What To Do ... Oh, What To Do ?

The Happy Tutor in his never-ending quest for the fundamentals has asked, apropopos of the interlinked chattering masses, "How do we plug ourselves into a new structure where the aggregate of our actions is more than just people talking?"

To which I preempively replied in an private email, as the warm-up for my weekly spanking:

"I think this is a very important questions, inarguably central to our collective future.

Positing goals, allocating resources and achieving (and measuring achievement of) goals are important .. I'm not so sure about *measurement* generally unless looking for direction for the next goals ... but obviously when the main goal is "money" and it has to be shared with more than one person, measurement of some form is important. And I'm someone that used to proselytize that "what you can't measure you can't manage".

All this a connected collection of people can do ... and it's not so difficult. Posited goals can come from developing a shared vision and deconstructing that into goals. Allocating resources .. if you have resources, not so hard either. As Harry has noted in comments over at the Tutor's dumpster:

"It depends on what you would like to get done".

But .. and I think this is a big *but*, and central to the Tutor's purpose and activities .... our individual and collective relationship with the core issue of money versus/and purpose is the crux here, I think.

What the tricksters over at Wealth Bondage keep on chattering about *doing* is shifting some (and hopefully increasingly more) peoples' basic perspective on this issue .. and it seems clear to me that without some significant shifts here, we're more or less doomed.

I suspect (but don't really know) that it's mainly been in the last 30 years or so ... ever since the advent of (first) tv, then easy credit for everything, supporting by the increasing presence (saturation ?) of refined marketing practices such as storytelling, branding and glurge .... that the majority of people in our North American society have a pretty unconscious and conflicted relationship with money and purpose. Drawing on my observations from 15 years of consulting in (amongst other related areas) the strategies and practices of compensation, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that there are very good reasons, from a social control perspective, that money is for most people doled out in bi-weekly insulin-drip like electronic injections to a bank account. It's seen as life-blood, essential for survival and a deep existential threat to survival when absent.

There is a ferocious dependency on it, which will very very quickly override any noble purposeful activity in its relative absence. One has to be really fed up, or because of strong values so inclined, to address and seek to master this dependency.

Have you, for example, ever tried long periods without income .. say 6 months, or a year ? What I have learned, through that experience, is that psychological fear of the absence of money is tantamount to virtual "death", in many ways . So, the question presents itself ... "Are you ready to *die* for your values and beliefs ?" I think that this is the basic issue with which most people need some help in order to *amount to more on our own time*, with respect to moving beyond chattering to some form of putting individual effort and commitment into collective possibility.

Which is probably why really MAJOR change, such as the French Revolution or the Boxer Rebellion, or the bolshies, or the nazis .. are all pretty easily connected with troubled, worried and rumbunctious economic times .. things got so bad that people stopped being scared and realized something fundamental had to change.

This is just about the only destination I can see for the train ride the US , as the dominating champion of market capiltalism, is taking everyone on. Absent a really REALLY compelling purpose that involves survival .. a *burning platform*, as it's called in organizational change lingo (which ironically is exactly what Cheney and Rove have been using, in the guise of terrorism), why WOULD people seek real and substantive change to the current system of distortion, lies, cronyism, legislated plutocracy ?

Why for example, in tackling global terrorism, would we not ask why so many people in other, less-developed countries have some beef with ongoing economic and political injustices over the past 50 years or so (implemented mostly in covert ways which are only sometimes discovered, rarely aired until long after, and then only really complained about by cranky old leftists - Gunter Grass' recent foray into examining this issue in the context of Germany's current governance comes to mind).

It seems that the majority of people blithely accept the kool-aid they're offered .. get an education so that you (maybe) can get a good job, buy (or lease) a new car with 0 down and a 60-month 0% interest rate, then get an adjustable-rate interest-only mortgage ... and then hang on for dear life, hoping that when they reach 40 they'll have either accumulated enough to say "fuck you" or that they might be one of the few that stay on and on, or that their house has continued to grow in value such that Ditech.com can ride in from stage left with a $49 fee second mortgage ... and just assume that this is the way things are, and are meant to be.

This is what the much-vaunted "highest standard of living on the planet" consists of, brought to you by the American Dream and Industrial Light and Magic.

That's the path laid out for good, honest people, marketed by our socio-economic institutions - schools, employers, governments, financial gatekeepers. And then there's the other path ... make a spectacle of yourself, lie, cheat, gain some notoriety and then either run for elected office or have someone ghost-write a tell-all book, or dream up some ridiculous but mean reality show, and cash in on exploiting human foibles."

Back to the Tutor's question ... "How do we plug ourselves into a new structure where the aggregate of our actions is more than just people talking?"

Harry is right on ... "It depends on what you want to get done".

It's a fundamental requirementto clarify purpose to the point where people collectively can honestly say ...

"chattering is fun, but it can be even more fun, more fulfilling, to address useful purpose *X*.

We know, or at least believe, that information and knowledge can be power. And so by first connecting and clarifying what we want to do (chattering about stuff is the first step, but getting down to it is hard work to do well), and then deciding on a starting point, and then implementing, evaluating, adjusting, and advertising why this purpose is mission-critical to this group of people and their (invited by purpose) constituents, we can begin to address Tutor's question and harry's (relative) direction. They invite somber reflection that can lead to identifying purposes that may come to be seen as more important than money.

And if we truly hope to see some real change in the whys, wherefores and ways we live, I believe that we will (individually and collectively) need to address the question of money 's central role in driving our lives.

Then again .. "money talks, bullshit walks".

I ask myself, master bullshitter that I am, whether or not this is the future - where one's life, starting from day one at kindergarten, has the default, not-reflected-upon purpose of making money - I want to help create for my nephew, my friends' children and most importantly, the 2 or 3 billion children in other parts of the world that for whatever reason (what WERE they thinking ?) chose non-white, non-North American parents ?

Asking oneself some version of this question leads neatly, I think, to "what ought I do, why and with whom, and how to start" .. which I think might become helpful to moving beyond just talking.

Clearly there have been many initiatives set up online during the past five or so years that have aimed at, and to some degree accomplished the goals of a collective purpose ... and I think that in almost all cases these initiatives will have had to grapple with the money and purpose issue. Either there has been sufficient money to attract some people willing to address the issues, or the purpose, belief and passion have been great enough to overcome the centrifugal forces of money.

In the world we have, capital markets, the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States and rich people who might be sponsors have the veto power over almost all initiatives. It's either permitted, enabled or funded .. or it's not. I find it lamentable that one of the best strategies I've been able to come up with (one I have often suggested) is to say .. "hey, George Soros or Pierre Omidyar might, just might be interested in this". As opposed to these two, and no doubt some others, why is it that so many wealthy people want to minimize and avoid taxes, avoid giving back to the society or set of conditions that helped them become or remain wealthy .. why do they hate the society in which they live, and support its philosophical and spiritual impoverishment so that their children can remain wealthy ?

Here's another (I think, uncertainly) good example. Bill Gates, strident capitalist he, has been much lauded for the Gates Foundation's size, clout and purpose .. addressing AIDS issues in Africa, mainly. And yet, when having to choose between money and principles, it seems that he can still be swayed more by the lustre of opportunity than by some inner moral values.

In the world we (may) want, I suspect that somehow or other we'll have to consider again this philosophical construct of purpose and exchange we call money.

But I just now realized we had already covered much of this in one of the Tutor's recent classes. I think I remember, maybe, that the homework question was something like "Can caritas ever become more important as a purpose, a driving force, than Mammon?"

And I remember thinking about it, scribbling some notes ... and then the collection agency called and I had to switch to figuring out which credit card still had enough room left on it to make the late payments on two of my other credit cards.

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