The Initial Agreement

The Initial Agreement

            The following ‘maxims’ represent the rough draft of an ‘oath’ or initial agreement made between consenting adults. It can also be made by children and teenagers who also wish to do their best to enter into Agreement with other people who make this Initial Agreement. This initial agreement is part of a larger corpus of political and philosophical concepts that make up a unified vision of a future society. I am calling this imagined society that I hope we can become the Agreement Society or the Maxim Society. I am working to write out a series of essays that will spell out this vision and the steps we can take to achieve this society. These efforts will include a rigorous defense of the loosening of senseless anti-drug laws, particularly against Marijuana. I am also working to write a tentative and improvable constitution that could theoretically guide this society.

            I envision this Initial Agreement being taught to children from a very early age, as young perhaps as 4 or 5. Consequently I have tried to design the whole sequence of sayings to appeal to a diverse type of mindsets and learning styles, from the sophisticated and nimble to the slow and goofy, from early childhood to the elderly. I also envision the Initial Agreement being occasionally changed and always improved by popular and fairly determined consent. This Agreement would be the Agreement Society’s way of expressing its core values to one another and also of making a mutual pact of communal and widespread understanding of what constitutes achievable and meaningful wellbeing. These concepts would ideally guide the entire society’s conduct. In another essay I will discuss in much more detail what exactly I hope to accomplish by creating such a set of statements and building a society around these statements.  

            Each statement would initially be taught one at a time to children, in the order of their composition. Each statement would be accompanied by a thorough series of discussion and explanations by a trained adult. Children (and adults and everyone in between) would be thoroughly encouraged to debate, discuss and enlarge upon the adequacy and inadequacy of these statements (including the last). The sayings are meant to have an air of both goofiness and fun to them, and also an air of profound seriousness.

There would ideally be a coming-of-age ceremony among classes of students, perhaps around puberty, when all the students, their teacher(s) and their family would come together at a ritual time and publicly profess the agreement to one another. Each student would have an opportunity to say one or more of the sayings for the rest of the people to hear in sequence and at the end of the ceremony everyone would repeat the agreement. 

     My idea here is that these statements approximate the Kantian notion of a categorical imperative - that is, a statement or plan one says to oneself that one would also wish for other people to have or make. It also incorporates the Kantian notion of a Kingdom of Ends, in which each person conceives of every other person as an end and purpose unto themself, and not simply as a means to an end. So the aforementioned ceremony, and the sayings themselves, would represent a promise and a standard for conduct and goals for  and to oneself and to the larger community of the human world you belong to.  

Please provide feedback on what you think of my idea and these sayings, their order, their adequacy, etc. Also please feel free to propose additional and alternate sayings, and to propose the removal or change of certain sayings. I would like this to be a group project between real people who want to see real and meaningful change in this world.

Without further ado:

The Maxims or 

The Initial Agreement

by uh…we forget who…? Manbeard? Manfart?

Mancheeseyogurtjellyfishaspecialhappycoloreddancetime!YES!

We have it!

2    1. Don’t limit yourself.

2. Don’t limit anyone, anything, any place, any idea, any dream, any feeling, any misgiving, any perception, anyone, anything, any culture, any time, any cloud, any tiny drop of water, etc. and on to infinity…

3. Keep on going.

4. Then keep on going.

5. Limit definitions.

6. Stay balanced.

7. Re-examine balance every day.

8. Stay true to your family.

9. Everyone is family.

10. Give your family breathing room and space to live, to breath, to love, to die, to be happy and as peaceful and as considerate as they can be or will be able to.

11. Respect your elders.

12. Think for yourself.

13. Don’t tolerate injustice.

14. From time to time, argue with your elders in as kind and truthful a way as possible.

15. Don’t limit your family.

16. Don’t hurt yourself.

17. Don’t hurt anyone if you can help it.

18. Take good care of your body.

19. Feed yourself.

20. Cook good healthy delicious food if you can help it. Try if you can’t.

21. Cherish the world around you.

22. Be involved with nature, gardening, and the seasons. Get as close to them as you can.

23. Feed others.

24. Look for the truth.

25. Appreciate the truth.

26. Need the truth till it burns and you feel its sweet majestic caramelized fresh peach pulp burning your tongue. Ouch.

27. Be funny. Or try.

28. Appreciate funny. It appeaches you – get it!? I meant ‘appreciates you’ – ah, funny, right? Wink? Funny? Meh.

29. Dance every day or try if you can’t.

30. Make amazing art or try.

31. Read great books or at least listen to them.

32. Listen to amazing music and share it with your friends if they will listen.

33. Be wildly inventive.

34. BE modest ly ironic.

35. Enjoy yourself till you are dead.

36. STAY BALANCED!

37. s t a y   c a l m.

38. Dig it. Know incontrovertibly that you can dig it.

39. Hope for a time of healing.

40. Be there.

41. Be everywhere.

42. Love your fellow man.

43. Respect all life.

44. Take your time.

45. Get it right.

46. Be patient.

47. Cherish your time here together with all of us who deep down love one another every day every minute every hour no matter how big or small the love we know or see.

49. And let it end in most melodious Laughter and her older brother Hope and their intimately close distant cousins, Righteous Anger and Love.

50. Ah hahaha haha hee hee ah hahaha haha ohohoho hehee haha uhaahaha uh….um….yeah. YEAH! (Feel free to improvise here).

Fourth and Final Section: The Syndividual

I was going to break the second section into two separate blog posts, but I have been so lazy and so long in posting them and the section is so tightly tied together that I feel the best thing to do is release the whole section.
 I hope you take the time to read this and if the ideas are encouraging or engaging, please feel free to let me know. Or argue with me. Anything is better than silence and inaction when it comes to moving the state of our species and the planet forward. 
As a side note, I plan to make a Facebook page in support of syndividual action and thought, and will be posting links and further relevant discussions and videos there. You will be able to find it on my Facebook page when I have created it.
So, without further ado, section II (for this blog it is the fourth section or blog article).                                    

II

Total Change

Our improvement and change cannot be solely a matter of laws, of politics, of philosophy, economics, religion, rhetoric, technology, art, individual action, or even of adequate knowledge in the new and scientific sense of the word knowledge. The barriers to change are total, incorporating all aspects of what it means to be a human. This sense of the total and holistic requirements of real change is quite daunting, and doubtless is a serious aspect of the current malaise of disillusionment of which I have spoken. After all, we have seen some epic failures in the arena of change-making: Leninism, Maoism, Fascism, etc. These examples show that many generations before ours have not been as disillusioned; many have pinned their hopes on the power of religion to transcend humanity in this world (think of the birth of Christianity), or a theory, or politics, or drugs. Some have pinned their hopes for implementing real change on politics alone. Just think of the American Revolution and the many revolutions that surrounded that time period, or of the enthusiasm of the political-minded in our generation– they have wedded their childhood hopes for real change with the belief that that change must or should be anchored in political change. I could go on (in fact I will for just a little while longer), to point out the different generations and social groups and organizations that have not been disillusioned, that have believed and fought for the real possibility of change. Recall the enthusiasm of Bacon and the scientific community right up till the beginning of the Twentieth Century, when the amoral compass of science’s products became much clearer – and dark tsunamis of violence and rage and ill-used technologies tore the world asunder. Recall the hippies, and the energy and sincerity and hope they generated and expressed before the majority of them lost steam, splintered, got jobs, had families, or became disillusioned or distracted: their anchors for change were philosophy, music, sex, and drugs (I might well be missing a few, since I was not a hippy and am not a hippy scholar!). These are real points for changing our world – but they cannot be the only ones, and they cannot be conceived as the central ones. Not everyone values those aspects of life equally, nor should they be made to. The same goes for any other major movement thus far for changing our world for the better.
The changes we seek in our heart of our hearts will have to be, as William Shakespeare calls it, “a sea change”: “Full fathom five my father lies. / Of his bones are coral made. / Those are pearls that were his eyes.  / Nothing of him that doth fade but doth suffer a sea change/ into something rich and strange. / Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell” (The Tempest, 1.2.400-406 ). The change will have to be total. When the metamorphosis is complete, the changes will be internal, psychological, spiritual, and all outward changes will be but outward manifestations of our redeemed potentials. We will have dragged as a people all or most of our dark potentials forcibly to the bottom of the well. We will have brought into the light, or at least hovering near the surface, our greatest gifts, our deepest and most irenic potentials. Sea nymphs ring our knell, and we are indeed headed towards a fate rich and strange: but it can be one that descends upon us unwilling, or it can be one that we have marked from afar, uncertain of the details, but certain that it will be a better world by far than the one we inhabit now.    
So the rejoinder to my rejection of the myth of permanence, indeed, the concern that makes it necessary to proclaim it a myth, is the contention that we need to get our shit together. It is a stinking mess. As noted, one thing it is important to admit is that the kind of total change we need is not going to be easy to accomplish. But difficulty does not equal impossibility. Nor do we need to suddenly ascend to the perfect society. We just need to do a whole hell of a lot better than we are doing right now. Drastic improvement, not perfection. And as I have taken the time to argue, we can drastically improve, all of us together. The realistic path towards this total improvement is to achieve a critical mass of syndividualistic behavior by most members of our civilization.  An excellent illustration of the total change achievable by the critical mass that I hope for us to achieve can be found in Neil Postman’s extended discussion of the dangers television poses to the sustained wellbeing of our culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death. There he writes of the critical mass achieved by our television-oriented culture, but the metaphor and the general manner of achieving total change applies to my goals here:
             I find it useful to think of the situation in this way: Changes in the symbolic environment are like      
             changes in the natural environment; they are both gradual and additive at first, and then, all at once, a
             critical mass is achieved, as the physicists say. A river that has slowly been polluted suddenly
             becomes toxic; most of the fish perish; swimming becomes a danger to health. (Postman 27-28).  
The idea here is to reverse the rise of a toxic critical mass - to gradually create a healthy and robust critical mass of positive syndividual behavior, to create a critical mass where the majority of us behave as syndividuals, not individuals, and that behavior becomes the dominating social atmosphere for individual and group conduct. In such a way positive and enduring total change is possible.
Now it really would not be very cool of me to yell “Yo, we can make a difference, we have the potential, deep down we are awesome and we just have to dig ourselves out of this shithole” if I didn’t at least provide some very general guidelines on how I think we can make that total change I have spoken of. After all, I have generally described what it will look like, but I have not said what we need to do to get there. And so I will do that now.
First things first, we need to realize that not all freedoms are created equal. The way some people talk and act, freedom is an absolute good that must be protected in as many forms as possible or the basic rights of individuals will be infringed and the world will come crashing down. It is precisely the opposite. If we continue to blindly protect and endorse the freedoms to poison the environment, poison ourselves to the detriment of our society, blindly consume without regard to the effects of our ravenous consumption, honor and empower the greedy, gain undue and disastrous influence over political affairs (yes, I am talking about lobbying influences) and other patently destructive and nefarious freedoms, then we certainly will follow the route of absolute freedom to a very ignoble and destitute end. More on what that will look like later. Being an individual and being free are all well and good in theory. But in reality, Thoreau’s idea of the self-sufficient everyman is dead-wrong, and Donne was dead right:
            No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod  
            be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
            manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in
            mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (Devotions upon
            Emergent Occasions, 17).
Individuality and freedom are conditional and interdependent realities – and therefore as “goods” or existences as ends we pursue they are limited, interdependent, and conditional in scope. We are not islands, but clods of one continent (perhaps we are crappy material after all!). But I will elaborate on these last ideas lest the non-philosophically minded spit on this blog (in reality, their computer screen!) out of frustration.
We do not exist independently. Everything we do takes places in a world shared by other living species, especially our own species. Our world is a world with limited resources, no matter how great and near-infinite those resources may at times seem. Our world is a world of intermingled actions and causations, a world full of billions upon billions of butterfly causes and effects. So our individual existences are conditioned by these parameters; the limited resources and the intermingled causality of the world place limits, causes, and effects upon our individuality – and consequently upon the exercising of our freedoms. If I buy a thousand tons of timber, unless I and others are willing to share the use of that timber without compromising the quality and durability of the timber, in the name of absolute freedom (and property rights), unless we come up with conditioned terms of shared use, those resources are now unavailable for “free” use to anyone else. The same for any other finite resource. Consequently, the notions of freedom and the individual as they exist in current legal, political, and social practice throughout much of the Western world are not notions that have long-term viability. These notions cater to the whims of the powerful and the greedy. They are, in good part, a serious aspect of the dilemma we find ourselves in. We have not done enough to protect ourselves from the abuses of freedom, from the over-reaching (what the Greeks called hubris or over-stepping one’s bounds) of individuals in the name of that which we deludedly hold as quasi-sacred: individuality.
So we must replace these dominant notions of the absolute individual and absolute freedom. Because though we recognize that we must place limits on the individual and on the exercise of freedom (we have, after all, made it illegal to kill, to steal, to lie under oath, etc.), these limits are atavistic and out of focus, and many of us are secretly all hungering for absolute freedom and absolute individuality. We have forgotten the Golden Rule. In the back of many of our minds, we are thinking, “absolute freedom for me if I am lucky enough to get it, but not for everyone else.” We both cheer on and jeer at the ridiculously wealthy – we want what they have, but we sure as hell wouldn’t give it up if we had it. We want our society to allow it and even approve of it – so that there is a chance that somehow we too can have it. But we simply can’t all be thinking that: it will take us to where we are – and down to mass perdition. For my part I propose these replacements for freedom and the individual: the syndividual and mediated freedom. And by these terms I don’t just mean ideas that I will systematize and define – I mean actual practices that closely correspond to the ideal. I am advocating a combination of praxis and theory – one or the other won’t do.
It comes down to desire. It really should have very little, at least in the beginning, to do with laws and external restrictions to action. All other things we have set our hands and minds to in the effort to improve this world will be for naught if we change not our desires within. Again, a sea change. If we don’t change our desires, the “right” laws will be just like a weak stone wall set up to prevent the ocean from washing on the beach: good luck with that. Desires, like individuals, like our freedoms, are conditional – and conditioned. We condition ourselves to desire certain things, and we condition others. We see what others want, and if those desirables give the illusion of happiness, we want them too. So a syndividual does not secretly desire absolute freedom and absolute individuality. The syndividual recognizes these desires as illusory and destructive. The syndividual places conscientious checks and balances on his desires: he desires these balances more than he desires the standard items and habits that inhabit our world’s matrices of desire. More importantly, the syndividual wants total change, because he sees that the world is not happy – and if he is knowingly and willingly contributing to that unhappiness through violence or greed or reckless consumption or abuse of his and others’ talents (to give a few examples), then he is not happy with himself. And he takes steps to contribute to his happiness and the world’s in ways that are balanced and compassionate – for example, exercising moderately, eating moderately with a healthy diet, contributing positively to some of the communities around him, speaking honestly, using his talents for the betterment of himself and those around him. The syndividual does not recklessly overstep his bounds: he recognizes that he must share his freedom (and will thereby find that freedom more meaningful) with all living beings. He conditions and limits his freedoms in the context of his total environment. So if he knows that Chilean Sea Bass is near extinction and they are a valuable part of the world’s ecosystem – then he does not selfishly eat them when there are plenty of other available food sources. I am not speaking of a commune, since I am not speaking of a political or social structure – but an internalized attitude towards life and the goals one makes for oneself in life. The syndividual seeks to create a synergistic environment through his lifestyle and actions (get it, synergy plus the individual – the syndividual!). To do so, the syndividual should be aware that he is only part of a whole, that the human species is only one part of a vast complex system. He doesn’t need to know everything – but he does need to be open to learning how he can better fit into the improvement of the whole .

The Two Hurdles to Change

Now I am going to return to the two ‘hurdles’ I mentioned in the first section, and I will connect them here to the concept and praxis of the syndividual: 1) positive imagination, and 2) the syndividual’s general role in changing our external conditions. I will begin with the positive imagination, which ties directly into my discussion above on conditioning our desires and being open to learning how we can better fit into the improvement of our whole society. As I discussed in the section on compassion, the first step and the first hurdle to creating real and total change is to recognize the quality of our imagining and to learn to choose and control the nature and quality of our imagining. To be honest, this first hurdle deserves its own extensive discussion, but for the purposes of this essay, I will limit myself to a few paragraphs to flesh out the concept of the positive imagination.
This first hurdle is almost purely subjective, and does not require a significant or consistent reaching out to other people in a coordinated effort to improve the world – but it will lead to that. My contention (and it is not an original one, but instead derives much from thinkers such the Dalai Lama, Chuang Tzu, and the Buddha) is that our society, from the level of the family and education to our media forms and advertising, conditions us to imagine and construe our world in primarily closed and negative terms. We are encouraged to see ourselves as closed entities, independent beings who must answer solely to and for ourselves the questions of meaning, money-making, happiness, and the good life in general. Social and spiritual meaning and happiness is ‘out there,’ and we have to take the meaning and happiness out there and bring it inside us. We are also encouraged to see ourselves and those around us in petty, overly judgmental, and, for lack of a better word, selfish terms. So my happiness is my happiness; my job is mine, no one else’s. My house is mine, no one else’s. I choose an outfit and am encouraged to think, to say to myself “what will others think of this?” with a negative response in mind, a negative critique of my clothing, my thoughts, my hair the thing to be worried about and feared. Everywhere around us we imagine and see threats and suspicions, criticisms and judgments, limitations to our happiness that we must either topple or avoid. Everywhere we seek legitimation of our acts as ego acts, everywhere we seek to meet approval, everywhere we seek to triumph over others in an endless and remarkably petty competition for superiority, as if happiness and beauty can’t be shared. Everywhere we search for the external hallmarks of our superficially defined standards of happiness, rendered jealous if we see others happier than we, rendered lonely if we see others with families and us alone. This perspective is endlessly legitimated and endorsed by our consumerist culture, our government, many of our family members, by the media that surrounds us. This is the closed and negative imagination. It is a perspective; it is an optional way of construing the world around us. And it doesn’t work. No wonder we are where we are. We are social and spiritual beings at our core. Compassion is in the very grain of our being, as I have been arguing, and when it is twisted through negative imagining, when we isolate our search for meaning and happiness and leave our imaginations twisting in the darkened and neurotic corners of our lonely minds, no wonder we see and experience the world as a dark and vicious rat race.
So the opposite of the closed and negative imagination is the open and positive imagination. That too is an optional perspective. We want happiness either way; we want meaning either way; we want beauty either way. So we can choose to see them as something to be fought over, a precious and rare commodity to be gathered up by the fortunate and the strong – or we can see happiness and meaning and beauty as open resources, increased and made deeper and more universal and more ubiquitous by our willingness to share it – the universal resources of every one. The open imagination sees the world this way: my happiness is yours, yours is mine. I am happy to see you happy; I rejoice to see your fortune, because it is mine as well. You have a car, I do not – do I even want a car? If I do, perhaps you can help me figure out how to get one; or you can show me what are the reasons to not want a car. Or we can car pool and I will throw you some gas money. The world is wide open! I have just published a best-selling book, you just lost your job and have become quite depressed – come to me and ask for recommendations, ideas, energy, compassion, and you will receive them, and be replenished, ready for the next step in your life. And I will learn your sadness can balance my joy, can remind me it is not all about me, that my joys can be shared without me losing my balance and my hope in this world. I buy the shirt I want because I like it, not because you or anyone else likes it – if you do like it, great! If you don’t, well that is your opinion, have fun with it. The positive and open imagination does not imply a loss of personhood or identity; it implies a willingness to recognize and share identities, goods, ideas, happiness. It implies a willingness to let go of the negative perspectives of others and to give them space to grow, to leave you alone, and to let time and the world and even perhaps your own actions heal their hurt. Furthermore, with the open and positive imagination, we view our responsibilities as not simply to ourselves, or to an exclusively defined collection of responsibilities to family, friend, and country, but as dynamic and open, awaiting still greater and greater illumination. You are responsible to yourself, but you are also equally responsible for discovering and sharing a universal and sharable happiness and meaning. This in itself is not a burden but a joy – a joy of discovering and living, growing and sharing. Living with an open imagination, you do not fear condemnation – you acknowledge it if legitimate and work to be a better person, or ignore it if illegitimate, and hope for the betterment of that person or group. You do not fear; you understand or seek to do so.
As noted, the path to living with an open imagination, the first step in becoming a syndividual, begins by simply recognizing the quality of our current personal imagining. How do you think? What kinds of thoughts do you have on a day-to-day basis? If you truly want to be happy (and most people I have ever met truly want to be happy, but have various blockages to the pursuit of that happiness, whether they be psychological, material, or both), then you need to recognize that the quality of your thinking determines how you will be happy and how far you will get in that search. Real happiness is universal and not limited to singular subjective experiences, but occurs in situations and places and can always be shared; it is not the exclusive property of particular individuals. Let your thinking reflect that as much as possible, and do not be upset if it does not happen right away; simply start with being aware of how you think, which is very much the product of habit and environment, and recognize that not all your thinking and feeling deserves or merits legitimation. Legitimate and encourage positive imagining, and discourage and delegitimize negative and closed imagining. And you will have begun the process of engaging in open and positive imagining.      
The first hurdle is the most personally difficult. But it is my belief that many of us are capable of thinking this way and consequently jumping over the first hurdle of becoming a syndividual and changing the world around us. It is a question of will and desire, not potential. We can be happier and more compassionate – do we will it, do we want it? I believe that given time and the appropriate amount and kind of discussion, the answers to these questions are positive for a great many of us. The second hurdle is not as personally difficult, but is doubtless more socially challenging, since it will involve the willful, consistent, and coherent change (and possibly the creation) of many institutions, including political, economic, educational, social, media-oriented, and military institutions, to mention a few. I have, after all, called for total change, so this last should be no surprise.
Now as for the second hurdle, there are two major aspects to clearing this hurdle: 1) altered communication within the various creative systems I briefly mentioned in my discussion of our creative potential; and 2) altered participation in (and use of) those same creative systems that surround us. To be philosophically fair here, I need to note that communication constitutes a form of participation and use in the sense I have outlined above, but for common-sense purposes it deserves to be singled out as a salient and distinct topic. So let us discuss the question of communication first.
I will break down the question of communication into two aspects, as perceived from the perspective of the subject (you, me, the individual perceivers and actors in the systems of communication): active and passive communication. The world around us communicates to us in various ways, and we communicate to the world around us in various ways. In many pivotal senses, these two aspects of communication determine a great deal of what constitutes the external conditions that shape and condition the actualizing of our potentials. For it is through our communicative processes that we share and receive our visions of the good life, and reinforce or alter those visions and perceptions of reality. And as I discussed earlier, it is our visions of our potentials and goals that will enable us or prevent us from achieving total change. So we face four choices regarding both our active and passive communication: 1) what forms of communication and messages do we choose to receive; 2) how do we choose to view and internalize these forms of communication and messages; 3) what forms of communication do we wish to employ in communicating ourselves, our visions, and our goals; and 4) Within those given forms, how do we wish to communicate ourselves, our visions, and our goals?
The concerns and ideas that allow us to answer those questions are isolatable, but they mutually affect one another and are (this should be no surprise at this point) interdependent and relative concepts, habits, and traditions. So it will be difficult for many of us to make quick, coherent, syndividualistic, and sustainable decisions regarding these choices, especially since the answers require sorting through a dense maze of causes, effects, habits, conditioned negative thinking, and traditions that is probably quite hazy to many of us. But I am hoping that by providing here (and hopefully in later essays) a general framework of communicative values I can aid in the decision-making process. I think it is safe to say that many of us do not look at communication this way, and indeed, many of us take much of our communicative environment and our own communicative habits for granted – that is, we forego the process of rationally examining those four choices and making rationally informed decisions, and instead allow our habits, local traditions, and our impulses to inform our decisions (if in this case they can be said to be decisions at all). To be fair, there is a vast range in this continuum between 1) not rationally deciding on any of the four choices, and allowing impulse and habit to dictate all of our communicative actions; and 2) rationally reflecting and then making decisions on every aspect of all four choices. I am advocating a measured and disciplined movement over time towards making rational decisions about each of these choices – rational decisions with total change and syndividual behavior as the guiding principles. I do recognize that we cannot all be hyper-rational (and am indeed inclined to think that rational thought has a limited scope to what it can provide for us in leading a spiritually balanced and meaningful life). But I also believe that between conditioning ourselves to imagine our world positively and openly, trusting and embracing our concordive potentials as I discussed in the first section, and using our rational powers in limited amounts over time, we can convert much of our individualistic and discordive communicative tendencies to concordive ones.
Having discussed the general nature and feasibility of rationally and syndividualistically assessing these four choices, I am going to provide a very brief and general framework of syndividualistic communicative values, which I will elaborate upon in later essays and upon which I hope others help me debate, enlarge, further discuss, and put into action.
1) The forms and messages of communication we choose to receive and/or participate in ought to be assessed in terms of their contributions to our positive and open imagination and our concordive potentials in general. From these criteria, we can more soundly assess the general likelihood of a particular form or system of communication and its messages guiding and/or motivating us and others in becoming more syndividualistic and achieving total change. For example, is my watching True Blood encouraging me to behave more syndividualistically and prompting reflection, positive imagining, compassion, creativity, and a growing sense of courage, etc.? Or is it distracting, discouraging, mind-numbing, and likely to make me valorize and praise unnecessary and unrealistic forms of conflict and violence, among other problems? Or is it simply a neutrally pleasant and distracting form of entertainment? I am not going to go so far here as to specifically condemn this or that television show, radio talk show, computer game (yes, there is much communication occurring in games, especially video and computer games), chat room, radio station, type of music, etc., or to pull a Plato and say that poetry and plays and all the entertainment and media that surrounds us is ‘bad’ or to be straight-out avoided. That is too reductivist and antagonistic an attitude to take if I am to appeal to enough people to make my theory convincing, and to respect the genuine and legitimate differences that exist between all of us. I would instead say that each person ought to ask themselves the question I asked of all the forms of communication they passively partake in, and when they have their answers, decide in favor of our concordive potentials, the open imagination, syndividualism, and total change. If the answers are predominantly negative or even neutral for you personally, it is probably wisest to dispense with engaging in that form of communication. After all, your time, life, and consciousness are precious, so why waste any of them on activities that do not positively affect your ability to actualize your concordive potentials and help the world become a better place?
2) While you are deciding which forms and messages of communication to reject or ignore outright, you must also be deciding, with the same criteria as before, how you view and internalize those forms and messages you are receiving/participating in. This second kind of choice can help you to make the first kind of choice, which, once made, is rather easy to stick to. This second kind of choice is a bit more difficult, since it is a choice we constantly have to make – if we are to be alert to how we imagine the world and to how we help to shape the world. Having already discussed the criteria for assessing communication, I will simply say here that the same criteria of the open imagination, the concordive potentials, the syndividual, and total change ought to be applied to how we accept or reject the claims and messages of any communicative system or form, whether it be the daily news, a novel, a poem, or a deeply moving film. The whole of a film, television show, etc., may prove to meet our syndividualistic criteria, but do all the messages within them? And can those messages be used or appreciated syndividualistically in ways not prescribed by the systems or forms themselves? The answers to these questions are once again up to us personally – but when we have our answers, I argue that the internalization and direction of use ought to be syndividualistic ones.
3) What forms of communication do we wish to employ in communicating ourselves, our visions, and our goals to the larger world, debating, discovering greater commonalities, persuading, organizing, giving counsel, etc.? Blogs, protests, essays, tweets, photography, art, film, radio, music videos, personal conversations, among other things, are all possible methods of communication; all of them seem to present excellent possible syndividualistic uses. For example, Nas and Damian Marley made a song called “Patience,” and a music video to accompany it , that discusses many of the issues this essay addresses. Nas and Marley made the album, Distant Relatives, in order to “build some schools in Africa, and … to build empowerment [and] to show love and stuff”; in addition, all proceeds from the sale of the album are dedicated to charity projects in Africa. This is the kind of syndividualistic communication I personally aspire to, but there are so many other (perhaps less dramatic) means to communicate. It comes down to the criteria I established before, but it also comes down to whether those communicative acts fit your lifestyle: we can’t all produce music videos and record rap/reggae charity albums, but many of us can write a blog or contribute to discussions in syndividualistic ways or tweet positive messages daily, or paint pictures that are designed to inspire and express happiness and joy, etc. And if we have been engaging in negative and discordive communication, angry rants, lies, abuse, or perhaps producing distracting and empty pieces of entertainment, perhaps it is time we look to the criteria of positive imagination, the concordive potentials, the syndividual, and total change, and re-evaluate our priorities. For as discussed, the dissemination of such negative communication can have extremely deleterious effects on the well-being of the community at large in addition to oneself. So here, as well, discretion is required, but so too is syndividualistic activism, either small or large and suited to your personal tastes, skills, and time.

4) How do we wish to communicate with one another? Once again, this choice informs our considerations of the third kind of choice, since we may not yet have settled upon the general forms of communication we are committed to engaging in and are still sorting out our options, but a consideration of how our communicative interests and skills most instinctively rise to the level of compassion and syndividualistic creativity can inform our decision to use comedy or sarcasm or silliness, for example, to express ourselves in various forms. We also should consider what styles of communication are best for us to steer clear of, since we may find ourselves typically becoming negative or demeaning in those forms of communication, whether it be gangsta rap, prank calling, or speaking to a person who typically sets us on edge and provokes us to say hurtful things. As before, the criteria of open and positive imagination, the concordive potentials, the syndividual and total change should be the guiding visions of how and when (and where) we choose to engage in communication.              
Now I will turn briefly to the second aspect of the second hurdle, altering our participation in and our use of the creative systems that surround us. Now this topic is so vast, vaster even than the topic of changing our communicative patterns (which I definitely feel I have shortchanged you on) that I cannot even reasonably offer a brief categorical discussion of the subject. That will have to wait for later essays. Instead I will have to offer a few notes on the nature of our current creative systems, and how one can generally approach them in a syndividualistic fashion. Now you may recall that when I was discussing creativity in the first section I mentioned that we have a general tendency as individuals and groups to accept or reject the value claims of our various creative systems and of their products on their own terms. I also mentioned that we need to moderate and adapt our creative systems and their products to everything else we value and seek in life. I will go further here and say that our status quo participation in these spheres empowers and legitimates their current forms and the current ways in which we use their products. And we have already established that the status quo kind of blows. Now while reactionary views of this dilemma frequently call for the destruction of the most palpably discordive of these systems, such as the finance industry or the military, and isolationist and escapist views often call for a stepping away from the total society, I call instead for a middle approach: a flexible, multi-approach vetting and critique of our various creative systems, whether they be the sports industry, the finance industry, genetic engineering, robotics, the film industry, the government, and so on. There is no single general answer on how to change these systems, but instead each of us must examine our relationship to these institutions and their products using for criteria the open and positive imagination, the concordive potentials, total change, and the syndividual. How much time and money should we be spending on watching professional sports? Do we need to join an anti-war organization to diminish America’s massive military presence? Do we need to go into politics to help regulate the finance industry? These and thousands upon thousands of other questions press, and we must try to sort our way through, gradually, determining where we can best take primary active roles in change, and other times take supporting roles in changing various institutions. Discussion doubtless can also assist and has assisted in helping many of us to find more syndividualistic ways to make a change in the way the world works, but we have already discussed this and will hopefully discuss again in my own writings and those of others. Presenting a system for sorting through these questions and discovering answers is beyond the scope of this essay, since such a system would take up at least as many pages as this essay has so far. So rather than present the system I am working on developing with others, I will simply note that the questions and answers we must formulate in order to begin reorienting ourselves towards all the creative systems and their products can be clustered around six central lenses through which our society currently views the individual and thereby arranges its systematic claims on our attention. These six lenses are: man as 1) thinker 2) feeler 3) consumer 4) communicator 5) perceiver, and 6) doer-in-general. Because all systematic claims for validity and use are centered around these six lenses, we can cluster our questions around these lenses ourselves and use them plus the aforementioned criteria to derive answers as to how to use and participate in the various creative systems that surround us.    

Conclusion!

All these concepts radically challenge the standard sense of individual ethical obligation (recall our discussion of compassion): as a syndividual, basic compassion is no longer personal, and personal compassion is no longer enough (it never really was) to satisfy the basic ethical standards we should be setting for one another and for ourselves. Compassion in the absence of witnesses is possible, meaningful, and even necessary. Compassion in the absence of inquisitors counts the most if we are to erect together this sea change in our species. The radical difference this spells out is that we can no longer look primarily to particular individuals who have taken on particular social and vocational roles to satisfy the ethical burdens of our society. No longer can we simply look to the monks and Red Cross volunteers to handle the problem of global poverty, or to radicals to effect real change, while the rest of us do ‘real work’. Those roles will indeed still exist, of course; and the burdens of ethical behavior and erecting real change will still be unequally and heterogeneously distributed. But the culture of specializations and micro-specializations that we have seen rise in the last 100 years, the culture that has increasingly encouraged us to become more and more narrow-minded in our life perspectives in addition to our careers, must give way. It must give way to a culture in which specializations of vocation do not cloud or narrow our moral compasses, but rather orient and enrich them. We certainly cannot all spend our days feeding the malnourished or educating the poor in Africa. However, each and every one of us can have a sense (more or less accurate, depending on our abilities to reflect and to be aware of the larger horizons of connection that surround us) of the problems that beset our species, and a sense of our proximities and roles in the perpetuation and ending of those problems.
So for some examples, while most of us do not willfully support the erosion of local businesses or the wide-spread levels of pollution created by our use of personal automobiles, we do frequently support the growth of massive corporations that are not fundamentally accountable to their local clientele (Stop & Shop, Walmart, McDonalds, etc.) and many of us continue to contribute to the rising pollution problems created by ubiquitous automobile use. These are, of course, just small examples of myriad ways in which all too many of us perpetuate the problems of our society without even taking an active and knowing role in the destruction. The syndividual continually looks to see what roles, major and minor, he can convert from passive destructive participation to deliberate mitigation and even assistance in solving the world’s problems, all while attending to the intimate contours of his own life. Indeed, by deliberately acting in such a way as to help bring about total change, he enriches his own life, just as the Dalai Lama informs us that this is one of the inherent values of compassion.
This all might sound potentially quite neurotic. My rejoinder to this comes in two parts. First, most of us are quite neurotic as it is – a true neurosis that much of our society shares but is not able to recognize as such. Erich Fromm described this scenario when he wrote:
                       Today we come across a person who acts and feels like an automaton; who                            
                       never experiences anything which is really his; who experiences himself
                       entirely as the person he thinks he is supposed to be; whose artificial smile
                       has replaced genuine laughter; whose meaningless chatter has taken the
                       place of communicative speech; whose dulled despair has taken the place
                       of genuine pain. (The Sane Society, 24)
This description comes frighteningly close to describing the majority of ‘individuals’ we meet today – it is the description of a socially accepted state of neurosis. Second, the state of existence I am proposing is the exact opposite of neurosis: there is an intense attention to detail and a radical search for patterns, but it is a search that constitutes a life meaning, a movement forward. Instead of taking that mental energy, as many of us do, and fantasizing or daydreaming or worrying, we would be connecting to one another in pivotal, oft-unspoken, and profound ways. We would be being alive in a way that so often eludes the majority of us.
To cap all this off, the great irony of the myth of permanence is that it conceals the significance of the enormous positive (or at least potentially positive) changes we have wrought in the world. Indeed, it makes our world seem as if it sings the same old destructive tune no matter what new cures (the Flu vaccine), irenic organizations (the UN, UNESCO), positive and life-changing technologies (the internet, nanotechnologies) we devise. Indeed, as I have been hinting, we have not realized it as a species yet, but we are on the very cusp of either catastrophic failure or brilliant success as a species. On the dark side, in the next hundred years we may well suffer from a combination of a population explosion, a consequent civilization-ending dwindling of our usable natural resources, the destruction of huge swaths of our global ecosystem, widespread violence, disease, and famine, to mention the most salient issues. On the bright side, we have innovated in almost all the right ways we need to step forward into our brave new world except the one: we have not yet grasped that sense of total, holistic, positive change. After all, we now have technologies that enable us to prolong our lives significantly, produce more and healthier foods than ever before, control our population growth in a variety of ethically appropriate ways, spread mass communication and information with ease, ensure the quality of our lives through well-defined exercise and diet regimens. The list of our potentially salubrious innovations is insanely long – and we even have computers and software programs that can help us to index and sort out all our innovations if we want to! So if we find our configuration point, if we find our unity, whether it be through the syndividualism model I have briefly laid out or some other one, we succeed. But if we continue to spin out of control, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” till we ask with urgency far outshadowing the poetry that gave us the question, “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” (Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 91) – then we fail.
So tremendous change is upon us, whether we will it or not. It can engulf us in ruin, or it can be the first steps on a staircase spiraling towards the kind of society where the world does indeed seem like home and heaven all at once.

           

     

     This is where the Dalai Lama will be coming in shortly (I kind of told you he was coming!). If mutability, adaptability, and creativity are three of our core characteristics and potentials as a species, the fourth is compassion, or to be more specific, joy in the positive participation in other people’s lives and a joy in gaining and maintaining an awareness of other people’s lives. These are the core concordive potentials that can bring us forward into a newer and better world, the kind of world where Miranda’s awestruck words in The Tempest will ring true: “Oh, wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! Oh, brave new world / That has such people in’t !” Yet I feel I must defend the notion of our compassion as a universal concordive potential, much as I must attack the myth of permanence. Of all the concordive potentials I have discussed, compassion has fallen most into doubt in our times. And where there is doubt without the antidote of belief, there is darkness. There is a reckless flailing about. There is abandonment. There is cunning without justice. There is power without balance, mind without measure. None of which are very promising advents for our future – and all of which are now regular and widespread phenomena in our society. Compassion is now seen (or at least portrayed) by many as an optional extra in life; an aspect that those with free time or resources or “a good heart” readily engage in, much like artistic expression is now seen as the pleasure and kingdom of the chosen few, but not the many who must live in the real world. Just think of the heartlessness of the characters in Seinfeld – it may have been a running joke, but it was a dark joke and a successful one because of the deep grain of truth that poked us hard in our conscience as well as our funny bone. We act as if compassion, like art, can and perhaps should be indulged in privately, in small moments, with our family and loved ones when the world is not bearing down on us with all its ponderous weight – but that it does not have a serious role to play in the crafting of our lives. Unless we are monks, of course! 

  

            It will be helpful here to compare and contrast the Dalai Lama’s concept of compassion as something which we should develop to the state of universal compassion for our own benefits as well as others’ (Ethics 123-124) with two other concepts of compassion: Christ’s famous formulation (and its context) and Mengzi’s ideas about compassion. I want to do this briefly in order to show that between three continents and two millennia there has existed a stable nexus of compatible ideas and observations on compassion that demonstrates the universal existence of compassion. For if it is true that man is highly mutable in how he expresses his essence, how he dwells in this world, then it will also be true that man’s expressions of the universal instinct for compassion will be highly variable and highly dependent on social norms and theories (yes, theories!) for the expression of compassion. And to put it mildly, our current social norms completely suck. But they don’t have to suck – and neither do we! Yet I also want to compare these three theories of compassion in order to more fully integrate and express my thoughts on our potentials, and to prepare the reader for my discussion afterwards on how external conditions play such a pivotal role in the actualization of our potentials and how we can control those external conditions.   

            So here I summon the Dalai Lama: in Ethics for the New Millennium, the Dalai Lama vigorously defends the necessary and ubiquitous role of compassion in our lives, and not merely in a wistful sense. He writes

Let us now consider the role of compassionate love and kind-heartedness in our daily lives. Does the ideal of developing it to the point where it is unconditional mean that we must abandon our own interests entirely? Not at all. In fact, it is the best way of serving them – indeed, it could even be said to constitute the wisest course for fulfilling self-interest. For if it is correct that those qualities such as love, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness are what happiness consists in, and if it is also correct that nying je, or compassion, as I have defined it, is both the source and the fruit of these qualities, then the more we are compassionate, the more we provide for our own happiness. Thus any idea that concern for others, though a noble quality, is a matter for our private lives only, is simply shortsighted. Compassion belongs to every sphere of activity, including, of course, the workplace. (Dalai Lama, 127).

            Here the Dalai Lama speaks of the necessity and importance of compassion. Elsewhere he speaks of the ubiquity and utility of compassion: “Because our capacity for empathy is innate, and because the ability to reason is also an innate faculty, compassion shares the characteristics of consciousness itself. The potential we have to develop it is therefore stable and continuous” (Ethics, 123-24). In Ethics for the New Millenium, the Dalai Lama provides a rich and deep articulation of what it can and should mean to be compassionate. He calls for us to question the rather petty and narrow interpretation of compassion that seems to dominate much of Western culture, and develops, in my humble opinion, a near-flawless formulation of personal compassion. I will shortly discuss the one glaring flaw in his approach after I have discussed the other two compassion theories, but right now I want to enlarge on the significance of the Dalai Lama’s teachings and how they relate to my theory on total change and the myth of permanence.  

            The Dalai Lama argues that compassion is the source and fruit of “love, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness” and that essentially the compassionate life is the meaningful and happy life, since compassionate thinking, words, and deeds provide the framework for the arising of the aforementioned virtues. This ties in to my claim that compassion is the center stone of the four concordive potentials, as I will show very shortly. He also writes that imagination plays a vital role in the effective fruition of compassion: “If we examine those actions which are uniquely human, which animals cannot perform, we find that this faculty plays a vital role…But the use to which it is put determines whether the actions it conceives are positive or negative, ethical or unethical” (72). In connection with my points on the other three potentials and our need for proper external conditions, imagination as a composite aspect of compassion is completely essential to growing our compassion, balancing our potentials, and self-evolving to a higher state of consciousness and presence as a species. What I draw from the Dalai Lama’s thoughts on imagination and compassion is that we need to recognize what kind of imaginative forces we are allowing to gain dominance in our lives, our thinking, speech, and behavior. We need to do this because our imagination colors and shapes everything we do and think as subjective beings. When we begin to monitor and choose our imagination in a positive way, we can gain more and more conscious control of our behavior and we can more and more easily take compassionate action. And compassionate action, as the Dalai Lama notes, generates more positive energy and more virtues in those who are both the practitioners and recipients of compassionate behavior. Imagining this universe and our role in it positively is the first step towards fully actualizing our compassion – and balancing and coordinating our concordive potentials. In this way, compassionate thoughts, words, and deeds serve as the orienting point for positive creative behavior and thinking, adapting compassionately to the environment around us, and accepting the changes these behaviors create for us and the world around us. In the second section I will take a more in-depth look at positive imagining and compassion and how exactly they work as I flesh out my concept of the syndividual. But now, having capped my discussion of the Dalai Lama, I am going to look at Christ’s compassion theory and look for some connections there.

            I really don’t even have to say what Christ is most famous for saying, but I am going to say it anyway, and I am also going to look a little bit at the context of his saying it – at the larger core of Christ’s compassion theory. There are two versions of Christ’s formulation, one in the Gospel of Matthew and one in the Gospel of Luke, and we will go with Luke because it is ever so slightly pithier. And to be fair to other religions, the Jewish prophet and leader Hillel, who was alive just before the rise of Christ, had a phrase in his repertoire of awesome phrases that was very similar to Christ’s. And indeed, the widespread nature of this sentiment (it occurs as well in pagan sources and in secular philosophy, such as Kant’s famous categorical imperative) points to the widespread acceptance, at least on the level of wisdom, of the inherent value and presence of compassion in human life. So here goes: “Do to others as you would have them to do to you” (Luke 6, 31-32). This seems a very simple and bare edict, almost like, “yeah, so, I knew that…,” and this is probably the case, at least in part, because we are so used to hearing one version of it or another. But it seems likely that many of us, myself included, have not taken enough time to more fully process the significance of this concept. It is so stunningly simple, so easy to pack away in the head without working into our daily lives what that message can mean for our lives and the lives of others. There is a near-infinity of wisdom in this simple phrase, and after looking more at the biblical context for Christ’s compassion theory, I would like to unpack some of the deeper significance of his teaching and its overall implications for my own theories in this essay.

            Around this phrase, in both Matthew and Luke, Jesus ties compassion in this universalizing sense (very close indeed to the sense the Dalai Lama invokes) to the worship and awareness of God. We are, for better or for worse, not so much interested in drawing a universal lesson from this, since such an attitude these days when construed as mandatory for humanity is more likely to cause strife and marches and gunfire then it is to cause positive global change. But what else does Christ talk about? Just before the Golden Rule in Luke, Christ provides some context for the enacting of the Golden Rule, and after calling for universal compassion, he harshly reprimands those who are compassionate in a more limited (and for us, familiar, sense). Before: “But to you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (6, 27-28). After: “For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them” (6, 32-33). Now to unpack that Golden Rule a little bit: Christ is telling us to perform our actions while being so aware of other people’s being and needs that those actions do not, to the best of our abilities, conflict with the presumable wellbeing of others. He wants us always to be performing the intellectual experiment of putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes, to deliberately shift our perspectives so we can more readily sense the implications of our actions for other people. Christ is telling us to be always imagining the lives of others as accurately and sensitively as we can so that when we take an action, that action is at least as positive for other people as it is for us. He is telling us to be imaginative and sensitive, and that these qualities are fundamental to successful and meaningful compassion. Without imagination and sensitivity, how can one be successful on a regular basis in taking compassionate action, in putting oneself in someone else’s shoes?

            To look at it in another way, Christ is calling on us to put all four of our concordive potentials to use in being compassionate and living a meaningful life: be creatively aware of others, adapt to this awareness and its significance in our lives, change your life on these principles, and you will be able to act often, if not always, out of compassionate concern. So two thousand years ago, Christ was telling people they already knew how to practice compassion when it was easy, but the more rewarding way to do it was to practice universal and imaginative compassion. And people loved it! Christianity kicked so much ass and this idea of universal love was… well, pretty much universally appealing (even if not universally practiced). This goes to show that compassion is definitely a core part of our being, whether we are atheists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists (especially Buddhists!), Christians, agnostics – we simply need the right conditions for our compassion to really shine. Christ and his message have helped to provide a particular version of those conditions for many people ever since he gave that famous Sermon on the Mount. But sadly those conditions are not universal, unlike the raw potential of compassion.

            Which brings us neatly to Mengzi. Mengzi argues that compassion is a fundamental part of human nature; and unlike Jesus and the Dalai Lama (at least in his Ethics for the New Millenium), Mengzi elaborates on the social and political conditions necessary for the flowering of compassion in society. For Mengzi, the social and political conditions he envisions are wedded to his vision of universal compassion, much as Christ’s vision was wedded to the worship of God. But we can accept and draw benefits from both aspects of Mengzi’s theory without accepting wholesale the total validity of his proposed social and political conditions, much as we drew from Christ without accepting (or rejecting) his theistic religiosity. On human nature, Mengzi writes:

As for what they [humans] are inherently, they can become good. This is what I mean by calling their natures good… As for their becoming not good, this is not the fault of their potential. Humans all have the feeling of compassion. Humans all have the feeling of disdain. Humans all have the feeling of respect. Humans all have the feeling of approval and disapproval. The feeling of compassion is benevolence. The feeling of disdain is righteousness. The feeling of respect is propriety. The feeling of approval and disapproval is wisdom. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom are not welded to us externally. We inherently have them. It is simply that we do not reflect upon them. Hence, it is said, ‘Seek it and you will get it. Abandon it and you will lose it.’ Some differ from others by two, five, or countless times – this is because they cannot fathom their potentials. (Mengzi 6A6.5-6.7)

Here the myth of permanence re-emerges as an issue again, since it has helped to hide from us our potentials: we have surrounded ourselves with a galaxy of distractions and with the strong bulwark of cynicism and jaded and staid complacency that is such a strong part of our zeitgeist. In order to overcome this bulwark, we must follow Mengzi here and reflect long and hard upon our potentials – and take action passed upon this reflection.

            Mengzi is much more linear than Christ, and more socially minded than the Dalai Lama, but between all three it is clear that compassion is one of our central features as human beings – and to borrow a Christian term but recast it in a secular mold, compassion should be the center-stone of our redemption. Mengzi blames the differences in the way humans manifest their compassion on social, political, and material environments, and in this I have to (mostly) agree. If we are to sincerely believe in our potential as a species, then we must believe in the significance that the social, political, and material elements must play in the success of our species. Mengzi says, “In years of plenty, most young men are gentle; in years of poverty, most young men are violent. It is not that the potential that Heaven confers on them varies like this. They are like this because of what sinks and drowns their hearts” (6A7.1). Generally speaking, Mengzi proposes as the remedy for poor social, political, and material environments that which men value in common: “What is it that hearts prefer in common? I say that it is order and righteousness” (6A8.1). More specifically Mengzi proposed a “benevolent government,” an ethically instructive educational system, a reinforcement of the value of reflection, and a whole suite of specific political actions for rulers to take, but we will not look into these last, since they are largely of so specific a nature that they will only detract from the foci of this essay (Norden xxv). But suffice it to say that much of what Mengzi has to say based on his theory of compassion could be quite profitably modified to serve as part of a framework for bringing about real and total change in our society. An ordered and righteous society certainly sounds good to me!

            Yet despite all the wisdom of Mengzi’s approach, we must remember that the change we seek will almost certainly have to encompass far more than the political, legal, social, and material changes that a purely Mengzian approach would advocate. But between the three accounts of compassion I have examined there exists a stable tripod of theory and practice that extends back across more than two thousand years and, if we include the spread of Buddhism and Christianity, across all the inhabited continents. And as the Dalai Lama notes, “All the world’s major religions stress the importance of cultivating love and compassion” (Ethics 123). This near-universality of an emphasis on compassion only further endorses my claims about compassion, but perhaps even more importantly, compassion is the sort of attitude that inherently encourages comity and compromise. This means that while I have only sketched out a tripod of theories on compassion as a way of demonstrating the viability of universal compassionate practice in our time, that practice has at its fingertips a world-wide body of theories and practices it can syncretistically draw upon and synthesize into a secular and universally utilizable theory of compassion that can also satisfy disparate religious and cultural beliefs. 

            All this jazz about compassion and commonalities and the core elements of humanity is one long DNA strand meant to point out one thing: the idea that we can’t change the world is a myth perpetuated by institutions, ignorance, tradition, and above all, fear. If total change is to come (and we are the ones who must bring it upon ourselves, not cosmic superheroes, aliens, Jesus, movie stars and philanthropists answering the real-world version of the batman signal, nor the four horsemen of the apocalypse – no one wants to see them come anyway!) we must look to our mutability, adaptability, creativity, and compassion for the solutions. Our compassion will have to be deep, and we will need to be creative in the ways we use it and conceive of it. We will have to be willing to change ourselves in the name of compassion, creativity, adaptability, and mutability. And we will have to adapt, to accept and understand the significance and value of our own creativeness, our own compassion and mutability. Cuz baby, I think a change would do you good.

            After all, we know we are not a perfect species, but that is no excuse for saying we cannot do a much better job improving the likelihood of our improving as a species. That is the myth of permanence talking; that is the negative imagination parading before our eyes. We can change. And by “can” I mean it is in our immediate grasp, it awaits only the momentous realization of a strong minority of a single generation for us to take the first discernible and self-knowing steps towards radically progressing as a species. We can choose from a pre-existing wide array of possible habits, diets, exercise regimes, institutions, climates, social surroundings, rhetorical environments, political structures, etc., all of which go towards shaping the manifestations of our humanity. And to top it off, we can invent (and are constantly devising meta-inventions, new ways to create inventions or to manipulate the manipulators of our environment) new forms of these in case the existing habits and diets and institutions are not effective enough for us.

            So we have evolved to the point where we can choose the grounds of our evolution to a remarkable degree. We can self-evolve, and I do not simply mean this in a physical way (though the sinister implications of this possibility are growing more apparent by the day). We can evolve socially, psychologically, spiritually – if we want to. And we will only want to if we see the benefits, and believe in their possibility. The myth of permanence radically denies this possibility – but it is a shitty lie. We can change in two key ways, and this is where I will be discussing the Dalai Lama’s one major deficiency in his compassion theory: 1) we can change as individuals by changing the way we imagine the world and thereby truly engendering our compassion. This is the first step. 2) But we can also change, and we must change, the external world around us. The Dalai Lama discusses compassion almost exclusively from an individualistic perspective; he calls for personal compassion, but he speaks very little about the importance and necessity of vast social, institutional, and global change. This is where Mengzi’s theory helps us out, since he is the theorist who specifically targets the external conditions that give rise to our actual expressions of being. He acknowledges that our families, institutions, traditions, economies, and other environmental factors strongly condition the ways in which our potentials do and do not become actualities.

            So how do we overcome this second hurdle to total change? The first hurdle is difficult enough. Surely we are not all called to become revolutionaries and activists? While the second section of this essay will more thoroughly address this question, I can say here that there are ways for all of us to be involved in jumping over that second hurdle, of changing our total conditioning environment without giving up our vocations or rejecting our families and taking vows of poverty. Just as the Dalai Lama’s vision of compassion does not require us to give up all the personal aspects of our lives, my vision does not call for all of us to become professional revolutionaries and full-time volunteers. 

Section II: Concordive Potentials

     I am going to mark out four concordive potentials that, when actualized, can help us to create and maintain states of organic and balanced concord, peace, and vitality with ourselves and the rest of the planet. There are obviously other concordive potentials, but these are the four I believe to be the most central to our total ability as a species to dramatically change our behavior and presence, and as I noted, this essay is meant only to sketch out my position on these concerns, not to be a completely thorough-going inquiry.  

These four concordive potentials or capacities are: our mutability, our adaptability, our creativity, and our compassion. The first three potentials are, I think, fairly obvious and almost commonplace in the sense that most of us are aware of – and even proud of – our mutability, adaptability, and creativity as human beings. Yet various forms of the myth of permanence have largely obscured the full concordive implications of those three potentials – implications I will examine shortly. But compassion is the most contentious, the most important, and the least understood of the concordive potentials, and deserves the most discussion. Indeed, my discussion of compassion will ultimately ground the principles upon which I will present my claims for total change and the syndividual in the second section of this essay. But first I need to discuss the other three potentials and how they contradict the myth of permanence, since that discussion will help to provide a needed context for understanding the concept of concordive potential, and understanding how these potentials are much deeper and richer than has been previously recognized.  

The first potential is perhaps the most obviously universal – and yet it is the most under-appreciated and ambiguously perceived as a concordive potential. So let’s talk about the obvious first: human societies are incredibly mutable. As Erich Fromm wrote, “man, in contrast to the animal, shows an almost infinite malleability; just as he can eat almost anything, live under practically any kind of climate and adjust himself to it, there is hardly any psychic condition which he cannot endure, and under which he cannot carry on” (The Sane Society, 26). The existence of such radically different societies as the Innuit, Aztec, Han Chinese, Hellenic Greek, Republican and Empirical Roman societies (not to mention the thousands of other societies that have graced the Earth) patently demonstrate the broad scope of possible human societies. And the explosion of technological and general innovations in the last century only further reinforces the inescapable conclusion that we have only touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to exploring all the facets of human potential and human organizational capacities. 

This leads to the second feature of mutability I initially mentioned: the mutability of humanity is often perceived ambiguously or seen as merely a neutral feature – a quality awaiting further dispositions and influences before it takes its settled form, a quality as likely to lead to chaos and strife as to order and peace. This claim, while true, commits an ontological blunder: it picks out our mutability as a stand-alone trait to be evaluated and considered on its own. This is the issue with the nurture versus nature argument when it comes to our mutability. Both arguments reify our mutability: it is a potential that only exists in relationship to other potentials and actualities, and is not a stand-alone potential. This is true of all our potentials, indeed of everything in existence, and rather than enter into a lengthy ontological debate I will simply recommend the reader peruse the Buddhist and Taoist classics on the subjects of interdependence and existence, of which my claim is a variant. Each of our potentials and whether and how it becomes actualized, whether it is a concordive or discordive potential, conditions and affects our other potentials and their actualization or lack thereof. However, our potentials form clusters of relationships: potentials that tend to have concordive and discordive relationships with other potentials. This is precisely the reason for discussing the four concordive potentials as a group: they cannot adequately be seen as either concordive or discordive without being conceived in relationship with other potentials and actualities of human nature and the environment that surrounds us. So in the context of our creativity, adaptability, and compassion, our mutability is a concordive potential, since if we use our creativity, adaptability, and compassion to craft a beautiful society and live full, meaningful, and peaceful lives, our mutability will allow us to accept this life without reverting quickly or easily to a more atavistic lifestyle. On the other hand, if we choose to associate our mutability as necessarily associated with our greedy and violent and deceptive potentials, then of course our mutability will be a discordive potential. 

In this profound way our nature and our flowering as beings is up to us: we can choose how to perceive and emphasize those relationships between potentials and actualities of our nature. I choose to see the positive relationships, and I argue for the rest of us to do the same. The positive relationships between our potentials are possible: do we want to make them a reality for the many and not just the few, or is this edenic vision too blasphemous for our fearful hearts? Now is the time to cast aside fear, which has no more claim to verity than does hope – and to live with strength, vision, and hope. 

The second potential is our adaptability. Mutability here is simply the raw malleability of our nature when seen in the context of our creativity, compassion, and adaptability, all emphasized and conceived as a self-reinforcing constellation in our hearts to be brought forth consistently into the world. Adaptability is distinct from mutability in that it is our ability to find the strength of will and the fortitude to survive and to find meaning and value in a vast variety of environments and conditions. In a way, curiosity is often a subset of our adaptive potential, in that it allows us to find value and meaning in exploration and discovery. To avoid reification, it is necessary to note that adaptability is a composite potential: courage, curiosity, invention, and fortitude all play their part in forming the appearance of this one potential. But in this discussion of total change and the myth of permanence, it is more fruitful to treat this ability to find meaning and to survive physically and spiritually in a broad array of environments as a somewhat distinct concordive potential. 

Examples of the universal nature of our adaptability abound – the same broad plethora of societies I mentioned before points to our adaptability as much as to our mutability, but countless individual examples of perseverance and adaptability in extreme circumstances abound as well: Nelson Mandela’s nearly 30 years in prison, Auang San Suu Kyi’s long struggle with the military authorities of Burma, the revolutionaries in the British Colonies who fought for independence and created the United States of America. Indeed, even fictional examples of adaptability and all its composite qualities I mentioned, such as courage, curiosity, invention, and fortitude, serve to prove my claim that adaptability is a universal potential in us all, since fiction derives much of its appeal from the verisimilitude in its portrayal of this very human trait. One of my favorite examples of adaptability in fiction is in the movie The Two Towers. I am thinking of the scene where Aragorn convinces King Theoden, surrounded by 10,000 orcs and on the verge of absolute ruin and defeat, to sound the legendary horn of Helm Hammerhand and ride out to defeat the orcs and the dark armies of Saruman. There is adaptiveness abounding in this scene, and it is so stirring a scene in good part because it rings true – it awakens within us our own sense of dignity in having such courage and adaptability ourselves, even if we usually express our adaptability in less dramatic circumstances.

 

But of course people can claim our adaptability is discordive as much as I am claiming it is concordive. But that is because we have let it be discordive, we have at times closed our hearts to concordive possibilities and seen only the dark relationships within and without. This is, indeed, a real-world point that I believe Tolkein makes throughout his trilogy - that we can use our adaptability for good or evil, and this is a question of vision, not potential. Our adaptability, if given the right environment and coaching, can enable us to put to effective use the tools that our creativity creates and our compassion guides us to apply. If we trust in our compassion, creativity, and mutability (and by ‘we believe’ I mean we individually believe in our collective abilities to be effectively compassionate, creative, adapative, and mutable) we can adapt ourselves to letting go of fear and of our deep assumptions about the darkness inside of us and around us. And we can find meaning and truth in a newer and better world – an abiding sense of meaning and truth.    

The third concordive potential is our creativity. Creativity is distinct from adaptability in that where adaptability is rooted in surviving (spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically), creativity is rooted in creating and exploring the universe’s possibilities. This potential also has its various dimensions – the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical, and the innumerable beyond; and in many ways, adaptiveness and creativity are deeply linked potentials. Much of the meaning we find in life, that meaning-making and defiance against the sense of meaningless and destruction that so frequently characterizes adaptiveness, is meaning we first discover and awaken through imagination, through our various creative impulses and acts. What creativity discovers and fashions, adaptiveness grasps onto and brings (or does not) into the meaningful center of our lives. Our creativity is one of the central forces responsible for our art, our spirituality, our intellectual lives, our sciences – all the products of man, all the artifices and manipulations of the reality adaptability is a composite potential: courage, curiosity, invention, and fortitude all play their part in forming the appearance of this one potential. But in this discussion of total change and the myth of permanence, it is more fruitful to treat this ability to find meaning and to survive physically and spiritually in a broad array of environments as a somewhat distinct concordive potential.

     Our creativity is very obvious as a universal quality, but its profound nature, especially in relationship with the other concordive potentials, has historically been under-appreciated and under-utilized. Much of our creativity, in terms of the products and systems of creativity, has been conceived in terms of the individual systems they appear to represent unto themselves. In this way, much art is typically approached as art for its own sake; much religious and spiritual discourse and activity is approached as religion and spirituality for its own sake; technology for its own sake, on its own terms. We take or leave these activities, we appreciate or denigrate these creative systems based on the values and benefits these systems articulate for and unto themselves. We frequently (but not always) take their internal claims to be sufficient for understanding their values and uses in our lives and in adapting them to our lifestyles. So technology claims value in being able to make our lives easier and less fraught with suffering and difficulty – and by and large we accept this claim in our use or rejection of technological products. The arts, (at least modern theorists and artists) including literature, music, the performing arts, and the visual arts, claim in different ways to offer value in satisfying our ‘artistic’ needs as either artists and writers or readers and purveyors of art – and we accept this claim in our appreciation and use, dissatisfaction and disuse of the systems and products of the arts. The same for religions, spiritual movements, academia, sports, and so on. 

The problem here is that by taking the validity of these system’s claims for granted, without moderation and adaptation to everything else we value and seek in life, we are shortchanging ourselves. We are not properly actualizing our adaptability and mutability as human beings here, since we are not sufficiently utilizing our compassionate potential. All four potentials shine forth brightest when they are considered and actualized in a balanced and self-aware relationship with each other. This is a general grievance, thankfully, and not a universally true one (people do independently assess the claims of our creative products and systems, just not nearly enough). But it seriously underscores the problems we face in coming to terms with all our potentials, especially our concordive ones. The creative potential of humanity, and the products it yields, cannot be approached as self-sufficient and independent entities or processes if we are to actually achieve total change and expose the myth of permanence for what it is. They must be seen as necessary and mutable parts of a whole relationship between all the potentials we seek to actuate and all the actualities we wish to dispel (war, global poverty, famine, wide-spread greed, etc.). So technology and its products cannot be seen simply as devices to make our lives easier and more pleasant. Such an attitude, if seriously pursued or even complacently accepted, deprives us of the ability to see more compassionate and adaptive uses of technology that the technological system itself might not prescribe – it encourages us to use technologies without an eye for the broader implications of those uses in our lives and the lives of others and the life of the universe around us. The same critique can be made of all our creative systems, from art to politics, from sports to television. We need to be able to see these systems and products, and all our own personal creative endeavors and impulses, as part of a whole relationship between our other potentials, needs, and desires as human beings, and our overall place in the universe. And we can do this. We just have to accept that there is a balance to strike, there is a union to be forged between our compassionate aspects and our creative aspects, our adaptive and our mutable potentials – and we are not there yet, but we can be.

I will post Section 3, which is an extended discussion of the concordive potential for compassion, next week. Please feel free to comment or to post a link to this blog on your facebook pages (or other social media pages) if you are interested in this discussion. Also please feel free to post links to related blogs, discussions, organizations and the like here or on my Manbeard facebook page!