Smash the Machines in our Minds

wisely.  Get this.  Authorities are almost never wise.  Work on yourself and your community.  There lies the future.

We need the encouragement of ideas. To never ever go down the mechanical industrial colonial track of producing lots of cheap shit – ever, never, never, ever. To never make the world a set of precisely measured cogs where to think let alone voice is the act of a non-believer, an infidel, a rebel.

But all those qualitative feeling, coping, changing, human and earthly things are never in the completely irrelevant models pumped out by those of us who were taught financial and economic decision making. The ability to think strategically dies when you think you can paint the world by numbers. You cannot nail jelly to a wall. Unless you freeze it in a state in which it will not last.

I was going to write about an economic schema that might help – a set of considerations and then links to how to encourage and evaluate those considerations (mainly through a people/culture-focused and earth-focused shift from the nonsense of mechanically ‘allocating’ ‘resources’ –

Create value,

Multiply value,

Retain value,

Distribute value,

Attract value.

Value in all senses – environmental, cultural, economic – create Tuscany, not Nebraska Inc. where the corporate model turns people into the voters of Trump – a glimmer of hope for those too busy struggling to think.  Create the flowers that attract.  Don’t bother measuring the scent.  Just sense it.

But we are set on the opposite, because that is how those blinkered minds in power suits who believe in the mechanical world and use the word ‘efficiency’ without having one iota of a clue of what a completely meaningless word that is without defining the context as well. Efficiently destroy the earth perhaps? Efficiently extract the ‘resource’? Efficiently eviscerate the community and leave it with the slag?

– *Repel* value because what poet, philosopher or lover of life and spirit from whence entrepreneurs emerge, wants to come and live in Mordor – unless of course you are a Sauron, and you are looking for some cheap Orcs, or a Shire to ravage, or an Ent Forest to destroy.

This is madness.  And they dress the destruction up by referring to jobs and GDP.  For heaven’s sake, get rid of those who cannot think.  A curse on the political parties who smile with mad eyes, salivating with greed at the outsider who would (‘efficiently’) take our water and eat our souls.

I was going to write about this and that, but it is not enough. It will never be enough until we change the way we see the world.

There are deeper philosophies that need to be

“If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves…. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”

And that is what we ought to write and speak about. That we need to think in systems. We cannot continue to think mechanically, because it will kill all meaning, and eventually ourselves as well. And systems thinking does *not* mean in *hard* systems where you merely extend your quantitative senses beyond your normal narrow agronomy or dollar measure. You have to bring in consciousness, and morality, and what a community is, and how a bird will change behaviour with the puff of a breeze, taking a small pocket of warm air from beneath that shrub, onto her wings.

It means looking at the world through a Complexity and Adaptability of a parent and a child. Neither are ‘objective’ one to the other. There is no wider predictability beyond the basics of what will harm in extremis.

We need to think and see the world as in part a loving parent views a child – who wants that child to be happy, to experience joy, to live a full life that is rich in meaning, to take the inevitable hits and move on, to belong to family, community and whenua, to be more than to have. We need to see as the child as well – because we are each nurtured and nurturers. By all the gods, we need to re-embrace reverence and other virtues. We need to feel the spirit, see the potential of the dance, to create the beauty.

We need to write and speak and sing and dance and have conversations about *that*. A way of seeing that does not perpetuate the soullessness of an increasingly mechanical

view of what some dare to call – life. The mechanical dogma of material mathematical reductionism to cogs and wheels is not life. It is a zombie existence.

There is no point talking about the surface things unless we dig deeper into the dogmas that are so engrained we do not even know they are there.  If you want a better future for this province, or that country, or this planet, we need to have those conversations – about rejecting the models of Modernity, and seeing the world anew.

I think I’ll write about that.