These days cosmologists are holding the infinity of the universe as constant and letting its density and expansion/contraction rate vary.

In some sense quantum mechanics is about holding the observer constant and letting the physical interpretation vary (particle or wave; position or momentum; exist or not).

What would we get if we held consciousness constant and let the universe vary?

Related posts:

1. Entanglement
2. Quantum Reality and the Measurement Paradox
3. The Process

I then remembered another colleague who was universally praised by the media and others as being a one-man savior in Haiti after the earthquake. He had quite admirably hit the ground running, on his own initiative, with incredible resources, to set up a refugee camp. While I’m not sure how his efforts have evolved today, when I visited his camp I was struck by how isolated it was from the rest of the relief effort, and how sanitation and medical care were actually worse than what was reported about the USAID and Red Cross camps. This is not to question his good intentions or the impressive amount of work he was able to almost singlehandedly accomplish in a short period of time. But rather the way he was going about it possibly nullified all that.

Together these two examples illustrate to me that social enterprise is not about What you are doing so much as How you go about doing it.

To be sure, there are limits to this definition. Does it matter how Pepsi creates its products, or what refreshing innovation challenges it supports, when the vast majority of its operations are to sell us sugar water in plastic bottles?

But shifting the focus from What to How, enables us to see more clearly that most entrepreneurship these days is in fact social enterprise. Why? Because most entrepreneurs these days care deeply about social/environmental problems, and are intent on addressing them, either directly or indirectly through their business. Nor do you have to be an entrepreneur to be a social innovator.  Pepsico has legions of them as employees and consultants.

Calling yourself a Social Entrepreneur or saying you work in Social Innovation does not automatically make it so. And on the flip side, just because you don’t identify with these terms, doesn’t mean you are not a positive role model for social enterprise.

It’s time to shift the conversation from What to How.

Related posts:

1. Help Wanted: Social Capital Uncontractors
2. “Social Entrepreneurship has Complexity Written All Over It”
3. Social Entrepreneurship Tax Credit

Yet, all around the world, there are signs that the Berlin Wall of education reform is crumbling. Here are a few shining lights:

TEDucation

No single institution or movement has done more to spark educational change than TED.com.  Hundreds of millions of people are watching their videos and learning from inspiring individuals sharing ideas and experiences that cannot be learned in a traditional school environment.  And there’s an acceleration effect because many of the talks are about education and the transformation that’s going on in areas you would never know about otherwise.  Best of all, these talks are free.

Working from Within

There are groups like Decision Education Foundation which go into schools and augment their capacities by teaching skills that should be part of every curriculum.  And there are individuals like John Hunter who teach lessons which cannot be learned at home or on the internet (unlike the three R’s).

Not Waiting Around

There are many groups who are not waiting around for Supermen like Hunter to save the existing system.  Rather they are working alongside it to make it more effective.  There are after school programs, like Self Enhancement, Inc., which miraculously has transformed an entire population of at-risk youth into a community of high school graduates (100% in 2008 and 2009) many of whom go on to thrive in higher education settings.  Dave Eggers, the bestselling author, started a grass-roots initiative to provide extracurricular tutoring in which the tutors get just as much benefit as the kids.  And there’s El Sistema (“The System”), which famously produced the virtuoso symphony conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, but which more importantly is transforming our idea of what education is.

Reinventing the Model

Others, like John Hardy, are taking taking the idea that education can be revolutionized, and are just doing it.  And in doing so are challenging our most basic assumptions, such as “adults know what’s best for kids to learn and how to teach it to them.”  What if there were a school with no classes, no grades, no tests, and the students (age 5 to 18) decide what they are going to learn and how to run the school?  If you are thinking “Lord of the Flies”, tune in to hear about the Brooklyn Free School and free your mind….

Turn On and Tune In

It’s no surprise that formal education is moving online.  But did you know that it’s top notch and free?  Check out the Khan Academy which has delivered almost 100 million lessons to students around the world in math, physics, finance, history and more.  And why pay over $300K attending Stanford to get a degree in Computer Science when you can take the same classes for free online?

We Are Superman

It turns out that kids really can teach themselves and each other, when provided with the right guidance and framework.  And it’s not just in resource-rich areas like Brooklyn.  In India, Kiran Bir Sethi and Shukla Bose are showing the way.  But it also turns out that kids don’t need guidance from adults, they just need access to learning tools and for adults to stop interfering.  If you haven’t seen Sugata Mitra’s experiments of providing free internet terminals without instruction to rural Indian kids who don’t speak English, you need to watch what happens.

It turns out it’s not just kids who can learn from one another.  The Barefoot College is turning grandmothers into solar technicians and teachers of solar technology.  Oh, and again, a common language is not necessary in either case.

It turns out, it’s not just schoolchildren and the elderly that can learn from one another.  Skillshare is connecting individuals who want to learn anything to people who want to teach them.  Why not teach a class yourself in your local area?  After all, we are all Superman or Superwoman in something.

So, what are your favorite examples of Education 2.0?

Related posts:

1. Decision Education Foundation
2. Decision Education: A Call to Arms
3. Don’t wait for superman

Beating the world champions at Jeopardy was slightly more interesting because we acknowledge the vast range of knowledge and language understanding involved.  But ultimately, since Jeopardy is just a game, we are left with the feeling, “so what?”  How does this affect my life one way or another?  Enter, Siri, the voice recognition system integrated into the new iPhone 4S.

When I heard about the feature and saw what it claimed to do, I was intrigued, but figured that the claims of how well it worked were really exaggerated.  After all, it’s easy to program for requests that you can anticipate and individual speakers’ accents and colloquialisms.  Practically speaking (I figured) it would be no more useful than the standalone Siri app you could download, or the Google voice recognition system.  But after experimenting with it for a few minutes, I was blown away.  Not only is the syntactic recognition way more accurate than anything I’ve ever seen, Siri exhibits an understanding of the semantic and pragmatic like no other system I’ve seen, except perhaps google’s search engine itself.*

Sure it was fun asking “Who’s your daddy?” and getting a different reply based on the gender of the speaker, or asking Siri what (s)he’s wearing and getting an appropriately evasive answer.  But my real aha moment came when I got an email from a friend suggesting we chat next week sometime.  Normally this kind of thing would either clutter my inbox until I created an appointment in my calendar or next Friday rolled around and I realized I hadn’t responded in a socially appropriate timeframe.  I was curious how Siri would handle the request, “Remind me to call Mark on Wednesday”.  Not only did it repeat back my request verbatim, but it created a reminder for 9am on Wednesday using a new Reminder App bundled with iPhone that I didn’t know about.  Most importantly, it gave me a very real peace of mind and reduction of anxiety that I haven’t been able to get from any of the dozens of productivity apps or systems I’ve tried, like Evernote and Omnifocus.

This Quora article outlines the significance of Siri’s great leap forward for AI, pointing out that voice represents the “4th interface” for human-computer interaction (the first three being keyboard, mouse and gestures).  The real key though is that Siri actually does things of practical value for a mass audience.  In other words, Siri helps you get things done that you want done.  This is new.  And huge.  And just the tip of the iceberg.

The article ends with a suggestion that we should start thinking about new uses for the technology because eventually there will be an API that allows app developers to make use of the power of voice interaction.  This fact is inevitable, even if Apple and Siri are not the ones that will do it.  The AI genie is coming out of the bottle.

So, my question to you, is what’s the next killer app that utilizes voice interaction?  What would you like to see personally?

Related posts:

1. Truthocracy – Part III – MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

What I would like to express here is concern for my family, friends, colleagues and supporters who believe in me and who feel my pain as if it were their own.  It sucks to have to endure the character assassination and potshots being taken at me in the media and social networks without being able to defend myself.  Privately though I have received incredible support from many of you, and I can’t tell you how much it means to me.  May you never have to endure something like this, but if you do, I hope you have friends as good as mine.

To the skeptics, please consider that not everything you read is true, and our society is built on a presumption of innocence until proven otherwise.  It’s difficult to take back hurtful things that you might later regret, when the damage has already been done.

To those of you who have asked what you can do to show your support, I am grateful for the offer.  My only request at this time would be to not let the naysayers and haters be the only voices out there expressing their opinion of me. My twitter is @rafefurst, and I’d love to hear from you publicly.

With Respect and Love,

Rafe

No related posts.

Background: part 3, part 2 and part 1.

In the interview with Jon Gunn in Part 3, I mention that I’ve been thinking of what “version 2″ of the Personal Investment Contract might look like.  Here’s the model:

1. Investment Amount - Same as before, intended to give the individual some time to pursue their passion (or figure out what that is) without having to worry about how to support themselves.
2. Maximum Return - The cumulative total amount that the investor can receive as return on their investment.  If and when this amount is reached, the contract is over.
3. Annual Exclusion - The amount of annual income the entrepreneur can make without having to share any of it with the investor.
4. Minimum Revenue Share - The minimum percentage of gross income the entrepreneur returns to the investor after deducting the Annual Exclusion.

Following are some examples of various different career paths and uses for a PIC.  Click on the thumbnails to expand the graphs.  These are modeled with various “reasonable” assumptions but if you want to experiment with how it might apply to you or under different assumptions, here’s the spreadsheet.

Example 1: Entrepreneur

• Investment Amount: $50K
• Maximum Return: $2M (i.e. 40x )
• Annual Exclusion: $100K
• Minimum Revenue Share: 25%

Example 2: Social Innovator

• Investment Amount: $100K
• Maximum Return: $1M (i.e. 10x)
• Annual Exclusion: $50K
• Minimum Revenue Share: 30%

Example 3: Small Biz Expansion

• Investment Amount: $300K
• Maximum Return: $1.8M (i.e. 6x)
• Annual Exclusion: $0
• Minimum Revenue Share: 40%

Example 4: Career Change

• Investment Amount: $1M
• Maximum Return: $4M (i.e. 4x)
• Annual Exclusion: $200K
• Minimum Revenue Share: 60%

Example 5: Investor

• Investment Amount: $3M
• Maximum Return: $300M (i.e. 100x)
• Annual Exclusion: $250K
• Minimum Revenue Share: 100%

Several things to note: the Minimum Revenue Share is calculated from the gross income (all sources) as reported on your tax return; you get to deduct the Annual Exclusion amount before figuring and paying taxes.   If your effective income tax rate is 40% and you quit your job — using the Investment Amount to live off of — you’ve just stretched out your runway by 40% (i.e. you don’t pay taxes on the money someone invests in you).  Finally, this contract gives you incentive to pay more than the Minimum Revenue Share to your investors, since the more you return, the quicker you reach the Maximum and end the contract.

Related posts:

1. Investing in Superstars
2. Investing in Superstars, part 3
3. Investing in Superstars, part 2

I get a lot of questions from folks who are interested in learning more about Personal Investment Contracts and so I felt it was time to synthesize some of the most common ones and give you some answers.

Who is the first person you invested in?

A film maker named Jon Gunn.

What is your relationship with Jon outside of this investment?

He is my brother-in-law, and a former business partner of mine in an instructional DVD company we co-founded with Phil Gordon.  I’ve also invested in a couple of his independent films.

Why did you invest in Jon directly?

I have been a big believer in his talent for a long time.  None of the ventures I just mentioned though have made me any return on my investment.  Phil had been suggesting for a while that if we simply invested directly in Jon’s future earnings, we’d do better than investing in his projects.

Why is the contract only three pages if it’s a lifetime deal?

Basically it comes down to this:

1. The contract is there simply to remind both parties of what was agreed to at the time of signing.
2. Inevitably circumstances change for one or both parties and it will be necessary to amend the contract.
3. If both parties are committed to maintaining a strong relationship, then amendment is easy and actually leads to strengthening the underlying relationship.
4. On the flip side, if one or both parties are stuck in the past and are not looking for the continued win-win, it ends in lose-lose (i.e. litigation).
5. If you can’t trust each other to honor the spirit of the agreement when conflicts arise, is a longer contract going to make matters better or worse?

Are there legal and tax consequences you had to consider?

Yes.  It turns out a three-page contract is way more complex than a 30-pager.  If you are considering doing anything like this and want to deviate from the contract template, I recommend contacting Orlando Medina who created the contract and vetted all of these issues.  There are very few lawyers like Orlando who are both legal virtuosos and business-creative rolled into one.

Why not create a fund for Personal Investment Contracts?

Most investment funds are explicitly meant to remove the personal relationships that a PIC relies on.  While not explicitly a PIC fund, the Presumed Abundance fund is based on the premise of investing in people and relationships.

Another approach that might work is to attach a fund to an incubator like TechStars or a fellowship program like the TED Fellows.  The incubator then acts as a proxy for that personal relationship: both investor and investee feel a sense of responsibility to the third party, which can also act as an neutral arbiter if problems arise.

Have you made an equity investment in anyone else besides Jon?

Yes, Michael Keller.  He was a founding partner in the instructional video company (along with myself, Phil and Jon).  Michael and I have been friends for years and I had also invested in one of his movies.

Do you only invest in film makers, I thought you were into technology and social entrepreneurship?

The film connection is somewhat coincidental.  Michael is working on a startup in stealth mode right now.  I’ve talked with a few close friends who are tech/social entrepreneurs about investing in them but the conditions just haven’t been right.

Would you invest in me?

Not unless we’ve known each other for several years and have been through some experiences together that have tested our relationship.  We need to know that we’ve got each other’s back, and are committed to working out problems that arise.

What’s more important to you as an investor, trust or talent?

No question: trust.  I truly believe that “talent” is within us all, and by removing obstacles (financial and otherwise) we can unlock that talent.  That said, not everyone is at the point in their lives where lack of money is the real obstacle.  In fact, very few people are, even though we’d all like to believe otherwise.

So if money isn’t the real issue for most people, what is?

It’s different for every single person, but what I see most often is that there is a tricky balance between the drive/confidence to achieve lofty goals on the one hand, and the courage/commitment to personal development, growth and learning on the other hand.

How have your personal investments turned out?

From an ROI perspective for me as the investor it’s too early to tell (it’s been two years since the first one).  But from an interpersonal standpoint, my friendships with Jon and Michael, it’s been incredibly positive for me so far.  To give you insight into Jon’s experience, we recorded this:

Related posts:

1. Investing in Superstars, part 4
2. Investing in Superstars
3. Investing in Superstars, part 2

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”  (Margaret Mead)

“Be the change you want to see in this world” (Gandhi)

There is an idea virus within American culture that has the power to destroy.  The idea is that technology and innovation are fundamentally good.  Whether you consider yourself a technologist, an entrepreneur or a scientist (all labels I use to identify myself at times) I’d like to propose an alternative to to this idea and an inoculation against the virus.

Observation #1: Innovation amplifies whatever values and beliefs are held by the innovator.

For instance, if I value my time, I might invent the first clock, or start a business to create time-management products, or devote my life to unlocking deep mysteries of the physics of time.  And if I believe clean drinking water is a fundamental human right, I might invent a new method of water purification, or start charity:water, or study how global climate change affects water policy for at risk populations.

Observation #2: When certain values or beliefs are amplified others are necessarily diminished.

This is moral leverage.

Through the creation, promotion and use of specific innovations, the values associated with those innovations become selected for; conversely, those innovations which are never created (or are out-competed in the marketplace) leave their concomitant values vulnerable to conflicting and more technologically fortified values.  Think of it as an evolving moral ecosystem where values thrive and spread or go extinct bad on selective pressures amplified by innovation.

Let’s look at the global financial crisis through the lens of moral leverage.  We may ask ourselves what are the innovations — technological, financial, legal, political, and so on — that enabled the situation to unfold as it did?  What are the values that were promoted or amplified, and what are the values that became “collateralized damage”?  Finally, what are the individual and collective beliefs about the world that were either reinforced or falsified by the events of the past few years?

To make it more concrete, listen to this Fresh Air segment on tax liens and see if you can answer these questions.  Or listen to the second segment in the show to hear the link between the industrialization of food production and the advent of breast cancer.se

Observation #3: Innovation by itself is neither good nor bad.

There are luminaries that argue innovation is inherently good because it is democratizing.  And others who point out that technology leads to bubbles and echo chambers, which lead directly to evil.  But innovators are optimists and often make the claim that, in the long run, innovation leads to good: violence declines; eventually dictatorships fall.  The techno-optimist story goes that violence and dictatorship cannot last against the inexorable and exponential advance of technology, especially those that promote transparency.

Moral leverage provides another another interpretations of the same data, which is not that innovation is good, but rather…

Conclusion #1: People are inherently good.

Except for the value placed on democracy itself, democratic systems are, by definition, amoral; they simply allow “we the people” to express and live by our own individual and collective values, whatever those may be.  Part of the freedom of expression afforded by democracy manifests itself in what we would call innovation.  So if innovation acts as moral leverage — amplifying the will of the people — then the logical conclusion is this: the moral arc of the universe derives it’s bent towards justice, not from technology or innovation but rather from their source: YOU.

Is this so surprising though?  Isn’t “good” defined by that which promotes our values?  Or if you prefer, the value of life as a whole?  And even if you believe that good is defined by God’s values… are we not made in God’s image?

Now you may say, so what?  The distinction between “humans are good” and “innovation is good” is purely academic.  To that I would say:

Conclusion #2: Innovation without conscious moral intention is amoral.

Innovation by itself will not save the world, it will only hasten the arrival of its implied moral ecosystem.  If you are working on technology for violence — even in the name of “defense” — you are creating an ecosystem under which violence thrives.  This internet worm, presumably created by those who would protect you from nuclear attack, chillingly illustrates this point.  Without considering moral leverage, it’s easy to frame our choices in ways that blind us to the infinite possibilities, and “force” us to act against our own values.

Conclusion #3: It’s not hard to save the world.

What life requires if we are to survive is this: each of us must check in from time to time with our own values, and reflect on whether they are in harmony with our words and actions.  It’s really that simple.

The great thing about leverage is that it turns small shifts at the source (i.e. you) into massive revolutions in the end.  That choice you made the other day to forego the water in a plastic bottle is a small expression of your values, but it has the potential for viral infection that changes the world.  And when you align your career choices with your personal values as Scott Harrison did, you accelerate the spread of your values exponentially.

So how do we know what’s right for us?  Very simply… it’s what feels right.  It’s an emotional resonance (a loving feeling perhaps?) that tells us that we are in line with our values.  Conversely, when we feel stress or discord, or that sinking feeling, we know something’s not right.  It only becomes hard when we waste energy on things that we cannot control, when we take responsibility for other people’s actions, or when we mistake other people’s values for our own.  Which leads to the most subtle but important premise of all:

The only way to fail is to judge.

The act of judgment is what the “logical” mind does.  It tells us what we (and others) “should” do, based on a set of rules and assumptions.  The mind is a wonderful tool, essential for survival.  But it distracts us from listening to our heart and living by our values.  That is something that can only be felt and is beyond the reach of logic or words.

You don’t need laws or incentives to be a good person.  Listen to your heart.  And trust the universe be the judge of whether you did the right thing.

Related posts:

1. Violence on the Decline
2. Invisible Etiology

The fragility of the global financial system (as measured by the US dollar) is a function of the gap between rich and poor.  In the past, only a small ruling elite could decide to use capital to purchase all of the following: food/clothing/shelter; savings; insurance; personal free time; investment; starting a business; buying a private jet; leverage/volatility; political influence; fame.  Today an ever-increasing population has more of these purchasing options at their disposal.  The percentage of wealthy is inversely proportional to the percentage of poor, meaning: as the few grow wealthier, more people become poor, relatively speaking.  This is what’s known as a Pareto distribution (aka the “80-20 rule”) and it’s an inexorable unintended consequence of network effects from the internet and global connectivity.

The recent financial crisis illustrated very clearly that in Pareto wealth distributions, those above you on the curve can unilaterally decide to gamble capital that is backed by you.  In particular, the top 0.01% have the ability (and incentive) to take a free shot at increasing their wealth by putting up as collateral the homes and living wages of the bottom 99.9%.  This dynamic is not something that can be “solved” by political or legislative action, for it crosses sovereign and geographic boundaries.

At the same time though, because of global finance and the internet, we are also seeing the emergence of a meta-stable system of worldwide, frictionless virtual currencies.  Already virtual currencies are being traded on the open market for cold hard cash.  World of Warcraft, Second Life, Farmville and other games are just the start.  As “game-ification” of social networks takes hold we will begin to see the accumulation of vast wealth that is created strictly along the social dimensions (friendship, trust, humor, reputation, loyalty, risk-tolerance, transparency, etc.).

This shift represents an opportunity for the world economy to evolve into an what Taleb calls antifragile: a system which not only is resistant to chaos and endogenous shocks, but actually thrives on them.  Antifragile systems derive their metastability from two properties in combination: (1) ability to adapt to a changing environment (2) ratchet mechanisms. (See Parrondo’s Principle for the math underlying antifragillity).  What this means in practice is that the system has to be configured such that there is flexibility when perturbed, but flexibility in such a way that the perturbation causes the system to tighten up (not come undone).  Think of a tangled string which turns into to a sturdy knot the more forcefully you yank on it.

Unfortunately complex adaptive systems (such as the global economy) cannot be “engineered” from the top down.  But once the system is close enough to a new metastable state, it can be nudged close enough to the attractor basin so that it falls into orbit.  It is my belief that we are at that tipping point already in the global economy.  Or if we are not, we are close enough that by employing a fairly straightforward policy in the U.S. (or perhaps Europe), we can assure the metastability the world needs and desires.  Here’s the simple outline:

• Bipartite Fed Policy:
  • Continue/expand current policy to create an strong attractor towards basic cost-of-living (i.e. incentivize humane social policies)
  • Reintroduce a gold standard floor to act as insurance against total collapse of the dollar.  This is the ratchet.
• Exempt virtual fiat currencies from all tax, securities law and other regulatory regimes, creating an ecosystem of creative risk-taking
  • Upon conversion to cash, all of the normal policies would apply, including capital gains taxation.  There may not be such a thing as a free lunch, but unfettered chaos in the kitchen is important.

In essence, what I’m proposing is to assure – via the Bipartite Fed Policy – basic human rights, plus the right to earn a living and save for retirement.  This then frees up virtual currencies as a mechanism for the entrepreneurs, risk-tolerant investors, and social innovators to go as crazy as they want without infecting “real life” with toxic assets.

Here’s why this might work.  It is well-known that the physical economy (of scarce goods and resources) is governed by the law of diminishing returns.  By contrast, the virtual world has increasing returns to scale, because you can actually give something away and still keep it for yourself (e.g. an idea).  Economies based on scarcity suffer when leverage and volatility go unchecked; economies of abundance thrive on leverage, due to antifragility.

As we wake up to the new world that is emerging, we begin to see that we are naively applying economic policies designed for a scarce world, to the abundant, virtual economy.  The CAMP model above simply honors the important distinction between these two worlds and lets the inherent economic forces in each world act freely and naturally.   By segregating the scarcity economy from the the abundance economy (via the ratchet) we dampen the destructive oscillations in the physical world caused by leveraged self-intrest; at the same time we are able to reap the benefits of leveraged self-interest in the virtual world.  Think of CAMP as a pressure release valve for the current volatility in the world economic system.

And here’s the the epic win scenario: imagine what happens when tens of millions of people have had the experience that very few are ever afforded, which is to directly experience the fundamental dynamics of abundance: the more you give, the more you get.  The only way to reach such a scenario is by allowing everyone to feel safe and secure about their basic living needs.  One way or another, we will pass through the storm.  The question is, how much chaos are we willing to accept along the way?

Related posts:

1. Cancer as a Complex Adaptive System
2. Alfred Hubler on Stabilizing CAS
3. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

The Internal Family Systems model, which I have been working with for about a year and a half, states that “All parts want something positive for the individual and will use a variety of strategies to gain influence within the internal system.” This statement matches my experience. Every part of my mind has a goal that it cares about and a role that it takes on in order to achieve that goal. For example, I have a part that helps me figure out how I can make the most of the situation I’m in, because it wants to make sure I don’t have any regrets.  (Before I developed a better relationship with it, this part used to be more focused on berating me for missing out on fun.)

Sometimes, I will encounter resistance to taking a certain action from one or more of my parts. For example, I used to have a silencing part, which prevented me from speaking when it was afraid that I might say something that would look bad or hurt someone.

Other times, I will encounter broader objections to making a change in my behavior. Last week, I was considering scheduling more of my time. And that time, I got much more diffuse resistance: many of my parts had the vague sense that making this change would upset the balance, and feared that they might lose out, in the sense of not being able to perform their role as effectively. Some parts of me that cared about socializing were concerned that I might have to change my current pattern of meeting up with people, which involves a fair amount of spontaneity and last-minute planning. Some parts who cared that I get enough big chunks of time on my own to work were concerned that if I were planning things it might interfere with its current strategy, which involves a certain amount of deciding to isolate myself when I was in a mood conducive to working, not always predictable beforehand. I sensed a general fear of change coming from my parts.

This reminded me of a perspective I came up with a while back: that attachment (in the Buddhist sense) can be thought of as internal bureaucracy.

In any large organization with many moving parts, there will be a general resistance to change. This resistance occurs because each individual piece prefers by default to function in the existing system. There are exceptions, of course: some parts of the bureaucracy may see how certain benefits advance their goals—but embracing change is not the norm. Things are already working a certain way, and change in one part of the system will require other parts of it to adapt to the new ecosystem. And change takes effort. An example of this tendency in action would be resistance to simplifying our tax code. It’s broadly acknowledged that our system is not only quite inefficient, but path-dependent: it wouldn’t look the way it does if we were designing it from scratch. But at this point, accountants, lawyers, and IRS employees themselves, and even individuals who are used to filing taxes the current way, are all attached to the current system. If there were just one person or entity with an objection, it would be easy to address through negotiation, but it’s much harder to negotiate a solution with a bunch of different parties that all have something to lose from change in general.

Similarly, it’s easy enough for me to negotiate with individual parts of my mind (now that I’ve learned techniques for doing so, anyway), but implementing changes with broad implications is harder because there are many stakeholders.  And even small changes can interfere with the current roles and agendas of multiple parts of my mind.

My best model of the non-unitary nature of the mind tells me that attachment is best understood as emerging from the competing desires and roles of the various parts of our mind. Thinking of reducing attachment as cultivating a mental ecosystem that isn’t threatened by change, helps me feel much more positively towards the idea of detachment. Attachment isn’t my enemy—it’s a natural (though not strictly necessary) consequence of the competing agendas of my parts. Eliminating attachment also seems more tractable when I think of it as an emergent property. I can listen to the concerns of my parts and help them understand that evolving in the face of change instead of resisting it is in fact in their individual interest—which I sincerely believe.

I haven’t heard of anyone framing attachment quite this way before (by all means point me to a source if I’m wrong about this), so I’m quite eager to hear what other people think of this view. Does it make sense? Does it seem useful?

No related posts.