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Agnostic, Fear, Money, Saving the World

The Journey is the Goal

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You can imagine with a goal or mission to “Save the World”, especially when you are not certain that it even needs saving, that the journey along the way becomes pretty important.

You’ve got to like the process. You have to enjoy pondering things. You have to find it interesting connecting disparate things together and deriving solutions from first principles.

Finding elements that are very likely to be  close to the truth and working forward from there.

Ultimately you have to find it fun to be so deluded that you think it is possible that you may have the/an answer. After-all this delusion is your reality.

I often wonder how many people out there have the solution but like me have been too fearful of ridicule to share it.

I did a personal/business development course once called Money and You. The course put you through a survival game to teach the value of synergy. As a team and as an individual you had to plan your survival and the results compared. It exposed that there was a greater probability of success as a team than as an individual. The bigger thing I got out of it however was in the debrief afterward. There are always one or two individuals that would have survived by themselves but as a team met their demise. The learning point was that their inability to get their message across to their team literally killed their team members and themselves.

So where does this put me with my plan to “Save the World”?
Leave it to others who are more certain that their solution will achieve it? The problem is that they may be wrong, or worse still, their solution may accelerate the world’s demise.

The same course offered this definition of Courage. “Doubt + Action = Courage”

Not noted for my extraordinary levels of courage and my agnostic view of the world providing me enormous amounts of doubt;  Simple algebraic arithmetic “Action = Courage – Doubt” which in my case is of course negative.

Does this realisation stop me from pursuing my mission to save the world or does it just mean my action is always backwards?

I have had a consistent course of action for the past twenty six years, producing parts of the plan and slowly fitting them together. The short answer is “I guess not”.

Rest assured I am enjoying the journey.

Love, Power, Saving the World

Essential Elements of Any Plan to Save the World.

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  • Most importantly it must come from a position of Love.
  • Individuals must personally benefit from participation.
  • Groups must get a benefit through involvement.
  • Must produce more than it uses. (Adds Value)
  • Must be self-perpetuating, It must grow as a natural consequence of its structure.

Doesn’t add up?
Seems like perpetual motion to you?
Never-the-less I must include all these elements in my plan for it to succeed.

Power, Science

There are no such thing as “Rights”

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You have no “rights”. Not even to eat, drink, breath or even to be born.

Everything we regard as rights has taken energy to give the appearance of being a right.

Institutions which consolidate that appearance require constant energy to maintain them.

Like the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics without energy to bring order from disorder a system will naturally tend to chaos.

Where does that energy come from?

I like to think the “Boundless energy of the Human Spirit”.

Destruction is therefore a waste of the efforts that came before us and shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.

Constant, never ending Improvement is a far more productive and is part of the solution to “Save the World”.

Business, Fear, Money

Deming

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In the early 1980’s I climbed out of my teens, I entered the workforce and started to learn how business worked. As part of a company following the flavour of the month management philosophy I was put through W. Edwards Deming Institute’s training program. Being young and impressionable I thought the philosophy was excellent. I still do. I was tasked as a lower middle management employee to champion the new philosophy through the company.

I knew these sorts of things needed to be championed from the top. I thought that upper management were all committed. I found to the subsequent demise of my employment how wrong I was. A lesson learned. Don’t challenge the boss by pointing out where they aren’t following the philosophy they are committed to following.

There were two things that particularly stuck in my mind from my Deming Training.

  • Firstly, that “Fear” was an impediment to good business.
  • Secondly, that random remuneration was infinitely more motivating than the current systems of remuneration.

Like all good business management philosophies the relevance of their wisdom extends beyond the business context.

Many systems have stemmed from Deming’s teaching; Kaizen (Tony Robbins calls it Cani), Just in time, Six Sigma and many more have tweaked and branded their way to successful consultancy service models. Almost without exception they all tended to avoid what Deming had to say about remuneration.

It wasn’t that they avoided the question of Money and how to dish it out. It’s just that of all Deming’s wisdom, this was the piece that was most consistently ignored.

I came to realise over the years that the reason for that was probably “Fear”.

The following video is old but still true. It is worth watching in it’s entirety but if you don’t have time skip through to the 3 and a half minutes starting at 5 minutes in.

This part is what Deming regards at his third Deadly Sin and what I remember most vividly from my training.  As with many people who have been trained along these lines I have come to realise, it applies not only in business but in every day life. Life just isn’t fair

Business, Fair - Justice, Saving the World, Technology

Money

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Save the World
The Venn Diagram - What system impacts the most fundamentally on our World?

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.” ~ Mayer Anselm Rothschild (Banker)

What do we reform to give best bang for our buck?

Financial independence is something we all covet but very few enjoy. Money, however much we wish it not to be so, dictates much of our enjoyment of life. We wish to eat, it requires money. We want new clothes, it requires money. We’d like to travel, more money, and so on. Hence those who have control over the supply of money, are deemed by most individuals to have power and control. Banks, Governments and Companies are the groups which wield this power. Within these organisations, individuals make the day to day decisions which ultimately give or take away money from other individuals. Traditionally, these organisations tend to be organised in a hierarchy where the individuals at the top have the ability to make decisions over the supply of money to those individuals beneath them. The ability to hire and fire is the ultimate example of control of the money supply. As society’s requirement for access to money increases so, an individual’s feeling of control over their own lives diminishes. Entrenched fear of losing money supply is still the most dominant management system in play. There are many management systems which have been implemented to redress the control of money, and hence control over our own lives issue. Within business, Piecework Pay, Production Bonuses, Profit sharing, Gain sharing are all systems, with varying degrees of merit, which, whether by chance or design, promise to pass back a degree of control to an individual. Most of these systems attempt to design in fairness of compensation through the use of empirical data, manipulated by some algorithm. Generally the algorithm consists of logic that some form of consensus has deemed to be fair. More often than not, individuals within an organisation will know of, or perceive of, examples where the system has not produced a fair result, whatever the system.

What if we accepted that systems were sometimes not fair and created a compensation system that didn’t use “fair”, as a guide but instead relied on faith in group, and individual humanity?

What if we created a system which enhanced communication, exchanged ideas, and gauged feelings?

What if this system empowered all individuals within an organisation not just those who excel?

Wouldn’t that be “Good”?

  • I’m a Communist?
  • I’m a Greenie Wack job?
  • I’m a conspiracy theory Nut?
  • I want to bring down the free market?

I’m none of those, just a bloke with a plan to save the world.

Fair - Justice, Giving, Love, Saving the World

The Little Red HeN – Revised

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Once upon a time, there was a little red hen who lived on a farm. She was friends with a lazy dog, a sleepy cat, and a noisy yellow duck.

One day the little red hen found some seeds on the ground. The little red hen had an idea. She would plant the seeds.

The little red hen asked her friends, “Who will help me plant the seeds?”

“Not I,” barked the lazy dog.
“Not I,” purred the sleepy cat.
“Not I,” quacked the noisy yellow duck.

“Then I will,” said the little red hen. So the little red hen planted the seeds all by herself.

When the seeds had grown, the little red hen asked her friends, “Who will help me cut the wheat?”

“Not I,” barked the lazy dog.
“Not I,” purred the sleepy cat.
“Not I,” quacked the noisy yellow duck.

“Then I will,” said the little red hen. So the little red hen cut the wheat all by herself.

When all the wheat was cut, the little red hen asked her friends, “Who will help me take the wheat to the mill to be ground into flour?”

“Not I,” barked the lazy dog.
“Not I,” purred the sleepy cat.
“Not I,” quacked the noisy yellow duck.

“Then I will,” said the little red hen. So the little red hen brought the wheat to the mill all by herself, ground the wheat into flour, and carried the heavy sack of flour back to the farm.

The tired little red hen asked her friends, “Who will help me bake the bread?”

“Not I,” barked the lazy dog.
“Not I,” purred the sleepy cat.
“Not I,” quacked the noisy yellow duck.

“Then I will,” said the little red hen. So the little red hen baked the bread all by herself.

When the bread was finished, the tired little red hen asked her friends, “Who will help me eat the bread?”

“I will,” barked the lazy dog.
“I will,” purred the sleepy cat.
“I will,” quacked the noisy yellow duck.

“Yes!” said the little red hen. “You are all welcome to share.” “I had fun planting, cutting, grinding and baking.”

“Now I can also enjoy watching the fruits of my labour being used”, and she did!

For the more traditionalists amongst you, the original story above.

Agnostic, Family, Love, Religion, Saving the World

As if you needed a reason to save the world

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I’ve never been a disciplined person. I wish I was. I’m sure if I had been I would have achieved a lot more than I have by now. I know the theory but have a hard time putting it into practice. I should have goals. I know they should be attainable, measurable, and time bound. When I actually do set goals I generally, but not always, achieve them. So let’s start the process of setting me a goal, a really cool goal that I really care about.

So what do I really care about? Ummmm! See this is where it gets tricky, I have this tendency of letting my mind get away on me.

Take for instance the thought that I would like a happy life, which quickly gets extended to wanting a happy life for my daughter, and once I start thinking about that, I want her offspring to have a happy life as well. Well she doesn’t have any children yet, so I don’t know them, and yet, I want them to be happy. Ok, so I want people I don’t even know to be happy, well, I don’t know most of the people in the world, so if I move on down the thought process, I perhaps want everyone in the world to be happy. Very quickly I have got to something that I want that is seemingly unattainable. I have seemingly broken the first rule of goal setting by finding something I want that is unattainable.

I guess this is where you are supposed to break the thing down into manageable hunks and create some mini goals, which are attainable, that sets you off in the direction of your overall goal. I guess one could call that overall goal a mission or a vision.

So my mission is for “Everyone to be happy for evermore”?

Well first things first I guess, we need hope that there will be a “for evermore” for people to be happy in. So I guess my mission could be to “save the world”; yeh! That will do, my mission is to save the world and my mini goal is to come up with a plan to do it.

I can hear you saying hold on, that’s a complete waste of time. What ever you come up with will never work, much greater people than you have tried and thus far failed. What makes you think you can succeed where others have not?

The answer is “I don’t know” but it’s my mission now so time to give it a go.

Am I alone in this mission? Seemingly not, for a start I apparently have all the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant contestants wishing for world peace and determined to use their crowned stature to achieve it. I’m in good company. How common is this mission? If we look at what got me to my mission I would suspect it is very common. A huge proportion of the world population want to be happy and want their children to be happy. If we add in the constraint that this must be achieved in conjunction to adhering to one or other religious beliefs, this happiness desire is almost universal. Assuming everyone wants to be happy, by necessity we require a world to be happy in. Q.E.D. The world must be saved and its no less my responsibility to save it as yours.

Agnostic, Saving the World, Science, Technology

The World Doesn’t need Saving?

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A famous visionary Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller , as he neared the end of his life, suggested that perhaps the world had seen a turning point. He saw the event of man-powered flight across the English channel in 1979 as an inspirational example of “Doing more with Less” and that if, as a global people, we can continue to follow this principle in every thing we do the world is on a path of recovery.

Since his death in 1983 have we continued on that path? Perhaps we have. Have we bottomed out as far as negatively impacting on our planet and humanity? Perhaps the natural momentum of doing more with less will carry us to a peaceful, prosperous world where poverty has been eliminated. I don’t know. We certainly seem to have the technology, the tools, one would suspect the individual will to continue on the recovery path. Perhaps there is nothing to worry about.

Just in case this isn’t so, I feel it is my responsibility to create an action plan to ensure a path Bucky saw as having started, continues yielding the results he envisioned.

The following is an amusing Talk by Robert Wright doing his best to convince us that we are indeed on the right track. His brand of Optimism is best listened to with distance between you and razorblades. 🙂

If you are running short of time, skip to 14:40 minutes into the talk the last 3 or so minutes, and listen to what he has to say about “Launching a Moral Revolution”. Personally I am more optimistic than he is on this process. I guess that’s because I think I have invented a mechanism to make it happen. Pay special attention to what he has to say about the Intelligent pursuit of self-interest as this is somewhat related to how I intend to “save the world”.

Agnostic, Religion, Saving the World

My Religion?

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It seems to me that Religion, from a practical perspective, is a set of guidelines to live ones life by. (Brand loyalty gives rise to a multitude of flavours; Judaism, Budism, Christianity etc)

I guess I have one of those.

I like to think I have derived them from first principles.  “If I was on the receiving end of the action I am taking, what would I think or feel about that action and the person taking it?” Karen Armstrong is doing her best to get us back to those first principles by advocating reviving the golden rule.

Being agnostic there is one overriding rule I feel compelled to live by “Don’t Recruit Followers to My Religion” , or in other words,  “Thou shalt not promote one’s Brand”. I have my own reasons for this rule.

  • There is Power in Numbers.
  • Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
  • “He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy!” – quote Brian’s Mother, Life of Brian (1979)

Even more compelling a reason is that someone I can assume carries a great degree of credibility, forbid conversion of Jews and Christians (people of the book) to Islam. Who am I to argue with the Prophet Muhammad ? Not until the 10th Century did it become legal to convert Jews and Christians. Obviously 400 years or so is sufficient enough time to corrupt a religion.

Someone else that holds a bit of sway in the Jewish community, Rabbi Hillel, stated that, “The Book” so to speak could be summed up by “The Golden Rule”. This guy died when Jesus was 10. Not sure how well teachings got around in those days, but I can assume that Jesus was pretty taken with the Golden Rule as well.

  • Taking the advice of a the pretty switched on historic figures above as, likely to be “good”.
  • That my religion (my system by which I make my moral decisions) is based on the golden rule.
  • Q.E.D. No Recruiting Rule.

I can show you a man made plan but I can’t show you a miracle.