I know why I want to blog and why I cherish this space on GEO for doing so. However, I struggle constantly to put it into words that speak it clearly. Here is my best effort up to now:
The world doesn’t work very well, at least not well enough. The reason why is not difficult to state: we as a species don’t know how to cooperate well enough to make it work well.
It seems to me that this is really important. Our fucking-up is getting to be too costly, maybe even too much for survival. Many of us know in our bones that this is basically true.
However, there is a bigger problem. We don’t really get that we have a big problem with cooperation. We don’t see how the ways we do things from relating to raising a family to working, etc. could be really different. We don’t because we don’t see the yawning gap between our enormous potential for cooperation and our actual performance.
In the early part of the 20th century a few physicists, maybe not even a hundred, realized that the physical world was far more than anyone had ever imagined it to be up to that time. They saw a yawning gap and it blew their minds. Realized that although common sense perception made sense, it also blinded us from seeing the ungraspable immensity of physical reality and its power. They realized that all of that was way beyond the scope of how we usually see and experience physical reality.
And everything changed from that moment on. Changed as more and more people saw the value of this new way of seeing physical reality and funded its research and development.
What a cooperative endeavor that has been! Except that we are also now being threatened with extinction because we cannot cooperate well enogh in using the wonders it has produced.
Well, out of my own personal experience I believe that human social reality is far more than any of us can ever imagine. Our learned ways of seeing, relating to, and experiencing each other blind us from seeing the immensity of our cooperative and loving reality and its power. And as much as we might understand intellectually that we can change our learned ways, we don’t get that this intellectual understanding is but a drop in the bucket for what is needed.
The point is to change the world, and to do that we have to become that change. Our political mission is a hugely spiritual mission of personal and collective transformation. More simply: learning to love.
And maybe the reason we don’t see the immensity of our potential for cooperation is precisely because it would change everything.
In any case, this is what my blogging is about.
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