One Earth One Humanity Stored Value Comprehensive Thinking
I have been working away at my first book, Beauty of Beginnings – 365 Days of Inspiration and Contemplation for a Syntropic World – curating the six years of daily musings. Today, I share a few of these, all written in the same week in late January and early February of 2021. I was going through a significant Syntropic download.
I hope you find them useful.
Synergy, syntropy and the urgent need for comprehensivists
No amount of examination of the explosive element Sodium, or the poisonous gas Chloride will determine that when we combine these two elements under the right conditions, we get Sodium Chloride, also known as salt, a harmless white powder we sprinkle on our food.
You can dissect a caterpillar in every possible way, and examine it under the most powerful microscope, but nothing will determine a butterfly.
Synergy, a term brought into the human lexicon by R. Buckminster Fuller, has been co-opted by people who have not taken the time to really understand its meaning.
The behaviour of the whole cannot be determined by examining the parts separately. We must start with Universe first. (The whole) R.Buckminster Fuller
Our obsession as humans with examining the parts, the Sodium, the Chloride, the caterpillar, comes at our own cost.
At this time in humanity’s history, we face problems that cannot be solved through tinkering with and examining the parts.
Our Climate issues require a whole system approach.
The domination of the big tech companies is a global issue. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution dictating free speech is only relevant to the USA, yet when a company such as Facebook or Google operate in every corner of our home planet, we need to begin to consider governance from the whole.
Given most global multi-national companies operate with almost unlimited rights or constraints, they now have more power than any state. Additionally, their sanctified remit to pay dividends to their shareholders is primary, and it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out we have an impending crisis that can only be solved through a synergistic response.
Taking this down to the personal level, a focus on the parts, our addiction to specialisation, niches, silos, and atomisation, has created an ill-equipped society when it comes to the ability to see the whole.
To be a comprehensivist – someone who has the capacity to see the whole, to step back and rather than see the elephant’s toenail, see the whole elephant, or even better, the elephant in the context of where it lives – is a rare skill, one that has been underrated.
Our sensemaking as humans, our education system, does not educate for whole systems comprehension. The machine industrial age has wanted compliance around speciality.
To be a comprehensivist, to work synergistically and syntropically, is the only way we can create a more beautiful world for Earth and all her creatures.
January 31st 2021
Back to Source
In our increasingly complex world, in our rush to keep up, to stay off the edge of precarity, to serve, to create…
It is easy to forget Source.
The Source of an idea, the seed, the first impulse, the start, the very beginning. The etymology of a word.
We want to jump onto the newest tech, like blockchain, and yet we fail to examine why we might want to remove human-to-human trust from a relationship. Why decentralisation is a value. What is currency?
In our reduction of most everything to a monetary price, we fail to ask…what is value?
Really, what is value?
What is money? Why was it designed? What is banking? Why was it designed? What is capital?
What is economy? Debt? Credit?
What is relationship? And transaction?
Or…what is soil? Do we connect to the Earth that holds us? Do we understand the very ground upon which we walk with such scant regard? Where does our food come from?
In the disconnect from Source, humans become increasingly fractured. The further from Source we go, the further from genuine nourishment we travel.
If we want to build a world that has a beautiful future, we might begin with a return to the difficult questions of examining Source.
When we add to Source the Evolutionary Purpose towards which we are heading, we create tension. That tension gives both directionality and shape.
Without this, a Source Idea is a cipher, a zero. It needs the direction and the tension to bring it into existence, held in the field of humans as steward leaders to the idea.
February 1st 2021
Stored value
Years spent learning, testing, failing…
What appears as nothing for so very long, an accumulation of invisible, weightless know-how and experience. Then suddenly, an event happens, a challenge lands, and out of seemingly nowhere, you pluck the answer, the strategy, the pathway.
So simple. So effortless.
Yet only possible given the years or decades that brought you to here.
We humans think stored value comes in such modalities as land/housing/physical assets.
These indicate your dollar buying power going down, and as such, from the whole system’s view, not really a valued leverage at all.
But to invest in the opportunities for accumulated invisible weightless knowledge and experience might give a real return on value.
Not on a human-constructed timeline. But almost certain to happen. It is called being in the right place at the right time. Kairos time.
How do we account for the value of this seemingly simple, effortless response? So often, we step over it.
Time instead to see it for what it is. Years or decades of application. Worthy of honouring.
This is one of the outcomes of Synergistic Accounting. To see and honour value in multiple domains, to recognise stored value.
February 2nd 2021
Everybody or nobody
“We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.” R.Buckminster Fuller
With every day, this statement gets harder to argue. A virus infects the world. AI and algorithms turn sense into mush, creating runaway conspiracy theories and lunatics running asylums called governments. Global corporations defy any border and do what they will, including skipping from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to avoid any form of contribution as tax, and any form of penalty for the consequence of exploitation and extraction. Supply chain dependencies break down communities. Our waste and rubbish cannot find a home in someone else’s backyard without contamination. Our addiction to fossils as energy is costing us all.
The old school makes the borders stronger. America First! Lost in some dinosauric theory that we are islands of nations separate from our Spaceship Earth. As if the liver of your body can exist on its own.
The weapon of propaganda is a proven one. Fear. Scarcity. Division. To keep conquered keep divided.
If we want a world with a future, we humans committed to a Syntropic World need to recognise when fear and scarcity kick in. To choose instead to turn 90 degrees and face the horizon we know offers possibility and well-being to Earth and all her creatures.
One Spaceship Earth, one common humanity. Everybody or nobody.
February 4th 2021
Unity is plural at minimum two
This is one of the generalised principles that form the core of the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, our mentor to Syntropic World.
The singularity, the one point, is a reductionist impulse that doesn’t exist in nature or Universe.
Polarity is a fundamental requirement of existence. Polarity creates tension and compression, dimension, and space.
A practical example.
You have an idea. It arrives from the field, the same field a word or thought arrives from. The idea, at the moment of arrival, has a Pattern Integrity, a set of unique qualities and particularities, values, and flavours…at the very point of arrival. This Pattern Integrity is essential for the idea to express itself in integrity, in whatever form that might eventuate.
It arrives for you, with these unique features. Your task, if you choose to accept it, is to create the ecology in which this idea might become fully manifest, expressing this unique Pattern Integrity. Not the shape or form you seek to impose upon it.
You are not the idea, and the idea is not you. You are the steward of the idea and its Pattern Integrity.
The idea is towards a purpose. It is not the purpose, for the purpose needs ways and means to bring it to life, and ways and means can exist in an infinite number of expressions.
Now, we have dimensionality.
We have the steward of the idea.
The idea itself. We call this the Source Idea to remember the moment of inception.
The Source Ideas Unique Pattern Integrity
The purpose towards which the expression of the idea moves. In Syntropic World this is the Evolutionary Purpose.
Within this dimensionality, others can convene, deeply intending to bring the Evolutionary Purpose to life, and able to work with the Steward of the Source Idea and its Pattern Integrity.
*We go into much greater detail on each of these elements during the Syntropic Enterprise Masterclass. Read more here. https://syntropic.world/masterclass/
February 8th 2021
