This dude also deserves a thread, a postmetaphysical visionary of an integral paradigm different from the trademarked variety. And quite "spiritual" to boot, if by that we mean creating a more equitable and humane lifeworld in which all can thrive and aspire to their highest potentials. From the integral capitalism thread:

Balder:

Have you discussed Jeremy Rifkin's notion of "distributed capitalism," based on emergent peer-to-peer technological models, which he discussed in his book, The Empathic Civilization?  I skimmed the thread and didn't see mention of it, so I thought I'd add it to the mix.  Here's a brief article on it.

(An interesting notion of his, which is not directly relevant to this thread but possibly relevant to this forum, is Rifkin's notion of an emergent "dramaturgical self" as a stage of self-making beyond the "existential postmodern self."  I haven't explored it in depth -- I've just been reviewing his book for a class -- but I'll look into it more and will comment further if it's relevant.)

theurj:

Thanks for these links. I've heard of Rifkin but have yet to read him. I agree with most of what he's saying but he is stretching the definition of the term capitalism beyond its intended meaning. Recall its meaning from the beginning of the thread. Private ownership of the means of production with profit flowing to the top is antithetical to shared, open and distributed ownership of resources and information and P2P relationships, much like selfish concern and cosmocentric morality are so in a moral hierarchy. Rifkin is right to make the connection between the worldview and economic-communication systems, and that the internet correlates with an empathatic, biospheric view necessary for such shared resources and environmental consciousness. But again, capitalism was all about the exploitation of natural resources as if they were infinite with little to no regard for the environmental consequences. Rifkin laments this destruction and rightly analyzes the consciousness and systems that created it, capitalism, yet by keeping that name in his new view of P2P distribution is a functional misfit.

One can also view him speak on his new book at YouTube. Just watching the first couple minutes it seems to be the same info in the text linked above.

Balder:

I also had posted this video on his work here on IPS awhile back.

theurj:

Now I understand hybrid systems during transition phases. For example we have hybrid gas-electric cars which are better than just gas-driven. But we know that it is a transition to a full electric car when we develop the technology and infrastructure to make it feasible. That is, we know we must completely leave behind using a limited resource like petrol for a more sustainable energy source. So with economic systems. There are hybrids of capitalism with open source and of course it is a step in the right direction. But like with petrol we know that at some point we will leave capitalism behind in a more equitable, humane and environmental consciousness with correlative political economy.

 

So for me it says something about our consciousness to which economic system we attach. Given the I-I agenda of a kinder, gentler capitalism it appears to be on the transition of rational-pluralistic and it calls that integral. Hence you get no language or values about open source, distributed networks or P2P. Whereas I think what Rifkin is describing, that ecologic empathy that is growing out of the informational-pluralistic into the internet P2P network, is what we might call integral. And it is open source, not private property. But again, it is currently a hybrid in transition but we know where it is going and what must be left behind.*

 

*As to worldview and moral level replacement, see the previous thread on ladder-climber-view. Like I said, I don't think it's a strict or clean dividing line between one level and the next, with transitions containing mixes and hybrids. But we see the trajectory of where it's going and what it will eventually leave behind.

You can find Rifkin's website here. Following is an excerpt from the synopsis on his lecture "The age of access":

"The new information and telecommunications technologies, e-commerce and globalization are making possible a new economic era as different from market capitalism as the latter is dissimilar from mercantilism. In the new century, markets are slowly giving way to network ways of conducting business, with far-reaching implications for the future of society....The notion of exchanging and holding on to fixed property becomes an anachronism in a society where everything is continually evolving."

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Ahmed's doc is very good! Matter of fact. It stays away from the emotive, manipulative, conspiracy theory trope. This is a case where i find the secular narrative working really well. I do wonder if he really believes that all this convergence is simply random coincidence though. Nevertheless, his solutions are based on what i call the right hand protocols.

Andrew, My mind has latched onto the "sixth pillar" ( the psycho-social factor related to "greening") and simply won't let go. I'll try to make good use of my "O" part of OCD. In fact, I'll just call it my "calling."

I decided to include the sixth pillar-related excerpts as part of a response to your comment because your "cognitive dissonance" is part of that sixth pillar. Without your dissonance change would be less likely. And the cause of the dissonance is likely similar to the theme of one of the Sienfeld sit com episodes; being "caught between two worlds."!  

Rifkin (below) does a good job identifying how culture is shaped by the dominant way of making a living. Culture lags behind, still stuck on the needs and directives of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. The TIR culture will be qualitatively different than either of those first two waves of "making a living." We must allow ourselves time to gradually assimilate the TIR culture into our minds and hearts. Fortunately it happens to be quite heart-friendly, more like "human" (in the good sense). In some respects the concomitant culture of the TIR is really a "breath of fresh air." Still, we are used to breathing stale air and it may take a while to aclimate (sp?) to this new air. 

After reading Rifkin's insight about how big business shaped education, I felt victimized, and began hearing one of the songs used in the Civil Rights era: Free at Last

Regarding our cultural misconceptions of "capitalism" (conflating modern capitalism with the kind that Adam Smith idolized). 

page 108 of paperback edition of The Third Industrial Revolution, by Jeremy Rifkin: 

With the coming of the railroads, ownership became separated from management. A new genre of professional administrators took to the helm of these ant new enterprises, while ownership was diffused to the far corners of the Earth. The new overseers bore little resemblance to the small family proprietors idolized by classical economic theorists like Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say at the dawn of the market era in the late eighteenth century. 

Regarding how modern education's form was (and still is) determined by big business culture: 

pages 111-113 of paperback edition of The Third Industrial Revolution, by Jeremy Rifkin:  

The rationalization of production and distribution of products required a rationalization of the workforce itself. Fredrick Taylor became the first management expert. His theory of scientific management's designed to recast the persona of the worker to comport with the operational standards that were used to maintain new, centralized, corporate bureaucracies. Taylor used efficiency principles already developed by engineers and applied them to workers with the expectation of turning them into living machines, whose performance could be optimized, much like the continuous production processes churning out standardized products. 

Taylor believed that the best way to optimize worker efficiency was to separate thought from action and place total control over how a steaks was to be accomplished in the hands of management. "If the workers' exertion is guide by their own conception," according to Taylor, "it is not possible … to enforce upon them the methodological efficiency or the working pace desired by capital." 

Taylor took the core idea of executing rationalized authority tin a centralized, top-down management scheme and imposed it on every worker. He wrote: 

The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the tsp which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doting the work .. [T]his task specifies not only what is to be  done but howe it is to be done and the eat time allowed for doing it. 

The principles of scientific management quickly crossed over from the factory floor and commercial offices into the ohm and community, making efficiency the cardinal temporal value of the new industrial age. Henceforth, maximizing output with the minimum input of time, labor, and capital became the sine qua non for directing virtually every aspect of life in contemporary society. 

Nowhere were the new rationalizing principles of the modern business enterprise more welcomed than in the public school system, first in America and Europe and, later, the rest of the world. Turning out productive worriers became the central mission of modern education. Schools took on the dual task of creating a literate workforce and preparing them to serve authoritarian and centralized businesses, where they would take orders from the top and optimize their output at the bottom in the most efficient manner possible, while never questioning the authority under which they labored. 

The schools became a microcosm of the factories. One-room school houses gave way to giant, centralized schools that , in appearance, could easily have been mistaken for factories. They were given daily work assignments, along with detailed instructions on how to carry them out. Their tests were standardized and their performance was measured by the speed and efficiency of their responses. They were isolated into autonomous units and informed that sharing information with fellow students was cheating and a punishable offense. They were graded on the basis of objective criteria and promoted to the next grade on the basis of merit. this educational model has remained in force to the present day and is only just now coming into question with the emergence of the Third Industrial Revolution, whose distributed and collaborative nature requires a concomitant educational model.  

-----
darrell


andrew said:

I'm watching the Rifkin doc that was posted on Integral Options and at the 14 minute mark he says that there are millions and millions of people in Europe right now plugged into an internet of things co-created green energy grid. I was wondering if someone in Europe who is doing this ( and has access to the integral community) would come online here and share with us how they did this to their home or business. 

In Canada, B.C. and Vancouver all i see happening is massive promotion of petro -chemical infrastructure.

This is creating some cognitive dissonance in me upper left quad. Can someone help out with this?

A friend of mine said his brother is on a bi-directional smart energy grid in California, and actually can sell his renewable energy-produced electricity to the power company. I mentioned that this flies in the face of what Rifkin says of the smart grid strategy of the U.S., which is of the uni-directional variety of smart energy grid, and which holds onto the power companies as producers of energy, rather than as brokers and managers of energy services.

But IMB's transition from making computation boxes, hardware, and onto specializing in IT services instead, sets a potentially valuable precident in the big business world/culture. Hopefully the "de-materialization" trend will be embraced eventually by the US energy regimine, and thus change its mind from its current plans for a uni-directional smart energy grid , to a bi-directional smart energy grid (like Rifkin does claim is the EU's plan, thus embracing one of the main pillars of the TIR). The US is lagging behind. San Antonio is the major exception, as they have a master plan to enter into the TIR. 

My friend and I concluded that there must be "pockets" in the U.S. where a bi-directional smart grid is available and working. 

I was just getting ready to propose in my book-in-progress, Your Third Nature, something like the LANs (local area networks) which preceded the Internet. Why couldn't a developing or re-modeled community create a "Local Area Energy Network" (LAEN), in order to begin on a small scale what the bi-directional smart energy grid would do on a large scale?

I am a strong proponent of "scaling up." By that I mean starting on a small scale and then generalizing the findings to larger scales. This is the way science works. It starts in a small scale, laboratory, setting and then sees if the findings there hold up in the larger scale of everyday reality.

A big part of mental and/or actual simulation is creating an artificial space where an idea can work without a bunch of extraneous variables (Sometimes its okay -- even preferable -- to work in a vacuum. A vacuum is not the dreaded "bubble" because it is temporary. It is a stepping stone, not a home.). The mental simulation starts small and is practiced under ideal conditions first, then tested in less ideal, less pure, conditions later. Scaling up allows us to come up with new ways, without becoming mentally defeated before we even try to think or do. 

Rifkin also describes what I call "scaling out." By "scaling out" I mean pooling resources to overcome economy of scale problems when new economic initiatives are undertaken. An example of "scaling out" would be small businesses could sharing equipment or financing, etc. 

If my Hilltop Economic Empowerment Project gets legs, there is a possibility that the (proposed) Hilltop Oatcake Company, owned and operated by the Alltop indigenous corporation, will end up renting kitchen space from already health-approved restaurants. My next neighbor gave me a link to a man who can broker this "renting." This would be another example of "scaling out" in order to scale up. It is also seemingly a part of what Rifkin means by a "distributed capitalism" approach. 

d

andrew said:

Here's one link that i found:

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/03/german...

I checked youtube and google and couldn't find any individuals explaining how they are hooked up into a smart grid.

Glad you are looking into this smart energy grid matter. The more I read Rifkin's book, The Third Industrial Revolution, the more I realize that at some point social justice movements and other affilations to promote human wellbeing will need to research and even visit "hot spots." Culture shapes minds. A visit to a "pocket" of cultural change, where groups of people are either using smart energy grids or doing things to lead up to it, will be needed, so you can "feel" the change and "fill" the empty abstractions with concrete examples. Such field trips would also spread the cultural momementum via role modeling. As long as the pockets are spread out no such positive role modeling of thoughts and deeds can occur unless aided by a trip and by internet-assisted comunications prior to the trip(s). This culture-spreading practice might be humorously called "out of pocket" field trips.  

The travel money or out of pocket expenses would have to come from fund raisers of some sort, such as the Hilltop Oatcake small business co-op I am imagining and promoting in real life. The simultaneous imaginative writing and community participation (I'm attending an interaith community development organization -- The Shalom Zone -- meeting the 22nd of this month, bringing along samples of the proposed "product" for an ongoing fund-raiser for a disadvantaged section of town) is playfully called "write living" in my book-in-progress, Your Third Nature

d

darrell

Darrell R. Moneyhon said:

A friend of mine said his brother is on a bi-directional smart energy grid in California, and actually can sell his renewable energy-produced electricity to the power company. I mentioned that this flies in the face of what Rifkin says of the smart grid strategy of the U.S., which is of the uni-directional variety of smart energy grid, and which holds onto the power companies as producers of energy, rather than as brokers and managers of energy services.

But IMB's transition from making computation boxes, hardware, and onto specializing in IT services instead, sets a potentially valuable precident in the big business world/culture. Hopefully the "de-materialization" trend will be embraced eventually by the US energy regimine, and thus change its mind from its current plans for a uni-directional smart energy grid , to a bi-directional smart energy grid (like Rifkin does claim is the EU's plan, thus embracing one of the main pillars of the TIR). The US is lagging behind. San Antonio is the major exception, as they have a master plan to enter into the TIR. 

My friend and I concluded that there must be "pockets" in the U.S. where a bi-directional smart grid is available and working. 

I was just getting ready to propose in my book-in-progress, Your Third Nature, something like the LANs (local area networks) which preceded the Internet. Why couldn't a developing or re-modeled community create a "Local Area Energy Network" (LAEN), in order to begin on a small scale what the bi-directional smart energy grid would do on a large scale?

I am a strong proponent of "scaling up." By that I mean starting on a small scale and then generalizing the findings to larger scales. This is the way science works. It starts in a small scale, laboratory, setting and then sees if the findings there hold up in the larger scale of everyday reality.

A big part of mental and/or actual simulation is creating an artificial space where an idea can work without a bunch of extraneous variables (Sometimes its okay -- even preferable -- to work in a vacuum. A vacuum is not the dreaded "bubble" because it is temporary. It is a stepping stone, not a home.). The mental simulation starts small and is practiced under ideal conditions first, then tested in less ideal, less pure, conditions later. Scaling up allows us to come up with new ways, without becoming mentally defeated before we even try to think or do. 

Rifkin also describes what I call "scaling out." By "scaling out" I mean pooling resources to overcome economy of scale problems when new economic initiatives are undertaken. An example of "scaling out" would be small businesses could sharing equipment or financing, etc. 

If my Hilltop Economic Empowerment Project gets legs, there is a possibility that the (proposed) Hilltop Oatcake Company, owned and operated by the Alltop indigenous corporation, will end up renting kitchen space from already health-approved restaurants. My next neighbor gave me a link to a man who can broker this "renting." This would be another example of "scaling out" in order to scale up. It is also seemingly a part of what Rifkin means by a "distributed capitalism" approach. 

d

andrew said:

Here's one link that i found:

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/03/german...

I checked youtube and google and couldn't find any individuals explaining how they are hooked up into a smart grid.

"This flies in the face of what Rifkin says of the smart grid strategy of the U.S."

Because someone in CA is doing this therefore it is common practice in the US? You realize that CA has always been the bellwether State, leading the way in just about everything progressive. That though is in no way indicative of what has yet to happen in the rest of corporate America. Especially lately, given the immense regressive forces in our Congress and Supreme Court. Yes, the US will get there eventually, but it's going to take a lot longer than some of the EU and likely even China.

"My friend and I concluded that there must be 'pockets' in the U.S. where a bi-directional smart grid is available and working."

Indeed, progressive pockets, like those that implemented the new Obamacare Medicaid expansion. But most of regressive America is not doing so, literally killing poor people by preventing them from getting the health care they need. They are the actual death panels and they control the Congress and many State legislatures and Governorships.

Spot read the link article. Looks like standardization issues are in need of being worked out in order to make the energy sharing workable. Certification procedures for small, medium, and large voltage stores/producers. And are there actual and reliable physical interfaces between small, medium, and large stores of electricity? I can see now how SME s (Small and Medium sized companies) will likely play a major role as a kind of interace between the home-owner electric producer and the big power companies. If LAENs (Local Area Energy Networks) could be established, this would in effect create an SME-level "store" of energy by using the scaling out (resource-sharing in order to operate at a higher scale) method that I mentioned earlier. 

Or the good old "co-operatives" which have been an expression of "lateral power" (to use Rifkin's term) for ages. 

darrell 


Darrell R. Moneyhon said:

Glad you are looking into this smart energy grid matter. The more I read Rifkin's book, The Third Industrial Revolution, the more I realize that at some point social justice movements and other affilations to promote human wellbeing will need to research and even visit "hot spots." Culture shapes minds. A visit to a "pocket" of cultural change, where groups of people are either using smart energy grids or doing things to lead up to it, will be needed, so you can "feel" the change and "fill" the empty abstractions with concrete examples. Such field trips would also spread the cultural momementum via role modeling. As long as the pockets are spread out no such positive role modeling of thoughts and deeds can occur unless aided by a trip and by internet-assisted comunications prior to the trip(s). This culture-spreading practice might be humorously called "out of pocket" field trips.  

The travel money or out of pocket expenses would have to come from fund raisers of some sort, such as the Hilltop Oatcake small business co-op I am imagining and promoting in real life. The simultaneous imaginative writing and community participation (I'm attending an interaith community development organization -- The Shalom Zone -- meeting the 22nd of this month, bringing along samples of the proposed "product" for an ongoing fund-raiser for a disadvantaged section of town) is playfully called "write living" in my book-in-progress, Your Third Nature

d

darrell

Darrell R. Moneyhon said:

A friend of mine said his brother is on a bi-directional smart energy grid in California, and actually can sell his renewable energy-produced electricity to the power company. I mentioned that this flies in the face of what Rifkin says of the smart grid strategy of the U.S., which is of the uni-directional variety of smart energy grid, and which holds onto the power companies as producers of energy, rather than as brokers and managers of energy services.

But IMB's transition from making computation boxes, hardware, and onto specializing in IT services instead, sets a potentially valuable precident in the big business world/culture. Hopefully the "de-materialization" trend will be embraced eventually by the US energy regimine, and thus change its mind from its current plans for a uni-directional smart energy grid , to a bi-directional smart energy grid (like Rifkin does claim is the EU's plan, thus embracing one of the main pillars of the TIR). The US is lagging behind. San Antonio is the major exception, as they have a master plan to enter into the TIR. 

My friend and I concluded that there must be "pockets" in the U.S. where a bi-directional smart grid is available and working. 

I was just getting ready to propose in my book-in-progress, Your Third Nature, something like the LANs (local area networks) which preceded the Internet. Why couldn't a developing or re-modeled community create a "Local Area Energy Network" (LAEN), in order to begin on a small scale what the bi-directional smart energy grid would do on a large scale?

I am a strong proponent of "scaling up." By that I mean starting on a small scale and then generalizing the findings to larger scales. This is the way science works. It starts in a small scale, laboratory, setting and then sees if the findings there hold up in the larger scale of everyday reality.

A big part of mental and/or actual simulation is creating an artificial space where an idea can work without a bunch of extraneous variables (Sometimes its okay -- even preferable -- to work in a vacuum. A vacuum is not the dreaded "bubble" because it is temporary. It is a stepping stone, not a home.). The mental simulation starts small and is practiced under ideal conditions first, then tested in less ideal, less pure, conditions later. Scaling up allows us to come up with new ways, without becoming mentally defeated before we even try to think or do. 

Rifkin also describes what I call "scaling out." By "scaling out" I mean pooling resources to overcome economy of scale problems when new economic initiatives are undertaken. An example of "scaling out" would be small businesses could sharing equipment or financing, etc. 

If my Hilltop Economic Empowerment Project gets legs, there is a possibility that the (proposed) Hilltop Oatcake Company, owned and operated by the Alltop indigenous corporation, will end up renting kitchen space from already health-approved restaurants. My next neighbor gave me a link to a man who can broker this "renting." This would be another example of "scaling out" in order to scale up. It is also seemingly a part of what Rifkin means by a "distributed capitalism" approach. 

d

andrew said:

Here's one link that i found:

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/03/german...

I checked youtube and google and couldn't find any individuals explaining how they are hooked up into a smart grid.

Andrew, I also like the comment by SteveAnnica a lot - I agree with almost everything he says, and also recommend the Donnella Meadows link he provided.  The situation we're in is mostly about energy, and the decline of oil.
 
andrew said:

Thanks for the links David! 

Good article by Nafeez. He does mention that Germany is indeed doing something green. 

I liked this comment the most though : 

SteveAnicca

In case people can't be bothered to read this all read Donella Meadows Limits to Growth fame http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/limits/meadows_1999.pdf

One question for now. Do any of these other sources have the ears and hands of the EU (or any government) and are getting them to enact this sort of agenda?

Yup, operation illegitimate landlords! lol

Before i get to some of the replys here i want to address my initial query as it goes to accuracy. I remember when Wilber was on the  Trivedi thing and recall Julian correctly saying that if this were true it should have been on front pages all around the globe. I would think the same thing would be true with Rifkin's claim here. So, an official invite is being put out to Rifkin here to explain the comment that millions and millions of people are individually connected to a smart grid in Germany and that most of Germany's government buildings are online to an interconnected smart grid right now. 

I love this idea but i do believe information should be accurate.

It's in the new book, with source material. I've ordered it from the library but it will take some time to obtain. Unless someone here wants to buy it and report back? Also if you want to actually find out before reading the book, write to Rifkin andrew and ask him to reference the pages and sources in the book backing this claim. I've always found him amenable to inquiries. Take responsibility for obtaining the answers you say you seek. Here's the website for the book.

Okay, i will e-mail and ask him about that claim. i'll also let him know that he has fans on this site:)

Yes to the reality of "regressive forces." But only a few years ago the battle cry of the right (which is generally wrong) was "defense of marriage." The movement made no sense at all, other than being a wedge issue to get out conservative votes during a Presidential election, etc.. I have been in a heterosexual marriage for almost 40 years now (will be, this August) and no homosexual relationships have ever threatened the wellbeing of my marriage. Perhaps they even strengthed my marriage by taking a few potential heterosexual adulterers out of the picture! There have been no gays throwing rocks through my living room window, disturbing the peace of my marriage. No gays stirring up arguments between my wife and I (we've done a good job of doing that on our own). No temptation for either of us to become homosexual. And neither have the "gays" brainwashed my two sons. Their sexual orientation seemed pretty oblivious to the rate at which people with a same-sex orientation "came out of the closet" or got married. 

And in just a few years the truth of these conclusions has been pretty much borne out in opinion polls and in recent laws.  Other such ridiculous "hold-on-to-the-past" conservative issues (including anti-Obamacare) will likely go the same route, sooner than later. The Traditional way of life is coming to a close.

This scares the shit out of those who identify with it. Their world is ending. They sense it whether they want to admit it or not. The tragedy is that they are fighting over a vehicle instead of the basic values which could be translated into more modern terms. The sanctity of heterosexual marriage could easily be translated into the sanctity of a commitment and stewardship of love relationships. A new form of an old and "valuable" value. Different external form, same essential truth. Tragic that some will suffer the indignity of losing the culture war, when all they needed to do is to think a little deeper or a little more figuratively. Just a little of a more flexible and inclusive thinking style could save a lot of people from having to go down (or out) kicking.

The good of amber could be included in the modern, post-modern, integral, and non-dual (or "unity-consciousness") stages. With just a little change in a thinking skill.

This  thinking skill could be taught in schools. No need to assume that certain people can't think in a more "both/and" way or what I call "Thinkng Like Energy," or right-brain-informed whole-brain thought. Until schools and communities set about practicing this more inclusive mode of thought we will never know how many people are capable of engaging in it.

If it is tied to intellect limits, even that does not mean it is inexorably tied to such limitations. There could be effective end-arounds which allow a person to play within their game in terms of left brain limitations of identifying and tracking and sequencing all sorts of discrete information and concepts. Less "intellectual" ways of whole thought or big picture thought. For Christ's sake, that's why spiritual leaders like Christ used parables!  Simple but effective metaphors/analogies, effective chunking techniques, etc. Instead of waiting for everyone to become geniouses (sp?) at analyzing "things."

The Native Americans of old did not have to go to Harvard to think in more dynamic, interactive, inclusive, interdependent, interconnecte, whole ways. I have been told that at least some Native American cultures teach verbs before nouns. There is no reason to believe that many more, if not most, of our the European-gened Americans could not learn to think in terms of verbs and whole patterns first, and then add the analyzed, left-brained, differentiations next.

This is a more "additive" way of producing proficient thinking. Metaphorically mirrors the "additive production" method of "3-D printers" as described in Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution. The additive method saves capital and energy, and can lend itself to increasingly local applications rather than requiring large, centralized, factories, etc. 

In terms of additive "production" of thought: instead of subtracting whole-pattern thought, replacing it with particularizing thought, and then waiting for someday when the whole-thinking might return. Why not support the whole-thinking from the get go, and then simply add layers of more differentiated thought onto it, in a transcend and include sort of way.

Children seem to naturally possess more right brain proficiencies. Why not build on that, instead of subtracting from it or erasing it?

I'll include the Rifkin excerpts again, in order to show how culture might have been more or less coerced into going an overly left-brain directions to the exclusion of potential right brain skills development. : 

Regarding how modern education's form was (and still is) determined by big business culture: 

pages 111-113 of paperback edition of The Third Industrial Revolution, by Jeremy Rifkin:  

The rationalization of production and distribution of products required a rationalization of the workforce itself. Fredrick Taylor became the first management expert. His theory of scientific management's designed to recast the persona of the worker to comport with the operational standards that were used to maintain new, centralized, corporate bureaucracies. Taylor used efficiency principles already developed by engineers and applied them to workers with the expectation of turning them into living machines, whose performance could be optimized, much like the continuous production processes churning out standardized products. 

Taylor believed that the best way to optimize worker efficiency was to separate thought from action and place total control over how a task was to be accomplished in the hands of management. "If the workers' exertion is guide by their own conception," according to Taylor, "it is not possible … to enforce upon them the methodological efficiency or the working pace desired by capital." 

Taylor took the core idea of executing rationalized authority tin a centralized, top-down management scheme and imposed it on every worker. He wrote: 

The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the tsp which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doting the work .. [T]his task specifies not only what is to be  done but howe it is to be done and the eat time allowed for doing it. 

The principles of scientific management quickly crossed over from the factory floor and commercial offices into the ohm and community, making efficiency the cardinal temporal value of the new industrial age. Henceforth, maximizing output with the minimum input of time, labor, and capital became the sine qua non for directing virtually every aspect of life in contemporary society. 

Nowhere were the new rationalizing principles of the modern business enterprise more welcomed than in the public school system, first in America and Europe and, later, the rest of the world. Turning out productive worriers became the central mission of modern education. Schools took on the dual task of creating a literate workforce and preparing them to serve authoritarian and centralized businesses, where they would take orders from the top and optimize their output at the bottom in the most efficient manner possible, while never questioning the authority under which they labored. 

The schools became a microcosm of the factories. One-room school houses gave way to giant, centralized schools that , in appearance, could easily have been mistaken for factories. They were given daily work assignments, along with detailed instructions on how to carry them out. Their tests were standardized and their performance was measured by the speed and efficiency of their responses. They were isolated into autonomous units and informed that sharing information with fellow students was cheating and a punishable offense. They were graded on the basis of objective criteria and promoted to the next grade on the basis of merit. this educational model has remained in force to the present day and is only just now coming into question with the emergence of the Third Industrial Revolution, whose distributed and collaborative nature requires a concomitant educational model.  

-----

d

theurj said:

"This flies in the face of what Rifkin says of the smart grid strategy of the U.S."

Because someone in CA is doing this therefore it is common practice in the US? You realize that CA has always been the bellwether State, leading the way in just about everything progressive. That though is in no way indicative of what has yet to happen in the rest of corporate America. Especially lately, given the immense regressive forces in our Congress and Supreme Court. Yes, the US will get there eventually, but it's going to take a lot longer than some of the EU and likely even China.

"My friend and I concluded that there must be 'pockets' in the U.S. where a bi-directional smart grid is available and working."

Indeed, progressive pockets, like those that implemented the new Obamacare Medicaid expansion. But most of regressive America is not doing so, literally killing poor people by preventing them from getting the health care they need. They are the actual death panels and they control the Congress and many State legislatures and Governorships.

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What paths lie ahead for religion and spirituality in the 21st Century? How might the insights of modernity and post-modernity impact and inform humanity's ancient wisdom traditions? How are we to enact, together, new spiritual visions – independently, or within our respective traditions – that can respond adequately to the challenges of our times?

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