Heroes Not Zombies

“Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy”

That particular line in Paul Mason’s Guardian article about post-capitalism really jumped out at me.

It jumped out at me because for a long time I’ve become very disatisfied with the contemporary emphasis on hierarchies, bureaucracies, organisations and societies modeled on machines. The mechanical model with all its emphasis on measurement and its basic assumption that nothing is more than the sum of its parts has been useful in some ways, and remains useful in some areas of life – parts dealing with machines!

But when it comes to Nature and, in particular, to living organisms, that model just does not add up. With sufficient power and resources the mechanical model can be imposed on natural systems – but only for a while. Eventually, the mechanical model diverges too much from natural reality to be useful.

That’s where we are now – our economies, our societies, our systems of health care and education, our politics – are all being changed as the network model undermines the hierarchies.

With new information, communication and collaboration technologies we have more and more opportunities to work with others to create different ways of learning, different ways of healing, different ways of living.

That’s pretty exciting but for many people it’s more frightening than anything else. We have to support each other to build our ability to hope and to innovate or we’ll remain suppressed, controlled and stuck.

It’s going to be fun to imagine and create our new ways together. Are you up for it?