• Mythquake
• MQ-1: Everyday upsets
• MQ-2: The centre of the universe
• MQ-3: I am what I do
• MQ-4: Whoever you voted for…
• MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?
• MQ-6: The meaning of life
• MQ-7: Sugar and spice
• MQ-8: Let freedom reign
• MQ-9: Possession
• Aftershocks

I also have a fairly large collection of research-material in electronic form, and a matching domain-name, mythquake.com .

If someone wants to take over the project, all I’d would ask for is some kind of credit in the final product. That’s it.

Anyone interested? If so, please let me know via a comment here.

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-9: Possession‘, explored what will probably be the source of the most disruptive mythquake that’s hit human society for several thousand years: the notion of personal property and possession.  It’s the key-stone for our entire economics, much of our politics, much of our systems of social relations: yet in terms of physical fact, it has no more foundation than the equally delusory myth of ‘rights’. Dangerous indeed…

Yet if such mythquakes are inevitable, what can we do about them? How can we prepare for them, so as to minimise the damge they would cause? That’s the topic for this final chapter of the book.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Did the earth move for you?
• Mythquake preparedness
• Everyone’s a winner

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

Aftershocks

Did the earth move for you?

[Seeing the myths as myths is painful; if we can get beyond that, mythquakes are exhilarating.]

{This section is really just a review of what’s been described through the book, and asking how much of it rang true for the reader. We also want to re-introduce the idea that, for the most part, mythquakes aren’t dangerous, and that if we can learn to trust that they are just natural phenomena of conceptual-space, we can also learn to surf the waves of mythic change – a new kind of extreme-sport, perhaps?  }

Mythquake preparedness

[Earthquake preparedness » mythquake preparedness (reprise); if we want to minimise the damage, we need to rebuild those stories to create more flexibility when 'the Big One' hits.]

{n the same way that we can be prepared for earthquakes, we can also be prepared for mythquakes. Mythquakes are an inevitable fact of human life – but we can design for that fact, and use that design to minimise the impacts and the damage, just as we do for earthquakes. To do this, we need to recognise that the stories we tell ourselves about ‘how the world really’ works are constructs, exactly as buildings are: and we can build flexibility and resilience into those structures of story, just as we can with the structures of buildings in earthquake-prone zones.

The muddled, mistaken notion of ‘possession’ is right at the core of this, and is also the key to design for mythquake-preparedness. Expectations provide a sense of ‘possession’ of certainty – which is what triggers all those everyday upsets. The toddlers’ belief that they ‘possess’ the position of ‘the centre of the universe‘ is what triggers the tantrums of the ‘terrible twos’. Basing our identity and sense of self on work-roles and the like – I am what I do – is a kind of possession of certainty which, if we’re not careful, also possesses us. Much the same is true of politics: whoever you voted for, some government claims to possess the sole truth and sole choice about how the society will work. And we see the same in economics too: the myth that money makes the world go round ultimately depends on an even stranger myth that “possession is nine-tenths of the law”. Each society creates its own definitions of ‘the meaning of life‘ as a means to possess certainty about ‘how the world really works’. ‘Sugar and spice‘ and similar childhood myths about gender and the like are often carried through into the adult world, attempting to enforce possession of societal priority over others’ lives, and even those others themselves. The ‘possession’ may well be as much about assertions of anti-possession – all too often, the cry ‘Let freedom reign!‘ is little more than a demand for a ‘freedom-to-not’ that aims to offload all responsibility onto some unspecified ‘Other’. And finally there is the obsessive grasping for possession as possession – including possession of life itself.

All of those stories of possession, in all their myriad forms, are fictions that we tell ourselves are ‘true’: and whenever Reality Department shows us that they’re not ‘true’ – that they are only fantasies and fallacious fables - that’s when a mythquake will occur. The myth of possession underpins almost everything in our culture: yet it is the cause of mythquakes – not the cure.

To find practical approaches to mythquake preparedness, we will probably need to look outside our own culture. ‘Traditional’ societies with responsibility-based rather than possession-based economies can provide strong suggestions: Australian aboriginal culture, for example, or many of the native-American cultures, or some of the long-lasting peasant-cultures in Europe or Asia. Another useful theme would be the Buddhist notion of ‘non-attachment’ – though we need to remember that non-attachment is also non-detachment, a committed stewardship to and of the respective entity.}

[signs in the sky: analogy of min-min lights as prelude to earthquakes (xref to Paul Devereux's Earthlights etc).]

{Often there will be precursors to earthquake activity – ’signs in the sky’ for those who can learn to read them. For example, ‘earthlights’ such as the ‘min-min lights’ of central Australia are frequently associated with pre-earthquake seismic activity – perhaps piezo-electric effects from preliminary rock-movement deep below the surface, though we still don’t know for sure. In other places, animals may change behaviour-patterns immediately before an earthquake: many of the examples are only anecdotal, but some – such as a study of frogs in Italy – have solid scientific confirmation.

The same will be true of mythquakes: there are similar ’signs in the sky’ the warn of the impending shake-up or or break-up of some carefully-cherished myth. We all know of “the pride that comes before the fall”, the over-certainty that seems to to be an instant magnet for Murphy’s Law, the assertions such as “it’s obvious” or “it must be” that act as cue-phrases for failure. Watching for signs such as these provides a key component of mythquake-preparedness.}

Everyone’s a winner

[Win-win vs win-lose - difficulty of "the only way to win is not to play" (cf. suicide), but we have no choice but to play; only thing we can do is learn how to change the game.]

{The crucial understanding here is that we create the myths, hence we create the conditions for mythquakes. They’re not something that we can ever avoid; but we can learn from them. In that sense, mythquakes are some of our key teachers about the real nature of Reality Department: the ‘lessons’ may sometimes be unpleasant, but everyone wins from each of these learnings.

One of the nastier side-effects of the myth of possession is the lethally-mistaken notion of ‘win/lose’ – that we can only ‘win’ by making someone else ‘lose’. The reality is that whenever that happens, everyone loses: the only way to win that kind of game is to not play. Yet with mythquakes, there is no choice about whether we play: mythquakes are an inherent fact of being human, so the only way to not-play is to not be alive –  which is perhaps not a good idea… The way we win – and the way we help everyone win – is to learn how to let go, learn how to ‘make our moves’ as we surf the waves of mythquakes, creating ever-more-powerful ways to work with the real wonder of the real world.}

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-8: Let freedom reign‘, explored one of the deep-myths of ‘Western’ culture: the notion of rights. Despite the frequent claim that rights are inherently ‘true and inalienable’ and the like, we’re forced to conclude that they don’t actually exist as anything much more than an arbitrary and unsupportable declaration of wishful-thinking – leaving the culture lethally exposed to mythquakes that may be amazingly destructive at almost every imaginable scale. That in itself is worrying enough. Yet there’s one more deep-myth that has an even greater potential for devastating destruction: the concept of possession. That’s what we’ll explore in this final main chapter.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Down to the core
• A property of mind?
• The unwantedness of anti-property
• Possessing or possessed?
• Sustained by belief

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-9: Possession

Richter 9: Rare great earthquake. Devastating in areas several thousand kilometres across. Equivalent to around thirty thousand megatons of TNT (Indian Ocean tsunami, 2004). Around one per twenty years on average.

Mercalli XII Vision distorted; ground moves in waves or ripples; objects thrown into air; large amounts of rock move; river courses altered; almost everything is destroyed.

Down to the core

[The core myth?; "mine!" - a two-year-old's view of the world; possession-based property as expropriation, theft]

{The idea that we can possess something is probably the most fundamental myth behind all modern societies. Protection of this idea is right at the core of Western capitalism: one of the first preconditions that the World Bank makes in any discussions with national governments is that their legal frameworks must place private possession of property at their very centre. When the communists took over in Russia, they transferred the possession of that property from the individual to the state: yet they never questioned possession itself. Hence the analogy of arguing about the position of deckchairs on the Titanic, because at this deep fundamental level there’s little real difference between capitalists and communists – they’re just minor variations on a ‘possessionist’ theme. Yet possession itself is no more real than that notion of ‘rights’: it’s a nothing more than a social fiction, held together by habits of shared belief. And at some point we need to question how well that fiction actually serves us in practice – because all the indications are that it doesn’t serve us well at all.

In essence, possession is the two-year-old’s view of the world: “mine!!!“. In part it’s grounded in the two-year-old’s fear of uncertainty, fear of loss; the two-year-old’s extreme self-centredness. In British law at least, property is not something we possess directly, but – again like a two-year-old – claim ‘that despotic dominion’ of a purported ‘right’ to exclude all others from access to that resource, either in the present or elsewhen. And it assigns to others – and often those others alone – the responsibilities to create and affirm and protect those ‘rights’, regardless of how much loss or damage that it may cause to them. It also actively promotes the privileging of the short-term over the long-term: purported ‘profit’ – which itself is the creation of further purported exclusive ‘rights’ to shared resources – is obtained only at the moment that this possession is transferred, so there’s a huge pressure to convert everything into ’saleable commodities’ as quickly as possible to maximise that personal profit. In that sense, it becomes very difficult to argue against the old anarchist notion that “all property is theft”, since in effect it almost invariably involves some form of expropriation from someone – if only from the needs of the future, or the hopes of the past.}

A property of mind?

[Limited application of possession to physical property, increasing absurdity beyond physical realm - e.g. intellectual property, 'our people', etc]

{The concept of possession is designed around physical resources, whose key attribute is that they are ‘alienable’: if I give it to you, I no longer have it, and therefore have the ‘right’ to be compensated for the loss. It’s therefore possible to create a trail of provenance for every physical entity, from land title-deeds and so on, which can be made to seem ‘fair’ to everyone involved. (This doesn’t take into account those transactions that are manifestly not ‘fair’, nor the expropriation from those whose future need for the same resource may well be higher than ours, or for that matter the almost unimaginably huge theft represented by colonialism and the like, but let’s skip over those for the moment – we’ll come back to them later.) A possession-based economy can thus be made to seem as if it works, in the short-term at least.

But when we try to extend the same model to other kinds of entities – and hence other kinds of ‘property’ – it breaks down completely. Ideas and other so-called ‘intellectual property’ are ‘non-alienable’ – if I give it to you, I still have it. The model can again be made to seem to work if we bundle the ‘intellectual property’ together with some form of physical ‘property’ – such as a physical book, an audio-disk, a seat in a cinema. But physicalisation carries real costs: so why can’t we just treat the pure digital-information as property, and control it in the same way as for physical property? Surely that would return much more profit? Well, yes, except for two fundamental problems. One is that, to quote the old phrase, “information wants to be free”: it’s transferred by making new copies of itself, so to control access to that information, we have to control every possible copy. Since any ‘escaped’ copy will permanently end that control, increasingly-extreme attempts at ‘digital rights management’ and the like reach a point of diminishing returns where they reduce the the perceived-value of the information or become too unwieldy to work at all. At that point, creating an ‘escaped’ copy becomes less a matter of ‘piracy’ than usability – a fact which renders the possession-based business-models of many industries completely non-viable. Much the same applies to patents, where the whole of a patent is to make something ‘patently obvious’, but is then rendered unusable by increasingly-insane and indefensible attempts at ‘rent-seeking’ – indefensible because the trail of provenance does not reach all possible originators of the components of an idea, but instead is arbitrarily assigned to an individual or a corporation, expropriating all others in the true audit-trail. In short, intellectual-property as it’s currently defined really is theft: there is no other way to put it.

It gets even worse when we look at other categories of purported ‘assets’ – particularly that no doubt well-meant but disastrously-deluded phrase “our people are our greatest asset”. The only time when people are ‘assets’ in that same ‘alienable’ physical sense is when they are slaves… not a good idea… Instead, the ‘asset’ is actually the relationship between people – or, in the case of brands and other ‘aspirational assets’, between people and an idea or belief or the like. And because those ‘assets’ exist only between, they cannot be transferred. Hence purported ‘valuations’ based on employee-relationships or website visitor-numbers or brand-recognition or ‘goodwill’ are, by any sane measure, fundamentally fraudulent, because the ‘value’ cannot be realised in any alienable form.

But – and this is the really serious ‘but’ – the pretence that that ‘value’ exists is used to claim ‘rights’ to physical resources. So we have one part of the possession-economy dealing with real finite physical resources, being lined up against supposedly exactly-equivalent imaginary resources that are potentially infinite. Hence anyone who claims to ‘control’ those infinite imaginary-resources can in effect assign themselves an ever-increasing proportion of the finite physical resources. Yet this is exactly what banks and other ‘financial instruments’ are legally entitled to do: and the result is, by any real measure, a theft on a scale so unimaginably huge that it manages to make even colonialism seem minor by comparison. To say that it is not sustainable is an understatement: and yet it is a direct and inevitable consequence of a possession-based economy.}

The unwantedness of anti-property

[Split between property (desirable) and anti-property (undesirable); anti-possession is 'right to be excluded from consequences', to dump it on others; anti-property » "dump it on Mummy"; unsustainability]

{Another way in which ‘profit’ can be made is by what in mainstream economics are referred to as ‘externalities’ – in other words, offloading responsibilities onto others, either in the present or elsewhen. For example, I used to live in one of the old gold-mining areas in central Victoria, Australia: vast personal profits were made by some of the miners during the gold-rush in the 1850s, but tidying up the mess they left behind has cost many times more than that in the decades and centuries that followed – costs which they themselves never bore at all. Many business-models turn out to be ‘profitable’ only via such externalities, exporting the unwanted ‘anti-property’ onto others – much like a two-year-old dumping the half-item ice-cream onto Mother and expecting, or demanding, that she should always clean it up. In effect, it requires that the Other be powerful enough to clean up that mess, whilst denigrating them sufficiently to keep them feeling that they have no choice but to clean it up – a delicate balancing-act of sustained abuse at which some people unfortunately learn to excel during this particular stage of childhood, and seem never to learn to do otherwise. The key point, though, is that it is not sustainable: eventually Mother will learn to say ‘No’, and the same is true of those people and people and whole nations who are dumped-on in this way. This is one class of mythquake that is already starting to hit hard in mainstream economics – and it’s likely only to increase in intensity in the future, as more and more people start to challenge the myths on which that form of theft is built.}

Possessing or possessed?

[Possessing or possessed? - it goes both ways; "till you prise it out of my cold dead fingers"; possession vs responsibility]

{All possession is a two-way street: in possessing something, we are also in effect committed to it, possessed by it. Every transaction in a possession-based economy requires us first to let go of that ‘possession’ – and the emotional attachment can easily reach the extremes of “till you prise it from my cold dead fingers” and the like. There’s also the blunt reality that “we can’t take it with us” when we die – although plenty of people seem to have tried, yet achieved nothing more than an absurd wastage of rare resources. And there are also hints of this even in the words that we use to describe purported possession – such as ‘mortgage’, which literally translates as ‘death-pledge’. Possession slows everything down.

The alternate to a possession-based economy is a responsibility-based model, or stewardship-model: we ‘own’ something because we declare responsibility for its appropriate exploitation, and demonstrate that responsibility in practice. Variations on this theme typify most ‘traditional’ societies and economies, and are actually what most enabled the colonial theft, precisely they state explicitly that the land and the like are not possessed by any individual – which makes it easy for other cultures to then claim that they do now ‘possess’ it.

And although a responsibility-based economy may seem the exact antithesis of mainstream business, in fact almost all business will operate internally on that kind of model: a business-rule owner or process-owner or project-owner is not the person who possesses it, but the person who has responsibility for it – and the moment that someone does claim to possess it is the point at which it ceases to work. There’s an interesting lesson there that could be useful to explore in business on a much, much larger scale. }

Sustained by belief

[Possession is not sustainable, responsibility is; the possession myth colliding with reality - it's happening right now, whether we like it or not]

{Perhaps the most important point of all is that there  is no way to make a possession-economy sustainable: it trades off short-term gains against larger long-term losses, an in effect can only be made to seem sustainable by operating as a pyramid-game, a ‘Ponzi scheme’ in which those at the ‘top’ steal from those further down, yet conceal the theft for as long as more people can be dragged or deluded into playing the rigged game. In essence, the game is only viable in a context with infinite resources – but in the physical world at least, the resources are definitely finite. The exact timing would vary according to how we calculate the figures, but a best-estimate would suggest that we reached the effective limits of the pyramid perhaps fifty to a hundred years ago – and everything else since then has been much like the cartoon-character running off the cliff, suspended in mid-air only by sheer momentum and a careful refusal to look down. The myth of ‘intellectual property’ as an infinite resource has kept the game going for a little while longer than would have been the case for a pure physical-economy, but even that is already beginning to break down, as we’ve seen above.

In short, the possession-myth is colliding with reality, right here, right now – and there’s no way we’re going to be able to avoid it. So hold onto your hats, folks, because this is a true Big One, a mythquake that will inevitably tear our metaphoric world apart…}

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-7: Sugar and spice‘, covered probably the most controversial class of mythquakes, around cultural, societal, interpersonal and personal definitions of gender. It’s controversial because it’s something every person will experience in daily life, and causes constant friction between the self and the Other – in every sense of ‘other’. Yet though the ‘gender wars’ can often be explosive, and can cause real damage not just to individuals but to entire societies, they’re not in themselves the most serious class of mythquakes: we still have to dig deeper to get to the real tectonic plates of myth. This chapter explores one of those deeper myths, the notion of ‘freedom’ – a mythic structure that embeds a potential for societal upheaval on a truly grand scale.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Freedom-to and freedom-for
• The wrongs of rights
• There are no rights

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-8: Let freedom reign

Richter 8: Great earthquake. Can cause serious damage in areas several hundred kilometres across. Equivalent to around one thousand megatons of TNT (San Francisco earthquake, 1989). Around one per year on average.

Mercalli X: Most buildings, some bridges damaged or destroyed; dams and reservoirs seriously damaged; water thrown out of rivers and canals; large landslides; ground cracks over large areas; railroad tracks slightly bent.

Mercalli XI: Most buildings collapse, some bridges destroyed; underground pipelines destroyed; roads break up; large cracks in ground; rocks fall; railroad tracks badly bent.

Freedom-to and freedom-for

[Paediarchy » 'freedom-to' vs 'freedom-for'; myth of 'rights'.]

{“Let freedom reign!” – a great catch-phrase, yet it can conceals a morass of really serious problems, some of which immediately become evident once we understand the prevalence of paediarchal thinking, particularly ‘Western’ cultures’ concepts of freedom. There’s a huge structural difference between ‘freedom-for’, as the ability to act on shared purpose, versus ‘freedom-to’, the ability to act on personal purpose without reference to others’ needs or desires. The notion of ‘freedom-from’ implies much the same confusions: all too often it turns out to be a self-centred ‘freedom-to-not’ do something that is actually needed in a societal context or, in the case of something like ‘freedom from fear’, is an insistence that someone else is responsible for providing the conditions for that ‘freedom’. All of which leads us, inexorably, to the well-meant shambles that underlies the entire concept of ‘rights’.}

[“health is a right, not a business!” – poster I’ve seen frequently on my travels]

{Everywhere we go – especially in ‘Western’ cultures or ‘Western’-influenced cultures – we’ll see references to rights. Health is a right, education, the right of way on the road, the right to strike, the right to vote, the right to silence, animal rights, women’s rights, men’s rights, prisoners’ rights, pensioners’ rights, ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’; the whole monolith of the Bill of Rights or the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet what no-one seems to ask is where those rights actually come from, or what needs to be done – and how and by whom – to make them real. That kind of ‘cultural blindspot’ is an almost guaranteed precursor for major mythquakes…}

The wrongs of rights

[Rights vs responsibilities - "I have rights, you have responsibilities"; 'rights' as structural abuse - 'jus prima noctis'; 'women's rights'.]

{In essence, a purported ‘right’ is simply a declaration of a desired outcome in a social context: but on its own it tells us nothing about how that outcome will be achieved. In practice, a ‘right’ is the outcome of a complex interlocking set of mutual responsibilities: to make it work, we need to start from those responsibilities – not from the purported ‘rights’ – and map out those actions and interlocks, emphasising the mutuality. What we usually find instead in the ‘rights’-discourse is a notion that the ‘right’ somehow confers the absence of responsibility - a non-mutual relationship that damages or destroys the interlocks that would make the ‘right’-outcome real. In effect, the concept of ‘personal rights’ sets up expectations that will frequently fail in real-world social context – setting the scene for frequent low-level mythquakes.

Where the purported ‘rights’ are demonstrably mutual, the model can just-about be made to work, though often with awkward inefficiencies – such as in many legal systems, and in some countries’ traffic-laws. But where the ‘rights’ are demonstrably non-mutual – and especially where those non-mutualities are enshrined in law – the scene is again set for many mythquakes, but often at a much more severe level, all the way up to full-blooded (and bloody) revolution. Past examples include the bizarre ‘jus primae noctis’ – a feudal lord’s ‘right of first night’ with the bride of any newly-married couple; sometimes it can be seen in the absence of a right, such as the laws which made it illegal – on pain of death – for a peasant to defend himself or his family against any form of attack by any so-called ‘nobleman’. Lack of mutuality is often based on fact of birth, such as gender, immigration-status, religion or race – as in the legal structures and strictures of the now-defunct apartheid system, or the still-extant Israeli system – and in effect is a form of legalised abuse, since it assigns all responsibility (and, often, blame) to those who do not have the purported ‘right’. In those terms, for example, almost the entire of the purported ‘women’s rights’ discourse can be interpreted as state-sponsored abuse of men – and hence, in the longer term, a guaranteed source of the kind of tensions that can explode without apparent warning into an extreme mythquake.}

There are no rights

['Rights' as a religion - the paediarchal religion of the toddler's self-centred tantrum; there are no rights, only responsibilities.]

{The intent behind the idea of ‘rights’ is often noble enough – human rights, animal rights, the right of freedom from oppression – but the painful reality is that it just doesn’t work in practice. On one side we have the blunt fact that many claimed ‘rights’ are little more than an attempt to satisfy a two-year-old’s tantrum of “mine!” or “shan’t” – or to protect ourselves against others’ such purported ‘rights’. The other side is that the rights themselves are an illusion, a mirage: the only thing that is real is the mutual responsibilities from which those supposed ‘rights’ can exist. So the only way forward is to start from the responsibilities – not the ‘rights’.

A useful example of this is in traffic-law. Most traffic-law in the US is based on the concept of ‘right of way’ – and the only way that it can be made to work is by forcing everyone to stop, frequently, in order to re-establish whose ‘right’ has priority over those of others’ ‘rights’. When the priorities of those ‘rights’ are exactly symmetrical – such as four vehicles arriving at the same moment at the ubiquitous four-way-stop – the only way to resolve the clash is by one person arbitrarily overriding others’ supposedly-identical ‘rights’: hence the continuing prevalence of ‘might is right’… In British traffic-law, by contrast, no-one ever has right of way: instead, the entirety of the law is framed in terms of ‘responsibility to give way’. The responsibility is on all road-users to optimise the usage of the road by all users: no-one has automatic priority over anyone else. The same logic is extended further in countries such as the Netherlands, which have intentionally removed traffic-signals from some junctions; and perhaps even more in many less ‘controlled’ countries, where the complexity forces a more fluid relationship with all other vehicles, if often in what seems like barely-credible chaos!

The key point here, though, is that there are no rights: only responsibilities are real. Any attempt to claim or enforce purported ‘rights’ – especially ‘rights’ that are inherently asymmetric – will inevitably lead to mythquakes: and the more forcibly those ‘rights’ are promoted or defended, the more violent the resultant mythquake will be.}

In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-6: The meaning of life‘, we explored major mythquakes that arise from collisions between ways of thinking – particularly science and religion, as ’social constructions of reality’ that provide definitions of ‘the meaning of life’. Here we go deeper again, to mythquakes that arise from a rather more personal part of the meaning of life – the social construction of gender. Unlike politics or science or religion, whose mythquakes tend to focus around particular rallying-points, the assumptions here are anchored in people’s physical being, and hence distributed much more evenly throughout the social milieu. The result is that when a major mythquake does occur in this domain, its impacts are both locally intense and broadly distributed – creating potential for even higher damage, yet also much harder to identify and to resolve.

The current content of this chapter focusses perhaps too much on Western views of gender, without much link to other cultures – in part a reflection of my professional experience in the work I did in Australia on domestic-violence, and the huge dishonesties around that field and Australian feminism in general, which I also see in perhaps less extreme form in most other Western countries at present. As a result, the chapter-structure probably needs somewhat of a re-think – perhaps an extra intro-section to deal with gender in general, and the complex trade-offs between societal expectations or needs and the biological and anatomical facts that underpin them. I also haven’t done anything here about sexual-orientation (not ’sexual-preference‘, because in most cases it isn’t a choice as such at all); and the chapter probably also needs to address the biological fact that there more than a mere two sexes – current genetic-research indicates that perhaps as many as 1% of the population would need a ‘none of the above’ box for the ‘Which sex?’ question on most personal-information forms…

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• …and all things nice?
• Snips and snails?
• Patriarchy and paediarchy

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-7: Sugar and spice

Richter 7: Major earthquake. Can cause serious damage over larger areas. Equivalent to around thirty megatons of TNT (largest nuclear bombs). Around one every twenty days on average.

Mercalli IX: General panic; damage to foundations; ground cracks, sand and mud bubble up from ground; considerable damage to well-constructed buildings; reservoirs and underground pipes damaged.

…and all things nice?

[Extends gender-themes in wider scope: some examples of (especially) women's stories built on self-congratulatory wishful-thinking - e.g. "sugar and spice" - and the huge social pressures to hold the stories together when there's little or no foundation to them.]

{My starting-point here was that nasty little childhood doggerel that seems to be common throughout English-speaking cultures: “What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all things nice! What are little boys made of? Snips and snails and puppy-dogs tails!” – assertions that seem in turn to be just about the only background beneath many feminists’ pretence that women are somehow ‘inherently better’ than men. More on that in moment, when we look at domestic-violence and the like in the next section.

The point here is that each culture has its own way of describing and acting on the real differences between males and females – one of which is well-described in Margaret Mead’s acerbic remark that “motherhood is a biological fact, fatherhood is a social fiction”. We also frequently see three pairs of assertions, each of which has some limited basis in biological fact: “men do, women are”, “men think, women feel” (often described more in the negative, “women don’t think, men don’t feel”), and “men are hunters, women are gatherers”. In the past few decades enormous efforts in Western cultureshave been placed on the women’s side of each of those pairs, so that no-one would doubt that women think, or women do; yet the stereotypes on the men’s side have, if anything, been worsened, such that there is even less respect of the reality that men too are ‘human beings’ rather than solely ‘human doings’, or that men too also definitely have feelings which are somehow assigned very low social priority – increasing the social tensions in those cultures, and hence the potential for explosive mythquakes.

Western feminists have also been notorious for making arbitrary assumptions about purported ‘women’s oppression’ in other cultures, without reviewing any of the culture-specific facts, or even asking the opinions of women in those cultures themselves. Many assertions seem to be based on an arrogant, self-centric pseudo-sympathy – “what I would feel if I were to experience that, from my background and culture” – rather than genuine empathy – “what she feels, from her own background, culture and experience”. There has been a great deal of research on this strange form of ‘cultural imperialism’, very little of which has actually been respected in real feminist practice: instead, histrionic ‘awfulising’ about practices in other cultures has been used either to ‘justify’ or to conceal increasingly-extreme anti-male sexism in the West. Some cultures do indeed oppress women, from our perspective; yet the blunt fact is that most Western cultures actively oppress men far more. Self-centred stories about ’sugar and spice’ are part of the societal processes used to maintain that oppression: the resultant potential for gender-based mythquakes is huge, yet largely unacknowledged, and largely unaddressed.}

Snips and snails?

[Dangers of self-confirming prophecies about assigning all unpleasant characteristics to men.]

{The flipside of the ’sugar and spice’ myth is ’snips and snails’, defining all unpleasant human characteristics to men alone. Part of my research some years back was on the disparity between the ‘official line’ on domestic-violence – which purported that women alone were the victims, and at a very high rate [e.g. "one in three women" etc] – versus the physical reality from hard-data such as hospital-records – which clearly indicated that the overall risk was much lower than claimed [one in ten lifetime risk], was roughly the same for both sexes, that by a small margin men were more often victims than women, and that, by a large margin, the most violent class of relationship was lesbian. (I’d actually started that research after two of my lesbian friends had ended their relationship with a knife – fortunately without puncturing each other – but had been aggressively refused any help by the so-called ‘Women’s Help Service’ on the grounds that they had not blamed any man for the assault.) In Australia at least, the disparity is not only huge, but is backed by an enormous amount of social pressure to keep the disparity from becoming known. The potential for destructive mythquakes is, again, huge.

Another characteristic in Anglo cultures has been the systematic denigration of men, coupled with a similarly systematic exclusion of men and most forms of ‘masculine nurturing’ from parenting and child-rearing. Since masculine-nurturing is primarily about teaching safe management of risk, the result has been several of generations of children who have little or no grasp or even awareness of real-world risk and how to minimise and manage it. The resultant mythquakes tend to be localised, but only in the sense that relatively few people are harmed or killed in each individual incident – but the sheer numbers of incidents and their impacts ripple outward throughout the entire societal milieu, often feeding into an unfounded culture of ‘fear of the Other’ or unfocussed ‘fear of the unknown’.}

Patriarchy and paediarchy

[Evasions of responsibility on the part of both sexes; 'patriarchy' vs paediarchy - 'rule by, for and on behalf of the childish'.]

{Overall, much of the ‘gender wars’ appears to be based on evasions of self-responsibility, following the delusion that power is the ability to avoid work. In some cultures men demand that women should cover themselves up so that those men do not have to face the fact of their own sexuality; in other cultures, women demand the ‘right’ “to dress as we please” or whatever, and then complain when others respond to what is, in any biological sense, blatant sexual-advertising. In short, it’s messy, and often magnificently dishonest.

The feminist literature that typified my own adolescence and beyond would frequently rail against the purported evils of ‘the patriarchy’, which in Jungian terms appears to be little more than a lebl for the ’shadow’ side of those women themselves. One extreme example was a book in which a former colleague used the word ‘patriarchy’ or ‘patriarchal’ literally more than a thousand times as a kind of generalised all-purpose synonym for ‘bad’. It seems to me that the real purpose here is ‘Other-blame’: not so much ‘patriarchy’ as a demand for the ‘rights’ of  ’paediarchy’, “rule by, for and on behalf of the childish” – inherent self-dishonesty, regardless of sex or gender. Since any form of self-dishonesty leads inevitably to mythquakes, there’s plenty of potential for serious problems here – all of which is blamed on that blurry, ill-defined Other, creating an ever-increasing spiral of stress and strain. It’s important to note, though, that although the respective mythquakes are generated from this specific context, they tend to actually surface in other domains – simply because this is usually too close to people’s own self-definition for it to be faced with any real honesty.}

In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?‘, we moved up to the level of mythquakes that can often cause serious damage beyond the immediate locality of the collapse of that specific belief. Here we start to explore deeper beliefs and deeper assumptions that in reality are no more stable than those myths about money – and hence have even greater potential for destruction when they break. The example here is around core cultural-worldviews such as belief in the validity of the purported ‘truths’ of science or religion  - in other words, the generic structures that underpin shared assumptions about how the world ‘really works’.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Science and religion
• The religion of science
• Religious wars

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-6: The meaning of life

Richter 6: Strong earthquake. Can be destructive in areas up to a hundred or more kilometres across. Equivalent to around one megaton of TNT. Around one every three days on average.

Mercalli VII: People have difficulty standing; drivers feel their cars shake; loose bricks and tiles fall from buildings; furniture may break; slight to moderate damage to well-constructed buildings, significant damage to poorly-constructed buildings.

Mercalli VIII: Drivers have difficulty steering; chimneys fall; branches break; foundations may fail; cracks may appear in wet ground or on hillsides; water-levels in wells may change; poorly-constructed buildings suffer severe damage.

Science and religion

[Science vs religion - both are variants on the same story, "god created in the image of man", self-worship and self-aggrandisement.]

{Science and religion are often posed as opposites, but in fact both assume a fairly rigid concept of ‘order’ – their only disagreement is about what that ‘order’ really is. In that sense, they’re again like Tweedledum and Tweedledee – arguing about the position of the deckchairs on the Titanic. There’s also a disturbing similarity in that both seem to build a strongly self-centric view of the world: religion often pretends to a world created by some kind of deity, whilst science pretends to some purported ‘objective order’, but at the back of it, there’s still a strong flavour of ‘priesthood’, ‘the special ones’, ‘the only ones who know’. This over-certainty in the ‘rightness’ or righteousness of self is an almost certain guarantee for future mythquakes, either at a personal level – such as the all-too-common occurrence of moralistic evangelists being ‘caught in the act’ in decidedly non-moral behaviours – or, unfortunately, at a much larger scale.}

[impact of the story: difference between linear vs circular view (one-way life versus many [un]happy returns)]

{One key example of how worldview impacts decisions at a deep level is the comparison between a linear concept of ‘one chance at life’ – typified by the Semitic group of religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity – versus a reincarnation ‘many-lives’ concept – typified by many Eastern religions, by Celtic traditions, and in the designs of many computer-games! At a personal level, there can be severe mythquakes when these two fundamentally different story-types collide, though these collisions are not necessarily destructive. For example, Western doctors often find working in ‘many-lives’ such as India forces them to re-think their entire worldview, their concepts of ambition and compassion and so on; yet Indians have said that they like having the Western doctors there, because they get things done – they don’t wait around until the next life for something better to happen! But there can also be a dark side to this: ‘many-lives’ cultures can place a low or even very-low value on each individual life, and can embed dysfunctional relationships such as caste-structures into the society on the assumption that each person ‘chose’ the respective life and social position; and some ‘one-life’ cultures – typified in its extreme form by some of the US-style evangelist cults – even aim to destroy all life beyond their own, because they cannot conceive of anything having any reason to exist beyond the span of their own ‘one life’.}

The religion of science

[Science as religion, e.g. the Skeptics; "my place in heaven is dependent on the number of souls I can convert to the true faith" « deep uncertainty in the 'truth' of the story]

{Scientists often purport to be against religion, and that their own work is beyond religion, but the ways in which they act often is essentially religious in flavour and in its zeal to ‘correct’ other’s ‘heresies’ and the like. The Skeptics Society is one well-known and often-infamous example, and frequently unscientific – sometimes to absurd extremes – in its assaults on purportedly ‘non-scientific’ ideas; the fervour for atheism by Richard Dawkins’ and his followers provides frequent echoes of the most extreme evangelical cults, including ‘conversion’ to ‘the one true faith’ of atheism. Psychologically speaking, that which is attacked often represents that which one actually is, hence much of so-called science probably has its roots in deep-seated fears about uncertainty – and hence yet another guaranteed source of serious mythquakes.}

Religious wars

[Real risk of serious damage - obvious in the case of explicit religious wars, less obvious when the religion is less explicit, as in 'the enlightenment', or Darwinism, or monetarist economics.]

{Any definition of ‘the truth’ is inherently fragile, hence a common tactic is to attempt to prevent mythquakes by trying to force all others to the believe the same ‘the one truth’. This is the source for all religious wars, and although it’s inherently futile – especially in the longer term – a lot of lives may be lost in the process… The Semitic religions are some of the worst offenders in this regard – particularly Christianity and Islam, both of which explicitly seek “not to bring peace but with the sword” to ‘convert’ others by force – but history shows that at some point every religion has fallen for the same mistaken ’solution’ to the mythquake problem. Secular ‘religions’ are no better, either: the destruction wrought by Darwinism, by monetarist economics or by ’scientific management’ and similar delusions may be less overt at times, but the impacts on people’s lives have probably been no less at all.}

Our whole economy is built around the idea of possession, and exchange of possessions; yet what do we really possess?

Things? Not really – a point made all too evident by the phrase “you can’t take it with you”…

Ideas? We don’t even know where they come from, so the whole concept of ‘intellectual property’ is a bit moot anyway.

Relationships? They only exist when maintained by both parties, and they usually fail if anyone tries to possess them, so that option doesn’t work either.

Faith? Hope? Belief? A more likely kind of ‘possession’, though it tends to break down for the same reasons as for relationships.

What else?

The only themes I could find were time and responsibility.

We each have a certain amount of time. We have no idea how long that might be, or what will happen in that time, but it belongs to us alone. We can give our use of that time to someone else – hence all the mess of ‘employment’ and ‘compensation’ and ‘familial duties’ and the rest – but we can’t give the time itself to anyone else. It’s our possession alone: our responsibility as to what we do with it.

And we do each have our own responsibility, as ‘response-ability’ – our ability to choose appropriate responses within and to the context. Through responsibility, and through our responsibilities, we express who we are in what we do, how we think, how we relate, what we choose.

We possess our time, and our responsibility. They possess us. Everything else seems to be an option.

Comments/opinions, anyone?

In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-4: Whoever you voted for…‘, we moved into the level of mythquakes that most people would probably notice within their everyday lives, with politics as the given example. Note, though, that most politics is only a level-4 or thereabouts: despite all of the pretensions of importance, most of it is really little more than arguing about the position of a single deckchair on the Titanic, and for most people, not much – if anything – of real significance will change with each change of government. But here at MQ-5 we do start to get into realms of significant damage, and that do start to affect most people whenever there’s some kind of breakdown – a catastrophic collapse of over-extended assumptions. The example I’ve used here is the comfortably-complacent ‘certainties’ of current economics – and particularly the notion that ‘economics’ is solely synonymous with money.

(Another general aside: yes, we’re currently in the midst of yet another ‘Global Financial Crisis’, and for some countries – and certainly for many individuals – the impacts are occasionally rippling upward in impacts to what might seem like MQ-6 or even MQ-7 levels. But in practice, much of the talk of ‘crisis’ is little more than arguing about what to do about a single broken deckchair on the Titanic: it still doesn’t address any of the deeper issues, and history makes it plain that this is merely the current expression of a regular boom/bust cycle – a repeated pattern of mythquakes that point to much deeper and much more serious fault-lines in the structure of our everyday reality.)

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Managing the household
• A monetary mismatch
• Back to barter?

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?

Richter 5: Moderate earthquake. May cause slight damage to well-constructed buildings, but can cause major damage to poorly-constructed buildings. Equivalent to around thirty kilotons of TNT (Nagasaki atomic bomb). Around two to three per day.

Mercalli V: Doors swing open or closed; small objects move; liquid may spill from open containers; almost everyone feels movement; sleepers awake.

Mercalli VI: People have trouble walking; everyone feels movement; objects fall from shelves; furniture moves; trees and bushes shake; windows break, plaster walls may crack, other non-structural damage in poorly-constructed buildings.

Managing the household

[Economics as 'management of the purse' vs 'management of the household' - money as 'the easy bit'; meaninglessness of GDP/GNP as a measure of anything.]

{The word ‘economics’ literally translates as ‘the management of the household’. Up until the mid-19th century the word ‘economist’ was essentially synonymous with ‘housewife’ – hence the tautologous term ‘home economics’. Ever since then, though, there’s been a ‘term-hijack‘ which has constrained the view of ‘the management of the household’ to monetary transactions between households – an absurdly limited concept of what actually goes on within and between the various types and scales of economy. We now have ‘micro-economics’, that describes pricing, and ‘macro-economics’, that describes monetary aspects of world trade; but we still have almost no models of economics that describe the whole of an economy. There are some attempts to make this happen, such as GRI (Global Reporting Initiative), and the somewhat bizarre but actually more-realistic ‘Gross National Happiness’ metrics of Bhutan – but always we seem to be dragged back to the monetarist delusion that purports that every activity and every form of value can be can somehow be reduced to monetary terms alone. (It doesn’t work: consider the price of a hug, for example, or the value of hope; likewise the absurdity of putting a monetary ‘valuation’ on irreplaceable personal items such as family photographs.) The mismatch between the over-simplified views of monetary-based ‘economics’ and the much more complex realities of ‘management of the household’ will guarantee repeated mythquakes of varying severity.}

[GDP measures amount of money in circulation, without reference to the purpose or use of that money, e.g. according to GDP measures, crime is good (because keeping people in prison is ‘economic activity’), natural disasters are good (repairing damage is ‘economic activity’), wastefulness is good (excess consumption represents increased ‘economic activity’); proper ‘management of the household’ is therefore ‘bad for the economy’, voluntary work of any kind is ‘bad for the economy’]

{One of the most bizarre notions in current ‘economics’ is the belief that ‘the economy’ depends on people not being economical, but instead must be as wasteful as possible. We are exhorted to spend, spend, spend to keep ‘the wheels of industry’ from falling off: so ingrained is this belief amongst ‘economists’ that the official response in Australia to the ‘Global Financial Crisis’ was to issue everyone with a $900 tax-rebate in the hope that they would go out and spend it on something. Other absurdities can be seen in the notes above. There are so many issues here, around scrambled notions of ‘economics’, that this section alone could be a book in its own right.}

A monetary mismatch

["Money makes the world go stop" - mismatch between monetary income and resource needs through the stereotyped life-cycle; money-economy as the worst system for managing resources that we could devise.]

{The main aim and claim for monetary economics is that it provides the best possible means to manage the society’s resources. It’s a claim that simply does not hold up in practice: in fact in some it’s almost the worst possible system we could devise. Part of the reason is because of the way we calculate ‘profit’ or ‘loss’ across a single set of transaction rather than across the whole of a system; and it also seems that every time a monetary transaction is involved, the overall system comes to grinding halt – see ‘Money is the root of all… wasted time?‘. Another problem is that it only works at all for those have something ‘monetisable’ to exchange – an assumption which doesn’t actually apply to probably the large majority of the population whose work – like most of mine, in fact – is not ‘monetisable’, or who are somehow classed as ‘not working’. (I still get very upset when I hear a woman say “I don’t work, I’m only a mother”: parenting is some of the hardest work that there is, and what’s that word “only” doing in there, anyway?)

And if we take a map of the stereotype lifecycle, from child to teenager to first leaving home to getting together with a partner to having kids and so on, and onward to old age with perhaps a few serious incidents of accident or illness along the way, and then map probable resource-needs and probable resource-availability against that timeline, we can see straight away that there’s an almost perfect mismatch: whenever we least need resources is when they’re most likely to be available, and certainly when we most need resources is when they’re least likely to be available. In a money-economy we’re supposed somehow to smooth out the bumps via savings and loans and insurances and the like – which have proved, unfortunately, not only to be extremely messy, complicated and unreliable, but also to be a magnet for theft of various kinds, so much so that it’s clear that the system now barely works at all. The word ‘mortgage’ also literally translates as ‘death-pledge’ – a term which is proving all too accurate as gaming of house-prices has resulted in a system that takes ever larger proportions of people’s working life to pay off.

In short, the money-economy does not work – which means it’s a very, very serious source of mythquakes of mid-intensity and, increasingly, above.}

Back to barter?

[Money is simply a standardised form of barter; likewise 'alternative currencies', 'time-currencies' and 'Local Energy Transfer Schemes' (LETS) are merely variations on the exact same theme; barter is not the answer, but a key part of the problem - and unless we tackle that deeper problem, the mythquake-stress will keep building up.]

{If money doesn’t work as a means to manage the economy, what’s the alternative? Various people have proposed a variety of ‘alternative currencies’, some of them based on exchange of time rather than exchange of physical and/or virtual objects – but in practice all of them have been shown to introduce their own complications and failure-points, and none of them so far have explained how it would work for that large majority who have no means or option to exchange anything directly with others. Others have proposed ‘going back to barter’, but the exact same problems still apply, and in essence money is simply a standardised, virtualised form of barter – in many ways an advance on barter, rather than an inherent failure as such. Given that none of these systems can be made to work at a true whole-of-economy scale, it’s clear that the real problem lies deeper than barter itself. Just what that it might be is something that will become clearer as we go along: but in the meantime, expect many more mythquakes around the increasingly-muddled mess that is the money-economy.}

In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-3: I am what I do‘, we’ve started to move beyond mythquakes that have only a small localised impacts, and into contexts where the mythic breakdown hits a lot more people – and hurts a lot more, too. So when we get to the next level, MQ-4, people in general will definitely begin to notice when this kind of mythquake comes to town – and will often complain about it as a group rather than solely as individuals. Which brings us into the realm of politics – or rather, what is most commonly described as ‘politics’, because in a sense everything is political.

(Note for Brits at this time: yes, this happens to be posted in the midst of the aftermath of a particularly mythquake-full general election – a ‘hung parliament’ and all that. [There are some who would say that all parliaments should be hung, in one sense or another, but given the inanity of the times, the detail of that is perhaps best left unsaid. ] Consider this juxtaposition to be no more than an amusing coincidence: there’s always somewhere in the world that’s dealing with this specific type of mythquake at any given time.)

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• …the government got in
• Tweedledum and Tweedledee
• The structure of power

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-4: Whoever you voted for…

Richter 4: Light earthquake. Noticeable shaking of indoor items; rattling noises; significant damage unlikely. Equivalent to one kiloton of TNT (smallest nuclear bombs). Around fifteen to twenty per day.

Mercalli IV: Dishes, windows and doors rattle; parked cars rock; trees may shake; most people indoors feel movement, as do some outdoors.

…the government got in

[Politics made out to be a big deal, some real changes and real damage caused, but...]

{For most people, politics will sit somewhere between football and religion: it’s something we have to put up with, that means very little in practice, and the only thing that’s certain is that the rich will get richer, whilst for the rest of us the taxes will continue to rise fast and the real standard of living will continue to slowly fall. Politics may actually matter quite a lot in some countries, in the short-term at least; but in the longer term even a major event like the fall of the Berlin Wall has made surprisingly little difference to people’s lives. In the mainstream so-called-democracies, the people in the middle are mostly shielded from the most severe mythquakes of politics – for now, at any rate – though out on the edges, for those struggling to survive on a meagre pension or non-existent medical benefits, a change of government can likewise matter a lot. Overall, though, the old anarchist slogan has it just about right: “whoever you voted for, the government got in”.}

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

[...at present it's just Tweedledum vs Tweedledee - despite all the surface arguments, there's really not that much difference between any of the political parties]

{There’s a nice quote in Martin Gardner’s ‘The Annotated Alice’ that explains the original story of Tweedledum and Tweedledee:}

Lewis Carroll’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee have their origin in an 18th-century verse about the furious arguments between music aficionados in London as to the relative merits of the composer Handel and his Italian rival, Bononcini:

Some say, compared to Bononcini,
Signor Handel’s but a ninny,
whilst others aver that he to Handel
is scarcely fit to hold a candle.
Strange that all this fuss should be
’twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee!

[most current mainstream politics is just ‘rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic’ (or, to continue Carroll, a 'caucus race', chasing each other round and round and getting nowhere and then all expecting 'prizes' – all following the same basic principles, just arguing about who gets what without ever looking at where the ‘what’ comes from)]

{All of the mainstream political parties follow much the same assumptions – and they have to, not least because doing otherwise would seem to threaten too much of a mythquake for middle-class comfort, which would then render the party ‘unelectable’. In Britain, the differences between the main parties are so small that it’s best described as an argument about the position of one deckchair on the Titanic; the smaller parties might perhaps argue about the position of other deckchairs within the same small group, but that’s about it. Even capitalists and communists still assume the same basic property-model: their arguments in essence are only about who gets to sit in which chair, not about the existence of the chairs themselves, or the overall state of the ship. Lewis Carroll parodied this pointlessness brilliantly in ‘Alice In Wonderland’, in his parable of the ‘caucus-race’, the drying-off exercise after Alice’s tears almost drown a motley collection of assorted animal-characters. British folks again would note the irony that every one of these ‘elected representatives’ expects a special prize at the end of the race: only Alice – the ‘ordinary voter’ – is left without one.}

[need to look at the stories beneath present politics to see where the potential damage lies, and where we can build more flexibility into the stories we build.]

{Note that this kind of mythquake is typically only around level-4 or so: big enough to be noticed and to perhaps shake things up a bit for a short while, but not much more than that. Despite what politicians and their supporters might think, it’s certainly not a level-9 – which gives us a good idea of just how severe the more serious mythquakes can be. But even here we do get a few hints of where those greater shake-ups might arise: they’re in the policy-topics that are in every ‘election-manifesto’. But none of these topics are ever actually tackled in any real depth at all: instead, it’s the same lame arguments about the positions of the same set of deckchairs, which is why the deeper myth-stress – the mismatch between assumptions and reality – continues to build.}

The structure of power

[Introduce theme of power as 'the ability to do work' vs delusion of power as 'the ability to avoid work'.]

{This is a theme I’ve explored in more depth in several of my previous books, such as SEMPER and SCORE: enhancing enterprise effectiveness and Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems – see also the summary-sheet here. The key point is that whilst the physics definition of ‘power’ is, in essence, ‘the ability to do work’, most social definitions of power are more like ‘the ability to avoid work’, usually by offloading it onto others via blame and the like, and often manipulating ‘the law’ to attempt to ensure that that avoided-work does not come back. In effect, there is a purported ‘possession’ of the ‘right’ to avoid the work – whatever that ‘work’ may be. Because the means to release the resultant social and other stresses is explicitly blocked here, the stresses will inevitably continue to build until catastrophic failure eventually occurs, in a mythquake of much higher intensity – as we’ll see later.}

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-2: The Centre of the Universe‘, we looked at some relatively-minor everyday mythquakes whose impact is usually localised and transitory – such as a two-year-old’s temper-tantrum at broken expectations, and the perhaps even more bizarre emotion associated with expectations around competitive sports. But here we move up into territory where the mythquakes are rather more noticeable, becoming less localised, with impacts that are less transitory and often quite a bit more severe. This levels seems typified by a whole class of mythquakes that can arise whenever we confuse “who I am” with “what I do”.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Doing life
• The end of the world

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-3: I am what I do

Richter 3: Minor earthquake. Often felt but rarely causes damage. Equivalent to around thirty tonnes of TNT (largest conventional bombs). Around one to two hundred per day.

Mercalli III: Shaking felt indoors, though often not outdoors; hanging objects swing back and forth.

Doing life

[Dangers of this story - if I identify myself with what I do, life ceases to exist when I lose what I do; affects both genders, traditionally in different ways - retirement vs empty-nest syndrome - but these days lines are much more blurred.]

{It’s very common for people to identify with their work: “I am a carpenter”, “I am a programmer”, rather than “I work as a carpenter”, “I do computer-programming as part of my paid-work”. The danger here is that if we identify too strongly with the task, the sense of self can be lost when the task ends. This can lead to a kind of multiple-personality-syndrome, with rigid compartmentalisation between different aspects of one’s life – often providing strong mythquakes if we meet work-colleagues when on vacation, for example, or old college-buddies at a family event. This can be particularly difficult when “I am” refers to both a task and a status: “I am a parent” applies both to the status of ‘parent’ and the tasks of parenting. Up until, a few decades ago, the identification with work – “I am a carpenter” etc – mainly affected men, whereas the parent-role confusion mainly applied to women as mothers; these distinctions have become much more blurred in recent decades as biologically-determined boundaries between roles have lessened as a social driver. In both cases, though, any over-identification leads to a tendency to cling on to the role well beyond the point at which it actually applies – such as in the ‘empty-nest’ syndrome’ – which tends to exacerbate the intensity of the resultant mythquake when that identity necessarily breaks down.}

[Portuguese distinction between estar, ser, ficar, versus English ‘to be’]

{Sometimes the problems can arise from the language itself. Where English has just the one verb “to be” – “I am”, etc – Portuguese has a very useful distinction between estar – a transitory condition of “I” - ser – a permanent attribute of “I” – and ficar – an active attribute of “I” in the sense of “I am doing”, or  somewhat closer to “I make”, “I stay as”, “I remain”.}

The end of the world

[Redundancy or retirement may be literally experienced as 'the end of the world'; less easily survivable than lower-energy mythquakes, but still a personal story with few effects outside the immediate scope.]

{What makes the mythquake worse is holding on to the identity; conversely, the less attachment we have to any role, the lower the intensity of this kind of mythquake. This can be much harder, though, when the separation is forced from outside, such as in retirement, redundancy or the ‘empty-nest’ syndrome when the last child leaves home. And although each mythquake is personal, it’s very much harder when an entire community is hit at once in this way – such as the closure of a major employer in a small town, or the aftermath of a disaster in which many lives – especially children’s lives – have been lost: the Richter-equivalent energy may remain quite small, but the impacts compound on each other to increase the Mercalli-equivalent intensity that is experienced within the wider community.}