Creating a New World
- Thread starter Laura
- Start date
anart
A Disturbance in the Force
Palinurus said:
Hi albimece09, andto the forum.
I noticed your avatar. It's the same one as Redrock12 is using.
See for instance this post of his: http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,31445.msg418044.html#msg418044
Maybe you should choose another pic ?
ends
Palinurus, it really doesn't matter that they have the same avatar. It's a bit rude of you to tell someone to change their avatar, especially as you're welcoming them to the forum.
Palinurus
The Living Force
Being rude wasn't my intention, so if this is perceived as such I sincerely apologize. May be a language problem. I could've chosen different wording but didn't realize the need.
I just tried signaling something I myself experienced as confusing, with the thought in mind that it might take both Redrock12 and albimece09 quite some time to notice the overlap. Also, it seemed easier to change it immediately now than later on when it has already been used for quite some time.
I realize in hindsight that my remark was based on internal considering gone too far. Really sorry about that. Lesson learned. Thank you anart. ;)
I just tried signaling something I myself experienced as confusing, with the thought in mind that it might take both Redrock12 and albimece09 quite some time to notice the overlap. Also, it seemed easier to change it immediately now than later on when it has already been used for quite some time.
I realize in hindsight that my remark was based on internal considering gone too far. Really sorry about that. Lesson learned. Thank you anart. ;)
celestialvisionz
Padawan Learner
This is a Fun Question for me- something that school teachers should ask their students more often;
Everything in this world is free, free perceptions, free way of living with perceptions, and free to choose a way of living their life.
When a baby first steps into being on earth they are automatically on their way of choosing how to live. That is, if they want to choose,
and there is not a time limit for choices, this baby when it is ready can choose over 1000 more or less ways of living their life . There is a monetary system
in this world BUT only for those whom choose to live on that aspected monetary path.
In other places on earth there are resourced based economies which means that scientists surveyed the lands and have accumulated enough resources for
all to live by and with. There are places like Shops whereby you can get the resources needed but without paying a thing. These Shops are filled with numerous
items, asked for by the citizens to the shops conductors.
Everything in this world is free, free perceptions, free way of living with perceptions, and free to choose a way of living their life.
When a baby first steps into being on earth they are automatically on their way of choosing how to live. That is, if they want to choose,
and there is not a time limit for choices, this baby when it is ready can choose over 1000 more or less ways of living their life . There is a monetary system
in this world BUT only for those whom choose to live on that aspected monetary path.
In other places on earth there are resourced based economies which means that scientists surveyed the lands and have accumulated enough resources for
all to live by and with. There are places like Shops whereby you can get the resources needed but without paying a thing. These Shops are filled with numerous
items, asked for by the citizens to the shops conductors.
I have just been to hear an interesting 2 hour talk by the travelling Canadian speaker Nicole Foss.
You can listen to a radio interview with her for free here:
_http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2513651/nicole-foss-global-finance-and-peak-oil
She also sells for US$50 a 5 hour extended version of her talk on DVD on her website here:
_http://www.theautomaticearth.com/
She doesn't talk about cosmic catastrophes, but some of the ideas she talks about could still be useful for restructuring society after or in anticipation of a cosmic catastrophe. She thinks a global financial system collapse is imminent. If that does not happen, an equally large collapse due to energy shortages will happen. She did not mention global warming or human-made carbon dioxide emmisions.
Here is a short summary of a few points I can remember from her talk:
A global financial meltdown is just around the corner. The big recession of 2008 was just a small blip. The crash is yet to come. It will be no different to the Tulip mania boom and bust of the 17th century. There is no getting around the fact that the current financial system is a gigantic Ponzi scheme. The amount of artifically created credit in the financial system is huge, and at present we are playing musical chairs, and there aren't enough chairs for everyone to sit on when the collapse happens.
A country who's debt exceeds its GDP will never be able to pay back that debt. Austerity measures reduce the GDP even further.
Central governments will not tell you when a collapse is going to happen, and will be of little help when it does.
The collapse is already happening in many European countries now. What is happening in Iceland, Greece, or Spain now will come to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the USA. Youth unemployment in Greece is over 50%. Cities that presently see themselves as having expensive housing and a housing shortage, such as Auckland, will find that they have abundant housing when whole families return to living in the same house as their grandparents to make ends meet.
It doesn't matter which national government is elected in the next elections. The problems are entrenched in the system, and the inertia of central governments is too slow to do anything about them.
Humans for the most part have two settings, complacency or panic [large laugh from the audience here].
The future will increasingly be local. We will be eating with locally grown food, using local resources. ATM's may stop working. Banks may seize the money you have deposited with them. Banks do not hold your money for you. What they do is they have a liability towards you for a certain amount of money. If the bank collapses and they can not meet that liability, you lose your money.
Keeping money in cash form will be helpful. A deflationary period is likely, when goods will drop in price. At the same time however, purchasing power will also on averge be declining for people, as they will find they have less cash on hand.
Local governments, if they are able to realize the problems ahead, could help by getting rid of bureaucratic entanglements concerning making the best use of local land resources. Big local spending on ribbon-cutter opening ceremony projects like a new stadium is inadvisable.
At the end of her talk, one person asked "What keeps you going? Do you follow any kind of spiritual practise?"
She replied something like: "No. Knowing what I know, I could not just keep it to myself and and not tell anyone about it."
You can listen to a radio interview with her for free here:
_http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2513651/nicole-foss-global-finance-and-peak-oil
She also sells for US$50 a 5 hour extended version of her talk on DVD on her website here:
_http://www.theautomaticearth.com/
She doesn't talk about cosmic catastrophes, but some of the ideas she talks about could still be useful for restructuring society after or in anticipation of a cosmic catastrophe. She thinks a global financial system collapse is imminent. If that does not happen, an equally large collapse due to energy shortages will happen. She did not mention global warming or human-made carbon dioxide emmisions.
Here is a short summary of a few points I can remember from her talk:
A global financial meltdown is just around the corner. The big recession of 2008 was just a small blip. The crash is yet to come. It will be no different to the Tulip mania boom and bust of the 17th century. There is no getting around the fact that the current financial system is a gigantic Ponzi scheme. The amount of artifically created credit in the financial system is huge, and at present we are playing musical chairs, and there aren't enough chairs for everyone to sit on when the collapse happens.
A country who's debt exceeds its GDP will never be able to pay back that debt. Austerity measures reduce the GDP even further.
Central governments will not tell you when a collapse is going to happen, and will be of little help when it does.
The collapse is already happening in many European countries now. What is happening in Iceland, Greece, or Spain now will come to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the USA. Youth unemployment in Greece is over 50%. Cities that presently see themselves as having expensive housing and a housing shortage, such as Auckland, will find that they have abundant housing when whole families return to living in the same house as their grandparents to make ends meet.
It doesn't matter which national government is elected in the next elections. The problems are entrenched in the system, and the inertia of central governments is too slow to do anything about them.
Humans for the most part have two settings, complacency or panic [large laugh from the audience here].
The future will increasingly be local. We will be eating with locally grown food, using local resources. ATM's may stop working. Banks may seize the money you have deposited with them. Banks do not hold your money for you. What they do is they have a liability towards you for a certain amount of money. If the bank collapses and they can not meet that liability, you lose your money.
Keeping money in cash form will be helpful. A deflationary period is likely, when goods will drop in price. At the same time however, purchasing power will also on averge be declining for people, as they will find they have less cash on hand.
Local governments, if they are able to realize the problems ahead, could help by getting rid of bureaucratic entanglements concerning making the best use of local land resources. Big local spending on ribbon-cutter opening ceremony projects like a new stadium is inadvisable.
At the end of her talk, one person asked "What keeps you going? Do you follow any kind of spiritual practise?"
She replied something like: "No. Knowing what I know, I could not just keep it to myself and and not tell anyone about it."
ka
Padawan Learner
I’m new, and this is my first post to ANY blog. “Creating a New World seemed like a good place to start.
My first thought was, there is no hope: the World has been an evolving catastrophe for over 300,000 years, and that seems to be what the Divine Cosmic Mind designed it to be.
In my six decades of life
the country (USA) has gone to the dogs,
the economy has become a gulag,
the public mind has gone down the toilet,
my body has succumbed to all the indignities of old age—
and my workplace has become a very much better place to be.
Woops! How did that last item get in there???
But it’s true. I look at my own life and I see that my workplace is a different world from what it was 26 years ago when I entered it.
How did THAT happen?
On the off-chance that there might be something more there than random luck, let’s consider it. It might give heart to someone else down in the trenches. Maybe there IS the possibility of a better world—around our immediate selves, at least.
I came to the company I work at after some really bad experiences working for shamelessly exploitive employers. I had been economically trapped.
One previous employer was a for-real psychopath, and I was scared stiff for several years on end. When I finally extricated myself, I knew the smell of psychopath, and I knew the smell of decency. The people I went to work under at my next job were decent folks.
Note: I had a choice, there. Not everyone always has choice, but when you have it, take it!
My new workplace was a small company, light manufacturing. I was middle management: I had to spend most of my days working with and supervising people that worked hard for small money. I did have regular exchanges with the top managers, and I functioned as a kind of go-between, responding to the needs and demands of both sides. In order to do my job, I had to maintain respect and credibility of employees, my boss, and other managers.
It certainly wasn’t all sweetness and light. The owner of the company embodies the fashion for ruthless, hard-nosed business style, and that set the tone for my manager, too.
There was one department (not under my supervision) in which half a dozen people spent 8 hours a day cursing and yelling at one another, and they weren’t joking. I cringed whenever I had to pass through.
Down in the trenches, there was at least one supervisor using his authority to extort sexual favors.
The purchasing agent’s idea of entertainment was to drive people to their wits’ ends.
There was just some plain old personality conflicts and bullying going on.
In the midst of this I had to direct people, hire and fire, enforce policy and rules, and make recommendations about promotions and pay, work with other managers and give input to higher management on questions of personnel policy.
Business is definitely an STS world. If a business cannot hold its own in the shark tank, it goes belly-up, and lots of people lose their livelihoods.
There has to be enough in it for the owners to put up with the headaches involved; the product has to be priced to sell in the marketplace.
It is simple truth that the interests of labor and management are diametrically opposed; they are natural enemies: management wants to pay as little as possible, to get as much work as possible, and to exert as much close control as possible. Labor wants more money, less labor and more freedom.
Fortunately, both Labor and Management in this organization were also mostly decent people, with some respect for the reasonable expectations of one another.
Still, when the hard questions arose, my boss always started from the hard-nosed attitude that management had pressing reasons to take advantage, had the power to take advantage, and I should support it “for the good of the company”. Well, the company does have its legitimate requirements, but . . .
In these negotiations I was the only one in a position to speak up for not-screwing the employees. And anything I might have to say always sounded lame in the context of hard-nosed executive reasoning. I certainly didn’t have any room to get up on any moral high horse.
But it was my job and my role to speak for the employees, and I did, or I registered my unease with something I thought was not right. Maybe not very loud, not very eloquently, not very bravely.
I can’t tell you how many times a voice in my head warned me that my bosses were going to despise me and laugh at me and write me off as a bleeding heart.
I never went out of those meetings with the idea I’d won anything for anyone.
I took defeats. I had to be careful. I had to retain the confidence of my superiors that I was working on their team. As soon as they started to think that I was flaky or a communist, I’d lose any influence at all, and probably lose my job.
But often after such meetings, after the decision had been made over my head, the result showed that I’d been heard. I never heard the words, “You were right.” But over the years, the pattern of company decisions showed a consistent respect for employee welfare.
More powerful than that, newly hired personnel brought in a higher decency-level. “Birds of a feather flock together”, and the company flock began attracting more human beings.
The employees who cursed and yelled moved on, replaced by civil and sociable individuals. The top management got wise to the troublesome purchasing agent, and replaced him with a human being. The abusive line supervisor picked on the wrong girl, got fired for sexual harassment, and was replaced by a human being.
After twenty-odd years, my manager has almost entirely dropped the pose of hard-nosed ruthlessness. There is a real camaraderie in the factory. People have left to take jobs that paid more, and then come back after a few years.
It’s certainly nothing like heaven. It’s a job, in a pecking order. (And I don’t even LIKE my job—never have. I spent the fire of my youth trying to ‘make it’ as an artist.) At a certain point, though, I looked around myself and saw that my workplace is pretty good, for a pecking order. It’s not good, but it’s better—for me and for the hundred and more other people who spend 8 hours a day in it.
And my big, heroic contribution was to say a few lame words when I felt I had to. It would have done nothing, except that I kept saying them, for years and years. The secret was, there were ears hidden behind hard poses; there was conscience hidden behind hard poses; there was a will to do the right thing, given the opportunity and the excuse to do so. I may have made it just a little bit harder to ignore their conscience.
So, what seemed to help was simple persistence in being a human being.
That seemed to help make a better world.
Do your best to be a real human being in this slaughterhouse. Do what it takes to preserve your own humanity, and then act from your humanity, as opportunity permits.
We cannot know what the consequences will be. It might come to something.
My first thought was, there is no hope: the World has been an evolving catastrophe for over 300,000 years, and that seems to be what the Divine Cosmic Mind designed it to be.
In my six decades of life
the country (USA) has gone to the dogs,
the economy has become a gulag,
the public mind has gone down the toilet,
my body has succumbed to all the indignities of old age—
and my workplace has become a very much better place to be.
Woops! How did that last item get in there???
But it’s true. I look at my own life and I see that my workplace is a different world from what it was 26 years ago when I entered it.
How did THAT happen?
On the off-chance that there might be something more there than random luck, let’s consider it. It might give heart to someone else down in the trenches. Maybe there IS the possibility of a better world—around our immediate selves, at least.
I came to the company I work at after some really bad experiences working for shamelessly exploitive employers. I had been economically trapped.
One previous employer was a for-real psychopath, and I was scared stiff for several years on end. When I finally extricated myself, I knew the smell of psychopath, and I knew the smell of decency. The people I went to work under at my next job were decent folks.
Note: I had a choice, there. Not everyone always has choice, but when you have it, take it!
My new workplace was a small company, light manufacturing. I was middle management: I had to spend most of my days working with and supervising people that worked hard for small money. I did have regular exchanges with the top managers, and I functioned as a kind of go-between, responding to the needs and demands of both sides. In order to do my job, I had to maintain respect and credibility of employees, my boss, and other managers.
It certainly wasn’t all sweetness and light. The owner of the company embodies the fashion for ruthless, hard-nosed business style, and that set the tone for my manager, too.
There was one department (not under my supervision) in which half a dozen people spent 8 hours a day cursing and yelling at one another, and they weren’t joking. I cringed whenever I had to pass through.
Down in the trenches, there was at least one supervisor using his authority to extort sexual favors.
The purchasing agent’s idea of entertainment was to drive people to their wits’ ends.
There was just some plain old personality conflicts and bullying going on.
In the midst of this I had to direct people, hire and fire, enforce policy and rules, and make recommendations about promotions and pay, work with other managers and give input to higher management on questions of personnel policy.
Business is definitely an STS world. If a business cannot hold its own in the shark tank, it goes belly-up, and lots of people lose their livelihoods.
There has to be enough in it for the owners to put up with the headaches involved; the product has to be priced to sell in the marketplace.
It is simple truth that the interests of labor and management are diametrically opposed; they are natural enemies: management wants to pay as little as possible, to get as much work as possible, and to exert as much close control as possible. Labor wants more money, less labor and more freedom.
Fortunately, both Labor and Management in this organization were also mostly decent people, with some respect for the reasonable expectations of one another.
Still, when the hard questions arose, my boss always started from the hard-nosed attitude that management had pressing reasons to take advantage, had the power to take advantage, and I should support it “for the good of the company”. Well, the company does have its legitimate requirements, but . . .
In these negotiations I was the only one in a position to speak up for not-screwing the employees. And anything I might have to say always sounded lame in the context of hard-nosed executive reasoning. I certainly didn’t have any room to get up on any moral high horse.
But it was my job and my role to speak for the employees, and I did, or I registered my unease with something I thought was not right. Maybe not very loud, not very eloquently, not very bravely.
I can’t tell you how many times a voice in my head warned me that my bosses were going to despise me and laugh at me and write me off as a bleeding heart.
I never went out of those meetings with the idea I’d won anything for anyone.
I took defeats. I had to be careful. I had to retain the confidence of my superiors that I was working on their team. As soon as they started to think that I was flaky or a communist, I’d lose any influence at all, and probably lose my job.
But often after such meetings, after the decision had been made over my head, the result showed that I’d been heard. I never heard the words, “You were right.” But over the years, the pattern of company decisions showed a consistent respect for employee welfare.
More powerful than that, newly hired personnel brought in a higher decency-level. “Birds of a feather flock together”, and the company flock began attracting more human beings.
The employees who cursed and yelled moved on, replaced by civil and sociable individuals. The top management got wise to the troublesome purchasing agent, and replaced him with a human being. The abusive line supervisor picked on the wrong girl, got fired for sexual harassment, and was replaced by a human being.
After twenty-odd years, my manager has almost entirely dropped the pose of hard-nosed ruthlessness. There is a real camaraderie in the factory. People have left to take jobs that paid more, and then come back after a few years.
It’s certainly nothing like heaven. It’s a job, in a pecking order. (And I don’t even LIKE my job—never have. I spent the fire of my youth trying to ‘make it’ as an artist.) At a certain point, though, I looked around myself and saw that my workplace is pretty good, for a pecking order. It’s not good, but it’s better—for me and for the hundred and more other people who spend 8 hours a day in it.
And my big, heroic contribution was to say a few lame words when I felt I had to. It would have done nothing, except that I kept saying them, for years and years. The secret was, there were ears hidden behind hard poses; there was conscience hidden behind hard poses; there was a will to do the right thing, given the opportunity and the excuse to do so. I may have made it just a little bit harder to ignore their conscience.
So, what seemed to help was simple persistence in being a human being.
That seemed to help make a better world.
Do your best to be a real human being in this slaughterhouse. Do what it takes to preserve your own humanity, and then act from your humanity, as opportunity permits.
We cannot know what the consequences will be. It might come to something.
truth seeker
The Living Force
What an inspiring first post, ka! This was something I think I really needed to hear today, so thanks. :)
It feels strange to ask you this now, but it'd be great if you could post an intro in the newbies section (link below). It doesn't have to be much but just a bit about how you found the forum.
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/board,39.0.html
It feels strange to ask you this now, but it'd be great if you could post an intro in the newbies section (link below). It doesn't have to be much but just a bit about how you found the forum.
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/board,39.0.html
Dragon Snacks
Padawan Learner
Voluntaryism-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntaryism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntaryism
ka, thank you so much for this, I agree with truth seeker, very inspiring! Tears were coming when I read this...
It's so true, what counts in this world is persistence in being human and acting that way, without thinking about a "grand plan" or anticipating. Eventually, something good will come out of it. But it's damn hard. So congratulations on your effort and your persistence!
It's so true, what counts in this world is persistence in being human and acting that way, without thinking about a "grand plan" or anticipating. Eventually, something good will come out of it. But it's damn hard. So congratulations on your effort and your persistence!
It seems to me that a purely STO world is a Utopian ideal which can never be achieved without throwing the whole universe out of balance. Perhaps the C's could comment on what percentage of STO it would take to achieve a balance, and we could work from there.
When I was in New Guinea, I watched a whole village of natives build a house for a newly joined/married couple. From the ground up. The men felled the trees and cut them up and positioned them, then built the floors, walls, and frame for the roof. The women busied themselves with palm fronds, thatching them for roofing material. It was awesome to watch.
It was not a small house.
I have noticed that other communities also do this, in particular, the Amish.
In my opinion, this would go a long way toward establishing community spirit and bonding, while at the same time removing the necessity for the women to have to go out to work to help pay a mortgage. There is no mortgage.
In New Guinea, the women tend the gardens and grow Taro, their staple food. Men go out fishing in their lakatois. The women make nets and baskets and the men make bows and arrows and hunt fruit bats etc. Wonderfully artistic people, and truly STO.
I read elsewhere that leaders can be selected from groups of ten households.
Then each ten of these leaders can select its leader, who will become the leader of a hundred. Each ten of these leaders of 100 can select their leader, and they will become leaders of 1000, and so on it goes, until there is selected the leader of the nation.
These leaders could be males or females, or of different religious leanings.
They would only need to represent the people who elected them.
When I was in New Guinea, I watched a whole village of natives build a house for a newly joined/married couple. From the ground up. The men felled the trees and cut them up and positioned them, then built the floors, walls, and frame for the roof. The women busied themselves with palm fronds, thatching them for roofing material. It was awesome to watch.
It was not a small house.
I have noticed that other communities also do this, in particular, the Amish.
In my opinion, this would go a long way toward establishing community spirit and bonding, while at the same time removing the necessity for the women to have to go out to work to help pay a mortgage. There is no mortgage.
In New Guinea, the women tend the gardens and grow Taro, their staple food. Men go out fishing in their lakatois. The women make nets and baskets and the men make bows and arrows and hunt fruit bats etc. Wonderfully artistic people, and truly STO.
I read elsewhere that leaders can be selected from groups of ten households.
Then each ten of these leaders can select its leader, who will become the leader of a hundred. Each ten of these leaders of 100 can select their leader, and they will become leaders of 1000, and so on it goes, until there is selected the leader of the nation.
These leaders could be males or females, or of different religious leanings.
They would only need to represent the people who elected them.
ka
Padawan Learner
MusicMan said:
Hi, music man:
My mind has been moving in a direction similar to yours on the topic of creating a new world, but you clearly know substantially more than I do about the way other cultures do things.
I was really impressed by a point David Graeber made in his recent book Debt: the First 5000 Years. He describes many customs of economic interaction practiced in "primitive" non-market societies; and at the end he says that it's liberating to know how very differently various societies have handled the issues that all human societies have to deal with.
The powers that be in the present global capitalist world, he says, want us all to think that their way is the only viable way--but it ISN'T.
I've been reading history for years, with these questions in the back of my mind; and right now I've got a stack of anthropology books on my coffee table, as my attempt to stretch my own ideas about what might be possible.
My knowledge of what anthropological writings would be most valuable for this purpose is almost nil. I just read the Wikipedia article on history of anthropology and took some shots in the dark.
Maybe you, or someone else on the forum more deeply informed on the anthropology literature could steer me in the most rewarding directions.
Mod note: fixed quotation box.
ka said:
"I've been reading history for years, with these questions in the back of my mind; and right now I've got a stack of anthropology books on my coffee table, as my attempt to stretch my own ideas about what might be possible.
My knowledge of what anthropological writings would be most valuable for this purpose is almost nil. I just read the Wikipedia article on history of anthropology and took some shots in the dark.
Maybe you, or someone else on the forum more deeply informed on the anthropology literature could steer me in the most rewarding directions."
I have never studied anthropology, ka; I can only state what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears, and express an opinion about that.
My advice would be to travel to other places and absorb their culture, while you are still young enough to appreciate it. I was lucky enough to have been in the Navy, and saw a lot in my twelve years.
"I've been reading history for years, with these questions in the back of my mind; and right now I've got a stack of anthropology books on my coffee table, as my attempt to stretch my own ideas about what might be possible.
My knowledge of what anthropological writings would be most valuable for this purpose is almost nil. I just read the Wikipedia article on history of anthropology and took some shots in the dark.
Maybe you, or someone else on the forum more deeply informed on the anthropology literature could steer me in the most rewarding directions."
I have never studied anthropology, ka; I can only state what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears, and express an opinion about that.
My advice would be to travel to other places and absorb their culture, while you are still young enough to appreciate it. I was lucky enough to have been in the Navy, and saw a lot in my twelve years.
Buddy
The Living Force
ka said:
Personally, I don't know whose anthropological work I'd recommend these days. There was a time I'd recommend Harvard anthropology professor Clyde Kluckhohn's work because he and Alfred Kroeber once led a drive to put 'values' back into anthropological studies.
Clyde's position was that only values and value-systems provide a basis for a fully intelligible comprehension of culture because the actual organization of a culture is in terms of their values. Unfortunately, Clyde's work was viciously attacked by objectivist sociologists like Judith Blake and Kingsley Davis whose technique involved converting Clyde's 'searching-for-the-right-words' statements into jargon terms (like mores, determinants, norms) so that only they fully knew what they were saying, even when it seemed to impress other readers. So, basically, they were attacking their own creation and not fully understanding what Clyde was trying to do and for which he could have used some help and support. Can you tell I'm disgusted?
Think about it, how would you describe the QFG or Cassiopaea group 'culture' without referencing values related to various activities from dietary experimentation to truth-telling? You couldn't do it. All you'd wind up with is a laundry list of items with no discernible relationship to each other that could just as well be arranged alphabetically as in any other manner. Hardly a living picture of an evolving assemblage of human beings living and working in concert.
Turning to the concept of ponerization, I think 2008 was the year of the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partnership with universities and I would trust even less of the literature written on related subjects from that point on.
You can read more about that on this tekgnostics blog that also has some excerpts from original reporting done by The Guardian’s Nafeez Ahmed:
_http://tekgnostics.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-minerva-initiative.html
Maybe others on here have better ideas for you.
