There is a paradox in the way that creativity is expressed in the West.  Many arts are undertaken alone.  For example, the painter, the sculptor, the author and even the musician often compose their work with no one else present.  Yet, the subject of their inquiries often revolves around the nature of relationship.  The relationships explored might be specifically the relationship between individual and god, individual with another individual, individual with society, society with god or even the nature of relationship itself.

I can be a little slow.  It’s only now I realize that working alone exploring aspects of not being alone, exploring relationship, is inherently incongruent.  Working alone, insights tip in the direction of sensitivity to when relationship goes awry.  The artist in the West often chooses a medium and context (working by himself or herself) that predetermines the insight outcome.

That insight would be that we are alone.

I am observing the converting of the young in our society from a culture touting independence with conventions that reinforce individuality and allegiance to feeling alone to a new web-based culture that encourages sharing, reverence for the commons, transparency and doing things in mass.  I anticipate that the experience of…

On the autism rights and neurodiversity blogs in July, fury erupted around the radio show host Michael Savage’s comments that autistic kids were brats.

Savage said that autism was a “fraud, a racket.” He went on to say, “I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is.”

The rage of autism advocates communicated quickly. Home Depot, Aflac, Sears, Budweiser, Direct Buy, Cisco and Radio Shack withdrew sponsorship before the end of the month. Radio stations dropped the show.

As an activist and organizer, I feel like what I observed was a social change miracle. Society likes to keep its anomalies and minorities invisible. Savage’s words have revealed the power of a group that will not hide.

Deep into this great transition from a capitalist, hierarchical, patrifocal society to the horizontal, aesthetic-based, partnership society, events occur that provide a window into the future. Neurodiversity is almost invisible at present. It is becoming a central focus of society very quickly. This last July was a coming out party.

Autism and Asperger’s rights represent the third wave of genetic justice. Civil rights, the first…

The economy is swooning. Assets are transforming into fertilizer, being plowed into the fields as we prepare for the next stage of our social evolution. The seeds are planted. What we’ll be eating will be different from what’s come before.

The age for the onset of puberty has plummeted. Diet has dramatically cut off cerebral neurological development by accelerating pubertal onset by four years or more. Early puberty testosterone surges in males and females has halted synapse production, curtailing abstract thinking, inhibiting the human, natural ability to make connections, to understand, to appreciate, to experience revelation.

This process will change with the radical diet changes coming in the near future. High-fat, high-carb, high-protein diets will be replaced by diets that our planet can support. Pubertal timing will adjust and our children will reach puberty later. As a species, there will be radical repercussions.

The hidden will become available. The subtle will become easily accessible. The obvious will become uninteresting.

Watch closely the trajectory of pubertal timing. After diet has changed and we are back on track toward achieving puberty around 16–18, we can estimate when this epoch of transition will be settling down.

Our brains developed as a mammoth appreciation…

I study conditions characterized by maturational delay with the idea that those individuals represent an older matrifocal social-structure precursor to the patrifocal people around today.  Our time is an era of synthesis as a very ancient matrifocal and a 6,500-year-old patrifocal social structure merge.  This merger is the social equivalent of our two brain hemispheres becoming balanced, with the unconscious and the conscious becoming friends.  Imagine what life would be like if our unconscious didn’t feel that so much content needed to be hidden.  Imagine the resources that would be available if energies weren’t devoted to keeping up barriers between conscious and unconscious material.  Ways to cross the line to the unconscious is one of the specialties of the matrifocal-focused.  It is one of the gifts they bring to the integration.  These are the artists, dancers, musicians, gifted athletes and the autistic.

I make a number of predictions concerning autism.  Some have been supported by the literature, some have been ambiguously supported and some go unsupported where no studies have been done.  I propose that the following apply to autistics that come from families exhibiting maturational delay, such as left-handedness.  The specifics of how this model makes these predictions can…

Lee Goodman has a talent for being present when my life takes a radical shift.  In high school, as we became close friends, Lee introduced me to the hippie protest movement.  In 2002, Lee brought me back into the protest movement when he invited me to a peace march in Northbrook.

Four days after returning from the United States Social Forum, Lee and I were in my living room discussing the commercial possibilities of an application my firm was developing when that underground aquifer of inspiration offered me a taste and then complete emersion of an idea.  Yet, it was more than an idea.  If felt like I was looking into a window of how the future would unfold.  Directly connected to the revelation in the convertible with Marcia earlier in the week, the idea was about interconnection, the neotenization of society, with an outline of specific features of the next step in the transformation of our species.  It hit me as Lee stood to leave to head back home.  I rose, my tongue between silence and stuttering as I watched him depart.  Later in the week, I called Lee to share the vision.

Integrated into the online campaigns being…

Friendster appeared and evolved into My Space and another variation, Facebook. Other forms are emerging and filling different niches. Linkses serves the business community. Change.org enhances the nonprofit world and empowers the individual seeking change. Google is seeking to create universal social networking software. Social networking variations are appearing overseas.

It is one of those unique moments not unlike when dinosaurs evolved feathers or when humans began to sing. Social networking has the potential to transform culture in several complementing ways, quickly, in a fashion that allows for deft adjustments to a changing environment.

First, it’s cheap. Second, it’s easy. Third, it encourages participation by those with time, rather than by those with money or resources. Entry level facility can be developed in minutes.

Anyone with specific interests can find others of similar inclination, empowering both by their being members of a group. Human hubs with many connections can thrive in an environment that exhibits this characteristic and offers ways to exercise the gift. The creative can share their creations. The shy can reveal the inner self. The curious can explore. Leaders can lead. The technologists can construct and modify.

Where is this networking headed?

Prepare for a cascade.

Power…

This last week we observed repercussions of a clash between a quickly integrating world and a financial elite seeking to enhance its wealth and power by legislating minimal regulation with no transparency. Corporations wished to experience no accountability by their behavior. The result, in this new integrated world, is the beginning of the end of American Capitalism.

What happened between Monday and Friday of last week happened over many months earlier in this century. On Monday, the elites realized that by creating financial vehicles whose sole purpose was to generate exponential wealth, they had manufactured a mythology that had crashed. By Friday a run on 3.4 trillion dollars of money market funds had begun, the equivalent to the savings deposits withdrawal dynamic that occurred in the 1930s. The Government decided to do what governments do – shield the interests of private institutions – to protect the corporations whose behaviors were destroying savings.

The integration of the financial world has exponentially decreased the time that the crises of confidence had spread across the planet. It is now understood that with no transparency, regulation or accountability the elites had created fictitious wealth and hid the location of fiction in the system.

It…

I use an image to explain the relationship between different activists’ intervention philosophies. The image is the teeter-totter. On both the left and right, political activists engage tactics that are part of strategies for change. They seek to move the center, the status quo, the conventions of society located in the present, in the direction of the past or the future. The Right seeks that we withdraw to behaviors society threatens to abandon. The Left works to seek to achieve changes that have not yet been engaged.

At present, with the Right in America having so successfully brought things backward eighty years or more, what with the dramatic increase of stratification and corporate control, it seems like the Left is seeking to go backward to the 1970s when there was some obvious forward movement. Right backward. Left forward. However far back the Right succeeds in pushing back conventions, the Left keeps seeking to place its weight on the teeter-totter in a way that changes the center of gravity, forcing the center to move in the Left’s direction, forward in time.

This competition is a might confusing because our societal convention has time marching from left to right as we read…

Charles Bonnet’s 18th century hypothesis that the great Chain of Being intuitively ordered all living beings on a 6000-year-old earth began to topple with Darwin’s biological interpretation of Lyell’s discovery of geologic time.  A static, pyramidal structure with white European males at the top became a horizontal branching of connections over time with white European males as an endpoint in the process.  The West’s idea of progress or societal evolution still prioritizes the societies with the biggest guns and GNPs.  We continue to observe how changing ideas of time influence an understanding of our origins.

Stephen J. Gould heavily emphasized the power of the concept of contingency to suggest that humans, let alone a particular group of humans, should not be elevated as the inevitable peak of any pinnacle of evolution, biological or social.  Predicated on the utility of adaptability as the only real criteria for existence, each serves his/her/its role in the whole.  No one is any better than any other.  We are all the children of chance.

There are other, complementary ways of looking at this.  These other ways have to do with further refining our relationship with time, accompanied by a flattening of hierarchy and a focus…

How would an Obama presidency look if he continues to encourage and utilize the personally empowering, horizontal social networking infrastructure created during his campaign?  As a person observing an important step in our evolution beyond capitalist democracy, I seek evidence of this kind of profound systemic change.

The Peace, Justice and Environment Project (PJEP) came together almost a year ago as several members of the Illinois Coalition for Peace & Justice (now called the Illinois Coalition for Justice, Peace and the Environment) needed a separate organizational infrastructure to grow and mange the quickly expanding concept as it bridged to other states.  The initial focus was to seek practical ways for small, local Illinois grassroots organizations to become increasingly politically empowered by offering them easy online access to each other so that they could form temporary ad hoc coalitions while at the same time making available a number of unique online resources.  At this time, almost 1000 organizations in 29 states are integrated into the network.

In its first year, PJEP concentrated on bringing resources and tools down to the level of the local organization or the chapters of national organizations by providing them the kinds of online capabilities reserved for…

That a young, half-black, half-white man has achieved the position of Democratic nominee for the presidency is, to say the least, unexpected.  It was a black friend that alerted me that in the U.S., prejudice, antipathy toward minorities, is so deep that a person showing any evidence of African genetics is described as black.  A new paradigm has been emerging the last few years.  Advertisers seeking to communicate with the young frequently use mixed-race actors, often of difficult-to-interpret, unique blends, in their advertising imagery.  The hybrid is becoming popular at several levels.  Hybrid vigor as opposed to mulattos slandered is growing stronger as an undercurrent in contemporary intuitions for what is right and good.

Obama is a rarity among politicians, a walking congruity.  He speaks of bridging opposites.  He himself is that very bridge.  What is extraordinary is that this walking, talking metaphor goes even deeper.  A rarity among politicians, Obama maintains his message at deeper levels.

Below the surface, Obama has encouraged a candidate support structure characterized by social networking.  Social networking features a seemingly infinite number of spontaneous interconnections empowering the participants with knowledge of people and events far from their immediate area.  Users of social networking experience…

Some historians of culture have hypothesized that the great flood stories surfacing as early as the Sumarian Gilgamesh epic and later in the Old Testament are the written traces left from thousands of years of oral traditions describing an actual event. The event would be the creation of the Black Sea, when the Mediterranean broke through the Bosporus and created in a geologic nanosecond a huge, new body of water. That geologic moment has been estimated to have lasted perhaps 2 years, the time it took to fill a basin formerly populated by thriving land based ecosystems and, so the story goes, human beings.

Radio and television, democratizing forces before co-option by corporations, offered an experience of the commons. Though these were one-to-many communications, content often served the many instead of the few. There was a shift as the few successfully guided the message of media to be about how profits could be best achieved.

Radio and television learned to encourage a common frame of reference–a personality-based consumer culture–that offered none of the experience of the commons. Producer/advertiser and consumer formed an exhibition/evaluation feedback loop, not unlike the dynamics of runaway sexual selection. Producers/advertisers created mountains of consumables as consumers…

A pidgin is a kind of quasi-language composed of the pieces of more than one language crunched together when speakers of different languages are forced to communicate. Pidgins vary from place to place depending on the languages involved. For example, English in combination with local languages have created several different pidgins around the world.

In some communities, a pidgin gives birth to a creole. If children grow up listening to a previously unconnected smorgasbord of words and phrases, those children will provide those words and phrases grammar, syntax and the other civilized accoutrements of communication. In a single generation, a creole is born. Strangely, this creole is not as unique as you might imagine.

Creoles born of pidgins across the planet use an almost identical grammar, syntax and language structure. It seems that great minds think alike, in this case revealing a universality of thought. But the roots of language suggest a deeper hidden source for this way of thinking. There is only one language in the world with deep structural similarities to creoles born of pidgins.

That one language is sign language.

Sometimes when watching people talk, I become mesmerized by the movement of people’s hands. It’s obvious when…

In 2006, Steven Johnson came out with a unique little book called Everything Bad is Good for You. In this book, Johnson explores the possible positive repercussions of constant exposure to specific elements of popular culture, including gaming, reality TV, online experiences and film. His conclusion is that there might be powerful positive effects from these peculiarly self indulgent endeavors that include increased IQ, sensitivity to associational understanding and an ability to defer satisfaction to achieve long-term goals.

Counter intuitive, indeed. Fascinating, nonetheless.

When I was young, I did not often eat sweets or candy. My eyes were on a different prize. Before I could read, I was “reading” comic books. All my allowances and other monies went toward DC and later Marvel hero comic magazines. On Saturday mornings, I would walk, usually by myself, almost three miles to Winnetka, to the only comic book store in the region. In the 50s, a seven-year-old could wander miles in many suburbs with no concern.

Able to buy perhaps a third of the titles I adored, every week I was faced with a decision. With a quarter, I could buy two comics. Justice Leagues of America was my favorite followed by Superman,…

The revolution has been going on for some time now. It’s moving from the bottom up. As is usually the case, it begins with the young.

Neoteny is the process whereby the infant features of a species emerge in the adults of the descendants. For example, our chimpanzee-like infant progenitors had small jaws, big heads and big eyes, often walked upright and were extremely curious and playful. These features worked their way up in age with every descendant subspecies until, after several million years, they became features of human adults.

How “new” manages to appear later with time is a feature of the various scales of evolution or transformation: biology, society, ontogeny and biography. Very specific hormonal and neurological processes guide these transformations. Though the transformations of neoteny are all around us, perhaps because they are everywhere, they are difficult to see.

One of the most powerful characteristics of newborns and new beings steeped in the matrix of creativity and play is narcissism. This narcissism often masks the presence of the creative. This masking is particularly true when evident in adults, as we tend to pay less attention to the seeming selfishness of those lost in experiences of satisfactory self…

Moveon made a choice a few months ago not to integrate social networking features into its website but instead to suggest to members that they sign up with an established social networking provider, Facebook.

I was surprised.  Then, thinking about it, it makes sense.  Moveon is a centrally organized, hierarchical, nontransparent organization.  Social networking is profoundly horizontal, encouraging novel inventions by exhibiting the ideas that move the fastest through the network.  Moveon would no doubt have profited from the high quality information it could gather on ideas its membership was producing.  Then it would have had to address numerous little revolutions as people feeling empowered would want to see their ideas made real.

Moveon membership is mostly old folks.  The demographic is boomer.  Social networking is mostly young folks.  There is a clear difference in structural styles emerging between boomer and the young.  Obama’s message and fundraising focus is focused in no small way on the social networking paradigm.  For example, the Obama website offers a “friends asking friends” feature where you can watch how much money you raise through the people you bring in.  It will be interesting to see if this method continues into a possible Obama Administration…

It is not beyond consideration that the web is beginning to exhibit emergent characteristics that would suggest how intelligence evolves. Online, we can assume that consciousness exists. Hundreds of millions of consciousness derivations are behaving, invested in specific personal outcomes. Unexpected synergies are beginning to surface. Observing this online evolution, we might form tentative hypotheses on how earth’s biological infrastructure evolved.

Developing theories of biological evolution that presuppose that consciousness exists is not the same thing as presupposing that a mythological god intervened to both start the process of evolution and makes sure that the process unfolds to his or her satisfaction. Presupposing that consciousness exists, thinking outside the box of not considering god as a variable that you cannot isolate and weigh, you offer space for alternative conclusions. We tend to constrain our thinking by not taking into consideration the very thing that makes our thinking unique, consciousness, and the possibility that consciousness in not an emergent feature of evolution but the very instrumentation with which evolution plays, the ocean that the fish is unaware of.

In other words, instead of beginning your evolutionary theorizing by presupposing that god does not exist nor have influence on biological evolution, we…

Like cops with water cannons at mass protests, we’re seeking to sweep the streets of prophets, hoping those that want the future now will go away.

Television offers few visions but its own:  be afraid, buy now, be skeptical of change.  If there’d been TV before the Civil War and woman suffrage, the pundits would have scoffed at the end of slavery and a women’s vote, until they arrived.

Do we really think that the United States is not going to follow Europe?  National health care is coming.  Secular humanism is our future.  A politics of peace is on the way.

Our prophets are not the people on TV, but ourselves.  We know what the coming changes look like.  We know the way we want the world to be.  Some of us are in the streets holding signs up.  Most of us are grumbling to our friends.  Still, it doesn’t take a psychic to see what’s coming.

Turn off the TV.  Protesters are expressing mainstream, deep desires.  Prophets are being transformed into pragmatists as the impossible becomes the probable, and the probable becomes the truth.  Change is not the future; change is now.