Liquid Democracy
Alternatives to Political Systems, Deforestation, Society — by Thomas Fischbacher September 2, 2010
 Isn’t it time to imagine a new world? |
Perhaps it is impossible to write an article about politics without evoking strong – and maybe quite emotional – thoughts and responses. One particular all-too-human reaction to a novel concept or idea about which we have a strong "gut feeling" (good or bad) is to construct logically-sounding reasons to justify our initial emotions. For this reason, I would like to ask readers who would like to comment on this article to sleep one night over their reply before they post it.
Politics is all about defining the legal environment that guides society. It is this framework that defines to a large extent what is illegal and what is not, what is profitable and what is not – hence what sort of economic activities will be pursued. Evidently, political decisions therefore have a major impact on how well societies manage their natural resources. Some would even claim that sustainability is exclusively a question of politics. While I personally would not subscribe to this idea, there have been a number of people who became professional politicians out of a strong inner desire to move their respective societies away from their suicidal paths. Across the globe, some quite prominent politicians invested a lot of personal energy into this – often to ultimately fail in resignation. One might think, for example, of the German politician Herbert Gruhl, originally a member of the conservative party, who, cancelling his membership due to irreconcilable differences on environmental issues, became one of the founders of the German Green Party. In 1992, the year before he died, he published a sequel to his 1975 best-seller (whose title would translate as "Plundered Planet"), which roughly would translate as: "Ascension to Nothingness – the Plundered Planet at its End". In the U.S., Jay Hanson seems to have played a similar role. Resignation clearly speaks out of the last lines of his article ‘requiem’:
Comments (2)A Fresh Look at Gandhi – Part II
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Thomas Fischbacher July 23, 2010
by Thomas Fischbacher. Read Part I here.
History has seen many an ideology fail that wrongly believed to "finally" explain everything that went wrong in this world, and show a way out. The problem with any such system of thought is that its key feature – "to explain everything" makes it both very seductive and very dangerous. Seductive, because many (most?) people experience psychological discomfort at the thought of living in a world they cannot fully understand, and dangerous, because any such ideology by construction must be unable to recognize feedback of the "you are on the wrong track here" sort – it will always have both an excuse and a remedy ready that is of the form "it would have worked straightaway if only …". So, how do such ideologies fail? In the only way they can – by bumping into the solid wall of hard reality.
In human societies, "conflict" more often than not is a conflict between different interpretations of the world around us and how we think it should be shaped. The dominant attitude towards "conflict" in western society is one of "might makes right". "Conflict" is typically seen as a problem of "preferred outcomes", with "strategy" being the key tool employed by both parties in conflict as they lead their own ideology to victory – as if the world were a game of chess.
Comments (3)The Lesson of the Organic Vine Tomato
Society — by Thomas Fischbacher May 4, 2010
Whoever likes to drink wine, eat sausages, or read newspapers, had better not watch the production process. - Anonymous
A well-functioning society has to be aware of new trends and developments that influence the context in which it has to live. Also, it must be able to analyze and evaluate complex situations. The better a society does on these aspects, the stronger its ability will be to deliver flexible, dynamic, appropriate responses to novel challenges. For this reason, anyone whose work is related to informing or educating people carries a special responsibility that demands diligence. This includes teachers, journalists, scientists, and a number of other professions. In our present western culture, that is strongly dominated by the concept of manipulation of other people to obtain a strategic advantage, we can pretty much expect to find many of the well-established news distribution systems to be badly broken in that respect. We see this evidenced when we apply the very same ancient standards which this culture claims to cherish, in this case: "Thou Shalt not Bear False Witness". It is interesting to note that throughout India (for example), the cultural function of journalists for a long time was provided by wandering monks – hinting at a deeper understanding of the importance of journalism to be linked with high ethical standards of integrity. (The claim here is not that this system was perfect. The claim is that Indian society might have had a better understanding of what matters most here.)
Twenty years ago, most people were fairly helpless if they wanted to independently verify the validity and accuracy of news reports – and newspapers (say) generally tend to not report gross inaccuracies or fabrications in other newspapers. There is a long history of using images, in particular, to manipulate public opinion. One has to appreciate the importance of public exhibitions such as this one.
Comments (2)A Fresh Look at Gandhi – Part I
Eco-Villages, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Thomas Fischbacher March 19, 2010
A chinese proverb says: "the last thing a fish notices is the water in which it swims". And indeed, we often find that we are immersed so deeply in our present context and its corresponding mindset that we fail to ask the most important questions simply because we cannot see them. This certainly is true for the physicists who worked on the "Manhattan Project" and built the atomic bomb, genuinely believing that the situation at the time required all their effort to prevent Nazi Germany from using nuclear weapons in the war. It took a major catastrophe – the nuclear attack on two Japanese cities – to make a number of scientists ask themselves the question they perhaps should have asked much earlier: Is it conceivable that, all things considered, our present perspective on the general situation might be dangerously inaccurate? The relevance of this question has not changed since.
Money Literacy – Part V
Alternatives to Political Systems, Bio-regional Organisations, Consumerism, Eco-Villages, Economics, Ethical Investment, Financial Management, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Thomas Fischbacher January 21, 2010
Editor’s Note: This Part V of a series. Before continuing, please read Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV if you haven’t already.
"Money" is nothing but a social construct that comes with a number of "rules of the game". In one way, "money" has much in common with computer operating systems: most users are completely unaware of the degree to which these rules are flexible, malleable, and allow very different designs. So, before we ask ourselves: in what way could a different design of rules lead to a different role of money, it is worthwhile taking a look at what sort of phenomena the present arrangement gives rise to. A telling passage can be found in Bill Mollison’s autobiography:
Bill Mollison’s 1981 Permaculture Lecture Notes: New Edition
Courses/Workshops, DVDs/Books — by Thomas Fischbacher January 20, 2010
Bill Mollison teaching with Geoff Lawton at Trinity College, Melbourne, 2009
Photo © Craig Mackintosh
In 1981, Bill Mollison gave a Permaculture Design course for which Dan Hemenway produced lecture notes. While these originally were made available as a set of pamphlets for a small copying fee, they have been available on the web for quite some time, in PDF form, like here (6mb PDF), for example.
While the social and cultural context has changed quite dramatically in the last 30 years, and this material hence does not reflect that change, these pamphlets still provide quite a useful free resource that explains permaculture in detail. While the Permaculture Designers’ Manual certainly presents many ideas in a more accessible way than these transcripts of Bill Mollison’s lectures, they nevertheless are an often quite useful complementary resource. This holds in particular for a few issues which are presented in a slightly cryptic way in the Permaculture Designers’ Manual and benefit from an alternative explanation.
A re-edited version of this material, both in the form of HTML web pages as well as a PDF (using LaTeX-based typesetting which, hopefully, should be more homogeneous and easier to read than the original) is now available here: http://nmag.soton.ac.uk/mollison
This also provides a number of explanatory footnotes that should help to both provide more background on some ideas, and put them into more recent context.
Comments (1)Money Literacy – Part IV
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Financial Management, People Systems — by Thomas Fischbacher January 15, 2010
Editor’s Note: This Part IV of a series. Before continuing, please read Part I, Part II and Part III if you haven’t already.
Patterns are amazing things. Maybe, their fascination comes from the human mind being very good at spotting them, while at the same time also being very bad at spotting them. It is sometimes claimed that "a genius is someone who sees something that is patently obvious for the first time" and, very often, patterns are fascinatingly obvious – in hindsight.
By what process precisely does a culture lose its indigenous money as it gets connected to a more powerful economy? One might of course guess that "bait" is an important factor: Look at all these shiny new gadgets that the new money can buy. There’s even television screens! Still, some may not be that easily seduced, and as, unfortunately, we all feel better about major life decisions if we can avoid permanent confrontation with observations that force us to re-evaluate whether they might have been a major mistake, the question arises how to "connect" those to the new money economy who value their independence of it very highly.
Comments (1)Money Literacy – Part III
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Financial Management, People Systems, Village Development — by Thomas Fischbacher January 13, 2010
Editor’s Note: This Part III of a series. Before continuing, please read Part I and Part II, if you haven’t already.
A small economy joins the big economy
In the last part of this series, we saw that linking a big economy to a small economy is by no means an innocent act: naively, this might be regarded as just ‘giving everybody more choice’, i.e. more options for trade, hence more ‘freedom’. But everything works in two ways: one cannot link a big economy to a small economy without linking the small economy to the big economy. So, this will simultaneously give the big economy a strong handle on the small economy. What would in principle prevent a small population of economically powerful participants in the big economy from using their sheer weight to e.g. buy up key resources such as land in the small economy? This is not a purely theoretical issue – we see such processes all around us. Note that this is practically bound to happen if the big economy keeps on generating major internal pressure to "grow". And, as one cannot separate a culture from its economy, this effectively means that the largest aggressive-expansive economy, that of the culture called "western civilization", keeps on re-programming other cultures’ economies, and eventually these cultures themselves. Might that even be called ethnocide?
Comments (4)Money Literacy – Part II
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Financial Management, People Systems — by Thomas Fischbacher January 10, 2010
Editor’s Note: This Part II of a series. Before continuing, please read Part I, if you haven’t already.
Any society practices division of labour to some extent, and hence, needs some way to keep track of who is pulling their weight, and who is not. The fundamental idea is, of course, that someone who contributes to society’s well-being acquires some form of credit that gives him permission to ask society to do him some favour in turn. It is entirely conceivable that in some small societies – such as some close-knit families, or maybe some abbeys, all this bookkeeping on who owes whom how big a favour is done only mentally, without any form of written record or specific token. Usually, however, this keeping track of favours easily gets out of hand and becomes so confusing that societies soon start to rely on some sort of additional device – not for all processes, but at least for a considerable share of them. Let us for now call any such socially agreed upon way of keeping track "a currency". It is perfectly normal in any society to see multiple quite different currencies being in circulation simultaneously, from bank notes to invitations to a barbeque. This is important to note, for we normally associate only one concept with the term "currency": some sort of "formal money" (where we usually think of coins, or bank notes, etc.). Hence, it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves that this might be overly narrow-minded.
Comments (5)Money Literacy – Part I
Alternatives to Political Systems, Financial Management, People Systems — by Thomas Fischbacher January 8, 2010
The 20th century was strongly dominated by two schools of thought on how to design a system that guides human effort towards the improvement of living conditions and the advancement of human society: On the one hand, we have "capitalism", on the other hand "communism". While both are often regarded as irreconcilably opposing philosophies, the one proposing a de-centralized market mechanism, the other one a centralized planned economy to allocate "scarce resources", it is important to notice that, in the past century, both gave disturbingly similar results in one important respect: Back then, they both amounted to increasingly damaging vital life support system resources in order to meddle through the problems of the day. One might try to capture this thought in a succinct provocative phrase: The one thing communism and capitalism could not agree on is whether the process of destroying the current best available remaining resources should proceed in a centralized or de-centralized way. Mindless bickering over this – essentially minor – detail brought the world insanely close to the brink of instant nuclear annihilation at least thrice in the 20th century, in October 1962 [1], in October 1969 [2], and in September 1983 [3]: we should perhaps count ourselves lucky we even made it so far.
The Tricks of the Human Mind
General, Global Warming/Climate Change, Society — by Thomas Fischbacher December 19, 2009
Editor’s Note: Thomas Fischbacher has been a valued commenter on this site for a while now. Today Thomas makes his PRI post debut, with a great piece on why sometimes logic and facts are neither logical nor factual in the context of our cherished beliefs. Others that would like to contribute articles are very welcome to do so.
When studying the human mind, one of the most fascinating – and at times startling – insights is that there is sometimes a serious discrepancy between the tale the human mind spins to itself, and actual reality.
One especially striking demonstration of the extent of the distortions introduced by the brain’s data pre-processing was given by Edward Adelson, MIT professor of vision science, with the "checkershadow illusion":
The squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray
Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This innocent illusion is so extremely appealing because it conveys its profound message in the most direct, most immediate, most rapid way possible: Your eyes lie, and much more than you actually might ever have imagined.
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