:SUMMARY
* Our system promotes those leaders who are most able to ignore the collateral damage caused by their behaviors and policies. They and much of the population are at levels of development where they cannot actually comprehend the complex challenge facing us.
* Those who do comprehend the challenge facing our world do not yet have the capacity to address it. Therefore, our focus should be on learning how to learn what we need to know to increase our capacity to meet our global challenge.
* Strategically, focusing on building new systems probably offers a better chance of success than efforts at incremental change, head-to-head confrontations with elite power, ameliorating suffering or addressing diverse issues and problems.
* Dialogue is vital to deal with differences - both among us and in society - but has limits due to the cognitive immaturity of many participants and the resistence and manipulation by anti-democratic leaders..
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DIALOG ACROSS MAJOR DIFFERENCES -- DIALOG WITHIN DIVERSITY
:This is a "brief" essay on a very big issue, thus * because of the "brevity" (it has grown considerably since I started) has many loose threads and incomplete thoughts.
Enabling dialog between persons claiming different ideological persuasions is a challenge, but one that has seen enough success to lead us to believe that more peoples expressing initial differences can meet, dialog and deliberate, seek and find common ground.
We must be careful generalizing from experiments where the participants have been volunteers. To volunteer to dialog with "the enemy" means the person is already receptive to win-win solutions to problems. They also must have some respect for democratic processes, where persons of different persuasions should have their voice. I propose that the Right/Left, Conservative/Liberal differences of the participants in the experimental Lets Talk America dialog in June 2004 [as reported by Tom Atlee in http://www.co-intelligence.org/polarization-Fetzer.html and links from that document] were actually minor compared to the similarities that led to their participation. See also his more recent Exploring the Dynamics of Polarization. in http://www.co-intelligence.org/polarizationDynamics.html
As Tom and others fully acknowledge, there are those whose beliefs are such that it would be impossible to get them to sit down in dialog * more likely you would be shot when making the request. Missing from the experiment were the neo-fascists who masquerade as neo-conservatives * who believe in a one party system beholden to corporate power and being willing to do anything to destroy any opposition. The neo-fascist is dedicated to win-lose strategy and would spit on any suggestion for dialog. If they did accept to participate I would suspect that they had other agendas in mind.
Those dedicated to destroy democracy cannot be honest participants in democratic process!
Yet, the issue of how the vast human diversity can live together in a viable, sustainable, planetary Humanity remains our primary challenge.
It is my conclusion that differences that lead to violent conflict are distorted and enflamed by elites who desire to use these differences to gain or maintain power. The massacres in Africa and the Balkans the past few decades took place between peoples who had been living in relative peace among themselves. It is an interesting fact that the main division among poor peoples amplified is that between herders and farmers. The polarization in the United States is so extreme today that I can imagine a new civil war where angry "patriots", enflamed by reports on the media of atrocities committed by "protesters", kill and burn their "enemy"; many who will themselves kill and burn.
I believe that if it were not for elites flaming conflict, most peoples would eventually adapt to states of peaceful co-existence and eventual integration.
Deception now appears to be an inherited propensity, which will arise in practice unless explicit measures are taken to regulate against it. All previous controls over deception in the USA have now been removed. Deception is a very significant issue to be discussed in depth in other documents.
I wish to shift focus here. I propose that the Dialog-Within-Diversity issue is most important among those who feel themselves having much in common and who consider their differences minor. Why do efforts of self-organization plateau and fail to achieve their goals? What breaks down in dialog and deliberation among "like minded people"?
Read Seymour Sarason in The Creation of settings and the Future Societies (1972) for some early answers for peace movement failures in the 1960s. This is a primary theme of my thinking: that we are in our crisis of crises because those who comprehended best were yet not competent to do what was needed; and in the pressure of crises were unable to devote sufficient time and effort to improve their own learning-to-learn and learning-to-learn-to-learn competencies, as individuals and within teams. What If The Best Are Inadequate?
I return again and again to the quote by Aurelio Peccei - founder of the Club of Rome, at the end of his forward (in May 1979) to NO LIMITS TO LEARNING: BRIDGING THE HUMAN GAP:
::If I may conclude with a micro-riddle within the macro-riddle, I will just add that what we all need at this point in human evolution is to learn what it takes to learn what we should learn - and learn it.
As one who is allergic to simple solutions, I believe that if we just did what Peccei recommends, at both levels, all else would follow -- along a path of least resistance (not no resistance, but least resistance).
Then, there is the choice of goal if and when the like-minded get their act together'. Do they attempt to take control of contemporary institutions or do they continue to construct their own parallel (and substitute) institutions. The former strategy may seem the easier route, but on close analysis we may discover that 'the transformation of large, complex and highly dysfunctional social systems by internal incremental change is a practical impossibility. Once a change agent movement has organized sufficiently to capture and reform decrepit institutions they already have the power and creativity to construct their own better institutions. The crisis of crises in complex societies are problemateques, not problems, and there are no solutions. Indeed, dividing the Problemateque into separate (even if interacting) problems causes difficulties.
Yet, differences among the like-minded come to a head early, one factor wanting to challenge the establishment before they are strong enough and with sufficient competencies to succeed - and to sustain their success against the inevitable "counter revolution". Another faction wants to be more patient, gain internal strength before confronting the larger force. In reality, David seldom slays Goliath. Other factions may seek means to succeed that don't involve confrontation.
Unless protective measures are taken, the "quick to confront" factions usually prevail; leading eventually to the defeat of the movement.
Even when protesters win a battle, the elite * if not totally defeated * learns from the experience and plots to not lose the next battle. The relevance of every gain for the people have been eroded away. This can be expected.
This is analogous to bacteria learning, by selective adaptation, to develop strains immune to the antibiotics. Corporations are masters at side-tracking democracy * and the elite get better and better while the democracy oriented change agents continue their old "traditional" ways.
The perennial issue' is seldom explicitly debated: between those whose first goal is '''to relieve suffering and prevent death''' with those whose first goal is '''to remove the primary cause of suffering and unnecessary death'''. Sometimes there are insufficient resources to do both. Often no matter what is done to relieve suffering, it will continue * even increase. Yet, who can stand by and watch others suffer and die? Again, 'unless sophisticated processes are taken, the "relieve the suffering first" faction always wins and the root cause of suffering continues to thrive. This is the legacy of all human history, and the elite have no qualms in creating suffering to keep the activists busy.
A new wrinkle has emerged that both complexifies, yet brings clarity, to this issue.' This is the realization that adult humans can progress through different epistemological stages. 'Most adults are locked in immature epistemological stages and are literally unable to comprehend the complexities of contemporary society. This is much more than a lack of information * they are incapable of properly processing relevant information until they shift to higher epistemological stages.
Our knowledge here remains very primitive. The Subject/Object model proposed by Dr. Robert Kegan way back in 1982 in The Evolving Self'' is, in my opinion, the most important (but, unfortunately, not easy to comprehend unless you are in the small minority who have developed to the highest stage). But ''Spiral Dynamics originated by Dr. Clare Graves and promoted today by Dr. Don Beck is very useful. Both models are discussed in forums on Enlightenment and Integral systems by Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber. Although the reality of stages is fully acknowledged, the longer term societal and cultural implications seem to be taboo.
People in different stages literally live in different worlds, believe in different values and respect different ways of gaining knowledge and truth. Dialog and deliberation as envisioned by most practitioners of D&D cannot occur between persons locked into different epistemological stages. It takes years to develop new stages, and contemporary environments work against such progress.
The very ideals of democracy are seriously challenged by these facts. Just as very young children are not given decision rights on complex social issues they cannot comprehend, so the vast majority of adults alive today are locked in epistemological stages that render it impossible for them to consider win-win solutions, for example.
People in lower stages can be highly intelligent and very competent (especially in the "real-world of business"). People in higher stages can be poorly informed and na*ve.
What crude measures there are to determine the distribution of people at different levels of power as to their stages weakly implies that many of our world leaders are locked into lower developmental stages'. A further wrinkle is the very large number of persons whose natural development has been or is being now 'stunted * and will never become full participants of a functioning democracy.
To add one further wrinkle: severe mental dysfunction is epidemic'. Madness need not manifest as overt hysteria * but also in 'the calm behavior of leaders who are tolerant of very high levels of collateral damage. But, they have polished pubic images, groomed for the appearance of responsibility and leadership. Our understanding of normal psychological functioning is in need of re-examination. The ability of members of corporations (both CEOs and many ordinary workers) to permit anything as OK so long as the corporation profits (or workers have employment), yet can be "normal moral" individuals in setting and situations outside the corporation (or workplace) -- calls for study.
I hypothesize that whenever there is competition between individuals to rise in hierarchies of power, those most willing to damage or destroy their competition learn to better tolerate collateral damage. Eventually, those reaching the top of hierarchies of power have been selected for their very special sociopathic ability to ignore collateral damage.' They may even have had a head start by inherited predispositions for sociopathy. If this is true, as it appears to have been throughout human history, 'we cannot permit societal systems to exist that have hierarchies of power climbed by individual-individual competition.
The very nature of reality is calling for re-examination.
There are some very difficult choices that will need to be made, choices that carry us far beyond the simplistic, media created ideological categories.
AND, our MetaMetaChallenge' is how do we learn-to-learn to cope with this awesome complexity, filled with great dangers and greater opportunities. Simple D&D will hardly suffice. What is 'SufficientAction?
