cooperation, collaboration, creative evolution

Though I've altered it a bit with the 'Warhol' effect available on my Mac, this knot image was originally hand-drawn in charcoal by 

Rebecca Bacheler for my "Radical Perspectives" literature class and I think it brilliantly portrays successful community as a loose knot of specific actions and attitudes - thanks Becca!

Whether it's the fading echo of Social Darwinism or the dying gasps of empire, It's nearly a required dogma these days to believe and assert (if not celebrate) that humans are inherently competitive, greedy and war-like - but maybe it's this story that is the bad influence. Maybe it's time we consider the potential consequences of this story at this specific time in technological history, a time of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the World Wide Web. What is possible? Nothing is inevitable.

Apocalypse or abundance: which future do we tell?

Since the psychological reality of the "self-fulfilling prophecy" is well demonstrated in terms of expectations and the stories we tell about ourselves, perhaps its time to consider telling new stories and looking at the evidence all around us of cooperation, collaboration and creative evolution. If our internal organs fought each other we would be weakened and it would be called disease, right? Those who profit from war and scarcity are only a tiny minority of the planet who try to convince the rest of us that we're just like them so we will defend their 'rights' but with the Web, the flow of information has been like Toto exposing the false power of the Wizard of Oz.

Though sensationalism catches our attention and the media feeds us a constant diet of news about violence, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that humanity is actually becoming less violent in "A History of Violence". And a recent New York Times Magazine article "How Are Humans Unique?" suggests that humans may actually be more naturally cooperative than we're usually told. In our age of global conflict, WMD's and environmental degradation it is clearly a time to tell a new story about our species and its future.