The ghosts of the dead of Hiroshima seek peace — are we listening
I have just returned from an adventure in Japan. The ten days of navigating unfamiliar everythings was a much-needed distraction from the state of the world.
And what a shocking state of the world we have.
A nation that suffered one of the worst genocides in recent history gets away with the genocide of others, failing to see the hypocrisy. Can anyone point out a single volume from history that shows that responding to violence with amplified violence does not beget more violence?
A power-crazed oligarch president continues to fight for territory he claims is his country’s.
The climate crossed the 2-degree mark for a day for the first time in our recent (by thousands of years) history. More of this to come than life can bear.
Black Friday sales consume the world. Indeed, capitalism is metabolising the Earth.
Finding accommodation — a home to live in — becomes out of reach for more and more people as the central banks punish the middle to lower class with interest rate rises as their only perceived weapon against inflation, all the while ignoring that supermarket conglomerates, oil companies and multi-national organisations are making record profits.
More and more leaders get away with outright lying — day in and day out.
Institutions get away with corruption.
The public distrusts the government and institutions to the degree that they elect posers and con men (and the occasional woman — hello Italy) to rule, not realising the pain they are about to unleash on themselves.
Conspiracy theorists rule the airwaves. Snake oil salesmen, spell-casters — the con so easy on an audience that has felt ignored and marginalised by those who are supposed to speak for them for so long that they seek anything at all that is not business or government as usual. (Do read Naomi Klein’s brilliant book, Doppelgänger — A Trip into the Mirror World, for more. https://amzn.asia/d/fK1d7am)
Protesters and whistleblowers are charged with crimes while the corrupt and powerful walk free.
Hate and misogyny flame across every platform, often stirred by the platform owners.
Our creatures are going extinct at such an alarming rate.
And our capitalist system needs to create an extra 2.5 Trillion next year to keep it going. How? In its usual way, extract more, exploit more, colonise more (including our minds), and enclose more. Or create a few extra wars — that is always good for global GDP.
This little list took a few minutes to write and is far from complete.
Confrontation of the polarities and cruelties is brutal.
Willful ignorance is not an option.
We all need to unplug and take a break at times. But not for long.
There is too much to be done, and it starts with us. You. Me. We. Here. Now.
We must speak up, even against the certainty of being hated on. The kind of foul, reptilian hate indicates the hater’s wounded brokenness.
We need to speak louder. We need to protest. Whistleblow. Put our wallets back in our pockets when asked to spend on things we do not need. And take our wallets out to support those in need and the campaigns to uproot the lies and state-sanctioned propaganda.
We need to be impeccable in our integrity. Keep our word. Respect, honour, and find a place at the table for those our world has rendered voiceless, including our Earth and her creatures.
Men need to work harder to find women who have accumulated years of experience and knowledge that equals theirs, even if it is different, and move over to give these women a platform. It might feel like a win-lose game, yet it will be a win-win — because until we take diverse representation seriously, we will get more of the same. Even in the corridors at the edge of thinking — where I like to hang out — men hold the cards, get the media, and take the stage. I am tired of these good men’s weak excuses as to why they have so few women’s voices. As if the women are not there. They are. Everywhere. The women are busy getting on with things, heads down, working hard, spotlights and stages far from their attention bandwidth.
We must reject what Yanis Varoufakis describes as capitalism’s replacement, technofeudalism. https://amzn.asia/d/22rrU8IThe rentier feudal lords of technology have so much accumulated power in their small ranks that they control governments, elections, and propaganda.
Indeed, when the house of cards of capitalism comes down, which it will — for the following reasons;
- The maths of endless growth needed for capitalism on a finite planet is impossible.
- The monopoly of money hegemony that we have made the god of value determination — as a system requires debt and interest accumulation — is antithetical to life.
- When the greedy caterpillar eats all the leaves, even the caterpillar will stave in the end. While some of our techno feudal lords rush to colonise Mars, they too will be caught in the flare of greeds empty vaults. You cannot eat money.
that then we must ensure we have a replacement that serves all life. The Synergistic Accounting tool may provide a bridge to a replacement that is good, true and beautiful.
One of the most precious experiences of my time in Japan was the day spent in Hiroshima.
I wrote the following piece for my daily blog, Beauty of Beginnings, on November 16th 2023.
The ghosts of the dead
There was something inside me that felt a trip to Japan without a trip to Hiroshima would have been disrespectful.
As we sat in the cable car to the top of Mt Misen on Miyajima Island, there were skeletons of trees that had died from acid rain. Silent sentinels of horror surrounded by so much beauty the polarity was difficult to hold.
The A-Bomb Dome in central Hiroshima brought its audience to silence. One of the only buildings left half standing because it happened to be directly under the blast of the bomb. The bomb was detonated above ground to create maximum damage.
The statue of the small girl in Peace Park, a child who lost her life to radiation. She was known before her death for creating thousands of paper cranes. Bus loads of school children stand at her feet and gift her memory thousands of handmade paper cranes. Every day, this ritual repeated.
A mound of grass, stark in its simplicity, the final home for over 70,000 people cremated without being identified.
The Peace Park Bell — shown in today’s picture. The public is invited to ring it to hold the prayer for peace.
And then, far from the Peace Park, which was built on the area completely obliterated by the bomb, we walked through Shukkeien Garden. This beautiful place created in the 1600s was largely obliterated by the blast except for one of the bridges. Bodies of people who died from the radiation are buried in the grounds.
Hiroshima is a place where the ghosts of the dead can be felt everywhere. The Pattern Integrity of Hiroshima after its incineration is a call to peace. A felt sense of longing for a world that says no forever to any weapons of such destruction. There is a beauty in this longing. The people here know this as few others do.
Walking the land of Hiroshima as the world insists on killing, genocide and horror for some false god of rights over others in the name of ownership and power, I wonder if we will ever get the lesson without the experience that the people of Hiroshima had.
I pray we do. I am not certain that we will.
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I return to my work here in Syntropic World. Work I love. I stand on the shoulders of giants — people like Bucky Fuller. Plus, the many, many people who are committed to integrity, courage, decency, all-respect. People who insist on taking responsibility and consider the hypocrite that we all have inside, the one who likes to blame, be the victim and become helpless in the face of the enormity of what needs to be done if we want a world with a future for Earth and all her creatures. The incredible people who are part of Syntropic World applying new models, new maps, and new language to create a better world for all.
Integrity, courage and commitment are required.
The iceberg has hit our home planet, Titanic. Re-arranging deck chairs and polishing guardrails will not save anyone, although they could help to support those in desperate need right now — the hungry, homeless and sick — for example.
We must build new boats that make the existing ones obsolete.
Thank you for being here.
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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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