In Australia it is midwinter. In my part of the world midwinter is mild, with endless cloudless blue skies punctuated by fresh mornings. In many places our winter would be another’s summer.
Winter is that time for hibernation. Catching up on sleep. Eating hearty food. Snuggling.
It is also a time for projects. Foundations being laid. The steady and quiet building and design of the next stage of your enterprise.
Show me an MBA program or business 1-0-1 that speaks of the cycles of business, life and nature as working in partnership? Our human arrogance largely ignores nature’s cycles, with the exception of the summer holidays.
Added to this our economic model ignores human cycles. It was built on the industrial model of machines, including humans as machines. Some countries implement time off for pregnancy, birth, parenting. Most expect humans to be on for all but 2 to 6 weeks of the year, regardless of circumstances.
We certainly expect the business to be on 24/7, 52 weeks of the year.
Everything is designed around this. Keeping people on the treadmill of debt, constantly having to work as a machine just to exist. The only exception are those who have accumulated stored money, which gives them access to better deals, and hence more stored money.
There is often a righteous superiority of those who have accumulated stored money considering those who have not as lazy, or worse, refusing to consider that our systems are designed to keep the majority in poverty.
Every model of great amounts of accumulated money can be correlated with some form of exploitation, extraction, colonisation, feudalism. Off the backs of many. Jeff Bezos made $1.13 billion on the day he went to space. The same amount as 36,000 full-time warehouse workers will make combined, all year. He also paid the lowest tax rate of any one of those 36,000 workers.
We call this success!
When we look at the whole system of economy we can see the fractures. Mental health, family breakdown, domestic violence, addiction. The devastated environment. Creature extinction.
While there is no guarantee that supporting more natural cycles of human existence might reduce these things, perhaps it is time we experimented?
Imagine if we placed the following core principles at the centre of all we do, in all our enterprises and government agencies.
Every creature has intrinsic value.
Every creature has a contribution to make to the whole.
The question then becomes “How do we create ecologies that support every human’s value expression and contribution?”
Answering this question from the two suppositions requires a whole different way of thinking, acting and designing.
We might throw away the clock. 40 hour work week! Clock on, clock off. We might explore the division of work time, play time. We might also explore the whole idea of ‘having a job,’ as if this is the answer to success.
We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everyone has to be employed at some sort of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. Buckminster Fuller
If I propose a world where people have not just their basic income needs to be met, an adequate UBI (or Universal Syntropic Income), they also have access to excellent health care, aged care, child care and education at zero financial cost; where we get time and space to birth and raise children as if this was as important a role as any, and where we bring our unique skills to work and purpose that actually adds real value to all, and the future; what thoughts arise for you when I suggest this as a possibility?
Some of the usual ones?
How will we pay for this?
What about the lazy people?
This is impossible!
This is socialism (or some other ‘ism’)
Sounds great, but how to create this?
How do we get people to do all the sh*t jobs?
I do not have all or many answers to how we do this. Yet I understand the power of the question.
“How do we create ecologies that support every human’s value expression and contribution?”
If we are not asking this question as a central question of our civic society, our governments, our entrepreneurs and leaders, then why not?
Included in these ecologies are the opportunity for nature’s cycles to be honoured again, as they have been by indigenous communities. Our divorce from nature’s cycles has inflicted upon us the disease of Wetiko. A rapacious greed that assumes an endless supply of nature’s bounty, and cares not an ounce about the future.
When I look at my friend I do not see a machine. Or a number. Or a resource.
I see life, aliveness, beauty, humanity, possibility, desire to give, desire to express.
Like my friend, I know I am better at making a contribution if I am well-rested, nourished of food, soul and heart, given access to education and knowledge that ensures my equal participation, not terrified of being unable to meet my immediate needs, seen as worthy and offering value…
I can go really hard on a project for a short period of time before I need to rest. To replenish. I can work with others when there is a ground of mutual respect and opportunity for clean clear communication. I will show up with more brilliance when my children are safe and cared for, when I get time to parent.
We have such mythology running that we must work a minimum 40 hour week, week in, week out. That we must work. That if we do not, we are not worthy.
We have some mythology running that our work determines our worth. Our bank account is a reflection of our contribution, value, smarts.
Bucky Fuller wrote about obnoxico…what David Graeber calls BullSh*t Jobs.
We get caught in the spell of space flight, or unicorns. The rich and famous. Celebrity.
We worship on the altar of innovation.
Yet where are those thinking about the very systems and ground we walk upon. The ‘machine’ that got us here. Our water to our fish.
At Syntropic World we dare to ask the questions…how do we create the ecologies that enable humans, all humans, to gift their uniqueness to things that actually matter to others and a world with a future? How do we enable human coordination that considers how to create these ecologies? How to create new models that make the existing obsolete? How to be sure humans as nature partner with their nature to live in nature? All the while progressing to higher orders of capacity, capability and awareness?
In this winter season in Australia I am sleeping more through the longer nights, dreaming more, and building the architecture to support the summer season. Not rushed. No pressure. No clock ticking. A natural rhythm and partnership with movement, progress and enough.
My mentor of my adult life, Bucky Fuller, set out to demonstrate through his life that when we do what is spontaneously arousable from within for the highest good for the highest number of people, Universe would provide. Our needs would be taken care of. To trust this is true requires a deep and enduring partnership to the weightless immeasurable patterns that govern Universe. That level of attenuation is rarely seen as a leadership quality.
Yet those who listen to the way the wind moves, to the sounds of the water on the hull, our celestial navigators of past times, and our Syntropic navigators of present time, might have skills the world desperately needs now.
Enterprise that refuses to separate from nature, refuses to have dominion over nature, instead choose to apply how nature works to how we humans work together.
This is our question, and our challenge. Not a return to an indigenous past, rather a unification of our extraordinary capacity as human minds working together synergistically and the indigenous wisdom, together weaving a way forward that enables a syntropic existence for earth and all her creatures.
