a. Collective Intelligence

News

Stella 5Jun15 -

Intro

I've been involved in radical change movements since the 1980s (when I was in my early twenties), starting with the feminist and anti-racism movements in London, but really my passion for social change goes further back, to being very conscious of the opression of young people, as a youngster (see Background, below), and especially of the need to radically change the education system, as a teenager.

On my first permaculture course (CDP in London with Steven Read) in my late twenties I was delighted to find a more structured and positive framework from which to move on to creating the society we want, instead of just fighting against the one we don't want.

But I also later realized this positivist focus came with a woeful lack of basic political, cultural and 'psychological / emotional' awareness, which I found both shocking and delibitating in the permaculture network. I have come to think that it is major lack has seriously undermined the posibilities of permaculture design fulfilling its greater promise - which is to really design a Permanent Culture, instead of just building small 'sustainable' settlements, which (obvioustly, if anyone cares to observe) some of the great and totally non-physical destructo-culture forces (economics, war, jealousy, political manuevering... etc.) can destroy in an instant.

This almost-exclusively physical focus unfortunately is still now considered by many the essence of permaculture, and am both interested in the psychological reasons behind such illogical design posture (¿whatever happened to the Ethics, the directives, to designing for disasters, or with all 4 sets of components..?), which I suspect is just a deep hopelessness dressed up as 'you can't change human nature', but also in how to expand as quickly as possible the range of solid and workable 'PeopleCare' models available to the next generation of permaculture designers.

I am in total agreement with Bill's posture of not letting 'woo woo' stuff enter permaculture teaching (much of the 'New Age' has a lot to answer for in terms of retarding the progress of humanity, and these I have noticed have been directly responsible for the - to my mind tragic - 'hippifying' of permaculture in many - and expanding - circles), yet there is much that is very scientific, brilliant and totally coherent with basic permaculture ethics, directions, principles and systemic way of thinking that we're in danger of mixing up with the more 'belief-based' stuff (and disdain for rationality) that is being sold as consumerist 'spirituality'.

Modern science is no longer denying spirit. And that, that is epochal. As Hans Küng remarked, the standard answer to "Do you believe in Spirit?" used to be, "Of course not, I'm a scientist," but it might very soon become, "Of course I believe in Spirit. I'm a scientist." Ken Wilber: The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science (1982), Introduction

Projects / Designs

The research is of course via action-learning and these are some of the projects / designs I´ve been working on from 1995

BackGround

I rember as a young child observing adults being incredibly irrational and hurtful (with me and other young ones) and reasoning that they could only be that way if they had forgotten what it was like being a child and had somehow lost part of their minds along the way, and that therefore it would be likely that I would also forget, and so keep passing the cruelty on, forever. So I decided to never forget.

It turns out that the theory I now know as an adult totally supports that, but that decision has served as an additional emotional anchor along the way, which I'm very grateful for.

I'm still figuring out what it all means, but one of the results I think is that it has kept me in touch with reality and (mostly) out of the temptation to fall into any victim-mentality, to intellectually blame opressive people or believe there is such a thing as 'them': it is very clear to a child that the same people who are hurting them are also totally lovable and in big pain: a logical conclusion to that is that there must me something very wrong with society if it pushes good people to act in hateful ways. (Children in general are a lot smarter than adults, they just have less information so it mostly doesn't show).

Additionally, I was raised in an Italian family living around the globe: always in different societies where me and my sisters were expected to just fit in totally with local children: we learned the local language (always fluently) and customs, wento the local schools and made friends and lives there.

I was 0-2years old in the US, 2-4 in Pakistan, 4-8 in Italy, 8-10 in (the then) Chechoslovakia, 10-11 in Italy and Hungary, then 11-33 in the UK. At age 33 I moved to Spain for a sabbatical (to help set up a new permaculture project) and was suprised to find myself so much more at home in a latin culture and language, that when several other 'amazing coincidences' clicked into place, I didn't hesitate too long to make my home here.

The upshot of all of that is that I couldn't avoid developing a very keen awareness of culture, class and some of the mechanisms of opression, first hand and from very young. For eg. I've grown up knowing how limited we are by our cultural frameworks (eg. language itself) and how important they are in shaping our thinking and perceptions. Something that I notice most people grown up in one culture aren't even remotely aware of, or why it might be important.

But I also developed the 'view of the outsider', both in observing a new society's structures (for many people totally 'invisible'), and in being the recipient of much prejudice and sometimes outright cruelty, as a western child in places where local people were somehow aware (but also confused about) encroaching imperialism, or at least the economic injustice we so clearly represented: in the UK we were suddently poorer than most of the people in our neighbourhood, but in all the other places we were like royalty, in comparison. All very fertile observation territory for cultural pattern-spotting, and learning.

... to be continued ...

References & Definitions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence

is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. Collective intelligence appears in a wide variety of forms of consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans, and computer networks. The study of collective intelligence may properly be considered a subfield of sociology, of business, of computer science, of mass communications and of mass behavior—a field that studies collective behavior from the level of quarks to the level of bacterial, plant, animal, and human societies.

http://thetransitioner.org

TheTransitioner is an international network of researchers, social entrepreneurs, spiritual explorers, visionaries, writers, leaders, scientists, technical and software engineers who work on Collective Intelligence, Wisdom and Consciousness (CIWC)

http://cci.mit.edu

Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?'

http://www.collectiveintelligence.net

Collective Intelligence is a global group of entrepreneurs dedicated to improving the efficiency of social ecosystems and accelerating the flow of capital to good.

Action Learning Programme

European Academy

Chaordic Institute

Green Adventure

"We haven't worked on ways to develop a higher social intelligence...

We need this higher intelligence to operate socially or we're not going to survive....

If we don't manage things socially, individual high intelligence is not going to make much difference....

Ordinary thought in society is incoherent - it is going in all sorts of directions, with thoughts conflicting and canceling each other out.

But if people were to think together in a coherent way, it would have tremendous power".

David Bohm

New Age Journal, Sept/Oct 1989