Small Islands of Coherence in a Chaotic World
There is a battle going on currently between the libertarians and the authoritarians.
It exists in many domains, including the domain of money and currency.
The libertarians want freedom from rules, government and regulation, not realising that even in the wanting there is a contradiction. The rule to not have rules is a rule.
The authoritarians want to dominate everything — imposing wide sweeping surveillance measures, capturing, owning and deploying data to create conformity, controlling the media to produce the most powerful propaganda ever seen.
There are some authoritarians dressing in libertarian costume. They want to write their own rules for their monopoly companies while they manipulate the product that gives them obscene power and financial wealth.
In the world of currency we have the battle between the central bank created currencies and the myriad of cryptocurrencies. When the central authority places money, wealth, access, property and privilege above the people we get oligarchy and fascism. When we have unregulated cryptocurrencies we erode all forms of community investment through taxation.
The tension between libertarians and authoritarians is reaching breaking point. Amplification of both ends up in either explosion or implosion. Libertarianism leads to anarchy and chaos. Authoritarianism stifles all forms of creativity.
Both are brittle; absent any resilience.
Unity is Plural, at minimum two, said my mentor of over thirty years, Buckminster Fuller. This is a Principle of the operating system of our Home Planet, true in all cases.
Existence requires otherness — an up to a down, an in to an out, a yin to a yang.
Yet the conversation isn’t about more or less authoritarianism or libertarianism. We do require both — enough freedom to enable creativity, choice, and appropriate incentive — and enough rules and regulations to prevent care-less-ness about anyone but the self-serving interests of some.
What is missing from the polarising conversations is the re-animation of civics and citizenship.
We have eroded the strength of community and family.
What does it mean to be a participating member of a community? To inhabit a place and bear that place responsibility for appropriate care? To hold others to account without the requirement for state policing and legal codes?
Where are the community currencies? Barter, gifting, reciprocity, long term thinking, kindness?
Interestingly, the hard right of politics does see this absence of family and community. However, their attempt to reanimate community and family uses regression rather than progression. They seek to take people back in time, rather than find a pathway that transcends where we are and includes the basics of love, care, dignity and respect.
The libertarians create events like Burning Man to inhabit a sense of community, an event that is accessible to elites only.
The space between the poles of libertarianism and authoritarianism is where Syntropic World sits.
How do we build ecologies of synergy, where collectively we are better than in isolation? How do we build community that encodes self and collective accountability? How do we dignify all forms of contribution, refusing to worship at the alter of a mono-currency? How do we strengthen bonds between people, between people and earth, between people and other creatures?
If a community is only rich in monetary wealth then everything becomes a transaction and takes away vital opportunities for community engagement through relationship. We lose gifting, exchange, a sense of reciprocity.
How do we create systems of social accountability that do not depend on legal codes, central banks and governments tying everything into regulatory knots? Not replacing these, as governments and governing are required to administer whole systems and infrastructure projects like roads, health care, education, taxation and collective law.
Can we create enterprises where people choose to participate based on an open and disclosed set of agreements and codes that hold everyone to account, while also building self and collective management and development? We at Syntropic World call this the Trust Manifesto. It is designed to build trust between all participants as we show up, contribute, learn and hold each other to account.
Imagine it! We get to choose each other, we get to be seen for our contribution in multiple domains, from knowledge, skills, wellbeing, warm data, care, love, technology. We learn to give and receive. We also evolve as we evolve the product and service that captures our hearts and minds. Our enterprise has built-in checks and balances to enable evolution as time incites change, as people change, as our product and service evolve. In Syntropic World these checks and balances include the Integrity Council.
At the same time, some forms of constraint, some forms of rules and agreements, are essential to enable maximum creativity, accountability and discipline. What are the rules? Who writes them? Who changes them? To whom are we held to account? Who do we depend upon? Who do we act in service to? How do we encode moral, ethical and social values? Do we need all of these codes placed into law? Or can we encode them within a community itself?
These questions apply to any human endeavour, no matter the size. Families, partnerships, community groups, and large enterprises. It also applies to the creation of currencies within a community boundary, from gifting to tokens. The governance is designed into the architecture of the currency.
I return as always to the Principles of our Home Planet and its incredible life. A human body does not have a central control system to ensure the heart beats, our blood flows, we take a breath, we digest our food. Our physiology is not an undifferentiated heap. Everything within our biology is in co-ordination with all the other organs of the body. Not separate. Mutually entangled. The mind of ours takes time to learn to be elegant stewards of our biology. Our body being is a fractal image of the world we are stewarding. Would someone know that by experiencing you and your body being? Would they see how elegantly you steward the first enterprise you are responsible for — your body being? Can we claim to truly want to birth enterprises for a world with a future when we care-less about our own enterprise of cells and biology? Can we claim to want to steward Syntropic Enterprises when our relationship with self and others is fractured?
Synergy — the greatest exponential technology available to anyone — is a whole systems Principle. We are the model first of the world we want to see.
Having spent hundreds of hours in conversation with senior business leaders in intimate 1–1 conversations I easily reached a conclusion that no matter what our station in life, underneath all of the roles we have and costumes we wear, we want similar things. The opportunity to bring our whole selves to our work and life, to be seen for who we are, to be part of something that matters, to be held closely, to be loved.
It is time for us to reclaim community, to build enterprises with a thoroughness of design into the human relational co-ordination as if our relationships with self, others, the Earth and her creatures matter most of all, which it does.
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Syntropic World is a global education and community of practice applying the organising principles of nature to enterprise design and human coordination. Creating ecologies of trust, ensuring integrity in everything, enabling collective sense making, and organising around a central purpose — how to create a world that works for 100% of humanity without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.
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