Medard Gabel was the Director of World Game Institute, a nonprofit global education and research organization founded by Buckminster Fuller in 1972. Based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, this unique educational research centre publishes one of the world’s most comprehensive integrated databases of national indicators, called Global Recall and Global Data Manager.

These indicators clearly show that Humankind still has the resources, the technology and the information to provide food, shelter, health care, clean water, and renewable energy for everyone, while simultaneously stabilising the population, stopping global warming, halting deforestation, eliminating illiteracy, and completely retiring the debt of the developing countries – and to do so within a decade!

World Game estimates that these objectives can be achieved for a total investment of US $2.5 trillion, or US $250 billion a year over a ten-year period. This is equivalent to about thirty percent of what the world currently spends on its annual defence budget, and is thus clearly affordable. Although expensive, this premium is far less than the economic, social and environmental price of failing to develop a sustainable civilisation before it is too late. It’s benefits almost defy description.

The Institute also produces the World Game Workshop, an interactive educational game which is played on a map of the Earth the size of a basketball court. Over 40,000 people have participated in these workshops at UN agencies, governments, corporations, universities and schools around the world. The game is now also being played interactively on the World Wide Web.

World Game Institute was one of the first participants in the Global Vision Project. What follows is an edited transcript of a video interview for Global Vision’s Sustainability film / TV series and CD-ROM, shot on February 28, 1995.

What is the World Game?

Interview with Medard Gabel

H.G. Wells said that humanity is in a race between education and catastrophe. Buckminster Fuller said that the greatest challenge facing Humanity is how to get most people in the know about the planet, its resources and problems, in a short a period of time as possible. The World Game is a tool to help us win the race against catastrophe, and to get the most people on the planet in the know about the world, its problems, its resources, and how they can effectively participate in solving the world’s problems. The World Game educates people about the world in a way that is unique and enjoyable. It gives people an experience of what the world is all about, the way an astronaut experiences the world. It gives us a global overview of the planet, through an educational workshop that takes place on a giant map of the planet.

Over 100,000 people in 48 states and about 35 countries around the planet have taken part in the World Game. We’ve been doing it for over twenty years now. It’s a very effective, powerful tool to help people learn – in a very experiential, enjoyable way – a huge amount about the planet and its problems, in a short period of time. That’s what the World Game is all about. It’s purpose is to give people not just the experience and the information and a global perspective, but to help us all participate in developing solutions to the world’s problems.

World Game’s mission is to provide the perspective and the information needed by global society to solve the united problems that we all face as we move into the 21st. Century. The whole perspective issue is much more important than just the information. If we’re tackling the wrong problem, if we don’t have a global perspective, we could spend all our lives trying to solve the wrong problem.

WORLD GAME INFORMATION PRODUCTS

World Game Institute has developed a series of information products that help people recognise and define world problems and participate in developing solutions to these problems. One of these is this workshop that I just described. Another is a series of computer-based products that help people get their hands on the vital statistics of the world. One of these is called Global Recall.

Global Recall is both an interactive atlas, an encyclopaedia of the world’s problems, and what we call a Solutions Laboratory. The Solutions Lab is where you go and develop a solution to a problem. You’re led through a series of activities, the end result of which is a detailed solution about how you can solve the problem that you picked. When you are done with developing the solution, you send it in to us and you can enter the World Game Tournament. If you win the tournament, you get a cash prize to be spent on the implementation of your strategy, and you get a round-the-world airplane ticket. The solutions are judged by the United Nations. That’s Global Recall.

Another one of our products is Global Data Manager. This is a huge database of the world’s vital statistics, with over 10,000 indicators for every country in the world.

DOING MORE WITH LESS

In the race between education and catastrophe that H.G. Wells talked about, how do we employ the world’s resources so effectively and efficiently that they are able to take care of everybody on the planet? At World Game Institute, our research – which has been going on for over twenty years – documents that it is possible to take care of everybody at a standard of living higher than anybody currently enjoys!

The way we do that is not by giving everybody a North American standard of living, where everybody’s got two-and-a-half cars and consumes 25% of the world’s total resources. That couldn’t happen. It’s not possible. There’s not enough to make that kind of a world work. But what is possible is to give everybody a standard of living higher that even what the North Americans have, by using our information, our technology, our know-how, and our resources as efficiently and as effectively as we know how. Everybody on the planet could have all the food, the energy, the education, the health care, the shelter that we need – not just to meet the bare minimum or the minimal standards of living, but to give everybody a quality, comfortable lifestyle, and do so in a sustainable way. That’s possible with what we now know about the planet and our resources and our technology.

What the world needs is some useful tools for looking at itself. We need more than just satellite images from outer space, we need some tools that will allow us to see where we are, where the ten-year-olds are, where the high-school students are, where people are hungry, or where there are food surpluses. The World Game is a tool for helping us see ourselves, not from outer space, but from here. It helps us not just recognise where and who we are, but how to use the resources that we currently have to effectively feed, clothe, and house everybody on the planet.

One of the ways it does this, is similar to the way war games work. But instead of the generals and admirals in the Pentagon and Kremlin figuring out the moves and counter-moves for World War III, it actually allows you to figure out how to beat the real enemies of humanity: things like starvation, lack of health-care, malnutrition, shortages of energy, and environmental pollution. And it does this in a way that allows us all to cooperate and everybody wins, rather than you win and I loose.

The World Game is a necessary, useful tool to help solve the world’s problems, and expand the amount of creativity and intelligence and care and consciousness that is being focused on the world’s problems. Instead of it being just a few – the elite, the experts – who deal with the world’s problems, the World Game makes it possible for all of us to look at the world and to develop solutions.

THE FUTURE BELONGS TO YOUNG PEOPLE

There are more children in Africa today under the age of fifteen than there are human beings in the United States! There are more young people in China under the age of fifteen who speak English than there are people in England! The future belongs to the youth of the world. They own the future. They may not own the property, or the military, or the multinational corporations. They can’t even vote yet. But they do own one thing, and that is the future. I, at my age, have spent at least half of my life. The youth of the world, at their age, still have three quarters to eighty percent of their life in front of them. So the future is owned by them. This is why it’s so important that the young people on the planet start caring about both the environment and all the other problems we face, because they’re the ones who are going to have to deal with it. The World Game is a tool for helping empower people to take care of the planet. It gives us a way of solving some of the problems, recognising what they are, and coming up with solutions to them.

THE MYTH OF SCARCITY

Malthus was a British economist who said the world’s population is increasing at an exponential rate, and the goods and services and food are increasing at an arithmetical rate. This means that we’re all doomed to starvation in the near future – that is, according to Malthus a couple of hundred years ago. Well, he was wrong! He’s been wrong for two hundred years, but there are still some people around today who think that we’re about to outstrip our abilities to provide for ourselves, that we’re eventually going to starve to death, or that the world is going to poison itself. If you look at it from just a narrow frame of reference, there is alot of evidence to suggest that idea might be true. I’ll contend that it’s wrong. Because if you look at the big picture, and all of the information out there, you will be overwhelmed by the possibilities and the opportunities we have to not just feed, clothe, and house everybody on the planet, but to move ourselves from just a bare minimum, on up through the spectrum of choices that the richest countries of the world now have.

TAKING CARE OF EVERYBODY ON THE PLANET

Using present-day technology, resources and know-how, we can take care of everybody on the planet. We can do that by doing more with less. We can use our know-how to employ resources in ways that are so effective that they do so much more with so much less that we take care or more and more people with the same amount of resources. This isn’t magic: it’s called ephemeralisation. This means substituting information for materials and energy. As we learn how to do something more and more effectively, we can get rid of the heavy materials that we’ve been using, and substitute know-how. An example of this is how quarter-ton communications satellites now outperform 175,000 tons of transatlantic cable. In the same way, fibre-optic cables and cellular phones outperform the older technology by two orders of magnitude. By doing more with less, it is possible to take care of everybody on the planet.

THE FUTURE AS OPPORTUNITY

Alot of people think that we’re doomed. Doomed to starvation or malnutrition or ecological disaster or thermonuclear holocaust. Any of those are a possibility, either for the whole world or part of the world, but if you abdicate your responsibility, or if you fall victim to apathy, it’s a downward spiral. There are other ways of perceiving the world. It’s critical that the world’s young people don’t get depressed by what they encounter in the world’s newspapers and television programmes. There are other ways of looking at the planet and its resources: as a capacity and an opportunity.

GETTING INVOLVED

We all have the opportunity to help solve the world’s problems, but underlying that is a fundamental fact that everybody needs to know. This is that is that it is possible to solve the world’s problems, that we’ve got the resources, we’ve got the technology. The only thing we’re missing is your consciousness, energy, intelligence and creativity. We have to focus our consciousness on the problems and solve them. We can do what needs to be done. We’ve got the money, the technology and the resources. What we need is you to help put these things all together.

One of the ways this can happen is by doing more with less. Buckminster Fuller used to refer to this ephemeralisation. A good example of what this big word means, as I just mentioned, is how a telecommunications satellite that weighs a quarter of a ton outperforms – does more with less than – 175,000 tons of transoceanic cable. In the same way, cellular phones today in China and elsewhere are outperforming the entire telecommunications network – all the phone lines and everything – in the United States. We can do so much more with so much less in terms of resources and technology and the money it will cost to do this, that we can take care of everybody on the planet. Now this isn’t magic. It’s just simply substituting information and know-how for materials and energy. We can do it. Its up to you to participate in making the solutions possible.

EVERY ACTION COUNTS

Buckminster Fuller said that the world teeters on the threshold of oblivion, that we could fall down into oblivion. And that the teetering on the threshold of oblivion is so critical that the actions of every individual count. If you, who knows better, throw your soda can onto the sidewalk or your candy wrapper onto the street, that may be the thing that tilts the world in the direction of oblivion. In other words, every action of every individual counts. It’s not just something that the big corporations or the big governments or the experts or the mass of humanity – the other folks – have to do. It’s something that you and I have to do.

World Game Institute is doing is putting together a series of tools to help people deal with the problems of the world – getting them the information, the vital, accurate information about the state of the planet. We’re doing this through computer software, CD-ROMs, and something called the Net World Game on the Internet. This will enable you and I, sitting in Singapore or in San Francisco, to participate in a great logistics game through which we can compete and cooperate in developing solutions to the world’s problems. These problems could be a recent earthquake in some part of the world or a new outbreak of starvation or famine in another part of the world, or some of the long-term systemic problems facing humanity, like the fact that there are now close to a billion people who are illiterate. Using the Net World Game through the Internet, we’ll be able to participate together in solving these problems. This will not just be an academic exercise like “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could solve this problem?” It will empower people to actively create and implement real-world, viable solutions to the world’s problems. We’re not deluded enough to think that you can have a good idea and just snap your fingers and it’s going to get done. But if you have the information, then you can leverage the world to move in the direction that your values dictate.

LEVERAGING THE WORLD WITH INFORMATION

This can be done the same way that smallpox got eradicated from the planet. A small group of people in Western Europe put together a plan that called for the end of smallpox. They didn’t have the money it would take to do this, but they knew that Western Europe and America between them were spending about $200M a year to control smallpox within their borders. By the time they got through with their studies, they had a good cost/benefit analysis that said look, you’re investing $200M a year in this program, but we can save you 10 billion dollars over the next twenty years. To make a long story short, they got their money, they implemented the program and 1978 was the last case of smallpox on this planet. They changed the entire planet, with information! By having enough information about how to make the world work, they actually changed the world.

With our workshops and our CD-ROM products and our Net World Game on the Internet, the World Game is attempting to give all of us the opportunities to move the world in similar ways, to develop viable, real-world solutions to the planet’s problems so that we can actually solve them. We can create cost-effective, affordable solutions to the world’s problems. In the same way that smallpox was eradicated, World Game can demonstrate that it’s also affordable to eradicate malnutrition, starvation, illiteracy, and lack of health-care.

THE FULLER PROJECTION MAP

The Fuller projection is the only map that gives us a view of the entire planet without distortion. It’s essential for us to have an accurate view of the world. Back in the 1930’s and 40’s, Buckminster Fuller saw that the world maps then in use (and still in use today) – the Mercator projection, the Robinson projection, etc., were grossly distorted. Fuller developed an accurate map of the entire planet that shows the world without any visible distortion of the land masses. It’s an icosahedron, which is basically a spherical arrangement of twenty equilateral triangles. The way Fuller developed this is by taking the spherical surface of the planet – and projecting the geographical data onto these equilateral triangles. But the technical part of the map is not as interesting as the ability to see the world accurately. If your view of the world is distorted, if you’ve got an inaccurate vision of the planet, if you’re basing it on the current configuration of what, say, the Mercator map looks like, you could come up with some really crazy solutions to the world’s problems.

The Fuller Projection is the most accurate representation of the entire planet that we currently have. It shows the entire surface of the Earth without any breaks in the continental outlines, and it shows all the continents accurately shaped and sized. Buckminster Fuller developed as a tool for plotting information on a global map without any visible distortion. It’s a crucial tool for helping us to recognise, define and solve the global problems confronting humanity today.

If you’re concerned about the ozone hole over Antarctica, or the opening of another ozone hole over the Northern hemisphere, or the rain forests, or any of the problems that concern us as human beings on the planet, from natural resources to technology use to environmental pollution, you’re going to want to see where the problems are. You’ll want to plot them on a map. If you try to plot them on anything but the Fuller projection, you’re going to end up with a distorted view both of the planet and of the problem. Plotting things, displaying information on the Fuller projection map gives us an accurate view of the world. All the other maps – the Mercator, Goode, and Robinson projections – don’t have the South Pole on them; they’re missing an entire continent, so you don’t see Antarctica. There’s no North Pole. Greenland is shown nine times the size that it actually is in the real world. Africa is much smaller. It’s biased to the North. So there are dozens of problems with the Mercator map. The Fuller projection is more of a North-South world. The Mercator map is an East-West. The Fuller projection map is the most accurate map of the entire planet and it is indispensable for looking at global problems because it is the only map that gives us an accurate view of the whole Earth.

ON POPULATION

There are now over five-and-a-half billion of us on the planet. That fact is astounding. In 1900 we had a little more than a billion of us. Never before in the entire five-and-a-half billion years of the history of the planet, have we had so many complex life forms like us. Now alot of people think that that’s a negative, that we’re polluting the environment, that we’re going to destroy the world. But I think that it’s an incredibly miraculous event! A human being is the most complex living being in the known universe. Five or six billion of us have the potential of transforming the entire planet. I think the astounding fact of our presence in the universe here on this planet needs to be looked at very carefully – not just in a way that frightens us all: Oh my God, there’s too many of us! It’s really: “What’s going on here? Why is it that we are all here together? What functions are we performing here on this planet? What’s our role?” Think about it.

WHOLE SYSTEMS

The ecologist Howard Odum said that the only way to understand a system is to understand the system it fits into. We need to take the big picture. We need to look at the world, and the problems of the world, from a global perspective – not a local one, not from our home town or state or our country. We need to view the planet from a holistic perspective. We need to see across boundaries, we need to be able to see not just across geographical boundaries, like from a satellite looking down to earth. We need to see across system boundaries, problem boundaries, nationalities, culture boundaries. We need to be able to see the whole interacting systems out there for us to solve our problems, and for us to really recognise what’s going on and to tap the potential that is out there on this planet.

© Global Vision 1998 

Read Medard Gabel’s Synergies of the Whole.

As you sow, so shall you reap. Adversary action usually provokes adversary reaction ending in an adversary resultant or loss. The end never justifies the means. In fact, the means always end up becoming the ends. Terrorism is adversary action. Fighting terrorism only makes more terrorism. … Reposted from Guardian/UK.

When the Means become the Ends

Jonathan Steele

The bombast has increased with the bombs. We saw two disturbing escalations this week. The explosions that devastated the British consulate and the HSBC bank in Istanbul mark a significant widening in the choice of targets by those Islamist radicals who use terror to express their hatred of British and US policy in Iraq and the Middle East. The Blair/Bush response reached an equally alarming new level of ferocity.

At their swaggering joint press conference on Thursday, the two men repeatedly made the risible claim that they could win their war on terror. The prime minister was the worse. While Bush gave himself a global carte blanche to intervene anywhere, by speaking of his “determination to fight and defeat this evil, wherever it is found”, Blair put the issue in terms of a finite goal. He talked of defeating terrorism “utterly” and “ridding our world of this evil once and for all”.

The hyperbole of the religious pulpit allows for all-embracing and eschatological language, but these men are meant to be practical political leaders. When Blair, in his opposition days, invented the phrase “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, he knew that crime could never be totally eliminated. The task is to reduce and restrain it by a variety of methods. Violence and terrorism are no different. Like poverty, they will always be with us. At best they can only be diminished and contained. Yet now, with the arrogance of power, we have the Bush/Blair roadshow promising in sub-Churchillian tones to vanquish terrorism as though it were a clearly defined enemy like Nazi Germany.

Terrorism is a technique. It is not an ideology or a political philosophy, let alone an enemy state. Our leaders’ failure to understand that point emerged immediately after September 11 2001 when they reacted to the attacks in New York and Washington by confusing the hunt for the perpetrators with the Afghan “state” that allegedly “harboured” them. The Taliban ran avicious regime, but Afghanistan was a disastrously failed state and its nominal leader, Mullah Omar, had no control over al-Qaida.

By the same token the “war” on terror should have remained what it initially was, a metaphor like the “war” on drugs. But instead of being harmless linguistic exaggeration to describe a broad campaign encompassing a range of political, economic and police counter-measures, it was narrowed down to real war and nothing else. The slippery slope that began with Afghanistan quickly led to the invasion of Iraq, a symbolic and political enormity whose psychological impact Bush and Blair have not yet grasped.

When Ariel Sharon, then a middle-aged general, wanted to send Israeli tanks into Cairo in October 1973, it was the arch-realist Henry Kissinger who realised how devastating the emotional effect would be in the Arab world, and stopped him. For a new generation of Arabs, the sight of American tanks in Baghdad is just as humiliating. Osama bin Laden’s claim that having US forces at airbases close to the Islamic holy places in Saudi Arabia is a desecration appealed only to a few Muslims, but the daily television pictures of US troops in the heart of an Arab capital, and not just patrolling but using lethal force to back up an administration of occupiers, inflames a much larger audience.

Jack Straw argues that terrorism preceded the war on Iraq and it is therefore wrong to blame the US and Britain for increasing the danger. This is a non-sequitur, which also flies in the face of the evidence, admitted by US officials themselves, that non-Iraqi Arabs have been infiltrating Iraq to commit acts of terror because of the US presence.

Sharon, similarly, says suicide bombings in Israel started before he took office. Does that mean he shares no blame? That is not the view of four former Israeli intelligence chiefs, who argued last week that Sharon’s exclusive reliance on hardline responses has weakened Israel’s security and increased the number of attacks on Israelis.

Before the war on Iraq several of Britain’s intelligence experts, including senior officials, warned that it would increase the risk of terrorism and make British interests potential targets – a view shared by most critics of the war. To suggest they were wrong runs against common sense.

Coming after the war on Afghanistan, the war on Iraq has made al-Qaida’s grisly work easier. Dispersed by American bombing from their remote mountain lairs, they have shifted to the much easier terrain of an urban Arab environment where they can be more readily hidden and helped. Resistance to US forces in southern and eastern Afghanistan as well as terrorist attacks on aid workers and other western soft targets are on the increase, but they appear to come from Afghan supporters of the former Taliban as well as other Pashtun radicals from Pakistan. Most Arabs who were in Afghanistan have moved to Iraq. There they have been joined by new Arab recruits, eager to add their energy to Iraq’s local resistance.

In the long history of terrorism, al-Qaida has provided two novelties. One is its global reach, marked by willingness to strike targets in many countries. The other is its use of suicide attacks as a weapon of first, rather than last, resort. Under the broad heading of terrorism as a political and military instrument, suicide bombing is a sub-category, a technique within a technique.

In the post-colonial world its first proponents had nothing to do with the anti-Islamic myth that martyrs are motivated by the hope of being greeted by dozens of virgins waiting in heaven. It began with Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka, an act of martial self-sacrifice by angry women as well as men. When it spread to Palestine over the past decade, it was an act of last-resort desperation by frustrated people who saw no other way to counter Israel’s disparity of power, as Cherie Blair once publicly pointed out. Al-Qaida has merely taken an old technique and made it the weapon of choice.

The shock this week is that Bush and Blair not only still believe that war is the way to deal with terrorists but that even when faced by the escalation of Istanbul they think victory is possible. The real issue is how to control risk. Anti-western extremism will never be eradicated, but it can be reduced by a combination of measures, primarily political.

The first is an early transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi people and the withdrawal of foreign forces. An arrangement whereby the new Iraqi government “requests” US troops to stay on will convince few in the Middle East. Second is firm and sustained pressure on Israel to make a deal with the Palestinians, presumably on the lines of the recent accord worked out in Geneva by Israeli and Palestinian dissidents.

There is no guaranteed defence against a suicide attack on a soft target. “Hardening” targets by turning every US or British building, at home or abroad, into a fortress makes little sense. It is better to try to reduce the motivations (hatred, revenge, or an overwhelming sense of injustice) that make people turn themselves into bombs. That endeavour will also never produce complete success. In Blair’s misguided words, it cannot be done “utterly” or “once and for all”. But it is the more productive way to go.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003 

See: Protecting Humanity and Synergic Disarmament. Also See: Timothy Wilken’s  SafeEARTH series: 1) Beyond Crime and Punishment, 2) Synergic Containment: Protecting Children, 3) Synergic Containment: Science & Rationale, and 4) Synergic Containment: Protecting Community.

Read Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s: 1) Aggression and Violence 2) Evolution of Weaponry  3) Psychological Effects of Combat.

Reposted from Strike The Root.

Homogenizing America

Craig Russell 

Behind that which is seen, lies something which is not seen. ~ Frederic Bastiat

We tend to think of technology as personal convenience, as something that makes our lives ìeasier´ and therefore ìbetter.”  But we achieve that ease, that so-called betterment, at a very dear price – one we don´t see right away and have little consciousness of until much later, if we come to consciousness of it at all.  Sure, we have shopping malls and automobiles, central air and Arby´s, but mostly unnoticed and unappreciated goes the fact that we´ve obtained these ìgoods” at the great and lasting expense of giving over the minds, the spirits, and thus the futures, of our children to the State.

Generally speaking, our lives as Americans depend upon technology and the mass production it provides.  Our clothes, for example – our blouses and skirts, our pants and our shirts – are almost all machine made now, produced by the identical thousands.  Walk into any Wal-Mart anywhere in the country and you´ll find the same things – different sizes, certainly, but the same styles, the same makes, the same colors and fabrics.  Drive through any town and you´ll see the same McDonald´s, the same Wendy´s, the same Burger Kings, offering the same food at the same quality for the same price.  Walk through any supermarket and you´ll see the same cans of Green Giant vegetables, the same Sara Lee pastries, the same Pepsi Cola soft drinks.  Only through mass production can so many live so easily and so ìwell” – only through technology is such inexpensive abundance possible.

But the introduction in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries of mass production to American life required major adjustments to American thinking.  During the Nineteenth Century, Americans tended to think and provide for themselves.  By and large, they farmed their own land, slaughtered their own meat, made their own clothing.  They cooked their own food and provided for their own health and their own old age.  They even managed to entertain themselves.  Very few of them worked as an employee of another.  They depended only upon themselves.  No one had a claim on them, and they had claims on no one.  They had both freedom and the responsibility that goes with it.

But mass production requires mass consumption, and mass consumption requires mass thought, for if people remain unique and independent in mind and spirit, then mass production will fail.  It can succeed only when the masses have the same tastes and desires, the same wants and needs and beliefs.  It can succeed only when, in short, most everyone thinks alike.

The late Nineteenth Century surge of technology and innovation brought unimaginably great wealth to a handful of men and their families: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Ford.  But according to John Taylor Gatto in The Underground History of American Education, to secure their position and keep that constant flow of wealth, they had to control overproduction, ìa condition which could degrade or even ruin the basis for the new financial system.”  They realized, however, that ìthe ultimate source of overproduction in products and services was the overproduction of minds . . . real scientific control of overproduction must ultimately rest on the power to restrain the production of mentality” (155).

And what better way to do this than to order children from their homes and force them, under the guise of ìeducation,” into indoctrination centers where they would systematically learn not to think for themselves and to become totally dependent upon others?  As Gatto says, ìthrough the dependence of all on the few, an instrument of management and of elite association would be created far beyond anything every seen in the past.  This powerful promise was, however, fragilely balanced atop the need to homogenize the population and all its descendent generations.  A mass production society can neither be created nor sustained without a leveled population, one conditioned to mass habits, mass tastes, mass enthusiasms, predictable mass behaviors.  The will of both maker and purchaser had to give way to the predestined output of machinery with a one-track mind” (155-6).

Thus, argues Gatto, the modern school came into existence.  America in the late 1800s simply had too many people from too many places reading too much and thinking too many different things.  It threatened the idea of unity forged in the blood and horror of the War Between the States.  And it threatened the profits of the Rockefellers and the Fords and the other capitalist giants.  This society had to be controlled, and controlled in such a way as to yield to those men the profits for which they hungered and lied and schemed.

ìSchool,” said Horace Mann, one of the founders of the American forced schooling system, ìis the cheapest police” (quoted in Gatto 256) and, according to Gatto, ìit was a sentiment publicly spoken by every name . . . prominently involved in creating universal school systems” (256).  Forcing all children into schools helped to ìstabilize the social order and train the ranks.”  Schools, he says, ìbuild national wealth by tearing down personal sovereignty, morality, and family life” (151).  It teaches them the same myths about the nation, about its government´s leaders and its history.  Modern schooling in America , says Gatto, provides ìnot intellectual development, not character development, but the inculcation of a new synthetic culture in children, one designed to condition its subjects to a continual adjusting of their lives by unseen authorities” (94).  They ìtrain individuals to respond as a mass.  Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete.  A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele.  A small business, small farm economy . . . requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between ‘Cheers´ and ‘Seinfeld´ is a subject worth arguing about” (43).

But schooling only provides half the answer.  After all, children can only attend school for so many hours in a day.  Thanks to modern technology, however, the rest of the time the television can tend them and help keep their minds straight.  After all, as Wes Moore said in his essay Television: Opiate of the Masses, television is ìone of the most potent mind control devices ever produced.

Think for a moment about how American children spend those infinitely precious and irreplaceable twenty-fours they´re granted every single day.  If we assume they sleep for eight hours, they then have 16 remaining.  Six of those they spend in school under the direct supervision of a State-certified employee learning State-certified things.  That leaves them with ten.  They have to spend some time with basic personal maintenance like washing up, getting dressed, and later getting undressed.  And they have to spend some time eating.  Let´s conservatively allot a total of four hours to that.  This leaves them with six hours.  What do they then do with that remaining time?  Maybe they´ll talk some with their parents or their siblings or their friends.  Maybe they´ll take a walk or play a game.  But chances are that they´ll spend the majority of that time watching television.  Wes Moore claims the average American spends four hours watching television every day.  Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in their Scientific American article called Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor, claimed that ìThe amount of time people spend watching television is astonishing. On average, individuals in the industrialized world devote three hours a day to the pursuit–fully half of their leisure time, and more than on any single activity save work and sleep.”  Even if we accept the more conservative claim of Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi, who talk about ìthe industrialized world” rather than just America, then that time has dwindled to just three hours.

And what does television do to them and to anyone who watches it?  According to both Moore and the team of Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi, watching television acts exactly like a drug on the human body, producing endorphins, which are structurally identical to opium and its derivatives.  Also, as if that wasn´t bad enough, it also shuts down the questioning and critical left hemisphere of the brain, which controls our language and our logic, while emphasizing the accepting and non-critical right hemisphere.

And what do people see on that insidious device?  Thousands upon thousands of commercials for one thing.  According to Moore , watching television ìbrainwashes consumers to throw money at the gaping void of their meaningless, terror-filled lives.”  And certainly the shows they watch frighten them.  I live near an elementary school, and at about 2:30 every afternoon, the streets by that school fill up with anxious mothers waiting to pick their children up and drive them home.  What are they afraid of?  There has certainly not been some rash of child kidnappings around here.  In fact, I don´t know of a single one that has ever happened around here.  What else but television could have frightened them so?  A one-time report, years or even decades ago, of the kidnapping of a single child at a single place in this huge, sprawling nation, and the cars and SUVs line up to cart little Junior and young Suzie those two or three blocks to home and the safety of the electronic hearth.

It´s easy for people to read about the effects of school and of television and simply to deny them because they just don´t want to believe them.  Such beliefs can quickly become inconvenient.  But we can´t just reject things out of hand.  We must think about the facts and the logic behind them.  If we can show that the facts are wrong, or that the logic is flawed, then we can indeed reject those arguments.  But if we can´t disprove the facts, if we can´t find holes in the logic, then we find ourselves faced, if we´re honest with ourselves, with a very discomforting situation.  Can we deny that we have become a nation which ìsits down each evening to commercial entertainment, hears the same processed news, wears the same clothing, takes direction from the same green road signs, thinks the same pre-framed thoughts, and relegates its children and old people to the same scientific care of strangers in ‘nursing´ homes and schools” (Gatto 224)?  Can we honestly deny that our children spend most of their waking hours with school and television, just as we did when we were young?  And can we deny that school and television have helped create the minds and the thinking that have put us into this situation?

If we truly want freedom in our time, we must find ways to minimize, if not totally eliminate, the exposure of our children to these two institutions of American life, for such exposure only strengthens the hand of the State.  The more parents who home-school their children (who send them to private school where they have much more control over their education), and the more parents who keep both their children and themselves from mindlessly vegetating in front of the television, the better the chances of freedom become.

Reposted from The Sacramento Bee.

Together We Can!

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Today is a new day in California. I did not seek this office to do things the way they’ve always been done. What I care about is restoring your confidence in your government. When I became a citizen 20 years ago, I had to take a citizenship test. I had to learn about the history and the principles of our republic. What I learned — and I’ve never forgotten — is sovereignty rests with the people, not the government.

In recent years, Californians have lost confidence. They’ve felt that the actions of their government did not represent the will of the people. This election was not about replacing one man; it was not replacing one party. It was about changing the entire political climate of our state. Everywhere I went during my campaign, I could feel the public hunger for our elected officials to work together, to work openly and to work for the greater good. The election was the people’s veto — for politics as usual. With the eyes of the world upon us, we did the dramatic. Now we must put the rancor of the past behind us and do the extraordinary.

It’s no secret I’m a newcomer to politics. I realize I was elected on faith and hope. And I feel a great responsibility — not to let the people down. As soon as I go inside the Capitol behind me, I will sign my first order as governor. I will sign Executive Order No. 1 — which will repeal the 300 percent increase in the car tax. I will issue a proclamation convening a special session of the Legislature to address California’ fiscal crisis. I will issue a proclamation convening a special session to reform our workers’ compensation system. I will call on the Legislature to repeal SB60 and I will work to reform government by bringing openness and full disclosure to public business.

I enter this office beholden to no one except you, my fellow citizens. I pledge my governorship to your interests, not to special interests. So I’ve appointed to my Cabinet Republicans, Democrats and Independents — because I want people to know that my administration is not about politics. It is about saving California. The state of California is in crisis. As I’ve said many times, we spent ourselves into the largest budget deficit in the nation. We have the worst credit rating in the nation. We have the highest workers’ compensation costs in the nation. Next year we will have the highest unemployment insurance costs in the nation. And we have the worst business climate in the nation. But even though these problems are staggering, they do not even compare to what Californians have overcome in the past.

Our state has endured earthquakes, floods and fires. The latest fires have destroyed lives, homes, businesses, and devastated hundreds of thousands of acres of the land that we love. On behalf of my fellow citizens, I salute all those who have served on the front lines of the battle. Firefighters, emergency workers, law enforcement officials, National Guard and thousands of volunteers. As we watched the firestorms raging, we saw bravery that never faltered and determination that never wavered in a fight that never flagged. To the families of those who gave their lives and those who have lost their lives, your loss is ours. As Californians, we mourn together, we fight together, and we will rebuild together. And just as California will come back from the fires, we will also come back from fiscal adversity.

I know there are some of you who say that the Legislature and I will never agree on solutions to our problems. But I’ve found in my life that people often respond in remarkable ways to remarkable challenges. In the words of President Kennedy, “I am an idealist without illusions.” I know it will be hard to put aside years of partisan bitterness. I know it will be hard to overcome the political habits of the past.

But for guidance, let’s look back in history to a period I studied when I became a citizen. The summer of 1787. Delegates of the original 13 states were meeting in Philadelphia. The dream of a new nation was falling apart. Events were spiraling downward. Divisions were deep. Merchant against farmer. Big states against small. North against South. Our founding fathers knew that the fate of the union was in their hands, just as the fate of California is in our hands. What happened in that summer of 1787 is that they put their differences aside — and produced the blueprint for our government; our Constitution. Their coming together has been called “the Miracle of Philadelphia.”

Now, the members of the Legislature and I must bring about the “Miracle of Sacramento” — a miracle based on cooperation, good will, new ideas — and devotion to the long-term good of California. What we face may look insurmountable. But I learned something from all those years of training and competing. What I learned is that we are always stronger than we know. And California is like that, too. We are stronger than we know.

There’s a massive weight we must lift off our state. Alone, I cannot lift it. But together, we can. It’s true; things may get harder before they get better. But I’ve never been afraid of the struggle. I’ve never been afraid of the fight and I have never been afraid of the hard work. I will not rest until our fiscal house is in order. I will not rest until California is a competitive job-creating machine. I will not rest until the people of California come to see their government as a partner in their lives, not a roadblock to their dreams.

Today I ask all of you to join me in a new partnership for California. One that is civil and respectful of our diverse population. One that challenges each and every one of us to serve our state in a joyful, productive and creative way.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have an immigrant’s optimism that what I have learned in citizen class is true: The system does work. And I believe that with all of my heart. I have big hopes for California. President Reagan spoke of America as “the shining city on the hill.” I see California as the golden dream by the sea.

Perhaps some think this is fanciful or poetic, but to an immigrant like me, who, as a boy, saw Soviet tanks rolling through the streets of Austria, to someone like me who came here with absolutely nothing and gained absolutely everything, it is not fanciful to see this state as a golden dream. For millions of people around the world, California has always glimmered with hope and glowed with opportunity. Millions of people around the world send their dreams to California with the hope their lives will follow.

My fellow citizens, I have taken the oath to uphold the Constitution of California. Now, with your help and God’s, I will also uphold the dream that is California.

The following essay is reposted from The Wind of Change.

Who Speaks for the Children

Einstein said “no apparently insoluble problem can be resolved by the same order or level of thinking as that which created the problem.” In terms of our relationship with the planet, the word “sustainability” usually refers to economic growth and the associated rate of resource consumption and waste assimilation. The motivation and focus , even of those in the environment business (a very revealing term) is still profit maximisation . This is just “more of the same” in terms of our thinking — there is no sustainable change – Why? Because people haven’t changed. Change starts on the inside. Meanwhile researchers not under the influence of global corporations advise us that we have fifty years remaining until global climatic meltdown . See “The Ecologist” Volume 29, No2 Spring 99 . This special issue is given over entirely to the climate crisis and associated global politics.

A paradigm shift is required from “development” and profit maximisation for all, to selective growth for some, realignment for others, and optimal profits for all with “respect” to the local community. Pollution of the environmental and human communities (the two are inseparable) cannot be resolved in any fundamental way with “more of the same” in terms of our way of thinking. Sustainability is “in my back yard only” ie the sustainability of my profit margin, whereas self sustenance embraces adjoining communities as part of the one system. Whilst the planet serves business, and not the other way around , nothing will ever change permanently. This is thinking with the head, and not the heart. The heart of the matter is the matter of the heart! The heart of Mother Earth is a different order of thinking all together. It could be said to be almost childlike, but it is not naive!

Much of the effort thus far has been grant funded whether European or local, or is often targeted only at initiatives which yield a financial return. In terms of short term outcome this is laudable but it is not an investment in sustainable change — of people! There is no other type of sustainable change, so lets stop measuring our children’s inheritance against “the green back” — and finding it wanting!

What happens when the grants dry up and the initial potential for quick financial paybacks become more difficult? Are present measures even keeping pace with the rate of increase in pollution? We still think with our heads and not with our hearts. Most environmentally aware businesses act from a profit or survival motive and not from altruism, with conservation seen primarily as yet another business opportunity. How many “environment business” organisations are in it primarily for the sake of Mother Earth? How naive ! No more so than going blindly on to an environmental Armageddon on the wave of “bloody” good profits and fat grants. It is going to take a little heartburn without the antacid of grants to stabilise our intake of resources. We, as a community, the business community included, need to accept responsibility for sacrificing the earth , and it quite rightly requires a sacrifice from us. Only thus will the balance be permanently redressed. Accepting grants is not accepting responsibility.

We have lost faith in ourselves as a race and as custodians of the planet. We hide behind the false security of sustainable profits. Sustainable change on the other hand, starts in the heart of individuals, not necessarily “directors”, as part of the polluted local community system in which all stakeholders have a voice. Most importantly the ultimate customer; the child — the ultimate beneficiary (?)

Total Quality initiatives pride themselves in establishing the customer’s needs and even involving the customer in the product specification etc. Yet when it comes to the ultimate product (survival) and the ultimate customer (our own children) we go grab our money bags and say “it’s my ball (planet) and you’re not playing! How naive can we get? The forgotten untapped resource, the emergent characteristic is the creativity of the child in determining its own future. e.g. Craigmillar Project+ in Edinburgh. Only thus can we invest in and capitalise upon the limitless synergy of the heart / head strategic partnership. Sustainable change has to start in our back yard. Why? Quite simply because its the right thing to do, it doesn’t matter who else is or is not doing something, the buck stops with us all as individuals. One small step of a child can be more productive than that of an adult as it is made in trust, and hence helps us to regain faith in ourselves as a race. If we genuinely want to change the planet we have to change ourselves first however childish it may feel. Until the pin striped business gent bends down to pick up his own (and his neighbours) litter in the street, there is little hope for the planet, is there?

So how do we introduce the new paradigm of Sustainable Change?

Involve the forgotten ultimate customer – the child or young person!

Local communities are systems in which the child (even within the hard nosed business man/woman) is the ultimate customer, and his or her literal children the ultimate beneficiaries.

Pollution of the physical is the result of pollution of the Spiritual. Until that is addressed, no sustainable change will ever occur. The child needs a voice in the local and global community it will ultimately inherit. This will come about as business gives recognition to the ultimate customers by involving them in business decisions through strategic partnerships with schools and Spiritual groups, thus creating a model business environment within the community (common-unity).

Past initiatives between schools and industry, sponsored by organisations such as Understanding British Industry (UBI), didn’t involve the pupils as they were for example in the design a few years back of an “ideal” Edinburgh+. Some local authorities have already established schools/business partnerships. In Sweden there is a project named School 2000 based upon Systems Thinking and Chaos Theory (see notes) which could be expanded into the broader community This initiative capitalises upon the creativity of staff and pupils as each others customers, giving considerable autonomy to the child in the determination of her or his own learning. It also admits that the child knows best what its own learning requirements are and how through dialogue, these should be met. This includes older pupils helping younger pupils to learn. But in so doing older pupils learn how to teach, thus the pupil teaches the teacher. Consider the analogy between company directors and teenage stakeholders in the local community. Synergy may well result in pupils creating their own future jobs and careers. Business could subsidise such initiatives (there’s the rub). Whats the payback? Thats up to us to create, the sky’s the limit, make of it what we will. What’s the alternative? Is there one?!

The human species is unique as a “thinker” capable of contemplating its origin and destiny. Consequently, human ecology is concerned with the Cosmic relationship between man and planet Earth. The issue of pollution / conservation is therefore first and foremost a Spiritual one. The will to sustain change must therefore be Spiritual in the first instance and secular second. This is the difference between the environment business , and the business environment! The third element therefore in this “Trinity of the Community” are local spiritual groups. Not necessarily institutional churches, who may also have members in the other two elements. When all three groups work together the Spiritual element will be addressed in a practical manner without which sustainable change is impossible. Such is the very nature of systems functioning, and polluted communities are systems with all manner of stakeholders.

As such groups progressively form strategic partnerships, the creativity of the heart of the child will enlighten the community as to its products, processes, and procedures such that the heart of the community is sustained by the community accepting responsibility for itself.

Remember Einstein: to resolve the issue a higher order of thinking is essential to that which caused the apparently insoluble problem in the first place. It is the adult , secular, male intellect that has got us where we are today. Do we really need/want more of the same? Whats the alternative? Well, we could all go to the nearest star and do the same thing all over again. Or, a little nearer home we could develop such communities based upon Systems Thinking which will act as patterns for other Scottish communities, thus becoming definitive Learning Organisations within the Scottish Nation. The key “ingredient” is emergent creativity which only manifests when the system, that is the community, accepts responsibility and functions as an integrated whole.

In terms of change, we have entered not just a new millennium which is a secular concept, but a new planetary age in the true sense of a Spiritual Epoch each of which lasts two thousand years. We can therefore expect many changes to come more quickly than we anticipated. For the “Environment Business” to become the model “Business Environment” it must implement sustainable change.

+ In the Craigmillar Project (1997) school children worked with architects, engineering contractors, and teachers to design a huge scale model of their ideal ecological city. The professionals were amazed at the results.

* Cost internalisation: (See paradigm shift on following page.) Accepting some of the costs which would otherwise be borne by the wider community. eg forest regeneration costs and/or unemployment resulting from de-forestation. Should these be borne by business alone; the end user alone; or partly by both? Who should make this decision?

A System is an entity which maintains its existence and functions as a whole through the interaction of its parts. Systems Thinking therefore focuses upon the integrated nature of action and reaction for good or ill between individuals within a system; and between systems . It is concerned with causes as distinct from effects (symptoms). In the context of this paper the objective for the individual is to serve the community and thus themselves, whilst the objective for the community is to serve the planet.

Chaos Theory: One description of Chaos Theory suggests that the flutter of a butterfly’s wings may cause a hurricane on the opposite side of the world such is the complexity of global weather as a system. It maintains that there is an order at the centre of all (apparent) chaos, the objective of course being to discover the rule which when applied will result in order out of chaos.

The theory relates to the “twilight zone” between science and art or religion, as the ultimate system is the Cosmos. A more intuitive, and yet potentially more pragmatic “experience” of the theory is given below:

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost,
For want of a horse, the rider was lost,
For want of a rider, the battle was lost,
For want of battle, the Kingdom was lost!