Friday, February 10, 2012

Lonely at the Top - Powerful at the Bottom

The previous post was about how the Internet supports us in directing our own fulfillment with greater immediacy.  This is happening because of greater self-awareness, and the Internet bringing more people together.  This is happening at the same time that lone leadership has entered into voluntary decline.


Lone leadership is in decline.  But that does not mean our impulses to command and control others has declined in the least.


To compensate for ineffective leadership, as a society we’ve entered into an elder-ful era.  The idea of the role of elder is from indigenous cultures to distinguish anyone who voluntarily dedicates his or her life to taking care of the greater good.  These days, I’ve noticed elders 18-years of age or younger. Look at what happened to Craig Kielburger when he was 12-year old in April 1995! http://www.freethechildren.com/aboutus/history/

I have experienced aspects of the Occupy movement taking responsibility for the greater good.  This is happening with varying degrees of self-awareness.  Some of us have noted our urge to shadow-box, to thrash and strike out at aspects of life we despise.  We don`t admit that whatever we’re fighting set up camp inside us long ago.


It’s on the record that the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring were spurred on in part because of  tools for organizing made readily available on the Internet.  We conduct the details of coordination for mutual fulfillment using both on-line tools, and those potential little-spies-in-your-pocket, we lovingly call cellphones.


Thank you social media.  And thank you open source software.


Coordination for mutual fulfillment tends to be carried out locally, in and among neighbourhoods.  Public spaces are where you’ll find those soul pools and nutrient rich spawning grounds where the elders swim.  Neighbourhoods are now vessels where projects wriggle and interweave, where adaptations arise from the cross-fertilization among notions. Social adaptations hatch in local places.  These are challenged, chased around, and later dismissed before becoming strong enough to find their way into the mainstream.


There’s no way of knowing what comes next from the shallow waters where social adaptations emerge.  Some new ways of doing things have inherent capacities to grow and plunge straight down because they are designed to trawl through the depths of our collected realities.  These surpass the role of lone leadership.  Drawing on what is deep within us has always been the role of muse.

No comments:

Post a Comment