Podcast Interview Answer #10 How Ecological Succession Compares to People’s “Social Succession” with Special Warning?

Podcast Interview Answer #10 How Ecological Succession Compares to People’s “Social Succession” 

with Special Warning?

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” 

Chief Seattle

Ecological succession is the process of gradual change in a community over time. It is based on organization that can predict the sense of a new development in any habitat. In some ways, nothing can remain the same except adapting to change itself. 

With nature, if we had a 100 years to spare,  we could concretely watch ecological plant succession in action to adapt to an altered environment in predictable ways starting from grasses, bushes, small trees and larger trees over time to restore balance and order. 

Nature’s ecosystems are complex, dynamic and adaptive with inbuilt resilience and capacity to cope  with environmental disturbances or stress and return to former stability.

What about a community’s systems or social succession to survive a severe uprooting of normal life?  Is there anything that nature’s ecological principles can help people to pass through any such a disaster to a level of sustainability again?

Social succession has yet to be defined in  a dictionary, but the comparison can be made to nature’s ecological succession. The case is made in 3 parts with a few supporting details:

1. Common principles relative to both nature’s and people’s communities
2. What if a global disaster undermines social systems and  foundations?
3. Warning about never losing the collective will

Part 1: Common principles relative to both nature’s and people’s communities

One consequence of living is to change and adapt as one's environment is altered.  The main issues become how to help manage connections, maintain diversity, broaden participation, and foster adaptive systems thinking. 

• we live in an interconnected world and need to think and act globally
• as environments change, adaptations are small and doable by everyone … wear a mask
• transitions are long term and require tolerance and patience
• a diversity of participants are needed as facilitators to help the common goals of survival
• front-line workers become the essential links to survival from janitors, drivers, cashiers to doctors
• a democratic system assures every member steps beyond private rights to common good

Part 2: What if a global disaster undermines people’s foundations and systems?

How can a society survive when people are impacted economically, physically and mentally?  On a planet of 7.5 billion people,  nobody is immune to this novel respiratory virus, CoVid 19, that can destroy lungs and other organs without natural immunity. 

In many ways, this viral pandemic will challenge the important principles of  ecological or social succession because of one reason … stay isolated for safety.  

Individual isolation is recommended as the main way to stop infections but lock-downs inside homes and social distancing are NOT the norms for Nature’s principles of change and adaptions. After a forest fire, the inhabitants draw together even more to support each other’s life-cycles. Unnatural situations can arise:

• individual communities are easily fragmented into fears, scapegoats and self-defensive behavior
• several socio-economic dysfunctions are displayed between racial and ethnic  inequalities
• economic recession can follow loss of jobs, displacements, future employment
• virtual reality grips a stronger hold on online retail monopolies that suppress individual small businesses
• specialized e-learning for in-house groups removes group problem solving and decision making
• virtual relationships are objectified without working and building together
• emotions rely on sensory experiences to feel empathy, sense of fairness and equality which may atrophy
• leaders seek ways to integrate technology into every aspect of civic life like surveillance and vaccinations without democratic approval
• autocratic dispositions that promise instant solutions or panaceas to placate the  helpless, hopeful believers
• wearing a simple face mask to protect everyone from breathing in a viral disease, symptomatically or asymptomatically, as advised by scientists, becomes a political football.

Over time these less than normal routines can evolve into divisive anti-social problems with serious loss of natural affinities by developing more tribes, partisanship and nationalization instead of common cause and effect within globalization.  

Think about Nature who doesn’t set leadership roles ... just common affinity for each organism's right to exist. Nature does not offer miracles...just logical progressions from single cells to complex beings and systems. 

Nature offers the only solution that it is only the collective will, that can make lasting changes.

  Part 3  Warning: Never lose the collective will 

In times of such overpowering disruption of normal standards or routines, the opportunity is availed to make changes and adaptations for a more inclusive and successful community within a better environment for all citizens, including nature’s rights.

• plan a different economy that is kinder to the climate and the planet
• form cooperative societies worldwide to pursue interests in science, artisans, entrepreneurship, culture  
• be resourceful in new developing new technologies  and skills while protecting ecological balance and nature’s rights to exist, regenerate and restore.

Most importantly, no crisis should ever reduce the people’s sense of belonging to and functioning as a community. We must never regress to living each for himself or revert to living within an isolationist policy.  As intelligent human beings, let’s choose to follow Nature’s presence as prerogatives to man-made regulations. 

Imagine if the bees decided that they would stop pollinating … nature wouldn’t survive, and neither would people.   

 

To that end, this solitary birch tree personifies how ecological succession could work in human terms through his experiences. 

Care for your own small space, no need to aggrandize.

Look after basic needs of others in your community, weak to strong. 

Be true to yourself based on your actions, not appearance or other opinions. 

No need to compete, stay content, maintain calmness within imitations.

Understand there is a beginning for every ending, as well as social succession for recovery. 

Whatever else, enjoy nature's communion. Take time to smell a flower and watch a tree dance in the breeze and wonder how nature connects and protects us all.  

Questions and comments are always important and appreciated. How do you feel about nature's principles to help us through this health and environmental crisis?

Annemarie

amarie10@gmail.com

1 833 471 4661 (leave a message for the best time to talk)

https://helpfulmindstreamforchanges.com

 "Nature is full of rules to help sustain each other but there is one great law whether it is written or not. This greatest law of nature is we are all connected ... when we change our seeds we change our biology … when we pollute our food, we pollute ourselves. It is impossible to alter one strand without changing the others.”

Excerpt: Ecological Succession of Birchum Birch

Is this how a pandemic can be visualized? We need People Power to turn it around.

Discovering Plato's Allegory of the Cave in the Cyber-World where Freedom of Education Can't Be Denied

Discovering Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in Cyber-world 

where Freedom of Public Education Can't Be Denied

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.  Plato

An allegory is a story with characters and events that reveal a hidden meaning or a moral message differing between right and wrong. Plato’s allegory of the cave from ancient Greek times still has morals to teach today's citizens undergoing a massive cultural revolution in a formidable, relentless technological cyber-world.  Not unexpectedly, we can share a common human bondage with both past, present and future timelines, but the differences are profound affecting even our youngest people.

There has never been a greater urgency to make the case that public education must remain democratic, diverse and strong; especially for young people who are the stimulus and hope as they inherit the future with greater degrees of fairness, ethics and justice, both to the kinds of society and environment they want to live in.

But 24 centuries ago, Plato started with an image of a large cave descending into the Earth, our natural connection. At the bottom of the cave is a large wall in front of which sit rows of prisoners in chains, meaning that people as public participants need to follow social rules or laws. (I would assume children were not present in these adult affairs.) Behind them is a platform where various puppets and puppeteers are performing their actions or events. Behind them burns a large fire so that only their shadows are cast on the wall. The prisoners do not see or hear the real puppeteers or their puppets but rely only on the echoes and shadows cast by these forms. Their only experiences and only words they can speak are about these shadows, thinking they are the real things.

For example, they may say “look there is a rich man” by pointing to the shadow on the wall. Plato asks would they be wrong in believing this shadow must be a real rich man without deception. Or is the perceived rich man just manifesting his image and desires in order to make people believe he is a rich man with special rights. Perhaps, it may actually be a poor man who starts the mirage and illusion on the platform itself.

The spectators can only ask the ultimate ageless question: do we gain knowledge as shadows of someone else’s reality or do we seek our own truths based on facts? 

From sitting in bondage watching shadows, people know there must be the cave’s opening at the top where they can exit into sunlight, meaning truth or enlightenment.  

Obviously we do not live in an ancient Greek world. Their wall would be more classical knowledge; images would be limited to location, harvests, marketplaces, families, some warfare, many deities to explain the forces of nature and wise philosophers who begat the name democracy meaning “whole citizens able to rule in government.”  Our connection is, as part of the perpetual human condition, that we also care for our environment, our productivity, our families, traditions, and our past and future histories.

What’s happening with today’s technological containment with modern puppeteers?

However, our physical containment is channeled deep into recent technology. We do not watch shadows cast by a fire, unless in quiet repose in front of a campfire shooting sparks into the dark sky. Our wall is the global worldview now where our planet Earth appears as “a tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam.” The audience, including young people, sit neatly within their social rules; but this time, the shadows on this wall are created by the glow of the internet screen. 

Our opinions, our glimpses of reality, our illusions of truth are controlled by the light of the internet, even more brilliantly enhanced by individual i-pads and cell phones at our fingertips.  

So, who are these puppeteers and new kinds of puppets, casting shadows and sharing messages for our behalf on our screens? Definitely, the range of scale offers an infinite variety of acts from which to choose. Once more, the nature of this medium overtakes the meaning of the message where the focus is always on the moving parts without regard to background composition or long-term effects.    

Without precedence, however, this internet medium has enabled, accelerated and extended this focus on the obvious, the loudest, the most theatrical, without attention to personal and social consequences; in other words, this is the brain limbic system fulfilling its key functions of emotions, memories and arousal or stimulation.

And so, it is that the loudest actors, loaded with the most spectacles and huckster speeches, cast their viral shadows not only on the wall but also on the personal screens of the bonded prisoners in our society; including even children, armed with their own devices.

Our modern cave has turned into a clamorous and glamorous social media circus. Each big noisy shadow is followed by an even bigger noisier shadow, without boundaries. Lines are quickly drawn along sexism, ageism, racism and elitism. Furrows are made for nationalism, authoritarianism, partisanship, and extremism. Egos thrive, tolerance suffers, toxicity normalizes, the word ‘hate’ surfaces again and again, human rights are questioned, and society fragments. Twitter-verse becomes the new Twilight Zone where the smallest words have the biggest bangs.

What kinds of problems can happen with the swarm of the biggest players?

The biggest problem is that the biggest puppeteers with the biggest shadows are the ones that proportionately fill both the worldview wall and the individual screens. Often these are the wealthy, academic and political players from corporate owned media outlets; and multinationals such as industrial and medical platforms with plans to profit from and control the masses. 

There is even the rare possibility that one puppeteer with the right celebrity hype and exposures can rise as a demigod to not only fixate the seated crowd but infiltrate the moral public conscience and give license to follow darker instincts.

The biggest immorality of such unrefined media ascension and access is when despots with the biggest microphones begin to shape the attentive populace to fit into their realities, illusionary and false as they may be. The purity of freedom of speech is ransacked by fake news and yellow journalism. Our common moral justice demands that news must rely on observed truths; but history shows how the term ‘fake news’ has been used before by tyrants to cover their own propaganda. There is no other way to explain the phenomenon of an educated man with a strong Christian faith who can blatantly describe an actual photograph of a terrible event with the most comforting lies to suffice his followers…the infiltration is complete.

Back to Plato, both our ancient and modern societies also share this common human bondage. Most people would prefer to remain in chains or keep tuning into those performers who replay their favorite programs. We tend to prefer to see shadows of reality from others, because it releases us from seeking our own truth. At the same time, often these manufactured social images affect our normal self-images to think we have no comparable abilities, skills or results but need a king on a white horse for rescue.

As changes become tougher to face, it’s easier to discriminate, bully, blame or victimize the person next to you who may be watching a different screen. In fact, the allegory continues, that if for some reason we find ourselves outside the cave, where we can find freedom, this state can be very frightening because illusions are more satisfactory for the moment. There is pain associated with liberating yourself from the past or coming into the daylight or enlightenment.

And so, people keep exposing themselves, keep clicking, tweeting and twerking, keep looking at false illusions on the wall and their screens, facing personal traumas, believing there is some sanity at least within some shadows of the loudest puppeteers. Unfortunately, this transformation can also apply to young people.

Can Plato’s truth fit into our modern society?

Back to Plato’s philosophy which is that truth exists outside the cave on the wings of education. The sun is a metaphor for freedom described as enlightenment. This is where ideas flourish, the essences of  love, justice, beauty, and service to others with decency and morality are encouraged. This is where the arts and sciences are nurtured, where the creative and spiritual contributions make connections and bind relationships.

Plato believed that everyone wants to crawl out of the cave of darkness and ignorance and walk in the light of truth. He taught his students that all of us want to be part of something higher, a transcendent reality of which the world we see is only a small part to where our human bondage can unite everything into a single harmonious whole.

Why is the Freedom of a Public Education Essential for Democratic Society?

So how do young people fit into our modern technological social revolution? 

As a captive audience, they have also been exposed to the streaming shadows and fake realities in front of their internet screens. They have vicariously adopted adult roles while often facing media abuse, trauma, addiction, hyper-sexuality, materialism and market manipulation. 

   

The moral outrage here is they are still young; their adolescent brains have not fully developed to make rational decisions or judgement calls. The associative prefrontal cortex doesn’t have the experiential inter-neuronal complexity until their early 20’s to make deductive critical reasoning. 

This transformation of youth culture via a veritable social media invasion is unprecedented, crying for discussions and solutions because young people must remain as our main stimulus to better manage changes in societal and environmental spheres. Can anybody dare say this is insidious indoctrination?

There is no doubt that digital technology saturates today’s educational platforms. Definitely there are advantages to the ability to “connect to specialized information nodes and resources in real time” and learn from social networking, blogging, message boards, Google searches, and Wikileaks. But how does individualized social autonomy explain the difference between teaching and learning via traditional methods in public schools?

My reference is personal experience. In a public classroom there are students of diverse backgrounds, abilities, and goals; including special needs. The lesson objectives are shared equally and collaboratively. Students interact at their levels and interests with a one-on-one teacher who encourages brainstorming by understanding the basics of critical thinking and making consensual decisions.

Public education creates the public where the country’s interests and civic responsibilities are talked about so that every person can hear their own voice and feedback to manage situations where multiple representations, or truths, can exist. There is no one elitist or biased puppeteer to promote his or her agenda with private enterprises. What is the better way to develop citizenship values?

In Plato’s world, the main purpose of education was to “ban individualism, abolish incompetence and immaturity, and establish the rule of the efficient.” Publicly, education was the positive measure for the operation of justice in an ideal state where ignorance was the root of vice. Properly, education started with storytelling to young children, continued with teenagers and citizens with civic roles and progressed as long as 50 years to the rare individual capable of governing the country.

Plato said, “that those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture, will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”  Maybe, perhaps you also  wonder what Plato might say about his “transcendent, integrated development of human personality” in today’s internet world of change?

Our hope is public education with equality for every child minus the bright lights of illusion. We must do better especially for our children’s sake.

The further a society drifts from the truth, the more they will hate those who speak it ... George Orwell

New Beginning for an Old Tired Network Marketing Story

New Beginning for an Old Tired Network Marketing Story

…redemption begins minus the common hype and struggle

Who doesn't have dreams to live above the average day-to-day existence?

Who doesn't want financial security in a changing New Economy?

Who doesn't believe in people helping each other to succeed?

I entered the field of network marketing home business because I wanted to believe in such potentially positive answers.

First, it was about participating in the proactive wellness industry with doctor formulated supplements versus mass manufactured store shelf fillers. Then there was an elixir from sea grass with PubMed references. Next promotion was a tonic based on ancient ayruveda medical herbs with doctors' stamps of approval. And yes, it was easy to justify expensive monthly auto shipments if they were filled with promises of good health. Just to be sure I knew what I was talking about, I completed a two year online course to become a Certified Nutritional Supplement Distributor.

Second, as e-commerce on the internet evolved, it was logical to switch from physical distribution to promote a free application to override search engines to find the lowest prices on products, to help brand local businesses and share in worldwide affiliate pools. Yes, this was the next BIG WAVE with a monthly subscription fee of only $29.

Could it be possible that most people could afford $29 a month to be part of a compensation matrix which paid out over 60% of world wide earnings to associates?

For the first time I heard the term "democratic" business opportunity for the masses. Yes, it seemed the right time to brand myself as fair and democratic home business mentor. 

Yes, it was time to post my Mission Statement because no family should be disenfranchised from the New Economy.

However, you probably also realize, that between the first and second enterprise were years of work and commitment to learn to function as an internet marketer in a rough and ready wild west frontier of internet marketing.

As often is the case, it is only with hindsight, that the futility and ultimate tragedy of broken dreams and wasted time becomes painfully clear. Yes, if you want to, you may compare it to a sad divorce where both parties seem to have tried their best but failed miserably to meet their goals. On one side, the heavy-duty magnetic promoters who set the early marketing standards as proclamations that building lists with vast traffic would lead to easy gold mines; and, on the other side, ordinary folk stoked with dreams without the essential skills were suffocating on their dust slowly.

How has your experience been like?

Would you agree that this network marketing and internet marketing coalition based on so much determination on both sides has fallen apart with such disappointment? Do you have your reasons? Does this mean you give up, feel a victim, or do you revamp, face the truths via results, and join the New Digital Economy with the right goals minus the two biggest blunders? What other options do we have with advancing technology? And is it possible to reconcile the strengths of both?

You are invited to check out a report with connections to the Big Picture:

Internet Marketing Exposed

Right reasons to make Money from Home

Internet Marketing Explodes

Network Marketing #1 Blunder...Be A Dreamer

Network Marketing #2 Blunder...Be A Leader

Getting to Know a Mastermind System for True Leverage

As well, check out the Self-Franchise Report.

What is the ONE system that is complete enough to cover all the bases and essentials of internet marketing but creative enough to specialize in your products?  You can take these tools for a test run to see if they may work for you in an effective, time efficient way with excellent follow-up service to make your company or website stand out with the personal touch as necessary.

I look forward to your questions, comments or mind streams for a better understanding and coping with what is happening to our world and internet.

Sincerely,
Annemarie Berukoff

Note: this is Blog 3 in a set of 3 to help explain the background and reasons for creating new personal website. 

Blog 1: Who Am I? Who Really Cares? Why Bother?

Blog 2: Is There a Better Way to Open the Mind?