Thursday, January 02, 2003

As I explained on Monday, the old way of living is dying. Neutrality, which is based on Capitalism and the Great Market, is failing. We humans must now  work together or perish. This moring's essay at Future Positive gives some insight in to the process of working together. A Story about Partnership Arthur Noll writes: A person riding a donkey illustrates partnership, very well.  The donkey has excellent senses, and has instinct to listen to those senses.  The donkey doesn't suffer fools who don't listen to signs of possible danger.  It stops at such signs, and no persuasion short of threatened death will convince it to advance into the death it senses ahead.  It is master of the event. The person riding a donkey is going to be a partner, or they aren't going anywhere together.  Force a donkey too much, and it will end up looking for a chance to kick you in the head, or run away.  But if a person is willing to listen, a donkey is also willing to listen.  If no danger is sensed ahead, the donkey will concede to carry you forward.  People have liked horses better than donkeys, because while horses also want partnership, they aren't so conservative about fears down the road.  Horses have evolved to outrun any danger down the road, and this fits nicely with the instincts of people, who also feel like they can outrun, outfight, and outsmart anything they meet up with.  A human riding a horse makes a good  metaphor of instinctive leadership leading instinctive people.  A human on a donkey makes a good metaphor of how leadership rationally should be. (01/02/03) Time for Three Laws of Corporations? Thom Hartmann writes: Corporations are created by humans to further the goal of making money. As Buckminster Fuller said in his brilliant essay The Grunch of Giants, "Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys - legally enacted game-playing..." Corporations are non-living, non-breathing, legal fictions. They feel no pain. They don't need clean water to drink, fresh air to breathe, or healthy food to consume. They can live forever. They can't be put in prison. They can change their identity or appearance in a day, change their citizenship in an hour, rip off parts of themselves and create entirely new entities. Some have compared corporations with robots, in that they are human creations that can outlive individual humans, performing their assigned tasks forever. Isaac Asimov, when considering a world where robots had become as functional, intelligent, and more powerful than their human creators, posited three fundamental laws that would determine the behavior of such potentially dangerous human-made creations. His Three Laws of Robotics stipulated that non-living human creations must obey humans yet never behave in a way that would harm humans. (01/02/03) 10:09:23 AM

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