Replying to LO28008 --
Was: LOs, certification and metanoia
Dear LOst souls (before one can do soul searching, one must have lost one?
No, i mean, you have LO souls, LOer souls and LOst souls? No, i mean i'm a
bit lost in my thoughts, this message is a bit of a hotchpotch), thank you
At and Andrew for your contributions,
Culture, i've been told, is a set of behaviour, ways and means to survive
in a situation. Imagine a culture starting in a niche. As the culture
develops, is succesful, it grows out of its niche and becomes apparant, it
can be labeled. I would like to compare a culture with a species: the best
adapted culture (best adapted to the situation) will survive. Then tragedy
cuts in: the situation has changed, the environment, the niche is no
longer a niche. The culture becomes hyper-critical: a small - or not so
small - event can make it tumbling down. Avalanche. A wise culture should
have controlled demolition now and then.
We have the fossils, traces of previous cultures in our heads. The old
fossilized cultures are still alive and kicking. Like recombinations of
DNA, strethes of information, ideas, feelings haunt us. Maybe our
behaviour is an expression of these meme's, cultures testing cultures. Is
there a best culture? Why do we think there is? Why compete? Is
co-operating not a better strategy? Isn't a open society, a respectful
culture better?
We try make impressions on other such streches who are still forming: we
try to teach our children well. But we do not know before hand what is the
sensible thing to learn our children. Will they live in a hostile world,
better make them brave and strong at the expense of open and vulnerable?
Better save then sorry! So we try to do both: and respect another culture
and try to compete with the other culture.
Is this a problem? I suppose not. Our environment has completely changed.
We're no longer cave dwellers, tent campers, bush men, wigwam pullers; we
do not have to wait for the waters of the Nile to return, ask the Gods for
a favour or pray for our daily mail (;-)). So ALL classical cultures are
in decline and trying to establish their most valuable bits into the new
paradigm, the new cultures. This is a blind process and a blindening
process. We do not know what part will fit our future generations best.
And we also do not know what part we'll play in this new culture. I
suppose our souls, eyeless, are lost, lost at the moment, lost at what is
happening; we'll have to let loose or we'll get lost forever. Ever
considered this a loose - looose situation? The more you have to loose,
the harder this must be.
Confidence,
Jan
AM de Lange wrote:
> Reason (3) is for me the common cause in the decline of many cultures.
> Political leaders dictated their followers for supposedly their good
> rather than actually consulting them widely to learn what is good for
> them. These autocratic leaders usually consulted only the men of fortune
> who self exploited the masses for their own opportunistic gains.
> Dictatorship and furtuneship go hand in hand.
snip
> It said that power corrupts. But how does it happen? Autocratic leaders
> use rote learning to drive their followers into camps where these
> followers never would have gone themselves. They pay no attention to the
> authentic learning and personal knowledge of their followers, neither in
> helping them to learn authentically nor learning authentically from them.
> They simply declare that only they as leaders know what is best for their
> followers. In other words, their corrpution begins by corrupting
> knowledge. To shut the mouth of anyone trying to question their autocracy,
> they often use the oldest trick among all. They declare that they rule by
> divine preordination. That is why they use a religion to defend their
> dictatorship.
>
> We will have to become wise to leaders with autocratic tendencies who may
> slowly diverge us away from the path of a rising culture. Perhaps the
> following is an example of such wisdom:-
> < http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12477 >
snip
> Is the Western culture of Western nations declining? Some people see such
> a culture as all the artifacts of a civilisation. But I think personally
> of a nation as an organisation and thus of a culture of nations as an even
> more encompassing organisation. By thinking this way I feel that the rise
> or decline of a culture can be followed by looking for the presence or
> absence of metanoia in it. But to certify it -- no way!
>
> The medieval guilds played a vital role during the Dark Age of European
> culture. They functioned like tiny LOs as Leo Minnigh and I have wrote
> about several years ago on our LO-dialogue. Whether Western culture is
> declining or rising again, LOs with their ubique metanoia will play a
> vital role in it. In a declining culture they become a safe niche and in a
> rising culture they are at its daring frontiers.
-- With kind regards - met vriendelijke groeten,Jan Lelie
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