All is in fragments and upheaval now as powers of evil siege the planet. Yet the dawn of a new age stirs. Thank you! I subscribed to you Substack and to the vision of the circular economy.
This is a brilliant essay. You are a brilliant writer and thinker. You have eloquently articulated a contemporary version of the principles of Rudolph Steiner’s three- fold social order. In reading this I experienced a hopeful feeling of a new and very early dawning of awareness that culture is the garment- the cloak of humanity, a field and force that unites us in archetypal human consciousness of our potential to shape our world. We do innately long for a utopia that is
100%, Michael. Your statement, "...positive social transformation much more often arises from culture, and from the shared values and actions of the population, than it does from ideologues and politicians" rings absolutely true for me. Laws are fine, but as my husband's grandfather always said, "a contract is just an agreement made between people of good faith." It is the "good faith" part that we are sorely lacking, the "shared values" part. I'm not sure how we remedy that. Although...
...now that I think about it, perhaps that's not something we have any control over. Perhaps we just need to open ourselves to the possibility of an energetic shift toward goodness and truth, and participate in that shift however and whenever we can, trusting that we are instruments of a power far greater than ourselves.
Let me say that no attempts to articulate something worthwhile amount to much if they do not meet a receptive audience. Your receptivity means much to me!
And along the way, I strive for some of your poetic cast of expression in 'The Art of Freedom' to infuse my own missives.
Hmm… yes, laws are good and necessary, but perhaps not so many of them as we have, and perhaps not quite the same ones… and we need all need to understand they are kind of secondary to what is and should be done without laws. Rather than the control-freakery of trying to legislate every tiniest detail of life.
Our conversation calls to my mind the perennial debate about whether human nature is inherently good, or inherently greedy/foolish/destructive/whatever (bad). When I ponder that, it seems to me that human nature is inherently OPEN, capable of the greatest good and the greatest evil, sometimes even in the same person. I recount this in relation to the question of how we get to the goodwill – I think human behaviour depends a lot on the system it finds itself in. Our systems do not at all bring out the best in people. So we have to work toward changing them. The ‘shared values’ bit might in some ways be less difficult. Seems to me that often when people on opposite sides of the political divide debate, a lot of what they they want is the same - but they disagree on how to get there. There’s a part of what has to be done right there – realise that neither the left nor the right is really going to fix the world, and that old game is really part of the problem. ‘New Paradigm’ needed … subject of my next post.
How do we do it? Surely a balance between actively ‘doing something about it’, and ‘opening to the energetic shift’ is what is called for. The energetic shift is for sure happening, with for now both a dark side and a light side. The number of people engaging in the quest for some kind of restructuring, realignment, is growing. And there’s a fair bit in their common ground on the general principles of it… it is said that ‘nothing can stop and idea whose time has come’, and I think there’s a fair bit of that in where we are. Trauma compels people to re-evaluate, and there is always opportunity in that (even though it is nice to wish it could be done without the trauma). So when that gate opens, the thing to do is throw everything we can at the opportunity! Something greater than ourselves… which is also maybe part of what is IN us. Certainly, it is something quite other than ‘ideology’.
Why do I always write such long answers? What are ‘occassional tables’ the rest of the time?
It's taken a while for my thoughts on this to crystallise but here they are in essence (well, some of them, anyway).
I can see the value in Steiner's concept of the three-fold society and I agree that culture includes all the things you list. But I'd say it includes much more than just 'co-ordinated input to the legislative and production functions which serve it'.
I regard a society's framework of laws as the embodiment of its collective values. So, to my mind, all primary legislative activity takes place within the cultural sphere, including fundamental laws of ownership and inheritance, and laws governing the contribution individuals are expected to make to society. My feeling is that, if we can get those laws right, the problems caused by remote ownership would largely disappear and, with the broader distribution of wealth which that would bring, the question of how activities of the cultural sphere should be funded would largely solve itself.
The sphere of government, in my view, includes judicial and law-enforcement activity, along with responsibility for transport and communication networks and a basic welfare system, but only secondary law-making, i.e. establishing detailed rules about how primary legislation is implemented.
From this perspective, it's not that 'governments and giant corporations stitch everything up between them and crush out of existence all possibility of wider participation in society'; what happens, rather, is that a corrupt cultural sphere abdicates some of its own responsibilities and allows the other spheres to operate without some of the constraints that are necessary in a healthy society.
On the question of how long change might take, I think it's worth bearing in mind that, although it takes a long time to climb up a mountain, and a long time to climb down the other side, it's only a single – crucial – step from one side of the watershed to the other. I think that's where we're at now.
P.S. I think there's some overlap in what I've said above with arguments I've been making, for many years, that there is a polarity within the functions of government, and that a properly representative system would allow us to elect two sets of legislators with responsibilities for different areas of law (https://treasonableman.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/roots-of-polarisation.pdf).
Hi Malcolm, thanks for your kind comment on my 'sins' recently!
I still owe you a response on the above - it will come, as I think it important to continue these dialogues, see what new perspectives they lead to, possilby inspire others a little...
Hi Malcolm, thanks for continuing the dialogue. I will for sure come back to you on this when I can. Meanwhile, I came across this today, and though you might find it interesting:
I'm a bit skeptical about how any cultural space can develop when the major challenge at present is to separate the commercial space from the indirect control of the state space like we previous separated the state from its control of the cultural space (separation of church and state).
This public acceptance in ESG I think this is the recognition of the absence of this cultural space so an acceptance of this being carved out within the commercial space.
Thanks Wynn. It’s true that the government/corporate partnership has a stranglehold that will not easily be broken. At best we might hope that this has now become so extreme that more and more people are waking up to it. (Still a minority, but at present a rapidly growing minority, hence the panicked attempts to clamp down on dissent).
I agree with your observation that there is a kind of sequential or cyclical dynamic where first the church and state must be prised apart, and now commerce and state. Regarding that latter (present) challenge though, I find it hard to tell whether it is the state controlling commerce or commerce controlling the state. You can’t tell the knife from the wound.
And regarding ESG – yes absolutely, it seems right to many people because we can all recognise the urgency of the need to do something about environment, about problematic social and ‘governance’ dynamics. It’s possible that I might even have alienated some by declaring ESG ‘not a good thing’. The challenge is, as you say, to get people to recognise, first that this problem exists in the first place because there is a vacuum where institutions of cultural (social) responsibility should exist, and second that seeking to remedy that by having organisations with massive amounts of money, conflicts of interest and no electoral accountability step into the vacuum is a bad solution.
It must necessarily be a difficult road from where we are now, but only cultivating a widespread will to really reanimate social participation and gradually awaken that third social function will be able to achieve what ESG’s supporters think it might do. I think such things as home-schooling, crowd-funding and even the various medical networks which have recently been setting themselves up to ‘go around’ all the media and big pharma interference with the proper conduct of their work, are all more spontaneous and more real moves to put that socially regenerative responsibility back where it belongs.
All of those however are still pretty vulnerable to being sabotaged by powerful interests which want to keep their power. Ultimately I’d even say that given how much power we have allowed to accumulate in places and ways that are harmful, perhaps the most important task of all is simply spreading the conceptual ideas of a three-part society, a dynamic balance between institutions of government, production and culture, may be the most important activity of all: For a society with more distributed responsibility to come about, even long-term, it is new vision which first must be distributed – in large numbers of hearts and minds. Dialogue, engagement, and the hard thrashing out of what might eventually become shared perspectives that people can actually believe in.
But is there public acceptance? So much of the 'change' in the last few years has occurred without the public being aware of it. Take the 'working people' of this country (and I'm not just talking about blue collar people, there are also professional white collar men and women who have their IRA's and retirements invested for them by their corporate CEO's and boards.) Most of them are so busy commuting, working, raising children, busily keeping a home and building a life that they weren't made aware that their investments (which are large over a lifetime) are now being sunk into environmental, social, and governance orthodoxy that they might not agree with. In fact, they might think it has no value above broad based investing but don't know how to fight the massive net-zero initiative because it is huge and powerful and they are simply exhausted with other life struggles.
I think perhaps the point is that one section of the public sees through the ESG scam very clearly but another, and pretty sizeable, part swallows, without enough critical thinking, the dangerous and wrong arguement that the corporations are thus acting in the public good, and that 'since govnment is disfunctional (which it is) it is necessary that they should step in.
Probably that includes some of the management within the corporations themselves.
(It pains me that present-day management feels compelled to bring their political beliefs -- which ESG is whether they will admit it or not -- into our financial system.)
By the way there is a great book with very clear insight to the real nature of ESG, called 'Woke, Inc.' It is written by a 'real entrepeneur' by the name of Vivek Ramaswamy.
All is in fragments and upheaval now as powers of evil siege the planet. Yet the dawn of a new age stirs. Thank you! I subscribed to you Substack and to the vision of the circular economy.
Whoops... There is an innate longing in every human soul born of God to bear the fruit of a society that reflects our truest and noble nature.
You express it very beautifully, and very precisely.
This is a brilliant essay. You are a brilliant writer and thinker. You have eloquently articulated a contemporary version of the principles of Rudolph Steiner’s three- fold social order. In reading this I experienced a hopeful feeling of a new and very early dawning of awareness that culture is the garment- the cloak of humanity, a field and force that unites us in archetypal human consciousness of our potential to shape our world. We do innately long for a utopia that is
Well that is very circular and reciprocal too Cheryl - you have lifted my spirits and my sense of hope as much as I apparently lifted yours!
Your comments - and your pledge - are warmly appreciated.
100%, Michael. Your statement, "...positive social transformation much more often arises from culture, and from the shared values and actions of the population, than it does from ideologues and politicians" rings absolutely true for me. Laws are fine, but as my husband's grandfather always said, "a contract is just an agreement made between people of good faith." It is the "good faith" part that we are sorely lacking, the "shared values" part. I'm not sure how we remedy that. Although...
...now that I think about it, perhaps that's not something we have any control over. Perhaps we just need to open ourselves to the possibility of an energetic shift toward goodness and truth, and participate in that shift however and whenever we can, trusting that we are instruments of a power far greater than ourselves.
P.S. Thank you for always bringing new ideas and perspectives into my life! Your breadth of knowledge is staggering... :-)
My turn to thank you for high praise.
Let me say that no attempts to articulate something worthwhile amount to much if they do not meet a receptive audience. Your receptivity means much to me!
And along the way, I strive for some of your poetic cast of expression in 'The Art of Freedom' to infuse my own missives.
Hmm… yes, laws are good and necessary, but perhaps not so many of them as we have, and perhaps not quite the same ones… and we need all need to understand they are kind of secondary to what is and should be done without laws. Rather than the control-freakery of trying to legislate every tiniest detail of life.
Our conversation calls to my mind the perennial debate about whether human nature is inherently good, or inherently greedy/foolish/destructive/whatever (bad). When I ponder that, it seems to me that human nature is inherently OPEN, capable of the greatest good and the greatest evil, sometimes even in the same person. I recount this in relation to the question of how we get to the goodwill – I think human behaviour depends a lot on the system it finds itself in. Our systems do not at all bring out the best in people. So we have to work toward changing them. The ‘shared values’ bit might in some ways be less difficult. Seems to me that often when people on opposite sides of the political divide debate, a lot of what they they want is the same - but they disagree on how to get there. There’s a part of what has to be done right there – realise that neither the left nor the right is really going to fix the world, and that old game is really part of the problem. ‘New Paradigm’ needed … subject of my next post.
How do we do it? Surely a balance between actively ‘doing something about it’, and ‘opening to the energetic shift’ is what is called for. The energetic shift is for sure happening, with for now both a dark side and a light side. The number of people engaging in the quest for some kind of restructuring, realignment, is growing. And there’s a fair bit in their common ground on the general principles of it… it is said that ‘nothing can stop and idea whose time has come’, and I think there’s a fair bit of that in where we are. Trauma compels people to re-evaluate, and there is always opportunity in that (even though it is nice to wish it could be done without the trauma). So when that gate opens, the thing to do is throw everything we can at the opportunity! Something greater than ourselves… which is also maybe part of what is IN us. Certainly, it is something quite other than ‘ideology’.
Why do I always write such long answers? What are ‘occassional tables’ the rest of the time?
It's taken a while for my thoughts on this to crystallise but here they are in essence (well, some of them, anyway).
I can see the value in Steiner's concept of the three-fold society and I agree that culture includes all the things you list. But I'd say it includes much more than just 'co-ordinated input to the legislative and production functions which serve it'.
I regard a society's framework of laws as the embodiment of its collective values. So, to my mind, all primary legislative activity takes place within the cultural sphere, including fundamental laws of ownership and inheritance, and laws governing the contribution individuals are expected to make to society. My feeling is that, if we can get those laws right, the problems caused by remote ownership would largely disappear and, with the broader distribution of wealth which that would bring, the question of how activities of the cultural sphere should be funded would largely solve itself.
The sphere of government, in my view, includes judicial and law-enforcement activity, along with responsibility for transport and communication networks and a basic welfare system, but only secondary law-making, i.e. establishing detailed rules about how primary legislation is implemented.
From this perspective, it's not that 'governments and giant corporations stitch everything up between them and crush out of existence all possibility of wider participation in society'; what happens, rather, is that a corrupt cultural sphere abdicates some of its own responsibilities and allows the other spheres to operate without some of the constraints that are necessary in a healthy society.
On the question of how long change might take, I think it's worth bearing in mind that, although it takes a long time to climb up a mountain, and a long time to climb down the other side, it's only a single – crucial – step from one side of the watershed to the other. I think that's where we're at now.
P.S. I think there's some overlap in what I've said above with arguments I've been making, for many years, that there is a polarity within the functions of government, and that a properly representative system would allow us to elect two sets of legislators with responsibilities for different areas of law (https://treasonableman.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/roots-of-polarisation.pdf).
Hi Malcolm, thanks for your kind comment on my 'sins' recently!
I still owe you a response on the above - it will come, as I think it important to continue these dialogues, see what new perspectives they lead to, possilby inspire others a little...
A little inundated at present however!
best regards,
Michael.
Hi Malcolm, thanks for continuing the dialogue. I will for sure come back to you on this when I can. Meanwhile, I came across this today, and though you might find it interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R3KDFeaSK0
I'm a bit skeptical about how any cultural space can develop when the major challenge at present is to separate the commercial space from the indirect control of the state space like we previous separated the state from its control of the cultural space (separation of church and state).
This public acceptance in ESG I think this is the recognition of the absence of this cultural space so an acceptance of this being carved out within the commercial space.
Thanks Wynn. It’s true that the government/corporate partnership has a stranglehold that will not easily be broken. At best we might hope that this has now become so extreme that more and more people are waking up to it. (Still a minority, but at present a rapidly growing minority, hence the panicked attempts to clamp down on dissent).
I agree with your observation that there is a kind of sequential or cyclical dynamic where first the church and state must be prised apart, and now commerce and state. Regarding that latter (present) challenge though, I find it hard to tell whether it is the state controlling commerce or commerce controlling the state. You can’t tell the knife from the wound.
And regarding ESG – yes absolutely, it seems right to many people because we can all recognise the urgency of the need to do something about environment, about problematic social and ‘governance’ dynamics. It’s possible that I might even have alienated some by declaring ESG ‘not a good thing’. The challenge is, as you say, to get people to recognise, first that this problem exists in the first place because there is a vacuum where institutions of cultural (social) responsibility should exist, and second that seeking to remedy that by having organisations with massive amounts of money, conflicts of interest and no electoral accountability step into the vacuum is a bad solution.
It must necessarily be a difficult road from where we are now, but only cultivating a widespread will to really reanimate social participation and gradually awaken that third social function will be able to achieve what ESG’s supporters think it might do. I think such things as home-schooling, crowd-funding and even the various medical networks which have recently been setting themselves up to ‘go around’ all the media and big pharma interference with the proper conduct of their work, are all more spontaneous and more real moves to put that socially regenerative responsibility back where it belongs.
All of those however are still pretty vulnerable to being sabotaged by powerful interests which want to keep their power. Ultimately I’d even say that given how much power we have allowed to accumulate in places and ways that are harmful, perhaps the most important task of all is simply spreading the conceptual ideas of a three-part society, a dynamic balance between institutions of government, production and culture, may be the most important activity of all: For a society with more distributed responsibility to come about, even long-term, it is new vision which first must be distributed – in large numbers of hearts and minds. Dialogue, engagement, and the hard thrashing out of what might eventually become shared perspectives that people can actually believe in.
Thanks for being part of that!
But is there public acceptance? So much of the 'change' in the last few years has occurred without the public being aware of it. Take the 'working people' of this country (and I'm not just talking about blue collar people, there are also professional white collar men and women who have their IRA's and retirements invested for them by their corporate CEO's and boards.) Most of them are so busy commuting, working, raising children, busily keeping a home and building a life that they weren't made aware that their investments (which are large over a lifetime) are now being sunk into environmental, social, and governance orthodoxy that they might not agree with. In fact, they might think it has no value above broad based investing but don't know how to fight the massive net-zero initiative because it is huge and powerful and they are simply exhausted with other life struggles.
I think perhaps the point is that one section of the public sees through the ESG scam very clearly but another, and pretty sizeable, part swallows, without enough critical thinking, the dangerous and wrong arguement that the corporations are thus acting in the public good, and that 'since govnment is disfunctional (which it is) it is necessary that they should step in.
Probably that includes some of the management within the corporations themselves.
If you feel incllined, take a look here:
michaelwarden.substack.com/good-government
michaelwarden.substack.com/the-failed-mantra-of-the-french-revolution
Thank you, I'll take a look at your articles.
(It pains me that present-day management feels compelled to bring their political beliefs -- which ESG is whether they will admit it or not -- into our financial system.)
Me too!!
There is a mighty battle in progress between right and wrong ways or re-aligning social dynamics!
Any comments on the other articles very welcome!
By the way there is a great book with very clear insight to the real nature of ESG, called 'Woke, Inc.' It is written by a 'real entrepeneur' by the name of Vivek Ramaswamy.