-------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 11:15:25 -0700 From: Larry Victor To: Richard Moore <•••@••.•••> Cc: Jim Bell Subject: Re: New book : re : Creating a Sustainable Future Richard and Jim: Excellent book. Below is an entry I made in a discussion on my NU_Group on Omidyar.Net, were there had been a dialog on creating "real world structures". ------------------------- CREATING A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY AND FUTURE ON OUR PLANET: The San Diego/Tijuana Region, a Case Study, by Jim Bell http://www.jimbell.com/Book2/Book2.pdf This book is an excellent example of a concrete project to create a concrete, significant REAL WORLD STRUCTURE. It is of the magnitude of the exemplar project that David and I discussed in our early dialog on what to do about the entire New Orleans region - that took place a few weeks before Katrina. Jim's plan is not new. A simpler variation was being proposed by researchers at the University of Arizona in the early 1970s when I first came to Tucson. Proposals of a similar nature have been made continually since (and probably before) the first Earth Day in 1970. Creating REAL WORLD STRUCTURES are easy, ONCE there is societal approval and resources allocated. Creating such large REAL WORLD STRUCTURES goes back to antiquity. Humans seem to be able to create given the power and the resources. However, there are two critical factors missing. One is the additional task to organize a population to approve the project and to make available the labor and resources. Even if such a project were to be done bottom-up by the people doing the work, and not trying to move governments to contract corporations to do the job, a major project (actually more complex and difficult than the project to create the "real world structure") to bring a society to a position to undertake such a project is needed. How does Jim Bell imagine a scenario for manifesting his project? The second problem is that existing power establishments often don't want such projects to succeed. Even if the elite might approve of the project in principle, that its success would destabilize their system of control - if not by creating pockets of direct competition, but also by demonstrating the viability of alternatives to their rule. Establishments may permit (but not support) bottom-up efforts IF they would defuse popular unrest, but would resist them when it appeared that the bottom-up efforts might grow in competency and spread to others. The Allende social system for Chile was such a bottom-up project of great sophistication - involving not only the workers and average persons but also talented technical expertise from across the globe to design a fair and scientific (cybernetically viable) economy for all. It had to be brutally oppressed, and was. We fail to recognize and accept that many of our leaders WANT what is happening, it is according to THEIR plan. All is not the result of mistakes or ignorance, but of explicit intent. Most who rise to positions of power today are not "good" people, but people who approve of power & violence, deception & conspiracy, exploitation & greed, and are open to employ persons who enjoy killing other humans. I call such persons "bad". My vision of NU is a world where "bad" people are unlikely to develop from childhood (we have yet to learn how "bad" people come to be) AND where our societal structures are not such as to attract and actually reinforce "badness". To successfully create a better world ALL relevant factors and domains must be considered. The end objective is a new system of real world structures. What I suggest is that designing and creating them is not the only challenge, nor the most difficult. NU_Group, in my view, is attempting to work on the challenges of how to create organizations to seaf projects that propose to create real world structures. The other issue, about strong opposition by the established elites is one I also have given considerable attention. I believe that an exponential growth of NU in a way NOT to directly confront establishments can lead NU to eventually replace, rather than compete with, existing power structures - but this is a complex domain that will require much dialog elsewhere. Reading Jim Bell's book and thinking again on the issues above leads me to think a viable strategy may be developing a synergy between 1) creating real world structures and 2) creating those orgs that will seaf the projects that create real world structures. I will refrain from the semantic argument that the orgs of 2) are ALSO real world structures. -------------------- You may be interested in following what we are attempting to do on NU_Group, and possibly participate. You will need to join Omidyar.net (free). Onet was created by Pierre Omidyar (inventor of eBay) to further his interest in facilitating synergy between social entrepreneurs, and has recently made this complex platform open to the public. Nu_Group is the product of a few months work by David Braden and myself, starting within the platform of Onet, but given its planetary goals, must move on to other platforms. NUG is rough and prmitive, but a start. INSTRUCTIONS FOR JOINING ONET AND NU_Group JOINING OMIDYAR.NET Go to http://www.omidyar.net/home/ Near the top, left click on Join us now. The new window will ask you to enter your email address twice. Click Sign-Up. You will be emailed a temporary password. It will take them a little few minutes to send you your password by email. There will also be clickable url on the email, click it and enter in the Sign-In space your email address and the password. Now, PLEASE create a primitive Profile, that is where you will enter your name, so we can find you. You can add more later. You should find information on how to do this from the webpage you will start with. You should also want to change your password to something you can easily remember. There are a number of ways to learn about Onet. JOINING NU_Group Click "Organizations-General", then click on NU_Group; will take you to "home" (middle brown tab bar for group), Find [JOIN} on the home page to join the Group. Click on the "workspace" tab, then click on "Add" in Watch List on the left panel, this creates a bookmark to NU_Group There are many paths within NU_Group: EXPLORE. Guides for NU_Group are under development. Down First Page is "FOR ALL NOVICES TO OMIDYAR.NET" which briefly orients you to composing in workspaces. Hope to see you there, Larry -- -------------------------------------------------------- http://cyberjournal.org "Apocalypse Now and the Brave New World" http://www.cyberjournal.org/cj/rkm/Apocalypse_and_NWO.html Posting archives: http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?date=01Jan2006&batch=25&lists=newslog Subscribe to low-traffic list: •••@••.••• ___________________________________________ In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
