Thinking outside the box

Terry Pratchett once wrote, "I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it." Encouraged by what I wrote about last, I'm making a ruling that there is some going on in there, so there's nothing stopping us from getting out of it and thinking further.

You see, the reason I figured the guy I wrote about last time missed the point is because he wants to apply a top-down solution to a bottom-up problem. The things that affect you the most are the things that need to be addressed most expediently. Yes, you have to get everyone involved as much as possible. You win "converts" by demonstrating that it is worth the time and effort to self-direct as much as possible of one's own fate.

There will come a time when you have to go beyond the community; but, when a wider range of communities find agreed to solutions, then the next level of the hierarchy, so to speak, can be addressed (or eliminated, as the case may be ... we may not need as many layers of anything as we currently have). After all, we need roads and water supplies and sewage treatment and garbage collection and energy and telecommunications, and these simply need to be addressed on a larger scale, but we haven't taken the time to figure out what that scale might be.

We'll never figure it out, though, if we keep insisting in thinking the same old way we always have. That's where we are right now, carping at each other with such useless verbiage that nothing at all can get done and the divide-and-conquer types have free reign in, well, dividing and conquering. We're not doing ourselves a favor by not talking. It hasn't got us anywhere and insisting on perpetuating what isn't working is simply not very bright as I see it.

I can't say it enough: we need to start thinking seriously about what is really important to us. We need to start talking seriously about the things we take seriously. And, we have to be open enough to the "other" to recognize that s/he just might have something to say, as an individual, that is worth listening to.