Narrative is important. It get’s us through the day, it animates us to action, it keeps the wheels turning when we’re not sure how to show up on any given day. It gives the knight their quest.

What is a knight without a quest?
Like calling a pickle a sandwich.
A story with no story.
Culture relies on narrative to drive our story.
Culture has no place for a knight without a quest.

The wonderful thing about quests is they are an equal opportunity invitation. Anyone can set off on a quest and the systems we put in place must honor and work generatively with this knowledge of our limitless creative spirit.

Unfortunately, we have inherited and choose to perpetuate and also improve infrastructure that uses limiting narratives to suppress our collective ability to imagine and get awesome things done.

Strange Deceptions and an Invitation to Playful Creation.

The systemic throttling of our civic imagination.

A Crime Against Humanity:

Culture depends on stories. We get along and agree to do stuff together because we buy-in to certain narratives about our belonging, purpose, origin, destiny, ideas, beliefs, values, paradigms of self-worth, so forth…

Fiat currency and all economic systems rely on users (you and I, perchance) to accept the core narrative of the currency / system. Perhaps, not unlike the terms of service you “accept” when using software platforms — whether you know it or not, you’ve acknowledged the terms if you show up and play the game.

When we show up and play the game, we are placing our trust in the currency, in the infrastructure, and in each other to keep showing up and to honor the values/terms/protocol. In so doing, we “buy-in” to the driving narrative.

For example, in the US, “The US dollar is the best currency and the backbone for the global economy.” There are atrocities this nation has committed to try and maintain the reality of that statement.

The strange deception

The strange deception in our economy is that it is designed to limit our freedom of speech and access to modern day gold-rushes.

Barrier to entry into the big market moves of today are sooooo much higher than a train ticket out west. (Mind you, that came with risk to life, and I would not advocate for regression in our prospects and trade-offs, but rather point us toward the next imagining of the kind of story we want to live in and tell.)

Under the status quo narrative and system, wealth generation is designed to have obscene capabilities of return on investment for those with more money and resource than most of us can ever access. The system perpetuates cycles of wealth funneling into more and more concentrated buckets. Rich get richer as the poor get poorer.

Irony…

While this economic system oppresses us, we have continued to support the delusion. We have been told this way is the best way, and half a century shows how our own government has persecuted economists, poets, artists, politicians, pastors, leaders, organizers, friends and more, all for suggesting the system change or, god-forbid, actively working on improvements or experiments — which is the normal human thing to do.

Of course, the ultra wealthy would not want the narrative to fall apart — every dime they “own” depends on our obedience to the system that sustains and growths their wealth. This economy optimizes hard to ensure wealth continues to magically generate for the people holding power, relegating most all of us to somewhat burdened lives, anchored to jobs that turn the wheels of the concentration of wealth and power, tied to subscription and rental based living — transient lifestyle afforded to us by our corporate overlords. A kind of evolved feudalism (some call it techno-fuedalism.) Still we have psychopaths sitting in thrones and claiming divine mandates in their strange quests of validation through the best algorithms, models, and general ability to capture, hold, and redirect human creative force and attention.

We don’t need new apps and invasions of privacy and erosion of our liberties and loss of our creative rights and suppression and outright fraudulent tampering of our voice and vote — we need liberting paradigms in our politics and policy and programming that help us to see and act on new ways of meeting our basic human needs without bleeding out so much of our resource to the lecherous class of investors and ultra-wealthy who prefer capital gains to the healthy longevity and flourishing of humanity.

Get your greasy and greedy paws out of our precious resources.

I have heard that globalised capitalism has permitted astounding achievements in health, technology, life expectancy and general quality of life. The proof is in the pudding.

Pudding is great and all but A.) dessert isn’t the whole meal and B.) I am not eating the same meal everyday if I can help it.

Humans can create and organize ourselves in infinite ways we haven’t yet dreamt of. Seems no surer way to stamp out innovation than to declare and institute the idea of absolute knowledge.

Stop worshiping the process and be invited back into the liberating waters of playful creation.

The idea that we have arrived at the best system for us and that we should not iterate or rehab the thing is an affront to our civic imagination, which again is limitless.

How many are now and have been oppressed in slave(like) conditions to build and drive the hot and deadly engines of the great economies we know today?

See how the patterns of exploitation perpetuate and evolve over time — where wealthy interests continue leveraging breath of life for a quick and bloody dollar. Eg. The carceral system in the United States is a huge cash cow and modern day slave-holding and caste-enforcement system — spreading state-sanctioned social and economic diseases in Black and Brown neighborhoods, and beyond.

We get upset about the abuse and domestic terrorism imposed by our government in situations like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and yet today social disease is administered by the Federal Government and prison industrial complex.

There is an invitation in all of this, as with every house of cards you may feel falling in your own life. We are invited to remember ourselves, have confidence in our imaginations, and trust that when we show up in playful creation together, we will transform and be transformed. As we cultivate creative liberty within, we will more naturally work together to dispel the myths of caste and division that juice the gears of the current arrangement.

…

Gabriel

PLUGs:
The Next System Project, by the Democracy Collaborative
Self Awareness
You
Each Other
Community
Programs/ Systems —> Infrastructure with a Heart