts, perhaps rearrange the distribution of income, impose minor taxes and subsidies to compensate for well-defined and narrowly-specified “market failures” – but otherwise the government should leave the market system alone.

The main argument for the market system is the dual role played by prices. On the one hand, prices serve to ration demand: anyone unwilling to pay the market price does not get the good. On the other hand, price serves to elicit production: any organization that can make a good, or provide a service, for less than its market price has a powerful financial incentive to do so. What is produced goes to those who value it the most. What is produced is made by the organizations that can make it the cheapest. And what is produced is whatever the ultimate users value the most.

The data processing and data communications revolutions shake the foundations of the standard case for the market. In a world in which a large chunk of the goods valued by users are information goods that can be cheaply replicated, it is not socially optimal to charge a price to ration demand. In a world in which cheap replication produces enormous economies of scale, the producers that survive and profit are not those that can produce at the least cost or produce the goods that users value the most; instead, the producers that flourish are those that established their positions first. In a world in which the value chain is only tangentially related to ultimate value to users – in which producers earn money by selling eyeballs to advertisers, say – there is no certainty that what is produced will be what users value the most.

The market system may well prove to be tougher than its traditional defenders have thought, and to have more subtle and powerful advantages than those that defenders of the invisible hand have usually listed. At the very least, however, defenders will need new arguments. And at the most, we will need to develop a new economics to discern new answers to the old problem of economic organization.

Read the full article

A Bill Ellis’ Review

Reciprocity is the Basis of our Future Culture suggests Dominique Temple in issue No.31 of Golias: Le Journal Catho Tendre et GrinÁant (Golias, BP4034, F-69615 Villeubanne FRANCE, (in French)).

Reciprocity is a form of economics practiced by most indigenous people in many parts of the world. Unlke “exchange”, “trade” or “barter”, reciprocity is based on prestige gained by gifting. Ownership, accumulation, competition and materialism, are not recognized in reciprocity societies instead the are rooted in giving, cooperation, human relationships, and ecology. “Self-interest is replaced by “public interest”; the individual’s well being is dependent on the well being of the community, so the individual’s whole life and purpose is devoted to community well being.

Dominique bases the main article in this publication on an examination of the Native American economy since Columbus. Columbus’s logs for the first three years are filled with wonderment at the Native’s proclivity for giving, and their lack of interest in exchange. In a few passages Columbus seems to almost understand the radical different basis of the cultures he’d discovered. But he succumbs to his search for gold, and his cultural roots in exploitation and domination.

But through the ages the Native Americans have maintained their roots in a culture of reciprocity. In spite of the repressive efforts of the early colonists and the later neo colonialists to press them into the EuroAmerican economic system, they have held on to their own means of distributing goods and maintain relationships, except when dealing with outsiders. Their tenacity has been read by the U.S. government and others as a turn toward Marxism, and led to further repressions during the Cold War. But, Temple points out, that unlike Marxism, the indigenous system is not based on class struggle or government ownership. For the Native American had no interest in “property”, “ownership” or “accumulation” which is as necessary for Communism as it is for Capitalism. The native Americans “wealth”, or assured well being, was dependent in his “poverty”, or the amount of goods s/he had contributed to others in the community.

With the end of the Cold War there is a growing leniency toward the Native Americans, and toward other cultures. New studies have shown that almost all cultures, except the EuroAmerican, based their roots in human relationships, reverence for the Earth, and reciprocity. These are the same qualities gaining precedence among a growing number of progressive thinkers and Gaian philosophers. Temple sees this as a hopeful sign, and believes that we will learn that a different culture and a different economic system is not only possible but in the making.

Doing Business as a Gift to Society

Gifford Pinchot

The next step in the move toward sustainable business is to make the business itself a gift to society.

Companies that use sulfuric acid end up with a hazardous waste. DuPont, instead of distancing itself from the hazardous waste generated by its customers, saw this problem as an opportunity to differentiate its offering in one of the most basic of commodities. The company took back the spent sulfuric acid, purified it, and resold it. This was good business because once DuPont got good at it, recycling turned out to be cheaper than creating from scratch. It also gained the company market share and margins in what had become to others a low-profit, uninteresting commodity. In this case, DuPont does well by doing good, thus winning both the exchange and gift paradigms.

The sign of excellence in a new world of the larger self is not vast profit or possessions, but sufficient material success to allow large and thoughtful contributions to society. For some strategies of societal service, huge profits may be needed, for example to build up the capital to purchase forestry land and convert it to sustainable forestry, or to extend a chain of tutoring schools that serve those who otherwise might not read, including the poor. Other strategies for making a contribution might require only a modest income that could be used for marshalling forces for change by example or through volunteers. In a world dominated by a larger sense of self these two strategies could do equal good and would be considered equally successful.

One feature of our society works directly against implementing a larger vision of success: institutional ownership of companies. In an earlier era of owner-operated businesses, an owner who thought solely of profit without regard for the effect of decisions on employees or the welfare of the community was thought to be a monster, and rightly so.

In contrast, the law today forbids pension fund managers from full humanity; they are precluded by law from allowing concerns for the environment or the good of employees to interfere with maximizing return. Institutional investment laws need to be changed.

Read the full article

A Spiritual Basis for the Gift Tensegrity

Timothy Wilken, MD

As children we all taught that it is better to give than to receive. Certainly, that seems likean excellent philosophy for making close relationships and living in the social world. Jesus of Nazareth is credited with saying:

“It is Better To Give Than To Receive.“

Whether you believe Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ foretold in biblical scripture or just another human who lived far ahead of his time, we can all agree he said some remarkable and wise things. His followers were called Christians because most of them believed he was the Christ foretold in the scripture.

“Early Christians lived in a world far different from ours. Lots of people, in and out of the church, suffered on a daily basis without any “safety nets” between them and poverty. But Christians were especially susceptible to deprivation since discipleship took away any last vestiges of help due to the alienation from family and nation. One of the worst financial decisions to be made by anyone could be that of becoming a Christian. Yet it is from this crucible of suffering that Luke draws one of the greatest themes of the Book of Acts: benevolence. New Testament Christianity forever becomes our model of a people who took care of its own, who breathed life into the teaching of Jesus that “it is better to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).”

Jesus of Nazareth may have been one of the first humans to embrace synergy. His words seem to capture the very essence of synergic morality. Synergic morality is more than not hurting other, it requires helping other. Jesus was one of the first humans to state the fundamental law of synergic relationship. It is known as the Golden Rule:

“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law.”

What would you have others doto you? The best one word answer I can find for this question is help. “Help others as you would have them help you.”

Confucius 579-471BCis credited as the author of the negative formof the Golden Rule:

“Do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you!”

“This negative form of the “golden rule” is next found in the Jewish Book of Tobit 4:15 from the Old Testament Bible (3rd Century BC): “And what you hate, do not do to anyone.” It is also found in the writings of the Jewish scholars Hillel (1st century BC) and Philo of Alexandria (1st centuries BCand AD), It occurs in the 2nd-century documents Didache and the Apology of Aristides. It also appears in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Seneca.”

We can restate this a little more clearly as:

“Do not doto others what you would have them not doto you.”

What would you have others not doto you?

Here the best one word answer is hurt. “Donothurt others as you would have them not hurt you.”

The negative form of the Golden Rule is true and correct as far as it goes. In fact, it is the underlying premise for the Neutral Moralityfound in the western world today. But, Synergic Morality requires more of us than simply not hurting. It requires more of us than simply ignoring others. It requires us to helpothers—to helpeach other. Jesus of Nazarethunderstood this on the deepest of levels. He called for more than a prohibition against hurting others. He ask all humans to helpeach other.

Synergic Morality rests then on the premise—that when you help others, you will find yourself helped in return— “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” Synergic Morality is morethan the absence of hurting. It is the presenceof helping.

World Scripture on The Golden Rule

World Scripture of Giving and Receiving

Also see: GIFTegrity, Read the Scientific Basis for the GIFTegrity, and the Specifications for a GIFTegrity.

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Wednesday, November 9th, 2005

GIFTegrity

Timothy Wilken, MD

Tensegrity is the pattern that results when push and pull have a win-win relationship with each other. The pull is continuous and the push is discontinuous. The continuous pull is balanced by the discontinuous push producing an integrity of tension and compression. This creates a powerful self-stabilizing system. The term tensegrity comes from synergic science.

The gifting tensegrity is a newly invented mechanism for the exchange of human help. Let us begin by describing how a GIFTegrity might be structured and how it could work. Every member of a synergic help tensegrity would participate in two roles. That as a giftor and that as a giftee.

The continuous pull of the giftees’ needs are balanced by the discontinuous push from the giftors’ offers of help. Again we see as an INTERdependent life form, there will be times when we will help others and times when others will help us.

The GIFTegrity works on trust. I give help to those in need and trust that when I am in need there will be those who will give me help. Synergic Trust was discovered long ago, and was once known as:

The Spiritual Principle Of Giving And Receiving

“When we give to one another, freely and without conditions, sharing our blessings with others and bearing each other’s burdens, the giving multiplies and we receive far more than what was given. Even when there is no immediate prospect of return, Heaven keeps accounts of giving, and in the end blessing will return to the giver, multiplied manyfold. We must give first; to expect to receive without having given is to violate the universal law. On the other hand, giving in order to receive–with strings attached, with the intention of currying favor, or in order to make a name for oneself — is condemned.”

And while, The Spiritual Principle of Giving and Receiving relies on “Heaven to keep account of giving.”, the Gift Tensegrity relies on a public database to keep account of giving.and receiving. This database of the synergic help exchange is a public space where the exchanging of help is made visable to all members who are participants in good standing.

When you join a Gift Tensegrity you sign in and register as a Giftor-Giftee. You will fill out two profiles. The first profile is for your role as a giftor. Your giftor profile is the list of the types of help you would like to give to other members of the synergic help tensegrity.

The second profile is for your role as a giftee. Your giftee profile is the list of the types of help you would like to receive as gifts from other members of the synergic help tensegrity. A third profile will develop as Giftor-Giftee members use the synergic help exchange. This is the personal history of each member’s giving and receiving. This profile is transparent. It can be seen by all members who are particpants in good standing. It shows all the gifts you have given, all the gifts you have received, and any comments made by other members of the synergic exchange tensegrity that you have interacted with in relation to the exchanging of help. Every exchange generates a Giftor’s comment rating the Giftee, and a Giftee’s comment rating the Giftor.

Now once a new member has completed their Giftor and Giftee registration and entered all their data into the data base, the computer sorts and matches gifts of help with needs for help.

Now initially within the Gift Tensegrity, the role of Giftor is active. The role of Giftee is passive. This means that once the computer has completed sorting and matching registered gifts of help with registered needs of help, the lists of matches are presented to the Giftor. These matches are not available for viewing by the Giftee.

The list of matchs are sorted with those who have the highest ratio of giving/receiving and most positive comments being sorted higher on the list than those who have lower ratio of giving/receiving and negative comments.

Freedom of Choice in the Synergic Help Exchange

However, the Giftor is free to offer his gift to anyone on the list regardless of the order presented. The Giftor is in control of his giving. Once the Giftor has made his choice and selected a Giftee to receive his offer of help, then the Giftee is notified that an offer of help has been made.

The Giftee is then presented with a list of offers of help from those Giftors that have selected them for offers. With these offers of help comes access to the profiles of the offering Giftors. The giftee is then free to examine the offer carefully, read the profile of the Giftor and decide whether to accept the offer or not.

Freedom of choice is an absolute tenant of the GIFTegrity. The Giftor decides when and to whom to offer a gift of help. The Giftee decides when and from whom to accept a gift offer of help. Giftors are unknown to Giftees unless the Giftor offers help. The Giftee is under no obligation to accept an offered gift. At this point the Giftee may contact the Giftor with questions or clarifications about the offer. If the Giftee accepts the offer, than that action is recorded as a synergic help exchange and both profiles are updated. Both Giftor and Giftee can make comments about the interaction then or at a later time if more appropriate. If the Giftee declines the offer of help, the Giftor is notified so they can offer their help to some other member.

What you might give or receive…

How do you registering the types of help you might choose to give or like to receive?. It would seem that almost any good or service could be exhanged in a synergic help tensegrity. I would suggest three general classes of Gifts as a way of organizing the data base. Also considerations of Local, Regional and Global come into play.

1) Human Knowing — KNOWLEDGE: Expertise, Consultations, Counseling, and Advise.

Those humans with expertise in almost any field can make that expertise available to others as a gift. Physicians, Attorneys, Accountants, Engineers, Scientists, Teachers, etc., etc., etc.. Location may be less important with telephone and internet communication.

This can also be available in the form or books, art, courses, online files, etc., etc., etc..

2) Human Action — WORK: Sevices, Projects, Labor (skilled and unskilled), Jobs and Tasks.

This could be as simple as baby sitting, or giving someone a ride to as complex as building a room on someone’s house or writing a custom software program, etc., etc., etc.. It could be a million and one different forms of helping provided by humans in action. Location is very important. Many services would only available locally.

For the third category, I have borrowed the term lever from synergic science. It means any device that provides the user with leverage.

3) Human Levers — THINGS: Tools, Appliances, Equipment, Automobiles, Trucks, Tractors, Lawnmowers, House Furniture, Household Goods, Furnishings, Materials, Supplies, etc., etc., etc..

And, you can give these things away fully or only gift the use of them for a specified time. Location is very important for the gift of using a tool or appliance, perhaps less important if the item is given away fully. Shipping costs might make a difference, but you can Gift an item with the provision that the Giftee pay shipping.

In fact you can gift anything with conditions. A gift is an offer of help. The giftee is under no obligation to accept the offer. Synergic exchange is fully voluntary. The giftor makes offers of help when and to whom he chooses. The giftee accepts offers of help when and from whom they choose.

Conditional Gifting

If I gift the use of a tool for a weekend, I may do so with the condition that it be returned in clean and in good condition. Conditions of gifting is both intelligent and synergic.

Things that are gifted can be new or used. Working or not working. The important thing is to describe the offered gift accurately. A television repairman might like the gift of an old TV, that he will repair and use or gift to someone else.

Since your giving-receiving profile is based not on the number of gifts offered, but rather on the number of gift offers accepted, it is of great importance to have a good relationship with the giftee. That means your discriptions of an offered gift needs to be very accurate. No one will be criticized for gifting junk as long as they describe it accurately as junk. Those seeking junk will be happy. Remember one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.

Status in the GIFTegrity

Your ranking on the help offer lists is determined in part by your ratio of giving-receiving. Everytime your offers of help are accepted your ratio goes up. Those who give the most to others will be the most honored members in the community of the GIFTegrity. So you will want to give as much as you can. Likewise every time you accept a gift offering from others your ratio goes down. So you will want to accept others gifts carefully and only when you truly value them.

The other factor in determining your ranking on the help offer lists is your comment mean. This the average score for comments made about you during help exchanges. Every encounter will be rated. +10 for it couldn’t have been any better to -10 if couldn’t have been any worse. To be successful in the gift tensegity you need to give and interact in a positive way with other members. This means you want to accurately describe your offered gifts and make sure those accepting your gifts get what they expect from your descriptions. You also want to be courteous and friendly in your encounters. If you have an encounter that earns you a low comment from an exchange partner, you will want to repair that encounter as quickly as possible so that that exchange partner will modify or withdraw their low comment.

For instance, if I gift a used computer to someone and it doesn’t work as described, I need to be willing to take it back at my expense if the giftee paid for shipping. Or pay for disposal and give up my credit for the gift. Remember, every exchange effects ratio of giving-receiving for both the giftor and giftee.

Gifting — Local, Regional & Global

Knowing is one of the most global of gifts. With the internet and modern communication devices, I can help people all over the world.

Human action will usually need to be local, occasionally regional, and rarely global.

Levers and especially use of levers will usually be local. However, it may make sense to gift a major appliance or automobile regionally. And rarely, smaller lighter items might be shipped globally especially if they are unusual one of a kind.

Bringing Dead Wealth to Life

One major advantage of the GIFTegrity is that it resurrects Dead Wealth. Dead Wealth is that wealth within the human community that is not being used to help self or others. Dead Wealth is found in all three forms — Knowing, Action and Levers.

Knowing — Almost all of us have significant expertise in some areas. Some knowledge of how to solve problems that we have encountered in our lifes. However, in our present world we trade the hours of our lives to others for just enough money to earn our livings. Our employers don’t want our expertise and knowledge unless it applys to the limited task they hired us to perform. Yet in the larger context of community our unwanted expertise and knowledge could help others. The GIFTegrity gives us an outlet for sharing that expertise and knowledge.

Again, this might be in the form of knowing and action joined together such as consultations, couseling, analysis and real time problem solving, or it may be available in the form of knowing and levers such as reports, books, video or audio tapes, artwork, photos, computer files, etc., etc., etc..

Action — We all have some hours in our lives that could be available to help others. The Gift Tensegrity gives me an outlet for all of those other skills and abilities that I am not currently trading to some employer for money. Some of us can do home and automobile repair, handyman work, cleaning, cooking, sewing, child and elder care, teaching, etc., etc., etc..

Or, it might be that if we knew what help others needed, we could combine their errands with our own when we are out running around anyway. The Gift Tensegrity allows you to quickly find out how you can turn those wasted hours into help for others.

Levers — And finally, we all have lots of perfectly good things we have in boxes in our garages, attics, and closets. Used tools, appliances, furniture, clothing, furnishings — things we never use but are too good to throw away. Now they can be easily liberated by simply describing them acturately and gifting them away. Or how about just gifting away the use of some those great tools you only use one day a week or one day a month.

GIFTegrity Servers — Local, Regional & Global

Because so much of our need for help is a need for local help. I see the need to establish Neighborhood GIFTegrities. This is where you will get help with household repair, automotive service, child and elder care, transportation, etc., etc., etc..

I envision this being started when someone with the time and interest decides to gift the use of their home computer and DSL line to run a neighborhood GIFTegrity Database. Then anyone in the neighborhood could use a computer with dialup connection to the internet to connect to the local GIFTegrity and enter into synergic help exchange.

These Local GIFTegrities servers would then be linked to Regional Gift Tensegrity servers which in turn would like to Global Servers. This would lead to a disseminated system with high level of redundancy.

This system will work easily with today’s home computers and off the shelf database software.

Need Help — Look First to the GIFTegrity

The GIFTegrity is a synergic help exchange. And as INTERdependent form or life, we all need help. As a synergic help exchange that means that the relations between the members of that exchange will be synergic. Remember synergic relationships are those that make me more productive, more effective, and more happy. When I need help, this is where I will look first.

In the beginning the gifting tensegrities will not instantly replace the fair market. It will begin as simple an alternative to the fair market. I will begin to meet some of my needs at the GIFTegrities. As I begin gifting and finding that some of my needs are met this way. I will have less need to sell the hours of my life for money to use in the fair market.

Once I am gifting 10 hours a week.I will then be able to reduce my working week from 40 to 30 hours. This is how the transition will occur.

Out of Work — Look to the the GIFTegrity

The gifting tensegrities can be enormously important to those individuals finding themselves out of work. When there is no market for the hours of your life. There is still no shortage of people who need your help. The gifting tensegrities acts as an immediate outlet for those with help to Gift, but no market for their help to Sell.

In fact the GIFTensegrity becomes a new type of insurance for all humans who are at risk for losing their jobs. In this society, that is all of us.

GIFTegrity — Not Just for Individuals

Synergic TeamNets are groups of individual humans that form themselves into Synergic Teams for the purpose of performing a larger and more complex task than they can perform as individuals. These individuals co-Operate through a network based on synergic relationships and synergic compensation mechanisms to accomplish those larger and more complex tasks. Barry Carter has written extensively about this concept in his book Infinite Wealth. And, I have developed a mechanism for organizing Synergic Production Teams called the Ortegrity which is available elsewhere.

TeamNets can register with a gifting tensegrity and list the Needs of their TeamNet Project. They may be able to attract the help they need thought the free synergic gift exchange, or they can attract help, by inviting others to join their team for Synergic Revenue Shares if the project produces revenue.

Read the Scientific Basis for the GIFTegrity

Specifications for a GIFTegrity

Synergic Economist Wayne F. Perg, Ph. D writes:

“My concept and understanding of the GIFTegrity is one of a radical move away from trade-oriented or materialistic sort of exchange.

“In the GIFTegrity there is no accounting, there are no prices, there is no barter (no tit for tat), and there is no medium of exchange! For me, it is the road to a post-monetary, post-barter economy.

“Barter and monetary economies both tie together giving and receiving. One cannot be done in the absence of the other. It is this
“tying together” that is the ultimate source of “dead resources” and unemployment.

“The GIFTegrity frees giving from receiving and receiving from giving and will, as it is implemented, bring all resources to life and eliminate unemployment.

“The GIFTegrity does this by creating transparency, i.e., by creating good information on the SEPARATE giving and receiving actions of all members of the gifting tensegrity. Because there is no trading, only gifts given with no requirment of payment, there are no market prices and no accounting of trades. What there is is an open exchange of information on needs and resources available to fill those needs and ongoing individual negotiations around actions that will meet those needs.

“I see the GIFTegrity bringing the exchange relationships of a living organism to human society. As Elizabet Sahtouris has pointed out, the heart does not hold an auction for the supply of oxygenated blood and it does not withhold blood from those organs who are currently unable to pay.

“I see the GIFTegrity as a powerful new vehicle for first supplementing and then eventually replacing our present exchange economy that relies on money and barter to facilitate exchange.

“I see the GIFTegrity as a powerful step forward from money systems and barter because it separates the acts of giving and receiving whereas both money systems and barter tie giving and receiving together into formal exchange transactions. It is this tying together of giving and receiving that creates “landlocked” resources and unemployment.

“I do not see the GIFTegrity replacing informal, undocumented and recorded giving and receiving within families, groups and communities within which all participants are known to each other and within which trust is well established. In fact, I see the operation of the Gift Tensegrity increasing the number and size of the groups within which informal, undocumented giving and receiving is the norm.

“It is my understanding that, in the GIFTegrity, I do not make any commitment to giving in advance. As a giver, I have access to information on the needs of those who are seeking what I have to give, but potential receivers of my gifts have no access to me as a giver until I offer my gift to that person, organization, or community to which I decide that I would like to give.

“Also, given my big picture vision for the GIFTegrity, I see givers and receivers including organizations (including for-profit businesses) and communities as well as individuals.”

Read the Scientific Basis for the GIFTegrity

Specifications for a GIFTegrity

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Monday, November 7th, 2005

The following essay was written in 2001.

Healing the Earth

Gary R. Varner

Let us turn our energies towards healing the Earth and place our own desires aside for a while.

Physicist Stephen Hawkings stated that he does not believe that humankind would survive to see the dawn of another millennium. Because of the destruction of the ozone layer Hawkings said that the Earth would likely become a boiling pot similar to Venus—devoid of all life, all atmosphere.

While none of us can know the eventual outcome of his prediction, we do know certain facts that are dismally true. One-quarter of the mammals on Earth will become extinct in the next few years. Over eleven thousand species of mammals, birds, and plants are in immediate crisis of extinction. Important environmental habitats for the sustainability of whole ecosystems are being destroyed by “development”, burned or otherwise destroyed by pollution. The Rainforests are being destroyed at a rate of 2 acres a second. The destruction is intentional and man made.

Due to global warming, huge chunks of ice have begun to melt and break off in the Arctic the size of Delaware! Enormous coastal areas will be threatened with flooding resulting in the loss of crops, animals, and natural habitat. Not to mention human lives and the demise of whole towns and cities.

Another recent discovery is that the contrails from airliners create weather. Time lapse photography has shown that after several minutes the contrails expand, forming clouds which alter the natural weather systems. Weather is also “created” and mutated around our large cities, creating “hot” spots and wind tunnels which change regional weather patterns. Rain clouds gather around certain metropolitan areas which have resulted in regional flooding and droughts.

Sometime ago English ley-line scholar Paul Broadhurst told me that the energy rhythm (or “heart beat”) of the earth had increased a tremendous amount. He hypothesized that this increase was in response to the
“earth consciousness” which had increased over the last few years due to people acting to protect the earth and with the increase in the number of Pagans who are, of course, Earth-based. I disagree with this theory. I believe that if the Earth was at rest and “happy” Her heart beat would be slow and steady—not at a hyper level which, to me, indicates that the Earth is in panic. The Earth may, in fact, be fighting for Her life.

Dr. Hawkings suggested that humans need to occupy and colonize other planets to ensure the survival of the human species. With the destruction we have caused on earth since the advent of the Industrial Revolution we should be able to destroy another world in much shorter time! An interesting theory of late is that humans did, in fact, originate on another world—perhaps Mars. When the Marian environment was destroyed humans migrated to the Earth and had to “start over”in their technological development. Now we may again be faced with the same result. An interesting thought.

The Earth’s response is the same response that the human organism displays when confronted with foreign bacteria. It fights back. The depletion of the ozone layer is becoming alarming. Even though the manufacture of fluorocarbons has ceased the ozone layer has continued to diminish. Huge, gaping wholes in the protective layer are appearing in more and more areas. This eventually will allow the ultra-violet rays to pour in causing not only serious skin cancers to become more and more common, but also to destroy the simple microbes that are the foundation of the food chain. When they are gone the rest of the plant and animal species will break down and die. An increase in deadly storms, floods and volcanic action are observed yearly. The Earth is trying to destroy its “germ” population out of self preservation. Humans have become a cancer rapidly destroying the Earth’s ability to survive.

The sad thing is that humans have caused all of these things to occur. We have decided that individual animal species are less important than our menial jobs. We have decided that it is better to burn the rainforest so that cattle can graze upon the land. We have decided that having gas guzzling cars that pollute the atmosphere is more important than keeping the atmosphere clean and pure for our future generations. We have decided that it is better to have massive fish factories sailing the oceans, in some areas of the seas completely obliterating reproductive populations of certain fish, than to ensure that those fish species continue to flourish and to survive into the next millennia.

Are there answers? Yes. It is not too late even now. But the answers will not be easily accepted. To stop this suicidal behavior we must totally change our attitudes, our lifestyles, our obsession with materialism. We need to take chances to create better, more Earth friendly, technologies. The United States has made it illegal to grow hemp because of the association with marijuana. Hemp (the non hallucinogenic form) can be used to manufacture fuels without petroleum products, a vast array of medicines, paper products without the use of wood, clothing and foods. In fact there are over 20,000 uses for hemp that are not allowed to be created in this country due to the strong lumber/petroleum lobbies.

We need to redesign our communities to make them smaller, self sufficient and more pedestrian friendly. The village concept needs to be re-introduced where people can live, work and play where they reside. The American way of living, which requires each person to have a car to commute to work and to shop, is a dead end. The regional mall is certainly creating the death of our small cities and an increase in urban blight. Our towns need to be reborn with their own vitality and character.

The indiscriminate “development” of our rich agricultural land must stop. The continuation of “genetically engineered” foods must cease. Monsanto has created a line of vegetable seeds which will produce only one crop. What this will mean to developing nations already torn apart by hunger is incredible. No longer will they be able to produce a crop of seed plants because the seeds will not be fertile after the first harvest. While a boon to Monsanto’s profits (they will be the sole marketers for seeds if they get their way) this is a case of extreme stupidity and totally lacking in any ethics. They have also created a line of corn which has an internal pesticide which just so happens to also kill any butterfly that may land on it and may, in fact, cause other severe environmental and crop damage.

Many of those who state that they have a “God given right” to make a living need to be reminded that they must act responsibly and ethically. These people do not have the right to make a buck in lieu of an ecosystem. They do not have the right to force small farmers out of business, to monopolize food production, to over-fish, to slaughter indigenous people and destroy those cultures to increase their profits.

We need to downsize our “technologically advanced”society. We have lost our link to Nature and the senses of our ancient ancestors which allowed them to co-exist with the rest of the Earth’s residents in a give and take relationship. Because we have taken so much for so long we have created an extreme state of unbalance and disharmony.

We need a responsible government.

It is the responsibility of every man, woman and child to again become oriented to our place in the organism of the Earth.

Let us turn our energies towards healing the Earth and place our own desires aside for a while.

It is time vote for the people that will create good rather than those who can only promise tax cuts for the wealthy or an increase in our salary. Without the life enriching world of Nature we are truly lost. Those who strive only for personal gain will create a world not worth living in.

In this time of world uncertainty and waging war it is even more important to look at “us”–what we do to ensure that the world remains a wonderful place to be in and not one to shun. It is time to ensure that all of the people of the world are able to be sheltered, to have enough to eat, to enjoy their cultures in peace. It has to start with
“us”.

Visit author’s website.

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Front Page
Friday, November 4th, 2005

The following speech was given in March 1996. It is reposted from Gandhi Today.

Thoughts about Gandhi and Non-Violence

Jan Viklund

The year of 1991 was a year of dramatic changes in our global village and in my personal life. As the war in the Persian Gulf escalated, some words kept echoing in my mind:
“Villains don’t fall from the skies, neither do they pop out of the ground like evil spirits. They must be seen as symptoms of society and therefore every citizen is responsible for their existence.”

Yugoslavia broke down and I recalled some other remarks by the same man to his fellow countrymen:

“A nation of 350 millions don’t need the dagger of the assain, nor the sword, the speard or the bullet. It needs a will of its own.”

Later on that same year, as the autumnleaves began to fall, so did the foundations of Russia. The attempted coup was successfully repudiated by nonviolence in action by the citizens of Moscow in a wellorganized human chain around their White House, showing the truth in these words:

“The political power is based on the maxim that the government of the people is possible, only as long as they consciencely or unconsciencely consent to be governed. The power resides in the people and are for some time trusted to those you choose as your representatives.”

I slowly began to realise the significance of that great little man who Winston Churchill called the halfnaked fakire – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, also called Mahatma, the great soul. A title of honor he certainly wasn’t very pleased with. As one of his fellowworkers commented: “India has had her share of all to many gurus and prophets. Gandhi is good enough just as a human being.”

I also discovered that although India holds Gandhi as the Father of the Nation, and the Western Peace Movement turned him into a holy relic, much remains to be done – to say the least – on that experiment in nonviolence that he started in this century.

The opposite conception
War and peace, love and hate, bad and good… we have opposite conceptions for most things in the human existence. But what do we really have as an opposite conception for violence? As long as we lack a truly concrete definition in our mind, we are not capable of expressing it in daily action. Ahimsa – the sanskrit definition for nonviolence also stands for universal love, compassion. Despite the many conflicts in India, ahimsa is a far more established definition in the East than nonviolence is in the West. The main difference is that we more or less consider it as a technique, a method, or just the absence or freedom from violence, whereas in India ahimsa stands for a whole philosophy of life, a way of living. The origin of ahimsa goes back to 3.000 B.C., to Buddha and the Buddhism, and to Lord Mahavira, the founder of Jainism. Jain means a conquerer, not a conquerer of countries or treasures, but a conquerer of the self. One who has mastered his own desires. There are approximately 10.000 jains in the world today, belonging to a branch of hinduism that has no bloodshed on it’s conscience. But unlike the Tibetan Buddhists they have not suffered any major oppression.

What Gandhi did in the 30s is that he developed the ancient hindu philosophy of ahimsa, into a social and political tool, not only to make India independent but also to uplift the self-confidence of every Indian, in his constructive programme for social, religious, political and economic justice.

Nonviolent resistance
When Gandhi started his commitment back in South Africa, the English press referred to the struggle as a method of “passive resistance”, a term sesponsible for that deep-rooted misinterpretation of nonviolence as a form of passivity. Actions of nonviolence is on the contrary exactly what is says – actions which are nonviolent. Gandhi coined a new word for this. Satyagraha. It’s made up of two sanskrit words, satya and graha. Satya means “that which is”, which is undestroyable, or thruth, and graha means holding on to something. So satyagraha litterally means holding on to the truth, and offer nonviolent resistance, even at the cost of your own life.

The one who offers satayagraha is by the way called a satyagrahi.

It’s almost impossible to estimate the number of satyagraha campaigns in India during Gandhis’ lifetime, they where several hundred linked together, and even today satyagraha is performed by local villages in great amount, when the corruption in India gets too serious. A popular form of satyagraha is to do everything “according to the book”, which paralyzes the entire system. Watch out for that reverse and odd form of strike, when you go to India!

The Soul-force
The force of violence is mecanichal, physical, while the force of nonviolence is mental and spiritual. Gandhi also referred to satyagraha as the soul-force. The main thing when you offers nonviolent resistance is to distinguish between the wrong-doer and the wrong-being-done.

That means you oppose the injustice, but without loosing sight of the human being inside the aggressor or the opponent. I’d like to quote Adam Curle on this psychological aspect. He’s in his 80s by now, and has for several years been working as negotiator and peace mediator between guerilla leaders and governments in South America, Africa and Asia. In the foreword of one of his books he actually says that “the term nonviolence is just as insufficient as calling love non-hate. And he goes on to explain that ” to say ‘I non-hate you, darling’, would seem like a fairly lukewarm expression.” Here follows some extract from the chapter about nonviolence on the indiviual level:

We can’t controll our thoughts and emotions completely. Perhaps we don’t express them in words, but they more or less arise spontaneously. It’s easy to verify this. Try to observe or memorize how your thoughts jump from one subject to another and ends up somewhere it couldn’t be predicted, as a link in an hidden chain of associations. These associations dominate a greater part of our mind, and is connected to hidden dreams and memories. They bring us moments of anxiety, depression, happiness, fear and self-satisfaction.

We are not aware from one moment to another of who we are. We are not experiencing our own presence. When we are angry, we are the anger. When we are depressed, we are the depression. We are not aware of ourselves as a special phycho-physical unite. We are not aware of the basic foundations for our existence, the origin we share with others which relates us with everybody. Our instinct of self-preservation is strong and prevent us from recognizing the facts that links us to other human beings. But still, we notice that something is missing, that something in our lifes is unsatisfactory.

Our identity
We try to compensate this by building a false identity, we can call it the “I” or the ego. This image of myself, that I call
“I”, and which I think is a constant, is really a constantly changing collections of moods, impulses, thoughts and imaginations. Yesterdays
“I” are not todays “I”. Although some characters in all those different “I’s” are more permanent than others and stands for some continuity, our image of the “I” is an illusion. That “I” which appears in the company of friends, when we want to make an impression on people, with people we feel afraid of or dislike, people we love, when we are happy, depressed – all these are different, separate personalities, masks we put on or off. But unlike actors we are not aware that we do it.

We create images of an “I” with bits and pieces of our life, which we hope shall make an attractive and pleasant impression. The cornerstone in this image may very well be a special talent or quality which we ourself consider of great value. But that which satisfy us, not necessarily satisfy others – and then we feel that the “I” lets us down.

When this happens we experience what we can call an crisis of identity. We automatically try to rebuild the broken defence system of the ego. We blame the damages on the circumstances or other people – they are stupid, have bad taste, the show envy, etc. etc. At the same time, we rebuild our
“I” so it can handle any further attacks. When the damages are too serious to handle, we become what we call depressed.

These states of minds that occur then, are harmful for all human relationships, especially for those that demands a great inner strength and sensibility, such as mediation, peacekeeping and active nonviolence. There you need a calm mind, which will not be affected by the need and fears from an unsatisfactory ego, and which is capable of creating a serious communication with others, a contact with their common origin. A disturbed mind just tend to influence others with its own anxiety.

Individual nonviolence
Well, how do we react when we are faced with violence – physical violence, mental violence or social violence? The first impulse can be anger and a strong sense of revenge, to meet violence with violence. Another reaction can be to give up, out of fear. That would mean a form of cowardice which turns away from injustice, and which according to Gandhi is worse than revenge, because it let’s the violence continue unstopped.

No, we must first establish that we are not conducted by an depressed ego, and than realise that we and the one who threaten us have a problem in common. We are faced with the danger of being hurt in larger or smaller extent, while the aggressor is faced with the moral danger of hurting another person.

What’s that for some sort of moral danger, you may ask. Well, the danger is that the aggressor may develop a violent behavior that narrows his possibilities of reaction, and may lead to both bad reputation and painful revenge. For the moment he’s naturally not aware of this. Therefore we must not only try to prevent violence, but to do it in a way that makes him understand that his methods will hurt him just as much as it will hurt us. To do this is is the very core, the essence of nonviolence. It’s a kind of technique which uses the violent energy of the aggressor to turn upside down on his self-understanding.

Margot and the landlordess
A more concrete example may illustrate this: (this is a true story)
Margot, a young women from a poor family in the north of England, got an education at a London University to be a socialworker, moved to London and rented a room. Among the students there were a large number of Africans. Margot made friends with them and sometimes she invited them to tea in her room. But one day her landlordess said: “I have noticed that you invite black people. I don’t like them and must ask you not to do that.”Margot replied to her: “I can assure that they won’t do anything harmful.”The landlordess said: ” That doesn’t matter. I just don’t want them in my house, and that’s that.” Margot said: “It’s your house, and you have the right to decide who may or may not visite it. I shall not invite them again.”

Margot now wrestled with her own disappointment and pain, and manage to get rid of the bitterness over the landlordess’ behavior, by the insight that the woman was stuck in the conventional racism that existed within the society. She also realised that this attitude couldn’t be confronted openly. At the same time, Margot decided that if she wasn’t permitted to mingle with her African friends, she wouldn’t invite any friends at all. Everything else would in some way mean that she accepted her landlordess prejudice. After some weeks the landlordess noticed that no one came to visit Margot. She remarked: “You should mingle more with your friends, it’s not right for a girl like you to be all alone.”

Calmly and without any anger Margot explained the situation and the landlordess became most regretful. “Oh, please, invite them”, she said. ” Their color really doesn’t make any difference.”

So Margot invited them again. When the landlordess met them she discovered that she actually liked them, and furthermore let them rent some rooms. If Margot have consented to the landlordess’ restrictions under protest, turned angry and moved out, it would have brought damage to them both. Margot would have lost a room she liked in any other way, and been forced to look for another, the landlordess would have been forced to look for another guest and – most important – the racism would have remain without any modifications.

Margot was a women with high principles, that ment more to her than her own social life. They proved to be a lot stronger than the landlordess prejudice. But often we are involved in disputes where the moral principles seems less important than our own wellbeing, our comfort and our sense of being illtreated.

So far Adam Curle, who recently published a report on his work in Bosnia, where several centers for Peace and Nonviolence has been doing a tremendous job in refugee camps and among youth – far, far outside of the media spotlights. This book is called “Another Way – Positive Response to Contemporary Violence” (Jon Carpenter Publishing 1995, ISBN 1 897766 22 X) I strongly recommend it!

Recognizing nonviolence
I have found that life persists in the midst of destruction, remarked Gandhi when thousands of sikhs were massakred in Amritsar in India 1919. “And therefore I came to the conclusion that there exists a force that is stronger than violence. But history don’t recognize nonviolence. If two brothers quarrel and become friends again, this do not become history. But if they need the help of a lawyer or hurt each other serously it will certainly be recorded in the books. Nonviolence is that everlasting force which upholds the universe. History just becomes a notebook of the interruptions in that continouting flow.”

Three years ago I first heard about an international campaign aimed to bring about some changes in this. That is to finally recognize nonviolent resistance in our political structure, in our societies. It is initated by an female Indian peace reseacher, Dr. Suman Khanna, who made her sholarship on Gandhi in 1978 and has been visiting Sweden regulary since the mid 80s. I want to point out that there are two kinds of peace researching, soft peace reseach and hard peace research. The latter has to do with military expenditure, defence policy and nuclear disarmament, and get a lot of attention, while soft peace research has to to with mediation, civil relationships and nonviolent conflict resolution – and is a bit less glamorous and not so wellpaid. Suman Khanna works in that field.

- According to Gandhi the aim of education is to build character, she says. But what we do, both in the East and the West, is to produce money-making machines, not thinking human beings. If we made thinking human beings the world wouldn’t look like this today.

Waste of human brilliance
In Sweden she discovered that the Nordic Peace movement struggled with many inner conflicts, that it had became a protest movement, rather than that social movement Gandhi advocated. She had many discussions with Scandinavians who couldn’t accept that besides body and intellect, man also has a soul. The world consume 2 million dollars every minute on military expenditure, but its not mainly a question of a waste of money but with the human brilliance.

- All this power could be used for something constructive, says Suman. I have worked in the slum areas of India, in the greater part of Calcutta, and seen children die in their mothers arms, just because they did not have one rupie for an injection! There are many forms of violence and Gandhi saw poverty as the worst form. 35.000 children die every day due to malnutrition and lack of social care.

To handle conflict
When Suman Khanna visit schools and universities she analyzes the war system with the pupils. What do you think are the main causes? she asks them. Often the answer will be conflicts. But what is a conflict?

- Conflict is only a clash of interest and opinons, says Suman. They are not the real problem. There will always be different thoughts and ideas. We are different! It’s a beaty in this. The question is not conflict itself, it is how we handle conflict. And there are only two ways – through violence or through nonviolence. If conflict is handled properly they can lead to growth in institutions, they can lead to growth in personal relationships. But we have the war system of today, because we – that is adults living in democracies – have decided, that when there will be a conflict we may use violence to resolve it.

- We shouldn’t confuse the habitual with the natural, she continues. We teaches as history only is a matter of war, but the fact is that nonviolent resistance has been used by a lot more people besides Gandhi and Martin Luther King. It is not a question whether nonviolence works, but that it hasn’t been recognized in the political structure.

During Sumans workshops the need for a concrete plan to promote nonviolent resistance internationally, developed. and this resulted in a campaign which was launched last year, on the 50th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Aug. 6th 1995, and is planned to continue to the year 2000. The campaign has been initiated in 16 countries by now, including Sweden.

Nonviolent Defense
Nonviolence is a science, Suman remarks. It does not mean just sitting around feeling good about the world. Without analysis, research and proper training you can’t practise it. We have constructed a perfect violent defense system. But we haven’t put so much as one dollar a day aside, on systematic training in nonviolent defense.

And there is such a defense. In USA we have the Civilian-Based Defence Association, where professor Gene Sharp has been doing reseach on the issue for over 30 years. In The Politics of Nonviolent Action, a regular encyclopedia on nonviolence, he systematically describes 198 specific actions, including historical examples. Ever since the 60s the ideas of a civilian based, nonviolent form of defense has survived even in Sweden. In 1974 the Swedish government established a delegation for non-military resistance, to investigate this possibilities. But in the end it just turned out to be a lot of bureaucracy, and quite unrecognized by the general public – that is, the very people who is supposed to be trained and educated in nonviolent defense.

The Peace Army
Actually, the first seeds of nonviolent defense was already spread by Gandhi, at the ashrams and communities where thousands of people from all different nationalities and religions lived together. Gandhi talked about a Peace Army, Shanti Sena.

“O, misers, your speech is not backed by sena”, it says in the Vedas. Meaning is has no power, it will not carry. Literally sena means a band of people assembled to do or die. The idea occured in 1914, while Gandhi struggled in South Africa and the world got ready for the first world war. What is a winning army really, Gandhi asked himself. The armed chariot that wins the victory of Rama in Ramayana is not of the ordinary kind:

“Courage is it’s wheels; character it’s banner; self disciplin and good will it’s horses, with mercy and spiritual balance as it’s reins.”

This was the equipment suitable for the nonviolent soldier. In the 20s Shanti Sena became a part of the Indian struggle for independence and fostered fearless and passioned co-workers. Says Gandhi: “Satyagraha brigades can be developed in every village and block in the city. They must remain free from political intrigue, but with good judgement and a will to serve.”

Several of western friends of Gandhi was inspired. Dr Maude Royden in an open letter of London Daily Express in 1932, asked for volontaries for a peace army. It would serve as a buffert between the fighting Japanese and Chinese forces in Shanghai.

Martin Luther King Jr in India
After Gandhi’s death Shanti Sena went into decline. Vinoba Bhave, the spiritual inheritant of Gandhi, revived the idea in the end of the 50s.

March 2nd 1959 eight hundred satyagrahis gathered for a march from Ajmer to Gagwana. One of the participators was Martin Luther King. At the camp after the march King asked Vinoba about the possibilities for satyagraha in the nuclear age.

We no longer can afford conflicts of mental attitudes, Vinoba answered. Courage, vision and faith are necessary elements for a mutual disarmament. I feel that two forces will shape the human life hereafter, those of spirituality and those of science. But a third force should cement these two together.

Shanti Sena expanded and included disaster relief after floods, refugee services, work with Himalayan bandits, and racial riots. The Shanti Sena also became internationally active and collaborated with people in Cyprus, Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Unarmed Peacekeeping Force
In 1971 Vinoba formulated a proposal for an “Unarmed Peacekeeping Force”, presented to the UN. The idea resulted in the “Cyprus Resettlement Project” of 1972-1974.

Shanti Sena got several follow organizations in the west. Peace Brigades International was established in Canada 1981. They train escorts to threatened human rights activists in different parts of the world. Peace Brigades have offices in 14 countries, including one in Sweden.

Civil threats
Most peace researchers today agree on that the major military threats are decreasing, that after the end of the Cold War, what we are witnessing is a large number of civil wars, within countries, not war between countries. They also agree on that the so-called civil threats are increasing. Civil threats, that is enviromental disasters, terrorism, xenophebia and racial violence. But defending human rights and the enviroment requires a completely new kind of defence. Bjˆrn Hettne, peace researcher at the University of Gothenburg, in an article recently warned for a potential risk of civil war, even in a country like Sweden. There are a number of trustworthy indicators of a society on the edge of a breakdown, and two of them are: 1, when the largest group of people with a common interest, is fairly small, and 2, when the difference in standards of living increase in the society.

“We lived on the belief that we had a rather low level of conflict in Sweden,” Bjˆrn Hettne remarks. “But the main solidarity is declining, in favour of the interest of your own group of people. There is a lack of security, which expresses itself in violence.”

Hettne’s opinion is that you need more psychological research, less soldiers, and a lot more active civilians.

In that perspective, there is an urgent need to develop the same self-confidence in our society, as Gandhi managed to do in India in the 30s. More than anything else he enlightened his people and made them feel faith, trust and courage. But I look around me today and I see mistrust and discourage.

You can’t live on mistrust and discourage. Your need faith, trust and courage as well as you need food and water. Then you don’t need any violent walls to surround you. With faith, trust and courage, nonviolence becomes reality and not just a longing or a wish.

I would like to invite you to proceed Gandhi’s experiment in nonviolence and participate in this very important campaign.

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Front Page
Tuesday, November 1st, 2005

The following song was written by Karen Rupprecht and Pam Minor to help teach children to co-Operate. Listen to the song.

Working Together

Some things are hard for one to do
Some things are hard for one to do

It’s more fun when there are two
It’s more fun when there are two

If three four five can lend a hand
If three four five can lend a hand

Then we’ll have a happy band
Then we’ll have a happy band

Chorus:

Working together it’s a snap
No arguments or things like that
Working together you will see
It’s much more fun in harmony

Some things are hard for one to do
Some things are hard for one to do

Please jump in and help me too
Please jump in and help me too

If six or eight or ten jump in
If six or eight or ten jump in

All together we will win
All together we will win

Listen to the song. This song is available on Perfectly Proper Musical Manners. More from: Songs for Teaching

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