Robert Paterson's Weblog

His Dark Materials - Book Burning?

I saw this on Peter's Blog:

Toronto-area Catholic school board bans Pullman fantasy trilogy reports the CBC:

At a board meeting Tuesday evening, the trustees of the Halton District Catholic School Board voted to ban the title [The Golden Compass] as well as the remaining two books in atheist author Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy: The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass.

It’s remarkable to me that such things can still go on, especially given that, although Catholic in name, the Halton District Catholic School Board is completely funded by the public. Kind of makes you wish we had some sort of over-arching law that protected our fundamental freedoms from book banners like this. Oh, wait, we do.

I have just finished book II and will be reading the last book this weekend. I wonder how many of the Board have read any of the trilogy? The main point that Peter and I make is surely this - that our freedoms are just that. When we self select for others what can be seen and read, we drive a wedge into freedom.

We each of us have a choice to read or see what we want. If you don't want to read Pullman then don't. But what gives you the right to prevent others and what grounds do you select to make such a ban?

Content is not the point - freedom is.

Having said that, what is the content for those who will not read them or have not read them?

The trilogy is about freedom itself - it is about a titanic struggle between those that believe that they know best and will do anything to protect their position - for our own good! - and for those that wish freedom. So it's ironic that the film has spurred the same struggle. It's a struggle between positional power and personal power.

The protagonists are a remarkable girl and a boy - they are brave, resourceful, honorable and self sacrificing. The setting while "fantastic" is emotionally realistic - good people die and bad people do well. I am reading the trilogy as I also watch the Wire. There is a strong link - The "System" is boundlessly dreadful and eats away at our souls while all the time purporting to be doing the right thing

For me the irony is that the gospels tell the same story. My bet is that many so called Christians don't know their Bible very well either. They have not read either Pullman or the Gospels!

Just a reminder then for those that use Christianity as a shield but have not read the Bible:

• Jesus makes it clear that God needs no building or organization
• Jesus has little patience with those that take a legalistic view of their relationship with God
• Jesus gets angry with those that seek to make money out of tawdry businesses connected to the church
• Jesus shows through his own life and choices that God loves us all including the worst sinners
• In particular Jesus, living in an extreme patriarchy, loves women and includes them as his closest friends
• Jesus was so anti institution that he was killed by it

I find it all so ironic! By the way, Jesus also has words for those of us sinners that accuse others of sin - check it out

When I have finished Book III I will review it in detail.

 

Amesbury II - Ripping Yarns - Books for Boys

This is the second of a short series on Amesbury, my wonderful prep school and its influence on my life.

Not only did Bracklands have the grounds and woods that enabled me and my friends to recreate WWII, the wild west, the 100 years war and the trenches of WWI but it also had a library that fired us up to go on these adventures.

The Amesbury library was very well stocked - but there was an anomaly - almost none of the books had been purchased since 1939 and most were acquired in the late 1920's and 30's. I was imbued with the Boys view of the world of at least a generation prior to my own.

I have been wondering recently whether such books might have any appeal to children raised on Harry Potter or on Philip Pullman. So I have begun to reread them again and to look for the opinion of recent readers.

Who am I talking about? Many of you may never have heard of G A Henty or Percy F Westerman. Many of you think that Conan Doyle only wrote Sherlock Holmes stories. Have you read the White Company - a book about the 100 years war? Few in North America know the names of Biggles and his creator Capt W E Johns. For Biggles fans, have you read the WWI books? Many may know of Hornblower, because of the TV series, but I wonder how many boys still read C S Forrester.

Some thing is going on - a kind of time machine - that is opening up a world of adventure where boys take on manhood. The big hint may have been the very successful Dangerous Book for Boys - with its guide on how to skin a squirrel and useful tips on making your own catapult. The PC dogma that suggest that boys should really be girls is fading.

I am amazed that Kindle has many of the Henty books available - maybe for copyright reasons - but look at the  reviews! Modern kids and their parents are enjoying the mix of adventure, history and sheer good story telling as I did.

This book is full of adventure, excitement, and HISTORY. If you want to learn about King Richard, Knights, the Crusades, or Medieval times then this book is perfect for you. Clean and entertaining, it's a story the whole family can and will enjoy if you buy it. G.A. Henty makes the book come alive with his wonderful story telling abilities that include twists and turns, and wonderful characters. You will begin to fell like your there as Henty describes the Middle East and England with wonderful descriptions and details. I highly recommend you buy this book!

Henty was THE boys author for the Edwardian period. Each of the 100 plus books has a historical setting where a boy comes to manhood. The History comes effortlessly along for the ride. The struggle for acceptance into a man's world is of course a universal story that all boys share. So your son gets a great story told well and in background and painlessly learns a lot about history. My response was to want to know more.

Percy F Westerman took on Henty's mantle as THE author. His books tend to have a technology bias -  pirates with airships - Invisible planes etc.

For pure kids adventure, I love Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons. When I was a boy, we played unsupervised. My sister Diana and I roamed Accra in Ghana, surfed the ocean, fished by the ocean, killed snakes and kept scorpions as pets - so the kids in Swallows and Amazons simply go off all day in their boats. Here is a recent review:

Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" is the first in a classic series of children's stories that will appeal to readers of all ages. The book is set in the English Lake District in the period between the two World Wars, (where the author was living at the time). It tells of a time when a healthy imagination (and the freedom to take advantage of it) was enough to keep most youngsters both amused and out of mischief. The world was a safer and simpler place back then and this book does much to make us realise just how much has been irretrievably lost since.

Not that this was ever Ransome's intention, of course. He was simply drawing upon his own boyhood experiences (from a yet earlier time) as well as contemporary ones of the children of a family friend. He used these to weave an enchanting tale that would remind those same children (by then returned `home' to the deserts of the Middle East) of a happy summer spent sailing in England.

The story's strong basis in reality (albeit several separate realities, as it were), tempered with Ransome's love of sailing (and his knowledge of Lake District life), imbue the book with a strong sense of authority. Both the text and the author's own pen-and-ink illustrations also have an endearing charm that comes across even now, some 70 years after the book was first published. One of the great things about this book (and indeed, the whole series of books that was to follow) is that Ransome avoids most of the stereotypical treatments of children's roles that his contemporaries (as well as later authors) continually espoused. He always manages to treat (nearly!) all of his characters as equal partners in their activities, whatever their age, gender or background. The children are also afforded a greater respect and rather more freedom by the adults than is common these days, too.

And while the children's `adventures' are nothing fantastical or extra-ordinary when viewed from an absolute perspective, Ransome manages to convey so much of the children's own excitement at their activities that the reader can't help being drawn into their world and so come to share some of that same excitement. All in all, this a delightful book and should be on everybody's essential reading list, regardless of their age!

There is nothing prissy about these books. They speak to an ideal of children taking charge of their lives. Secretly they are also very educational.

History as taught is often the worst subject in school. Lists of dates etc. But history absorbed as "Story" is something else. 

Of all the writers of boys historical fiction, my favourite is the late Rosemary Sutcliff. She more than any other writer got my interest in Ancient Rome. Here is a recent review of the Lantern Bearers

Set in the brief Romano-Celtic twilight between the end of the Roman Empire and the creation of Anglo-Saxon Britain, this is the story of Aquila, a Roman soldier who chooses to stay among his adopted people. However, his world crashes to pieces when he and his sister are enslaved by the Saxons, their father slain and their farm destroyed. Aquila eventually escapes, but his sister, now married with a Saxon son, makes her own choice to stay with the invaders.

Aquila is embittered and angry, and the remainder of the story is his redemption, helped by a kindly priest, his Celtic wife from an arranged maarriage, and the Romano-British leader, Ambrosius, whose friend he becomes.

I first read this book in my early teens, and it has stayed with me ever since. The themes of irreparable loss, vengance and redemption are quite adult, but not at such a level that adult or teen cannot appreciate them. Sutcliffe brilliantly captures the heroic twilight of the Dark Ages, and makes it utterly convincing.

My hope is that as we move to electronic publishing, as we see with Henty, that more of these gems will become available again.

So this Christmas and next year, as you wonder what books you might expose your boys to - please check out some of the authors here.

Part III - English School Food

Christie Blatchford Talks - 15 Days

Christie Blatchford - Fifteen Days - A Review

The Canadian army is very small - many organizations claim to be like a "family" but the Canadian Army is a family. In the larger world there may be 6 degrees of separation but in the Canadian Army there may be only two. So every loss is a wound for all. Every loss is indeed the death of a brother.

This remarkable book is a revelation of what it may mean to be part of a true Band of Brothers - a world where the most senior general lends a master corporal his own wedding ring so that he can ask his girl to marry him - a world where the entire platoon comes to the home of a fallen comrade and spends a week in the community celebrating his life - a world where a 40 plus year old widow enlists so that she can continue to be part of the family - a world where Colonels weep for their men.

The book also causes the reader to think more deeply about war and soldiers. It is politically correct to feel that all war and everything about it is bad. But we discover, that for all its terror and for all the losses, for a soldier war is what he lives for. It is when he also discovers whether he is any good at his life's work. We discover how good our soldiers are. Surprisingly, for we always think the less of ourselves, in Afghanistan, we are considered the heavy weights who punch well above our weight.

We discover that while war exhausts a person more than any other activity, it also makes him more alive.

We discover that PTSD is much more prevalent in peacekeeping than in the kind of situation that we find in Afghanistan. In peacekeeping the kit was awful and the impotence high - imagine simply witnessing atrocity? But in Afghanistan our soldiers can take the initiative and they are very well equipped and have rules of engagement that make sense.

We discover a new kind of woman soldier - who are at home in this strange world, as is of course the "Blatch", and who are no longer seen as odd.

We discover how the families of our soldiers have been integrated into the mission and we see how the worst of all news is given and how the families are supported when what they all fear the most occurs.

This is not the civil service in green that was the sadness of our forces for many years. Implicit throughout the book is that someone really knows that he is doing. I think that someone might be called Rick Hillier.

We discover how great our local field leadership is too which also says something more about General Hillier -

Brig- Genl Dave Fraser to LTC Ian Hope, in radio orders given at 11.30pm on July 17 "You need to recapture Nawa and Garmser by 1600 hours.

Hope to Fraser: "Roger that. Recapture Nawa and Garmser by 1600 hours."

Fraser: "Any questions?"

Hope: "Just one: Where are Nawa and Garmser?'

Not only do we routinely pull off tough missions, but the Cols take all the risks that their men do - they lead by example. They also tend to do the really terrible things like personally extract the burnt and mutilated bodies of their dead so that the buddies in the platoon would not have to remember their friend like that. There is all this bull in the public service about "Servant Leadership". Here you see it for real at all levels from the LTC down to the Master Corporal.

We discover the central frustration of the mission. That we have to go back again and again and take the same ground because the ANP, the police, cannot hold it - we learn how complex this work is.

But most of all, we learn how fortunate we are to have those wonderful people wearing our uniform.

It is a mystery to me how, in a nation, so cut off from the reality of war, that we can once again have the kind of army that we had in 1917. A pathfinder Army.

A small army that can think and adapt. A small army that is lead by men and women of an integrity and skill that put our business and public organizations to shame. A small army largely made up from men and women from small town Canada who have that can do attitude that used to be the hallmark of Canadians.

Who else could tell this story but "Blatch"? A woman who acknowledges that she knows of only two soldiers who swear more than she. A woman who not only craps in combat but tells us all about it. A woman who shares the hardships, the joys, the terrors, the losses and the fun. A woman who loves her boys and who is loved back.

She writes with such a love and a passion - I could not put the book down except when my eyes were so full of tears that I could no longer see.

It is exciting, it's very funny, it's very sad. But in the end it is heroic. Not in a little boy's view of heroic but in the most mythic sense of people who live for each other in undertaking a very hard task.

At the end of the book, "Blatch" goes back to see everyone to see how they are.

"Eight months later, Hope (LTC Ian Hope) answers my email form an airport lounge somewhere. I wrote back to tell him of one of the stories - bawdy and funny, loving and sad, always brutally honest - I'd heard from the troops.

You must miss them so fucking much," I said. " I can hardly bear to write about them sometimes. I find them so beautiful."

"You understand what I miss," he wrote back. "I am Odysseus."

This is a wonderful book about wonderful people written by a wonderful person - who has by the way a wonderful dog but that is another story.

The Social Revolution is Everywhere - Brave New War a Review

In the 1930's a handful of writers, General "Boney" Fuller, Heinz Guderian, an unknown French major, Charles de Gaulle and Captain Basil Liddell Hart were able to look ahead and describe what Blitzkrieg and war in the future would be like. Only one of these, Guderian, got the attention of his national leadership.

The political and military leaders of Britain and France would not see what was coming - they were entranced by their memories of WWI. The price for their attachment to ideas that no longer worked was a catastrophe.

Once again, our political and military leadership is attached to an idea that no longer works. Conventional militaries have lost every conflict with socially based guerrillas since 1945, but we think that if we only tried harder, we might prevail.

"Creveld (Martin Creveld is one of the leading military historians of our time and is based at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) realized that whenever a state takes on a guerrilla movement it will lose. The reason is that whenever the strong are seen beating the weak .. they are considered barbarians. This view, amplified by the media, will eventually eat away at the state's ability to maintain more cohesion and drastically weaken its global image"

As the state's soldiers continue to fight weak foes, they will eventually become as ill disciplined and vicious as the people they are fighting die to frustration and mirror imaging.

For the state, it will likely not only lose the war but also in the process destroy the effectiveness of its army"

We can see this happening already. I cringe when I hear boosters ask that I support our troops. Little do they understand that the deaths and the physical wounds are nothing compared to what is going on spiritually when an army is subjected to this process.

It is not as if this is a surprise. Much of what is going on has been defined with great clarity. 

Once again there is a group of thinkers that have built over the last 20 years an ever more clear vision of what is really going on and what can be done. These men are the spiritual sons of one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, the late Col John Boyd. (I will post a reading list later)

John Robb's new book "Brave New War - The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization" is the latest addition to the growing body of knowledge about the nature of the threat posed to Nation States by what is called 4GW or Fourth Generation Warfare. If you want to know what we are really facing in the world today - this is where you may best start.

At the heart of the new reality is that the new social guerrilla is not like the Stern Gang in the 1940's or the Vietminh who were trying to create a new state. The new guerrilla has no time for any state. They are essentially tribal.

"The insurgency's learning goals in Iraq are completely different from our own. It is focused on how to disrupt and spoil the evolving political order rather than to replace it"

"To really understand this future, you need to discard the idea of state versus state conflict. This age is over. It ended with the rise of nuclear weapons, the integration of the world's economies and the end of the cold war... wars won't be fought by states but at a level below the state .. the rise of super-empowered groups is part of a larger historical trend ... technology will leverage the ability of individuals and small groups to wage war with equal alacrity ... over time .. as the leverage provided by technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination - with the ability of one man to declare war of the world and win!"

"Airplanes are being turned into flying bombs, cell phone networks are being used to detonate bombs from miles away and critical computer networks are being hacked. Most important, a growing number of attacks are being made the underlying computerized networks that support our very economic fabric: from oil distribution to electricity grids."

The cold war was won by bankrupting the Soviet union. Bankrupting it both financially and morally. We now are being subjected to this form of attack. The more we respond conventionally to threats, the more further along the road to ruin we go.

"Because of the impact of systems, a $250,000 attack (9/11) was converted into an event that cost the US over $80 billion (some estimates are as high as $500 billion)."

This is how Rome fell. Once it made a linear defense its goal, the costs ramped up beyond the capacity of the tax base. Once it separated the army from the citizen, the moral heart of use of force was lost.

These are the stakes!

John's book is not simply a crie de coeur but is a tightly argued work that shows in detail the nature of  a networked foe and how he will use our own critically vital networks to weaken us. Imagine New York losing power for 6 weeks. This would not be hard to do. Think about that we have lost in terms of freedom of travel and trade already. Think of what we have lost in terms of moral authority and liberty.

Having painted a crystal clear picture of how a war of networks is playing out, he comes to an astonishing conclusion that I hope he fills out in his next book.

For having explained the threat, he has set up a lifetime task of defining what to do to to reduce the threat. The short answer is to create local resiliency and sustainability.

If we on PEI can be energy independent, we will have gone a long way - what about your city or region?

John's thesis for coping and surviving is for us to create a network of locally self sufficient regions to replace our dependency on the central state and central systems of all kinds - energy, food, economy.

In a networked world, if you are dependent on a machine, you are vulnerable.

So here we see the great connection of much of the new thinking that is emerging in all fields. Every part of human life has been taken over by a machine metaphor. This no longer gives value. In fact it creates dysfunction and dependency that expose us as individuals and as societies to systemic failure.

The machine state is only a phase in our our social evolution. It is only 150 years old. It has had its day. The time of local self sufficient networks has arrived. Our global conflict will force this upon us, just as it forced the state upon us in 1914 -1918 and 1939 - 1945.

I know of no better starting point for undertanding what confronts us than John's book.

Everything is Miscellaneous - A Great Book by David Weinberger

There is a telling moment in the film the History Boys where a teacher tells a student of the feeling that you get when you think that you are the only person in the world to have a special insight about something and then you read a book and find your thoughts articulated by another so much better. You are not alone in your thinking and someone has the skill to take your rambling thoughts and to define with with great cogency.

This is how I feel this morning. I went to bed early last night with David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous - The Power of the New Digital Disorder. I tried to put it down but had to get up and read it until I had finished. I had a very restless night when I had - my poor old brain has been processing in background all night.

One of the thoughts that springs to my fore-brain today is the descriptor part of the title that tells us that the book is about "Power".

The challenge that David presents the reader is that there is a true revolution that has been set in motion like a brush fire that will become a wildfire that will take all before it.

5,000 years of literacy has made information increasingly into a thing. It has become increasingly explicit. The confines of paper and the physical world have defined how information is stored, controlled and owned. Today a student puts a dot in a circle for a right or a wrong answer in an exam. Higher education has been captured by the idea that knowledge is a thing. Businesses are built on owning explicit information - hence Microsoft state that they intend to sue on more than 100 patents.  Information was organized by how convenient it was to ship a thing - hence the record album versus the song. Information was good or bad by right of who controlled it - hence Britannica.

David calls this 2nd order information. It is the foundation of power in every field today.

"We have entire industries and institutions built upon the fact that paper order severely limits how things can be organized. Museums, educational curricula, newspapers, the travel industry and TV schedules are all based on the assumption that in the second order world, we need experts to go through information, ideas and knowledge and put them neatly away.

But now we - the customers, the employees, anyone - can route around the second order. We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory. We can do it ourselves and , more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we go to them.

The miscellaneous order is not transforming only business. It is changing how we think about the world itself is organized - perhaps more important - who we think has the authority to tell us so."

This is the challenge that David sets himself at the beginning of the book - to make the case for a revolution of power driven by the difference in how information is regarded, stored, accessed and used.

The triumph of the book is that he meets this challenge. He build layer and layer of example to meet the demands of his challenge.

The existing power owners face a terrible paradox.

"This creates a conundrum for businesses as they enter the digital age. If they don't allow their users to structure information for themselves, they will lose their patrons. If they do allow patrons to structure information for themselves, the organization will lose much of their power and control.

The paradox is already resolving itself. Customers, patrons, users and citizens are not waiting for permission to take control of finding and organizing information. And we're doing it not just as individuals. Knowledge - its content and its organization - is becoming a social act."

David spends a large part of the book explaining this process. Here is my own synthesis.

Explicit knowledge can never help a person as well as tacit knowledge. Example - you have just bought a barbecue. You could spend all of Saturday with the instructions or you could ask your handy neighbor over. What is the better process? We all know the answer. Well that is the difference. David's point is that real information that is really useful is best found below the surface and is teased out by conversation.

When paper became the only storage medium, explicit knowledge and all its official filters and gatekeepers got the power. Now, using bits information can be stored at no cost all over the place and linked to everything. There is NO ONE RIGHT ANSWER. The ONE RIGHT ANSWER is a product of the limits of a physical, paper, storage system. There are 60 million blogs now. Follow a tag on a topic, you will find maybe millions of entries - some great some poor - but in aggregate a truth emerges that can never happen if you had to write the definitive piece on the topic. Except maybe over time. Imagine Wikipedia in 20 years time. Some key articles will have been polished so well by so many people over such a period of time that maybe the implicit will have been captured. This process cannot be replicated by Britannica.

"One of the lessons of Wikipedia is that conversation improves expertise by exposing weaknesses, introducing new viewpoints and pushing ideas into accessible form."

David asks, will our kids today - who share every element of their lives in public - be able to go back to the cave and insist that knowledge is a solitary act where their is only one way?

"Now we cans see that knowledge isn't in our heads. It is between us. It emerges from public and social thought and it stays there, because social knowing, like the global conversations that give rise to it, is never finished."

What is also happening, other than a shift of power, is that something that has been lost will return.

What has been lost in a world that focuses only on the surface - is meaning.

Today complex problems confront us. Finding meaning in them will be the difference between our survival or not. Looking only at complex problems such as the economy and the planet or what is health or what is education or what is peace though the lens of the explicit leads only to lists and to barriers of beliefs that cannot be crossed.

Meaning arises from conversation. A marriage becomes a marriage that might survive when a couple continue to share their feelings. Children are set on a trajectory for health and energy when they have the right to participate in the conversation that is a healthy family. People who work together can do great things when they know and trust each other deeply - this can only happen when they know each other deeply and this can only happen when real conversation over many years has been part of the process.

The traditional power brokers hold their power though shutting down conversation. It is no surprise to me that Facebook and MY Space are getting banned by institutions such as governments and schools. This is a life and death struggle for power.

But those that allow the meaning will triumph.

"The infrastructure of meaning is always present and available, so that we can contextualize the information that we find and the ideas that we encounter. It's business's new greatest resource. Because it is shared by all - customers, partners and competitors - the businesses that succeed will be the ones that embrace it most thoroughly and most intelligently."

Power for individuals changes as well:

"The result is a startling change in our culture's belief that truth means accuracy, effectiveness requires clear lines of command and control and knowledge is power.

It is not who is right and who is wrong. It's how different points of view are negotiated, given context and are embodied with passion and interest. Individuals thinking out loud now have weight. Authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity.

It is not whom you report to and who reports to you or how you filter someone else's experience. It is how messily you are connected and how thick are the links.

It's not what you know, and its not even who you know. It's how much knowledge that you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence.

A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself."

So David presents us all with a choice. Hang on and die or move and have a chance of a great life.

So to my friends in public radio - it is not about the news. It is not about the music. It is about the meaning of the news and the meaning of music. It is all about story. It is all about giving up your fixation on control. It is all about helping your listener find more meaning.

So to my friends in education - the university that returns to Plato's academy will rock the world.

So to my friends in business - the organization that exists to create meaning for its employees and for its customers will roll over those that merely try and make money for a few king pins.

 

Change or Die - Alan Deutschman

"All leadership comes down to this: changing people's behavior. Why is that so damn hard? Science offers some surprising new answers -- and ways to do better." Alan Deutschman

I am convinced that the central belief of our age, that we are parts of a machine that works only in an economic sphere, is the single most dangerous threat to the future of our species and our planet.  This threat is made more dangerous by the fact that there is no work more difficult than trying change deeply held beliefs.

I, and many consulting friends, have spent many years in a vain effort to help organizations change their beliefs. In addition, all the doctors I speak to tell me of their frustration with most of their patients who will not change their lifestyle or even take the pills to save their  lives. Most thoughtful consultants and Doctors that I know have given up or are thinking of giving up. All of us have become very cynical.

What are we all missing? Why aren't our important lessons being absorbed by our clients/patients? Why can't they hear us? Why are they so stupid? Can they not see that if they do not do as we tell them that they will die?

Now I know that I am the stupid one. Now I know that it is I that am the incompetent one. What was it that I missed?

Look carefully at the man burning at the stake. It is March 21st 1556 and he is in the market square in Oxford. Mary is now Queen and the Catholic Church is on a rampage of revenge. It is the time when two competing beliefs about how to relate to God are tearing Europe apart just as the Sunni and the Shina are ripping apart the Middle East today.

See how he has put his hand into the fire.

This is Thomas Cranmer, who had been the Archbishop of Canterbury. He is dying for his beliefs. He had been offered life if he had recanted his heresy of supporting the Protestant beliefs. He had accepted. But ...his conscience burned at his soul and he went back to Queen Mary and told her that he had to recant his recantation. So she had him burned in the flesh. As the flames rose about him, he put his right hand, the hand that had signed his recantation, into the flames until it was a crisp. He is doing more than dying for his beliefs, he torturing himself for his beliefs.

We die not for money. We die not for love. We die for our beliefs.

When we are confronted with the choice "Change your foundation belief or die". We routinely choose death.  We would rather our body or our organization die a physical death than for us to kill our inner belief. Our inner spiritual reality is more important to us than our physical life. It matters not that our reality may be expressed in gross dysfunction. It is who we are inside.

Most of us are Cranmers. Most of would rather torture ourselves with disease and dysfunction and stress than recant. Why do addicts choose death? Why can we not talk our daughters out of anorexia? Why can we not talk our fathers out of drinking or gambling? All around us we put our hands into the flames and keep our faith.

So for you or me to offer this choice to a client, or to a patient, and hope for them to change is a mistake. In so doing we may drive them into martyrdom.

How do I now know this? Well I had my suspicions about what I had been doing wrong but then I read an article in 2005 that started to wake me up. Now the article's author has expanded his important findings about the science of Change and Beliefs into a book.

I am convinced that Alan Deutschman's new book Change or Die is a critically important book for our time. Why do I make this big statement? I make it because, as I see the world, all the really pressing and important problems that beset the human race today are rooted in Beliefs. In one belief actually: that we are helpless objects in a machine universe.

Health - Today most of the illness that beset us such as heart disease, diabetes, depression and some kinds of cancer is rooted in how we see ourselves and our reality. It is how we live that makes us ill. How we live is rooted in our beliefs about ourselves and our world.  When told to change how we live, 90% of us ignore the lifestyle advice from our doctors. Many even give up taking treatment. Our health care systems and the social and economic base of our society are being overwhelmed by people who would rather die than change. They feel helpless and we continue to spiral down.

Crime - The US spends more on prisons that on hospitals. Why? Maybe because we have given up on these "Psychos" who commit crime. No one thinks of rehabilitation anymore. "Let's throw away the key" is more the line.  The belief is that there are a large group of really bad incorrigible people who can only be punished. We would rather that all criminals die than change. They too feel that they have no hope and guess what their response is?

Big Business and Big Government - Never have people in big business and big government (both bureaucracies) been so busy. But never have their organizations been so incapable of adapting to the change that confronts us all. Never have they been so incompetent. Big media fights a losing battle, big government cannot help citizens in New Orleans, Big Education fails more and more of our kids and blames them. They are gripped in a belief that they are machines and that if only they could be more efficient that somehow they might turn the corner. They can see that new organizations have arisen that will challenge and then destroy them. Other airlines don't want to be like Southwest. They would rather die than change. How do all those inside them feel and what do they do?

War and Conflict - Never before has big Military been so ineffective. Big Military has lost every conflict to social military since 1945 and is about to lose again. More troops, more money will not be the answer. A belief in war being only about the delivery of physical force is the belief that is in the way. We would rather our sons and our daughters die in vain for this belief than change. What will be the outcome of this failed belief on our world? What will our sacrifice of our own children do to us?

Humans and the Planet - It is clear to a many people now that something is going very wrong with how we live and how our lifestyle affects the planet. But a belief is in the way that blocks us from making our future as a species a priority. We would rather live the life we live today than grant our children a chance of a life of their own. What does this choice do to us and to them?

Here is Alan whom I spoke with last week at 5am his time! He sounds as he looks - open, engaging and full of the passion that we find in men or women who have made an important discovery.

I am not going to give you a synopsis of the book. You can find it here. Instead I want to offer you what I feel are its great lessons.

The key to change is not another idea. It is not advice - however well meaning or correct. It is not a lecture however true. The key to change is to be found in the human heart.

Alan has reviewed the vast body of literature on what works in therapy to help people confront and then move through their belief barriers to a better life. There seems to be many different approaches that work. One on one. Groups etc. But the one thing that the successful paths had in common was a person who truly, sincerely believed in the capability of the other to make the change. This open hearted person often knew this before the subject did. The magic that crossed over was that truth of the feeling that this person loves me for whom I am now in all my misery. He loves me for me now not for what I should be. He sees in me the person that I can and could be. He gives me the gift of hope.

So human growth, begins not with the word but with the heart. If I feel that you truly love me - Thank you John - then I can hear you. When I hear you, you can help me re frame what I think is my reality and start to see my self in a different world.

But of course just getting a glimpse of the new world that awaits me, will not stop me reverting back to my habits. It takes a lot of active work, lots of repetition to learn a new way of living. I have to experience many many times what another way of being feels like for it to stick as a new habit. Only when I have repeatedly re-experienced my new choices can I finally make them my own. Only then can I accept the death of my old self and now change.

For it is now clear to me. That to change we have to die.

The choice is what kind of death? Is it the death of the old inner me or the death of me? As Alan shows us - for the old inner me to die, I need your accepting love as the opening. Then I can open my ears, my eyes and my body to new ways. Then you can help me re frame my perspective. Then you can work with me for a long time - years even - so that I can experience the new enough for it to become the new inner me. 

Change or Die is not a "How To" book. But it is a revelatory book.

I compare it to Darwin's Origin of Species.  Many will reject it because it violates their reality. If you are  machine person, first of all you will question that you need to change at all. Secondly, when you hear my choice of language  - the "heart" - "you must be joking Rob?". Just as Darwin still has those who can never accept that man is merely a point along an evolutionary path, so there will be those who will attach themselves to being part of the machine world.

But for all of us that may have a hint that maybe we are not a machine. For all of those that sincerely want to help. For all of us that know we might need help. Then, like the Origin of Species, this book reveals the science behind our hope, behind our intuition and behind our experience. It gives us an approach that is known to work.

So then the choice is really ours. If we seek to address the great problems of our time, then we have been given a route to take.

Lecture and fail. Love and have a chance. Or as Alan says it

Reframe
Repeat
Relate - and the greatest of these is Relate

Here is a Link to Trusted Space Books where you will find the home for this post

Change or Die - The Book is here

As you my readers can tell, I am quite depressed about my inability to help some of my customers, intiate real change.

One of the best articles on why change is so hard and what we might do to make it easier appeared in Fast Company written by Alan Deutschman in May 2005.

I and many others were attracted to the article because it addressed questions that deeply concerned us. Such as:

• Why do interventions from outside - such as much of my consulting work - not imitate real change?
• Why is even a life and death message not enough?
• Why is it that trying to change all on ones own usually does not work?

Alan has now written the book that was published this week. Here is the first chapter. I can't wait to get my copy and to find out more.

Change or Die is a short book about a simple idea. Whether it's the average guy who has struggled with a stressful life for so many decades that he has become seriously ill, or the heroin addict who commits felony after felony, or the managers, salespeople, and laborers who try to make it through unnerving shifts in their business, or virtually anyone who comes up against unexpected challenges and opportunities, people can change the deep- rooted patterns of how they think, feel, and act.

I wrote this book because I believe passionately in this idea. My mission is to replace those three misconceptions about change--our trust in facts, fear, and force (the three Fs)--with what I call "the three keys to change." In the pages that follow I'll introduce you to Mimi Silbert, Dean Ornish, and many others who have come upon the "missing links" of changing behavior. To make sense of these astonishing examples, I'll draw on ideas that have emerged from psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience. I'll show the paradoxical ways in which profound change happens and how we can deliberately influence and inspire change in our own lives, the lives of the people around us, and the lives of our organizations. I'll argue that change can occur with surprising speed and that change can endure.

From the start I want to make it clear that I'm not focusing on how people change on their own. Much of the time, change comes naturally to us. We experiment. We get excited by new ideas and new directions. We learn from experience. We grow and mature. We respond to the new demands of each new stage of our lives, such as college, career, marriage, and parenthood. When we're troubled or distressed and find that our usual solutions aren't working any longer, no matter how hard we try, we seek out new approaches until something works. In Heartbreak Ridge Clint Eastwood plays a Marine sergeant who tells his platoon that their motto must be to "adapt, improvise, and overcome," and that's what the rest of us do in real life too. Granted, some people are more adept than others--more resilient, tenacious, or creative--but basically we're all this way. Change often seems to become harder as we get older, but neuroscientists say that there are certain things we can do to sharpen our skillfulness at change as life progresses, and that's what I'll look at later on.

But my main topic is how to change when change isn't coming naturally: when the difficulties stubbornly persist. When you're stuck. When you've tried again and again to overcome problems and all your efforts have failed and the situation appears hopeless or you seem to be powerless. When any reasonable person would think it's an impossible fix. That's what this book is about. I'm going to start by looking in-depth at the three "impossible" cases I've brought up so far--heart patients, drug- addicted criminals, and rebellious autoworkers. As I explain these cases I'll introduce a number of psychological concepts and put more flesh on the bones of a master theory of change. First, though, you need to know the bare bones. This is just a first pass, and these ideas shouldn't make much sense yet. They will become much clearer once we go through the real-world examples. But here, for starters, are the three keys to change, which I call the three Rs: relate, repeat, and reframe.

THE FIRST KEY TO CHANGE

Relate

You form a new, emotional relationship with a person or community that inspires and sustains hope. If you face a situation that a reasonable person would consider "hopeless," you need the influence of seemingly "unreasonable" people to restore your hope--to make you believe that you can change and expect that you will change. This is an act of persuasion--really, it's "selling." The leader or community has to sell you on yourself and make you believe you have the ability to change. They have to sell you on themselves as your partners, mentors, role models, or sources of new knowledge. And they have to sell you on the specific methods or strategies that they employ.

THE SECOND KEY TO CHANGE

Repeat

The new relationship helps you learn, practice, and master the new habits and skills that you'll need. It takes a lot of repetition over time before new patterns of behavior become automatic and seem natural--until you act the new way without even thinking about it. It helps tremendously to have a good teacher, coach, or mentor to give you guidance, encouragement, and direction along the way. Change doesn't involve just "selling"; it requires "training."

THE THIRD KEY TO CHANGE

Reframe

The new relationship helps you learn new ways of thinking about your situation and your life. Ultimately, you look at the world in a way that would have been so foreign to you that it wouldn't have made any sense before you changed.

These are the three keys to change: relate, repeat, and reframe. New hope, new skills, and new thinking.

This may sound simple at first, but let me assure you that it's not. Just look at the three examples I've brought up so far: The people who run the health care establishment still don't understand these concepts. Nor do the people who run the criminal justice system. Nor do most of the people who run America's major corporations.

 

Understanding the Matrix by Building Trusted Space

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

Getting to Maybe - More on Authors

Getting Maybe continues to work its way into my thinking.

Here are my series of posts all in one spot that describe many of the key ideas in the book. The last two are supporting ideas from other sources

• The Question of Complexity - How to think about complex issues
• The Call - Backing people not projects
• Listening - What is deep listening and how to keep you ego out
• Listening - Beyond the obvious and beyond words
• Relationships - It's all relationships
• Outside support - parenting and workplace why relationships matter
• Outside support - Relationships and where we live

I find it helpful to know more about who writes good books and their own context.

Here (Tamarack - The Institute for Social Engagement funded by the McConnell Foundation) is a great source of information on the writing team and why they wrote the book. In the follow on you will find an agenda and a supporting big idea of theirs that they call "Panarchy".