I was following a thread on Handmeon where the idea of a Gift National Product came up. A friend offered an interesting statement:
A Gift National Product would indeed be a more inspiring fiction than the conventional GNP that increases with every broken window and devastated nation.
Rules always have exceptions…
… except this one?
Confucian wisdom via A Ku indeed!
don’t treat yourself like a tool (a ku!). Take your life seriously. Do something that excites you. Something that you wake up wanting to do.
I’m taking a course on storytelling. Although I have been involved in community informatics for several years as an activist and organizer on digital divide/digital excellence and community networking, I found this work to involve the telling of stories and general reframing community and what we are about, or what is possible for us.
I was watching a video from the TED conference where Isabel Allende offered the old adage: What is truer than truth? The story. (Variants on this answer may be a matter of translation: Legend, Myth, Story, Narrative.)
I grew up on Grimm, and many mythologies… great preparation for an early encounter with Joseph Campbell via the Power of Myth (where Bill Moyers, another hero, interviewed him). I later made extensive study of semiotics and have an enduring interest in narrative, and the importance of story and discourse.
In recent years Italo Calvino brought me back to the play of stories/storytelling in the work of the OuLiPo — where art is craft that you work at each day, and good art or literature arises from finding the right combination of signs through experiment and experienced judgment.
Campbell’s work on myth and ritual, the idea of the story opening a path to greater truth than mere facts, or perhaps a greater truth in discourse around a story than in any particular telling or offering of an account, and the idea in Calvino that folktale is not myth degenerated but that myth arises out of folktale when the right combination his hit upon, these are all connected.
Storytelling is part of the natural and necessary repertoire of human behavior… it helps us cope and adapt as well as honor and remember. Though stories can be used to divide, their healing potential is critical in this moment. Our creative play can reconfigure our individuality and our collective life.
Don’t support dictatorial regimes.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
– Upton Sinclair
(quoted by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth)
How much stronger does this hold for industry funded institutes or “think tanks”?
What is the difference between funding a pre-determined position (or view) and funding a line of inquiry or research? We’ll take that up shortly in another post. But simply stated, the impetus to “not understand” and the aims of obscuring the matter for others and for public decision making certainly differ in more than degree.
Always rid yourself of desires in order to observe its secrets,but always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations.– Lao Tse on observing the Tao.
I encountered this quote on a playbill for The Shaming of the True many years ago and have always kept a copy of this observation near to hand.