Roz Savage's Blog, page 10

My guest on this week’s podcast is Professor Tim Jackson, ecological economist, author, and playwright. Since 2016 he has been Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) at the University of Surrey in the UK, where he is also Professor of Sustainable Development. He is well known for his book, Prosperity without Growth (2009/2017) which has been translated into 17 foreign languages. His latest book Post Growth – Life after Capitalism was published by Polity Press this year. In 2016, Tim was awarded the Hillary Laureate for exceptional international leadership in sustainability. In addition to his academic work, Tim is an award-winning dramatist with numerous radio-writing credits for the BBC.

Tim was one of my examiners for my recent doctorate on the nature of change. Towards the end of our conversation he mentions that it’s quite entertaining that the tables are now turned, and the fact that he gave me a moderately hard time in my viva, or doctoral defence as Americans call it. So yes, he did make me sweat. But actually I’m immensely grateful to him, because the amendments he requested are now forming the core of my forthcoming book, The Ocean in a Drop.

But I have to admit that coming into this conversation, I did feel a bit like a poorly prepared undergraduate heading into an exam. I hope my nerves aren’t too obvious!

We talk about Aristotle, wisdom, resilience, fear, consumer capitalism, Maslow’s hierarchy, 100 year plans, inequality, the 1%, materialism, the science of desire, pitchforks, revolutions, yoga, yin and yang, the patriarchy, and our mutual confession to being closet monarchists.

What I really appreciate about Tim is his courage to question the status quo, especially around GDP as the pre-eminent metric of success – when we know it’s a tremendously poor indicator of wellbeing and happiness. We’ve been sold this myth that sustainability is all about sacrifice and wearing a hair shirt and it just isn’t true. Once our basic needs are met, we really do have the opportunity to have happier people AND a healthier planet – at the same time – by focusing on the things that bring real joy, like doing fulfilling work, having healthy relationships, and feeling safe and supported by our community – we really can have our environmental cake, and eat it.

Patreons can enjoy this podcast from today. If you’re not yet a supporter on Patreon, do please consider signing up. Else you can enjoy this podcast from next week for free on the usual podcast platforms.

And last week’s conversation with Charles Eisenstein: From Separation to Interbeing, is now available publicly.

 

Favourite Quotes:

Tim’s favourite quote, from Lau Tsu, which we discuss at the start of our conversation: ‘That enough’s enough is enough to know.’

We’ve been led into this dream of a kind of materialistic cornucopia, that we can have everything we want, that we can go on having it forever, and that future generations will have even more of it. But apart from the ecological impossibility of that, I find it philosophically and psychologically bankrupt, because I don’t believe that’s what human fulfilment and human happiness is about. I don’t believe that, when you ask people if that’s what it’s about – I don’t believe that philosophers of the ages think that’s what it’s about, or poets, or dramatists, or novelists – I think that actually, we’ve given away such an intricate part, an integral part of our humanity, by thinking that we’re just novelty-seeking hedonists who want more and more material stuff.

I’ve always been fascinated with the work of Abraham Maslow, and in his early work he pitched something which has been called the hierarchy of human needs. He pitched it in a fairly hierarchical way, saying you have to have subsistence – if you don’t get enough to eat then you’re not worrying about what’s happening tomorrow. And then, when you get over that, you’re worried about your social needs, and how you get on with your neighbours, and your relationships, and your status in the pecking order. And after that, if you’re lucky, you can get on to your transcendental needs, this sort of self-actualization, and this higher development of who we are as beings. And this metaphor of the hierarchy stuck somehow. But when we go back to Maslow and look at his later writing, for example in 1968, he published a book where he said that we also have a side of us, which is much less material, which is ultimately transcendental, and possibly even something that we could call spiritual and these two things go on in human beings at the same time, not one after the other. And the reason most people don’t get to that point is that we live in a society that actually encourages those materialistic values over the social and spiritual and psychological values.

Those who benefit from inequality have no desire at all to do anything about it, and those who suffer from inequality have no power to do anything about it… what we’re looking for is a politics brave enough to give voice to that muted outrage, to give it a place to go… we’re still looking for those brave political leaders who are prepared to articulate that, and be the mouthpiece, to be the representatives of those who don’t have the power to articulate, and don’t have the voice to be heard.

Men have suffered under this [patriarchy]. There’s a deep unhappiness beneath our vision of masculinity, and there’s also a sense of freedom in moving away from it.

It’s been found that more materialistic people find it harder to reach that state of flow, even though it’s the most satisfying thing in the world. Materialism actually stands in the way, and we tried to figure out why on earth that is. And we discovered that more materialistic people tend to try and force the positive, and turn away from the negative, so they turn away from undesirables. And all this energy that you take suppressing the undesirables and not facing the fear actually takes away from the focus and the concentration that you need to achieve the state of flow.

 

Show Notes and Links:

The Science of Desire, by Ernest Dichter

The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson

From Alain de Botton’s School of Life, an analysis of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

TED Talk by Nick Hanauer: Beware, Fellow Plutocrats, The Pitchforks are Coming

The Dandelion Insurrection: Love and Revolution, by Rivera Sun

To find out more about Tim and his work, his website is https://timjackson.org.uk/

 

Featured Image: Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash  (kid) or Photo by freestocks on Unsplash (shopping)

Yesterday we launched my new podcast, Sowing the Seeds of Change. In our first episode, I talk with the wonderful and deep-thinking author, Charles Eisenstein.

I first met Charles in 2012 at Yale, and then we crossed paths again at the Global Economic Visioning Summit at Bretton Woods in 2018, where Charles kicked off the event with an amazing double-act with Daniel Schmachtenberger, where they very movingly described their hopes and fears for our future.

Charles is an essayist, speaker, and the author of several books including Sacred Economics, Climate: A New Story, and The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible. He has four sons and a little dog named Inka. He lives with wife and youngest son in Rhode Island. He tells me his garden and office are messy.

I know you’re going to love this conversation. We talk about changing our story from a Myth of Separation to a Story of Interbeing. We talk about Taoism, miracles, sacredness, success, happiness, breakdown, breakthrough, food production, gaslighting, love, death, trauma, raising kids, the matrix, and the joys of being a misfit.

Oh, and there are jetskis and psychedelics in there as well.

Charles is one of the smartest, most thoughtful people I know, who combines a sharp intellect with great compassion for humanity. He publishes thought-provoking essays on his website, at charleseisenstein.org.

The podcast is now available to my patrons at Patreon.com. It will be publicly available from Wednesday next week.

Here are my favourite quotes from our conversation:

A miracle is something that is impossible from an existing story of what’s real, but possible from a new one.

We’re not separate individuals, but we are a totality of relationship, we are the nexus point in a matrix of relations, we are our relations. In Africa, this is called ubuntu – my being depends on the being of all beings. And therefore when being is reduced in the world, for example, if a forest is cut down, or a species goes extinct, then I become less. If people are oppressed anywhere in the world, then part of me is oppressed as well. We’re all connected. This seems pretty obvious. But our world runs on the opposite. The modern constructed world runs on a denial of that truth.

The remedy is to understand that the deep, authentic human needs that drive endless acquisition and greed are tragically unmet in our society – the need to belong, the need for connection, the need for intimacy, the need to know the faces and places around you, to be embedded in a web of stories, in relationships, the need to be at home in this world – cannot be met by money. And if you try to meet it with more and more money, how much more money will be enough? No amount will be enough. So it’s like we have a society of winners and losers. And the tragic irony is that even the winners are losers.

If we want to really change society, we have to get out of the war mentality that sees the wealthy, the affluent, the privileged as a less moral sort of human being, who we have to take down. What we have to recognize is that it’s not working for them either. And then in a spirit of friendship, we can say, “hey, let’s change all this”, rather than a spirit of “you’re over-consuming, and we’re going to take away the things that you have.” That that would only be necessary if they really were the most joyful, happy people on earth. But they’re not. I don’t think that they’re necessarily less happy than the poor, but they’re not more happy either.

Our system reduces sacred nature into commodities, it reduces sacred humans into members of a class, and puts a veil between us and a world which is actually sacred in its entirety. 

[We] program people to see the world, to see progress, as a matter of overcoming – finding an enemy and overcoming that enemy. This is a lot of how geopolitics works, our political culture, our medical culture. We’re very comfortable in a situation where there’s an identifiable bad guy. It’s a relief, because then you know what to do. You attack something, you suppress something, you banish something, you kill something, you destroy something. That’s our comfort zone, and that is culturally programmed. You win a war against radical extremists, against Islam, you wall off the immigrants, you find some identifiable source of all the problems, then you never have to look at yourself. And you have no access to the matrix of causes that includes yourself, that includes everything.

One of the conclusions of the story of interbeing. If you’re not really separate from the world, if all of the cosmos is mirrored inside of you, then any inner change corresponds to an outer change.

 

[Featured Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash]

Hey there – remember me? The short, blonde ocean rower who used to diligently post blogs here every Thursday? It’s been a while…

Thanks so much to those of you who have written to ask me if something is wrong, if I have retired from public life, or if I have died. Thankfully none of those are true. I have just been very busy working with a team within the SEEDS conscious currency, and for a while there Zoom calls took over my life and threw my routine out of whack.

But I have sorely missed writing my blog posts, and interacting with you, so now I’m getting back into the blogging groove – and with an exciting new podcast, to boot!

As my long-time readers will know, for the last two decades I have been on a quest to find out how humanity can create a better future. My odyssey has led me through a series of epiphanies about the systems, structures and stories that underpin our human civilisation, while my insatiable curiosity about how the world works has taken me deep into the dynamics of change.

I am now sharing what I’ve learned, along with the super-smart people whose ideas have influenced my journey, via my new podcast, Sowing the Seeds of Change. If you’re interested in the future of the world, the forces that will affect it, and the ideas that we can use to chart a course to health and happiness for people and planet, I think you’re going to enjoy this. I’m hoping to invite my audience to see reality from fresh perspectives, and when everything seems rather difficult, even hopeless, to dare to dream that the seemingly impossible can come true.

There is more information about the podcast, including a short introductory video, on my Patreon page. Do please check it out. There are some great benefits for you to enjoy if you feel moved to support me in this new endeavour.

I’ve been busy pre-recording Season 1, and we launch in the first week in October as a podcast (I’ll send the link once it’s live), and also as a radio show originating from WPVM in Asheville, North Carolina (with huge thanks to James Navé for creating this amazing connection). WPVM is part of two major radio networks, Pacifica (over 200 affiliate public radio stations) and PRX (monthly audience of 25 million people), meaning the show could potentially be beamed out all across North America to spread those seeds of change far and wide.

And I’ve got some super-cool guests lined up for your entertainment and edification – if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, a lot of these names will be familiar to you:

Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is PossiblePaul Hawken, Drawdown, RegenerationTim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth, Post GrowthSharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted, The Enchanted LifeBill McKibben, The End of Nature, EaarthJude Currivan, The Cosmic Hologram, HOPE – Healing Our People & Earth General Stan McChrystal, Team of TeamsKimberly Carter Gamble, Thrive, Thrive OnKim Stanley Robinson, Mars Trilogy, The Ministry for the FutureRichard Bartlett, The Hum, EnspiralPeggy Liu, JUCCCEIain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain

(With Charles Eisenstein)

Another exciting piece of news is that I am about to sign a book deal for my next book, The Ocean in a Drop, which is based on my recent doctoral dissertation (yes, you may now call me Dr Rosalind Savage!) and will also include material from the podcast interviews. The Ocean in a Drop will be published by Flint Books in October 2022.

I’m on a tight deadline for delivery of the finished manuscript – 3rd January – giving me just three months to write it. But at least I am starting out from my dissertation, so I’m not staring in panic at a blank page. I’m also reminding myself that my first three ocean voyages (the Atlantic, and Pacific Stages One and Two) each took about 3 months (103 days, 99 days, and 104 days respectively), so I know from first-hand experience that a LOT can happen in 100 days! And heck, who needs a Christmas anyway… Or birthday. Or New Year. I’m sure it will still be a more enjoyable festive season than December 2005, when I was rowing my first ocean.

Speaking of oceans (as I often am), 4th October this year will be the 10th anniversary of my arrival into Mauritius after rowing the Indian Ocean, my third and final ocean. So this feels like the perfect time for me to be launching this new chapter of my life and work. Exciting times!!

I trust that all is well in your world, and I’m delighted to be back in the land of the (blogging) living.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” (Abraham Lincoln)

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” (Buckminster Fuller)

Featured Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash

 

Forgive me, lovely people, for it has been 4 weeks since my last blog post.

After writing about WWIBLs and WOLs, life dictated that I try out “WWIBL if I didn’t post a blog for several weeks?”, and it turns out the world didn’t stop turning. Thanks to those of you who wrote to me to ask if I was still alive. I am.

Blogs will get back to (something like) normal from next week, but for now I am going to dedicate this post to an event dear to my heart – TEDxStroud. I first had the idea for this a little over a year ago, when the coronavirus still seemed to be something that happened to other countries, and well before the UK went into lockdown. Looks like I picked an “interesting” year to curate a TEDx.

But at last, after a long year of preparation, in which the committee and speakers have had to adapt and pivot many times as the UK danced in and out of lockdown, I am proud to say that we will be streaming eight incredible speakers online this coming Sunday, 21st March, from 2pm to 5pm UK time. No matter where in the world you are, I hope you will join us to revel in the culmination of an incredible amount of hard work.

Tickets are a bargain at £7.50, bookable through Eventbrite. We look forward to seeing you on Sunday!

If you’re on LinkedIn, please check out this great video from our Production Manager Sally Eden on the making of TEDxStroud.

Here are the treats we have in store for you:

Dr Lucy Chan – ‘How I Saved a Life with Fierce Compassion’: Director of the Mindful Living Community, Lucy talks about the powerful “Mama Bear” kind of compassion that we can bring in service to others.

Inez Aponte – ‘Reclaiming the art of living well – and why our future depends on it’: Inez is a facilitator and educator in the Human Scale Development Approach and explains Barefoot Economics.

Ann Finlayson – ‘Education – What is it good for?’: The Chief Executive at SEEd examines how education needs to be rethought to truly support our young people.

Nishita Dewan Shea – ‘The magic of unlikely alliances’: Lockdown created the space for Nishita to re-examine her own values – and to realise the benefits of unlikely alliances.

Angela Findlay – ‘Facing the past to liberate the present’: Angela Findlay is a professional artist, writer and speaker. Her former career teaching art in prisons, plus extensive research and writings on Germany’s post-WW2 process of commemoration, reveal the potential of the arts to bring about healing and change.

Dr Zareen Roohi Ahmed, PhD – ‘A Mother’s Gift to Humanity… Period Justice’: After losing her daughter, Zareen poured her energy into alleviating period poverty for women and girls in the UK and abroad.

Shalize Nicholas – ‘What is Zero Waste clothing?’: The designer and director at Stroud store Madia & Matilda tells us why she’s passionate about zero waste.

Jojo Mehta – ‘Ecocide law: protecting the future of life on Earth’: Carrying forward the legacy of her best friend, Polly Higgins (who was also a dear friend of mine), Jojo’s campaign to make it an international crime to wilfully harm our planet.

Although of course the speaker videos will be available later on YouTube, this will be your only chance to see two beautiful performance pieces during the breaks, to participate in the chat with members of the committee and our speakers… and to see me acting as Master (Mistress?) of Ceremonies!

That link again for tickets!

We have recently started WOL in Samara, our organisation within the SEEDS currency ecosystem. WOL is not just the wise (or sometimes slightly foolish) owl of Winnie the Pooh fame, WOL is also Working Out Loud, as described by John Stepper in his TED Talk and on the Working Out Loud website.

If you haven’t heard of working out loud (and until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t), it’s sort of like Twitter, but also very much not. It involves posting your work activities online (we use Discord channels, with one channel per person), thereby sharing transparently with the people in your work community what you’re doing and thinking that relates to your shared endeavour. You’re not spamming your colleagues with a blow-by-blow account of your day, because you’re not sending the updates to anybody, but the information is there for your co-creators to dip into, browse, and respond to as much or as little as they want to.

This serves several functions:

A logbook so you can see how you’ve been spending your time – but more humane and dignified than old-school time-reportingTransparency so others can see what you’ve been doing – important for building trust in decentralised organisations, especially when we are all working from homeAn invitation to collaboration, advice, and/or moral supportA way to find out what makes your colleagues tick – and for them to do the same for youHelps teams to spot duplications and gaps

In my view, it’s a wonderful practice, with many benefits.

There is, however, one big risk that I could see, and this is what brings me to WWIBL. WOL creates scope for egotistical busy-ness signalling. “Look at me! I’m so busy and important! Check out all these big thoughts I’m thinking, and all these important people I’m talking to!”

How did I spot this potential trap? Because I fell right into it.

(You might think I fell into it a long time ago when I started this blog in 2003, and haven’t got out of it yet… and you would be entitled to your opinion.)

I was thinking about this at 4am, as you do when you’re busy not sleeping. I was reflecting on this post that I put on my WOL channel yesterday:

“Just so you know… from now until 13th March I am attempting to function beyond full capacity. I have 3 main projects – TEDx*, Sisters, and SEEDS/Samara, all of which are reaching peak activity at the moment (the TEDx* goes out on 21st March, but we are prerecording on 11th and 12th). I have 3 speaking engagements next week, and am away from home for 2 nights for work (3 x speaking slots) the week after. I am taking 2 online courses, plus SEEDS Ambassador Academy. And I am moving house, from furnished to unfurnished, so I need to find furniture, curtains, etc., as well as packing and managing logistics. Oh, and the examiners came back with a request for final amendments to my doctoral dissertation, but that will just have to wait. I’m not being “woe is me” – all of these are good things – but they are all happening at once, which was not the plan!”

(This, incidentally, is not truly a WOL-worthy post, but at the time I was feeling overwhelmed, so it was a cry from the heart. It’s basically a whinge.)

As I lay there thinking about this at 4am, I realised I was getting very caught up in this story of “I’m so busy – help!!”, and I wondered What Would It Be Like (WWIBL) if I used my tried and tested technique from the ocean: when I can’t change the situation, what can I do to change my attitude? And suddenly I found more spaciousness.

WWIBL if I didn’t meet this deadline?

WWIBL if I dropped out of this meeting?

WWIBL if I wasn’t indispensable to this project?

WWIBL if I didn’t have my new home completely unpacked and fully furnished within the first week?

WWIBL if I stopped telling myself this story that I am so impossibly busy, and just got on with things?

WWIBL if my blog post ended rather abruptly?

 

*If you haven’t already bought your ticket for our TEDx event, please do! Even if you don’t have time to attend, we would still appreciate your support, and it’s a bargain at £5 per ticket. Buy one! Buy ten!

Please also consider supporting this important film project, about the sixth mass extinction, and featuring my young friend Bella Lack, a passionate youth activist for our world!

 

After I published my blog post on the Yin and Yang of Organisations, I received an email from Clint, who wrote:

“I’m sure you know that the line between is called a chiasm; It is both a barrier and a unifying force to hold the two as one. I see humans, and all sentient creatures in the chiasm, and indeed every atom and cell.”

Well, actually, I’d never heard of the chiasm, so I confessed as much, and asked for more detail. Clint replied:

“The visual is two elements, that are oppositely charged, coming into vicinity of each other and moving to unite. As they are each discrete, they are not allowed to become one. Essentially, they bounce off each other, then come back together and begin to spin around each other, faster and faster until they are about to implode when, in a flash of creative light, the chiasm comes into being, simultaneously holding the two elements apart and uniting them as one new entity.”

So this sent me off down a rabbit hole of chiasm-curiosity. I felt there was something profound here, tickling at my consciousness – maybe something to do with my affinity for the in-between places, the realms where worlds collide, or what Paul Wallace calls Both and yet Neither (aka BayN).

I don’t claim to have thought this all the way through yet – but here are some initial thoughts.

Chiasm in itself is a fascinating word. According to Wikipedia, in anatomy a chiasm is the spot where two structures cross, the best-known being the optic chiasm, the place in the brain where the optic nerves intersect. The X-shape of the crossover inspired the etymology of the word, from the Greek letter X, pronounced Chi.

In genetics, the chiasmata is a crossover point “where homologous chromosomes exchange genes, allowing genetic information from both the paternal and maternal chromatids to be exchanged, and a recombination of paternal and maternal genes can be passed down to the progeny”. According to Varsity Tutors:

“The result is a hybrid chromosome with a unique pattern of genetic material. Gametes gain the ability to be genetically different from their neighbouring gametes after crossing over occurs. This allows for genetic diversity, which will help cells participate in survival of the fittest and evolution.”

The way I interpret this (or possibly misinterpret it) in the present context, is that this exchange increases genetic diversity and improves the resilience of the species.

In rhetoric, chiasmus is a device where words or phrases are balanced with similar, though not identical, meanings in an A-B-B-A pattern (which has now given me a Dancing Queen earworm). An example would be:

“By day the frolic, and the dance by night.”

— Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes (1794)

… where day is juxtaposed with night, and “the frolic” with “the dance”.

So the general concept underlying chiasm, chiasmata, and chiasmus is the crossover, the fertile void in the space between, the third element that is neither one thing nor the other, the creative space where all the cool stuff happens. (See my blog post about edges).

By coincidence (or is it?), and despite the Greek origin mentioned above, Chi (or Qi) in Chinese philosophy is the force that makes up and binds together all things in the universe. It is, paradoxically, both everything and nothing.

So far, so abstract. What is the practical point of all this metaphysical meta-twaddle?

I’m still working it out, but this is what it feels like to me. In these present times, we are in the Chiasm. Sometimes it might feel more like the Chasm, like we’re falling into a deep dark hole of environmental degradation and the disintegration of old structures… but there is an I hiding importantly in the middle (without veering off into cheesy platitudes, like “There is no ‘I’ in TEAM!!”).

In a sense, the present moment is always the chiasm, the place where we are no longer in the past, and not yet in the future, the place of unfolding. This has always been true, and yet it feels more true in 2021 than at any other time I’ve known. It really feels like we are on the cusp of new ways, not just of doing things, but even of perceiving reality itself. Crossovers are already happening, turning our perceptions upside down and inside out.

Here are some examples.

1.     Mind Emerges from Matter, or Matter Emerges from Mind?

In relation to the hard problem of consciousness (the question of what gives me a sense of my me-ness), scientists have been asking how matter gives rise to mind. Now it seems that maybe mind gives rise to matter. Crossover.

2.     Individuals Connect, or Connection Individuates?

Our Western culture has been dominated by the philosophy that we are all individuals (cue Life of Brian flashback – still my favourite comedy line ever), living in a harsh world where we have to compete for scarce resources. Greed is good, and lunch is for wimps. But maybe a different reality is possible, in which we recognise that we are all interconnected and interdependent, and until we are all thriving, nobody is thriving (very much the ethos behind the SEEDS currency).

As author and educator Michael Nagler puts it:

“Within the emerging new story . . . just about every social change that thoughtful people have long been yearning for—including the change to a sustainable planet—becomes more thinkable, and doable… Take, for example, the acute inequality that has polarized our society. What drives it is greed… Is not greed, in turn, a function of the belief that we are primarily physical entities in competition with others? . . . But what is behind greed itself? It could not exist without the idea that a human being is material and separate from others, including the environment we live in… In contrast to the old story—which held that the universe is primarily made of matter, has no discernable purpose, and scarcity, competition, and violence are inevitable—the new story sees the universe as primarily consciousness and the human being as body, mind, and spirit, able to locate and carry out their life’s purpose in a meaningful—indeed, fundamentally benevolent—universe.”

3.     We Build on the Past, or we Magnetise from the Future?

The most present and immediate example of this for me right now is in relation to Samara, the new Decentralised Holonic Organisation (DHO) we are creating within SEEDS, to evangelise for a new economic philosophy, and facilitate the adoption of the SEEDS currency by the people and communities who can most benefit from it.

Samara has attracted an amazing bunch of smart, heartfelt people who sincerely want to help create a better future – and, as with any group, we are in some sense a microcosm of what is going on in the world at large. I see the push and pull between these two dynamics: do we design our new organisation based on what has worked in the past? Or do we, to use Otto Scharmer’s phrase, lead from the emerging future?

To say a little more about what that second option looks like: imagine that you’re on a boat on the ocean, and it’s dark and foggy, so you can’t see too far ahead. You’re trying to make landfall on a small island. Your GPS isn’t working, so you need to get a visual. Suddenly, you see a light, flashing intermittently. You realise it is a light at the entrance to the harbour. Now you know what you’re aiming for, and you allow it to draw you forwards towards your destination. Occasionally the fog thickens, or a high wave rises, and you lose sight of the light for a while, but you keep heading in the right general direction, and soon enough it comes back into view.

To me, it feels like we need to combine both the backward-looking and future-facing approaches, but the emphasis has to be on the future vision. If we build Samara on the foundations of the past, we will only end up replicating strategies that are past their use-by date. The old structures were failing, and if we keep doing what we’ve always done, we’ll keep getting what we’ve always got. Sure, we can adopt some best practices from the past for the day-to-day basics, but our intended destination has to be informed from the future.

It takes a huge leap of faith to operate this way, and can often feel like we’re building castles in the air, with no solid footing… but such is the journey of the pioneer.

Fancy Words… But How?

How do we do this? How do we think thoughts we’ve never thought, and aspire to do things we’ve never done?

Here’s my hunch. I’m sensing a shift from the individual to the collective. In truth, nobody ever operated as an individual. The myth of the lone wolf is mostly that – a myth. Jobs had Wozniak. Einstein had Grossman and Besso. Lennon had McCartney (or was it vice versa?). The creativity arose in the space in between, in the relationship, in the chiasm. Together, the partnerships became greater than the sum of their parts. What they achieved was the result of Both, and yet Neither.

I’ve written a lot about yin and yang, and the need for balance between the two. But maybe “balance” is too mundane, setting the bar too low. The real magic, I am coming to believe, lies in the chiasm, the border between, where the two polarities are held in a juxtaposition of attraction and repulsion.

If two bar magnets are placed with their axis parallel to each other and their opposite poles facing each other, then there is one neutral point on the perpendicular bisector of the axis equidistant from the two magnets.

If one magnet is the past, and one is the future; one is the yang, and one is the yin; one is the material, and one is the metaphysical, what would it be like if we designed from the neutral point?

X marks the spot.

(I hope that made some sense. If not, ask me questions, and I will try to clarify. If it did, let me know!)

Further Reading:

I found these notes from Paul Wallace really interesting. Also the image of the Möbius Strip – maybe something more to explore there the next time I feel like diving down a metaphysical rabbit hole?

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote about the chiasm. It didn’t particularly float my boat, but you might enjoy it – a good commentary here, also mentioning the Möbius Strip.

I have been fortunate enough to spend some time recently with Anneloes Smitsman, who I met through our shared participation in the SEEDS community, and our conversations and her writings have been tremendously influential on my thinking. You can read her PhD dissertation online: Into the Heart of Systems Change, and find out more about how her principles are being applied in SEEDS in the video of the SEEDS Sixth Constitutional Assembly.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, I’m sure you will have heard of cryptocurrency, but to a lot of us it seems rather a strange and mysterious concept, the province of Millennials and Silicon Valley types, rather than an everyday reality. Until about six months ago I would have said the same of myself. I am still far from being an expert, but I have more of a clue than I used to, so here I am going to do my best to make crypto seem less mysterious and more accessible.

If you’re wondering why you would even care to find out more, there are many possible reasons, but the one that appeals to me the most is this: in our mainstream economy, we have created a system that works well for some (the wealthiest top few %) and not so well for everybody else. But money is just a man-made device (with the emphasis on “man” – as the chief designers of our modern economy were mostly male) for exchanging value. Cryptocurrencies are also a device for exchanging value, and because they are not owned by a government, they have greater liberty to tweak the rules of the game – for example, to make the game fairer for the have-nots, to level the playing field and empower women, minorities, and the Global South. That, to me, is reason enough to get interested.

On to those three things…

 

1. Whose butt does it come out of?

This may seem like a strange question. I shall explain.

I’ve been introducing about ten of my Sisters to the SEEDS cryptocurrency, because I feel that SEEDS and Sisters have a good alignment of values, in our shared aim to create a better, more sustainable, peaceful and equitable future. It has been a wonderful way to find out what reservations people have about SEEDS, and cryptocurrencies more generally.

One of my Sisters asked a particularly pithy question, relayed from her husband: “This currency – whose butt does it come out of?” To rephrase this poetic enquiry, he was asking: How is it worth anything? Surely you can’t just create a currency out of thin air, and have people pay good dollars/pounds/euros for it?

Well, actually – yes, you can. Like anything else (a house, an artwork, a glass of Elvis Presley’s drinking water or a lock of Britney Spears’ hair), something has value if humans, in all their wonder and weirdness, decide that it has value.

If I take out my purse and look at the cash inside (which has been there for several months now – even pre-Covid I hardly ever used cash… but I digress), I see the rather nasty pieces of plastic that have now replaced UK paper banknotes, and discs of cheap metal. These objects would be meaningless to a cow, tree, or space alien. The only reason I can spend them on food, clothes, or other goods and services because the vast majority of humans have agreed that these otherwise insignificant and useless objects represent a store of value that can be exchanged for things that are of actual value to me, in that they can be eaten, worn, or otherwise serve my material needs.

In effect, all money is a fiction. To answer my friend’s husband, all money comes out of somebody’s butt, be that the Bank of England’s butt, the Fed’s butt, the IMF’s butt, or whatever.

 

2. What is it for?

Why was cryptocurrency created? And how is it now used?

There are many different answers to this question. To take Bitcoin as the best-known example of a cryptocurrency, Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 white paper described it as “a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash” – in other words, a currency designed to sidestep governmental control. Ideologically, it was intended to decentralise the money supply, and the timing of its origin was no coincidence – the aspiration was that it would combat the systemic problems that created the global financial crisis of 2008. A prominent Bitcoin miner, Wang Chun, is quoted as saying, “Bitcoin [gave] people back the control, and their freedom, for the first time since banks took it over some 100 years ago.”

However, Bitcoin and many of the other cryptocurrencies have ended up being used for old-school speculation by investors. You may well have heard of people making fortunes on Bitcoin as its value fluctuates wildly. As with anything else, if someone is able to buy low, sell high, there is money to made – in vast sums. So rather than being exchanged for goods and services, people have tended to invest in the currency itself, in much the same way that traders bet on gold or pork bellies, so some of the potential to be a gamechanger has been dissipated by people using a new currency for old paradigms.

 

3. Doesn’t it use a lot of electricity?

You might have heard about how environmentally unfriendly cryptocurrencies are. From The Telegraph last year:

“Just one Bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of electricity as a British household for nearly two months, new figures have shown. The amount of energy needed to run the cryptocurrency has soared to record annual highs of 77.78 terawatt hours – the same as the entire electrical consumption of Chile.”

Why is this? Now, I don’t pretend to fully grasp what is involved in “mining” Bitcoin, never having done it myself, but as I understand it, the problem starts with the very same feature that made Bitcoin (and various other cryptocurrencies) attractive in the first place: the fact that the ledger, or accounts, are not held centrally by a bank but are distributed in encrypted form (the “crypto” in “cryptocurrency”) across a network of privately owned computers in a series of blocks of data (the “block” in “blockchain”).

Some people acquire Bitcoin simply by buying it, but other people earn Bitcoin by providing a service to the Bitcoin community. According to Investopedia: Bitcoin miners receive Bitcoin as a reward for completing the data blocks of verified transactions which are added to the blockchain. Mining rewards are paid to the miner who discovers a solution to a complex hashing puzzle first, thereby verifying the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions. The probability that a participant will be the one to discover the solution is related to the portion of the total mining power on the network.

Err, yes. If you know exactly what that means, you’re a better man than I am. The article linked above includes the “Explain it Like I’m Five” version, if you really want to know more.

The main point is that there is only one reward per block of data, and the reward is large. Winner takes all. No doubt luck helps in the race to be first across the line, as there are trillions of potentially correct guesses, but so does computing power, and the more computing power you’re using, the more electricity it’s going to use. So the miners end up in an arms race to have the fastest mining facility.

But it’s important to realise that not all blockchain systems are created equal. For example, the Telos blockchain, which SEEDS uses, is based on EOSIO. Most of this article was Greek to me, but this sentence I understood: “EOSIO is 66,000 times more energy efficient than Bitcoin and 17,000 times more energy efficient than Ethereum” (GenerEOS, 2018)

 

Which brings me to several other ways in which SEEDS is different. In fact, I don’t really think of SEEDS as a cryptocurrency, but rather as a complementary currency that was designed to achieve the specific goal of environmental restoration, just as the Stroud Pound or Ithacash are designed to promote small, local businesses.

Stability: Unlike Bitcoin, SEEDS has a mechanism to keep its value relatively stable, avoiding the wild fluctuations between boom and bust. According to conventional economic theory, increased demand leads to a rise in price, while decreasing demand leads to a drop. Once a Seed reaches approximate parity with the USD in terms of spending power, there is a way to balance supply and demand for Seeds so that the value stays the same over time, making it even better than national currencies, which tend to lose value in real terms due to inflation.

Governance: Both Bitcoin and SEEDS are decentralised, meaning that nobody owns them, but in SEEDS there are governance processes that allow all Citizens of SEEDS to propose amendments to the rules, and to vote on them.

Different value system: While we might think of money as being value-neutral, actually it isn’t – or at least, not in its current design. An economy affects people’s behaviour by what it rewards and what it ignores. SEEDS specifically aims to support the regeneration of our ecosystem, so it rewards people for making a contribution to both the ecosystem and to the flourishing of the SEEDS system itself. It is aiming to reengineer the incentive structures to promote prosocial and pro-green behaviours.

I hope that has helped to slightly demystify cryptocurrency. In all honesty, you don’t need to understand anything at all about crypto in order to use SEEDS. You can simply use the SEEDS app as a way to buy and sell stuff, without knowing any of the above, just as you would use money.

Further Reading:

A 6-part beginner’s guide to cryptocurrency

A short history of cryptocurrency

What is this SEEDS thing, then?

I am going to defer here to my colleague, Ronnie Potel, interviewed earlier this month in Bali. What follows is a paraphrase of his words, around 50 mins into the interview:

“We’ve got ten years to solve our global challenges, or we’re going to go the way of the dinosaurs. We have the will. We have the capital. We have the technology. So what is the problem? Our governance and economic systems. They have served us so well, for so many years, but are no longer fit for purpose. So we just need to build a new system. We can build it, make an app, and put it on a phone. We can build a whole new governance system, a new economic system, a new civilisation, a whole new way of thinking, driving us and incentivising us to regenerate our planet.”

My way of describing it would be to echo Ronnie’s words, and add: it’s a new currency that encourages and rewards the behaviours, by individuals, by organisations and by businesses, that will help restore the biodiversity and overall health of our planet, while also helping humans to thrive, by rebuilding a sense of community, and by paying people to pursue their passion if it contributes to the greater good.

And if you haven’t come across “regenerative” before, it just means one step beyond “sustainability”. “Sustainability” carries the implication of adjusting our human patterns of consumption so we can continue to consume indefinitely into the future, which is a very human-centric perspective. “Regenerative” refers to the behaviours that actually restore and repair the damage we have already done to our ecosystem, allowing (the other parts of) nature to thrive at the same time that humans thrive.

(NOTE: SEEDS stands for Sowing Ecological, Equitable and Decentralised Societies, and refers to the overall economy of SEEDS. Seeds (uppercase S, then lowercase) is the name of the currency, like dollars, pounds or euros. The symbol is the letter S with an equals sign sloping upwards, denoting equality and progress.)

How does SEEDS support the regeneration of our planet?

Various ways. First, there is neither debt nor interest in the SEEDS system. Interest-bearing debt is what has driven the pursuit of infinite growth on a finite planet, which in turn leads to the exploitation of people and the natural world as the have-nots scramble to pay interest to the haves.

Second, the current system spends huge sums of money on subsidising fossil fuels, the military, and bailing out banks and other failing companies. Yet many people would prefer to see that money spent on creating green jobs and the restoration of natural habitats. In SEEDS, there is no government (or lobbyists) deciding where money should go – everybody gets to vote, with the power of their vote depending on how much they have contributed to SEEDS – not financial contribution, I should emphasise, but contribution of commitment to the SEEDS community and its regenerative values.

Third, SEEDS recognises the importance of producing food in regenerative ways, rather than the degenerative intensive farming methods employed by Big Agriculture, involving artificial fertilisers and pesticides that kill wildlife and degrade the topsoil. So SEEDS provides grants, interest-free loans, and subsidies to small-scale producers of local, organic food, that embrace permaculture principles. Customers are rewarded for transactions with these producers, helping them gain a competitive edge over the industrially-farmed foods that would otherwise have a price advantage. (See this article for more detail.)

Fourth, it’s not just food producers that can benefit. Local co-operatives and networks can also apply for grants from SEEDS, for initiatives that balance conservation, regeneration, economic and social goals to achieve the desired future, such as tree planting, restorative land projects, regenerative food production and education. (See this article for more detail.)

And fifth and finally for now, any business can theoretically become a SEEDS ally, even BP or Exxon. But every organisation gets a Contribution Score based on how much it contributes to the SEEDS community and economy, but above all, how much it contributes to the biosphere. The first two figures (community and economy contributions) are multiplied by the last figure (biosphere contribution) to determine an organisation’s overall reward for participating in SEEDS. So if it has a zero biosphere contribution, any number multiplied by zero equals zero, so it gets no benefit for its participation. This is not to punish the organisation, but to give it motivation to raise its game and improve its contribution to restoring our planet’s health.

 

How does SEEDS reduce inequality?

As well as organisations, individuals also get Contribution Scores. Although of course it’s nice to receive acknowledgement that you’re an honourable and contributing member of a community, virtue doesn’t have to be its own reward in the SEEDS economy. You actually get paid for being a good citizen. This is how it works:

SEEDS has a process for keeping the price of Seeds stable at around 1 Seed = 1 USD in terms of purchasing power (after the go-live date later this year or early 2022), which involves releasing a wave of new Seeds into the economy on a periodic basis. This is called a Harvest, and the new Seeds are distributed according to your Contribution Score. So if you’ve been a good SEEDS Citizen and been actively engaged in the community, you get a nice little windfall of Seeds.

In our mainstream economy, “to they that have, shall be given”. Wealth attracts more wealth for various reasons, such as the rich being able to indulge in riskier investments that carry higher rewards, hire better accountants meaning lower taxes, and purchase high-return assets like property. So the rich get richer, while the rest of us don’t. In SEEDS, the Harvest windfall is allocated on a percentile basis, rather than based on absolute amounts.

The maths gets a bit complicated (see the SEEDS Constitution linked at the end of this article if you really want to dive in deep), but as an example, if the wealthiest person in SEEDS has “planted” 100,000,000 Seeds (“planting” is like putting Seeds in a long term deposit account), then she will be positioned at 99 on the percentile ranking for Planted Seeds. If the second most planted person has only planted 100,000 Seeds, he will still be positioned at 99 (assuming at least 200 people) for planted Seeds as he is the second most committed.

The long and short of it is that, over time, inequality decreases in SEEDS, as opposed to inequality increasing in our mainstream economy.

How does SEEDS support communities?

SEEDS recognises the crucial importance of community to the physical and mental wellbeing of people. So organisations that support community-building efforts can also apply for grants and interest-free loans. This is especially encouraged at the level of “bioregional” communities, with bioregions being areas defined by natural features, such as rivers, watersheds, and mountain ranges. These geographically (rather than politically) defined areas are given incentives to restore their natural resources, such as clean water and healthy topsoil, while also bringing their inhabitants closer together in a shared sense of purpose.

 

How does SEEDS support creatives, healers, and other people pursuing their passion?

The idea of a Universal Basic Income has been floating around for a while, and is being piloted in various parts of the world. The SEEDS perspective on it is a little different. UBI is a handout, a flat rate social security grant that is designed to cover the cost of a fairly frugal lifestyle. The recipients don’t have to do anything to receive it, other than be a citizen of a place where UBI is offered.

SEEDS has the concept of a Universal Earned Income, for people who contribute to creating a better world by serving the environment and/or their fellow humans in ways that are usually not rewarded, or are rewarded poorly, by our mainstream economy, such as habitat restoration, clean-ups, alternative healing, or art. By offering their skills, time and energy to the SEEDS community, creative and contributing souls can not only earn Seeds, but also accumulate high scores for reputation and contribution, earning them a larger share of the Harvest payouts.

 

This all sounds like serious stuff, so why is SEEDS sometimes referred to as a game?

In a sense, all money is a game. It’s a human invention, a shared fiction. Money means nothing to a cat, dog, horse, or oak tree. It’s just a huge and very complex game of Monopoly, a game that we all take very seriously – many of us see money as a matter of life and death – literally. But it really is a game, which currently has big winners and struggling losers – so it’s time we changed the rules of the game to be more fair, both to humans and to nature.

 

Why are you, Roz, so excited about it?

I don’t believe we can solve our current crises of environmental destruction and inequality from inside the current system, which is the same system that created those same crises. It has taken me many years of environmental activism and obsessing over why and how change happens (the subject of my recent doctoral dissertation) to arrive at this conclusion. I absolutely believe we need economic reform.

Also, I suppose that when we humans get excited about an idea, we want to check out the other people who are excited about that idea. Do we feel a sense of belonging and kinship with them? Do we feel at home in this tribe? And I’ve been very impressed with the people who are participating in the creation of SEEDS – they are a wonderful, thoughtful, friendly bunch with a powerful vision for the more beautiful world that is most definitely possible.

I say a lot more about my journey into SEEDS in my blog post a couple of weeks ago: Sowing the SEEDS of Love.

 

Why should I care?

If you’re the kind of person who cares passionately about the future, especially sustainability, democracy and equality, and feels that our old systems and structures are past their use-by date, then you’d probably want to get involved with SEEDS.

 

How can I get involved?

There are many different levels of involvement, so you can choose whatever works for you.

You can show your support for the new economic paradigm by signing up to SEEDS. You start out as a Visitor, and as you engage more in the SEEDS economy, you graduate to Resident and then Citizen. (I’ll be honest, it’s not as easy as it could be to sign up. At the time of writing, this link will help a great deal. But I hear a new version of the SEEDS Passport app is coming out very soon, which will make it significantly easier. I will keep you posted.) By buying and planting Seeds, you are supporting organisations that are restoring our ecosystems.

As a company, movement, cause or organisation, you can sign the pledge of support for SEEDS.

If you want to get more evangelical about the regenerative renaissance, you can apply to be an Ambassador for SEEDS.

And if, like me, you really want to make a commitment, you can apply for a role in the decentralised organisations that create and develop the SEEDS infrastructure,and spread the good SEEDS news around the world.

 

I’ll be sharing more about my journey with SEEDS as time goes on. Coming up soon, I’ll write about cryptocurrencies, and why SEEDS is different from Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any of the other cryptos you might have heard of. Don’t worry – I’ll keep it non-technical, largely because I am still learning, so I couldn’t make it technical if I tried!

I realise this is a lot to take in. If I’m leaving you confused, PLEASE email me with your questions, and I will do my best to interpret. Your questions will really help me to home in on the parts that are getting lost in translations, so thank you in advance for asking!

 

 

Further Reading:

Article on SEEDS: Regeneration and Beyond

SEEDS Constitution (a tough read, in all honesty – for enthusiastic, detail-oriented folks only!)

Or if video is more your thing, check out the SEEDS YouTube channel.

And if you didn’t follow the link last week, I urge you again to watch Daniel Schmachtenberger’s succinct analysis of the urgent imperative to reassess what we value economically – see How Not To Go Extinct.

I’m involved in setting up a new organisation within the SEEDS ecosystem. (I wrote about SEEDS last week, and it seems I succeeded in conveying my excitement, but may have lost some folks with the details. Fear not – I will be unpacking various aspects of SEEDS over the coming weeks, and hopefully all will become clear.) Initiating a new organisation – with its own unique culture – raises a lot of really interesting questions, including something I am really passionate about: the need for yin/yang balance.

This is something I have thought about a lot, and wrote about in my doctoral dissertation. When an organisation is setting out to generate social change, it is important that it should be the change it wants to see in the world. (Same goes for individuals setting out to generate change.) There has to be integrity between what it is saying and what it is doing, or it just doesn’t work. (See what I wrote about As Within, So Without, and my all-time favourite leadership story, about Christiana Figueres.)

So, because SEEDS is all about regenerating our ailing ecosystems and communities, reducing economic inequality, and building the brave new regenerative civilisation, it feels absolutely crucial that it develops a healthy balance between yin and yang. If you believe, as I do, that our current problems of environmental degradation, oppression, and inequality, spring from a mindset of domination rather than equality, in which men dominate women, rich dominate poor, the Global North dominates the Global South, and humans dominate nature (or attempt to – we never really win, because the laws of nature always win) then we need to grow out of the unhealthy yang pattern of domination, and evolve into healthy yin cooperation. (Note that there are also healthy yang patterns, and unhealthy yin patterns – I’m certainly not demonising or denigrating the yang, as you will see below.)

I’d like to emphasise that, even though in Chinese philosophy yin is the feminine principle and yang is the masculine principle, yin does not equate to female, and yang to male. We are all a blend of yin and yang, and the yin/yang concept encompasses far more than simply gender traits. Yet again, I am going to reference the wisdom of the late, great Bernard Lietaer, from whose work this graphic is derived.

One thing to note is that yin and yang are not absolutes – as with so many things in Eastern philosophy, everything is relative. So something might be more yin than another (water is more yin than fire or earth) but something is not intrinsically yin. It’s all about the relationship between the two polarities.

Also important to note is that balance is crucial. Too much yin would be as bad as too much yang. The sweet spot lies in the interaction and complementarity between the two. We don’t expect never-ending summer, nonstop daylight, to be perpetually awake, or to be always breathing in. Each element needs its complement. Humans and the rest of nature have rhythms and cycles, and we ignore them at the peril of our health and wellbeing.

And finally, I’d like to emphasise that this is not about attempting to sit forever at the Golden Mean, Aristotle’s sweet spot on the spectrum of a virtue – neither too much of a good thing, nor too little of it. Yin/yang is about the dynamic, creative interplay of the two poles. Nobody would be happy with a world where it was forever twilight, we were forever half-asleep, or everybody was halfway between male and female (now there’s a weird thought).

So, to go into a bit more detail on this graphic…

 

Competition / Cooperation

If we look to nature for inspiration, we see the interplay of competition and cooperation. Trees compete for light in the forest, and alpha males compete to lead the pack, but there are also, everywhere, examples of intense cooperation. Did you know that lichen, which looks so mundane and uninspiring to most of us, is actually a magical alliance between a fungus and an alga (or sometimes a cyanobacterium)? The fungus can’t produce its own food, so it uses the sugar produced by the alga’s photosynthesis, while the fungus allows the alga to colonise places where it couldn’t otherwise survive. (See the British Lichen Society (who knew?!) for more on this intriguing relationship.)

In the human world, competition has accelerated innovation – for example, the Space Race put a man on the moon (although we could debate whether this might have happened sooner if the USA and USSR had collaborated rather than competed). The Olympic Games inspire athletes to ever greater heights of achievement. Yet cooperation has been essential throughout human history, and is hardwired into us in the form of the feelgood hormone, oxytocin, that rewards us for behaving with care and empathy. We need both competition and cooperation in order to thrive.

 

Having-Doing / Being

Yang is the active principle – creative, busy, and doing-oriented. Yin is relatively chilled and patient, the wintertime of rest and composting to yang’s summertime of growing and blooming.

Some organisations alternate periods of more intense activity with periods of reflection and integration, sometimes based on the lunar cycles: the waxing moon from new moon to full moon for expansion and experimenting, the waning moon from full moon to new moon for integration. Activity is happening in both phases – just a different kind of activity. This rhythm allows workers to synchronise on pushes and pauses in a sustainable way – and even to plan vacations for the yin part of the cycle, so they can step away from their work and allow some subconscious processing to happen while they lie on a beach.

 

Volatility / Sustainability

Change is the only constant, but a high level of change can be exhausting. Equally, as some people are discovering during Covid, too long with nothing much changing can be stultifying. I’ve heard the phrase “Groundhog Day” many times over the course of the last year. As with the doing/being pair, we can appreciate unpredictability and steadiness all the more when we experience the contrast with its opposite.

Some companies (think Silicon Valley startups) are extremely yang – grow fast and sometimes turbulently, get famous, cash out within 5 years. Others are the Steady Eddies of the corporate world, although they tend not to grab the headlines. So-called “chaordic” (chaos + order) organisations attempt to straddle the line to get the best of both worlds – operating at the creative edge of chaos, while trying not to fall over it. Tony Hsieh of Zappos was one who fell off.

 

Technology / Interpersonal Skills

This article reveals the shocking news that women have a “comparative advantage in tasks requiring social and interpersonal skills“. Gosh, who’d’ve thought. (The same article points out that one key driver of the uneven sex ratio in management at most companies is our inability to distinguish competence from confidence. Again, I doubt that this would come as a shock to any woman in the workplace. But I digress.)

In the Netflix series, Inside Bill’s Brain, Bill Gates of Microsoft fame admits that, to the tech entrepreneur, everything looks like a nail to technology’s hammer. As I suspect Bill would freely admit, he is not particularly in touch with his yin side. Luckily, he has Melinda to fill in the yin blank for him. As they talk about their philanthropic work, they both say that they complement each other well. He might be talking about the nitty-gritty design details of self-contained toilet systems, while she’s pointing out that the cubicles need to be big enough to accommodate a mother and child.

 

Bigger is Better / Small is Beautiful

Bigger is better. So is faster, stronger, harder, higher, louder, brighter… more, more, more. And look at where that’s getting us – planetary overshoot. Or, indeed, planetary overshot. This is not to disrespect Bigger is Better. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it isn’t. As with all the above, the point is balance, and our current economic model with interest-bearing loans has no tolerance for small is beautiful. The greater the interest, the more the economy has to grow in order to feed the insatiable appetite of compound interest.

In the context of work, we all want to feel like we matter. And in big corporations (and I worked for two – Accenture and UBS) it was very hard to feel like I mattered. I was a very small cog in a very large machine, and the more generic/plug-and-play I could be, the better. Another Brick in the Wall just about summed it up.

The new organisations allow people to be themselves, to be unique, and to self-organise into circles where there are genuine relationships of trust, understanding and mutual respect. Many have written about this, including Frederic Laloux, Margaret Wheatley, and even four-star US General Stan McChrystal.

 

Expansion / Conservation

You already know what I think about attempting infinite growth on a finite planet – especially growth that has tended to make the rich richer while income in real terms stagnates for the majority. (And if you don’t know, see my blogs on Overconsumption – Must, or Madness? and Prosperity Without Growth.)

Having said that, expansion is not necessarily bad. I’m all in favour of expanding the rights, incomes, and standard of living of people in developing countries. But expansion always and everywhere needs to be balanced with conservation, to make sure that expansion now does not come at the expense of the wellbeing of future generations.

 

Hierarchy Works Best / Egalitarian Works Best

Haha. I am smiling/grimacing at this header as I type this. I have spent long hours this week contributing to the formation of a new Decentralised Holonic* Organisation within the broader SEEDS ecosystem, and there have been times when I have yearned for a good old-fashioned hierarchy… with me at the top, naturally. And that is the problem with hierarchies – they may seem like the fastest and most efficient way to get things done, but mostly they benefit the ones at the top, while the vast majority buckles down to things they would rather not be doing. (See the perennially depressing Gallup data on employee disengagement.)

[*Holonic means a self-organising system of nested entities, e.g. I am an entity inside a sub-group inside a group inside an organisation. Wikipedia has more information.]

Recognising that people generally perform better (and feel better – both mentally and physically) when they are happy and fulfilled, a new generation of organisations is decentralising decision-making and giving people the autonomy to work in the intersection of what they can offer and what the organisation needs. This can feel chaotic (especially in the early days of such an organisation – and trust me, I know of what I speak!) but as time goes on people naturally congregate into groups sharing an aligned intention. Sociocracy attempts to blend the best of both egalitarianism (decision-making is a group process, with every voice heard) and hierarchy (each group has designated roles, including a Leader). This video, by Sociocracy for All, is a great 18-min introduction to how sociocracy works. Seems promising.

 

Central Authority / Mutual Trust

Central authorities came into existence for a reason. A great example is railway time. Before 1840, there wasn’t a standard national time zone for England, which you can probably imagine caused chaos, confusion, and not a few near misses on the railway lines. We wouldn’t want to go back to every community having the liberty to determine their own time zone. (I determined my own time zone when I was on my boat, rowing across multiple time zones in the course of crossing an ocean… but I was a community of one, so Boat Time caused no problems.)

But it’s not practical or desirable for central authorities to govern everything. In the UK there was (and continues to be) a growing resentment of dictates handed down from Westminster, apparently oblivious to the local needs of people in the North, West, or rural areas, and (to radically over-simplify) this is what led to the devolution of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales in 1998.

The ideal, of course, is to govern based on mutual trust, but given the high sensitivity of humans to perceived unfairness, and the fact that there will always be someone who spoils things, there need to be some guiding principles. The seminal work on this was set out by the Nobel Prize-winner, Elinor Ostrom, in her principles for avoiding the tragedy of the commons. All eight principles are important, but my two favourites would be: to ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules; and to build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system – what Alan Watkins has called crowdocracy, and which is also a feature of sociocracy (pictured below).

It seems clear to me that the last few thousand years have been dominated by the yang principle, and that a shift is now starting to happen. Shifts like this are rarely smooth. Those who have thrived in the yang culture will not be happy to lose power and authority as the old structures give way to greater equality of wealth and influence, and some will fight fiercely to preserve their privilege.

But if this world is going to work for the many, and not just the few, including all sentient beings and not just humans, then the shift is necessary and, indeed inevitable.

I used to ask myself how change happened – top-down, or bottom-up? Now I realise that I was still caught in the old yang mindset, and a yang system of change cannot produce balanced yin/yang outcomes. If change is going to happen everywhere, as it needs to, then the change has to come from everywhere, at all levels of the system. So it naturally follows that, as we at SEEDS are creating this Decentralised Holonic Organisation, I have to maintain my own yin/yang balance – for example, by stepping back from the time-sucking vortex of Discord messages to spend time out walking in nature, or writing in my journal, to pause and reflect. I also have to support and nurture balance in any interactions that I have – on every call, in every Discord message, in every document. And we have to weave this concept into every aspect of the work we do, because our organisation is in turn a microcosm of the world, and if we can’t get the balance right within ourselves, what hope do we have of creating greater balance in the world at large?

 

Other Stuff:

TEDxStroud: the new date for our livestreamed event is now confirmed for 21st March. Eight amazing speakers, livestreaming across the globe! Tickets are on sale on Eventbrite.

Go Reflect Yourself: a podcast interview I did last year with Heather Crider – check it out!

And finally, a link to a video that I really enjoyed, and I think you might too. Daniel Schmachtenberger on How Not To Go Extinct (less than 6 mins). Seems like generally a good idea, in my view.

Regular readers will know that I have been nurturing a growing fascination with complementary currencies, and have written about the need for a new economic model many times in the past (like here, here, here, and here). So far it has all been fairly hypothetical and abstract, but now the rubber is about to hit the road in a way that I’m very excited about.

Last August I had a Zoom call (what else!) with Scott Morris, who I had first met at the Global Economic Visioning conference at Bretton Woods in 2018. Scott is an expert in local currencies, and I was telling him about my global women’s network, the Sisters, and my preliminary designs for a complementary currency, called the yin, to counterbalance our predominantly yang mainstream economy (inspired by Bernard Lietaer’s work, described in my blog post on Yin, Yang, and Jung).

“Ah,” he said. “You might want to check out SEEDS. It’s very aligned with what you’re describing, and it might just save you ten years of your life.” That was quite a compelling argument, so of course I took a look at SEEDS, which describes itself as “The Conscious Currency”.

(In fact, I discovered I already had the SEEDS Passport on my phone, having been sent an invite by Bret Warshawsky of the Together Life System several months previously… and then promptly forgetting all about it. But when an idea is meant to find you, I believe, it will hunt you down and keep pestering you until you finally pay attention.)

As I looked at the SEEDS mission, I felt a growing sense of excitement. It was indeed aligned with my idea for the yin, but was about 10x better… and it actually existed, which is more than could be said for the yin at that point.

In short, SEEDS is a new cryptocurrency that is designed to incentivise and reward the behaviours by individuals, companies, and communities that support a sustainable and equitable civilisation. Its governance is decentralised, meaning that it is owned and governed by its participants, not by any company, and all decision-making is participatory.

The phrases that caught my eye in the documentation were things like:

Sowing Ecological, Equitable and Decentralized Societies (decode of the SEEDS acronym)A conscious currency for regenerative and thriving global culturesA financial ecosystem to empower humanity and heal our planetUniversal Earned Income (contrasted with Universal Basic Income, which is a handout) to enable individuals to pursue their ikigai, or purpose, even if it is something not recognised and rewarded by conventional economicsA more stable currency (overcoming the boom and bust cycle that is built into conventional national currency)The evolution of a global society that recognises the role of humanity as stewards of our planetary ecosystems and designing for thrivability and future wellbeing

I was falling in love… with a cryptocurrency. I had that wonderful feeling of everything in my life having led up to this discovery. In my doctoral dissertation last year, I had examined my attempts to raise environmental awareness by rowing solo across three oceans, and the reasons for my lack of success in having an impact – specifically, my naïvete in thinking that simply telling people about our ecological crisis would make a difference. Change is so much harder than that. We are all embedded in systems – social, political, and particularly economic – that perpetuate the status quo. I had come to the conclusion that we cannot solve our environmental crisis from within the same system – neoliberal capitalism – that created it.

Yes, I know that we have B Corps and Conscious Capitalism and carbon taxes and the rest… but when we look at the statistics on carbon emissions, species extinction, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, etc. etc., it is clear that the speed, scale, and severity of our ecological degradation continues unabated.

So I had yearned for a viable alternative to the mainstream economic model, and here it was, in the form of SEEDS. It was exactly what I had been looking for.

I started to explore the SEEDS ecosystem, tentatively at first (I’ll be honest, the current version isn’t incredibly friendly to the uninitiated, and initiated I most definitely was not), but then with steadily growing enthusiasm. A big breakthrough was being invited to the SEEDS server on Discord (a platform that’s kind of a cross between WhatsApp and Slack, with different channels for different areas of interest), where I found a buzzing hive of activity, and also found my two new best friends, Irina and Sorin in Romania, who took pity on a confused newbie and held my hand through the early stages of transitioning from Visitor to Resident (and now, as of last week, I am a Citizen – hurrah!).

SEEDS is still in its infancy – last I heard, there are around 130 Citizens, and about the same number of Residents. But the community has a clear vision, and the tech tools to make it a reality, and although it’s a long shot, it just might work.

When I talk with people about it, they sense my excitement, but don’t always quite get what it’s all about. It’s not easy to wrap your head around it all at once. People also have lots of questions, not all of which are answerable right now – either because I don’t know the answer, or because no answer exists. SEEDS is still emergent, a verb rather than a noun. For example, yesterday we had a big call about spinning up a whole new DHO (Decentralised Holonic – which the spellchecker wants to call colonic, but that would be entirely different – Organisation) provisionally called Samara, which is the name of the winged seeds of trees like the maple and sycamore, the purpose of the wings being to help the seeds spread far and wide. SEEDS is a very dynamic creature, teetering on the brink of chaos, but as I’ve written before, the edge of chaos is where all the cool stuff happens.

Some are also sceptical about whether a cryptocurrency can really save the world. The early cryptos, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, may have tried to be revolutionary, but were mostly requisitioned by the old-school practices of speculation and fast profit-making.

My honest answer is that nobody knows if SEEDS will work. I certainly don’t know. But here’s what I do know. When I was on the Atlantic (my first ocean row) I wasted a lot of mental energy asking myself, “Can I do this? Do I have what it takes?” And naturally my brain would search its memory banks and report back, “We have no idea if you can do this – you’ve never done it before. TIME TO PANIC!” Eventually I realised this was a bogus question – the only way I could find out if I could do it was to keep on sticking my oars in the water, and only time would tell if it was possible.

Likewise, the only way to know if SEEDS can work is to try, to keep on doing the doing until we find out. I am committed to doing my darnedest to make SEEDS work, as are many, many others in the SEEDS community. After 15 years of trying to figure out how to make a difference, SEEDS is the most promising thing I’ve found yet, and it arrived into my life just as I was wrapping up that doctoral dissertation concluding that our best hope at environmental salvation was to reengineer the incentives bound up in our economic system. The timing was so perfect that I felt a sense of destiny.

So this is definitely the mission for me. It may not resonate the same way for everybody, and it doesn’t need to – the tipping point in the diffusion of innovations curve happens at around 16%, after the pioneers and early adopters are on board, and the early majority start to get with the programme. 16% of the world population is a lot of people, but SEEDS isn’t trying to replace the entire global economy, just provide an alternative, and there will be certain geographical pockets (like Stroud and Totnes in the UK, and places like Austin TX, Asheville NC, Portland ME and Portland OR in the US) that will provide more fertile soil for SEEDS than others.

When it comes down to it, the feeling we have about an idea often reflects the feeling we have about the people who are already embracing it. And I love the tribe that is coalescing around SEEDS – smart, passionate people from all across the globe (which makes scheduling meetings a bit of a nightmare) who really care about making the world a better place. They are a wonderful, welcoming bunch with a real vision for the more beautiful world that, even on my darker days, I still believe is most definitely possible.

 

You will be hearing a lot more about SEEDS in the future, as I continue my journey as an advocate and evangelist. If you are intrigued and would like to find out more, either stay tuned, and/or email me and ask for an invitation.