Ten Tips on How to Save the World - first published in Episyllogism 2013

Ten Tips on How to Save the World

first published in episyllogism SEPTEMBER  2013

The instructions are simple. Learn from the bees, use your caring mind to gaze at the world, reclaim your power, reclaim your nature, hold onto curiosity, celebrate your creativity, give up blaming, live from a place of love, acknowledge your political self, and honour your spirit.

1. Learn from the bees
Marilyn Hamilton, CEO of Integral City, told a children’s story not long ago, that is easy to remember. Three key strategies enable bee hives to survive, which can teach us how to sustain the human hive – take care of you, take care of others, take care of this place. Our ancestors learned how to do this but sophisticated social systems have alienated us from our own capacity to manage the hive. However, world crises show we must re-engage in the process now.

2. Use your caring mind to gaze at the world
Look closely at the operating system, or the ‘apparatus’ as Simone Weil put it. Read ideas and opinions wherever you can find them. Ask yourself who benefits? Expand your gaze beyond your own immediate interests. Prepare to be disturbed but not defeated.

3. Reclaim power
Power and all its parts: politics, wealth, language, science, economics, institutional religion, are not evil. They are tools of a civil society. What is evil is the way these institutions have been corrupted to centralize power, to make it a zero sum commodity. Infinite power is natural, loving and intelligent.

4. Reclaim our nature
We are resourceful workers and stakeholders in our society. We are not a resource or a job description. We are not left, right, conservative or liberal – we are organic, politically mobile beings. Labels are assigned to influence and understand. We have courage, fear, anger, love and wisdom but they are not commodities, they are strengths that emerge and hide. The deadliest weapon of oppression is that which turns humanity and all of nature into a thing, a resource.

5. Hold onto Curiosity
This is what keeps us exploring, examining, interrogating the conditions we live under or in. As long as curiosity is alive we shall never be content with serving an oppressive and corrupt social order.

6. Celebrate your Creativity                                                                                            Music, theatre, farmers’ markets, poetry, gardens, maps, new political parties, conversations – are the means of expressing and sharing our humanity. Art is the what, where, how and who of our species as it yearns and evolves.

7. Give up blaming
Blaming is not problem solving and the problem is not what other people do. To solve problems we need to re-engage our power to care creatively, with curiosity and love.

8. Live from a place of Love
The habits and preferences you perform for your family, whether  blood related or chosen, is your place of love. How you surround yourself to survive, persevere and inspire happiness with all that you can, is a place of love. Adopt this practice outside your door, to your neighbours, your country, your cohorts, your congregation, and your local grocery store. Break apart the structures of false hierarchies. It demands attention to suffering, violence and calls for healing. Love is what drives great minds to take courageous stands outside of their particular disciplines for the greater good. Love is the openness to pain that makes injustice, corruption, cynicism and oppression unbearable.

9. Life is political.
You are an integral, intelligent, reflective part of a larger organism. Whether we survive as a species depends on protecting our earthly home from a system that enables a few egos to hold this planet ransom for the sake of temporary profit. There is no escape from politics. Its apparatus has been built on a grandiose delusion that refuses to see the natural world as sacred, and ourselves dependent upon its health. To be apolitical is to be a doctor standing at the bed of a dying patient, refusing to be involved because the disease is dirty. To dismiss the world stage and your part in it is to lobotomize the future.

10. Honour the spirit
The spirit is our energy. It imparts our intentions before we see them. It allows us to dream and care for the world beyond our own life. Imagination and love is the immortal legacy we leave for our great-grandchildren.

These are just my thoughts. What are yours? What would you list as the top ten tips on saving the world?

A Liberal Decalogue from Bertrand Russell

Brainpickings.org reprinted, a decalogue by Bertrand Russell. It originally appeared in the

December 16, 1951 issue of The New York Times Magazine. Here it is as I found it in Brainpickings, tipped off by an article in Episyllogism. I was tempted to make this more modern by removing the old didactic style, but thought it better to use the voice it was written in.

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

1984 - George Orwell

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984

(This quote was posted in Episyllogism)

Whose fault is it then?

In response to a previous post It Isn't Your Fault, Bob Lane (Episyllogism) responded with the question whose fault is it? Later he replied:  "I would think that individuals have an obligation in a democracy to learn the facts; to learn how to distinguish facts from nonsense; and to be skeptical about all media and government bloviations."

Which means, among other things, fact checking. Tips on how to check facts from politifact.com:
1. Ask the person making the claim for evidence. 

2. Look for what other fact-checkers have found before you.
3. Do a Google search -- and then search again. 
4. Search the Deep Web.  areas of the Internet that aren’t open to surface searching.
5. Look for experts with different perspectives.
6. Check out some books.
7. Anything else?

Humanity at Hazard: The Etiology of War

This paper by John Alexie Crane, published in 2008,  (and posted on Episyllogism) asks "Human beings are extremely creative at making weapons and war, but persistently inept at achieving lasting peace. Why is this?"

Crane explains this well and there are two main points that I took from it. One is that we are animals with animal instincts but our culture denies it. And the second point is that groups are led by males who have a strong drive for power and control. These alpha males arouse a fighting spirit among other males such as "Make America Great Again!"

Alpha males, when they are aware and responsible create better groups but if they are immature and unaware, they can destroy and devastate their group.

"Together," writes Crane, "we must develop a social order rooted in the reality of human nature rather than in denial and delusion, a social order that will make survival possible. Otherwise, this promising human experiment that has come so far in its development will end."

That is our task. That is the problem we must tackle.