Welcome, Fellow DIssident -- Robin 23:48, 2 December 2011 (PST)
I certainly agree on the ideas of "education" as the transmission of a sick culture, and of apart-ness as a concise explanation of why it is so sick. Charles Eisenstein calls this 'separation'. He thoughts tally closely with yours, so I suspect you are familiar with his seminal work, Ascent of Humanity -- if not, I highly recommend it.
Robin 23:48, 2 December 2011 (PST)
Re: Welcome, Fellow DIssident -- Individual-person 04:42, 3 December 2011 (PST)
Thanks for the welcome. I have read Eisenstein (actually I listened to yours and Lyn Gerry's reading of his book; thanks so much for that). I agree with Eisenstein about a lot of things though, deep as they are, I don't think his diagnosis and prescription are deep enough. For example, I think the culture of apartness informs our conception of Logic in very important ways. For example, the so called Aristotelian "Laws of Thought" express a kind of intrinsically dichotomous exclusivistic "or-based" thinking that I believe actually is a kind of Left-brain manifestation of the over activation of the Fight or Flight mechanism of the brain that is the usual result of child abuse (what we call child-abuse has been the historical norm of childrearing since probably before civilization--see Lloyd DeMause, Alice Miller etc. I think if one includes more subtle forms, it is the norm today). Anyway, its an involved thesis, but suffice to say that the collective trauma of humanity suffers from and transmits across time through is formal and informal forms of education is only reinforced by the latent and tacit influence of our forms of inner and outer logic and discourse, and that there is an alternative inclusive multivalued Logic (I call it Life-Logic), that is based on a concept of "Co-inference" (conference) and that this inclusive logic is based on, and so can nourish collaborative, "Both/And" assumptions, axioms, and intentions that privilege and reinforce Togetherness rather than the dominant Logic of unilateral inference based on competitive and alienated assumptions, axioms and intentions, assumptions that privilege and reinforce apartness and separation. More later.
there is also the related difference that, rather than the implying a "gift" economy (which still seems to involve a concept of private property--of property as unilaterally "belonging-to" someone and unilaterally changing hands without fundamentally changing its essentially alienated nature), my conception of healthy culture involves establishing a conception intrinsically property in which a tentative state "Belonging-With", is established collectively, not by unilateral inference but by multilateral Co-inference (what I call Cointegrative Conference). Imagine a kind of communal or civil "auction" in which things don't have prices but stories and in which the "bids" are not in money but in the various ideas of a communal brainstorm about where the entities in question belong (where they should be situated so as to be likely to produce inner/outer healing). This brainstorm of course would be based on the story of where the entity(s) came from and what the are as they relate to the stories that emerge as the various "bidders" explain and justify their ideas. Any Consensus facilitated would determine the fate of the object until the decision should be challenged, perhaps because of changing circumstance. This tentative the state of belonging-with would be challengable at any time, calling for some form of conference to reconsider the issue. You might say that in this model "contracts" understood as multilateral agreements as to the temporary "propriety" of a given state of affairs--are concieved as Living Contracts whose regular "food" is inclusive and fair conference, so that any such contract not regularly renewed by such inclusive conference can be declared "dead of starvation" (the quality of the conference establishing a certain state of affairs can also be challenge, which would be analogous to a claim that the contract is not "unfed" but "ill-fed", that it is invalid because of the "malnutrition" of unfair conference" rather than from a lake of conference altogether).
Its important to say that the above sketch is a bit misleading in that the primary goal of the conference in question would be inner/outer healing so that the appropriate disposition of goods and services would just be an important secondary result or aspect of such conference, which must be understand to be about healthy culture in general and to transcend economics and any other limited and circumscribed discipline or field of study.
There is a great deal more to all of this of course. I hope one day to illustrate the above as well as much else in the context of the living example of an intentional community that will be a kind of healthy culture pilot project. For now I just wanted to share this much as a conversation opener.
Take Care,
--I-P