Welcome post!

 [2024-02-08]

Hi!

If you are new to my blog and want to say hi in a comment, etc, I intend to leave this post as a space to do this right now.

Thank you for visiting.

Solutions

[orig posted 2016-12-13--1238hest]


I found some things in these which I feel provide a lot of #context and #insight as to where we are right now as a culture, particularly in relation to some of the #economic situation the world is experiencing.  These are primarily focused on #solutions .

Solutions

Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein 12min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEZkQv25uEs
David Holmgren explains how YOU can change the world with permaculture 6min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVS45dbNL-E
Prof Wolff explains what is wrong with capitalism, and where do we go from here (35min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P97r9Ci5Kg


[Edit: some new posts in this thread:

"the idea that our private choices can have cosmic significance"

https://www.instagram.com/p/BtJVzbDh0DO/

Michael Jackson - Man in the Mirror

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PivWY9wn5ps

Blessid Union of Souls - I believe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_eAzaTquN8

]

Mike Nickerson - Time For a New Game - The world we want is on our doorstep

[orig published 2016-10-11--2208hest]


Mike Nickerson - Evolutionary Sustainability and Cultural Transitions Researcher, Carpenter, Lanark Ecovillage Project Hearthkeeper Member
Highlights from "Time for a New Game", 7min talk clips from speaking to Occupy Ottawa on the convergence of economic and ecological unsustainability and socio-cultural evolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv5n37aczVg

The seventh generation initiative project Mike Nickerson is involved with:
https://www.sustainwellbeing.net/

#socio-culturalevolution #transition #economy #ecology #environment #sustainability #occupyottawa #transformation #community #collectiveconsciousness #collectiveevolution

Why I Decided to live at an Ecovillage

I wrote this elsewhere a while ago, and felt like maybe other people frustrated with going from protest to protest and yelling a lot and feeling like you were going nowhere with your activism would appreciate this.

Peace.

-----

orig written july 9th 2014

[here is a video of me speaking this more or less, although the first two minutes of 10, the audio is bad:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhuC6DwAwiU&list=UUsgmh-KYGBNzsJHP0gk9hJQ ]

Why I decided to live at an ecovillage

Michael Goguen

I had been involved in activism for a number of years.

I noticed a problem with the way I was interacting, and how the activism I was doing was draining me, instead of energizing me.  No matter how much I did, it never felt like enough - I always felt guilty about everything I didn’t or couldn’t do.  The responsibility for the world was on my shoulders, pushing me to go harder, but inevitably towards burnout, or towards giving up, and turning my back on helping out the world, or even ‘selling out’ - if you can’t beat them, join them.  INTERVENTION NEEDED!!!

So I decided to make a shift from “Guilt Based Activism” to “Bliss Based Activism”; instead of doing things out of guilt, towards myself or others, I would do things that felt like they uplifted me, and others.  I would accept that I could not do or change everything, but no matter how little, there was always something I COULD do; and I would do that, and let myself feel good about it, and not give up even though it felt like a small thing [metis Humming bird story - the big forest fire].

In Ottawa where I was living before I moved to the Lanark Ecovillage Project, I was involved with activism in my community around organized crime.  It was affecting me personally, including having serious consequences on people I loved.  I felt torn between ‘non-violent’ activism, and being brought back down the age-old road of the cycle of violence and ‘power over’.

The nuclear arms race of the cold war might be a good example of where the cycle of violence, and the arms race, leads.  Someone slaps someone; the other one gets a stick; someone gets a knife; a gun; and then a bigger gun, etc, back and forth, trying to attain the most power, like a perverse dark humoured cartoon.  Instead of working on the root communication and relationship issues, the seriousness of the situation escalates, until it is push-button nuclear, and somebody sneezes, and everybody dies.

So I could see that was where things were leading in the human trafficking situation in Sandy Hill, Ottawa, that I had gotten embroiled in - by escalating things, in power over, I was threatening the people who were doing these things, and they responded by escalating as well… and the consequences were more danger for myself, and them, and a lot of the bystanders and victims as well… in effect, in my poorly thought out approach, the actions I was taking were mostly harming my community, rather than helping it.

I reflected on how the root of most of the problems I’ve experienced in activism was based on unhealthy community and relationships; and that the solution to most of these, when you come right down to it, also seemed to be… creating healthy community and relationships.

In fact, in retrospect, a whole other avenue of non-violent warfare, that perhaps would make the nonviolent communications crowd proud, seemed to exist, that came out of network theory that I’d heard about in an Occupied Philosophers group.

In network theory, in a network you have nodes.  The nodes with the most connections have ‘best alternative to no agreement’, and essentially become the top of a hierarchy - essentially they can get better deals because they have more choice and freedom; in fact they can become monopolies, and start dictating rules and agreements.

Rather than ‘attack’ these upper hierarchy nodes, which might be construed as a ‘people’s revolution against a far more well armed and resourced force’, network theory suggests that you can instead of trying to ‘disconnect’ the higher nodes connections aggressively, you can connect all the other little nods that are more isolated, in essence creating an alternative to the ‘elite’ nodes, and breaking the monopoly, as the other nodes become more connected, meet each others’ needs, and phase out the need for these ‘elite’ nodes; the network essentially routes around the bottleneck naturally, balancing out unequal power distributions.  So in effect, while not eliminating these ‘elite nodes’, it forces them to reconsider their agreements’ reasonableness, or they have less leverage to use in negotations, so that relationships will be more balanced.

There is a metaphor with the transformation of a butterfly, and the necessary transformation of civilization that we are going to have to go through.  At first, when the first imaginal cell form in the caterpillar, the cells which will eventually turn into the butterfly, they are attacked by the caterpillar cells as foreign.  The imaginal cells form a tight group to help protect each other, and allow them to develop - and groups who want to transform society may imagine needing to create their own little clusters to allow them to develop.

Eventually, the imaginal cells in the butterfly clarify their form so much, that it is like the caterpillar cells realize what is going on; the rest of the caterpillar liquifies, and feeds into the imaginal cells - or perhaps in our society, you might suppose people will eventually get on board with what people who want to create transition to a better society, once they’ve clarified their vision enough.

So why did I join an eco-community?

“I can’t think myself into a new way of living, I have to live myself into a new way of thinking.”
If I want to model healthy community, I need to learn it and practice it for myself, first.
Everything stems from what I do for and within myself, first; be the change.

The rest follows, bit by bit.

Sacred Economics - Charles Eisenstein

[orig published 2016-10-11--1859hest]


Charles Eisenstein has a great little clip which summarizes some of the roots of the problem that have arisen from the money based economic system and capitalism, and shows simply how some of the original intended good got distorted, and some ways to realign this with the public good.


Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics 13min vid clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEZkQv25uEs


Charles Eisenstein's online book, Sacred Economics:
http://sacred-economics.com/

His website:   http://CharlesEisenstein.Net/

@ceisenstein on twitter
@Charles_Eisenstein on IG

"Winning the Story Wars" - Jonah Sachs

[orig posted 2016-10-11--1920hest]


"Winning the Story Wars" - Jonah Sachs

How the politics of making profit, "inadequacy marketing", and forgetting the 'spiritual myths' that empower our human journeys as a collective humanity got side tracked by focusing on 'material reality',  and a way back to bringing 'the hero's journey' back to the stories we create in our lives.

Sachs TedX Rainier 13min talk





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvaPF_y-fiU



https://winningthestorywars.com/

@jonahsachs

8 stages of social change movements

[orig published 2017-10-17--0017hest]






Major Social Transformation Is a Lot Closer Than You May Realize -- How Do We Finish the Job?

thx to David C.  for sharing this on the cusp of the New Year, Dec 30 06:58PM -0500 (this was from a few years ago now, and I'm reposting this old post from another blog since it perennially returns that activists and oppressed peoples feel despair and hopelessness and need to be reminded of changes happening on a bigger, slower scale that is sometimes almost too hard to see...)

Also see:  

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/moyermap.html 
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_Action_Plan

Apparently Bill Moyers developed the movement action plan, because he saw too many people and movements starting to give up when they were making real progress but they had felt that they had failed, so he thought this map might help some people.


-----------


Not just for Amerikans, eh?

Major Social Transformation Is a Lot Closer Than You May Realize -- How Do We Finish the Job?

It starts with winning over the hearts and minds of the American people.

The current social movement that exploded onto the national scene with the 2011 Occupy Movement is following the path of successful movements so far. The social change movement in 2014 is poised to begin an exciting era of broadening and deepening the growing consensus for social and economic justice.

The current social movement that exploded onto the national scene with the 2011 Occupy Movement is following the path of successful movements so far. The social change movement in 2014 is poised to begin an exciting era of broadening and deepening the growing consensus for social and economic justice.

This week, our article for the end of 2013 focuses on where we are, i.e. at what stage of the progression of social movements do we find ourselves; and broadly outlines the next steps. Next week, our article for the new year will look more specifically at the tasks ahead for the movement in 2014 and beyond.

Successful people-powered movements follow a similar arc of development. The best description comes from BillMoyer’s The Movement Action Plan: A Strategic Framework Describing The Eight Stages of Successful Social Movements. We believe this is essential reading for activists and include a link to it on the strategy page on Popular Resistance. Moyer expanded this 1987 article into, Doing Democracy, a book published in 2001, a year before he died. You can see a video of BillMoyer’s last public presentation where he summarized the insights of his lifetime about how social movements grow and succeed, and about his vision of a new culture emerging through the cracks of a declining empire.

Moyer’s work is heartening for social justice activists because it shows how movements grow, recede and change their functions at different stages. By understanding the current stage of development we can better define the work that must be done to achieve success and predict how the power structure and public will react to our actions. Moyer worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on poverty campaigns. He also worked on a variety of causes over his nearly 50 year career in social movements. In a recent conversation, Ken Butigan, a peace and justice activist who worked with Moyer, told us that Moyer wrote the first draft of the Eight Stages of Successful Social Movements when he was jailed with more than 1,400 people protesting the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in 1977. Butigan explained that one reason Moyer wrote the Eight Stages was so people involved in movements would not despair when the movement did not immediately succeed and seemed to disappear without success. These are expected stages of development. Just as we would not expect a 4th grader to be doing calculus, we cannot expect a social movement to jump from Stage 2 to the success of Stage 7. Each step in the process serves an important role.

This Historic Moment—Using the Movement Action Plan as a guide, we see that we are closer to success than one might think. The Occupy Movement was Stage Four of Eight. Moyer describes it:

“New social movements surprise and shock everyone when they burst into the public spotlight on the evening TV news and in newspaper headlines. Overnight, a previously unrecognized social problem becomes a social issue that everyone is talking about. It starts with a highly publicized, shocking incident, a ‘trigger event’, followed by a nonviolent action campaign that includes large rallies and dramatic civil disobedience. Soon these are repeated in local communities around the country.”


Stage 4 is the “Social Movement Take-Off.” During Occupy, it seemed that suddenly the unfair wealth divide, the corruption of Wall Street and the dysfunction of government came into people’s consciousness. These issues were discussed in the media and politicians started using language to show they understood there was a problem. Prior to this, these issues were largely ignored taboo topics that were not on the political radar.

In Stage 4, there are three concepts about which the public must be convinced. The first was accomplished during Occupy, that is: there is a problem that must be confronted. We also began to accomplish the second concept: current conditions and policies must be opposed. During later stages this second goal will be broadened and expanded. The final concept – and this is still ahead of us– is that people no longer fear the alternatives but want the alternatives put in place.

Throughout this process, the movement shows itself to be consistent with the best ideals of the nation, e.g. democracy, equality, justice and fairness; while the movement shows the power structure is out of step with these ideals. The movement exposes the differences between ‘official policies,’ what the government says that it is doing, and ‘actual policies,’ what the policies actually accomplish, which is the opposite of what they claim to accomplish.


Stage 5 is a state of “Identity Crisis and Powerlessness.” Participants feel like they failed and commentators say that the movement is dead and accomplished nothing. Some of the people involved in the Take-Off get burned out and suffer despair and hopelessness. In fact, this is as natural as the receding of a wave and Moyer points out: “The perception of failure happens just when the movement is outrageously successful” because it raised the consciousness and national awareness of a serious problem that was previously ignored.

Moyer quotes the I Ching, “Book of Changes,” an ancient Chinese text which dates back to the 3rd or 2nd millennium BCE, for guidance. The I Ching describes “Retreat” as a time of “an inner conflict based upon the misalignment of your ideals and reality,” i.e. the unrealistic expectation that long-term goals can be achieved immediately. This is a “time to retreat and take a longer look to be able to advance later.” We know many in Occupy who did just that before moving on to Stage 6, where we are now.


During the stage of Identity Crisis or Retreat, activists who step back may realize we actually created a massive grassroots-based social movement, put our issues on the agenda and gained majority support for many of our views. In addition, people began to learn of the enormity of the problem, agonize over the suffering of the victims of the unfair and corrupt economy and realize the complicity of people in power that they trusted.

The essential lesson of Stage 5 is that resistance from the power structure is a normal stage of the process. When we step back and look at the course of history, within the overall framework of change, the movement is on the path to success. We need to understand “what the powerholders already know – that political and societal power ultimately lies with the people.”

Often simultaneous with this feeling of powerlessness is Stage 6, “Majority Public Support,” which is where we are right now. During the current phase, the movement seeks to create broad and deep consensus over the issues that have been raised in the “Take-Off.” Our job is to win over the hearts and minds of the American people.


“The movement must consciously undergo a transformation from spontaneous protest, operating in a short-term crisis, to a long-term popular struggle to achieve positive social change. It needs to win over . . . an increasingly larger majority of the populace and involve many of them in the process of opposition and change. . . The majority stage is a long process of eroding the social, political, and economic supports that enable the powerholders to continue their policies. It is a slow process of social transformation that creates a new social and political consensus, reversing those of normal times.”


During this phase, the movement must transform from a “loose” organizational model to an “empowerment” model. This requires more structure but in order to be effective and create lasting change, it must follow the principles of being “participatory democratic, efficient, flexible, and capable of lasting over the long haul.” The movement must avoid becoming a “professional opposition organization” (i.e. avoid becoming part of the system or a member of the non-profit, professional complex). The movement must avoid becoming a mainstream group working for “achievable” reforms, focusing on elections and partisanship; instead they must remain “principled dissent groups” advocating for what is right, not what is possible, continuing to protest and resist and be based in the grassroots. Leaders must be “nurturing mothers, not dominant patriarchs.”

The focus at this stage should be grass roots organizing to build a broad-based pluralistic movement. The primary goals are educating, converting, and involving all segments of the population through a variety of means but most importantly through direct contacts at the local level to show people how the big social injustices of our era – the unfair and corrupt economy as well as the dysfunctional and corrupt government – affect them directly. It is important during this phase for the movement to continue to have nonviolent actions, rallies, and campaigns, including civil disobedience at key points of time and key locations – even though the size of protests will be smaller than during the “Take-Off” phase.


In addition to protest, opportunities need to be created for widespread civic involvement in projects that put the people at odds with the current system. These citizen involvement programs need to reflect the movement’s values and goals and the full range of the new world the movement wants to create. The movement should be putting forth a bold vision, a new paradigm, and larger demands beyond mere reforms of the status quo.

Moyers describes a grand strategy that includes 12 phases that lead to Stage 7, “Success.” Throughout this process it is important to remember a movement is only as powerful as its grassroots base and therefore must continue to nourish, support and empower that base. During this phase the movement participants switch roles from being “rebels” to being “change agents.” The 12 phases are to
(1) Keep the issues on the political and social agenda;
(2) Win majority support against current policies;
(3) Cause powerholders to change strategy although they do not solve problems;
(4) Counter each change in strategy by showing it is a gimmick, not a solution;
(5) Push powerholders to new strategies that take riskier positions and make it harder to hold old positions;
(6) Create strategic campaigns that erode support for the powerholders;
(7) Expand policy goals as the movement realizes the problems are greater than was evident;
(8) Develop stronger and deeper opposition to current policies;
(9) Promote solutions and a paradigm shift;
(10) Win majority support for the movement’s solutions;
(11) Put the issues on the political and legal agendas;
(12) Finally, the powerholders change positions to appear to get in line with public opinion while attacking the movement and its solutions (e.g. passing a Wall Street health law that claims to cover everyone while demonizing single payer health care which would be universal as too extreme).


Opposition to current policies will quickly grow to 60%, then rise to 70% or 75%. Support for the movement’s alternatives will grow more slowly during this time, with the public split on the alternatives. The movement must build public support for the alternatives to achieve success.


At this point, even though everyone wants the issue resolved, the government is still unable to take action. As a movement reaches the end of Stage 6, many powerholders begin to join the calls for change. As elites defect to support majority opinion, the political price paid by those who want to maintain unpopular policies exceeds their benefits and creates a political crisis that leads to resolution.


This leads to Stage 7: “Success.” The duration of Stage 6 is unpredictable and can take years. Success can come in several ways
(1) a “dramatic showdown that resembles the ‘take off stage.’” There could be a trigger and the movement needs to mobilize with broad popular support.
(2) A “quiet showdown” where the people in power realize they can no longer continue the status quo and launch a face saving endgame of “victorious retreat,” changing their policies and taking credit.
(3) Through “attrition” where the social, economic and political machinery slowly evolve to new polices and conditions. The result is not guaranteed when this process begins and the movement must continue the struggle until the goals are won. Stage 8 defends the success and begins the social movement again, focusing on the new injustices of that era.


Applying the Model to the Current Social Movement

In recent years there has been a global awakening of people understanding that big finance capitalism’s neo-liberal model of privatization and corporatization while defunding public programs and cutting necessary services to people is the cause of economic inequality and the failed economy. At the same time, the collapsing ecology of the planet with mass extinctions, destruction of the oceans and environment as well as the impacts of climate change have become evident to super majorities. The inability of governments to respond appropriately to these crises because they are corrupted by mega-banks and transnational corporate interests has led to mass protests.


A September study of protests from 2006 to mid-2013 found a rapid rise: “Our analysis of 843 protest events reflects a steady increase in the overall number of protests every year, from 2006 (59 protests) to mid-2013 (112 protests events in only half a year).” They found that what is driving protests are four inter-related issues: economic justice and opposition to austerity, failure of political systems, the injustice of global trade rigged for big business, and the rights of people, e.g. indigenous, racial and ethnic groups, workers, women, LGBT, immigrants and prisoners and the right to free speech and assembly.

Another study that mapped protests from 1979 to the summer of 2013 graphically shows the intense increase in protests in recent years. While there were protests against Thatcherism and during the break-up of the Soviet Union as well as against the Iraq War, no period like the last few years has had the intensity and breadth of protests at any time in the last 30 years. It is visually evident in a dramatic, interactive map of protests based on reports in the media (which we know does not even cover most protests).


This research, and so much more, indicates that the global protests have passed Stage 4, the Take-Off phase. In our daily reporting of movement news (sign up for a daily digest of news here) we have identified ten “fronts of struggle” in which sub-movements are very active. These include
(1) mobilizing youth and students and making education a human right,
(2) confronting environmental issues around climate change, extreme energy extraction, toxicity,food and mass extinction,
(3) creating a national healthcare system based on single payer financing and human rights principles,
(4) ending homelessness and creating affordable housing,
(5) ending poverty and creating a newdemocratic economy including confronting the banking and finance system and unfair wages and inadequate employment,
(6) ending mass incarceration, police abuse and the drug war,
(7) establishing immigrant rights,