Let’s take NO for an answer when shifting paradigms

When entering unchartered territory, odd language constructs can help create tipping points

When living on the edge of chaos, new learning and unlearning usually takes place at ever (often exponentially) increasing rates. An era when lots of potentials exist for building a new, better cradle for society. With the discovery of these potentials, this new unlearning and relearning, also new language constructs can be helpful. This post tries to add a glimpse to that.

A word of caution: paradigm shift is not a goal in itself, but we see it happen all around us. So there are already driving forces that intend to create a better, more beautiful World and use paradigm shift concepts to support their messages. It’s this positively intended shifts that I try to emphasize here.

The principles documented below were inspired by my previous (enterprise architecture) visioning work within Enexis and predecessors. Recently i got some reinspiration from the excellent post of Nature 2.0[1]. In that post a preferred future vision has been emphasized with a/o these 4 principles: no ownership, no identity, no scarcity, no money. These principles which sound great to me, inspired me to extend with other principles that can amplify the intent when used together of when selectively combined.

This is very fundamental. Since humans need language constructs to create mutual understanding, we have become used to put ever more constraints in our language. Much of these constraints were developed to defend the self, the ego and have during the course of eons become ‘culture’. Memes that have gone viral. A word like mining is a good example of an ego-driven word. Mining comes from communicating to another that something is ‘mine’. We ‘mined’ a lot (and still do), think of fossil fuels we mine from the earth. And even now, using modern digital technologies like Bitcoin we still developed the architectures in such a way that ‘mining’ can be possible.

Could we develop an ‘Our-ing’ digital technology, that is capable of preventing ‘greedy’ mining strategies? Tragedy of the Commons certainly plays a major role in this but only as long as something is naturally or deliberately scarce. As soon as we can create an abundant context for an ecosystem, ownership has no intrinsic value anymore. So the transformation from scarcity to abundance can deliver many benefits to society.

I promote proper use of the word “NO” in such a way that it could be made beneficial in paradigm shift contexts. This post can thus also be used to support, inspire or initiate paradigm shift discussions/dialogs/meetups etc.

These new paradigm themes have deliberately been constructed beginning with ‘NO’ or ‘NOT’ words. The reason for this is that the Powers that Be, the incumbents, the conservatives or those supporting or promoting the old paradigm tend to use these words a lot. If we frame new paradigm messages with these words, the Powers that Be will most probably easier accept them because it’s their native language. They might even become sponsors of some shifts!

This assumption is in line with this quote of Philip K. Dick: “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.” and then combined with the below mentioned strategy for paradigm change by Donella Meadows:

[NEW] No competition, we can improve society without competing, just by collaborating in (like minded) communities and coalitions of the willing.

[OLD]Competition is the (only) preferred way in order to improve or progress the world and in order to protect our countries and in order to protect our companies. Artificial borders come in very handy to create the illusion of separation

[NEW]No discrimination. We all benefit.

[OLD] Benefits go to select elites. Pareto is a good strategy, if we get 80% or long tail benefits we don’t need to look at the rest.

[NEW] No societal uncompensated externalities. No excuses anymore for not embedding the cost of externalities into the economy. Support and embed Kate Raworth’s Donut economy paradigm.

[OLD] Externalities are for society, profits are for companies. Immoral running of companies is supported and enabled by law. Drive for ever greater efficiency is a catalyst to not price externalities. Capitalism is a catalyst for ever greater efficiency (productivity) at cost of society.

[NEW]No global power concentration (like e.g. New World Order) but locally optimized ecosystems. Think global, act local.

[OLD]

We like power. We like to concentrate power. So we win at the expense of all those other suckers…

[NEW] No identity, there is no need for actors to identify themselves in order to add value to each other. Anonymous by design.

[OLD] Privacy by design. We need to identify actors so we can sue them or make them accountable. This way we gave certain (groups) of people more rights than others.

[NEW] No IP (Intellectual Property Right). It hinders collaborative and collective efforts to create a real better world.

[OLD] Let’s compete with each other. If I have IP, then you don’t. Then I win and You loose. And that’s OK with me, because I am greedy by nature.

[NEW] No Licensing. UnLicense model prevails.

[OLD] Lets license the stuff. So we can make lots of money from it. Let those suckers pay for it so only we can enjoy the benefits.

[NEW] No opaque markets.

[OLD] We don’t like transparency/open data because it is hindering markets that ‘live’ from intransparency. Therefore we rather keep things opaque, hidden in the dirty dark.

[NEW] Not for profit, not for sale, no patents, no IP. We like new organization forms that are not for profit and at the same time are not for sale and have no urge for patents or IP.

[OLD] We like profitable companies, and if large enough, we will sell them on the stock market. We use patents and IP as secret weapons to hinder (global) innovation, hinder collaboration and encourage competition.

[NEW] Not for sale. The (virtual) company that helps us creating hyper efficient, shared, democratized, demonetized, digitized ecosystem(s), is not for sale, so that (greedy) speculation is discouraged, anti-fragility and sustainability is by design enabled. From idea to nursery to startup to scaleup to scaleout to blitzscale: growth is the only driver to create companies. Greed is the primary driver to create bigger companies that are ‘for sale’.

[OLD] My company is for sale, so I can put the money in my pocket.

[NEW] No scarcity, there can be abundance in almost anything. Build a scarcity museum. Promote and embed Elinor Ostrom’s non-tragedy of the commons. Scarcity is either created artificially by ‘Powers that be’ or value is extracted from a common resource pool without taking into account effect on externalities. Current capitalism is an example of ‘overfishing’ but also any form of ‘mining’ usually is geared toward greedy behavior at the expense of others and/or the ecology.

[OLD] Scarcity is the only sustainable mechanism to progress the World.

[1] Nature 2.0, The Cradle of Civilization Gets an Upgrade, https://medium.com/@trentmc0/nature-2-0-27bdf8238071 by Jan-Peter Doomernik, Dimitri de Jonghe and inspiration from Carsten Stoecker.