John Renesch: Exploring the Better Future

Third Thursdays Call Series: New Choice for American Voters

The other day I got an email from a friend forwarding New York Times columnist Tom Freidman’s syndicated column in a local newspaper, the Press Democrat, published in Santa Rosa, just north of me in California. The title of the article was “Make way for America's radical center.”

This was the first time I had heard of Americans Elect which is “the first-ever open nominating process.” According to their website, “We're using the Internet to give every single voter—Democrat, Republican or independent—the power to nominate a presidential ticket in 2012. The people will choose the issues. The people will choose the candidates. And in a secure, online convention next June, the people will make history by putting their choice on the ballot in every state.”

Apparently, two out of three Americans say they would like another choice in our elections.  According to Timothy Garton Ash in the UK’s The Guardian, “American politics have become so hopeless that I begin to be hopeful…. In a CNN poll, 77% of Americans say elected officials in Washington have behaved like ‘spoiled children’ in the crisis over the debt ceiling; 84% disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job.” In what seemed to be an appropriate follow-on from last month’s blog subject of my Third Thursday conference calls, here’s what I discovered.

Apparently motivated by the shameful game of “chicken” that was played out in Washington in the last days of July and early August, Freidman admits to signing a pledge, as I have done since reading his column. He writes about “a viable, centrist, third presidential ticket” that will be elected by an Internet convention and will emerge next year. He writes, “I know it sounds gimmicky — an Internet convention — but an impressive group of frustrated Democrats, Republicans and Independents, called Americans Elect, is really serious, and they have thought out this process well.” As of this writing, over 1.7 million of us have signed this pledge.

In late July, Americans Elect reported they were “submitting a record 1.6 million signatures to gain access to the Californian ballot in 2012….this is the largest number of signatures ever collected in California for any one initiative. More importantly, the signatures were gathered in all 58 counties, making this a truly state-wide effort.”

As Freidman writes, this initiative may “take a presidential nominating process now monopolized by the Republican and Democratic parties, which are beholden to their special interests, and blow it wide open — guaranteeing that a credible third choice, nominated independently, will not only be on the ballot in every state but be able to take part in every presidential debate and challenge both parties from the middle…”

This initiative is not quite new governing system we have envisioned in the Third Thursday phone calls, but it does offer some hope that the old system might be salvageable. If so, our political leaders could be liberated from special interests and extreme ideas – radical left or right.

Third Thursday Explorations: Hospicing Our Decrepit, Dysfunctional and Obsolete Organizations

Last Summer, I started hosting a special conference call each month in conjunction with the Heartland Network, a social network hosted by the same people who host the Thought Leader Gatherings in Minnesota and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The intended purpose of this call was to explore with colleagues around the world how it would be to stop investing in the social institutions on which we depend for governance, regionally and internationally.  By “investing” we mean the emotional capital and the high hopes we embrace for changes we may make, such as bringing in new leaders, funding dysfunctional systems, spending time in debate or conversing about better candidates and planning reforms.

Our existing institutions may have served us well in the past but it seems that their time may be over given how dysfunctional, in some cases, even harmful, they have become. If their time is over and the time has arrived for them to retire, let us treat them as we do our dying – hospice with respect and compassion – honoring their service. Simultaneously, let us midwife what wants to be born, the yet-to-be-revealed  replacement organizations to serve our 21st Century globalized, diverse adult society.

Every third Thursday, unless I’m traveling, I host an open conference call to explore alternative systems and structures that might be more deserving of our energies - our hopes and our dreams for change which most of our existing institutions are squandering. The calls are open to anyone who wishes to engage in such an exploration. I ask people to email me at [email protected] to reserve a space. Once I know who will be on the call, I send prospective callers the call-in information. The calls take place for one hour, on the third Thursday of each month at 10 AM Pacific time.

Here’s an interview I did with a local cable show on this subject:

Link to TV show

The next call is August 18th. Let me know if you’d like to join it.

The New Responsibility Revolution

Those of us who are veterans of the human potential movement in the 1970s may well remember one of the popular mantras of the day urging us to “be willing to be totally responsible for creating our reality.” Remember that?

If I look around today and scan the horizon for who are amongst the most socially responsible people in the world, I’d be hard pressed to find anyone putting “more skin in the game” than the people who are risking their lives each day standing for democracy.  These people – most notably those in the Middle East and North Africa - not only include those who are demonstrating in the squares and circles, marching peacefully against totalitarianism, and showing their faces to the cameras publicly, they also include the many ex-patriots who could afford to flee their countries who are now returning to their homelands to be part of this pro-democracy revolution. They know they are at risk doing what they are doing and they are doing it anyway. They are standing on their values and willing to risk their lives in their stand.

Who would have thought we could find so many models for the courage of responsibility we are seeing in our media today? People from Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan are serving as models for leadership from the rank and file.

Map of Northern Africa and Middle East: Revolutions       Civil war       Sustained civil disorder and governmental changes       Protests and governmental changes       Major protests       Minor protests       Map source: Wikipedia

 

The paradigm of leadership is changing. We are shifting from a paradigm of a leader in an elevated position of authority with a following, a parental model you might say, to an emerging paradigm of universal responsibility – we are all responsible! Stated more poetically perhaps – It is time to stop looking for leaders “out there” and start looking leadership within ourselves. Said another way, it is time to stop looking outside and start looking inside.

This is the revolution we wrote and talked about years ago – no charismatic leaders, no Churchill’s or Roosevelt’s leading the charge. Just ordinary people willing to say, “No – that’s enough. We aren’t going to take this anymore.”

The Arab Spring is a collective stand by our fellow brothers and sisters putting their lives on the line, reminiscent of a collective stand taken over 230 years ago here in North America.

The founders of these United States of America were willing to pay a price to stand for freedom and liberty in the 1776 version of a pro–democracy movement. It might be worth a brief review of what it cost them to fully appreciate what risk really means. This summary is courtesy of Rush Limbaugh (you can read his entire essay – “The Americans Who Lost Everything” here):

    Of those 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence, nine died of wounds or hardships during the     war. Five were captured and imprisoned, in each case with brutal treatment. Several lost wives, sons     or entire families. One lost his 13 children. Two wives were brutally treated. All were, at one time or     another, the victims of manhunts and driven from their homes. Twelve signers had their homes     completely burned. Seventeen lost everything they owned. Yet not one defected or went back on his     pledged word. Their honor and the nation they sacrificed so much to create is still intact.

Now that’s putting your butt on the line. That’s putting your money where your mouth is. That’s putting skin in the game!

 

Who Are We and What Do We Want?

[Excerpted from Chapter One (“The New Great Dream”) of John’s forthcoming book, The Great Growing Up: Being Responsible for Humanity’s Future] 

  Some years back, before voicemail, a friend of mine recorded a memorable message on his answering machine. As I recall, it went something like this: “Hi, this is Gary. At the sound of the beep please tell me who you are and what you want. If you think these are trivial questions, be reminded most of us have been trying to figure this out all our lives.”

These kinds of questions have been the focus of philosophers, mystics, clergy and teachers of all varieties. Anyone who has embarked upon some level of self examination, personal development, vision quest, or other inner exploration has most likely ventured into this inquiry as well.
 
When Apollo 15 astronaut Dave Smith stepped onto the moon in 1971 and proclaimed, “…there’s a fundamental truth to our nature; man must explore,” he was affirming a deep-seated need of human beings. Once we have satisfied our basicl needs like food, sex, shelter, relationship and safety, we human beings are compelled to explore the unknown. We have wondered about everything, searched the Earth, are still exploring space (the macro) and the world of subatomic particles (the micro). Wherever there is a frontier, a horizon beyond which we cannot see, humans need to check it out. Indeed, we must explore!

We have made huge technological advances in recent years. We have gained vast wisdom from sages throughout the ages. Yet some of us wonder why we haven’t achieved the peaceful and secure existence here on Earth that we claim to want. Who are we and what do we really want?

In the past century we have seen breakthroughs of all kinds that allow us to create the kind of world we want for ourselves. So it isn’t a matter of the conditions being right. We have the wherewithal.

The cynic’s cry, “It will always be the way it has been.” This a disillusioned perspective, resigned to the present reality being as good as it gets. This is hardly the song of an adventurous human eager to explore the unknown, setting out on the quest for what lies over the horizon. The cynic has lost the spirit of adventure, spirit of exploration and, perhaps, the spirit of being human.

Let us re-engage that inner explorer in us and leave space to NASA and other outer space experts. Let us leave the oceans to the people already engaged in those explorations and leave the study of subatomic particles to the world’s scientists. With all these people and organizations fully engaged in their adventures into these uncharted territories, there are still at least five billion of us who could start exploring who we are and what we want.

We have everything we need to pull it off. The first step is to choose. We must decide that the promise of humanity is important enough to stand for it . . . and stand tall for it with all our might. Then we may get closer to answering the question of who we are and start acting more consistently with what we want.

 

Are We Nuts, Hypocrites or Just Plain Scared?

The title of this blog series is “Exploring the Better Future.” In this post I would like to explore why people fail to do what we know would be best for all of us.

Each of us is completely unique. Even twins are different. So why do we try so hard to be the same as everyone else and conform to some standard we made up?

We yearn for love and companionship yet hold ourselves back when it comes to expressing our affections and emotions with people we care about.

So many of us complain, publicly or inwardly, about the very same things we enable and empower through our silence or apathy.

We say we want relief from the hectic, stress-filled lifestyle yet we are quick to fill in each empty moment with something, maintaining the very busy-ness we claim to detest.

Many of us say we want community, yet we avoid contact with people as they walk by or avoid talking to anyone we don’t know. We choose to communicate through technology rather than in-person.

We claim to want people to be authentic and real yet do our part in protecting our sacred images of ourselves, withholding our vulnerabilities and private secrets.

Look at all the ways we say one thing yet do another, sometimes knowingly and sometimes unconsciously. This is co-opting ourselves, forcing ourselves into lives of wheel-spinning double-mindedness and energy-sapping inner-conflictedness.

Why do we do this? Are we so afraid of being who we are, so afraid of living the lives we say we want to live?

Could it be we trust more in our mind and all its manufactured opinions and beliefs than we do in our heartfelt values and deeper yearnings? Could it be we have allowed our minds, our egoistic “thought machines,” to become the slave masters of our lives while subjugating our hearts to the prisoner life of unrequited happiness?

How about breaking the chains we have placed on our own hearts and demoting our minds from master to servant?  How do we do that? It just might be a time to turn things over to a Higher Power, a power greater than ourselves - call it Nature, Providence (as the founders of the U.S. did), or God, however we might imagine that God to be.

And it always helps to get unreasonable. My favorite quote in this regard comes from George Bernard Shaw, adapted to modern language: “The reasonable person adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.”

Growing Income Gap Could Spark Our Own Tahrir Square

Watching the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo several weeks back followed by the storming of the Wisconsin state capitol building by crowds upset over the prospects of being disenfranchised here in the U.S., I wondered when there might be pro-democracy  demonstrations popping up all over the United States. After all, one of the major factors of the leaderless demonstrations in the Arab world is the oppressive economic disparities between rich and poor. As can be seen from the graph below, the gap between the richest one percent of Americans and the rest of us continues to widen. Eventually this gap will reach a breaking point. No society can sustain this rising disparity before the other 99% figures out the system is rigged against them.

John Perkins, former “economic hit man” who has inside experience of the power of corporate appetites, calls this result “corporatocracy.” Wikipedia defines corporatocracy, in part, as a governing system where “corporations, to a significant extent ‘own’ or have massive power over governments, including those governments nominally elected by the people, and that they exercise such power not by back-room conspiracies but by their enormous, concentrated economic power, and by legal in-the-open mechanisms (lobbyists, campaign contributions to office holders and candidates, threats to leave the state or country for another with less oversight and more subsidies, etc).”

In many respects, corporatocracy causes this growing disparity. By its nature it continues to drive economic wealth to the rich while leaving the lower and middle classes pretty much stagnated. This becomes especially notable when you adjust for inflation. Some argue that 99% of us are actually worse off now, in terms of spendable income, than we were thirty years ago!

As I was drafting this article, “60 Minutes” featured a shocking story which included, in part:
American families have been falling out of the middle class in record numbers….One of the consequences of the recession that you don't hear a lot about is the record number of children descending into poverty….it is estimated the poverty rate for kids in this country will soon hit 25 percent. (see entire report here)

Here’s a TED talk by Wael Ghonim, which was recorded last month at TED 2011. Ghonim is the Google executive who helped jumpstart Egypt's democratic revolution. He tells the inside story of everyday Egyptians showing that "the power of the people is stronger than the people in power." When enough people get fed up enough being victims of unfairness they will stand up for themselves.
Remember the parable of the boiled frog? Like the slowly-boiled frog we can get sleepy, then become unconscious and eventually die if the process is slow and gradual enough. The temperature rises so gradually that we acclimatize to the heat without triggering our life-threatening -danger responses. The disappearing middle class and the lower classes have been lulled into near-oblivion over the past thirty years as the gap continues to widen between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert opined a few days ago, “There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.” [For the full column click here.]

Where is that tipping point for organizing our own Tahrir Square vigil? Like the people in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain who have been willing to risk their lives for liberty, perhaps Americans can emulate what the protestors in Cairo bravely declared on television, “This isn’t fair!” and “We want our country back.”

Fortunately we are not frogs. We possess consciousness which, when awakened, allows us to make dramatic changes in our responses to situations. A dear friend recently reminded me of a pertinent quote to share here. It comes from Scottish psychiatrist, Ronald Laing: "The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change, until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."

Consciousness and Our Culture

  In her book The Watchman’s Rattle*, Rebecca Costa writes about what she calls “supermemes” that drive our culture. She identifies the third of these supermemes as “counterfeit correlation,” explaining that we have begun to substitute correlation for causation. We have started leaping to conclusions in the sea of complexity of our daily lives and giving false cause to matters we are unable to explain rationally. In addressing correlation she gives the following example:

    The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

    The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

    The Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

    The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British     or Americans.

    The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than     the British or Americans.

    Conclusion: Eat and drink what you like. It is obvious that speaking English is what kills you!

Costa uses this ridiculous example to masterfully demonstrate how complexity has caused us to lower our standards for proof. She writes, “Casually observing a relationship – any relationship - between two events is magnitudes easier than the grueling effort required to prove one thing actually causes another to occur.” She goes on to say that as the world grows more complex and it becomes more difficult to resolve the true causes of our problems, lowering our standards is a “natural response.”

I’m reminded of Einstein’s warning from a half century ago - that we cannot solve our problems with the same consciousness with which we created them. We need to be more aware that we can shift our consciousness, become more aware, and look at things from a different frame of reference.  Our simplistic thinking will continue to yield the kinds of adaptive behaviors we are seeing - tragic attempts to explain what we don’t know, to substitute beliefs for facts.

When you consider that the two telltale signs of a pending civilization collapse are gridlock and substituting beliefs for facts – Costa’s major point in the book – it appears we are well on our way toward that predictable end. What will change things? Heeding Einstein’s warning and shifting our consciousness will enable us to transcend the puzzling complexities that currently confound us. Not only will this avoid collapse but it could give birth to a world that works for everyone.


*The Watchman’s Rattle, Rebecca D. Costa, Vanguard Press, 2010

Consciousness and the Future: A Matter of Conscious Choosing

There’s a parable told in various versions that goes something like this: A Native American elder describes his own inner struggles to a young boy. He says, “There are two dogs inside me. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean and evil dog constantly fights the good dog.” The boy then asks him which dog usually wins. He answers, “The one I feed the most.”

Like the beautiful photograph below which I can hold either right side up or upside down, I can put my attention on the good thoughts or the bad, the positive or the negative. It is my choice.

        photo by Rosario Sapienza

I have found this simple parable incredibly valuable as I work to maintain a positive attitude for the future, not only my own but the future of humanity. While a bit of a maverick, I do call myself a futurist and have written and spoken about the future for many years. The future of humanity is probably not at the forefront of most people’s consciousness but, since it is the focus of my work, it almost always is mine.

While I occasionally get a bit down or despairing about the future of humankind - and the trends can be pretty discouraging - I consider this an occupational hazard. These times are when I must focus on the “good dog” inside me and look for the positive that is bringing us to a tipping point – not to a worse future but to a better one.

Another battle that goes on within me sometimes is whether to repair or transform existing systems and institutions or to move on and consider what new structures would better serve the conscious evolution of our species. We often make dysfunctional institutions stronger and more resistant by trying to change them. Putting our energies into those efforts may be counterproductive. In other words, there frequently comes a point when the more we try to improve them the worse they get! What a downer to contemplate!

One of my heroes is R. Buckminster (“Bucky”) Fuller who writes, “You never change things by fighting existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

By feeding the “good dog” inside me I am able to focus more on the positive vision I have for our future – what I stand FOR – rather than focusing on all the negativity confronting us and being AGAINST that.

Measuring Consciousness

"Our ordinary waking consciousness....is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness."  - William James

   It occurred to me the other day while I was in a discussion about consciousness that people mean different things when they use this word. In a spiritual discussion, people usually mean the degree someone is aware of their interconnection to the cosmos, God, and humanity. What about professional athletes who are totally in tune with their bodies, possessing extraordinary awareness of their physical presence? Or the person who possesses exceptional psychic abilities but is rather amoral when it comes to ethics?

How can we consider someone truly conscious when they may have exceptional awareness about one aspect of life – say in the spiritual domain – but are almost devoid of consciousness when it comes to some other part of their life, say their physical health? How do we rate someone’s consciousness when they possess uncanny awareness and presence in the domain of nature, for example, but are completely oblivious of any relationship beyond the material/physical plane?

Since we are all human and each of us possesses different strengths and weaknesses, or different degrees of awareness in different areas of our lives, how do we assess consciousness of the whole person?

I have been writing about conscious leadership for a decade or more now. My work has been focused on observing the consciousness of leaders – their skills and awareness, their mastery of their actions as well as their dominion of ethics, their commitment to responsibility for the whole and their continuous willingness to question their assumptions and choices. But is the conscious leader who has mastered one domain still regarded as conscious in the many other domains of his or her life?

We have all heard of highly-evolved spiritual teachers who have scandalized sex lives or other behaviors unbefitting a conscious icon in our society.

Is one’s consciousness a cumulative assessment of the various facets of one’s life?

I would enjoy hearing from anyone out there in the blogosphere on this subject.


NOTE: Be sure to catch my newsletter editorial this month.

From Survival to Service: The Maturing of Our Species

  Did you ever hear yourself say something you didn’t even know you knew much less ever thought about? If you have, you know the feeling of surprise and wonder…like who just said that? Was that me talking? This is why so much wisdom flows out of dialogue with one another. The exchanges are spontaneous and we often don’t have time to get ensnared in our minds. Our intuition just comes through uncensored.

Well, the other day, in such a dialogue with one of my spiritual communities, we were in conversation about service. Some read quotes about service. Others read poetry. I found myself saying that as we mature as people we are less and less motivated by survival  fears and more and more motivated by wanting to be of service to others….we morph from survival focus to service focus. Sometimes this journey is slow and gradual. Sometimes it is quite sudden. It depends upon the rate we are maturing.

Not only was I surprised but a silence filled the room for several seconds. Then one of our group asked me to say more. 

Now my mind got into the act and I’m sure I was less precise and concise as I tried to “explain” what I said. I liked the uncensored contribution to the dialogue better than my subsequent explanation.

We see this phenomenon is our aging society, whereby people are more apt to volunteer and do other service work when they are part of the growing older community. They have dropped the insecurities of youth and the façade that adolescent minds tend to take on. Pretense has gone out the window for many seniors who have become much more comfortable in their skin that when they were younger.

Another bit of wisdom that seems to come with age is the value of real meaning. The more people chase material possessions and stuff the more they realize the gratification is only skin deep and doesn’t sustain. They learn that true meaning comes by serving others without condition, getting out of themselves.

So if this happens for many people as they get older and some get more mature - and I’m clear these are two distinct qualities -  then why couldn’t a society do the same? Why couldn’t the species known as human make this transition and grow up into an adult society? What a concept?