Drinking the Koolaid: "Light and Love Delusion" as the new jingoism

Comment by Daniel LaLiberte on July 5, 2009 at 1:10

Ben,
It's good to see you here. I only discovered this network just now.

I've come to realize the need for ways to support the emergence of Global Consensus, and I am still scouting around looking for supporting systems.

You are quite right in your observation that individual voices merely added to an indefinitely long list is just a meaningless pile of voices. And it is worse for giving false hopes to those with otherwise hopeful outlooks. The only benefit is if it gets people to say something rather than nothing, which might be better than what we have had before. And the only benefit for that is if it leads to more communicating with others down the road. But the pace seems way too slow to address our needs at this time.

While I see the value in structured dialogs, elucidating all the various arguments and counter-arguments, this can also end in a tangled mess of confusion, unless it is constantly cleaned and organized, but at whose prerogative?

My attraction to "consensus" is that, if a decision is not mostly clear one way or another, then it deserves more debate, but for those things that ARE mostly clear, let's get moving on making it happen. And we have several very clear directives, obvious to almost everyone, such as getting ourselves off our addiction to oil, and all fossil fuels, stop dumping waste into our water and air, stop war, generally stop destroying ourselves, etc.

So my inclination is to find or develop a system which allows us, at a global level, and every level more locally, to express these obvious points of agreement, making it clear to ourselves and our elected representatives that we do in fact agree, and then find ways to act on those agreements.

Where we don't quite agree, yes, we need to find ways to work through the disagreements, which mostly amount to misunderstandings, in my experience. There are many cases of people acting in their own self-interest, or many other cases where the facts are just not well-enough known to move the discussion beyond speculations and opinions. Whatever the case, all needs to be expressed and worked out, but this obviously takes more time.

I am hopeful that the most significant things that we need to do are also the most obvious things that we can agree on, at least in part. And the more obvious they become, the more significant they are also, so they reinforce each other. So it is just a matter of getting our collective power together to make things happen, rather than continue to be controlled by a few misinformed, self-interested elite.

Comment by Ben Tremblay on July 5, 2009 at 17:55

Dan - Credit to your experience as well as your clear thinking on the matter, you've hit a number of nails on the head here. As some sort of expedient let me here point you to my /gnodal/overview.html ... 5 years old this month. (BTW I use Hesse's glasperlenspiel as a still point and ideal; to have the ability to refer in short form to some matter that has been well and near-exhaustively treated ... something to be wished for, I think, and something I have come near to achieving.)

On this fine Sunday morning let me essay on one of your points, ie disagreement. What I have as yet not managed to deply is a way to explore the bases on which these rest. As you say, usually due to misunderstanding. But I appreciate how the more substantial of these actually rest on different world views, as though energized by different first principles, as though rooted in different tectonic plates. It's that scenario in the domain of public policy decisions that has moved me all these years, since I first engaged the material in 1975.

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