Towards a cost based economy

Our economy is organised around maximising profit. Never enough. Winner takes all. As a result of that value system a handful ‘winners own’ half the planet. That is utter nonsense to my common sense. And as is shown, counterproductive to a thriving humanity. I know from experience value is naturally differently attributed. My smallest economy is my home. There it turns out other rules apply. They emerged as mechanisms to minimise the efforts necessary to fulfil my needs.

The frame is simple and straight forward. Every choice comes at a cost. Maximising profit today will have it’s price later. No externalising possible, nothing to extract from elsewhere. During my lifetime it turned out that the same truth ought to apply to the global economy. To me it makes sense that the natural economical laws that rule my household should ultimately rule the world. 

The current economy is based on an open model. Humanity exploits the world to it’s maximum. With the successful extraction of millennia old natural resources and externalisation of all costs we now threaten our own survival. We are littering and destroying our very own habitat. 

We need to invent a proper circular economy. And in order to do that, we need to redesign the old model. It is based on competition. That needs some fundamental rethinking. Collaboration is at least an essential counterweight. My current guess we need at least a healthy balance between those two extremes of this dichotomy. And different measures. Inside well organised companies it is all about minimising costs while maintaining at least the minimal viable output. That logic seems identical to the one that applies in my very own household.
So it would be interesting to think about how this can be scaled to the world economy.

Embodied presencing

schizoid-experience

The main message of Philip Shepherds book “Radical Wholeness” is gradually sinking in. With  innumerable effects and consequences. This one I want to note here: My body feels how my mind jumps around in response to the many impulses I become aware of.
I can now consciously perceive reflexes that have ruled my life so far. Like the dissociation when confronted with all sorts of bullshit and other things that are just ‘off’, just not in sync with the wholeness of the situation. I have labeled this sensitivity as my crap detector, but it seems to be more than this rational analytical faculty. Now I can also feel that this mental perspective is a result of a fear based reaction. It is like instinctively instantly jumping away as far as possible from this threatening unsafe experience. From the perceived wrongness. Leaving the body behind and observing from the ceiling. OMG. Breathe Harry…

The GCC and it’s allies.

At the end of the day, my day anyway, it is all about people. How do we connect, communicate and collaborate? If that went well I had a great day.
Yesterday I had GCC Zoom sessions trying to realise just that. And it covered the full spectrum between my desperate sense of isolation and this warm flood of belonging.
The exploration of how to be, do and decide together requires all my capacities, my reasoning, feeling, sense making and acting.

The GCC attracts many smart and sensitive people, aware of the great survival challenge cause by the rigged extraction system we live in. That is an immense pool of intelligence, ideas, creativity and experience. Sam Hahn defined one of the downsides as the smart people problem. I labeled the pattern Swarm Stupidity.

I already struggle to calibrate my vision with my own actions. So combining our rich and complex ideas and reaching meaningful decisions together can feel like a massive complex challenge.

 

 

The second session this Friday was an interesting exploration into these dynamics. Watch this video to get a feel for the complexity and the strength of the intention to sort it out and make sense of it leading to the proper decisions and actions.

The definition of a good decision seems to depend on the maturity of the decision makers. This demands adult behaviour.good=

The first session was more focused on the function and structure of the collective website, https://globalchallengescollaboration.org/
The proposal Joshua offered and created was a central WordPress website and a personal WordPress Blog for every participant. (You currently reading this on mine.)
So like a mothership in cyberspace with many interlinking other virtual vessels.

GCC-enterprise

I like and support this idea. This way the content created stays under my control and does not vanish on the timeline of facebook or another commercial social platform.
I still am on the beginning of the learning curve, but I am motivated to master this.

So following what I learned from William Charlton I share my current concept of the GCC website structure in the form of a proposal.

GCC-site-proposalAs Heidi suggested I would like to keep the front landing page short, sweet and simple. Clarity on the (current) purpose of the GCC  and the function of the site are key. And then of course the people with what they bring and desire. As I said, at the end of the day, my day anyway, it is all about people. How do we connect, communicate and collaborate?

So just three entry points. Anyone interested can quickly find more following these links into the site. I would design all other features like active discussions (forums), the archive of discussions (videos) and all other around this main structure.

One exception could be this last suggestion at the end of this Friday session on decision making. A simple link to the donation option is obvious, simple and probably very rewarding:

donate

Your feedback is very welcome in the comment section below. Thank you for your kind attention.

My experience is part of the collective

GCC-GardenLast year I spent many hours on line. In generative conversations that builded trust and intimacy across cyberspace. Across the pixelbridge as I coined it. I never dared to imagine the unprecedented power of genuine human connections becoming so present and available. Thanks to this new combination of digital technology and more mature social behaviors. Global peer to peer communication and collaboration has become available to anyone with a clear mind and internet access.

Clearing the mind has been my main struggle. So many thoughts, beliefs, convictions and worldviews are thrown at me that I spent most of my time sorting it out.

Messy buddy list

This is just to get a first overview of the wordpress sites of my GCC buddies

My need to belong

This is how I felt for years. I unconsciously made that feeling visible. Only after painting, I recognised it. That feeling of being totally alien in a naive representation of a safe nourishing world. Crying without a voice. Only then I became aware of it.
Like this cartoon fish finding himself in the wrong story. Wrong place, wrong orientation, wrong direction. Anguish, panic and no voice to utter the sheer terror…

burst

Underneath this I now suspect my deep unmet need to be seen and received in this world. The painting dates 1997, so two decades ago. Only now I become aware of many of my unconscious motives. I want to belong. I need to take my proper place.

The growing GCC network

Mothership

This Saturday ‘Barn Raising’ conversation gave me the opportunity to connect with Alex Reid from New Zealand, Heidi Hornlein from Italy, Jonah Lion from the United States. And Esteban Trev from Mexico. That gave me the opportunity to be informed about their websites.
Heidi is hosting The Wisdom Factory. Her blog is http://www.the-wisdom-factory.com
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Alex Reid is proposing a pattern for networking. His idea is based on propagating doubling contacts. That naturally leads to logarithmic growth. You can find him and his blog at https://www.groupsstartup.net/.  I hope that in the near future we will be all nicely gathering around the mothership, the https://globalchallengescollaboration.org/ That one exists thanks to the initiative by Joshua Bridge, http://joshuabridge.com/
Glenn Gaasland joined later.He currently does not seem to have an active site, but his Youtube Channel is here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyMxOCbplZx2aH2vBZmPcmQ
I am happy with the gradual growth of our virtual interconnectedness.

This tool we call language

From the moment I was introduced to the ‘Teal’ movement it was extremely difficult to understand all I did not understand. Everything mentioned was new, still emerging and without clear structure. Basically the language was unable to properly word what happened. The tools to grasp the evolution had to be developed as part of that process.

 

teal4.png

These are my sketchnotes from my first visit to the local Teal Community in Antwerp, in April 2016. (I added colour later to make the flow more readable.) We already were conscious that a clear shared language was key. The notes show at least three mentions of that need. The non-dutch readers can recognise this one:

taal=sleutel

I heard vague descriptions that have become familiar since then. For instance the most common might be ‘resonate’. It is a nice distinction from the rational ‘understand’ and the emotional ‘like’.

Yet I have seen little orchestrated effort in guiding the mostly spontaneous language evolution. I now think that would be helpful. Especially because this systemic level of development offers the opportunity to avoid the ambiguity that can hamper understanding. (Noting that ambiguity has a value of it’s own).
We need clean clear and plain language to express these more integral ways of being. Words to properly describe the mechanisms of the sovereign accountable commons we want to create. Putting it on the docket.

Scared and curious

I have always been both scared and curious. The label Schizoid fits me. But I always struggled to explain how this affects my behaviour. Since I stumbled on this lovely little puppy video on Youtube, thats became a lot easier. It metaphorically shows how I go about daily life. I approach every situation like the puppy approaches the plastic bottle. I love my life, but it is sometimes hard for me to stay present in it. So I constantly zoom in and out of reality…