This podcast topic is “Organize for Learning.” Learn how to address complex issues, think from alternate viewpoints, originate solutions, and dialog with others.
Follow up Teleconference: By this point, we should have created doubts that we can cure the ills of the environment while preserving high-growth expansionary economic systems. Changes will be huge. They may not be peaceful. Pessimists doubt that we can avoid war and violence. But more to the point of this topic, most of us imagine how our prior skills and expertise can somehow save the environment. That’s natural; we start from where we are, but we can’t count on existing skills to save us in Compression. Some skill needed may be radically new; nothing wrong with low energy innovation, but other skills may be recovered from a forgotten past — how great grandpa got along. To substantially change how we live, and fast, we must organize for learning new mindsets as well as new skills. And learning collectively.
How can we form groups to learn collectively what to do, why, and how to change very quickly? A big part of that is unlearning some of what has guided us in the past. If we are in business, our goals have typically been growth, profitability, accountability — usually as measured by money and monetary ratios. Suppose that no longer serves us well. Suppose our prime objective is survival of life — all life because human life is symbiotic with it. That puts us in a “different world.”
This discussion may hive off in many directions: One illusion of neoliberal economic ideology is that market thinking can resolve all problems, so what’s the hole in that theory? What’s real science vs. science subject to business motives? How can we sort out information of substance from all the deceptions from various media, whether they were intentional or not? How can we project potential long term consequences of actions, despite our bias for short-term concerns?
How do most of us actually learn to do differently? Do we learn to do differently first; then figure out the reasons why? Or can we learn why we need to change first; then change our habits of living?
- 8 PM Eastern, 3/3/2020