It should be obvious – more like blindingly-obvious, I hope – that there is a massive need for resources there, of all kinds. The human impact is huge: the immediate fact that so many have died is almost trivial compared to the inner-work that each of the survivors will need to do, over years and decades to come. Many villages and towns and even cities have been all but erased from the map: the physical costs of rebuilding the homes and shops and workspaces and infrastructure need to be matched by all the other types of costs involved in rebuilding human community. It’s clear that whatever happens onward, the power-plant is already seriously damaged, possibly beyond repair: which means that Japan has lost a significant proportion of its power-generating capacity, partially crippling its entire industrial and social base, not just for a few days or weeks, but probably for several years to come, until a replacement can be brought on-line. (The costs of decommissioning the damaged plant are another story again…) And right now, all of those people directly affected by the disaster – at least half a million people, and probably many more – need food, clothing, shelter and much more; and in the long term, rebuilding not just the physical spaces and work and everything else that goes with it, but rebuilding hope as well.

A responsibility-based economy matches the resources to the need. It prepares for that need, too – as can be seen in Japan’s rapid, well-rehearsed response, including mobilising 100,000 troops in the disaster-recovery effort (a distinct non-warfighting role for its armed-forces). Around the world, nations and NGOs alike have sent not just words but practical aid: and even if the sheer scale of the problems tends in practice to render many of these well-meant efforts down to little more than token gestures, the fact that mutual-responsibility is acknowledged there is important, with more than just token effect.

Contrast that with the response from the possession-economy – in other words, that which currently presents itself as ‘the economy’. In a sense that response could best be summarised by an, uh, unfortunate ‘Freudian slip’ by US economics-commentator Larry Kudlow, as reported by the largely apolitical lifestyle-magazine Vanity Fair:

In these tough economic times, isn’t it nice to know that calamitous natural disasters needn’t have an adverse affect on your investment portfolio? After the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan failed to induce a market nosedive, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow expressed his relief in terms that seemed to appall even his fellow cheerleaders for capitalism: “The human toll here,” he declared, “looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that.”

Yet whilst the disaster “failed to induce a market nosedive” in the US, the immediate ‘economic’ response to Japan has been very different. The national bank, for example, ‘released’ trillions of yen (hundreds of billions of dollars) to protect the national economy – yet in effect diluted and devalued the price-worth of every other yen currency-unit by doing so, because the price/resource balance has to come from somewhere. And in almost every other market elsewhere in the world, share-values in just about anything Japanese – car-companies, electronics, whatever – have taken a steep nosedive, already by 10% or more, and going down further with each new item of bad news. Insurance-companies worldwide have also been badly hit. In other words, the possession-economy’s response to a disaster of any kind is to reduce the available resources to recover from that disaster – just at the point where they are most needed.

In short, the possession-economy is driven not merely by the myths of ‘possession’ – the purported ‘right’ to claim exclusive access to shared resources, and to withhold those resources from others on personal whim or for personal gain at others’ expense – but also by anti-possession – the purported ‘right’ to avoid any inherent responsibilities that arise from that claim of possession. This is the dysfunctional side of entrepreneurship – where an entrepreneur acts not as a symbiotic catalyst in the economic ecosystem, but as a literal ‘between-taker’ ['entre', between; 'prendre', to take], a parasite whose sole ‘service’ is to take, and take, and take, whilst giving little or nothing in return.

Like a ‘fair-weather friend’, the possession-economy demands its (often excessive) ‘cut’ whenever times are good, but is nowhere to be seen whenever times are bad. In fact that’s when we discover that our so-called ‘friend’ has instead taken away whatever we need for recovery, and may even actively hinder us as we struggle to recover, creating an enforced dependence in order to maximise any future ‘take’. Responsibility accepts the costs of caring; whilst possession ‘succeeds’ because it does not care – placing itself above all others, demanding responsibility from those others, but evading the duty and mutual-responsibility of care for others in return.

There will always be some parasites in every ecosystem, of course. But to put it in its bluntest form, the paradigmatic parasitism of the possession-economy is a ‘luxury’ we can no longer afford. If we are to have any chance to survive in the longer term, we have no choice in this: somehow – and even if as yet we have no idea as to how – we must bring the possession-economy to an end.

First, though, a story, and a warning, from history.

I’ll admit I’m no true scholar of Australian Aboriginal history or law; yet from what I’ve gleaned so far, a few things stand out. First, its economic model is (or was) responsibility-based: most forms of law throughout the country had a very clear concept of ownership, based on explicit and formally-accepted responsibility. In some forms, this was described as ‘singing the site’: someone would take on ownership of some region by demonstrating that they knew the songs of the place better than anyone else, and were thus best suited to take responsibility for it. This model had remained stable for literally tens of thousands of years, through entire ice-ages, serving an overall population well into the millions. Until the Anglos came, barely two hundred years ago. And they asked one question: “who does this land belong to?” To which the local peoples replied, correctly in accordance with a responsibility-based model, that “the land belongs to no-one but itself: we belong to to the land”. To which the instant response was “it belongs to no-one? then this is terra nullius, land by possessed by no-one – how very convenient!” And then, as one Aboriginal elder described it, “the priests came, and they had the Bible, and we had the land; and they said ‘Close your eyes, let us pray!’; and when we opened our eyes again, we had the Bible, and they had the land”. In short, the ‘legal basis’ of modern Australia is nothing more than the blatant theft of an entire continent: and to say that the results of that theft have been devastating to Aboriginal lives and culture would be an understatement in the extreme…

Yet unless we take extreme care, that’s what always happens whenever a responsibility-based culture meets up against a possession-based one. Responsibility loses because it cares; and possession ‘wins’ because it doesn’t. Ouch…

And yet here we are, faced with the bald fact that the economic model that we live in, the model that we know, of ‘rights’ of possession, cannot be made sustainable, and that we somehow have to find a way to turn the whole thing round to a responsibility-based economics. Even a few minutes’ observation should be sufficient to make it clear that vast swathes of our culture are focussed on evasion of responsibility; most of what most people call ‘profit’ is actually the accumulation of future debt in some form or other. Above a surface veneer of ‘normality’, just about everything that we think of as ‘fact’ in our economics is either outright false, or at best based on some kind of fallacy – and yet at present just about everyone believes those fallacies to be true. More serious is the fact that many people – especially the supposedly ‘wealthy’ – have a huge investment in the belief that those fallacies are true, and will at first believe that they must back up that fallacious belief with weapons or worse. Also ouch…

And we also can’t afford to wait around until the supposedly ‘wealthy’ – or worst thieves, as some would put it – come to realise that there’s a problem here that they can’t simply buy their way out of with other people’s money and other people’s lives: because by then it will be way too late, for everyone.

So to put it bluntly, just about everything in our entire society is against in this in some way. And yet every indicator we have shows us that if this change doesn’t happen, and soon, we’re dead – all of us. Kind of high stakes here, then.

So where do we start? How can we start?

My suggestion would be to tackle it like any other enterprise-architecture task:

• find a vision that makes sense across the whole shared-enterprise
• identify the values that arise out of that vision
• identify the drivers and constraints

…and so on, and so on, and so on.  (Identifying the stakeholders is easy, though: it’s everyone. And everything. ) The rest of it, as is usual with enterprise-architecture, is what’s called ‘relentlessly political’ – which, in a sense, is exactly what we have to avoid, because of the, uh, rather serious problems described above. Which means we need to do it in what might be called ‘open stealth’ – make it clear what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it, and then let most people go quietly back to sleep again until we do have enough together to show that there is a real way out of this mess, and that we do have some tangible suggestions of a path from ‘here’ to ‘there’.

The core of it is this:

• we somehow have to replace every non-sustainable form of ‘possession’ with a sustainable responsibility-based equivalent that, at the surface at least, is experienced as creating the same emotional, practical and other functions as possession
• we somehow have to replace every possession-based institution – including the entire money-economy, which would be redundant in a responsibility-based economy – with institutions that provide equivalent responsibility-based functions
• we somehow have to replace every notion of ‘rights’ with responsibility-based equivalents that create the same effect as ‘rights’

On the surface, the last is probably the most challenging politically – not least because historically the US has based its entire politics on a concept of ‘rights’. From an architectural perspective, though, it’s actually the simplest of those sets of tasks, because in reality the entire concept of ‘rights’ is a delusion – there are no rights in the real world. To be blunt, they’re a fantasy – and in all too many cases that fantasy is propped up by offloading responsibilities onto others, in a state-sponsored form of structural abuse. Instead, what we think of as ‘rights’ need to be understood as desirable-outcomes that are created by interlocking sets of mutual responsibilities. So for every purported ‘right’, we need to model the mutual-responsibilities from which those supposed ‘rights’ arise – and identify how the mutualities need to work in order for them to be genuinely fair, genuinely mutual, and genuinely sustainable.

(For a real existing example, take a look at British traffic-law: just about everyone uses the concept of ‘right of way’, but to my knowledge it does not exist anywhere in law. [To be pedantic, the road itself is described as a 'right of way', but that's actually a responsibility on the landholder to permit passage through the respective piece of land.] Instead, everything is described in terms of responsibility to give way, with each apparent non-mutuality described in such a way as to demonstrate effective fairness over time – for example, we give way at a green light to an emergency-vehicle that needs to come across, because next time it could be us that needs the services of that emergency-vehicle. In the same way, every ‘right’ can and, I would argue, should be described instead in terms of the real mutual-responsibilities that realise that desired-outcome.)

Much the same goes for the other two sets of tasks. For every instance of ‘possession’ – whatever form it takes – we need to model the underlying responsibilities that underpin that purported ‘right’ of possession. This applies not just to physical property, but intellectual-property, and every other form of purported ‘property’: rights do not ‘exist’ other than as a social fantasy, and hence, to make them work in real-world practice, we need to identify the real mutual-responsibilities – which need, again, to be genuinely fair, genuinely mutual, and genuinely sustainable.

And every institution: what is that institution trying to do? Is it actually necessary in a responsibility-based economy? (For a perhaps-surprising number of existing institutions, the answer is ‘No’ – they’re only necessary at present to try to compensate for the fundamental flaws and failings of a possession-based economy. Banks, insurance, finance, pensions, anything to do with money, vast swathes of existing ‘property’-law – a few moments’ thought would illustrate that all of them are redundant in a responsibility-based economy.) If the institution does still need to exist in some form (and sorry, but to some extent that does include some equivalent of taxes ), what responsibilities does that institution enact? What are the mutualities that would make those responsibilities interlock?

From an architectural perspective, there’s a lot of work to do there, just to get started. We don’t need to worry anyone about where this is going as yet – but it should be clear that it does need to be done, and fast, if we’re to have any chance of getting out of this collective mess.

As I hope you can see, I’m doing what I can in this, towards creating a true architecture of responsibility. Yet I certainly don’t claim to have ‘all the answers’; in fact I’d barely claim to have more than a small proportion of the questions. But there ’tis: over to you, perhaps? Comments/suggestions, anyone?

Myself, I look at all of these things with an enterprise-architect’s eye – looking at entire economies, societies, cultures, as literal expressions of ‘enterprise‘. And beneath all of that turmoil, there’s one underlying theme that I’ve been tracking for many years now – one really obvious theme, yet oddly one which very few people seem to have noticed, or fully acknowledged its implications. It’s the way in which almost everything in our society – its economy, its cultures, its relationships, its idioms, its concepts of property, and perhaps most of its deep-myths – is ultimately founded on a notion of ‘rights’ of possession. And yet in all of my studies, over all of those years, I keep finding myself returning to one seemingly inescapable fact: there is no way to make a possession-based economy sustainable.

It’s true that a possession-based model gives better short-term results than most alternative (responsibility-based) models; but it does so only at the expense of longer-term sustainability. In effect, possession ‘succeeds’ by borrowing – or stealing – from the future, often in ways that are very inefficient and ineffective – hence what I sometimes call ‘the worst possible system‘, and so on. So the only way that a possession-based model can be made to seem sustainable is by running it as a pyramid-game, powered by an illusion of ‘growth’. When there’s nothing more to pull in at the bottom of the pyramid, the illusory ‘growth’ comes to a grinding halt – at which point the model has no choice but to cannibalise itself, all the way back until there’s nothing left. From all of the signs around us, we’re perilously close to that point now – if not already over the edge.

There are of course many people trying to tackle aspects of this, yet to me it seems that most of them are doing little more than wittering and whittling away at the edges of this problem. For example, there are many, many groups on working ideas for ‘alternative currencies’ and the like: yet none that I’ve seen so far resolve many or even any of the drivers for That Worst Possible System. Currencies are a crude mechanism to attempt to resolve the fact that point-to-point barter – what I call ‘double-entry life-keeping’ – simply cannot handle the complexities of real-world resource-exchange. So currencies don’t work because barter doesn’t work, and barter itself is an overlay on possession-based assumptions that also do not and cannot work. And it’s very frustrating to see so much care and effort lavished on so many variations of a core idea that, by definition, simply cannot work.

There are also many, many groups working towards environmental sustainability: but without tackling the problem of possession, we’re always going to slide back to something that’s inherently unsustainable. To put it in its simplest form, we cannot have sustainability without a system of law that supports it – which it certainly doesn’t at present.

And as we can see on the news every day, there are also many groups struggling to rein in various of the many ‘robber barons’ of the physical and financial and political and other spheres – and yet a possession-economy will always create new ‘robber-barons’ to replace them, because it’s inherent in the ‘winner-steals-all’ structure of the model. So to be blunt, important though those actions are, they’re all doomed to futile failure unless we go right down to the roots of the problem.

Surface-level politics is equally irrelevant here. At this kind of level, those endless arguments about capitalism versus communism versus socialism or whatever are almost entirely irrelevant: they’re merely variations on a theme of possession’, in effect down to little more than arguing about the positions of individual deckchairs on the Titanic. As history shows all too well, redistributing ‘possessions’ will make barely any difference in the longer term: our only chance for real change is to change even the idea of possession.

Which, to say the least, is going to be difficult. It’s not just that so many people are seemingly possessed by their possessions, but that our entire culture is possessed by possession itself. Look around at all those instances of the simple possessive-adjective ‘my’, or ‘mine’: every one of those is ultimately an illusion, because in the end we all die – and we ‘can’t take it with us’. (Hasn’t stopped many half-crazed kings from trying to do so, of course… ) The only viable alternative is a responsibility-based economy, but for most of us, possession is the only model we’ve ever known: “possession is nine-tenths of the law” and all that. Getting people to understand that possession does not and cannot work is not going to be simple. And we’re not just talking about a few people here: it’s a change in worldview that needs to be taken up, taken almost literally to heart, embedded in every action and interaction, by everyone in the entire globe.

In short, a mythquake of almost unimaginable proportions. But if that change doesn’t happen, the entire human species is dead – not just some of us, all of us. It really is as fundamental as that…

But it’s not an impossible task. In human terms, possession-based economies seem to be a relatively recent innovation – or aberration – stretching back no more than a few thousand years.  (Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B suggests that we can pin the start-point geographically and temporally as somewhere near Babylon at around 3000BCE, but it’s more probably an artefact and side-effect of agricultural settlement just about anywhere and anywhen.) Obsessive possessiveness is also a natural stage in child-development – the ‘terrible twos’ and the like – though usually tempered in later development – typically 5-8 years old – as awareness of social context comes in. (Some children never reach that stage of awareness, of course – which is one of the major drivers for the collective problems we face right now. Even worse, many cultures actively reward childish possessiveness and will often even punish a more adult sharing – a huge disincentive against creating an efficient and effective economy!) The point is that change is possible, and it’s a change to a worldview that arguably is more ‘natural’ in human terms than the literally childish myths of ‘possession’.

The catch is that it’s a change that has to happen fast – far faster than any other cultural change in human history. At a fairly conservative estimate, we have perhaps as few as ten years to get everything in place and starting to have a real, tangible impact on many people’s lives – because even an optimistic estimate places the fundamental failure of current ‘business as usual’ at no more than fifty to a hundred years. (The current upheavals in the Arab world, and relatively recent collapse of the old Soviet states, are and were all messy enough, but will seem almost trivial by comparison with what is likely to happen if or when the real resource-wars start happening later this century…) So in real terms we really don’t have much time at all: we need to get started now.

The alternative to a possession-based economy is a responsibility-based model: one in which we ‘own’ something because we declare responsibility for it and manage it accordingly – much like the notion of ‘process-owner’ or ‘project-owner’ in a business-context, but on the scale of an entire global economy rather than solely within one organisation. There’s a lot more that could be said on this – what it is, how it works, the challenges that need to be resolved, and so on – but for now it’s worth noting some of the real practical constraints that we face:

• the only cultures that have long experience of responsibility-economies are those that are often currently derided as ‘primitive’ – and they don’t have much if any experience of an economy on the kind of scale and complexity that we need
• worldwide we still run much the same kind of ‘slave-economy’ that was typical in Roman times: the main difference is that our ‘slaves’ are machines and systems that use prodigious quantities of energy – mainly some 10-100,000 years per year of trapped solar energy, in the form of oil, gas or coal – which in itself creates perhaps even more problems than it solves
• the change will require a much greater awareness of systems-level impacts of actions and inactions: and whilst we do know how to teach this to pre-school children – such as in the well-known HighScope project – we have little or no experience of doing this on a large scale with adults already embedded in the possession-economies
• despite the desires of so many dictators and would-be reformers (not that there’s much difference between them at times… ), cultural changes cannot be imposed from outside: to succeed, they have to be chosen as an act of personal free will – which means that we have to find a way to show that this worldview is preferable by and for everyone

But we’re architects: we’re used to constraints, in fact for most of us it’s the kind of challenge that we relish. Yet this is definitely ‘The Big One’: the greatest architectural challenge any of us will ever face. So what will this challenge mean to you – professionally, personally, in every other way? And what part will you play in this?

Any comments, anyone?

I’ve been delighted to see a useful and clarifying discussion between Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz on the origins of the well-known Cynefin framework. It’s been important to me because in my work I use some parts of that framework, and not others: the question of origin and authorship of the various parts of the Cynefin milieu (so to speak) has, until now, been decidedly blurred, and it’s been very difficult to know who to acknowledge without insulting one party or another. There does seem to be a lot more clarity now, which helps a lot.

Most people know Cynefin only from the simple visual frame and its four main ‘repeatability categories’: Simple [Known], Complicated [Knowable], Complex and Chaotic. Yet, as Dave has explained on various occasions, the term cynefin is actually a Welsh word, rather inadequately translated into English as ‘place’ (much like how another key Welsh word, hiraedd, is thinly translated as ‘homesickness’, when it’s more like ‘homesickness to the tenth degree’ for a ‘home’ that may exist only in the heart and soul…). And during that discussion on Cynthia Kurtz’s blog, Dave Snowden cited an early paper on his ideas:

Snowden, D. (2000) “Cynefin, A Sense of Time and Place: an Ecological Approach to Sense Making and Learning in Formal and Informal Communities” conference proceedings of KMAC at the University of Aston, July 2000)

I’ll admit straight off that I haven’t seen that paper: but it seems it might be an important one to refer to, because of that explicit inclusion of place. What’s frustrating, though, is that it seems to be both the first and last point at which ‘time and place’ are explicitly linked to the (later) ‘Cynefin’ approach to sensemaking (the categories, the dynamics and so on, and, later, the Cognitive Edge ‘Sensemaker’ software). And I’d love to see more.

To me ‘time and place’ is a very important theme in sensemaking, because the relationship between people and place is extremely complex: there’s an interaction between people and place, and in some ways it seems that the place itself has choices too. We see this interaction described explicitly in the Australian-aboriginal concept of the Dreaming, or (as Cynthia Kurtz describes) in the native-American notion of the Medicine Wheel (though in both cases it’s almost more an experience than a mere concept). It would seem to be in other cultures too, if perhaps less explicitly: for example, as Dave indicates, and as can be seen in other references to the Welsh cynefin, much the same would seem to apply in Welsh culture. And the same would seem to be true of people’s relationship to time – or times, rather – at any given place.

There are a fair few groups working in this space: for example, the English charity Common Ground, whose work on ‘local distinctiveness‘ I would very strongly recommend, along with their projects on parish maps and the book From place to PLACE, and the essay “Losing your place“. (Enterprise-architects especially should be able to see the direct application of those to the enterprise context, with the enterprise as metaphoric ‘place’ that people inhabit.)

And there are also a handful of more academic-oriented disciplines, such as psychogeography (popularised by the London writer will self, but with its origins more in 1950s France), and archaeography or ‘deep mapping‘, a kind of bridge between archaeology, art and culture. I’ve been involved in some aspects of those fields myself over the years, with my 1978 book Needles of Stone (updated 2008 edition here), and more recently in collaboration with archaeographer Liz Poraj-Wilczynska, developing formal disciplines to bridge the objective and subjective aspects of academic-archaeology (as in our joint paper in the archaeology journal Time&Mind). To some people the content and context of these various fields may be a bit too weird in places – even in the peer-reviewed ones such as Time&Mind – yet to me they all have real and practical applications in the complex processes of sensemaking for something as large as an entire enterprise.

The point here is that I do believe that the ‘place and time’ aspects of the original Cynefin would be highly relevant now in enterprise-architectures and the like, especially if brought up to date with the other deep work that’s been done on Cynefin over the past decade. The catch, of course, is that I’m definitely not the right person to talk about it: the only right person to present that, of course, would be Dave Snowden. And again, this weblog isn’t the right place: if anything new is to be written on this, it should be in Dave’s Cognitive Edge blog, perhaps, or some other academic paper.

Anyway, that’s the request: for an update on how ‘time and place’ fit into Cynefin sensemaking, and into the overall themes of organisational complexity and the like. Given the other crosslinks I’ve summarised above, I do believe it would be useful now.

Beyond making that request, it’s none of my business, so I’ll stop now. But if Dave or someone else does write on this, perhaps let me know? Many thanks.

• 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.}