In Tofino for this week, today preparing for 60 people who will be joining us for an Art of Hosting.
The beach here, as anyone living on the exposed west coast will know, is constantly buffeted by surf and there is an endless white noise created by the waves crashing on the four sets of reefs offshore. Once, when I was in Quinault in Washington State, I remarked to an Elder that this sound must have had a beginning at some time in the earth’s history and perhaps will have an end. But in the meantime, as long as human ears have lived on this coast, the sound of surf has always filled them.
That’s pretty much forever.
As we begin a week of teaching some of the arts of community, I am reminded of the aspects of our better nature that we humans have always had, and my focus is fixed on what ways of being community, like the sound of this surf, have accompanied human beings forever.
The Conservative Party of Canada has started heating up its leadership campaign and I have a passing interest in it. Two of the candidates – the two most odious – are known to me personally. Kellie Leitch is the MP in my parent’s riding in Ontario and she was very helpful in helping my dad and I to get some written comments before the commons committee looking at the omnibus bill C-30 that Harper passed in 2012 when my own MP wouldn’t do it. Since then she has supported asbestos exports (against her oath as an MD), a Barbarian Practices Act and a currently racist dog whistle campaign on “Canadian values.” Chris Alexander, who was her partner in crime on the Barbarian practices bill and the tip line campaign promise was an elementary school mate of mine. We grew up a half block from each other, and he came from a red Tory family, with his dad as a supporter of Joe Clark in the 1976 leadership of the PCs, and in retirement he has done some interesting leadership work on diversity. In 1984 I watched Brian Mulroney’s election vctory at their house. Chris was always the smartest kid in any room I was ever in with him, but he took a hard turn to the right and threw his lot in with Harper. What he has in smarts he desperately lacks in political graces. He’s become rude and inelegant. And his stock has fallen mightily. He was also a sore loser when his constituents kicked him out of the commons last year. It’s too bad. At one point, when he our ambasador to Afghanistan, I imagined that he might make a good leader of the Conservative party and given his roots, might even pull it back towards a progressive conservative agenda. He’s a disappointment of the highest order.
So I’m kind of personally invested in this strange campaign, which brought me to reading up on Kevin O’Leary this evening.
It’s interesting to read Kevin O’Leary’s Wikipedia biography. What stands out for me is how he basically has experience as a software developer, a celebrity and a finance guy. But look a bit deeper and you see that his software career included creating a product and companies that eventually created a massive catastrophe for Mattel, who bought his company, made him a multi millionaire and imediately went into a tail spin. He walked away golden while a massive company and the enterprise he built swiftly crumbled, wiping $3 billion of shareholder value of the books of Mattel. he parlayed that fortune into an investing career.
His investment strategies are heavily tilted to the oil and gas sector, which makes his recent pronouncements against carbon taxes to be self-interested at best. If he runs for office, it wil be interesting to see how he handles the conflict of interest issues that will come up as a candidate and later an MP, should he make it that far.
On the experience side I’m struck by how little experience he has with economics or governance, having never studied or served in those capacities. He certainly comes across as a financial whiz as a pundit, but he offers his takes on taxes, Canadian dollar valuation and enterprise from a business angle, not an economics angle. Remember that the Tories chastised Trudeau for being inexperienced. O’Leary is well known as a celebrity and a talker, but I don’t see much in the way of public service on his resume. He doesn’t even seem to be into philanthropy at all.
Lastly it is curious on his official website that he talks about his father’s ethnic Irish ancestry, but only mentions his mother’s family’s merchant background and not that they are also Lebanese. I actually think that’s an interesting aspect of his background and it seems a shame he doesn’t talk more about it. Perhaps he does in his books.
He’s an interesting character once you dive in. I find him rakish and irritating, short tempered and egotistical, all qualities that seem to have a place on Bay Street, but are grating on Wellington Street. I really think this crop of Conservative leardership candidates is weak sauce, and I fear that the party will go the Trump route and pick him because of his brashness. This, however is not a time for a celebrity self-promoter to be in power as prime minister of Canada, but the Conservative party seems to have a bare cupboard at the moment.
The world is in a weird place right now and a guy like O’Leary might appeal to Canadians desperate to have their own Trump. Some of this crowd would probably elect Don Cherry if he ran, or resurrect Rob Ford if they could, the man who was John the Baptist to Trump’s Christ. O’Leary is nothing more than a huckster, full of his father’s Irish charm and his own inflated sense of self-importance. Good god, public governance is in desperate times.
“The secrets to living are these: First, the past cannot be improved upon. Acknowledge what was and move on. Next, the future cannot be molded. Then, why bother? Last, nothing can ultimately be controlled; Not the past, nor the future, nor the present. Accept this moment as it is. Honoring these three, one lives without shackles.”
– Wu Hsin via whiskyriver
At some point I think the work of complexity cannot be done without a psycho-spiritual component. There are days which I would wish that Wu Hsin was a client. I feel like action like he is describing – Taoist wu wei or “doing non-doing” – is the high art of living as a human being in a complex world at whatever scale.
After our snowy weekend, a true cold snap sets in Monday #YVR pic.twitter.com/nvQMXdSnB3
— Chris Doyle (@ensembleator) December 9, 2016
I wonder how the media should change its reporting of volatile weather systems with hyper local effects? The biggest problem with the way storms hit our crinkly coast is that they can be radically different in effect in locations only a few Kms apart and the projections can change by the hour. And yet, mass media runs with the single regional forecast that is issued every six hours and people believe what they want, then getting frustrated with the quality of weather forecasting. We just want to be told what will happen.
Weather forecasting and monitoring is incredible now and we all have access to most of the raw data. But many people expect forecasters to get it right to a level of precision that is impossible at local scales and hardly anyone is prepared to to the work of slogging through the theory to understand what’s happening.
Was snow predicted for today? Yes. Is it happening? Yes. Are there areas in which it is creating treacherous conditions and therefore worthy of a regional warning? Yep. Is that true at your house?
If the answer to the last question is no it does not invalidate the accuracy or the role of meteorology. It might be an indictment of radio and newspapers who are never willing to explain the intricacies of complexity whether it is about economics, society, politics or weather.
Collectively we need to stop looking for simple answers and easy knowledge about complex system and get used to living with volatility, uncertainty and unpredictability because that is how the world actually works. It would help if we could all learn a little more about the complexities of the things that affect us and learn to use the raw data that shows what’s happening. I have a constant irritation that society in general is stuck because folks a) won’t do the leg work to understand complexity and b) expect those that do do the legwork to be the final arbiters of truth.
We are dangerously wanting to have our cake and eat it too.
Martin Luther King, writing from the Birmingham jail where he was biding his time after being arrested for non violent civil disobedience had this to say about the difference between just laws and unjust laws.
An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I it” relationship for an “I thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.
The Vice President elect of the United States of America has just promised that his administration will move swiftly to withdraw the civil rights of LGBTQ citizens of his country. It is probably worth having in your pocket a good working definition of the difference between just and unjust laws.