Hmm, this is interesting - some reflections on how the mediaeval system of guilds assisted in the local economics of the pre-global age:

"Thus in a restricted market where specialization is limited, a free market in which prices are set by supply and demand, and there are no barriers to entry, can make it impossible for many useful specialties to be economically viable at all. This is the problem that the guild system evolved to counter. By restricting the number of people who could enter any given trade, the guilds made sure that the income earned by master craftsmen was high enough to allow them to produce specialty products that were not needed in large enough quantities to provide a full time income. Since most of the money earned by a master craftsman was spent in the town and surrounding region – our blacksmith and his family would have needed bread from the baker, groceries from the grocer, meat from the butcher, and so on – the higher prices evened out; since nearly everyone in town was charging guild prices and earning guild incomes, no one was unfairly penalized."

from How relocalization worked, which has a lot more on this topic if you are interested. Well worth considering as I am engaged in trying to rebuild local economy. I am looking at getting folks to mutually agree an obligation to trade with each other as first choice, with the aim that everyone has a sideline and gets helped to make it work, or something.

JMG weighs in on The Occupy Movement.

& in the comments of that post, check this beauty out:

This past week, I had a conversation in the warmth and light of a rare mid-autumn mid-day without students. I've had no school for four days due to this Octoblizzard or Snowvember that knocked out power lines all over Connecticut and left school and home without power. A large number of my contemplations originally revolved around heat and light. Once I realized I wasn't getting them back any time soon, I stopped worrying about that, and started thinking about food and neighbors. As a result, I met a good many of my neighbors over backyard barbecues and impromptu lunches in the cold, as we got used to wearing our gloves and hats at the kitchen table. I made two grocery trips to towns that had working supermarkets, to bring back food for me and some of my neighbors.

Anyway, this conversation on the porch: one woman said she really wanted to go down and join the protestors on ccupy Wall Street, but something prevented her. When I and my neighbors asked her what was on her mind, it became clear that she didn't fear violence, and she didn't fear being injured. She feared being used. She was able to see, as clearly as this post made me see (and as I saw when she articulated it), that she'd felt conned into taking student loans she now couldn't afford, and conned into taking a series of bad paying jobs hat left her with no money to start her own business, and conned into giving up her dreams of being a nurse practitioner for something 'more practical' because it would pay someone else's bill on her mental training. The idea that her energy — her money, her time, her devotion to THE CAUSE — would only serve to put a different set of frauds in charge, galled her tremendously. "It's much better to be here, talking to my neighbors, figuring out what to do the next time the power goes off," she said. Which is what we did.

Another person on the porch had chosen to come back to his cold, dark apartment because he'd gone to a friend's house for heat and light and warmth... only to discover that his friends were using their time off from work, and the blessings of available energy, to play multi-player video games and watch hours of weird TV. "One of the folks there," he said, "has a nearly-failing business, and is about to have his house foreclosed on, maybe; but it's easier for him to use his leadership and management skills in an invented digital world to use a graphical interface to shift random numbers around in a spreadsheet and a database." He came home. His food and apartment was cold, but his mind was on fire.

That's a boot to the crotch to reevaluate one's life.

Yes indeed. You, me, and a few others - hell yes, why wouldn't I use a prompt to move in the direction of a real response to our shared predicament? Thousands more - severly aversive. Oh well! We shall have stew tonight.

Good stuffs on JMG today, about the inner/magical dimension to the predicament, and adroitly handling the nonrational drives that led to it.

"Seen from another perspective, though, these practical steps also have a magical dimension: they serve to bring the changes in consciousness we’ve been discussing for the last two months all the way down into the world of everyday life. To complete the task of breaking away from the murky thinking and the tangled nonrational drives that dominate contemporary life in today’s America, it’s necessary to break away from the lifestyles and everyday choices that are produced by that thinking and those drives. Mind you, the same equation works the other way around: to make the break away from lifestyles that demand energy and resource flows we can’t count on getting for much longer—and making that break is perhaps the most essential task of the decade or so immediately before us—it’s going to be necessary to turn away from the thinking patterns and the unmentioned and usually unnoticed passions that make those lifestyles seem to make sense.

The recognition that these two transformations, the outer and the inner, work in parallel and have to be carried out together is the missing piece that the sustainability movements of the Seventies never quite caught."

This stuff is a big deal for me as I grew up in a family that was doing a lot of this appropriate tech stuff, inspired by Schumacher and Quaker ideals, but I have seen my folks get burned by the contempt with which people who were living that stuff were subjected to. JMG has a comment, presumably from how he and people he know weathered the last backlash against the sustainable life movement:

"... any movement faced with a backlash of that kind can accept its short term losses, renew its commitments to its values and vision, keep on going straight through the initial waves of negative publicity, and carve out a niche from which it can’t be dislodged, and pursue a long-range strategy, knowing that the tide will eventually turn its way. "

This links into stuff we've been talking about in the Permaculture thread about bringing social justice awareness into the heart of permie projects - I think that is linked to finding a niche from which we can't be dislodged. If we are genuinely meeting people where they are at and exchanging ideas and skills we can all put into action to meet our real needs creatively, that is a strong foundation. Helping each other find warm clothes, cheap nutritious food, craft skills that give more independence - that gives us a strong position.

This is extremely difficult for me; maybe I'm more suggestible than other people, but it really hits me hard when I get scornful or dismissive messages about my ideas around right living (even when they are not directed at me or my ideas specifically).  Something I have to take the most elaborate care over is not resorting to dehumanization; writing off those who are on the attacking side as somehow lesser.  You can choose not to engage, to withdraw energies, but as soon as you start dismissing other people as being of lower worth you've already lost the fight...

I agree. I find myself deeply committed to working from and with the energy of love. I know I could get stuff done in my life that I would quite like to see by using hatred or disdain, but I am interested to see whether it is possible to achieve the results I want without having to use that kind of energy at all.

I also feel that I may be abnormally sensitive to the scorn and dismissal of others. I think it is part of being on a spectrum between dismissing others and taking their ideas on wholesale - I need to feel that I am open to reconsidering my opinions. I hope we can (continue to) support each other in following our best idea of the truth and building a half-decent future to live in?

I know I could get stuff done in my life that I would quite like to see by using hatred or disdain, but I am interested to see whether it is possible to achieve the results I want without having to use that kind of energy at all. 

Well right! It's been a gradual realization for me, that for many people the inner aspect is completely irrelevant. To invoke the topic, JMG said in the post this week -

"...it’s not the technical dimension of the predicament of industrial society that matters most just now. It’s the inner dimension, the murky realm of nonrational factors that keep our civilization from doing anything that doesn’t make the situation worse, that must be faced if anything constructive is going to happen at all. In a civilization that’s spent the last three and a half centuries trying to pretend that this inner dimension doesn’t matter, it was a foregone conclusion that most people’s inner lives would end up an unholy mess. "

Maybe it is a radical and beautiful act, to insist that the inner aspect of our actions matters nearly as much as the outer? I seem to have a deep conviction I have that 'the means are the ends in the making' - there's no separating means and ends. What gets done has an imprint of how it got done, that kind of thing - or perhaps just the recognition that the emotional imprints we experience have the potential to cause biochemical patterns in our cells. I have enticing visions of a world made whole, I hear it as something like - we are all invited to be part of a reconciling energy that will heal through each of our troubles. I have a strong sense of the link that JMG names in this week's post between the inner and outer aspects - each reinforcing the other.

Was talking to the spouse about the inverse this weekend. The external acts/ends being the exposed lever on the inner intent/means. At first I was all about backing up intent as an important thing  until something caused me to reflect on Buddhist teachings. Basically faking it until you make it, right action as a form of shaping the inner intent of the Self/ no self.


I think this is an important bit to poke at when the inner life is in question amongst people of different belief backgrounds. The life of the Spirit, while a personal focus, doesn't have to be a focus to have shit sorted out. The collective insight into 'decent conduct' doesn't have to rest on a religious or spiritual framework if that is a point of contention. If from a social justice perspective as well as an environmental conservationist view, an action is incorrect, and directs us toward a correct action, that outward action will in some way inform and shape an aligned inner response.

For me the crux is about the distinction between an imposed  correct/incorrect from a religiously derived world view rather than a less esoteric source. If for example, resource management and experience based compassion motivate people to undertake 'correct' action, I'm less inclined to support a framework that seeks to police action through a belief based code of conduct. (I say this, but really, it is all a belief OS of some flavor held somewhere the individual is exposed to)

Interesting, and, indeed. Please would you expand a bit upon:

"If for example, resource management and experience based compassion
motivate people to undertake 'correct' action, I'm less inclined to
support a framework that seeks to police action through a belief based
code of conduct." 

I'm not quite getting it (- is the sentence formed exactly as you wished it to be?)

> "If, for example, resource management and experience-based compassion 
motivate people to undertake 'correct' action, I'm less inclined to 
support a framework that seeks to police action through a belief-based 
code of conduct."  <

Ah, yeah Grant has it! (Care for an editing position? :) Sorry am a  bit crap at proper use of punctuation.

I do very much believe the values being discussed need to be held in a high collective regard. Definitely, they need to be much higher than the current scarcity model of hoarding resources being equated to success. My thought informed by the tension around intent/action discussed this weekend is that managing intent is more difficult and invasive than managing action.

Another way of putting it might be I'm hesitant to suggest the entire planet's human population needs to get self reflective in an epic spiritual or magical sense. I'm thinking Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Theodore Logan's  "Be excellent to each other" would be enough.  To be serious about it, I think H.H the Dalai Lama is right on "If you can, help others; if you cannot do that, at least do not harm them." I'm hesitant to require more than this from people busy with the demands of every day living.

The second step is to learn how to get along with the nonrational side
of your own inner life. There are any number of ways to do that; various
schools of psychology, philosophy, religion and magic all have their
own toolkits for this kind of work, and what appeals to one person is
certain to repel somebody else.

It's this repulsion effect that motivates me to not want to present it as an inner life of any flavor, but a compassionate outer social one. I'd add it is also about getting along with other people's nonrational sides and those are only our business when manifested through their actions.

Right. Like JMG is very clear that for him, it's called magic, he's a Druid, deal with it - and there are v often folks bitching because they don't like that flavour. I can see your point.

Folks' actions, though. Sometimes I am a bit freaked out by how much stuff comes through if I start paying serious attention to the non-verbals and less conscious layers of folks' behaviour. Because we are all telegraphing so much all the time, right? Continuous streams of data from all directions in which there are folks, their inner process write large in their breathing, postures, gestures, intonations and so on. Sometimes much easier just to shut off from that level of consciousness and act as if the content of the words spoken is the data source, with just the mildest flavour from the rest?

I encountered in the NLP world an encouragement to generate hypotheses and test them rather than just running with the impression from the intuitive side, which is a good maxim, and which I admit I don't always do. It's clear to me how much spiritual practice affects that nonverbal layer of behaviours - it's like the flavour of our habitual thinking is painted on the outside of us, right? (right?) So when JMG is talking about inner stuff I think he is talking partly about how much our wrangling of the less conscious bits of our souls shows up so much in our behaviour - so it does come right out into the outer world.

Ooh, I just stumbled upon a transcript of a talk by JMG, "A magical education". Yum. Thought one or two of you here might like.

Thanks for the link, that is great stuff!

That's a great howto right there. He's good for kicking us in the seat of laziness.

Maybe I'm too deep in my cynicism but I really really find myself disagreeing with his views on magic there. I really am not convinced it's a skillset that one learns. The whole kind of learn a natural science/renaissance man vibes I also disagree with. Does anyone really do this, after reading about it? It's in Crowley, it's in loads of other magical writers - don't think I've met one person who's done it yet. 

Not to be overly cynical, he's well intentioned, he's a good writer, but maybe I've read to many "how to be a mage" articles. I find his writings on peak oil etc. much more interesting.

Well, I took away more of a 'learn the trads - many if possible - and practice' more than the Renaissance Man stuff. I liked his inclusion of hoodoo work and other hands-on make things happen trads. I thought it interesting he stayed away from religious based devotional work entirely.

In my lineage the focus is on practice and thinking about the outcome constantly as well as going and learning with other practitioners. For me the  science/ancient lore spin was about addressing that going and working with others in a text based manner.


As for innate talent/ability versus practice and learning my own view is that to get good enough to offer professional level of service of any skill one needs to be able to demonstrate a working knowledge of that skill and tradition as framed by that trad. If a plumber is required to study and be knowledgeable about her field and seek certification in order to publicly put out the shingle so should a magician. If one is wrenching around under the sink of one's own house than whatever, but that study will still show up in the outcome.


That said, I always wonder why magical trads or spiritual trads have a stick in the fire about what people eat or don't eat.  I would think leaving that up to self assessment would be kind of important.

I feel that the mechanics of magic are very different from those of plumbing. One is clearly a quantifiable, learnable skill, the other is much more intuitive journey, more like artistic practice. I didn't get that from reading him. BUT I admit  I'm inclined to pick holes in stuff like this. 

Many of my mechanical skills including but not limited to taking care of hardware utilize my intuitive skills quite a bit. It seems odd to me to think that magic doesn't require a certain amount of mechanical skill, even if that is expressed in the mechanics of self discipline and action.

To further add, as a graduate of an art school that welcomed raw talent  but required honing of demonstrable skill, practice of one's art or skill is revealed in the progress of an artist's work. Even doing it untaught as an outsider over and over again is a form of practice.

JMG didn't compare magic to plumbing, though - he compared it to learning to play a musical instrument.

So if magic isn't a skillset one can develop in that way, then what is it?

Maybe because "skillset" does sound a bit mechanical, or maybe corporate? Granted that there are an awful lot of ways to define "magic" and I don't find any of them completely satisfactory. 

Sorry if that sounds deliberately obtuse, but the last couple of things that happened to me I think of as "magical" just happened spontaneously, in response to circumstances and emotion. They weren't products of skills I've been cultivating.

Sorry X post there, will digest and reply in the morrow.

Well... some people would probably argue that that doesn't count as practicing magic because you didn't produce a deliberate change in accordance with your will.

No worries! I'm not trying to be contentious or anything either, just exploring the concept.

What do folks have to say about JMG's writing about Magical Lodges, if anything?

wonderland said: Ooh, I just stumbled upon a transcript of a talk by JMG, "A magical education".

I like this quite a bit:

The irony here is that an obsession with authenticity is perhaps the single most inauthentic thing you can do in magic. We know one thing for sure about magicians in the past— anywhere in the past: they used what worked. The oldest and most authentic tradition in all of magic is the tradition of stealing anything that's not nailed down, and bringing along a crowbar for use on the things that are. Choose any magical tradition from the past, look into its roots, and you'll find a fantastic gallimaufry of sources. There are no culturally pure magical traditions. That's a simple fact of the history of magic.

I've found that to be the case time and again.  Look at any classical magical or mystical theory or practice closely enough and you'll see the seams where it was stitched together. 

Half of modern yoga comes from British calisthenic exercises.  Half of ancient Jewish magic comes from a hodgepodge of Egyptian, Greek, and Canaanite sources.  And on and on.

Got to laugh. Yesterday's offering suggests I could almost post this in the Fantasy Book Disappointments thread:

"Mulling over this question a few days ago, I started making a list of the more obvious features of the story in which we find ourselves at this point in the turning of history’s wheel. I encourage my readers to follow along, and see whether or not the answer that struck me occurs to them as well.

• We live in a world dominated by a vast, slowly decaying empire that gets quite literally superhuman powers by feeding on what we may as well call the blood of the Earth;

• That empire is ruled by a decadent aristocracy that holds court in soaring towers and bolsters its crumbling authority by conjuring vast amounts of wealth out of thin air;

• Backing the aristocracy is a caste of corrupt sorcerers whose incantations, projected into every home through the power of the blood of the Earth, keep the populace disorganized, deluded and passive;

• Entire provinces of the empire are ravaged by droughts, storms, and other disasters caused by the misuse of the Earth’s blood, while prophecies from the past warn of much worse to come;

• Meanwhile, far from the centers of power, the members of a scattered fellowship struggle to find and learn the forgotten lore of an earlier time, which might just hold the secret of survival...

It was more or less at this point that the realization hit: we have somehow gotten stuck, all seven billion of us, inside the pages of a pulp fantasy novel."

Further down, don't you just love this?

"It would arguably have been better for us all if, when Edwin Drake and his men went to drill the first commercial oil well at Titusville, Pennsylvania back in 1859, they had found an ominous standing stone there carved with glowing runes:

THE BLACK GOLD IS THE BLOOD OF THE EARTH
THE FORCE IN THE BLOOD IS THE FLAME OF THE SUN
TO DRINK OF THE BLOOD IS TO MASTER THE WORLD
BUT THE FATE OF THE EARTH AND ITS BLOOD ARE ONE"

Much-needed amusement for a winter morning. I wouldn't have told the story that way, but I can certainly see the value in doing so. I wonder if any fiction writers will feel inspired to start spinning stories of this kind of help us find a way?

*sporfle*  Good to see you, wonderland.

Ganking that quote for me tumblog!

Not bad, but I wouldn't count on "the forgotten lore of an earlier time" to save us.

Unless you include Karl Marx.  And John Locke.  And Gerrard Winstanley.  And such.

"As for moral agency, as I see it, that's something that individuals have; the primitive organisms we call human societies show no sign of it." ~JMG, in comments to this week's post. So, what would societies with collective intelligence look like, anyone got ideas? I am thinking about really basic stuff like ecological impact, and relations with other tribes? It's long been on my mind that humans seem to be amazingly collectively stupid - can we become collectively intelligent? What would that look like?

Unfortunately, I think science fiction teaches us that "collective intelligence" winds up looking a lot like fascism, only with giant bugs or body-mod erotica or both. JOIN US. 

Could a hivemind operate on consensus?

@grant Really? I guess I see that humans can have sparks of collective intelligence, for example credit unions. I guess I am interested in this because it is the subject of something I am working on in bits and pieces of time.

How do we create culture that supports the ability of folks to soothe and gentle the biological instinct and the social instinct to enable system 2 (conscious) thinking. I'm guessing that if we can create social environments that support good thinking - Nancy Kline's book is relevant I think - with the meta-agenda of the group tuned to collective outcomes, it might be possible to do something that looks collectively intelligent. I guess my models for group function are closer to consensus/dissensus than fascism from the Quaker background.

Essay by Nancy Kline (pdf) describes some of the principles involved in creating what she calls 'A thinking environment' in company culture. I like what Kline draws out - in her first books she explains that she is much influenced by the way Quakers do things, but she is using a completely secular/business-oriented model. The results though seem to me to show a way of integrating more diverse voices into collective conversations - generating the ability for the group to take in more unwelcome feedback, which I think is one of the major weaknesses in collective human processes at present.

entity said: Could a hivemind operate on consensus?

How could it operate on anything else? Unless you're using "consensus" to mean something different than what I'm thinking - everybody agrees to do the one thing. Even when self-sacrifice is necessary for the greater good.

I suppose the difference is in whether one opts to trust a central authority or one has some nominal voice in the outcome. That's a lot of voices.

wonderland said: Really? I guess I see that humans can have sparks of collective intelligence, for example credit unions.

Is that collective intelligence, though? I mean, it's a social contract so it's collective, but I'm not sure a credit union displays any intelligence as itself. Does it? (I'm blanking on the mechanisms you might be referring to.)

wonderland said: I guess my models for group function are closer to consensus/dissensus than fascism from the Quaker background.

When Picard got assimiliated and became Locutus of Quaker... that was like, whoah.

The Borg, in their original conception, were scary because they were leaderless, decentralized and completely networked. The writers introduced the Borg Queen so Data could have something/someone with whom to contend when having the traditional Star Trek individual vs. collective debate in the First Contact movie, a move that I think opened an unfortunate door through which eventually issued sexy lady machine with sexy number for name on Voyager. Fan favorite, science fiction nightmare... because that's a typical narrative trick for assimilating the threatening and unfamiliar. Sexualizing it.

The ultimate end - the Borg became a lot less threatening. They could be seduced or outsmarted.

The Borg, when they first showed up, had more storytelling potential than that because they were able to comment on two things that were kind of "in the air" in the late 80s/early 90s - the idea of corporations as persons, and the idea of viral intelligence. (See also: Hexus, the Living Corporation and Greg Bear's Blood Music.) Today, we kind of take these concepts for granted - corporations *are* legally people (bewildering!) while activists organize virally online without leaders or structures - just allegiance to an idea (Occupy). At the time, it was scary, new stuff.

The original Borg were effectively frightening because their society was smarter and more efficient than human (and Romulan and Klingon) society... which, in Star Trek, falls along a continuum of some kind of democratic government / taking advice from scientists / within a military structure. Top down, but in a chatty way - would the Federation be a model of a consensus-based society? All about individual freedom (though still with ranks and orders to follow)?

And the only way the writers could come up with to get around that Borg superiority was... to fundamentally change their nature. They cheated.

Even so, you hear non-science-fiction-fans (as much as such a creature still exists - yet another difference between 1989 and now) say "Resistance is Futile" or make some other Borg reference. Powerful concept.

grant said: Is that collective intelligence, though? I mean, it's a social contract so it's collective, but I'm not sure a credit union displays any intelligence as itself. Does it? (I'm blanking on the mechanisms you might be referring to.)

Hmm, maybe we are talking about different things. I was thinking credit unions are a sign of collective intelligence because being in one potentially provides both liquidity and security, making the people involved potentially more effective in at least those two ways: being able to mobilize greater-than-personal resources both towards personal goals and away from situations of difficulty.

I suppose that is part of my draft model for what collective intelligence looks like is that folks are working together to have better resources to meet each person's goals and to support each other when reeling from life's challenges. Add in some self-monitoring processes, including ecological impact.

Funny comparison - I'd not seen it that way. I'm not a huge watcher of TV but fall into the class of person who having seen an episode or two of Star Trek has been knwon to quote Borg given the right triggers. The features you draw out are certainly fairly Quaker. Maybe we are in better shape than it seems, when trying to live/work inside. Perhaps my lack of confidence is my frontier of the moment. Just come back from a weekend away staring into "Peak Everything", and some alarming indicators about global food control strategies by the global biotech giants, and the dysfunctionality of current supranational organizations (EU/UN).