Je Suis Charlie = Ebola Vaccine for the Human Soul?

Je Suis Charlie may be the most potent vaccine for an Ebola of the Human Soul that has been eating away the flesh of the human psyche since the first acts of terror were shouted in the name of Allahu Akbar.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2900835/Crowds-gather-central-Paris-solidarity-murdered-Charlie-Hebdo-journalists-slogan-Je-Suis-Charlie.html

God is Great. God is Good. But the God in all of US needs to be Better than Good. The God in Us needs to expand our whole understanding of the Master Code – to take care of ourselves, so we can take care of each other, so we can take care of this place/planet.

Je Suis Charlie is a clarion call for God to expand with compassion. But the God in Us needs to move beyond the Idiot Compassion that nurses the psychological Ebola that has been diminishing and disappearing the birthright fundamental to all the charters of human rights that we hold dear – namely freedom of speech.

Paris’s pain is a tipping point that is not reverberating just through France but across the Planet of Cities.

It feels as though the outrage at the murders of the Charlie Hebdo journalists and the police that came to defend them, has touched a deep nerve of outrage in the human psyche. Sparked not only by the public murders of real living particular people, but by the threat that a fundamental right of the human species has not merely been desecrated or denied but is verging on being wiped out.  Some basic quality of our shared human systems (particularly of the Human Hive) feels invaded, injured and infected.

The most poignant news clip I heard yesterday (on January 7, 2015 the day of the incident) was a Parisian Muslim man mourning the hijacking of his religion – which he stated was one of love and acceptance – for the purposes of murder.

When the taking of life becomes the driving force behind a group of people, and the skills of guerilla warfare are practised in the streets of the City of Love, something deep in the human soul rises up to name and claim the right to freedom of speech that was proclaimed centuries ago on the bastions of revolution – with one word – liberté!

While the destruction of the New York World Trade Centre declared economic war on Gaia’s Reflective Organ – and destroyed more people and more built value than Paris 2015; while the hijacking of women and children by ISIL and Boko Haram has declared bodily war on future generators and progenerators of the Human Hive; the effrontery of the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris declares war on consciousness and culture that is not merely Parisian or French, but fundamental to the evolution of the human species. Such a war is an Ebola of consciousness and culture that threatens to erase stages and structures that the wellness and the future of human systems depend on.

VUCA – violence, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – all characterize the Charlie Hebdo tipping point. And ironically to all those who can view Charlies with horror, they know somehow the most powerful forces that can address these plagues rest in the free flow of all forms of expression.

Free speech is not only an individual human right but a collective human necessity to advance awareness, intelligence, innovation, and discovery. Moreover it is central to dealing with our shadows. Free speech mirrors free thought and the reflective capacity that is the unique quality of Gaia’s Reflective Organ. It is what opens and enables the flex and flow of information across all human systems.

Paris’ Charlie Hebdo incident is a flashpoint warning to all the Cities of the Planet that an evolutionary intelligence may be in peril. Are we witnessing an Ebola of the Soul that starts by destroying the offices of a cultural commentator (using spoken/written word, humour, satire) but threatens the free expression of consciousness and culture across the world?

Or can we walk into the centre of this soul-eating war, and use it as a fulcrum to transcend and include freedom of speech to another level? Fighting Ebola of the body requires multiple and complex strategies to care for individuals, communities and countries (if not the planet). Care givers use the armour of hermetically sealed medical suits to rescue and treat the ill. Then they have used the strategies of Tough Love to separate the carriers of the disease from the rest of the community. And where necessary they separate afflicted communities from other communities by preventing mobility between them. Recently trials show one of the most effective treatments is blood transfusions from survivors to the infected. And with the art and science of innovation now vaccines are being developed to give healthy people preventative protection from the disease.

Learning from the experience of living systems, perhaps fighting Ebola of the psyche requires empowered protectors to take similar steps to expunge the hive from invaders against free speech? But it may also require separation of communities and the willingness of survivors to develop ways to inoculate others against contagion.

The greatest burden with this approach lies in the believers of the religion (Islam) that has spawned this Ebola of the Soul to stand against those who deny the value necessary for human life to progress on this planet.

As a species, perhaps we finally stand at the developmental stage that recognizes that some forms of expression are toxic at certain stages of individual and collective development and/or under VUCA contaminated life conditions? How can we learn to manage the scourge between cultures when we are not yet managing well the scourge within cultures? Are we finally ready for the Human Hive to catapult the defense of the right to free speech into opening an offence on the responsibility of free speech?

Who said living the Master Code would not require that we transcend and include the God in Us?

How do we now best call forth the God in Us to take care of ourselves, take care of each other and take care of this place/planet?

 

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The West and Russia: A Divergence of Values?

This is a re-publication of an article by Keith Rice, published in Eros and Kosmos, August, 2014.

It offers an explanation of the Contexting and Strategic Intelligences that lie behind the article I wrote on City Trigger Points, Country Tipping Points  also published in Eros and Kosmos.

Eugene Pustoshkin, Editor of Eros and Kosmos (the only significant Integral online magazine in the Russian noosphere) explains why this is an important article.

Keith E. Rice wrote upon my request his perspective on Russia/Ukraine and Putin. I value his analysis because it is informed by a good insight into what he terms integrated sociopsychology and includes a Spiral Dynamics Integral perspective. 

 

Of course, any single perspective is always destined to be limited, however this perspective, I hope, could offer fresh insights and open new dialogues and collective inquiries into the complexities of the occasions that we witness in East Europe which might have global repercussions. …

 

Blessings, Eugene Pustoshkin, 

Chief Editor, Eros & Kosmos (http://eroskosmos.org)

Keith Rice starts off by saying …

It’s difficult to write an article triggered by, but not about, an ongoing crisis that has no obvious outcome in any predictable timeframe. The Ukrainian army may be gaining ground but the United Nations’ concern about a growing humanitarian crisis may force them to slow down their assaults — perhaps helped by rockets fired at them allegedly from across the Russian border. The brutal fact is that West is not going to go to war over the low-level but brutal civil war in eastern Ukraine. The West is likely to continue to support Kiev diplomatically and with military supplies and intelligence and there will be reluctant incremental upgrades to the European Union sanctions on Russia (and retaliatory Russian sanctions on the West); but no American or European soldiers are going to die for Donetsk or Luhansk, even if there were to be an overt Russian military incursion.

Read full article: http://eroskosmos.org/english/the-west-and-russia-a-divergence-of-values/

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Systems Thinking – A Primer

Systems thinking is fundamental to understanding systems. So to understand systems, let’s start with exploring, what are systems? (1)

Systems are evolutionary structures. They are characterized by boundaries that contain system elements. Those elements have evolved across deep time, from the Big Bang until now. The basic evolutionary strata that we can point to on our planet can be classified as A – B – C (2).  Explaining this backwards …

C is for Cosmosphere – containing Universe, Earth and Matter . We study this with Astronomy, Cosmology, Math, Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Hydrology, Meterology

B is for Biological Systems – containing the living environment and life. We study these with Microbiology, Biology, Botany, Zoology

A is for Anthropocentric Systems – or human systems. We study these with Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, etc.

As humans we are the most complex systems and we not only depend on all the ABC systems but we ARE those systems. We are in effect Awake Bhangara-dancing Cosmic-dust.

An interesting characteristic of systems, is when you combine two different systems a surprising result can happen that is not necessarily evident from looking at the two original systems separately. For instance if you look at Hydrogen and Oxygen as two separate elements, you would not predict that combining them as H2O would produce water – with qualities that neither Hydrogen nor Oxygen possess on their own. ( We call this propensity of systems for unexpected outcomes – emergence.)

The B & A Systems contain the living systems. They are wholes that not only have boundaries, but the elements they contain co-exist within the boundary symbiotically – that is the existence of each element is dependent on the co-existence  and adaptability with other elements.

Systems are considered alive if they can do three things. They …

1. Can sustain themselves.
2. Connect with their environment (or adapt).
3. Reproduce.

When we consider how all these A-B-C systems have evolved together we can see that they make the world sustainable – as we know and need it to be.  Geology, Energy, Water, Climate, Food, Bio-genetic Ecology and Human Systems are all necessary to sustain our life and all other life on the planet.

And when we consider how these systems impact on one another we can see the major Threats that our global systems face today. Because human systems have become so successful, we are impacting on Ecology, Food Systems, Climate, Water, Energy and Geology in ways that are eroding these system as non-renewable resources or if they are renewable living systems, we are eroding their capacity to adapt and regenerate themselves.

Living systems evolve in complex hierarchies – which means as they evolve, they become more complex as they contain more and more systems.

Basic systems start with atoms, that make up molecules, that make up cells, that make up organelles, that make up organs, that make up organ systems, that make up bodies, that make up ecologies.

As a whole living system, the human body-mind is the system we are most familiar with.

But even our individual human systems belong to larger human systems: like families, teams, organizations, neighbourhoods, communities and cities.

Interestingly each of these systems is made up of other systems and we say they exist at different scales – that is they retain similar patterns, but each system is larger than the ones that make it up. And the larger it is the greater is its sphere of influence. The concept of scale lets us zoom in and zoom out to see systems with the same patterns at different magnifications and how they impact themselves, each other and their place on this planet.

My great interest is in the most complex human system that we have yet created – the city – because it contains all these systems co-existing in dynamic relationship. I call it the human hive.

In fact I believe we are in an era when even cities are being superseded by yet a larger system – that I call the planet of cities.

In human systems we need to consider not only what makes up our bodies physically – but also what makes up our minds consciously – and how we relate to others in group cultural systems and to the environmental and built systems.

So this brings us back to Systems Thinking. When we can SEE systems – i.e. recognize a whole with a boundary containing elements – we are starting to think in the basics of systems thinking. When we can see how different systems are interconnected, we are progressing our systems thinking to a more complex level. When we use our consciousness to design NEW systems we are demonstrating our evolutionary human capacity to use emergence and adapt through being innovative and creative.

As we design new systems, we eventually produce systems of systems – like say controlling water, by carrying it in water vessels, then irrigation channels, then viaducts, then water canals and locks; then building reservoirs and dams; and then creating plumbing systems; and- dare I say it? – bottling water.

But the challenge of systems thinking is not just to see one system in isolation of other systems – but to see the whole trajectory of ABC systems as an evolutionary supra-system. Then our thinking must consider the consequences of our innovations, designs and creations. True systems thinking embraces our responsibility for initiating change that impacts all earth systems – taking responsibility not only for our intended consequences – but the unintended ones.

One of the great values of Systems Thinking is that it is critical to being able to shift our perspectives so we can be effective change agents in the world. Systems Thinking enables and supports us to see (and respect) ourselves as whole living systems, in relationship to other whole living systems, within the larger context of environmental systems and ultimately the earth as a whole planetary system.

Thinking in systems impacts how we can shift perspectives and thus how we are able to adapt and innovate, design and lead and grow and expand our capacity for caring for the living systems we are, that we relate to and that we co-create.

This is fundamental to what I call the Master Code of the Human Hive: Take care of yourself, Take care of each other, Take care of this place … so that we can take care of this planet.

Endnotes:

(1) This was presented to Waterlution Toronto, Learning Lab Journey ” Exploring Complexity & Innovative Leadership Around Water & Energy in Ontario”. January 26, 2013. See also Guiding Step 4: Systems Thinking Helps Shift Perspectives

(2) Concept from Dr. Brian Eddy

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Cultural Intelligence Tells the Stories of the City Heart

Cultural intelligence represents the “We” life of the city. It is the beating heart of the Human Hive.   This heart-based intelligence embraces the relationships in the city.

These relationships transcend boundaries that both contain and separate families, groups, organizations and all the collectives of people in the city.  It includes the individual and the group voice; multiple levels of values; and both city cultures and rural cultures.

The voices of Cultural Intelligence tell the stories of the city, creating a heart-beat of the city that resonates to different rhythms, reflects distinctive heart-felt places within the city’s spaces and recalls the histories of the many cultures that now live in our cities.

City cultures depend totally on the quality of relationships. The culture of the city represents the lived values of its citizens. It is the perpetual barometer of “what is important around here”?

How we prioritize those values at home, work, play or in spiritual practise translates into the quality of our relationships and the intelligence that represents the city’s culture.

As our world cities have become more cosmopolitan, many cities now contain all the world’s cultures, belief systems and ethnic relationships within its boundaries. These kinds of “city limits” in fact are very complex and now create potential for unlimited possibilities. This cultural fertility is the seedbed of the Hive Mind that is gradually emerging as a new form of cultural consciousness (and an ever-expanding collective unconscious).

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This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.

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2011 Leaning Pillars of Sustainability

2011 may be the tipping point that globally shifted all the Pillars of Sustainability. By year-end each leans as precariously as four Towers of Pisa.

First we watched the Environmental Pillar reign tsunami terror on the city of Sendai, followed by the infrastructural meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plants, sending shock waves throughout the worldwide energy sector.

Before we caught our breath the Economic meltdown of the EU sent shivers of 2008 deja-vu around the financial world, expanding uncertainty and contracting portfolios of wealth.

Simultaneously the Social Pillar caught fire during the Arab Spring, spreading from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya and Yemen and still raging in Syria, the Straits of Hormuz and once again at the gas pump.

Finally the Cultural Pillar Occupied Wall Street and city centres around the world, challenging positions of power with perspectives of unfairness.

Energy, Matter and Information are being recalibrated above, below and around every Pillar. Sustainability itself has been occupied in very new ways.

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Occupy the Voice of Civil Society

Civil Society #occupies the We and Heart of the Integral City.  As Civil Society We beat with the pulse of cooperatives, credit unions, foundations, institutes, not-for-profits, NGO’s, social enterprises and other agencies who invest in cultural and social capital in our Integral City.

As Civil Society Members and Activists our volunteers #occupy principles of city wellbeing. As Civil Society Executive Directors and Staff, We #occupy roles that implement and deliver strategies and goals. As  Civil Society Boards, Steering Committees and citizen grassroots groups We #occupy visions and values that make a difference.

Civil Society occupies offices where financial asset accumulation is not the sole measure of our success. We #occupy expectations for Quality of life as a condition of our Integral City, and recognize our partnership with those who #occupy the offices of Civic Managers.

We #occupy politics as the art of the possible – it is our natural environment. We support the Integral City’s production and profit sectors so they generate rewards for people who #occupy the city everywhere.

We #occupy the hearts of city fathers and mothers who work to leave a legacy for our future generations. Our Civil Society Board Members #occupy successful economic and environmental city leadership roles. We #occupy beliefs in the priority of people’s contribution to profit and planetary success.

As We #occupy the heart of Integral City We are creating new agendas for social change.

As Civil Society We #occupy conscious and cultural ways and means to integrate We with I,  Him/Her and Them to create a Healthy Integral City.

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Ali’s Warnings Show Pre-Trans Cultural Divides = Strong Guidance for City Governance

The wise evolution of cultural affinities and loyalties is something nations must pay careful attention to, warns Ayaan Hirst Ali in a National Post article documenting her personal history. In fact it appears from her advice that it is a maxim that cities must understand in order to evolve governance that works in their post-modern pluralistic realities.

Ayaan Hirst Ali, Photo by Tim Fraser, National Post, Oct. 22, 2011

Ali is a Somalian born woman who speaks from the experience of surviving the brutalizing Islamic beliefs and practices of her Somalian heritage, with childhood transits through Saudi Arabia and Kenya until she immigrated to Holland. Remarkably she became a film maker and politician who risked her life (before, during and after her affiliation with producer Theo Van Gogh who was assasinated because of their joint actions) documenting the travails of women in Islamic culture in the Netherlands. Those experiences brought her into confrontation with the Dutch consititution which essentially could not protect her against the immigration cultures whose religious rights trumped the more progressive rights of the European Dutch culture.

Ali points out the irony, that the Dutch culture (along with most other European cultures) has a bloody and conflicted history that has emerged a pluralistic society, that permits allegiances to religious and cultures that basically undermine the very tenets of Holland’s permissive nationhood. Thus, Ali has chosen to emigrate to the United States. Why? She points to the melting pot precepts enshrined in the US constitution that separate politics and religion and demand loyalty to nation that supercedes loyalty to less inclusive cultural entitities (like religions, professions or organizations). The US conditions for cultural life, Ali, apparently believes will ensure greater wellbeing and freedom for individuals with careful circumscription of the tyrrany of collectives, and represents a hallmark of how she wants to live and therefore where she wants to live.

What catches my imagination about Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s story is that she seems to have defined a critical pre-trans fallacy related to governance. She points out that at the national scale, it makes no sense to subjugate more complex governance systems to the precepts of less complex governance systems. In a permissive society like Holland (or much of northern Europe, Scandinavia, UK and Canada) if you tilt the law so that the cultural rules of immigration cultures are allowed to trump the cultural rules of the country who enabled the immigrants into the country, then you recreate the conditions from the country of origin in the country of greater progress. Essentially she seems to be saying, beware that the rules formed in the traditional and pre-modern cauldrons of families, clans and feudal dictators do not get imported into the modern and post-modern nations of constitutions, rules of law and social safety nets. Do not taint the privileges of the social safety net with the horrors of Sharia law, honour killings, female circumcision, gender inequality and religious schools supported by the state.

Such is the all too real description of the pre-trans fallacy that uses the arguments from less inclusive cultures (the “pre”-inclusive cultures) to undermine the values of more inclusive cultures (the “trans”-inclusive).

With such a stark warning at the national scale, it raises a similar warning flag at the city scale. For the same considerations need to be given for the undermining of school systems (eg. the rules that include or exclude children based on cultural divides), health care systems (eg. rules that mis-match health solutions with health challenges), civic governance (eg. rules that govern public and private spaces) and city development (eg. rules that privilege some investment decisions over others).

If we care about our cities we must create governance systems that enable us to Take Care of Ourselves, Take Care of Each Other and Take  Care of This Place in a way that includes the transpersonal, transcollective and translocal without undermining wellbeing with what amounts to “idiot compassion” on a grand scale.

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Vegetable Grower Mid East’s Rosa Parks?

Events in Egypt this last week show how the consciousness of people  in the rural area that serves cities can ignite a whole culture. The amazing pictures of hundreds of thousands marching in Cairo and the Mubarak government’s progressive retreat in the face of the population’s fearless demands mark what the media call a “regime change”.

The question is, whether this regime change will merely be a shift from one para-military dictatorship to another, or from a dictatorship to some form of democracy? Dr. Don Beck often says, “be careful that you don’t confuse getting rid of what you don’t want, for getting what you do want”. 

What do Egyptians really want? Will it align with what the rest of the world wants it to want? Because as Ross Douthat has noted, the desires of the USA, Israel and Iran (to name a few interested nations) about Egypt, have not aligned for some time.

The dilemma faced by Egypt is one of growing up. Ironically this tinder box was lit by a young farmer in Tunisia, who merely wanted to sell fresh produce in the city. He was so angry at the refusal of authorities to allow him to pursue his perceived rights, that he literally torched himself – and set in motion a self-organizing inflammation that spread from country to city and city to city and now nation to nation.

The growing up that Egyptians seem to be demanding is the right to free elections and a government that represents their interests for the basics of life. But the world is witnessing Egypt’s challenge like an extended family witnesses the coming of age of a teenager. Will this teenager grow into more self-responsibility or regress into less self-responsibility. The cabal of nation-aunts-uncles-cousins-brothers-sisters-mothers-and-fathers are all holding our breaths to see what the next natural step of development Egypt will grow into?

And this holding our breath – instead of rushing in with a certainty that we know how to fix the situation is hopefully a sign that this extended family has maybe learned a lesson or two, about allowing cities and nations to determine what is the next natural step of development for them. Because you can’t parachute in a fix from the outside that will offer any long term resiliency — you can, at best, support the conditions for developmental capacities to grow themselves. It is a home grown coming of age that is needed most. So whatever the change – be it revolutionary or evolutionary – we must hope that Egyptians themselves can plant it, grow it, nurture it, and own it.

Who knew a humble vegetable plot could sprout such an energizing shift? This story may turn out to be the equivalent cultural shift for the Middle East as Rosa Parks was for the USA?

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