blog027 Politicians Are Not Your Leaders

SPARK 114

DISTINCTION: Politicians are not your leaders.

NOTES: The belief that politicians are your leaders is marketed to you by politicians. 

192 mega-governments register themselves at the United Nations as world leaders but they are not. Neither are their associated generals or corporate officers. 

 

It is categorically impossible for political, military or business persons to be leaders. Here is why: the rules of interaction in the current system do not allow it.

• Politicians and other elected officials cannot care for the true well being of humanity because they must please whoever has the money or they won't be re-elected.
• Military personnel must follow orders from their superiors rather than following their own conscience or they get court martialed.
• Employees at any level of the company are forced externalize social and environmental costs to maximize profits for their shareholders or they are out of a job.

 

If I am a politician I play the game of I’m right, you’re wrong. I identify other politicians as the enemy, then start a costly conflict to keep the business elite happy, which keeps me funded and re-elected. Masses of people have brainwashed themselves into thinking it is safer to do nothing about this.

If I am a corporate director I play the game of I win, you lose. By arranging that social and environmental costs go to the general public or to future generations I collect the most Monopoly™ money, corrupt the politicians, and wipe my competitors off the board. Masses of people have hypnotized themselves into thinking it is smarter to do nothing about this.

Leadership is a completely different game from politics or business. 

Leadership is the game of taking responsibility for the well being of all. 

Mistaking politicians and CEOs for leaders has given us a planet on the brink of ecological collapse, a free-energy-from-oil fantasy-world society that is running out of oil, predatory capitalism that demolishes economic stability, and no proactivity towards overpopulation, health care, pollution, sustainable energy, or developing the potential of each person. If we assemble the world’s politicians to agree on a fair, ambitious and binding treaty for reversing climate change all we get is procrastination. 

 

There is deep longing in the human heart to follow a good king. 

Can you feel it in you? 

But where is the good king to serve? Our deep longing is why we gullibly believe campaign promises even when we know candidates will betray us.

Politicians compromise to please their benefactors. Leaders understand there are things you cannot compromise on. 

Politicians believe what they have now is probably better than the risk and fear that come with change. Leaders make change. They go first, pushing something forward that they believe in. They paint a new picture of the future and then gather and empower leaders with flexibility to go there.

If you lead you may be labeled a heretic, or these days, a terrorist. The profound fear of being singled out and thrown into some nameless prison keeps most people’s mouths and souls tightly shut.

For those of you who feel to afraid to be yourself, here is one useful fact. Today there are too many heretics to capture. 

 

 

Heretics are leading new and startling nonviolent movements all over the world. Not just talking about it, but taking immediate and responsible actions to open new gameworlds for whomever wants in. 

These leaders are right now creating and living in cultures of higher responsibility than mainstream culture. Find out yourself. Learn about and connect in with any of the 111,000 heretical organizations registered online at . 

EXPERIMENT: This experiment has 3 phases. 

 

PHASE 1: IDENTIFY YOUR LEADERS Your leaders are the people who open doors for you to expand into greater personal capacity. You have thought-leaders, action-leaders and life-leaders. Who has empowered you? Beware that a leader may not necessarily feel like a friend. This is because a leader is not motivated to act in ways that make them more popular. A leader says what needs to be heard, and persists until it changes the circumstances.

Perhaps you are empowered by your mother or father? A school teacher? An author? Explorer? Researcher? Filmmaker? Artist? Perhaps one of your leaders is a faraway blogger who just keeps delivering eye-opening text to you. Perhaps it is the person leading a weekly meeting or a training session that you attend. Is there a climate activist, poet, musician or performer who is a leader for you? Think about it. Who nurtures your heart, inspires your soul, brings clarity to your mind and stamina to your body over the long haul? Perhaps your partner is a leader for you? Or one of your siblings? List ten of your true leaders and how they inspire you.

PHASE 2: SUPPORT YOUR LEADERS Paying taxes supports politicians. They use half your tax money to buy weapons, subsidize corporate profits, and pay their own expenses. Figure out ways to support your leaders. 

Your first idea may be to donate money to your leaders’ projects. This is important, for sure, yet there are many other things you can do. For example, it is mind-boggling how many people derive enormous benefit from the work of a leader and yet never tell anyone else about it! They keep it secret! 

Stop hiding away your leaders! Make it a practice to tell short exciting stories about what you learned from a leader. More ideas? 

• If you have any bootlegged films, music or software throw away your collections and buy the real thing. This supports the creators you love. 
• Communicate with your leaders and write them public thank you notes. (e.g. Thank Leonardo DiCaprio for the way he died in Blood Diamond. Exclaim your gratitude for the brilliant life-joy and dynamic genius of Lana Wachowski's speach at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crHHycz7T_c. Tell Kosha Anja Joubert how masterfully she navigated the 2013 Global Ecovillage Network conference in Switzerland http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2YIcIqn5OI) 
• Participate in your leader’s classes and workshops. Buy their books, CDs and DVDs and give them to everybody you know for birthday or Christmas gifts. Your relatives might not read the books, but you never know who will come over and borrow them!
• Go online and blog about the work of your leaders. Explain what they are saying in your own words.
• Give five star ratings. Write radiantly vulnerable online endorsements. 
• Share links to their websites and blogs. 
• Build their legend. 

These small actions truly support your leaders. 

Go out of your way to take actions that support your leaders each day.

 

PHASE 3: EXPAND YOUR OWN LEADERSHIP Commit to yourself as a leader. For example, Patch Adams, the world-reknown humorous-human doctor, writes back to every single person who writes to him . Child or adult, any country, if you write a letter to Patch he writes back, personally, to you. That is commitment. 

Bring your own leadership to life by publicly sharing your vision of what is possible: write, talk, sing, dance, film, paint, journey, build, design, research, do what most inspires you to take responsibility for the well-being of all. Then connect with, support and motivate the people interested in what you are doing. Keep learning from and feeding your tribe. Yes, you can.

(NOTE: If you want free emailed SPARK experiments to play around with every 3 weeks write to Sonia Willaredt at the Next Culture Research & Training Center:  sonia@nextculture.org)

(S.P.A.R.K. stands for Specific Practical Applications of Radical Knowledge)

Best wishes,

Clinton

blog021 We Are The Nation Of Avaaz

I feel glad about www.avaaz.org. ("Avaaz" means "voice" in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages.)

Avaaz emerged as a global nation of collaborating activists in 2007 with a simple democratic mission: organize Earthlings to close the gap between the world we have, and the world most people everywhere want.

With a population of nearly 14,000,000 (fourteen million!!!) Avaaz has become the 68th largest nation in the world, larger than Cambodia. We are larger than Belgium, Greece, Portugal, Zimbabwe, Tunisia, Cuba, or Bolivia.

Let this sink in past your mind for a moment.

If you have registered with Avaaz and participated in an action, you are a citizen of Avaaz.

With which structure are you more aligned? Your land-based corporate-controlled mega-government? Or your value-based global communication meshwork of activists?

We will soon be bigger than Ecuador, Mali, or Guatemala.

I want an Avaaz global passport.

What is the purpose of our country of Avaaz? We are a nation of activists enabling responsible conscious actions. The purpose of Avaaz, if I dare say it, is initiation into authentic adulthood, something long ago excluded from modern culture. The cost of putting adolescents in positions of financial, military, religious, and political power now impacts all life forms on planet Earth.

Avaaz empowers people from all walks of life to take action on pressing global, regional and national issues, from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate change. We are helping each other to help each other. Our internet organising allows thousands of individual efforts, however small, to be rapidly combined into a powerful collective force.

[Avaaz is] "a transnational community that is more democratic, and could be more effective, than the United Nations."  -  Suddeutsche Zeitung

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Following is a letter I recently sent to Avaaz coordinators. It feels great just to have people to write such a letter to!

Dear Avaaz Team,

(and I stress the "Dear" part...)

Here are 3 questions:

1) It seems imperative that oil extraction from the Ecuadorian Amazon be FOREVER stopped, and oil companies punished and taken out of business for having already raped so much of the jungles and disrupted indigenous tribes and tropical ecologies. What stops Avaaz from maximizing action in Ecuador?

2) How can Avaaz empower people working in mainstream companies and the military and governments to simply quit their jobs, go home, and grow community gardens instead? Let's take the insane systems down. Please. For example, Avaaz can empower women to stop teaching their daughters to be slaves of the capitalistic patriarchal empire.The evolution could literally happen overnight when women say to their husbands: "Quit your job or you will never touch me again..." 

3) When does the Avaaz Global Homeschool for Sustainable Culture start? I want to be part of it.

Thank you so much for creating a global nation which gives the 99% some clout.

Clinton Callahan

blog017: Welcome To Archearchy

Not that it matters but Marion and I spent Christmas 2011 exploring the home town of my mother's ancestors: Prague.



Every bakery in Prague offered Vonocka. ("vanotchka")

What is Vonocka? A slightly sweet braided yeast bread often made with split almonds and bits of candied fruit.  

How does Vonocka taste? Mmmm!

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During the past four days here at Tempelhof twenty-eight men and women from Europe and the USA co-created what I regard as an astonishing Possibility Lab.

"This was the most amazing Lab of all!" Marion said. But then she added, "I notice I'm saying this after each Lab these days... I wonder what is happening..."  

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Definitely something is happening, also for me personally. Two weeks ago I wrote to our circle of friends: I woke up this morning feeling particularly happy. Why? Because, while I was alone at home in Tempelhof doing my annual liver cleanse procedure, Thomas and Anne Schmid were leading Expand The Box over in the Tempelhof training room, Michaela Kaiser and Daniel Nüsser were leading Expand The Box in Bielefeld, and Marion was off to Wertheim with fourteen other women having a Women’s Archearchy Research Weekend.

When I recognized what was happening I danced a little jig around the office. I was celebrating that human thoughtware was being significantly upgraded to radical responsibility in at least three different locations around Germany simultaneously this past weekend and I wasn’t doing any of it!

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On Sunday of the PLab, after being with the 27 other participants for four days, it came to me as a four-body experience that there are already enough Possibility Managers on planet Earth creating and sustaining the radically responsible context of an archearchal culture that it is self sustaining. It can now carry itself. Further unfolding of archearchy will occur under its own momentum.

(More about archearchy, the culture that emerges after patriarchy, can be found in the book Directing The Power Of Conscious Feelings, also in German under the title Die Kraft des Bewussten Fühlens.)

Possibility Making at a Possibility Lab

The basis for next culture has grown solid enough that I can get off my personal lone-ranger campaign that I’ve been riding all my life and actually be received into a culture that understands and accepts and respects the stuff I came here to deliver. There is a global team at work (Portugal, Nederlands, Switzerland, China, USA, France). You are probably on that team.

Up to now I had been working through radical reliance on a message from a Chinese restaurant fortune cookie:

Be patient. Your proposals will be remembered.

Thoughtmap for Opening Your Pearl

Now my (im)patience is being replaced by a novel experience: belonging.

I can simply be a person in this archearchal culture, in relationship, doing my work. I no longer have to function as the reality-hacking edgework-revolutionary often regarded in groups as a dangerous problem. 

In response to my Sunday afternoon realization the PLab participants performed an improvised nonverbal ritual of receiving me into archearchy.

The ritual began when I stepped into the center of the room, stretched out both my arms, closed my eyes, and waited. In seconds I was embraced wholly, without reservation, from feet to head, front, back, hands, face. I was warmly welcomed on all sides, and tears long restrained burst out with sobs of relief loud and long from deep within me. Man. It was wonderful. And it went on for a long time. Long enough for me to get it.

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A Welcoming To Archearchy

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Being welcomed inside of a culture after trekking in the wilderness for decades, sometimes lonely, sometimes lost, sometimes nearly hopeless, was quite close to unbelievable.

I had been on a seemingly endless self-appointed research expedition to formulate the language, distinctions, tools and processes at the core of archearchal culture. I was creating and documenting ways for others to cross bridges to get to sustainable adult culture too. For me to suddenly find that there are already enough people co-creating archearchy on a daily basis in their own lives in different places in the world, enough so that the culture won’t immediately vanish if I died, and to recognize the possibility of dropping my long-practiced survival ways of the outsider personality and to be welcomed in and received as one of the people in archearchy, this is quite an extraordinary and transformative experience. I highly recommend it. I am blown away, and very glad, and relieved, and excited about what comes next, and I thank everyone from the red pill of all four of my bodies for holding and navigating this process for me and for being part of the team. This was definitely one of my most important initiations.

Sunday was also my 60^th birthday. Just after the ritual of being received into next culture Marion took me by the hand and led everyone into a transformed dining room, the floor now carpeted with cushions, stirring music coming from a CD player, a table ablaze with 60 tea lights sitting within an infinity symbol created out of 28 cans of American Root Beer soda (which Marion had secretly collected) and five tubs of vanilla ice cream. I hadn't had this in over ten years. And there was enough that I could introduce everyone to personally experience the ambrosia that the gods of Gremlin food have named Root Beer Float!  I think you can believe me when I say this was the best birthday party I ever had in my life.

(The second best birthday was back in college when I was "kidnapped" by my friends and left naked in the middle of the night in a sleeping bag by a lake after being blindfolded and skinny dipping with and being kissed by one or more unknown women... but that's a story for another time.)

blog010 Thank You, Transition Towns!

Here is a communication close to my heart from Diana Leafe Christian who refers to herself as an "Earthaven Airspinner". I don't know what an airspinner is, but Earthaven is one of maybe six stable functioning ecovillages in north America. Diana's column is from Earthaven's Summer 2010 Newsletter.

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Thank You, Transition Towns!

The way I see it, Transition Towns (now called Transition Initiatives) are doing exactly what ecovillage activists always wanted folks to do.

Ecovillagers worldwide support local economies and/or create our own economies (sometimes using alternative currencies). We support local farmers and/or grow our own organic food. We generate our own electric power if we can. Similarly, Transition Towns (or islands, peninsulas, counties, or city neighborhoods) create their own local economies (often with alternative currencies), grow their own local food, and generate their own local power. The Transition Movement got started by applying Permaculture principles to social design. Likewise, most ecovillages, Earthaven included, are designed according to Permaculture principles.

Ecovillages and the Transition Movement are both involved with Permaculture. Here (in the photo) members of Source Farm Ecovillage in Jamaica are determining their site design, lead by Earthaven member and permaculture designer Chuck Marsh (on right).

Ecovillagers have been motivated over the last 20 years or so by hoping to make the world a better place. Similar to “putting your money where your mouth is,” we attempt to put our lifestyle where our values are. But our motivation has not been to prepare for Peak Oil and climate change, which most of us didn’t know about until a few years ago. We live this way because it seemed like the right thing to do.

Transition Town activists, on the other hand, are specifically responding to Peak Oil and climate change. Yet . . . their response is totally resonant with the values and lifestyles of ecovillagers. For example, here’s the vision of Transition US: “Every community . . . will have engaged its collective creativity to unleash an extraordinary and historic transition to a future beyond fossil fuels; a future that is more vibrant, abundant and resilient; one that is ultimately preferable to the present.” Well of course. That’s exactly what we want for the world too.

Transition Towns are seeking to live more sustainably: ecologically, economically, and socially. And ecovillages provide models — little pinpoints of sustainability in the broader mainstream culture — where Transition activists can come and see what living like this actually looks and feels like. In fact, you could say we are trying to inoculate the culture. Jonathan Dawson, past president of Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) and author of the book Ecovillages, writes, “Ecovillages can be likened to yogurt culture . . . small, dense, and rich concentrations of activity whose main aim is to transform the nature of that which surrounds them.”

Over 100 Transition Initiatives are up and running in the United States, and as of July, 2010, you’ll find 321 Transition Initiataives on six continents — and the movement only started in 2005! Websites on the Transition Movement exist in Portuguese, Danish, German, Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, and Japanese. Ecovillages also can be found on six continents, from Europe (which has the most number per population), to Latin America (especially Argentina and Brazil), Asia, New Zealand and Australia (which has plenty, mate), and a few in Africa. North America has relatively few ecovillages relative to our population: Earthaven is one of only about six well-developed ecovillages on the whole continent.

I’m an ecovillage activist: in my work I advocate ecovillages and present workshops on starting successful new ones. Yet I believe Transition Towns — not ecovillages — are more likely to rapidly spread ecological values and practices worldwide. In fact, the Transition Movement seems to be the fastest-growing social/ecological movement the world has ever seen. I say, “Hallelujah!” As someone who lives off the grid and deals with buckets of compost daily — and wishes everyone everywhere would do the same for the Earth — I certainly hope this is true!

Diana Leafe Christian is author of  Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community, and Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities. She teaches workshops on starting new ecovillages, serves as a consultant to existing ecovillages and other kinds of intentional communities, and speaks and conferences internationally. She is publisher of Ecovillages, a free online newsletter about ecovillages worldwide, and her monthly column about ecovillages appears on the homepage of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) website. Diana lives in Earthaven’s Forest Garden neighborhood.