The Right Way to Flourish

I know I have been away from this blog for quite a while. I am working on the book that has hung around for much too long with good results. I will post here soon as I feel I have gotten the key thoughts down. One of my frequent source for posts is the oped columnists, but they are all preoccupied with the reality show called the nominating process. I find it is so far from my sense of what it should be that I cannot but turn away. For those who know I had a total knee replacement in… Read More

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The idea of a virtual reality is a pretty hot topic these days. Googling for “virtual reality glasses” brings up about 100,000 hits. Google and Facebook have invested over $2 billion in acquiring part or all of a couple of leaders in the VR business. But why on Earth would anyone want to spend money to land in a virtual reality when we already exist in one. Our modern culture has created a reality that departs from whatever the real world is like. We live in that virtual world everyday, but have been lulled into thinking it much more precise… Read More

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Tom Friedman raised a number of questions about the power of the social media in a recent op-ed column. Writing about a conversation he had with Wael Ghonim, who played a very important role in the Egyptian revolt. Friedman began with this question, “Does it turn out that social media is better at breaking things than at making things?” And then answered it. > Recently, an important voice answered this question with a big “ yes.” That voice was Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian Google employee whose anonymous Facebook page helped to launch the Tahrir Square revolution in early 2011 that… Read More

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I note the passing of Nigel Roome, one of the pioneers in the business and environment academic world. Many fond memories. Here is a [link]().

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Today, another long and complicated entry, but, for me, one in which many disparate ideas that have made my writing difficult seem to be coming together. I am beginning to see an orderly, explicable development of the ideas central to understanding flourishing, its critical importance, and its absence from today’s modern world. I note the subject of context has started to appear with some regularity in this blog. And rightly so. It is a subject that is not directly addressed in my books, but should be. Our modern institutions are build on a foundation of acontextual or decontextualized knowledge; a… Read More

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Note to readers: This blog digs deeply into the notion of flourishing and Being, and is not easy reading, but these ideas are essential for the transformation of our non-working culture. For those seeking to change our consumerist culture, new institutions and practices built on meaningful relationships are critical. The reasons for this are discussed here. Erich Fromm’s provocative book title, *To Have or to Be*, captures the primary challenge to flourishing. Human cultures reflect the dominant beliefs and values of those populating them. Most other developed country’s cultures and ours are clearly in the having mode. As I wrote… Read More

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Disappointment and anger directed toward what are claimed to be the failures of government to solve persistent social problems is misdirected. Government is not the culprit; the ineffectiveness lies in the way we think. We are stuck in a modernist mindset that sees the world as a big machine. When the machine sputters and fails us, we turn to the engineers and technocrats, and charge them to fix it. This is true whether the problem is deemed to arise from the systems of the government, private sector, natural world, or elsewhere. We tried to fix the financial system that broke… Read More

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As a follow-up to the last post, I just read this [op-ed piece](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/opinion/the-eight-second-attention-span.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region) by Timothy Egan, Egan is bemoaning the drastic shortening of human’s attenuation span. > In the information blur of last year, you may have overlooked news of our incredibly shrinking attention span. A survey of Canadian media consumption by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span had fallen to eight seconds, down from 12 in the year 2000. We now have a shorter attention span than goldfish, the study found. > > Attention span was defined as “the amount of concentrated time on a task without becoming… Read More

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The social/political world is constituted by a myriad of distinct groups of people, roughly distinguishable by a handful of structural features. Sociologists provide us with a plethora of models that vary largely by enumerating the relative dominance of these features. I tend to follow the structuration model of Anthony Giddens that posits that societies differ according to their beliefs, norms, authority structures, and commonly used material resources. The success or effectiveness of different societies can be assessed by comparing the outcomes of societal action relative to some set of stated values. In this blog post, I want to examine the… Read More

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I have had lots of time to think about what’s happening out there in the world as I am pretty much housebound for a few more weeks until my new knee tells me it’s OK to get behind the wheel. The political campaigns have captured much of the news, along with extreme weather and extremist terror events. Both the Republican and the Democratic races are full of negative name-calling and widely diverse policies. The Republicans, in general, are being characterized as appealing to an angry and disenchanted with government electorate. I see a very different dichotomy between the two parties… Read More

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