12 years ago, just before Christmas in 1994, I left CIBC fully intending to write a book. Well it has taken me a long to to allow the ideas to cook and to find the courage. This Christmas I am finally going to start.
The book is a voyage of discovery to find out how we can escape the Matrix and how to build an alternative. It is therefore like the the Red Pill in the film the Matrix.
My preliminary sketch for this "Book" or "Red Pill" is my Change this Manifesto - Going Home that Todd published in his collection More Space. (Thanks Todd)
I think that we in the West have been asleep for a long time. An idea put us to sleep.
It was 100 years ago that Henry Ford took the Newtonian idea of a machine-like construction of the universe and made it manifest on Earth.
Now we take it for granted that education is a linear process that leads to a credential. Now we expect that healthcare is an intervention by special people who deliver drugs and procedures. We take it for granted in business that we can have an economy or a healthy biosphere but not both. We take it for granted that work, family and education are separate processes that compete for our time. We think that it is normal to have a job and a manager. We believe that having more things will make us happy. We accept that we have no real say in the governance of our work place. Bombarded by millions of messages telling us what to buy, to eat to wear and to do, we have no confidence in our own innate judgment about what is good for us.
This mechanical model of separation has us gripped so totally that we don’t even know that we live in a kind of Matrix. For most of the last century the success of the Ford Model of mechanical relationships worked. The model delivered a massive increase in overall well being in a material way. We no longer experience this model as anything other than “Normal”.
But the price has been the loss of our humanity and a growing threat to the biosphere that supports all life. Now we are restless. The system does not deliver what we want anymore. It just consumes more of our energy. We don’t know what is wrong but we know that something has broken.
At this moment of despair, a new culture is awakening. This new culture is the child of Einstein and the revolution in physics of the early 20th century.
So if we are in trouble - what do we do? Most people's response so far is to work the old system even harder. Everyone is exhausted. The answer is I think found not in man's dogma but in nature's real laws.
Nature's way of operating a better business, raising your child well, being healthy, eating well, being governed well etc is above all to set the optimal environment. Build the right environment and the ecosystem will grow to its design potential.
I call this ideal ecosystem environment "Trusted Space". In this book, We will explore what this idea of setting the environment means for all aspects of our lives that had been until now seen as separate.
At the heart of the book will be the ideas and the math of what Trusted Space is for Humans and how this plays out in the two central dramas of our life story - how we work and how we are raised as children. You will see that this zone is the centre of our culture and worldview and how it affects everything else such as health, food, education, the environment and even politics.
Of course a linear book cannot effectively tell this non linear and totally connected story. So all of the material will be presented on the web. I plan to use a Dickens' approach of serialization. The web also allows me to link between connected topics and to have large areas of supporting links from the outside. Your comments will both add to the narrative and also shape it.
Here is the banner under which the Book will evolve -
Watch this space in the early new year
