Our Collective Wisdom

Hiatus

I AM NOT DONE.... I SHALL PERSIST.... I SHALL RETURN
~ Alan Briskin
Talmudic Commentary: "Pshh, Big shot.  I'll believe it when I see it."

Dear Friends and Subscribers to Becoming Conscious of Capitalism,

When I first began writing, I sought to discover new perspectives about our social and economic arrangements called capitalism.

I wrote at the beginning:

"At a time when many voices are calling for a new form of conscious capitalism, this is a chance to step back and  consider where we have been and how we can best shape the future."

My intent then, as it is now, was to share my journey of exploration, to clarify, provoke, inform, and at times delight.

I now am entering another period of reflection and discovery, so there will be a hiatus regarding regular posts.  I will continue, through my blog The Power of Our Collective Wisdom, to send periodic musings, quotes, images, and notice of books and events unfolding. If you have not already done so, please subscribe to my blog and/or mailing list to be notified of postings.

We'll let you know when the series begins again.

Notes from the Field

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family:  Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.  ~ Jane Howard

One of the stories featured in The Power of Collective Wisdom is about the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants (CERI) in Oakland, California.  Co-founded by Mona Afary, the center has been a tribe and network for Cambodian refugees and their families, many of whom escaped from the brutal regime of Pol Pot and the killing fields.

Mona's initial inspiration for the center came from her observing that in the waiting room of her counseling office, a group of Cambodian clients and their families sat together talking and laughing, knitting together and trading stories.  The possibility for healing was in front of her, in the interconnected web of life and love.

Now, seven years since their founding, CERI has become a life force for the community.  This month, in celebration and gratitude, 49 members  of CERI's community packed into 4 vehicles and traveled to Lake Tahoe for a retreat.  With gratitude to the Devata Giving Circle and Asian Americans/ Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP), Mona Afary provides us with these Notes from the Field:

"This weekend was a beautiful gathering and a joyful opportunity for a group of the women members of the CERI mental health community to spend time together, eat, talk, laugh and explore the outdoor activities and natural beauty of the Tahoe area. After a laughter-filled drive from Oakland, we arrived in Lake Tahoe and enjoyed the vistas of the lake, the pine forests and fresh air. Though tired from the drive, everyone pulled together to shop and prepare a delicious dinner for the whole group, which was followed by an evening of dancing and karaoke singing. Laughter rang through the house. Insomnia, a symptom of Posttraumatic Disorder, that most of CERI’s clients struggle with became a blessing as they stayed up till the early hours of the morning, enjoying each other’s company.

The second day, everyone was up and ready early at 7:00 am in the morning, excited to explore the Tahoe area. After an hour of check-in where everyone shared her experiences of the previous day, we loaded into the vans and set off for a waterfall hike. The views of the forests, mountains and the lake were stunning. Even as we struggled to find parking for four large vehicles, we all enjoyed each other's company and the environment. Everyone made each moment such a joy. As the majority of the women at CERI struggle with arthritis and joint pain, Aya had chosen a short trail, which led us to waterfalls, where there was a beautiful opening in the river before the falls. Many people took off their shoes and waded in the water to cool off, having splashing fun. Some even went into the stream entirely! Others enjoyed the view and the fresh air, and laughter with friends. After the waterfalls, we headed to Pope Beach on Lake Tahoe for swimming. We first had a picnic lunch, and then whoever wanted to put on her swim suit tried the Tahoe water! Despite the cold water, everyone had a great time swimming and wading by the beach and playing in the water.

We returned to the house where everyone rested, took a walk in the neighborhood, prepared food or made jewelry, while the men barbequed beef and chicken and graciously served the women. Later, there was more dancing and karaoke, game playing, and lots of laughs! The entire weekend was a wonderful celebration of community, enjoying each others' company and exploring a new area. The love, kindness and respect with which everyone treated each other was truly inspiring. As we were leaving Tahoe, all talked about how much they enjoyed being together. The comment made by a large number of the women was that this weekend was the most joyful and memorable experience in their lives."

The Heart of Collective Wisdom

I will be speaking at the Unitarian Universalist Breakfast Forum in San Francisco on Sunday, March 11, 2012.

My topic is "The Heart of Collective Wisdom".

Come join me!
Martin Luther King Jr. Room
First Unitarian Universalist Church
1187 Franklin St. at Geary
 
Breakfast begins at 9:30, program begins at 9:45 and ends at 11:00
 

WISDOM EMERGING

WISDOM EMERGING:
Finding the Intersection of Leadership,
Spirituality and Courageous Action
with Alan Briskin, Lauren Artress and Angeles Arrien

January 26-29, 2012
Earthrise, Petaluma
Register Now for early bird rates
Download the Brochure

 I'm excited to tell you about a four-day workshop I'm co-presenting with Lauren Artress and special guest Angeles Arrien called Wisdom Emerging: Finding the Intersection of Leadership, Spirituality and Courageous Action. Jan 26-29, 2012, at Earthrise in Petaluma. REGISTER NOW for early bird rates.

For the past two years Lauren and I have been outlining ideas for a workshop that would reflect our belief that this is a critical time in human history for groups to develop new visions of the future, and bring together our work on collective wisdom.  We are delighted that our friend Angeles Arrien, who is also a key contributor to the collective wisdom field, has agreed to join us as a guest presenter.  

Collective Collapse: It Takes A Village To Implode

Robert Moffat, senior vice president of IBM systems and technology group, was recently arrested by the FBI for conspiracy involving insider trading. The arrest sent shock ways through Wall Street exposing illicit, back channel dealings between prominent high tech executives and hedge fund managers. My information comes directly from Fortune Magazine, also seemingly shocked by it all, and reminding me of the policeman character in Casablanca played by Claude Rains who closes Rick’s Café by telling Humphrey Bogart, “I’m shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on here.”

Robert Moffat apparently was a hard working and respected executive considered a potential successor for CEO at IBM. The Fortune article describes him as a numbers cruncher, former Eagle Scout, and a man weighing in at 6-foot-2 and 265 pounds – a solid guy on all fronts. He had become sexually involved with a woman who worked for a hedge fund and she was quoted saying that trading business information was for her “like an orgasm.” The tale becomes more complicated as she was in love with her married hedge fund boss but it didn’t work out. Shocking.

One of Moffat’s attorney colleagues summed it up best: “There was no planet on which I could have understood what was being said about Bob. I just shut down.”

So we have insider trading among millionaires and billionaires, an Eagle Scout who seems to have it all risking everything, a woman who finds stimulation rubbing shoulders (at least) with powerful men, and another man who simply cannot comprehend how a straight shooter like Bob could go wrong. Well, there certainly is a lot to be shocked about. What we have here is a collective collapse. Most disturbing to me is the notion expressed by Bob’s colleague that he knows of no planet to understand what happened?

Aimless Wandering

Recently my colleague Barbara Nussbaum, who lives in Franschhoek, South Africa, coauthored a book on uBuntu, an African based spiritual philosophy of life which recognizes that we are not independent beings so much as the co-creations of our relationships, especially those in which there is love and caring.

She asked my thoughts on strategies for marketing the new book:

"How do you create opportunities for visibility? What strategies work for you? With thanks, always.

And this is what I wrote her:

"--------------- To create visibility, I walk around aimlessly and staple pictures of myself on vacant lots.

Recently, I've been reconsidering the strategy.

--- In some cases, I've given out copies of our book as door prizes for non profit organizations or provided them to radio shows like New Dimensions Radio as part of membership drives. We've given books to selected people like yourself who we believe will "find" the right people.

Personally, I've done numerous radio shows and given talks at churches, universities, non profits and other gatherings.

More personally, I carry a few books with me to events and when I meet someone I think would feel gifted by it, I make a personal gift of it. Visibility is not about the naked marketing of a product or service but a way of joining with others, creating community, making visible common values and aspirations. It's showing up in the full sense and hopefully without the baggage of feeling self conscious about it.

----------- But walking around aimlessly, for me, is still the most natural."

And Barbara wrote back:

"Thanks for making me laugh out loud! And for your wisdom,! I walked around aimlessly in the local pub and ran into Ugly Betty’s boss, Daniel Meade, played by actor Eric Mabius who is here in Franschhoek, doing a movie shoot."

You see, it’s not that hard.

Chapter Fifteen, Part Three

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A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today's headlines. 

Chapter Fifteen
Moving from Factions to the Whole: Paying Attention in New Ways
Part III: Social Perspectives
Time Range: 1811, Current Times

FLASH POINT

"If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object; but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check."
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Duane, 1811
 

Social Perspective: How Inequality Gets Under Our Skin
What societal pattern might connect a heightened sense of mistrust, poor health, violence, diminished life expectancy, and low job status? If you guessed social and economic inequality, then we are beginning to think collectively together. But why? Why should this be the case? We would need to explore the multiple interlocking factors that determine and influence the frequency and distribution of this kind of pattern. We would need epidemiologists willing to use their training to identify the root causes of illness and other health-related events in social and economic circumstances, unrelated to any particular economic theory or ideology.

Remarkably, this is exactly what epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett set out to do in their book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. With mind-numbing charts, diagrams, and statistical comparisons, these two professors documented why, by virtually every measure of well-being, the distribution of wealth far outweighs the importance of overall wealth in a community, region, or nation. Boiled down to its core, the results of these studies demonstrate how social and economic factions fracture the whole and make it worse off for everyone.

How so?

Social and economic inequality creates exaggerated differences in social standing, and social standing — our place in groups — has a dramatic influence on our health, intelligence, well-being, and positive images of the future. Here are three dramatic examples from animal and human studies drawn from Wilkinson and Pickett's work:

HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show "more of what's there".

Chapter Twelve

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A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today's headlines. 

Chapter Twelve
Occupy Wall Street
Time Range: September 17, 2011

FLASH POINTS

“[T]he American working class had accumulated a level of debt that was unsustainable. People could not make payments. They were exhausted: exhausted financially, exhausted physically by all the work, and exhausted psychologically because the family had been torn apart by everyone working.”
~ Richard Wolff, interview in The Sun, February 2012


“I have a feeling that right now, this human experiment on planet Earth is hitting the wall!”
~ Kalle Lasn, Estonian-born former adman lamenting the environmental and psychological costs of modern capitalism. He suggested in his magazine, Adbusters, that a September 17 occupation of Wall Street might be a good idea.

Some ideas just seem to catch on. The Occupy Wall Street movement began more as a sentiment than a plan, but that didn’t inhibit the national media from holding its collective breath waiting for demands. Somehow income inequality, the increasing concentration of wealth, and the effects of problematic externalities fostered by corporate persons never rose to the threshold of news. Certainly an annual piece on rising CEO pay or some poor neighborhood protesting corporate pollution might appear in newspapers, but these things were isolated from any larger context. Suddenly, and with just a slight reframing, Occupy Wall Street was rebranding our economic institutions as unjust, especially financial and insurance companies seemingly impervious to the havoc they helped wreak.

I imagine some of the financial analysts and brokers heading to work on September 17th wondered who these troublemakers were. Couldn’t this protest just be a new bunch of whiners and complainers, as if the ghosts of the Red Lion Pub had decided to go outside for a picnic? Yet the movement’s slogan, “We are the 99%” had a certain ring to it.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show "more of what's there".

Chapter Seven, Part One

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A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today's headlines. 

Chapter Seven, Part One
How Wealth Became Concentrated and the Poor Were to Blame: “Paupers are Everywhere”
1962

"Paupers are everywhere.”
~ Complaint heard from Queen Elizabeth, late 16th century, after returning from travels in the English countryside.

Michael Harrington, political activist, socialist, and professor of political science at Queens College, was no Queen Elizabeth, but his research on poverty came to the same conclusion. As he wrote in his book The Other America, he was horrified to find that 40 to 50 million Americans lived in poverty, a fifth to a quarter of the entire US population in 1962. Where were they hiding?

He believed that a subtle shift had taken place in the psychology and culture of poverty. Whereas the tenements of the early 20th century were seething with a mixture of races and immigrants, there was enough diversity of intelligence, backgrounds, and aspirations to create a modicum of hope and vitality. There was poverty, disease, and poor housing in the past, but they were circumstantial obstacles to be overcome in a country that could provide social mobility and the promise of riches. Something about the very nature of poverty had changed from these historical antecedents.

My father and mother were never rich, but through hard work and frugality they found a way to make a living and see that their children might have more education than they did. There was hope for a better future. In the ’30s, when my parents were teenagers, the context for poverty was the Depression, and it gave them a collective sense of shared hardship and sacrifice. Poverty was a marker not so much of the person as of the times, a condition of society. The poor, which included tens of millions on low wages, had more of a voice politically and were not necessarily stigmatized by their circumstances. The 1930s were also a turning point for unions, which were able to flex their collective muscle and found themselves, just as Marx predicted, able to aggressively pursue their members’ own economic self-interest relative to wages and work rules. 

HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show "more of what's there".

Chapter Three

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A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today's headlines. 

Chapter Three:
Ghosts of Past, Present, and Yet to Come
Time Range: 1911, 2011-12

Would not progress and economic growth lift all ships? Rather than economic cycles leading to greater economic division and social fragmentation, would there not transpire higher levels of educational attainment, greater entrepreneurial opportunities, and increased social mobility? In time, isn’t it logical to think that an investment class would value knowledge and motivation for its workers, leading to better working conditions, not worse? How could it be otherwise? With time, progress would surely come.

Like the ghosts of Past, Present, and Yet to Come in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, recently published as Marx trekked his way toward the Red Lion Pub, Marx’s portrait of the rich and poor tweaks the imagination and conscience. With little sentimentality, he predicted that society would repeat a pattern of boom and bust, with causalities counted, surprise voiced, and renewed commitment to the same pattern over and over again.  His writings suggested that we would all be caught in a matrix of exploitation and protest already calculated into the design, until the final act — Judgment Day. Is it true? Are we simply trapped in a version of the movie Jerry Maguire, with the Cuba Gooding Jr. character shouting, “Show me the money!”?

HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show "more of what's there".

   

FLASH POINT
New York City, March 15, 1911

 In the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, 146 garment workers died. The doors and stairwells to the exits had been locked to prevent theft and employees’ taking unauthorized breaks. Most of the workers who died were Italian and Jewish immigrants aged 16 to 23. Many died leaping from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors.
 

In the 20th century, with the exception of one other fire and the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, it was the deadliest disaster in New York City's history.

There were no eight-leaved clovers here, only actual working people. The fire stirred public outrage and forced city agencies to initiate safety reforms. The devastation also stimulated the growth of the International Ladies’ Garment Union in their efforts to battle sweatshop conditions.