[*BCM*] Be the change you want to see in the world.

[David Hammond]

Thank you, Turtle, and that brings me back to the SUV question.

Sometime in the last 500 years, as the influence of the Holy Roman Empire
waned, technology became TECHNOLOGY. A "clerical" class arose to administer
the tenets and liturgies of TECHNOLOGY, and assure the propagation and
expansion of its belief systems over time.  This new human secular religion
had one overarching commandment, "Thou Shalt Progress." At precisely this
point in history, the philosophical notions of "free-market" capitalism were
coalescing into actual human socio-economic behaviors, and the convergence
produced the 2nd Great Punctuation. (The 1st Great Punctuation was the
discovery of animal domestication.  All this from Stephen Jay Gould)

"Free-Market" capitalism, bound together with the religio-cultural belief in
TECHNOCRACY, allowed unbridled expansion of a single human culture for the
first time in human history.  We see the results all around us today.  The
Biosphere of the Earth is dying because of those results.

If TECHNOCRACY (the worship of technology) helped get us to where we are,
HOW IN GAIA'S NAME CAN WE EXPECT TECHNOLOGY TO FIX THINGS?  A possible
answer is: new technology isn't a silver bullet, it's an enabler of cultural
change.  This implies a primary desire that cultural change happen.  In the
spirit of "....do not adopt your enemy's tactics.....", we have no power to
counter the deafening propaganda of World Techno-Capitalism (try shouting in
the presence of a jet engine); what we CAN do is turn it back on itself.
HOW?

1) Creating the Cognitive Disjunct: Flyers duct-taped to SUV windows, same
text both sides, will be read, because duct tape takes a while to remove
from a windshield. The "victim" will have significant anger linked to a
radically contrary message.  Human psychology 101 - the message will remain
long after the anger is sublimated. As the truth of the message emerges
multiple times in multiple contexts (price of gas, traffic jams, etc), its
value will begin to take mind-space.

This only a single example of hundreds of tactics that "propaganda-busters"
can assume.

2) Offering the Culture-Change Enabler: Messages taped to the windshield;
"Shame, shame, shame" chants from cyclist groups; the escalating price of
fuel, and (Here's where BCM has NO input ... yet ...) burgeoning Print
evidence of Rapid Climate Disintegration; the street presence of bicycles
(old fashioned and new) doing car-like things; folks walking with big burlap
shopping bags in each hand; Folks walking into Cumby's and Tedeschi's and
saying, "Be like Super Stop-&-Shop".....

3) Bringing All The Cultural Enablers Back Home - Establish new,
locally-oriented businesses to enable the Cultural Change with products and
services.  To be most effective in reinforcing the cultural change, and to
rely least on unfavorable and chancy external economic forces, these
businesses, to the utmost extent possible, should source and sell locally.
All businesses aligned with the Eco-Millennium paradigm should organize or
re-organize themselves as democratic workers' cooperatives; and Workers's
Guilds that protect their members from both perfidious or benign failures in
the cooperatives, and have an interest in the organization of the
biographical community, should organize orthogonally w/r/t the worker's
cooperatives.

4) Government of the local Bio-Economic community resulting from this
paradigm shift MUST avoid both direct and representative democracy.  Both
processes are frought with error and corruptibility.  The interests of
Worker - Citizens (gathered in open brainstorming sessions), and the
interests of Guilds (gathered likewise), can be set orthogonally, with
intersections affirmed and disjuncts subject to Consensus Voting, in which a
1st and a 2nd place result each find legitimacy in a strict rule setting.

Look at what we walk away from: Media propaganda; "BIGGER IS BETTER", "More
is better", "Watch TV For The Truth"; "There's No Other Way".

Sounds like an ideal lifestyle to me.....

WHO can we win over???

Dave Hammond


-----Original Message-----
From: bostoncriticalmass-bounces at bostoncriticalmass.org
[mailto:bostoncriticalmass-bounces at bostoncriticalmass.org] On Behalf Of
turtle
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2006 4:57 PM
To: Boston Critical Mass
Subject: RE: [*BCM*] Be the change you want to see in the world.



Boston Critical Mass <list at bostoncriticalmass.org> wrote:

> 
> Is there a bike forum somewhere around here....?
>    
>   - Jon

Well, while the social atmosphere in Iraq may not seem to have much to
do with bicycling in Boston, it does.  We don't bike in a vacuum.  We
bike in the world.  And what's going on in the world, especially
relating to people's hopes and fears, effects absolutely everything. 
When people are afraid, they act defensively and selfishly.  On the
roads, in their homes, and in the voting booth.  

Remember the Butterfly Effect?  The idea of chaos theory is that a
butterfly could flap it's wings in China and cause a hurricane in
Kansas.  Everything relates to everything else.  

So if you really want a better place to bike, you need to look at what
is making that place, and the people who inhabit it, so antisocial.

Certainly, as I mentioned before, there are some people who, for one
reason or another, honestly want to fight as it gives them a sense of
purpose and power.  But the vast majority of people, as Anarchist
Judaism also noticed, really don't want war, and just want to live a
decent, peaceful life.  Those normal folks are the ones who get sucked
into war through fear.  And those are the people we can work with and
help - to be more conscientious roadusers, as well as more pro-social
people in general.

-Turtle

----------------------------------
"One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we
seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal.  We must
pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means." - Martin Luther King Jr.
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