Author: standardsoflife

The Path to a Future: The Three Premises

Part 3 in the serialization of the The Path to A Future. The Path of orderly change.

A new section will be posted every 2 weeks during 2011. Enjoy!
If you want to get a free PDF of the book go to http://www.standardsoflife.org/thepathtoafuture.

Peace, security and prosperity.

The interrelated, mutual dependence of these three factors is the essence of The Path, and we must understand those relationships in some depth if we are to avoid the navigation problems of our past. Tackled independently from each other none of them is attainable, but pursued with a fundamentally integrated vision all of them are achievable.

  • Peace allows us to focus our efforts and resources on the real problems.
  • Mutual, universal security allows everyone to move beyond survival to become active and voluntary participants in building the Path.
  • Prosperity is the incentive that draws people to the Path, and it is the reward returned to everyone for building it.

These three premises are inextricably linked, and vital to each other’s success.

A context that helps to frame the situation we find ourselves in today arose in the last century with the dawn of the nuclear age, when we ushered in that most human of innovations: Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD for short. In so doing, we helped to set the groundwork for where we are today: MADDER (Mutually Assured Displacement and Destruction by Environmental Reduction).

Whereas MAD left our fate resting on the decisions and actions of a very few military and political leaders, not going MADDER depends on the decisions and actions of the vast majority of our planet’s inhabitants. This necessity for hundreds of billions of decisions drives the course of the Path at every turn. If the Path does not provide for every citizen, every community, every nation, and every continent to join in and travel the same route, it will not lead us to our desired destination. It will only leave us madder.

To get everyone involved, the Path must offer everyone the opportunity to participate in the journey and the destination. The peace, security and prosperity that are the features of the Path must be available to, and attainable by, everyone. I’m sure that peace, security and prosperity are already most people’s goals in life, so it is not their desirability but their attainability that is the issue.

This is a very important element that is worth sitting with a while. Any solution, strategy or plan that does not account for the need to motivate and incorporate the vast majority of the world’s population into the processes cannot succeed. Good ideas that serve a minority will not result in the level of change necessary to mitigate our planetary impact. The need for universal participation requires that we adhere to serving the greater good of all, if we are to succeed for any of us individually. It’s almost as if the universe set up this situation specifically to make us face our most profound choices.

We have spent the last thousand years promoting and establishing mechanisms and behaviours that have led directly to where we are today. We have been so successful in that endeavour that we are now faced with the equal task of disestablishing or diverting those patterns without destabilizing our entire structure. The only way to do this is to make sure that we are following naturally sound principles that serve all the participants, as well as each of us individually.

Peace, security and prosperity are big words, often used by many, and meaning very different things in different contexts. They have quite specific meanings for the Path, so before we go on to explore the relationships between these three premises and their application in our lives, let’s get clear about what we mean by each one, individually.

Insight : Desire : Resistance : Momentum : Pressure : Change : Effort

The incredible events of January 2011 in North Africa and the Middle East show us the natural passage of real change. Change is not easy, it is not painless, and we all have a certain resistance to it. Whether it is in our personal lives or on the political and social sphere, we recognize the need for change long before we act to actually bring about that change.

The result of our natural resistance to change is that, when it does happen, it appears to happen quickly. It looks like there is a sudden turn around, a dramatic change of character that seems to precipitate out of nowhere. It does not come out of “no where”, it is just “now here”. Real change is preceded by many steps before the step we call the “change”. First there is insight into the condition that transforms unconscious acceptance into a conscious desire for something different. Then there is resistance as the conscious mind evaluates the consequences to everything else that will result from this change. There is natural caution and wariness that mitigates against disruption that might not justify the benefits of the change. If the value of the change is sufficient, the desire for it builds momentum internally against the bulwark of resistance and starts to build up pressure. Finally when the pressure is high enough, some random event appears to trigger a rapid progression of actions and awakenings. This is the moment we call “change”; in fact, this moment is the culmination of a process.

There are two important facets to this process that are best consciously recognized in advance for the change to be both lasting and as free of collateral damage as possible. First, that there is time to prepare; second, that after the change event there is still lot of work to do.

The change event is often so seemingly spontaneous and rapid that developments occur in quick succession, and there little, or no, time to develop processes or plans in the moment. This is the reason why it is “the ideas lying around at the time” that become the modus operandi immediately after the event. In our personal lives the change event often comes to us without an opportunity to consciously perceive its imminent arrival, and so we are necessarily at the mercy of the tools that we have immediately to hand at the time. But in political and social change there is usually a developing consciousness that affords some the opportunity of foresight, and they can prepare the ground in advance of the event by evaluating and developing the options and alternatives. This preparation, by those who can, is valuable and important work, performing a significant service to others and the greater good.

After the change event(s), the translation of insight and desire into a lasting and credibly different path forward requires real effort and focus. To a certain extent, the drivers that lead to change happen unconsciously and spontaneously, but a new reality must be forged consciously out of the present conditions. Prior preparation can help just by recognizing the amount of work that will need to be done after the event, and how long it will take. Change is for the best when it is backed by determination and effort – history is littered with the stories of post-revolutionary reversion.

All this is the reason for developing The Standards of LIFE. A recognition that significant pressure is building in societies across the world and that the coming decade will see resistance overcome in many places, in many hearts and in different conditions. We are working to develop alternative models for our societies, our freedom and our prosperity that will serve us well when we decide that the time is right for us to change our status quo. Join us! Start preparing for your change!

2011 : “Enough!”

Waiting for someone else

Hoping

Trying the easy option

Restoring the old status quo

Lazy morality

Turning a blind eye to violence

Magic budget math

Profit motive pardons

Fear

Disrespect

Delusion

Diplomacy

Double standards

Media domination

Factory food production

Data collation

Depression diagnosis

Victimhood

Excuses

Disengaging distraction

 

The Path to a Future: The Path

Part 2 in the serialization of the The Path to A Future. The Path of orderly change.

A new section will be posted every 2 weeks during 2011. Enjoy!
If you want to get a free PDF of the book go to http://www.standardsoflife.org/thepathtoafuture.

What makes now such an important time is that we have reached a crossroads. We are at a point where the only constraint on our destination is our choice of direction, our decision to limit our impact on our environment, this planet.

We have scaled the heights of growth and technology so effectively that, without a singular focus on living sustainably, we will change our planet’s environment very significantly, probably catastrophically. No matter where you live, or how rich you are, or how clever you are, you cannot be sure that you or your offspring will be amongst the survivors of climate change. Your best bet, by a long shot, is to choose orderly change over chaos. The Path is that orderly change.

The Path follows a simple logic that goes like this:

  • In order to bring about the global changes necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change we need peace. Without peace we will not be able to assemble or coordinate the resources and processes required to build The Path to a Future.
  • Even with peace, we still need everyone’s voluntary, personal and active participation in order to make the right choices, select the best leaders, develop the technologies, work together and implement the changes.
  • We’re not going to get global peace and cooperation unless there’s something in it for everyone. The Path to a Future cannot just be in people’s eventual interest; it must be the best thing for each and every one of us to do now.
  • Finally, The Path has to lead to a future that we want to live in. The future we aim for must be much better if we are collectively going to make the effort required to get there. This future must not only be sustainable, it must be much more fun, with more freedom and ample opportunities for joy for all.

The Path is made from three simple, reinforcing elements:

  • Peace is necessary to focus our resources on providing for our security.
  • Security allows prosperity to flourish.
  • Prosperity allows us to build greater security that sustains the peace, which makes broader prosperity possible.

These three things are inter-dependant. Not new and not rocket science, but with one big and important difference today: realistic achievability.

The link between peace and prosperity was expressed eloquently by Martin Luther King a generation ago (Beyond Vietnam, April 4 1967, New York), and the generation before that by Gandhi, and so forth back through the generations of time. What is different now is the global impact of our choices, and the possibility for global change. Before now to imagine globally coordinated or synchronized change was the stuff of dreams, but today the imagined differences and barriers between peoples have been brought low by the advent of global telecommunications.

The fear that others do not want the same results or that different cultures have irreconcilable differences has kept our sights low and our vision narrow. Now we can see on TV, with our own eyes, people in every corner of the world speak of the same desires, the same intentions and the same simple hopes for themselves, their communities and their planet. Mothers in Maharashtra, Manchester and Malawi all want exactly the same things for themselves and their families.

Keep this in mind as you wind your way down The Path with me. It really is possible for people everywhere to adopt the simple changes proposed in this book, and implement them where they live. In our time, in this age, these ideas can be discovered, disseminated and the process of change started. Within a decade change can be happening across the surface of the globe.

In this book I will attempt to show you that you can build this Path, that there are changes that you can make in the community, region and state that you live in today. I will try to be explicit about what the changes are, without ignoring the fact that exactly how they are achieved is going to be dependent on your specific situation.

After reading this book I hope that you will share with me:

  • A joy about the possibilities in front of us
  • An understanding of how the changes work together to create The Path
  • An enthusiasm for sharing The Path with others, based on your own intuitions and understanding of its value
  • A desire to start the changes where you live See you on The Path to our Future.

Continue reading “The Path to a Future: The Path”

The Path to a Future: Setting Out

The first part in the serialization of the The Path to A Future. A new section will be posted every 2 weeks during 2011. Enjoy!
If you want to get a free PDF of the book go to http://www.standardsoflife.org/thepathtoafuture.

So here we sit on the third rock from the Sun, in an otherwise basically lifeless solar system, living in a gloriously beautiful, paper-thin atmosphere that has the capacity to support and nourish us all. We have copious quantities of energy streaming into and around our planet and the technology to harness it. We have oodles of delicious food and the capacity to grow and distribute it. There is nothing standing between us and global peace.

And yet, as we enter our 41st Millennium, our economies are degrading our atmosphere and pillaging the planet, leaving vast swathes of desolation in our physical and social environments. We are diminishing our capacity to sustain life and are in danger of placing the solutions beyond our reach. Our democracies are perilously dysfunctional, and our grasp of the consequences almost suicidally absent. Only by harnessing our collective wisdom to our course of actions can we make the fundamental changes to our economies and societies necessary to achieve sustainable prosperity.

So, are we really just going to let it all go to ….?

For want of a plan, and the courage to follow it? Because it requires hard choices and hard work? Those are not good enough reasons for inaction.

Now is the time to act. Now is the only time we have. Today we can have evolution before revolution, tomorrow maybe not. Change is inevitable, but what changes is up to you and me.

The truth is that there is a path we can take, a path that leads to sustainable prosperity, but we will not choose what we cannot see. We do have the choice. There is a realistic, practical option for coexistence and prosperity. We have only to grasp the opportunity, to understand that this is the right time. This is a time pregnant with potential, and we are the ones alive in this time! All that is required is for us to see a path that will lead us to where we want to go. A clear, simple and achievable path.

Such a path of change must be so rooted in common sense that it is self evident on receipt, and so simple in application that it is realistically achievable by all. It will have to be hewn from the universal nature of humanity, and flexible enough to be shaped by the diaspora that adopts it.

This book shows you that such a path is available.

In the chaos and confusion of these times it seems that we are a little lost as to what to do differently, what to change or how to change it. I am convinced that by starting with simple observation of ourselves we can arrive at a clear understanding of what we need to change, and what it should look like after we’ve changed it. In these pages I explore natural principles which can guide us in reformulating the structures of our societies. If we start simply and are honest in observing ourselves, we can see these principles at work in our own lives.

Using these principles to formulate a path, we will have a rallying point, a banner around which all who are interested in change can gather together to promote the issues they feel are most important, in concert with everyone else and their individual motivations for seeking change.

This is about getting our act together, about focusing on the strategy and channeling our energy and enthusiasm for a better future into a common purpose. Whatever your specific concerns, there is little chance of any of our issues being resolved without a strategic, over-arching framework. We need a construct that serves those that are seeking change, as well as others who don’t know what to change, and even those who haven’t decided to change anything.

While many futures are available to us, individually and collectively, this is a story about one path that leads to a future in which we live in sustainable prosperity. There are other futures available to us. There are futures full of the same struggles, violence and waste that have characterized much of human history to date. Those futures are indisputably possible, and if we don’t choose differently they are our default destination.

The choices we face between peace and war, respect and hubris, love and hate are not new; we have faced them since the dawn of our times. The difference today is that our choices will affect everyone, everywhere, because they will affect the nature of the planet we all live on. Whatever we do, we are headed for massive changes to our cultures and our climate. The difference is whether we choose our own path through those challenges, or wait for chaos to be thrust upon us.

Indeed, the evidence of human history does not support the notion that we will make the choices that will lead us down the path proposed in this book. These choices have been heralded and recommended by our wisest sages over and over again, but rarely adopted and never fulfilled. But they were never as possible as they are now, because for the first time in human history we can truly act globally in unison. As seems uncannily often the case, we are presented with opportunity, at exactly the moment of necessity.

Our religions and our literature have long extolled the value of seeking our higher natures, of reaching for our destiny rather than settling for our fate. We have been told by the wise since the dawn of our ages that love is the manifestation of good in us and that we have the capacity to be the lights in our own creation. However, as a species, we have yet to fashion a working model for this practice. We see the lofty ideals espoused by our sages and prophets as just that: ideals, but not practical solutions. We look around us and see a world full of others who we think will not honour a mutual contract, let alone reach inside themselves for love and peace.

Realizing that appeals to our better natures or our faith in humanity have not proved successful to date, this book lays out a path of action that is intensely practical, realistically achievable and in our self-interest. Rather than asking you to have faith in the primacy of good intentions, this book describes changes that make sense, even if you don’t trust your fellow humans to reach for their better natures.

The purpose of writing now about this path is not to promote it as the only option. I, and no doubt you, are only too plainfully aware that we have many options and that we can quite easily follow our fate to our grave, without the courage to reach for our destiny. The reason to write this book, and for you to read it, is to envision a clear path that gives us the chance to choose our destiny.

It is a choice. We have to actively make the choice, if we are to reach a different destination. That means that we have to be able to see the path, to feel it in a very personal way. After you have read this book, I hope that you too will see and feel The Path.

Continue reading “The Path to a Future: Setting Out”

We Know Better

Bottom up or top down, which way is best?

We know better than you. That’s the basic message we hear nowadays – from captains of industry, diplomats, politicians and humans with a claim on the mind of god. But the truth depends on where you’re standing and who’s saying it.

Are you a Monsanto executive talking about how to feed the world? Or are you a farmer talking about what works for your land?
Are you a Western diplomat talking about Middle East peace? Or are you a Middle East citizen talking about your community?
Are you a banker talking about sovereign debt? Or are you unemployed in a capitalist democracy?
Are you an executive responsible for 10,000 employees? Or are you one of those employees?
Are you a pontiff? Or a victim of rape?

Who knows better than you?

Well, you know that no one knows better than you, about you. It is an inevitable facet of being alive that we are the experts on our own experience. This leads us to develop a certain confidence about the veracity of our perspective that we bring unconsciously to our opinions about other things, things that are not actually our own, personal experience. This false confidence is why the useful development of our selves passes inevitably through humility. Humility is a process by which we learn to distinguish between we can really know, because it is our own experience, and what we are deducing, based on the combining of facts we have access to and our experience with similarities. Without an intentional effort to develop awareness and humility, we are mired in a thoughtscape of certitude that serves our perspective but does nothing for the common cause. In other words, no one need know better than you, so long as you are not making decisions for anyone else; if you are making decisions that affect others, it is supremely important that you understand who knows better than you.

So “who knows better” is defined by both access to facts and access to humility. Those with access to facts but without humility are subject to arrogance and self-deceit that depreciates the value and quality of their opinion. Today power is centered around a “top down” approach, whether that be in the form of major multi national corporations or the political elites of industrialized societies, that is substantially lacking in humility – as is demonstrably proven by the Wikileaks revelations. This need not be a bad thing, in and of itself, because many decisions made for the good of the majority are best made at a high level; but if humility is missing from the atmosphere that those decision are made in, the quality of those decisions becomes disastrously poor. And poor decisions made at the top, for vast constituencies, are potentially catastrophic for everyone – witness the quality of current decision making about climate change.

Successful leadership in a successful society brings together facts and humility, often in the position of a ‘public servant’: an acquirer of knowledge who acts on behalf of the greater citizenry to enable high quality, effective and empathic decision making. But even a public servant cannot be a knower of all things and there is bound to be tension between the goods of overlapping constituencies, and that is why we also have politicians. Politicians are supposed to take the informed knowledge and opinions of multiple public servants and fashion policy, meaning that they make the decisions arbitrating between competing ‘goods’. The entire decision making process in advanced and complex societies is substantially dependent on the quality of the public service that feeds information into the decision making process in the first place. That leads us to another very worrying development of the last few decades in many powerful democracies: the public service has, all too often, been co-opted by the private sector. Through a combination of devaluing the work of public servants and attempting to honour the unbridled right of every individual to seek the opportunities that reward them the most, we have corroded the boundaries between public and private service so much that there is now, in many countries, a revolving door between the two.

The best decisions would be taken by those informed by the best knowledge of the issue, steeped in humility and the pursuit of the greater good. Instead we have decisions taken by the supplicants of the rich and the powerful (privately funded politicians), informed by a public service that always has half an eye on the best interests of the private sector for whom they may wish to work in the near future. Humility is not even regarded as a quality worth having, and quite possibly it is seen as a weakness.

So who knows how to fix this?

It is helpful, and important, to recognize the multi-layered truth about decision making and the source of useful knowledge. It is unlikely that any one person is the exclusive holder of the truth, it is more likely that there are a few truths dependent on perspective, and that the best decisions will come from reconciling these to fashion a ‘best possible’ solution. The better version of decision making will incorporate this multi-layered reality in its foundation and structure, such that decisions are made at appropriately different layers for different issues. A decision making process that incorporates this reality will best serve the greater good in more cases than either a single top down or bottom up diktat. While today’s power structures are undoubtedly top heavily and need of radical adjustment, we would do well to consider this nature of the problem, and the best possible solutions before simply electing to turn the hat upside down again. (I say “again” because we have had revolutions before, inspired by a desire to turn the power structure upside down, but they quickly run aground on the rocks of practical realities, and revert to upside up in pretty short order.)

Thankfully, we are already fairly well equipped to make this transition because we have already adopted two important building blocks for better decision making: defining the multiple layers and establishing voting systems. Layers are geographically concentric segmentations of our lands; where continents contain countries, countries contain regions or states, and states contain counties or communities. All this is already practically implemented and established, albeit in need of a large dose of citizen choice in the form of self selection of association. Furthermore many places around the world already have voting systems set up in each of these constituencies, and many also have distinct layers of government at each level of constituency.

So what do we need to add or change?

Ironically, the biggest flaw in today’s democracies is that we have “bottom up” ways of electing politicians to our “top” layers of government. Inherited from our tribal, non-technological heritage we send local representatives up to regional, national and international decision making bodies; where they are quickly overwhelmed by the scope and size of the issues and the large interest groups formed specifically to operate successfully at that higher layer. The exception to this is the presidential model whereby an “executive” is voted for by all the members of the total constituency. However, keenly aware of the potential for corruption in an individual, we make that executive’s decision making power dependent on the support of the elected assembly of local politicians. This has been the “state of the art” structure for politics for over 200 years, and is often lauded for its incorporation of a “balance of power”, or system of “checks and balances”. In our modern world however, this structure is failing us, and fails to deliver the quality of decision making that we could have with a modernized structure that incorporates the advances in our technological capacities over the last two centuries. Modern communications and transport mean that now we can know about and vote for candidates over vast geographies – witness our existing presidential elections as an example of this in practice already.

Instead of a bottom up electoral system to generate top down government, a “layered” electoral structure, with a direct line between every citizen in that constituency and their representative for that layer of government, will yield better decision making by politicians specifically focussed on the issues best addressed at that layer of government. The citizens not only decide who makes decisions on their behalf, but also at which level or layer those decisions are best made. In a multi-layered democracy every citizen votes for a candidate from exactly the same slate of candidates as every other citizen in that same constituency. For instance, for a national assembly: every citizen in the nation votes for a candidate standing for election by all the citizens in the nation; the candidate is not going to the national assembly to represent a local district, they are going to the national assembly to make decisions about national affairs, and only national affairs. That same citizen votes for representatives in local and regional assemblies, who decide which issues are better decided at their level or promoted for decision by a higher layer.

Neither strictly “top down” nor “bottom up”, multi-layered representative democracy generates higher quality decisions by locating the decision making in the appropriate layer of government best able to “know best” (in the opinion of the citizenry) about that particular issue. In the end we know best and we need to structure our decision making bodies to allow us to define the best place for different decisions. We still need humility and quality public servants, but those will be easier to come by when we reform our political systems to disperse our power over appropriate constituencies.

To find out more about how all of this works visit www.standardsoflife.org/mlr

Open letter to the Basic Income community

Dear Citizen

The purpose of this open letter is to invite you to consider whether the goals of Basic Income can be attained more effectively and more sustainably through the provision of Universal Services.

First, let us say that we heartily agree with the basic objective of moving forward to the next evolution of social organization, and that we find the historical precedents that you cite in support for Basic Income are indeed the very same that support Universal Services. There is not the width of a hair between our visions of a peaceful society, in which each individual can fulfill their potential and use their unique skills and abilities to contribute to the whole in a way that honors their freedom. We both recognize that the empowerment of the individual is the basic fabric of our common society, and that it provides the foundation on which to rebuild a new economy.

Furthermore, the distinctions between our mechanisms for achieving the same goals can be seen as quite subtle, even muted. The basic mechanism of providing a structure within which each and every citizen is guaranteed the bare necessities to sustain life is common to both of our approaches, and it is this commonality that drives us to believe that we are sufficiently of one mind as to be able to bridge our differences and join forces in the pursuit of our common goals. Our differences do not separate our intentions, our commonalities define our opportunity to work together.

The primary difference between Basic Income (BI) and Universal Services (US) is whether or not money is provided to citizens. This is not a difference in intention or objective, it is a distinction in the mechanism used to reach the same goals, based on the same principles. We have studied the fundamental economics of modern, monetary systems and concluded that the most important rebalancing that must occur is to return to the social sphere those costs that are social, and that this is necessary to develop a sustainable economy. If we do not socialize our social costs we cannot make the books balance and we cannot preserve the value of currency.

We recognize that the development of our societies and commerce over the last centuries has left us with an unconscious assumption that monetary instruments are the appropriate, and often only, way to measure and account for value. It is a natural extension of this assumption that we think of welfare and opportunity in terms of monetary values. However when we use money to pay for what is actually a social cost we are both devaluing the currency and creating unsustainable accounting, because we cannot monetize the social benefits that would be necessary to balance the books.

In the US model the same objectives of BI are achieved: every citizen is availed of the basic necessities to sustain life, and the opportunity to develop their contributions to themselves and their society. No one is obliged to “work” to receive the services, and they can use the services as they need them. The level of universal services provided is dependent on what that society can afford, in the same way that the size of the BI grant varies based on the wealth of the society. Many of the enhancements to the functioning of the labor market as well as the environmental benefits are the same with both US and BI. However there are important differences in both the practicality and the impact of US versus BI.

The biggest advantage of US over BI is that it is affordable (and therefore more practical) because it “pays” for the “cost” of the services by socializing the labor portion of the cost of delivering the same services. BI does not change the fundamental accounting practices at the base of the modern capitalist system, which are crumbling under our feet as we speak. US removes the subsistence portion of labor costs from the monetary transactions in the economy, and in so doing balances the economic accounting by constraining the use of money to value only economic assets. The impact of BI is the reverse, it encourages the fallacy that monetary accounting can balance the world, that social good can be paid for and that social costs need to be measured in currency.

The second most important reason why US is preferable to BI is that it enables the development and growth of a microeconomy that can supplant capitalist enterprise as the primary economic fabric of our societies, and this is a fundamentally more sustainable foundation for our society. By removing cash payments from the social support system US effectively enables the provision of micro services rendered for micro payments. When citizens seek to supplement their US in order to afford “luxury” items that are not included in the US they can meet those needs by providing services, products or labor according to their skills and abilities at prices that are effectively the marginal value added. This creates a rich ecosystem of micro transactions that creates a micro economy that meets needs more directly and accurately at lower cost and with less waste. With BI the transactional value of any service, product or labor is increased to a level that is defined by the value of the BI grant more than the value added by the service, product or labor.

Admittedly BI is presented as a supplement to social security, not a replacement, but it is inevitably perceived as an alternative and in practice it would be almost impossible to separate the two. This problems leads to many of the structural issues that BI has difficulty addressing, such as:

  • the incentive gap
  • abuse
  • effectiveness (size of BI grant)
  • appropriateness (differentiated needs)
  • and finally the most significant: we still need a social safety net.

The BI community has been extremely inventive and diligent in working to overcome these objections and problems by developing mechanisms that seek to redress these issues through different implementation processes, however this has led to overly complex constructs that further detract from the practicality of BI.

We are fundamentally of one mind regarding the necessity of moving forward to a better socio-economic model that incorporates the unassailable truths of freedom and individuality, and we share the same heritage and the same goals. We hope to unite with such a caring and thoughtful community as you have built around BI, and we would hope that this letter can serve as an introduction to the possibility of uniting forces around a cohesive vision for our common futures that will bring your and our communities together to fight for a better future.

Please consider this an open invitation for engagement and discourse that will yield a common platform incorporating the best of both of our approaches. Check out the framework described in a fair degree of detail at www.standardsoflife.org and let’s get moving forward together.

Yours faithfully,

The Standards of LIFE Community

Forest-re and REDD

The lazy lack of principled rigor in the immature scheming of self-infatuated Westerners and fin-dustrialists needs to be confronted with straight forward thinking based on simple principles, before we all disappear down the evolutionary chute of stupidity.

“Poor, ignorant natives are cutting down our forests and if we expect them to stop we need to start paying them to leave the trees alone.” That is the reason given by the good and the white to introduce a forest-carbon trading program (REDD) that will allow us to buy their forests from them, so we can stop them from destroying their forests, while we continue to destroy the planet. Because this brings “markets” in to the solution (“the way the world works today”) it is automatically brilliant and practical while being eminently sensible.

The reality is that the forests are being destroyed by commercial concerns and need to be protected by the people who live in them from those that would commodify them. The way to save our forests, and all their attendant flora and fauna, is to charge commercial interests an appropriate surcharge for their use of our common resource: the planet. Money raised from these taxes could be ploughed back into the indigenous communities to sustain them as Mother Nature’s protection force, and remediate the damage caused.

The incredible short-sightedness of well meaning but imperially minded white people like Saros and Goodall should not distract us from the obvious illegality of claiming someone else’s land and resources as our own, to do with as we wish. The forests belong to the people who live there and if they want to exploit them then they will have to pay the surcharges necessary to remediate the damage caused to our common habitat: the atmosphere. The politicians at the head of a nation cannot make agreements in their capitals to sell the contents of the trees growing on the land in their communities to some far off entity, and then pocket the money and impose restrictions on the lives of those who live in those communities.

Much better would be BLUU (Bluddy-well Leave Untouched and Uncommercial). The lazy lack of principled rigor in the immature scheming of self-infatuated Westerners and findustrialists needs to be confronted with straight forward thinking based on simple principles, before we all disappear down the evolutionary chute of stupidity. Stop painting the planet REDD and let’s have some BLUU sky thinking – that’s the way forward!

See www.standardsoflife.org for details on principled self-determination and practical carbon loading.

The Honesty and Courage of “system change”

Only those prepared to admit that we are fundamentally on the wrong course can help show the way to a different destination.

To proactively engage in change requires a reassessment of current motivations and norms. If the change has not occurred spontaneously up ’till now, it is because there are supporting mechanisms, rationales and motivations for the status quo.

Did you believe that late 20th Century mankind had reached a peak of civilization? That peace was upon the world, times were good and the economy was functioning properly? That democracy was producing quality leadership and decisions? That the economy was floating all boats? That a modicum of religious morality was a healthy guide? Because everything you see today is the result of those times, you might want to ask yourself how clearly you were seeing then and how clearly you can see now.

Change means admitting we were wrong. Until we can admit the flaws in what was driving us, we cannot have a different direction or a different destination. Reaching a different destination necessarily requires accepting that what has directed us thus far is flawed. If our politics is not representing us, if our economy is not serving us, if we are are destroying our environment, then we have to admit that the way we are doing things is not right. Our political system is not working well, our economy is not working for most people and our relationship with our environment is not working at all for our planet – which of our reasons for carrying on the way we are stands up in the face of these facts?

This is the honesty and courage at the heart of the ‘system change’ movement, to admit that we have not been getting it right. We cannot have a different outcome if we continue to harken after some golden age when what we are doing now was working, or if we continue to believe that we are basically on the right track and that a few simple adjustments will yield a different result. The courage to admit that we have got things wrong in a big way is the precursor to meaningful change.

Lets start with a short list of some the more obvious things we have been getting wrong.

  • Fundamentally wrong that top down is better than bottom up.
  • Fundamentally wrong that our society is a child of our economy.
  • Fundamentally wrong that religious morality is a decent foundation for law.
  • Fundamentally wrong that philanthropy is a replacement for taxes.
  • Fundamentally wrong that responsibility for long term profits motivates short term corporate decision making.
  • Fundamentally wrong that money is speech.
  • Fundamentally wrong that secrets are a good thing.

Only those prepared to admit that we are fundamentally on the wrong course can help show the way to a different destination. Beware the inside job, the man on the inside, the person in the know; for you are gambling with time, and time waits for no man.

We are “domestic consumption”

The overriding message coming out of the WikiLeaks leak of diplomatic cables is one of disrespect. You, me, all of us, we are the “domestic consumption” that the contents of the cables sought to avoid being consumed by. Be we American, Yemeni, German, Russian, Swedish, Korean or citizens of just about any country on the face of this planet, we are apparently untrustable with the truth. We are just too stupid, too happy and busy consuming, too ready to pay unquestioningly for government. A government which does not think so much of us that we can be trusted to hear the honest truth from those whom we entrust to lead us, and all paid for with our money.

Really?! If somebody walked up to you on the street and told you lies while picking your pocket, and then came up to you a few weeks later and asked for a character reference – what would you say? Yet you will be asked to vote for or support these same politicians/kings/leaders again soon, the very same ones who thought so little of you that their truth was too good for you to hear. What will it take to make you change your behavior? Perhaps the lying pickpocket needs to kick you in the groin before you’ve had enough?

Much of the reason that you cannot be trusted with their truth is because you would, quite rightly, disagree with them. You might even object strongly that they were either lying to you before they got to power, or they’re lying to you now that they have power, but one way or another: they are liars. The thing about lying, that we all know instinctively, is that mostly it is the liar that is damaging themselves when they lie; it is only when we are made a fool of by their lying that we feel ourselves to have been damaged by their lies. And that is the test we tend to apply to situations like these WikiLeaks: do we feel foolish in the light of the disclosures?

If you can steal yourself to take a deeply cynical view of your world and your compatriots, then you are less likely to feel foolish. Think cynically enough and you can let the duplicity of your leaders roll off your back. But you will have to dig yourself a little deeper into the mire with each spade-full of cynicism you heap on your already weary view of the world. If you allow cynicism to dominate your thinking, you lose hope, you lose sight of the better world you wish for and you lose the impetus to make your dreams come true. Cynicism is a self-engorging downward spiral to abject aspirational poverty.

Feel foolish. Be proud to expect better. Let it sting a little, and take the rise to garner up some gumption for something different. You have every right to expect others to live by the standards you hold yourself to and, if nothing else, the WikiLeaks show that our so called leaders do not hold themselves to anything like the standards we hold ourselves to. The only thing likely to be missing from a society run honestly by government that trusts and respects its citizens is quite as many rich people, not such a bad trade really.

Let us become the domestic consumers they are so frightened of. Let us consume them with a repudiation of their distrust, let us consume the disrespect they have shown us and regurgitate it as urgent change. Let us demonstrate that they were right to be scared of the impact of their lies on us. We, the domestic consumers of truth, hereby declare the end times of the privileged promoters of deceit. We fear not your positions of privilege nor your mountains of wealth, you have squandered our trust and betrayed your weakness as furtive agents of guile.