When he was Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney presided over the release of a remarkable report called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy” which skewered the idea that governments print money and create inflation when it is actually private banks that do that. David Graeber’s 2019 paper “Against Economics” came at a time, perhaps the last time, when I think we could have retooled economics to redistribue wealth through policies more in line with the ones that created the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s. Alas. The populists and oligarchs have now combined to divide up the world and everyone else is scrambling for cash. Carney knows better, but the coming federal government austerity is just what the richest want: make credit cheap so that more money is created that eventually ends up in their pockets. We are not on a track to create a prosperous society let alone use the money we have to reverse the social, educational and climate crises that require resources and public infrastructure investment to address. (H/t to Harold Jarche for the links).
While following a thread about systems thinking I was led to this blog called Perspicacity from cognitive researcher John Flach. Flach has recently co-authored a book called “Do Systems Exist: A conversation” which I am interested to read. I think there is a lot more to say about this, but if you were to ask me the question right now I would say “yes and no.”
I’m in Canoe Cove this morning which is a small boat harbour near Swartz Bay on the northern tip of the Saanich Penisula near Victoria, BC. This is a popular destination for the road bike riders who come up the peninsula from the City on a weekend morning. While having an espressos I. The very good Fox and Monocle bakery cafe, I saw a woman in a bike shirt that read “Samsara” on the sleeve. I am unsure if this is an ironic branding.
Links to explore from this week:
- July 21, 2025: knowledge sharing as legacy. Joanna Macy and sharing facilitation wisdom.
- July 22, 2025: barely hanging on to the world wide web, Finding each other, slowing down, and deeply connecting
- July 23, 2025: points of view,. Women’s football and how AI might give us a different perspective on democratic practice.
- July 24, 2025: destination and direction. It’s the journey, as usual.
- July 25, 2025: doing the little things right. Making beauty by paying attention to the small things right in front of us.
Enjoy the weekend.
Close relationships and small adjustments to stay together make it easier to address changes that might lead to catastrophe. Johnnie Moore posting about the more boring and competent of the two famous Antarctic explorers, Amundsen, and how his matter of fact competence led him to safety. But also in this post, Johnnie talks about a self-led choir that relies on intimacy, close listening and weak signals to make music without their conductor. Musica Intima here in BC also does this. From my own experience singing like that it is the small moments, relationship and adjustments that are everything.
My TSS Rovers are in Kamloops tonight for the final matches of the League 1 BC season. The women’s division was settled a couple of weeks ago and we will finish fourth for the fourth year in a row. But there is drama with the men’s division. We sit in first place two points above Langley United. Our fate is in our hands meaning that if we win tonight we clinch (and defend) the men’s division title. Any other result puts us in peril and opens the door to Langley pipping us at the line if they win tomorrow. It has been a season of bumps and twists and turns, and my heart will rest a lot easier at 9:30 tonight if we put it to bed. Forza Rovers!!
…and also doing the little things wrong. Like how a country disappears into a fascist dystopia. Never all at once, only gradually. In small intimate ways.
The golfer Scotty Scheffler, who just won The Open Championship, has made some waves recently with the interview he gave before that tournament where he talks about what is fulfilling in life. It’s not winning golf tournaments. In fact he expresses a little astonishment and confusion about why he does what he does, even though he is one of the best in the world at it. “You work all your life for two minutes of euphoria…” As a musician I can relate. We puts hundreds of hours of practice into learning a piece, only to perform it once, perhaps, for a couple of minutes of interesting music. And that’s not even counting the lifetime of work that goes into the training the voice, the fingers, the ear, and the heart to be able to perform competently enough to even be on a stage in the first place.
I was struck by the moment in his press conference where he says “am I making sense?” At that moment, I nodded, but clearly the golf and sports press gallery didn’t. And that is what separates artists from those who value the end line. As Alan Watts once said, if the result was everything people would only go to hear the final chord of a composition, or dancers would head to one spot on the stage and stay there. It’s a cultural error, which is what makes Scheffler’s comments seem so confusing, in a culture that worships the final result.
More patterns that are everywhere. Last week I shared a link about how the Golden Ration is over represented in our ideas about the universe. Today comes a beautiful article from Aeon which talks about the prevalence of the branching network (like a river valley or a bronchial passage) and the web (like neural networks or cosmic galactic clusters) and how they operate across scales. Interestingly in the article, the author Mark Neyrinck doesn’t seem to distinguish between networks with ends and those without. Networks where things arrive at certain places, and networks where they don’t.
I wonder if we are losing our ability to organize and work in networks at scale for social good. Here in North America we are very individual focused in terms of meeting needs and our current governments are most focused on creating the conditions for an efficient return on capital investments and concentration of wealth, following the long discredited trickle down theory of Neo-liberal economics. We are probably going to need networks of care, becasue the federal government is about to gut a number of public facing service personnel to pay for national defence spending and tax cuts. Most of these jobs are the liaison people that help folks with their federal pension plans, employment insurance, and federal taxation issues. The Department that serves First Nations communities and maintains Canada’s end of the bargain in terms of treaty benefits, stands to have substantial program cuts. This is one journey that is going to result in some dire destinations for vulnerable folks, newcomers, and Indigenous communities
More from the annals of disappearing knowledge. Chris Lysy offers an incredibly detailed analysis of how evaluation resources on the web have become impossible to find. (He also has a solution for his professional field; read to the end). This is part of the bigger trend of how we find the craft knowledge to support practice fields like evaluation and facilitation. These are fields that require a pathway to proficiency that requires connection with good knowledge and good practitioners. Search engines have ruined this connection and social media algorithms on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook also bury useful stuff. And lets not even discuss the-platform-that-shall-not-be-named.
We are living in the biggest and best library in the history of the world, which is not only filled with books and videos and other delightful things, but in which you can personally connect with the actual masters in all kinds of obscure fields of knowledge. And yet, someone has stolen the card catalog, and is standing at the doorway directing you to the gift shop. You still might be able to get into the library, but it’s impossible to find anything there.
One way to look and find interesting things is to practice slow, mindful web surfing again. Get off the apps. Follow a link and see where it takes you. Maybe keep a log of the places you have visited, to share cool things with others. A “web log” if you will. You might find others who do the same, and then you have an interesting collection of sites to visit and learn from. Nadia van Holzen writes this week about the gift of slowing down. It applies to walking as much as it does to reading all of the amazing stuff people still put on the web. But you have to get out of the practice of searching transactionally, only looking for the things that are related to work or productivity. “Sometimes, slowing down is enough to open your senses and invite surprise—sparking something new in the everyday,” Nadia writes. Richard Olivier, a man I met once in London before he died, called it “Purposive Drift.” It applies as much in the virtual world as it does in the physical world. Let your brain be amazed by the beautiful stuff out there that no one paid for you to find.
“Back then” we were connected, not separated by the Internet. The Internet was a tool for that. We met real people and forged real relationships. These relationships were virtual and “in real life” and they were at times, DEEPLY meaningful and important. Until I blocked a number of local neighbours on my local Facebook page, I actually sought to AVOID certain people on my home island. Now I don’t care what they have posted there; they aren’t the same in real life. My sense of community has been restored. “Back then” whenever I met someone whose blogs I had followed for a while I discovered that they were the same and our connections were instant and deeper.