Dear Readers,
I’ve not posted in longer than usual for no good reason except that a number of ideas got twisted up into drafts I could neither knit together nor untangle.
A few threads follow.
1.
The population of the planet reached eight billion people on nov 8th.
Think of all the poop.
How do we poop out love?
2.
What are we paying attention to? What should we be influenced by?
These are very 21st-century subjects: attention and influence.
Money still makes the world go round, of course, but the capital of power is, more and more, what finds eyeballs.
3.
At the end of a recent article in the NY Times, Anand Giridharadas says billionaires are “not our saviors, they are our mistakes.”
When will we pay, and pay attention to, those who can stitch the social fabric together rather than those who undo them? (Think of the hardware store you once went to on Main St., now replaced by Wal-Mart.)
In this interview, Scott Galloway points to Elon Musk's “total lack of grace” and how we still look to idols, “a super being,” with tech leaders now occupying that space because “technology is the closest thing to magic.”
Even if they are in the same predicament as those they criticize—they need attention—both Giridharadas and Galloway are worth paying attention to if only because they give us ways to get beyond the religious impulse of faith over reason, to look beyond the cult of genius—the idols—who would, along with a sycophantic and desperate for attention media, convince us things can only be solved by those whose obscene wealth demonstrates their capacity.
That is, while there are lots of difficult problems, we need only change tax policy and a few algorithms to bolster the middle class and lessen the divisiveness of social media overnight.
5.
We can't fall any further if
We can't feel ordinary love
And we can't reach any higher,
If we can't deal with ordinary love.
—U2
6.
Right now the World Cup is on. I mostly can’t watch. Qatar hosting and the sickening corruption of the organizing bodies pulls the bridle of my compliance too tight.
Another boondoggle for those who use money and eyeballs to whitewash their Iron-Age thinking.
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Still, the world pays attention.
In 1985 and 1995 more than thirty percent of our species tuned in for the Live Aid Concerts and those that followed.
Sure, the “Small Business” concert or the “Please Stop It Mr. Putin” festival may not be in the offing, but it is not impossible to imagine that announcement made from the public square we all hear.
—
Then again, you would think America would have heard the message about guns long ago.
7.
Sam Harris says somewhere that we have “flown the perch” of evolution, and that evolution did not prepare us to run the global society we must now run.
What if Musk and Gates and Buffet and Bezos give all their money to a small group of teenagers from around the world, kids charged with spending three years traveling and talking and figuring out how they will use those billions?
Planet Earth, The Plan
That could be the one-pager the kids write before they put a few hundred billion to work on its behalf.
A Lord Of The Flies kind of deal only on a golden island? Maybe. But at least everyone would read that page.
At the very least we would have a common text and something to focus on, a place from which to start as we work to poop out the love, together.
Lovely. From the East Coast of an empire in full self-destruct mode (over the Thanksgiving holiday, the U.S. reached 606 mass shootings this year alone). A global world of 8 billion people now means there are multiple squares with beautiful voices ringing out in many of them… how to focus our attention on the squares of justice and compassion so that we can figure out how to engage with open hearts those screaming out of fear and pain? How, indeed, do we poop out the love?