Cycle 4 Anchor

Hi @Ronen Hirsch sorry I missed the Reading Club proposal. My thoughts are similar to @Toni Blanco 's. If we're going to do a reading club I would prefer that we choose between a range of options as there are other things I'd like to suggest as well that we could benefit from reading together!

@Alex Rodriguez thank you for chiming in, but I feel you left a thread hanging in the air. If you wish to choose from a menu of other reading options, it would be helpful if you found an actionable way to follow that up. Since I am coming from a place of wanting to respect your input and wishes, your comment, even though you used the word "prefer" reaches me as an objection ... and an objection that I cannot resolve on my own.

@Toni Blanco your comments felt like a narrowing of the potential experience. There may be reflections about my relationship with money in this exploration ... but that feels like too specific a target ... and not what I had in mind ... and is probably better addressed in the sequel (Lila). Your last words "I don't know" are better aligned with my motivation in making this offering. The reading club is an invitation to play together with a different social dynamic ... and to do so while exploring something that I feel pertains to our exploration ... in as yet unknowable ways :) Also, as I replied to Alex, unless you want to make an offer to alter the proposal (be it the process or the book), I am not sure how to address or incorporate your reservation.

Part of the issue is that we've been talking in terms of consent/objection but I'm not sure how that translates into the agree/abstain/disagree/block signals in the Loomio poll you shared. We also don't have agreements in place about how we move forward with partial feedback from a poll (for example if someone doesn't respond, as I did in this case). To clarify my position a bit: I'm not likely to protect the time to participate in that but am fine if some part of the crew goes ahead with it. In that case I'd love it if some traces of your conversation ended up on Loomio where I could take them in (even in a limited way).

Another option, which I'd be much more excited about, would be if we set up a container for a reading group that included 1) creating a new thread in loomio for the reading group process 2) soliciting nominations for a text to read from the group 3) choosing from the menu of options that surface via the poll feature, 4) agreeing to times/rhythm for discussion, and using the comment function in the Loomio thread being a place where we can post thoughts asynchronously as our reading unfolds.

I don't have a general rule in place. Since this offering was not on the "critical path" of our shared exploration I chose that vocabulary for the proposal replies to leave space for expression, for you to use them as you please. I am also not treating this as a consent/object proposal, since it is (in my mind) optional both in terms of manifestation and participation.

I am a bit confused about your response. It is unclear to me if you do or do not have time for a "reading club" regardless of what format it takes. If the format itself can affect your availability, then I would like to see a proposal from you that can help navigate the crew towards that possibility.

Thanks for that feedback. I edited my response slightly to clarify that I would not be likely to protect my time for something that I don't have an opportunity to engage in at the process level (I took out the phrase "be able to" to make it clearer that this is a choice on my part). I'm happy to make a new thread and proposal along these lines and also welcome you to go ahead and get the group together on ZMM if I'm too slow on the uptake for that :)

It feels valuable to me to give you space to take the proposal forward and shape it into something that may better suite you and may benefit everyone else. Though it is not critical that everyone participate in this, it feels to me like it has the potential to be formative and so I prefer, if possible, that it become something inclusive.

I will signal you if/when I feel that too much time has passed or if I feel that your availability is holding me back.

Sounds good, thanks Ronen!

I wasn't sure where to put this post, but since it is related to money and Cycle 4 is related to money, I decided to put it here. I didn't think it needed a separate thread.

I am finishing the book Debt by David Graeber. I found the book difficult to get through. I reflected on why and realized that it seemed to me the entire book was about one thing: what happens to societies and to people when debt/money is created. To me the book was a history of the destruction of natural, healthy relationships. My sense is that before the creation of debt/money, or before something happened that required the creation of debt/money, most societies worked differently from the societies which have written histories. In many cases, writing seems to have arisen to account for debt.

I think that when societies are healthy, the meeting of needs and the abundance that emerges is shared by everyone in community. Gifts, food, objects and services are exchanged in relationship. The relationships exist first, and the meeting of needs and exchanges naturally happen within those relationships. Accounting for debt isn’t necessary.

I think the book Debt simply details a multitude of ways that the creation of debt/money degrades and destroys these relationships, and the creation of debt/money happens so that the valuable things which are exchanged can be traded and exchanged separately from relationships.

I found the book tragic, depressing, and tedious.

In writing this post I remembered a video of a woman describing what it was like to live in a Tibetan village before and after it opened to the global economy. She witnessed the degradation a healthy, joyful community after it joined us in the economic system we live in. The video is over an hour, but this description is in the first 8 minutes.

Your experience of the book has stayed with me ... lurking in the back of my mind. A few things have remained prominent in my thinking:

1. While yes the book can be tedious, it feels to me like an important book that sits beyond "likes/dislikes" ... to me it felt like a book that is important to simply know. It is a rigorous examination of our history with money ... the evolutionary partnership that we formed with money played. I think it was,(at least partially) written to target and take down the faulty financial arguments upon which much of our current social operating systems are built.

2. It's been a while since I've read the book ... but one of the things I appreciated about it was how debt (not money!) was used to resolve REAL social situations ... especially conflict!

3. I felt the book was an invitation to reclaim the world debt from its twisted modern incarnation as in "I am in debt to the book" and to bring it back to a basic human experience as in "I feel indebted to you ... and I am grateful for what you have given me ... and I have a natural impulse to respond generously to what I have received from you."

4. I was, and continue to be affected by the (surprising to me) notion that this latter, seemingly natural, innate form of human (non-quantified!) indebtedness is what weaves social fabric: a bunch of people that feel organically indebted to each other.

It seems to me that if there is going to be a world in which "societies are healthy, the meeting of needs and the abundance that emerges is shared by everyone in community", then in order to get there, it would helpful to learn about what we've already tried, what drove us to try it and why it didn't work!

I just discovered that this (follow-up?) book, challenging not just the history of money, but of other established (and apparently unfounded) assumptions about our history, was recently released:

https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/dp/0374157359

I have a .pdf of Dawn of Everything if anyone wants to read it that way. I LOVED it, for whatever it's worth.