CHAPTER 10.

THE MESSY PROCESS OF GETTING

THERE

aa

--and then all the people cheered again, and one man, who was more excited
than the rest, flung his hat high into the air, and shouted (as well as I could
make out) "Who roar for the Sub-Warden?" Everybody roared, but whether it
was for the Sub-Warden, or not, did not clearly appear: some were shouting
"Bread!" and some "Taxes!", but no one seemed to know what it was they
really wanted. Lewis Carol’s Sylvie and Bruno

"Who controls the past," Ingsoc told its cadres, "controls the future: who
controls the present, controls the past."

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

GardenWorld is inevitable. Really. Biotech, nanotech, and emerging needs

driven by climate, food, energy and less travel will carry us there. But it will be
painful because lots of old institutions, money and locations will fail, and resist
failing. So the more attractive the goal is, the easier it will be, and the happier for
everyone. The old split between conservative “no change needed” and progressive
“change a lot” policies has broken down. Now each person, each party, each
approach is putting together a different mixed collection of changes and
preserving. Conservatives are for “change” at least as much as progressives. In
some cases more so.

The question is, what do you care about and what does it mean we keep and
what does it mean we need to change. In the great conservative novel, Lampadusa's
The Leopard, Tancred, with serious reflection says, ``If we want things to stay the
same, things will have to change'' OK, which things change, which should stay the
same? That is the political question today. John Maynard Keynes once said, “It
take 90% of human effort to keep things from getting worse.”, and the people
doing that 90% usually don't want their part to change much, and we should recall
the cautionary in the message of the paradoxical aphorisms: plus ça change, plus
c'est la même chose. Change is more an illusion than we suppose, and human
beings remain recognizably similar through the centuries and across civilizations.
This recognition that the future is more like the past than we have been sold,
has led some thoughtful people to the kind of post modernism which puts together
pieces of the past in a collage of symbolically suggestive ways. Our task is to find
coherence in this rummaging through the past. Architects like John Carl Warnecke
have made conservation and restoration a good part of future design in the context
of sensitivity to the whole designed and built environment and its coherence.
The world economy and environment will require either more war, or a new
culture of economics which is more fair and friendly to the environment. We know
that we cannot bring 4/5’s of humanity to the US level of energy and space
consumption. Nor can the US maintain that level of consumption under anything
like current assumptions.. GardenWorld is attuned to the need for an economy that
is both human and environmentally friendly – and recognizes that it will be very
difficult to get there. But very attractive, as goal and task.
Our goernments are also creature of habit and status and fear. Governance is
difficult. All change hurts some people while helping others. Change mostly hurts
those who are running things the way they are. Some change is brought about by
direct human action but most of the is the unintended consequences of actions
taken, often long ago. The founding fathers, in order to prevent tyranny, created a
system of checks and balances that basically meant government did not work very
well and was hard to control, and especially hard to take over and dominate. But
the founding fathers did not anticipate the rise and then dominance of the
corporations. Nor did they imagine having to deal with large systems problems of
water depletion, failure of economics to employ most people for their own benefit,
the dominance – and failure – of energy flows, in short, to manage complexity and
demographics. Can we do it without fascism?
Societies that allow evolution have an advantage. Old empires are always in
trouble the leaders that dominate either want to continue to dominate –which
means keeping things the way they are – or, in the sighting of trouble to bail out –
which means they won’t try to manage change. They do not enter into the spirit of
the new but unacknowledged problems, but chose self-protection.
 The problem is made more difficult because of our history. Kings, from say
the 16 century, rewarded merchants and professionals with title to land. The ability
of the Kings to take back that title was blocked by political moves, and its broader
ownership by large landholders turned was into a law of nature by philosophers
like Locke, who said property came before kings. Over time those property holders
got rid of Kings and were able to buy parliaments. Kings and democracies tend to
have an interest in the welfare of everybody. But oligopolies have narrow interests
and are prepared to manage society for their own interests alone. This is of course
shortsighted but understandable. Yet it leaves the rest of us in a difficult situation.
In this situation governance is very difficult because anyone who tries to
take on the real problems will find themselves without a financial base to enter
politics. Moreover anyone already in government who tries to take on the real
problems will find themselves isolated. There are a lot of decent people in
Congress right now, but we rarely hear their voices except in committee hearings
on C-span.Their sane discourse is ignored by the press in favor of confict and the
drama of ruined careers..
I’ve been watching local politics. The goal of the political establishment is
to have a few hundred small issues and no large ones. Large issues bring too many
people to the Council meetings. The real problem is that if the local environment is
made better – building, education, health, living – more people will come and
swamp the system and increase costs faster than local economic growth. This is
what local politics is struggling with. To me it implies that we must get involved at
the local level and help out. “We are here to help the government.”
David Sirota recently wrote

At bookstore events in every corner of the country, the discussion is

almost completely national focused. Who will be the vice presidential
nominees? What will the latest scandal mean for the presidential
 candidates? How can Democrats or Republicans win the congressional
election? The queries, of course, reflect homogenized news from a
consolidated media industry that increasingly provides cheap-to-
produce, cheaper-to-replicate federal-level horse-race speculation
instead of detailed local coverage. The result is that Americans obsess
over distant political soap operas and palace dramas while neglecting
pressing issues in their backyards.

It's also terrific that we can have truly national conversations about
presidential campaigns and difficult issues like race. Then again, it's not
great that our best-known commodities in this culture are fast-foods,
gas-guzzling SUVs, and subpar Will Smith movies. It's also bad that we
more often end up having national conversations about celebrity
breakups -- and that when we do talk politics, Washington, D.C., is
considered more important than what happens in our own state capitols
and city councils. Indeed, in making anywhere into everywhere,
homogenization has swallowed up not only our downtowns, restaurants
and radio stations, but even our understanding of American democracy.
(fn

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_9844246 Anywhere Becomes

Everywhere By David Sirota Creators Syndicate, 7/11/08 )

We will see lots of initiatives to create incentives for green building. The
deal will be that business will move into this realm if incentives make profits
guaranteed. The problem with this model is that it will maintain elite moneyed
people in the center of the activity, and they will leave marginalized whatever and
whoever does not fit. Believe me, the level playing field we need to move toward
GardenWorld will be subverted by corruption and cronyism. The bureaucratization
of GardenWorld by existing institutions is a real threat to the fuller participation
GardenWorld aims for. This is made harder when we realize that the governments
at all levels must play a positive role in conferences, plannings, skills training,
health and land use regulations. We probably need a faster permit process for green
buildings and planning, but we must avoid slower certainly avoid slower
permitting for green focused building.. in my county, the Greens resist experiments
in water processing because it might make it easier for development.

Working our way out of our mess is taking a long time, because the power
and wealth in this society are benefitting by current free market and democracy
ideology. And rhetorical tricks. "Democracy and free markets" really mans
corporate control of markets and media control of elections and issues. For
example, “average wages are rising” without noting that his means large increases
for a few and for most, wages are still falling. Because of the large increases at the
top, most are losing out. Another, “rising productivity’ sounds like we are
producing more for everyone. But “Productivity” is defined as output per man
hour, and hence if we produce the same with fewer people (the downsizing option
for pulling money out of a firm), we still get the positive sounding “rising
productivity.” (But it IS good! Says the Wall Street Journal acolyte, never grasping
what is at stake, the well-being of fellow humans – “oh it will all shake out and
everyone will benefit”… and so on).

We make our policy choices and personal choices based on an image of

where we want to go, short term and long term. GardenWorld is a vision that
brings a better balance because then the use of technology has criteria – does this
tech advance private interest at the expense of the whole, or is it, despite some
personal gain, an enhancement of GardenWorld? GardenWorld will need
technologies, entrepreneurial activity and changes, but with decreasing distortions
in the benefits. The US by the way has 4000 industrial design students. China has
200,000. Artigiani, quoted earlier, writes,

Masses tolerated mistreatment by elites because, when civilized social

systems self-organized, they solved problems individuals could not solve for
themselves. In over-populated environments, even the most biologically
favored individuals found themselves at risk. There would simply not be
enough ripe vegetation or animals to supply necessary calories, regardless of
how well individuals could see, how fast they could run, or how cunningly
they could act. But if large numbers of people worked together at specialized
 tasks like farming, tool-making, soldiering, and bookkeeping, an artificial
environment could be created from which resources flowed in large and
digestible quantities. Once survival depended on organized behavior, the first
priority had to become maintaining the system in its altered environment.
Thus, even when civilizations treated individuals unfairly, once societies self-
organized people had to act so that the system on which all depended endured.
i
[i]

What is needed is a greater distribution of resources and authority. Right now the
center controls almost everything, whileGardenWorld requiresw an
experimentalattitude at local levels. GardenWorld initiatives also will run into
skills shortages. We have not got the skilled workforce for sophisticated building
restoration and retrofitting, nor for advanced agriculture. The danger is that we will
push in money to overcome these shortages, and this will support money based
organizations. We need six month training programs that are on attractive
campuses to create many of the skills GardenWorld will need, from plant tending,
the crafts involved with retrofitting buildings for effeciency,and speaking Spanish
to new and willing workers.

Gordon Brown in England as new prime minister has taken a major initiative
that could be of great advantage in easing the shift toward a GardenWorld
framework for social decisions. Again I quote at length because of the value of
what is said and who is saying it.

• I believe that the big challenges we face as a country - security, global

competition, climate change, rising aspirations, the desire for stronger, safer,
more sustainable communities - can no longer be solved by the old politics
• I believe that Britain needs a new type of politics which embraces everyone
in this nation, not just a select few.
• A politics built on engaging with people, not excluding them.
• A politics that draws on the widest range of talents and expertise, not the
narrow circles of power.
• It is a politics that takes a hard look at the tough questions, not the easy path
of short-term slogans.
• It is the politics of the common ground and draws upon the common sense
of the British people.
• And I believe I am not alone in thinking normal politics, this old tired
sloganising politics of the past, should not resume in the old ways this
autumn.
• So here are my initial proposals.
• In the constitutional statement before the summer I suggested how the
executive should give up power to the legislature.
• First, if we are to meet the challenge of engagement, the old models of
consultation need radical renewal. While they have been useful in shaping
policy, we have come nowhere near realising the potential of the public to
make better policies. I am determined that the wisdom and experience that
resides among the British people will be better utilised in future.
• Now we need new ways and means to bring together citizens to discuss both
specific problems that need addressing and concrete proposals for change.
• We have already taken the unprecedented step of publishing the legislative
programme in draft and inviting comments and views.
• So starting this week, we will hold citizens juries around the country. The
members of these juries will be chosen independently.
• Participants will be given facts and figures that are independently verified.
• They will look at real issues and solutions - just as a jury examines a case.
• And whenever these citizens juries are held the intention is to bring people
together to explore where common ground exists.
• It will be followed by nine simultaneous citizens juries on the NHS - one in
each region - linked by video. These will bring together patients, staff and
the public. They will examine major questions of concern to people, like
access to services, the quality and safety of care, and how we can reduce
health inequalities.
• So in the next three weeks we will tackle these big issues in citizens juries.
• But this is not a one-off event. It is an on-going process of reaching out - of
doing the business of government differently.
• So for example, I believe we can only win 'hearts and minds' in the fight
against terrorism if we engage people at the grassroots, in their communities.
• This will therefore be an issue that we will put to the people directly,
particularly those in the areas most affected, in local debate and dialogue.
• I also propose that representatives assembled from every constituency come
together in a nationwide set of citizens juries held on one day. The juries will
look at a range of issues like crime and immigration, education, health and
transport.
• Citizens juries will help government shape the policies in ways that the
people for whom they are created want. Direct citizen involvement in
 policy-making can be the ally rather than the enemy of a renewed
representative democracy.
• And a citizens summit, composed of a representative sample of the British
people, will be asked to formulate the British statement of values that was
proposed in the green paper 'The Governance of Britain'. This has to be a
living statement of the British people. It won't take root unless there is a real
sense that it has been raised by the people themselves.
• This will be part of a wider programme of consultation, led by Jack Straw
and Michael Wills, on the British statement of values, the idea of a British
Bill of Rights and Duties, and components of the Constitutional Reform Bill.
• Jack Straw will be announcing details of this programme shortly.
• Citizens juries are not a substitute for representative democracy but an
enrichment of it. And the challenge of reviving local democracy can only be
met if we build new forms of citizen involvement in our local services and
new ways of holding them to account.
• So as we expand opportunities for deliberation, we must extend democratic
participation in our localities.
• I want to see a vibrant, reinvigorated local democracy - from neighbourhood
level engagement and community calls to action, to a renewed focus on the
devolution of powers and responsibilities to local government and the
accountability of our local police and health services to their communities.
• In this way, people can connect neighbourhood meetings, local ballots and
elections, and new forms of community action, with decision-making and
the exercise of power over issues they care about in their daily lives.
• As part of a new concordat between local and central government Hazel
Blears will be working on proposals for the extension of local democracy
and decision making in these areas.

Brown’s initiative is great. Conservatives of a certain type will argue that

this is the old argument for socialism, and we’ve been there and it didn’t work. But
the fact is that the conditions are more dire, and the economy/politics does not have
a built in corrective mechanism without at least new legislation. That Brown makes
such a speech shows that circumstances can shift rapidly, and new policies emerge
when the time is ripe.

In an earlier chapter I describd using Erik Erikson’s model of the human life
cycle as a design template for judging new social innovations. I wrote
 That is, healthy development requires parents, schools, work, and society.
We can add these to Erikson’s diagram, running down the right side.

stage Human cycle Social institution

65 – death,belief Integrity vs despair society

40 – 65meaning Generative vs. society

stagnation

18-45 yr Love and Intimacy vs. isolation Work/ family

mutuality
12-18 yrSelf and roles Identity vs. Role Work/ family
confusion

6-12 yr Learning and Industry vs. school

participating inferiority
3 - 6 yr exploration and Initiative vs. guilt school
making
18 – 3 yr speech and autonomy vs. shane parenting
movement, diapers and doubt
0-18 mo food and Trust vs. mistrust parenting
emotional dependency
 So, for the eight stages, we have four significant social institutions that must
not fail the child.

• Our society needs to provide the conditions were ordinary human beings
can, in their 20’s and 30’s be good parents,
• Our society needs to provide educated and humane teachers and the settings
for education of their students.
• Our society needs to provide work which provides for dignity and creativity
at work and the resources for intimacy outside it.
• Our society needs to provide an interesting milieu that allows each person to
bring together the threads of their life into a meaningful and attractive
pattern.
• Society is a complex mosaic of interdependent generations.

My local county government is surging with needs for new jais and the fact
that jails are billed with people 70% drug dependent and 20% mentally ill, but the
county has not talked to the schools about a joint program and joint metrics to cope
with the obvious independencies.

If economic resources were more evenly distributed among nations, the

state, county and township levels and to individuals, then we would be creating the
conditions for intense and more balanced conversations. Involvement and decision
making are attracted and made possible by resources. Tom Atlee, at the Co-
intelligence Institute has brought together a number of technologies and case
studies that hint at some of the possibilities. One of his favorites and mine
anticipating Brown’s speech, the use of citizen panels drawn randomly from the
population and given a policy task such as, “Should we allow such and such?” (an
example might be re-starting the building of nuclear power plants). They are
brought together and given resources to explore this question over a series of
meetings, and the results are made available to a larger public for discussion. These
discussions are not binding on elected officials but would certainly be suggestive
of what people would appreciate or can’t tolerate. If this procedure was broadly
adopted so that many of us could participate in at least one level or another we
would be creating the conditions of re-weaving the society on the basis of a
broader significant conversation.ii[ii]
 The issues can be difficult. On Cape Cod a proposed wind farm brought out
lots of opposition. You go to the ocean to take in nature – and in front of you are
400 foot tall wind towers – lots of them, like a Spanish armada on the horizon. On
the one hand fewer people care because fewer have access to that kind of
waterfront. But the issue is not just greed – it is the technical dominance of the
landscape, and the cape issues are just another place where tech tends to win out
and the urban dominance of the man made spreads to the most tech free
environments. Energy from wind is good – unspoiled landscape is good. Like so
many issues the outcome will be a balance of force, not of clear thinking.
GardenWorld must accept the reality of this kind of struggle where initiatives must
be taken when there is NO completely correct path, but a real conflict of different
good..iii[iii]

We know so much now, how to green spaces, fold buildings outward into
garden spaces, grow vegetables in cities, grow crops on roofs and cool streets with
trees, change building codes, use new technologies. This is not the place to lay out
the options. They are emerging fast and many many experiments are underway.
The point is to understand that, if this were the vision of where we want to get to -
and I believe it already is for many people - then the eighty percent solution and a
better future become practical realizable guides to political decisions.
How hard will it be?

In Sonoma County where I live, the progressive environmentalists are

against the use of packaged small unit waste water treatment because it would
allow people to build on land that can’t qualify for septic systems. The result is that
a tech that should be widely deployed for the good of customer costs and return of
groundwater is prevented from development and deployment. The obvious – bring
the two sides together and allow for the new tech on land that could qualify for
septic sytems – doesn’t happen.
 A farmer with 200 acres of range fed organic beef will lose 70 acres to new
designations of streams as riparian zones. He points out that if he loses these acres
he will not be able to feed the heard with harvested grain, and will need to buy I
from outside the county, but the cost is prohibitive. He points out that the major
stream that will be affected by the new designation was “built” by the county who
asked him for permission twenty years ago to put that stream there as a drainage
from land above hs own.

The result of such politics is to keep the county focused on a few hundred
small issues , each of which can be finessed, but to avoid the larger issues that
would bring thousands to the Board meetings in protest. The leadership to step out
on larger issues doesn’t easily emerge in this circumstance. Jurgen Habermas, the
German thinker most comprehensive in discussing modern conditions is suggesting
a deeper problem:

The success of the coffeehouse as a medium for the formation of bourgeois

public opinion rested on institutional premises that disappeared over time. As
an intermediary space between state and market, in which autonomous
individuals can enjoy their common humanity in unrestricted conversation,
the public sphere vanishes with the increasing interpenetration between
government authority and commercial enterprises. Capitalist firms
increasingly wield considerable power, and while the state expands its
responsibilities to counterbalance them and guarantee individuals a measure
of security, the resulting interaction between large-scale corporations and a
growing state leaves little room for an efficacious free debate.iv[iv]

First is getting the idea of GardenWorld in play which creates the conditions
for local politicians, the local press, and volunteer organizations to know where
they are going. Not a world of NO” but of many yeses. I think it is a case of the
people already yearning for it, but it has no name. Sustainability and greening
characterize what it is without naming it. GardenWorld is an attempt to name
where merging activities should point to allowing for full lives along the way, lots
of inventiveness, new relationships, business vitality, participation, and play. I
remember Erich Fromm once saying, “Hope is like a tiger waiting. Do not hope for
what already is, or what never can be. And do not worry if it doesn’t happen in
your lifetime .”v[v]

We need new leadership. I’d love to see business execs after say age fifty-
five leave big business and take on public well being. I’d like to see political
candidates who saw the opportunity to push the system – and lose the next
election. What is wrong with that if it pushes the ideas forward?

We need to understand who will resist. Change always has losers and
winners. It is important to recognize this and not divide between us and them, but
to make reasonable compensation. The rich who are afraid of losing land value
because of “taking” for the public good must understand that the enhanced value of
their property in the last decades is because of public spending. The property rarely
went up in value because of actual Improvement, but because of generally rising
prices based on social investment.

We need to understand that what is necessary is radical, but not that radical.
The values are already in place, and what is missing is the visual imagery and hope
to get there. GardenWorld is mostly an evolutionary strategy, pregnant and the
current situation. But not entirely. To the merry-go-round I described in chapter
one makes this change hard. In some ways and requires the replacing of cash
competition with design competition. If we see that GardenWorld is encouraging
for business vitality and the entrepreneurial use of new technologies to create a
greater delight it would be some compensation for the loss of extreme incomes and
wealth.
 First let’s realize that we can’t get there - that is, though the 80% solution to
GardenWorld - we can only move through a series of successful approximations.
The economical and environmental challenges are not precisely understood. So
what we need is not a specific plan oer a period of years, but an increase in
flexibility. New climate, new technologies, new demographics, new styles, new
arts, new ideas – we are a restless species. Our response should not be a fixed
linear progression, but the achievement of a flexibility capable of responding to
changing conditions without hurting people. Our current response to potential
climate change and poverty do not show the requisite flexibility that would allow
for innovation, analysis and creativity. GardenWorld is a permeable container for
exploratory and innovative effort and the image of an attractive direction for our
betterment. GardenWorld is not yet accepted as a key evocative public symbol,
despite how powerful it is to most people personally. GardenWorld, by articulating
the evocative and essential attractiveness in its imagery should help.

This leaves open the question of how we get there. That is, from current
circumstances, to GardenWorld, through and well beyond the agenda that would
gather about eighty percent of the voters.

It is important to have in mind images of change in the past, real changes –

not the change to a new technology, such as telegraph or gasoline engine, but the
deep changes of the beliefs of the people. In the middle ages, in the context of
feudalism the two respected paths in life were the knight, with a glorification of
killing, and the peasant, with hard work on the land. The lowly merchant, with but
a little to sell, moved from town to town and was looked on with interest but not
respect. The emergence of the business leaders’ class has been the process created
by a combination of law and force. We can expect that the future will be similar,
involving shifts of consciousness and institutions, and what we take for granted
will again be in play.

GardenWorld will not work if it is seen as romantic and purely local effort. The
world is a mess and we need multilateral international institutions that help prevent
the worst globalization threats: war, poverty and subversion of local economies to
elite or corporate interests. Corporations can play a role despite their desire to own
the process and precipitate out the profits. For example, IBM
In response to a request from the IBM Center for The Business of Government, I
prepared this essay in 2005 to stimulate a discussion on what the “next
government” of the United States might look like. The discussion focuses on the
following five imperatives for the performance of American government in the
21st century:

• A policy agenda that focuses more on problems than on structures

• Political accountability that works more through results than on
processes
• Public administration that functions more organically, through
heterarchy, than rigidly through hierarchy
• Political leadership that works more by leveraging action than simply
by making decisions
• Citizenship that works more through engagement than remoteness

These imperatives emerge from America’s struggle to deal with deep

challenges facing the nation. At the core is a fundamental problem: The
current conduct of American government is a poor match for the problems it
must solve. If government is to serve the needs of its citizens in the 21st
century, it must reconfigure itself—to shift the boundaries of who does what
and, even more important, how its work gets done.

Some public organizations have already experimented with the

challenges of stretching and bridging their boundaries. At the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Julie Gerberding struggled with
a series of challenges, including the 2001 anthrax attack and Severe Acute
Respiratory Syndrome (SARS ), and devised a new model for CDC’s
operation. This essay concludes with an analysis of the steps she took, along
with a broader discussion of the imperative for creating knowledge-driven
learning organizations. Based on Dr. Gerberding’s experiences, what general
 principles can be drawn from CDC’s issues that would be useful in creating
the government of the future? Consider these three:

• The imperative for knowledge-driven organizations

• The increase in non-routine problems
• The growing need for non-hierarchical solutions

Government is moving into the information age. Effective government requires

public institutions that can manage information to learn how best to improve their
effectiveness. In the information age, democratic government demands both citizen
engagement and transparency. However, the growing

complexity of government’s administrative tools makes it far harder to

determine who is responsible for what. Innovations in information—who
produces it and who uses it—will be essential to crack this emerging
paradox of 21st century governance.vi[vi]

Other than the obious relevance of IBM’s initiative to the problems of the
st
21 century, what strikes me is the GardenWorld quality of this analysis, above all
organic rather than hierarchical, interested in solutions, rather than control.

The problems of climate change with migrations, ageing populations in the

industrial countries, and the increasing – as of this writing – concentration of
wealth and capital in fewer hands – mans that we will get significant change. The
question is, breakdown, or breakthrough? GardenWorld is based on a path or
reasonable evolution towards greater inclusion in the profits of the economy and
greater integration of the human and the natural.

I’ve argued that understanding the folks who seem to be “them”, not “us”
are more like us than we may be comfortable with. If we rank issues such as

· Healthy economy
· Good education
· People owning homes
 · Attractive cityscapes
· Good healthcare
· Cooperative foreign policy

There is fairly high agreement that these are good goals, and means are not
too controversial. It requires revenue. If tax policy was shifted to drop the curves
of the major concentrations, there would be enough revenue, and these activities
create jobs.

Even if we add further criteria to the changes in that list,

· Healthy economy (better distribution and less extractive)

· Good education (for the whole person, not just skills for low level jobs )
· People owning homes (better designed and freer from debt)
· Attractive cityscapes (with community participation)
· Good healthcare (humanly redesigned and attractive)
· Cooperative foreign policy (through extensive diplomacy)

We still get very high agreement. As we add qualifiers like vital economy,
public education, affordable health differences start to emerge, but these are
negotiable.If we start adding issues like

· Abortion
· Non-profit vouchers k-16 Education
· Affirmative action
· Defeat of Islam
· Christian nation

Real differences that can be hard to reconcile emerge quickly. But even here,
as details are added, differences in some cases get stronger, and in some cases get
weaker. Think of the new evangelical interest in the environment. We can expect
continual shiftings – in both positive (hope) and negative (fear) directions. Many of
the underlying differences are based on fear of how the others would achieve those
goals to our disadvantage through……

· Big bureaucracy
 · Big business
· Big police state
· Somebody else’s belief system

The “right” thinks the progressives will be lazy and contemptuous and do it
with big bureaucracy. The “left” fears that the conservatives will do it from gated
communities and trust funds while incomes for most will go down, and more
police will enforce social conformity and “property rights”.

George Lakoff has been a popular thinker among the progressives for trying
to name differences, but to me the liberal family vs. strong paternalism meme doe
not get at the actionable ideas, hopes and fears, that the vast majority of the
population actually embody and find evocative. GardenWorld is an effort to try to
name evocatively a hope that already exists but is inarticulate. The content is
simply to use our wealth to create a better life, with much higher participation in
both the production and consumption of the things of that good life, using health
and education as major enablers for the capacity to participate with skill and
vitality..

But given that the corporations contributed 75% of the money to run this
campaign, what to do? The resistance from that side is like a Chinese wall. A
Silicon Valley discussion group member posted

“Reengineering our socio-economic assumptions cannot be treated as a train

of thought, a movement or a revolution.” Note that it was at first, he assumes,
engineered. So why can’t we reengineer it? What is the meaning of “cannot”, from
socialism to fascism, they are being reworked all the time.

My feeling is that corporate leadership for the most part, already agrees that
the economy is skewed and unproductive. Some are willing or eager to ride this
out, taking profit from the system. But others, whose future they see being
weakened, would be amenable to a higher productivity agenda, with greater
environmental and social responsibility. Not productivity in man hours, but in real
output of products and services, total wages and profits). Bush has been anti-
entrepreneurial. He supports old line business and has no instinct for opportunity,
for the elegance of technology, for the hum of making things work well. This
approach to the economy is to freeze it in its current manifestations.

John Young, when he was president of Hewlett Packard, said “as a

businessman I can play and win by any set of rules, so society should set good
ones.”

A vital economy based on real entrepreneurship – creating with new markets

and new technologies to meet emerging needs – is open for the initiatives of
leadership. Successful politics should move into this space, creating jobs, building
on the American ideal of a can-do nation.

Efforts like bio-mimicry hint at the technical – biological nexus as a solution

generating model.

To get there we need some difficult analysis of the current scene

Most political talk in the us is about how we are the society of freedom and
open markets, but a realistic look says we are running under two systems:
representative democracy, and finance capital capitalism is a complex system
which has gone through and evolution from trade capitalism in about the 15th
century to industrial capitalism in the 19th and finance capitalism in the last few
decades. Capitalism seems to be central to the definition and functioning of our
society, despite the rhetoric about free markets, and I am asking, with the idea of
reversing the worst trends, such as income concentration, to change a bit the
dynamics of capitalism. But we need to be clear that “capitalists” and the political
process they mostly control, is part of the system but not the whole system. The
“inevitability of capitalism”, as in Fukuyma’s The End of History, is not an
adequate picture of reality.

Capitalism is distinct from markets. Markets are free for all participants to
make deals, Capitalism, which the current rhetorical environment spun out by
business-media equates with free markets, is really quite different. It is a
mechanism of control, especially of its participation in markets.

In classical economics there is no profit

 Business wants to avoid markets to enhance profit. In the background of the
information revolution is the understanding that if everyone knows what is going
on, all opportunities of brining capital together are going to be in motion, and the
result is, there is no profit – except for a short term till the system catches up and
you are defeated or bought out – except for monopoly or quasi-monopoly leverage
– what economics calls the theory of the oligopolistic) firm.

One of the great historians, Braudel made clear that capitalism is a small part
of an economy. It is those who control large amounts of cash. Few do. Not the
professionals who work for them, nor he people on salary. Owning stock is not
being an entrepreneur – it is a bet on making your money while driving up the
value of shares already owned by others and making the cash results available to
those who know how to use it. Capital, organized as corporations, seeks what is
really profitable, and lets the rest go to small business and local markets.
Capitalism is basically in the wholesale business and lets retail go to the small
business sector where profit is smaller (in percent and gross numbers).

I go into this to show that the way capitalism functions and its place in the
system is more open to new regulations and norms, and less able to resist, than we
have been led to assume.vii[vii]

In Sweden a number of years ago I went to an art gallery that had an exhibit
of art from the ”C” society. In the entrance way was a large sign that said, more or
less

“We all know what the “A” society is, and the “B” society is made of those who
work for them. The “C” society is the people who are left out, unemployed,
criminals, marginalized. This exhibit is artifacts of the “C” society”.

In fact, the “B” society, the professionals and employed, are what we mean by
“society”. It is most of us. But we let public policy be made by the “A” society, not
the “B”. In the last few years the growing awareness of falling middle class
incomes as the B’s join the C’s, is creating the opportunity – and eventually the
necessity – to revisit all this. The media is pressing us to think that the “A” society
is much bigger in percentage than it is, and riding along the rest of us more than it
is.. If we look at it as those with major capital accumulation that can be used for
rapid investment it is only a very small percentage of all of us. Those who own a
house for example that is now worth a million, don’t fit in the “A” team because
what they have is not liquid except through borrowing, and the likely target for the
borrowed money is not true capitalist investment, but buying stock in somebody
else’s venture, or, more likely, to help solidify the position of their children in the
“B” society.

GardenWorld should be a blend bringing the A, B, and C teams together in a

shared enterprise called society. There is plenty of room for capitalism if the small
percentage of the population who hold leveragable capital are willing to play.

The only excuse for rich people is if they have good taste,
otherwise they are too expensive. So, imagine,

• Technology for Gardenworld

• Land use for GardenWorld
• Education for GardenWorld
• Governance for GardenWorld
• Globalization and GardenWorld

A modest look at American public opinion shows an opening towards these

questions. This is a lead-in to the next two chapters, on human nature, and
technology.
i[i] Artigiani Origins, ibid pg 598

ii[ii] There is a growing literature on conversation. I think in particular of Zeldin’s the

intimate history of humanity and his follow-up book, strategic conversations. I consider
conversational theory to be the leading edge of the new governance.
iii[iii] Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy
Future on Nantuket Sound by Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb
iv[iv] http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-08-08-norberg-en.html

v[v] Erich Fromm, the revolution of hope

vi[vi] http://www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/KettlKelmanReport.pdf

vii[vii] See de lande http://t0.or.at/delanda/geology.htm. Keith Hart, Money in an

Unequal World