You what? “Say no to women’s rights” – you’re kiddin’ me, right? What kind of misogynistic claptrap is this…?!?

I’ll admit it: I’m being deliberately provocative here. (Did get your attention, though, didn’t it?  And don’t forget I did warn you that what I’m doing these days could be a lot more challenging for many folks? – well, this is what that looks like.  )

So cool it, okay? Calm down. It’s almost certainly not what you might think I’m saying. And don’t panic: ultimately this is more about a practical design-issue in ‘big-picture’ enterprise-architectures than about anything else. Serious, sure: but not misogynistic. Honest.

It’s true that there are specific problems around all closed-category ‘rights’ such as purported ‘women’s rights’ and the like – and I promise I’ll come back to those later. But that isn’t the real point here anyway. The real point is this: the whole concept of ‘rights’ could well be one of the most disastrous mistakes that humans have ever made. And we need to find a way back out from that mistake if we’re ever to achieve some kind of sustainable society.

In terms of well-meant stupidity, the notion of ‘rights’ is right up there with the toffee spear [thank you Terry Pratchett!] and the lead balloon: it doesn’t work, it’s never worked, in fact can’t work, because its cause of failure is built right into its very roots. Scrambled misunderstandings and misuses of the notion of ‘rights’ represent a huge failure-risk, right at the roots of all of our current ‘really-big-picture enterprise-architectures’. And to be blunt, the concept of ‘rights’ is so riddled with calamitous unintended-consequences that we really need to remove it, totally and permanently, from every aspect of every law in every land.

An assertion to which, at present, you might well disagree.

Which is fair enough, of course.

But perhaps allow me to explain?

(And yes, as usual, this is going to be a bit long… but I think you’ll find it worthwhile.)

Read more…

For all the talk of supposed ‘rights’ to this-that-and-the-other, there is one ‘right’ that we do not, can not and must not have: the right to not care.

There is no right to not-care.

And yet so many aspects of our society and culture and everything else are built upon exactly that ‘right’. Everyone who drops a piece of litter is exercising their ‘right’ to not-care – and dumping the burden of caring on everyone else. Many so-called business-models depend entirely upon the ‘right’ to not-care about long-term consequences. Most of the arguments between political-right and political-left are merely about who has the greater ‘right’ to not-care, and export the costs of care onto the other.

This matters, because in the longer term we survive only because of care. We survive because we care. Those of us who know this, who live this, know that yes, we will at times end up carrying the burden of those who haven’t yet learnt this bald fact. Most children do take time to learn how to care. But it gets hard – and harder – to keep going in a society where those who do care are actively punished for doing so, and those who don’t receive all of the rewards.

In our present-day world, people lose because they take responsibility, because they care; whilst others ‘win’ because they don’t.

Madness.

Not merely madness: suicidal madness. A cultural behaviour that embodies and enacts a slow, painful collective-suicide, for everyone. Not a good idea…

I’m perhaps extreme: I believe that the entire concept of ‘rights’ is a literally deadly delusion, and that only responsibilities are real. Yet it seems clear to me that if our society is based around that ‘right’ to not-care – and it certainly seems to be so – that kind of implies that there are some very big changes ahead if we are to survive. An almost literal change of heart, for a start.

And the core of that change is the recognition, by everyone, by every aspect and institution of every society, that the one right that no-one can ever have is a ‘right’ to not-care.

Something to think about as you go to work on your busy weekday morning, perhaps?

If ever you might need a clear example of the difference between a responsibility-based economy versus a possession-based one, and the fundamental dysfunctionality of the latter, take a look at the international response to the current natural-disaster in Japan, with huge problems arising from a massive earthquake and tsunami all down its north-east coast, and collateral impacts such as damage to and failure of the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

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.

Summary of another chapter from the Mythquake book-project.

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.

Read more…

One of the professional hazards of working in the futures space is that, by definition, many if not most of the themes I’m working on are five, ten, fifty or more years into the future. Without people like me doing the far-future work, that future will never happen. But whilst there’s a lot of often all-too-literal blood, sweat and tears that go into that work, almost no-one is willing to pay for it, since they don’t seem to be able to grasp what it means or what it’s worth until it’s already too late.

Sure, I can get by at times by doing what I can only describe as ‘junk-work’, base-level architecture and the like that almost anyone could do; but it isn’t my real work, it isn’t where I have the most value for any nominal employer or society at large, and it isn’t what I know I should be doing. Yet whenever I do try to do my real work, all I’m likely to be ‘paid’ is mockery, denigration and theft – because that’s pretty much all that our wondrous society has to offer for those who do not wish to be thieves themselves. (More on that in a moment.) Over the years, there’ve been quite a few folks now who’ve made a lot of money from my work; yet I doubt if I’ve seen a single penny of recompense from of any of them. Which hurts – and not just in the pocket, either.

Few people in the ‘normal’ world have any idea of the intensity of the loneliness that dominates life out here on the far fringes of everyday reality. I’ve never been an employee; always self-employed, or contract consultant, always the Outsider in any professional context. And although I do have occasional colleagues for whom some of the ideas that thrash through my head do make some degree of sense, fact is I probably have no direct peers, anywhere in the world; literally nothing in common with most people I would meet on the street, or anywhere else, really. That doesn’t make me ‘better’ than anyone else – far from it, more like; but it does make me more alone. In four decades as a nominal adult, I don’t think I’ve ever had a partner (in any sense of ‘partner’) with whom I could truly share my life and work; not surprisingly, yet never by choice, I’ve lived most of my adult life alone. Most of my childhood too, for that matter. Imagine that in your own life: no partner, no spouse, no children, no company, church, community, no person or place that is ‘home’; no certainty of any kind; nowhere to belong. No doubt you’ve had some edges of that for a day or two, a month or two; try it instead for a lifetime. You’ve no doubt been there from time to time, yet each time known too that for you “this too will pass”; try it instead knowing that that aloneness and isolation will never change. Being the Outsider hurts; it never ceases to hurt. Ever.

True, those of us who have to live this strange life do somehow learn to live with the hurt, sort of. We don’t have much choice about it, to be honest. But no real surprise that severe depression is one of the more frequent occupational hazards here. ‘Severe’ is perhaps an understatement: the only word I know that expresses it is the old Welsh term hiraedd, sometimes weakly translated as ‘homesickness’, but more an unyielding, unrelenting homesickness for a ‘home’ that we know does not exist – “a longing and a grieving for that which is not, has never been and shall never be”. Most of the time I manage to keep that hiraedd somewhat at bay; but right now it’s back with a vengeance. Downer again…

To see why this is so hard, and yet so inevitable, consider just two examples of what, after many years of study, I see as ‘fundamental truths’ that clash with core assumptions that underpin our entire current ‘Westernised’ society, and that put me in direct conflict with the politics of ‘ the right’ and ‘the left’ respectively.

The clash with ‘the right’ is this: there is no way to make a possession-economy sustainable. Our entire economy is based on so-called ‘rights’ of possession: yet whilst it’s true that there are a few ways in which it can be made to seem as if it makes sense with physical objects, it doesn’t actually work in practice, and it does not and cannot make sense for information, for business-relationships, or for just about anything else in the real world. What we might best describe as ‘double-entry life-keeping’ is a downright disaster, often falling into black farce: trying paying back a bequest, for example. And whilst, from a shallow, short-term-only analysis, a possession-model can be made to look more productive than its responsibility-based counterpart, in reality it can only be made to seem ‘sustainable’ by running it as a pyramid-game, a myth of perpetual ‘growth’. It’s been run that way for some five thousand years or so; but the blunt fact is that we ran out of room for growth in the pyramid perhaps fifty to a hundred years ago, and ever since then we’ve been like the cartoon character who’s run further and further off the cliff, way out into mid-air, but hasn’t acknowledged it yet because she doesn’t dare to look down. True, we might be able keep up the delusion of ‘business as usual’ for a fair few years yet – but the longer we refuse to face it, the harder will be the fall. We still have a chance to switch over to a responsibility-based model now, while we still have the option to do it by choice; later, when the choice is forced upon us, it will be way, way too late for most of what we currently deem to be ‘civilisation’. Not made any easier, either, that the cultures that call themselves ‘developed’ are the ones who’ve lost the plot, whereas the cultures they deride as ‘under-developed’ or, worse, ‘primitive’, are the only ones who have a clue. It’s going to be messy, to say the least; but leaving it much longer is going to be messier still. We know this; we all know this; yet anyone who says it out loud gets hit hard with the good ol’ game of “shoot the messenger”. Been there, done that, have the scars to prove it, am now too scared to even try any more. Yet someone has to do so: just wish it wasn’t me…

The clash with ‘the left’ goes deeper still: there are no rights. The whole concept of ‘rights’ is a self-centred delusion: only responsibilities are real. What we think of as ‘rights’ are desirable outcomes that arise from interlocking mutual responsibilities; but the ‘rights’ themselves do not and cannot exist in any independent form, however much we might declare them to be “true and inalienable” and the rest. In far, far too many cases, a supposed ‘right’ is actually an arbitrary assertion – petulant demand, more like – that someone else has responsibilities to us and for us, whilst we ourselves do not. Wherever such so-called ‘rights’ are inherently asymmetric, they in essence assign all responsibility onto those who are deemed to not have those ‘rights’ – one infamous example being the entire ‘women’s rights’ discourse, which no doubt started out with good intentions but is now little more than state-sponsored abuse of men. And to be utterly blunt, the huge body of law that exists to protect a so-called ‘right’ of possession is actually a state-sponsored form of theft, either in the present, the future or the past. Whenever we start from the ‘rights’ discourse, someone loses – which in the long term means that everyone loses. The only safe place to start is from responsibilities, and mutuality of responsibilities – which, given that our core economic model is based on those supposed ‘rights’ of possession, is exactly what our current society is least willing to do. One probable outcome is that the much-valued, much-praised Bill Of Rights that underpins so much of the USA’s way of life is what is ultimately most likely to destroy it as a nation – and, if we’re not careful, the rest of the world as well. Scary indeed.

So to understand my position as ‘the Outsider’, try knowing those two facts to be true – that there are no rights, and that there is no way to make a ‘rights’-based, possession-based economy sustainable. Try knowing the full implications of those two facts; try knowing, in a deep, visceral sense, the urgency of the societal need to face those facts; then try to find any way to stay sane whilst nigh-on everyone around you is pretending, as hard as they can, that those facts are not true…

So yeah, no real surprise that I’m back in downer again.

And there’s a lot more where those two clashes came from: a lot more. That’s what I do, that’s my real work: trying to make sense of enterprise-architecture in every scope and sense of ‘enterprise’, sometimes right down in the details, sometimes necessarily right up to the scale of an entire world, present, past, future. And I live with those deep facts, every day, working flat out trying to find any viable ways to help individuals, groups, companies, entire cultures to gain awareness and understanding and action on this, so as to move from ‘here’ – which is not and cannot be sustainable – to ‘there’ – which just might be, if we make that move in time, and if anyone will listen long enough to move at all.

No doubt the downer will ease off somewhen soon; it usually does. But if you wonder why I seem to slump a bit too much from time to time, and seem a little crazed perhaps more often than you might like, the above might help you to see why that’s so.

Hey ho.