Facilitating a Disruptive Emergence To Replace the Existing Elite System Running the Planet

When it comes to the question of revolution or system re-design, I fall back to my default favorite quote:

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." R. Buckminster Fuller

i recently read Fritjof Capra's book, The Systems View of Life, and interviewed him, which has "re-designed" a lot of my thinking on bottom-up and change. The system Gilbert Mercier describes-- where non-democratic organizations serving the elites, like World Bank, IMF, and trade pacts are deeply influencing if not running what we live under the illusion of believing to be democratic nations-- is an extreme aspect of the current world-wide system-- an outlier that could be very fragile and disruptable, especially if exposed to emergence (a chaos and systems theory concept) of true bottom-up, grass-roots powered movements like new iterations of Occupy and what Marina Sitrin has described in several books on Horizontalism and change.

We need to deal with the narcissistic sociopaths and psychopaths who have slithered into power positions in church, state and industry and take back the high ground of bottom-up values that embrace the consciousness that we are all connected to each other and to the ecosystem-- that forgetting this, losing connection consciousness is a dangerous pathology which manifests in selfishness, Ayn Randism, Libertarianism and which masquerades as advocacy of freedom.

We cannot directly fight the power and wealth of the elite's system. The only way we can get rid of it is to facilitate the emergence of a new way, as Buckminster Fuller described-- a way that undermines and replaces the existing system. I don't think that's a system re-design or a revolution. It's more of a disruptive emergence that comes out of the immense power and energy of a bottom-up grass-roots coming together. I was tempted to use the word up-rising, but as my old friend Swami Beyondananda has set, perhaps we need more of an upWISING. The elites are weak, fragile (as compared to antifragile) and vulnerable, compared to the full power of all of "us"-- the rest of the souls on this planet. We need to explore new, creative ways of connecting that big "we" together to energize the emergence of a new social, ecosystem force that disrupts and replaces the existing power system. Joseph Nye, author of Soft Power and The Future of Power, chairman of the North American branch of the Trilateral Commission, told me in our interview, that the word is going through huge shifts in how power works. One way, he describes, is "Power Diffusion," which is the shift of power away from all governments... to nongovernmental actors, and that is a lot harder to deal with, because that is quite new."

Nye goes on to talk about soft power, which is based on attraction, rather than money or force, and discusses how you can't use an army to fight cyber attacks or global warming. He offers a possible solution:

"...we are going to have to learn to use soft power to organize networks of cooperation with others to deal with these kinds of problems; and unfortunately, our vocabulary, the way we think about power, is very old-fashioned. It used to be said that power was determined by whose army wins, but in an information age, power also is determined by whose story wins."

I founded, organized and ran conferences for 15 years-- one was the first conference ever held on the art, science and application of story-- which brought together all the worlds of story-- screenwriting, fiction, news, politics, law, religion, storytelling, psychology, marketing. It started out as a collection of conversation about the blind spot my Storycon conference ended up exploring.

A few people have suggested the idea of putting together a conference to explore what can be done. If a confluence of supporting serendipities made a conference possible, I'd have to strongly consider accepting that bottom-up "call" to that adventure. It would have to come out of a bottom-up conversation of what it should focus on. Some topics to include might be embracing small, bottom-up change, connection consciousness, disruptive activism, soft-power, next generation Occupy, dealing with sociopaths, public banking and alternatives to capitalism, debillionairization, the future of democracy, justice, climate change.

I'm not sure where a meeting could be held, maybe where the space and support emerged-- a college campus, a summer camp, or who knows, maybe that awakened billionaire might fund it in a big city. Or maybe 10,000 or 100,000 people would bottom-up fund it.