Friends, I want to put together a book for publication in the Fall, when I will be able to afford to go through one of those on-demand self-publishing outfits that gets you listed on Amazon and prints your books for you as needed. Bill Blum has scolded me several times, saying that ideas have been developed on this list that can't be found elsewhere and which need to be published. Unfortunately, I'm not satisfied with anything I've written in its current form, not for a book. Most of the material is dense and abbreviated, giving some readers a headache from concentrating too hard. I think a book needs to go at a more leisurely pace, and it also needs to be written as a coherent whole. So once again I'm starting over, with the earlier material close at hand for reference and for borrowing. As usual, I'll post the drafts as I write them, and as usual I believe the final product will benefit from your feedback. I think it's important for the reader to have some idea of who I am, why I'm doing what I'm doing, and where my perspective comes from. Hence the introduction below. It evolved out of the recent posting, "Interesting times". all the best, rkm _________________________________________________________ Introduction to the book and author I grew up in Southern California during the boom years following World War 2. That was a benign world where you could leave the keys in your car, prosperity kept rising, and the education system worked. I always knew I'd be able to go to the university and that there'd be a remunerative career after that. I believed in Truth, Justice, Democracy, and the American Way, hated the Commies, and figured the whole world would be better off if everyone were just like us Americans. I believed that America was the moral leader of the world and that it gave out generous aid to help other peoples live better lives. We had defeated fascism and now we were bringing democracy to the rest of the world while we protected it from Red infiltrators. I was fully inside the matrix. There was little in my upbringing - or in the I-Love-Lucy & Ed-Sullivan media I was exposed to - to challenge this rosy, All American perspective. It wasn't until I started at Stanford University in the sixties that I began to find out there were differing points of view. And when the Vietnam War heated up and the protests and teach-ins started, I began for the first time to examine my assumptions and beliefs about America and its role in the world. And there was also the hippie culture, which led me to question my assumptions about the American Way of Life, with its dedication to work, success, and consumerism, and its lack of interest in inner understanding. As it became apparent that our leaders were lying to us, I began to examine my beliefs about democracy, to wonder whether or not one could call the USA a genuine democracy, and to wonder what democracy really means. I didn't pay much attention to the radical ideas going around in the sixties. I could see there was a dark side to the current US reality, but I still believed in the basic American system, the wisdom of the Constitution, and even the beneficence of capitalism. Marxists and anarchists and the violent fringe all seemed crazy to me. I adopted the hypothesis that the problem was mainly corrupt politicians, in league with the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned us about. Based on that hypothesis, I figured that solutions would involve things like voter mobilization, support for honest candidates, and perhaps a new progressive political party. We needed to revive our revolutionary spirit and put the Truth, Justice, and Democracy back into the American Way. We had fallen from our traditional path and needed only to get back on track, to be responsible citizens. Those days seem long ago. I'm not sure why, but somehow a life-long passion arose out of this line of questioning. Why isn't America living up to its ideals? How can that be fixed? I suppose the passion began as outrage - as an American Citizen - at being betrayed and lied to by our elected leaders. "They can't do that to us! This is a free country!" By golly, I was going to do something about it! I must have made an unconscious pact with myself to not rest until I figured out how we could get our happier world back again, how we could get home to Kansas. After a while I could see that the outrage was naive, as I began to understand the real politik that has always guided the paths of nations, regardless of their system of government. And I could see that the rosy world of my youth was in some sense an illusion, in that it was built on systems of exploitation and on human suffering of which I had no knowledge or understanding at the time. The outrage faded, but the passion remained. I now felt betrayal at a deeper level - at the level of a Civilized Being, a Creature of the Universe, a member of a highly-evolved Social Species. We deserve better! The world deserves better. Civilization can do better. Why isn't it doing better? What can we do about it? My quest for useful answers to those questions has gone on ever since. I began the quest by following my intuition, but in retrospect I can see that my procedures were modeled on standard scientific methodology. In fact, the methods parallel those used in studying the universe. A cosmology researcher comes up with a theory of black holes, for example, and then examines relevant parts of the sky to see if evidence for or against the theory can be observed. If the theory has merit, its further development can lead to increased understanding of how the universe works. The development of such a theory always proceeds in two domains in parallel: the observational and the theoretical, the external quest and the internal quest. Those are the yin and yang of science, inseparable according to quantum mechanics. The sophistication and usefulness of the theory co-evolves with the increased knowledge gained from purposeful observations. If the mature theory is finally proven - within some limits - to be valid, then that can give us a new tool to use in future research. It gives us a new discriminating lens so that we are able to extract more meaning from future observations. Similarly, my own quest has been a matter of allowing theoretical models to evolve in my mind (and in my writing), informed by my investigations into the historical record and my observation of unfolding events - and my overall life experience. The quest started when I began to critically examine my beliefs and assumptions, to ask honestly if they fit the data of my accumulated experience. I began to turn to more pragmatic hypotheses, emerging naturally out of the patterns I noticed in my observations. This investigation went on as a kind of background activity during the years I was employed in the workaholic software industry in Silicon Valley. My friends would sometimes get annoyed at my habit of bringing up political issues in conversation. For several years my main means of investigation was to listen to recorded books during the daily freeway commute. That provided time enough to listen to one unabridged book each week. I went through countless histories and biographies and all sorts of educational non-fiction. I wanted to know the whole story of humanity and of civilization. This period was like an undergraduate university course, a total immersion into new information and data. I made a few futile attempts at writing during this period, but I just couldn't find the time to do anything useful. And without writing I found that my understanding remained raw and undeveloped in my mind. Reflection and writing were the missing vehicles that could elaborate and clarify the latent ideas. This dimension of my investigation was languishing, and this became gradually more frustrating over time. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Gulf War came along, and Bush the First mysteriously announced the establishment of a new world order, my sense of urgency about pursuing my quest grew. The pace of history was speeding up at an alarming rate. Finally in 1994, I quit my job, took along my savings, and moved to Ireland to begin writing. I had worked out some provisional hypotheses and that gave me a starting point. By fortunate coincidence, the Internet was just then coming on line as something that was available on a mass basis for nominal cost. The number of users was growing rapidly, and academics had a strong presence since they had been hooked up to the predecessor Arpanet. I found that from my Mac in Wexford I could tap into a kind of Open Global Academy - open to all subjects and open all the time. I soon learned that this environment provided an ideal vehicle for systematically pursuing my quest. I found out that dialog was the key to my investigation. Here's the research procedure I came up with. I first find some discussion group of informed academics where their topic has relevance to my quest (history, economics, politics, anthropology, social movements, sustainability, international relations, etc.). Then I join the group's email list and follow their discussion for a few days. After I get a sense of the group's general perspective, I write a brief essay and post it to the list. The essay is a statement of my current working model / perspective, expressed in terms that make sense to that audience. I try to relate my thinking to the group's perspective by first pointing out areas of agreement. Then I present the evidence and reasoning which distinguishes my understanding from theirs. Finally I present my own synthesis: the new formulation of my model informed by what I'd learned so far from the group discussion. Unfortunately, this kind of posting has usually been perceived by members of the group as an attack, and many of the responses have been superficially articulate while being in substance defensive and characterized by ad-hominem and non-sequitor outbursts. The reason for this defensiveness was that my arguments inevitably involved a challenge to the group's basic assumptions - the very nucleus of ideas that binds the group together. That challenge could not be avoided - it represented the essence of the difference between my working model and the understanding of the group. Their rebuttal to that challenge was where I was likely to learn something useful. If they had good reasons for their assumptions, then I was always willing to update my working model. Fortunately, there were usually one or two in the group who had the patience to respond with reasoned rebuttals, and in some cases with a bit of agreement. I'd usually then post a follow-up essay, pointing to more agreement if possible, and including counter-rebuttals elsewhere. I'd usually find takers for this kind of back-and-forth as academics tend to love debates - it gives them a chance to show off their knowledge and cleverness to the rest of the group. And their defense of the core principles serves as a tonic for the group, renewing their bonds. So feeling no guilt from my perceived trouble-making, I'd eventually bow out of the discussion when there was no more to be learned. By this procedure I was able to efficiently tap into the most relevant knowledge of each group, and adjust my model to incorporate any new evidence or insights that were available. The procedure gets right to the point, and it elicits passionate responses because it is perceived as a challenge to the group's ego identity. I seldom reached agreement with group members, because of their stubborn attachment to their shared assumptions. Those assumptions so colored their interpretative apparatus that they literally could not perceive contrary evidence. But I appreciated their contributions to my quest nonetheless. These episodes were like a series of graduate seminars in the various academic topics, each involving a cast of informed experts and one lucky student. My understanding advanced considerably and my working model became more sophisticated and better substantiated. All thanks to the convenient forms of dialog enabled by the Internet. And I learned a lot about writing and rhetoric - how to articulate arguments and how to deal with anticipated objections from the reader. I set up an email list, "cyberjournal", intended to be a journal of my ongoing investigations and evolving theses. The list has been going for nearly ten years and has attracted a loyal community of subscribers and contributors. People regularly send in articles they come across for possible posting, and other email lists and websites typically pick up on our postings and distribute them more widely. I always post my own essays and articles first on the list, and in between I post articles that have been sent in, and responses to previous postings from subscribers. The list has the flavor of a study group. We have various topics under investigation and we discuss each in turn, depending on what new evidence turns up. I owe a lot to the subscribers of this list, and I consider any progress on my quest to be a joint effort with them. In all humility, I must say that the material going out on cyberjournal has generally been of high quality. I have a file of several hundred spontaneous messages sent in over the years by enthusiastic readers, expressing gratitude for what they got from the discussion - it opened their eyes, changed their thinking, gave them encouragement - comments like that. And some of the subscribers are editors of magazines and journals. I began to receive invitations to write articles for their publications, based on essays I had published on the list. Overall I've published over two dozen articles in a wide range of periodicals aimed at widely varying constituencies. The most popular of these articles was "Escaping the Matrix", first published in Whole Earth Review, and I've received many letters from readers who found that to be an eye-opening "red pill". My quest has converged into three lines of investigation. The first is aimed at understanding the current world system, how it got that way, and what agencies and forces are guiding its course. The second line seeks to envision a transformed world - not by dreaming up a utopia, but by trying to understand the obstacles, constraints, and opportunities that any successor system would need to deal with. The third line seeks to understand what kind of social processes might be capable of bringing about transformation, and seeks to find ways by which the emergence of such processes might be encouraged. This book is a status report on this quest. It's presented as a narrated overview of various historical episodes, developing evidence for my current understandings, and giving us terminology and scenarios to refer to as the narration proceeds. As we go along I'll mention books that significantly influenced my thinking, but I'll keep detailed citations to a minimum. Your feedback or ideas are welcomed, and I can always be reached by email at •••@••.•••. Richard Moore Quay Largo St. Wexford, Ireland http://cyberjournal.org _________________________________________________________
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