Dear Douglas:
I have taken the time to read your Web Page, but not your Social Technology
page. You have obviously put in an immense amount of "thinking time" on
your ideas - and many of them I can heartily agree with. Friendships and
relationships that are positive are very enriching and those that are not
can be very destructive - who needs it? Same with jobs. Who wouldn't like
to work with compatible people in a people structured environment rather
than the competitive ratrace that is the current capitalistic model.
So, at a superficial level, I find congruence with your outcomes and some
unease with your methodologies - partly because I am math aversive by nature
and I seriously distrust statistics and generalizations and approximations
that are often drawn from statistics.
You know, people are the problem. Why? My answer is because most of us are
terribly dysfunctional. Why? No one answer covers such a simple question
but one of my heroes is Joesph Chilton Pearce who wrote Crack in the Cosmic
Egg and a more recent book I am reading called Evolutions End. Joesph's
answer is that we haven't figured out the methodology to work with natures
plan. We have made bad guesses about human psychology, child birthing,
child development phases and we are working against nature, the result has
been dysfunctional people. A leap of logic here, when you have
dysfunctional people, you have dysfunctional society's, dysfunctional
economic systems and dysfunctional relationships.
Joesph's answer is to start trying to raise more people from pre-natal to
adulthood who are not dysfunctional. These people, not being dysfunctional
will then be able - from their more normal perspective, will be able to
devise new systems that make people more of what they could be. Well,
that's a pretty utopian plan but it has a logic in it that is difficult to
deny.
If you are a hog breeder and the hogs you are working with do not carry
enough weight to make you a profit, you engage in a long term project to
breed hogs that grow bigger - quicker. Now, I do not like my own analogy
but it has a big truth in it. You can't make something better when your raw
materials are flawed. You can't make a better people society when the flaws
in the people that created the dysfunctional society are the very ones
trying to design a new society. My guess, you will just get another version
of a flawed society.
I could go through your lengthy reply to my post and make some comments of
agreement and defense. I would rather challenge this topic with some new
ideas and get your response on them. So I will leave the rebuttals to
another time and await your comments on this theme.
Respectfully,
Thomas Lunde
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