This page is part of the archives of the IshCon.org discussion forums, as they existed from November 2002 to January 2007. Some links and other content references may be outdated or broken. For more information about IshCon, visit www.ishcon.org.
Topic: An old promise
Part of the forum "Dialog Cafe" in the IshCon Forum Archive
| Poster and Date | Post |
| Ghost Sat Jun 17th, 2006 at 03:09 PM |
Hey, Janene. "Back in the day, Janene," wrote: Hey Matt -- You snuck in on me On Vision: Would you say that you agree with the statement that Vision is the core of what we believe about the world and our place in it? I am assuming you would based on everything we've talked about over the years. Now, I guess the best way to get at what I'm trying to find out from you is to explain the 'upper level' of how I think this works. Quinn talked about our Story almost as much as he talked about vision. I think that a persons, or a cultures, vision is the moral of the story, so to speak. Here is our story of how things got to be this way. Since this is how things came to be, this must be the way we relate to the world. Does that make sense to you? So the next question is where does the story itself come from? Well, I would say that it is an amalgamation of histories and mythologies and daily life: both life here and now, and life as related to us by our elders (ie personal histories). This is why I don't see vision as a choice... not to say that you cannot choose to see the world differently when you learn something new. We here are evidence that you can make a conscious choice, but only once you question and revise the story behind it. Evolutionarily speaking, leavers ARE leavers, because that is the only story they have ever known. But takers abandoned the leaver story and vision. Why? Because the story of how things came to be this way no longer fit thier experiance. Because thier ancestors had introduced new themes and possibilities to choose from -- by thier actions and thier experiances. But when you say that they changed thier vision FIRST, then I want to know where vision comes from. Because the story cannot change from the only story we have ever known INTO something else until AFTER the histories, mythos and life lessons have changed. And this takes time... and it takes action -- the act of living in a different story. I'm hoping that this will let you know where I am coming from... if you have a different view of the relationship of story and vision, let me have it... or perhaps you have a completely different take altogether. That's what I want to know. Janene I fear that I may have made an error of significant magnitude. I have feared this for some time and have tried to avoid it; however, I think that the day of reckoning has finally arrived. I can hide from it no longer. It's funny. I realised some time ago that I may have mixed the meanings of vision and story. At the last IshCon (let's hope that refers to temporal positioning rather than permanence) I asked Quinn himself about the relationship between story and vision. He didn't have a very good answer. I chalk it up to a poor question. Nonetheless, it is time for me to purge myself and admit that I was wrong. What is my crime? Saying that vision and story are the same thing. For years, I've been selling the Theory of Vision, which states: Quote: -Humans form societies as a survival strategy -The society adopts a vision -The vision gives rise to a primary goal -The society naturally gravitates towards a lifestyle that facilitates the enactment of its goal -Through the evolution of activities within the framework of a lifestyle, a culture is formed -Programs are adopted as needed to fix an ailing system or culture and are reactionary -The alteration of any step in the chain will irrevocably change everything in the chain that follows that step Man oh man, has this idea caused problems. It's one of the CENTRAL rifts in the never ending great Godesky-Kabwe divide. One of the things that I've tried to do is to incorporate the Berkley model of infrastructure, structure, superstructure, that Jason loves. He's been leuke warm to the idea. The big sticking point for everyone has been, "how the heck does vision come so early?" Here it is. A reversal of some significance... IT DOESN'T. That feels good. I realise what my misunderstanding was. I have failed in three chief ways. My first failure has to do with vision and story. In Ishmael, Quinn said "First definition: story. A story is a scenario interrelating man, the world and the gods…" A story explains "…how things came to be this way." For Takers, we came to this point because "the world was made for man to conquer and rule and under man's rule it is to become a paradise; unfortunately, man was born flawed." This story explains why everything is the way that it is. For Leavers, we came to this point because "there is no one right way to live." More importantly, he spoke of PREMISE. -Taker premise = The world belongs to man -Leaver premise = Man belongs to the world The story explains why. It is an answer. The premise explains the story. It is a reason. These are the things that I tried to get at previously. The premise constitutes the FOUNDATION of every society. Quinn said something that I've never agreed with: "Second definition: to enact. To enact a story is to live so as to make the story a reality. In other words, to enact a story is to strive to make it come true…" In my book, I pointed out that you can't enact "there is no one right way to live." You have to follow the causal throughline from premise to story to goal. If we belong to the world and if there is no one right way to live, then we should live in accord with the law of life. If the world belongs to us and the world was made for man to conquer and rule and under man's rule it is to become a paradise; unfortunately, man was born flawed, then we should conquer the world. Vision is not these things. "Vision is to culutre what gravity is to matter." - Beyond Civilisation. Vision has to do with the spread of CULTURE. More on that later. My second failure has to do with the terms society and culture. A society is a group of humans like a pack is a group of wolves. "Third definition: culture. A culture is a people enacting a story." - Ishmael So yeah, I'd say that a culture is a people enacting a goal, but that's nit-picking. Each civilisation is it's own society. When you look at the elements that make up the structure, all CIVILISATIONS are the exact same structurally (with some minor cosmetic differences like capitalism or communism, democracy or theorcacy). At the very least, they're all cousins or "twins of the same birth". Civilisations are only different CULTURALLY. The Maya civilisation is not OUR civilisation. It's not a OUR civilisation because it is different CULTURALLY. Culturally, they lacked one thing, a single meme. Which meme? That civilisation should not be abandoned at any cost. OUR culture has that meme. And it's OUR culture that has taken over the world. OUR culture spread to every last civilisation either by transmission or by force. OUR culture is the only one left. To paraphrase Quinn, "all civilisations have become synonymous (or conflated) with OUR civilisaiton". When Quinn speaks of the signs that denote OUR culture, he isn't speaking about civilisation, or Takers, but OUR civilisaitonal Taker culture. It is OUR culture that has the meme "ours is the one right way to live and everyone should be made to live like us". There are many offspring from OUR culture. The Americans, the Dutch, the Persians, the Greeks, the Chinese, Coca-Cola, the Catholic Church... They're all cultural cousins, children of the same birth. They have the same structure, the same memes. What is the difference? Their visions. Their visions are slightly different but all ultimately cut from the same cultural and memetic cloth. So all of our great revolutions have all lived in the superstructural realm. The structural table has never been altered. Not once. My third failure is in how I approached my Theory of Vision. To say that one LEADS to another is itself misleading. It implies that the theory is a road map of how civilisations develop. That was never the intention. The intention was always to demonstrate which elements were slave to which elements. It's intention was to illustrate how change either succeeds or fails. So to begin, I will no longer say that X LEADS to Y but that rather Y is SLAVE to X. To use the Berkley meataphore, X is a table. Y, another table, whatever shape it takes, must fit on the table below it. If table X changes, then table Y may be forced to change. So... to try to rewrite the Theory of Vision, which should be renamed... perhaps 'Matt's Take on Cultural Materialism': Infrastructure sets the realm of the possible. It is essentially, what is there. It includes: -Natural physical -Artificial physical -Genetic Structure is how the species organises it's attempts to make a living. It includes: -Premise -Goal -Strategy -Lifestlye Superstructure is the cultural beliefs of a given society. It includes: -Cultural beliefs and practices -Memeplex -Vision The point is that none of these things nececarily lead to others. How could artificial infrastructure, like a highway, lead to a lifestyle without first being built by a people making their living? It can't. But it's presence will affect how that society CAN make their living. It is not a bottom up model. It is a dynamic one. Still some things are slave to others. For instance. Genetically, as you said so nicely in the edit of the book, Humans form societies as a biological ESS. So whatever comes in the structure is slave to that. We can't NOT form societies. So all of our lifestyle choices will be society based. That can only be changed by breeding that trait out of the species. A forest will dictate many things. But we can clear cut it. That new barren landscape will dictate things to the same degree. A cultural belief, like cows being sacred, will affect the source lifestyle. It is IRRELEVANT which came first and in which case. That's for investigators and speculators to debate. What IS relevant to us right now is THAT these things interract and HOW they interact. Our goal is change. If we understand how these elements interract, we can achieve that goal. Without the infrastructure to support it, civilisation is impossible. That's what the Peak Oil debate is all about. When that collapse occurs, will there be enough infrastructure left to support civilisaiton? But infrastructure does not dictate how a society SHOULD organise itself, merely how it CAN organise itself. Genetically, we must form a society, but the FOUNDATION of every society is the PREMISE. That one nugget influences every aspect of a given society. So when we talk about mind change, this is what we speak of. By changing our premise, by believing that we belong to the world, we simply MUST alter everything else that is slave to that. Any change that does not address the premise will fail to solve the problem because failure to alter the premise means failure to alter the structure. "Robert M. Pirsig" wrote: If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. If we change the premise, we will find ourselves in another story. I really hope you could follow along. My head is swimming a bit. I don't think I have it exactly right, but I think I've managed to put us on the same page. Let's talk about this. Peace and Love and Empathy, Matt |
| memeshredder Sat Jun 17th, 2006 at 11:29 PM |
Is it a story-story the minute you begin to enact it, or does it have to be passed down first before it passes the cultural litmus test? I think that our culture of rebellion is based on the fact that generations have continuously rejected the story that was passed down to them, but not having realized the associated psychology and mental archetypes involved, do re-initiate themselves back into the same story they begna with. And so part of our story included rebellion as a central theme because over the 10,000 years it has re-inforced the TA story. The back to the land movement in the 70's was the best thing that ever happened to the Maine tax base, as an anectdote to support my thesis. So as we face the challenge of re-writting the story, and because of living in an Information Age, we are slightly better equipped, but yet still, many of us are attached to the concept of "incremental change" which is why Semetic Civilization has survived 10,000 years, and other civilizations survived for much less longer... Dramatic change, such as the Renaissance, The Sacking of Rome, and the Internet still reinforced the story, albeit in new ways. However, I believe that the incremental change over 10,000 years has given us this vast toolbox in which we can create a new story to be in. Some have heard of est, some have heard of Landmark education. Remember when I was trying to explain at Ishcon 2002? the difference between the "story" and "what actually happened" and how that technology of the mind is key to this movement, only to fail given the single objection by someone who didn't like Sharpies and Easels(damn hippies)? Perhaps, had I been given the chance to finish, many things would have turned out differently, and this post re-ignites in a unigque and more organic waywhat I was attempting to accomplish as the opening activity of that Ishcon. So kudos to you, I hope I have been able to be constructive in this conversation, and I very much am looking forward to this particular journey,. |
| Nene Tue Jun 20th, 2006 at 09:12 AM |
Hey Matt -- Beautiful. Yes, I think we are starting to come together on this... but I just got back to town so give me a day or two to get my thoughts together. Nene |
| This page is part of the archives of the IshCon.org discussion forums, as they existed from November 2002 to January 2007. Some links and other content references may be outdated or broken. For more information about IshCon, visit www.ishcon.org. |