Home » Posts tagged 'sustainable progress' (Page 18)
Tag Archives: sustainable progress
Frozen and liquid egos
The ego
Ego stands for “I”. It represents the unique, living physical identity of a single living being. This ego becomes relevant in a dynamic environment where it needs to interact with the surrounding to survive, liveand develop itself. When interacting with other ego’s it becomes the “I am”, a self reflective revelation of self awareness. This “being” than becomes gradually aware of talents and skills which it needs to shown off to its surroundings in order to establish valued reconition with a social group order and potential hierarchy.
Frozen ego’s
Modern group dynamics of human beings have evolved into the type of robotics described in the previous blog. Institutionalized tasks are being populated by human beings who are serving the institutional objectives by performing specific predefined tasks without competition or open interaction. The interaction is predetermined by the hierarchy of the establishment. Such structural organization can be compared with the solidification of liquid or gassy elements. The molecules slow down their vibrating rhythm and take a static position within a fixed structure, connecting in a specific format with their neighboring molecules. They become frozen in rock like objects. That tends to happen with people in hierarchical organizations.
From a human point of view the “I am” is being largely eliminated and so is the dynamic development of the ego. The ego itself becomes frozen in a predefined fitting within a frozen context. Only the “I” counts as functional pupet in a puppetering theartre. The ego is surrounded by dogma’s that he or she adopts as truthful indisputable reality in order to remain in the structure. The surrounding enhances this by imposing the dogma’s formally by asking for loyalty in exchange. The group structure lacks flexibility and dynamics in exchange for control and predictability. The human being is not challenged to evolve, just to perform automated tasks within fixed patterns. People who manage such rock like structures tend to have frozen ego too as they fragment human abilities into functional routines without accounting for universal laws of chaos and evolutionary interaction.
A business or government hierarchy becomes an artificial being composed of many frozen egos. The people involved in such environment get disconnected from the universal reality and become dependent of the overall structure of the institution to provide certain securities. Those would otherwise have been found in a much more complex competitive interaction with other ego’s and nature. Frozen ego’s tend to adore the state of rest and lack of certain worries. Ego’s may learn rationalized patterns but lack the development of spiritual, physical and emotional awareness delaying the true evolution of the adulthood of each individual.
Frozen ego’s
When society gets over-organized through bureaucracy the frozen ego’s remain frozen also in a structured environment full of rules and control systems.
Liquid ego’s
A human being is in essence as volatile as gas, a unique complex element in a highly dynamic universe. We are excited by our surroundings and interact with it through multi-level communication in search for harmony and safety. We do not only interact with other ego’s, we also need to interact with nature to feed ourselves with energy and material composites that are life supportive and enhancing. Other species depend on us and interact with us in a similar way of interdependence and evolutionary dynamics. Human egos connect to each other for co-creation of off spring (establishment of families) and safety (cooperations), by organizing communities of self supporting groups of individuals.
The dynamics is based on open interaction and flexibility giving the community a liquid like behavior that adapts itself in shape and interaction with the environment with great ease and transparency. The ego’s in such liquid state are challenged to find and redefine harmony continuously becoming liquid also in the learning process. The inner competition is functional to the mode of self sufficiency of the group. Talents and skills are challenged to change, evolve and interact using the wisdom of adults with the volatile, explosive creativity of the younger generations. Purpose and learning become a natural process that enrich all involved in a process of sustainable adaptiveness with the environment. People who get accustomed to doing this like the excitement and challenge of change.
Education
A child develops and discovers the ego through trial and error experimenting with its physical capabilities, often under protective guidance of the parents. Through comparison with the abilities of others in one’s surroundings it enhances and challenges itself further, often asking for attention “look what I can do”. They play games that stimulate the mind and body in every possible way. This young ego can be seen as a vibrant growing and learning molecule in a huge human sea of alike molecules, each a different complex ego.
The continuous open demonstration of the ego at the growing up and competitive phases of a person are necessary to distinguish and position itself in the complex group dynamics of human beings. “Adult” in this sense has nothing to do with the physical full-grown state of a human body. That was just the protected growing up phase when the real competition starts and other types of adulthood are obtained: the emotional, rational and spiritual aging, up to the state of higher awareness. That is when an ego is in perfect harmony with its surroundings and needs not continuously expose itself anymore for recognition.
When we look at education in the societies of frozen or liquid ego’s we see big differences. The young ego’s in a frozen environment are taught (indoctrinated) to behave in a frozen state, learning certain rationalized tricks to fit into a preprogrammed format of societal evolution. In a more liquid environment we see that education evolves in a dynamic way, connecting the young rising ego’s directly with the dynamics of a changing environment. They learn to interact in a competitive way through the adventure of experimentation and feedback. In a liquid state we develop fully to the adult state of higher awareness, something that is much more difficult to reach in a solid frozen environment.
Current societies
Most societies today have evolved into frozen structures trying to control ego’s in a prefixed format. Those formats have become so rigid that they lack all flexibility to interact with a very liquid, ever changing universe. We see then that such structures break up, exposing the frozen ego to an environment that is fearfully liquid for them. Many frozen ego’s on the other hand have become aware of the unnatural state of their ego and search fearfully for a more liquid interaction with their environment.
They break loose and become the small flexible streams of new communities that further break the solid environment apart. We see this happening all over the world despite the powerful intentions of those who have interests in maintaining the solid state of control. We see the development of all kind of disorders by the blockage of the natural evolution of the ego. Without even being aware, the psychological, physical and emotional disorders produce severe instability in the solid frozen communities. People are wanting to break loose, sometimes not even knowing why, because of the sense of entrapment. The human nature is too complex and active to be locked up for a long period of time. The predominant state for sustainable progress of humankind is the one of liquid ego’s. We see different cultures, business enterprises and cooperative entities that show various degrees of frozen, liquid and gas like structures.
Breaking loose
From solid state to gas
Transformation
We are entering a natural phase of transforming from a predominant state of frozen ego’s into a new state of liquid communities. This is necessary to attend our underestimated relationship with the ever changing universe. We are part of that universe which predominantly is liquid, evolving in a spiral dynamic process that challenges new connections to appear and old ones to disappear. Our human awareness is an excellent evolutionary instrument for self protection through adaptiveness. When we block this we eliminate our adaptability and make ourselves vulnerable to unexpected circumstances.
The frozen state of human ego’s has however taught us many things too. It helped us to reach an average age expectancy that allows many to experiment life within the safe dynamics of singular gassy adventurous life styles, liquid adaptive communities and specialized frozen ego formats for highly specialized complex tasks. We have learned now that the human universe should consist of all three states that interact also dynamically. To achieve this we need to develop confidence in new societal formats where the logic of all states is acknowledged and supported. Like that we can create slowly a stable global human community based on safety, health, universal ethics and sustainable progress.
Sustainocracy is a first serious attempt to achieve such awareness and guide the frozen structures into liquid dynamics. AiREAS is a multidisciplinary community that combines structures of frozen ego’s with free individuals in a gas state of volatile interaction, creating a semi-liquid, purpose driven organization of thousands of people without any hierarchy or prefixed structure.
AiREAS is world’s first liquid ego structure for sustainable human progress
Me2 (followers) or Me1 (leaders)
Changing mentalities
When we talk about the practicalities around massive change of human behavior we enter a very intering field of STIR research. Especially when we deal with the type of change needed to achieve sustainable human progress within sustainocratic processes. My own strong belief was always that people first need to become aware of the challenges we face before they take initiative. This is the way I got active in this field myself, only after opening my eyes into a new kind of visual dimension of awareness. This awareness may not be enough yet to get everyone to change attitude but certainly places a trigger under the surface that can be pushed any time by anything.
My views were overthrown when I invited J. J is professor at the technical university. J. and his team do research on “perception” from scientific point of view. He wants to know the effects of professional electronics on people and their behavior. I invited him to share his opinion and expertise in the sustainocratic teams of AiREAS. We were making an action plan for public involvement at city quarter level in our “clean and healthy city” project. His scientific expertise could become useful to avoid inventing the wheel (with a lot of costs) and become more effective as a group. That is one of the key arguments to get scientific knowledge directly at the table in the first place. At the same time science could be interested in the practical initiatives of AiREAS to formulate new research questions and gain support of the other participants..
During the multidisciplinary discussion the participating lady from our public healthcare organization stated her frustration that, after spending lots of public money on health campaigns no measurable change had been perceived or achieved. I added to that my own findings that awareness is simply not enough. Prior to changing attitude the people need to become aware AND assume responsibility. Lots of people are aware that smoking kills yet continue smoking. Same goes with people taking the car, knowing that the bike would be healthier for the short distance. Awareness alone is not enough. My own model shows the following steps:
Awareness -> Acceptance of responsibility -> Change of behavior -> Recognition
This places a large responsibility on communication with a challenge to get a feel on how to stimulate each of the steps.
Everyone agreed except J. He said simply “Awareness? No! No awareness at all”. This caught us all by surprise. He explained a recent example, that a lot of communication had been done to get people to acquire solar panels. No one did. Until a bunch of neighbors got their own act together and placed panels on their roofs. Suddenly everyone else wanted them in the same street. Why not after communication? Does communication not work anymore? Why does the physical appearance trigger people and not reading about it with all the posible arguments on climate change, financial benefits, etc? What does that tell us?
Me2 or Me1!
For me it was funny because I use this expression for business enterprises when lecturing, training or coaching about “positioning”. But business is an entrepreneurial exercise in which market leadership (Me1 – me first) or being a follower (Me2 – me second) is a strategic entrepreneurial decision and awareness exercise. In fact it is one of the five keys of 21st century excellence that I published as my 5K multidimensional entrepreneurial model. But in my mind I had not made the link with the diversity of general human behavior in society. J. had just opened my eyes. This is how it works.
10-80-10
In a group of 100 people you roughly find this division of characters 10-80-10. Whatever changes you propose with some common sense you will always find 10% of the people opposing directly, no matter what. They are against everything. These are the “opposers”, the brakes on progress. On the other hand there is a 10% that is always in favor. They are the “innovators” of the group, the front runners, the Me1. This 10% is always in for something knew and is willing to pay the extra price to be innovative. For some it is even a sport to be the first in everthing. In business these are normally the business leaders that take the chances to do things that others have never done. They create new values. Then there is the remaining 80%. They just observe and listen to the others, they do not take risks. Normally they tend to listen to the 10% opposers who always claim to have the truth because “it was tried before”, “no one ever succeeded”, “its a waste of time and money”, “it does not work”, “no change, no risk”, etc.
When the Me1 in a quarter unite and show their initiative in public a part of the 80% will become a Me2, a group of followers. They overcome their fear and join the leaders of change. More join in when the novelty proves stable and adequate. The Me1 only manage silence the opposers through action, demonstrating that something indeed can be done. When introducing novelties or change most communicative energy always tends to go to the opposers who we try to convince of progress. This is also caused by the fact that the opposers put a lot of energy in blocking progress through their lobby using fear. The above shows that we should not even pay attention to them when we initiate sustainocratic processes that have already a strong reason to be introduced. To neglect this group is difficult because they tend to be the ones that go to meetings first, not the Me1.
In business the Me2 often position themselves to copy proven technology rapidly after its introduction by the Me1. While Me1 gets the recognition for the orginal idea, the Me2 make it accessible to the general public by making it cheaper, “better”, etc. The Me2 attention to a product is often good for the Me1 too. If the image of innovator is maintained, people who are Me1 will become loyal to the label because of its status as leader. Others however never buy from the leader because they know that price of a Me2 will be lower. It is all a game of psychology.
Sustainable progress
From our point of view all this helps to experiment with public initiatives and the introduction of all kinds of innovations. From a hardware point of view this can be understood, especially when dealing with city quarters with wealthy enough residents to follow certain trends and hypes that we try to introduce. But we want to transform society from a centralized to a circular local type of economy. This does not imply just external visuals around status an “look at me” Me1 attitudes. We work on getting people to become involved in their own local sustainable progress which is of not money driven. How would we make these good examples visible to achieve in depth mentality and cultural change? It opens up still more questions than answers that need to be researched:
- When do Me2 decide to follow Me1?
- What size of Me1 and Me2 do we need to get everyone or a majority to change?
- How do we reach the Me1? Who are they? What triggers them?
- We know about the Me1 psychology of wealth and luxury. Does it work too in the area of getting jobless people to become active in any way? Or youngsters who we want to get out of criminality or drugs and join certain wellness programs? When does it work and when not?
- What if the quarter is multi-ethnical, multi-cultural? What are cultural differences in all this and how do different cultures interact?
- How much awareness does it take an Me1 to take responsibility? Is it what we are saying (our prejudism?) in our communication strategy or is something else the trigger?
- Can the findings in one city quarter be applied 1 to 1 on another? Is there some kind of blueprint that we can develop and where is it valid?
- Who should do the innovative proposition for Me1? A business label? A government? AiREAS?
- What effects have external impulses s.a. a crisis on all this?
The entire “living lab” situation around sustainable progress driven manipulation, because that is what it is of course, is tremendously interesting. At the same time it is very much needed to get people to assume a different role in society than today. We are still heading for disaster if we do not change drastically our course. Institutionally I manage to get cooperative coalitions but getting 100’s of thousands of people with a daily job, a particular view of their own world (also manipulated of course) and a dependency of the system, is unique.
Huge multinationals are showing interest to try products, technological innovations through our platform. That is great of course, especially when they come with some money too for our research and main program: the local human being. So from a human behavior point of view both awareness and not awareness are applicable but in a certain order and under particular conditions that we need to find out. We do this of course not just with institutions and scientists but with the public itself too. They are the guinea pigs of their own transformation, which we develop transparently with their complete involvement. It will be very interesting to see what we find out when we deal with many of such projects around the world and do research by comparing the results.
We still have a lot of work to do to understand human behavior more. One would think that sustainable human progress is easy “to sell” to people. It is not.
What makes education “sustainocratic”?
Education today is a fragmented part of our lives. Compulsory at an early stage and voluntary later on, mostly concentrated on ratonal transfer of information. In my view this is no education. It is an exercise of memorizing stuff. True learning occurs when information is gathered triggered by emperic experimentation and purposely reflected upon with use of existing resources and learning guidance. A person is a complex being that gathers awareness through a lifelong learning process, not just using rational thought and memorized information but also dealing with sensory information, culture, emotional feedback, spirituality and physical abilities and disabilities.
One needs to learn to deal with failure and success, individualism, teamwork and the general adventure of growing up in a self aware situation. Human beings have the tendency of wanting to dominate their environment out of self interest but the dynamics of this surroundings, human and natural, also dominates our lives back. It is an art of living life to deal with this successfully.
Life patterns follow five lines of personal evolution, referred to as “quotients”. These are: IQ (intelligence), EQ (emotional), SQ (spiritual), PQ (physical) and AQ (awareness). All 5 together form the evolution of the individual consciousness as the individual experiments with life. Most educational support is given in the early phases of a lifetime, up to the initiation of early adulthood, just to give a person basic abilities and some direction, often influenced by a dominant culture or worldview. A young person has generally little to no awareness of the complexity of life. It is a newcomer that experiences the adventure of a lifetime as it comes. After the physical growing up phase the real learning process starts, mostly without guidance anymore other than the support and advice of friends, family or collegaes and the pleasure and pain of one’s own choices in life.
From a cultural perspective one is surrounded by a local situation that is determined by many factors. One can address these as a matter of fact but also challenge it through one’s own growing awareness. Today we find many people breaking through a glass ceiling referred to as the higher consciousness. This is a high level of awareness that allows people to look at one’s own situation from a timeless universal point of view within the complexity of humankind and its evolution. Knowing this as a point of reference at a later age, after living an adult life for some time, the aspect of education changes. Higher awareness is a significant within the future perspective of human evolution also at society level.
In sustainocracy education is seen as a lifelong process and integrated in the value driven processes of human sustainabe progress. Top level education should therefor become available to anyone, at all times, guiding individuals and groups in sustainocratic challenges.
In an economized world financial awareness and growth is dominant, also in education and the educational system. Its value is determined by its level of uniqueness and practical desire in “the market”, available to the highest bidder or subsidised by “the system”.
In sustainocratic processes education is measured against the sustainable achievements of the group. Excellence should translate in abundant returns of cooperative work which in turn fuels the education for renewal and forward driven processes. The success of the alumni in purpose driven cooperative work is also the success of the academy, termining also the reciprocity for continuation. In a money driven world this compensation is translated in money too. In a sustainocratic world other direct local values can be used also, such as housing, food sharing, energy, safety, etc.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 