Integration with one's context, as distinguished from adaptation, is a distinctively human activity.  Integration results from the capacity to adapt oneself to reality, plus the critical capacity to make choices and transform that reality.  To the extent that man loses his ability to make choices and is subjected to the choices of others, to the extent that his decisions are no longer his own because they result from external prescriptions, he is no longer integrated.  Rather, he has adapted.  He has "adjusted." The integrated person is person as Subject.  In contrast, the adaptive person is person as object, adaptation representing at most a weak form of self-defense.  If man is incapable of changing reality, he adjusts himself instead.  Adaptation is behavior characteristic of the animal sphere; exhibited by man, it is symptomatic of his dehumanization. Throughout history men have attempted to overcome the factors which make them accommodate or adjust, in a struggle -- constantly threatened by oppression -- to attain their full humanity.

Education as the Practice of Freedom, Paulo Freire, 1965

I first encountered these when I was in college, almost thirty-five years ago.  They were unexpectedly rekindled when I happened upon The 8th Habit (see previous posts).

The struggle for wholeness and integration continues, now also in places from which prescriptions poured when Freire wrote.  We must move, as he wrote "into dialogue with others whose historical "vocation" is to become transforming agents of their social reality."

	Can we move nations and people in the direction of sustainability?  Such a move would be a modification of society comparable in scale to only two other changes:  the Agricultural Revolution of the late Neolithic and the Industrial Revolution of the past two centuries.  Those revolutions were gradual, spontaneous, and largely unconscious.  This one will have to be a fully conscious operation...  If we actually do it, the undertaking will be absolutely unique in humanity's stay on the Earth.
	William D. Ruckelshaus (1989)

 
Ruckelshaus, writing 20 years ago, when Donella Meadows could notice and echo his statement, got so much right:

• a journey of nations and people in the direction of sustainability

• in the course of the journey, an enormous modification of society

• a fully conscious operation

• an unprecedented process is an option, if not a necessity

He brought to this declaration the insight that many, many people don't want and will vigorously resist having society recast in a proposed mold. They don't trust anyone, including a majority claiming the best intentions, with that responsibility.  They prefer familiar imperfections, wrongs and difficulties rooted in history to a thoroughly prescribed unknown.

How, then, to make the modifying operation attractive to an unprecedented number of people, practically all of them asking (as they've learned to do) what's in it for me?

Ruckelshaus conceived of a journey, an approach, to sustainability.  It meets important criteria.  Among other moves, the metaphor especially evokes emigration, the personal choice to relocate for a better life, imagined or promised. It's part of family history for so many.  In a sense, it's proven; people know they are beneficiaries.  Although it has one purpose, it also comfortably accommodates individuality – different points of departure, different initial views of the destination, different loads, strides and paces, different routes, different traveling companions, etc. – which is at risk, but when developed is a main ingredient of sustainable society.  We cannot get there without flourishing individuality everywhere.  And people will love finally being true to themselves, as recommended by the wise ones of all times and places.

But what sort of journey is the approach to sustainability?  People certainly are in all the best places!  Should they change places in a grand human shuffle, for the sake of change?  No.  In a world so full of people, in which nations' immigration policies are very controversial and lately dominant cheap energy resources are well on their way to sunset, emigration gets a makeover.  For most, there need be no perilous trip across a sea or hazardous trek over a border.  Instead there's awakening to and movement into present physical location, respective locales.  It's a journey because it's consciousness change and cannot happen all at once.

This is where fully conscious enters, in two ways; everyone participates increasingly as themselves where they can see and be seen, hear and be heard.  Because of disconnections, from places and people, created and enforced by buildings and other structures, highly powered mobility and global telecommunications, there's much that's new and engaging to see, hear, say and do in and with each settled area.

People will emigrate to where they are!  For the sake of sustainable give and take among flourishing individuals, relocation becomes relocalization.  We stay put, yet pioneer by setting new roots, connecting, exchanging and, thus, building a resilient and life-enhancing system.  In time, we discover what we can sustainably send to and reach for in the distance.

In humanity's fourth phase, we'll say we had more, but now we are more.

When I began this project, which will finally catalyze a loving movement so life affirming and life enhancing that everyone is drawn to it as a dream coming true*, I wrote "interdependence design consists of the visioning, pathfinding and arranging that facilitate, in each case, processes of both key-principles-adoption and restorative balancing and integration."  More recently, I recalled that my journey to that articulation included separate readings about working relationship.  Discovery of discrete manifestations of positivity sharing precisely that label was noteworthy and inspiring.  It was a moment of dream-coming-true.  Such moments are this producer's soils, streams and sunlight.

It seems everyone is familiar with the term dysfunctional.  Far too many have bought and daily invest in the belief that human nature makes dysfunction inevitable, makes every relationship a mine field and justifies controlling people.  Their chosen ism makes it so, at least operationally (and then historically), and makes them, collectively, Pandora:  I messed up, the good time's over forever.

What's right about the story of Pandora is that, despite restriction and repression, humans imagine, wonder and choose.  Without choice there would be no designs, humans would make no arrangements.  Pandora's guilt-driven-and-saturated mistake was to confuse her fond, but static memory of the irretrievable past with the dynamic reality it was, which is ongoing.  The memory eclipsed the anticipation necessary for vision, making her effectively dead in life.  "There is always the movement.  What was the movement is the establishment," explained Ralph Waldo Emerson, having contemplated soils, trees and surely more.

Working relationship was the focus of Roger Fisher and Scott Brown in their 1988 book Getting Together:  Building a Relationship That Gets to Yes.  Fisher and Brown defined good, working relationships as ones "able to deal well with differences," and showed how they can be achieved and maintained.  David Holmgren, who with Bill Mollison developed the permaculture concept, in his Foreword to The Basics of Permaculture Design by Ross Mars (1996), opened by stating "The permaculture concept is the conscious design of our working relationship with nature," and went on to include re-establishng our working relationship with nature in his designation of effective action now.  These affirmations of relationships that deal well with differences (even among species), that are functional, are guiding lights by which we can navigate to where we've always wanted to be.


* NOT because everyone will have read my writing, but because of what many do in view, where they are.

I’ve written that the three principles which are the foundation of these considerations are widely ignored, denied and/or replaced by artificialities.  I suggested we can read the relevant history as the escalation and complication of repeated (not to say identical) failures of perception into a massive and confusing distraction with great momentum.  I declared the artificial world that most humans now inhabit devastating, gravely threatening many forms and patterns of life.  Tragically, but consistent with the failures of perception, it is called the real world!

At first, humans perceived themselves as special, yet particularly puny, vulnerable and inconsequential.  Randomly and somewhat arbitrarily applying their distinctive attributes, they sought security (dynamically combines safety, predictability, ease and comfort) in numbers and dominance, in devices that extended themselves in all sorts of ways and in sciences capable of providing new clues to useful advantages.  Quite capable, if not thorough, humans got a lot of what they wanted, but, almost always, more than they bargained for.  Too often, that more roughly offset the desired results, sparking another round of problem solving and problem making.  Not long ago, for better or worse, humans got a tremendous boost and, again, something more, from fossil materials that can serve as fuels as well as product ingredients.

We are living in that sort of mix and continuing to rely on the fossil materials as if they always will be available.  They have enabled us to live more extremely dissociated and fragmented lives.  We, in fact, is a term that is, as a consequence, more and more vague.  Products of combustion and bits of discarded packages and products are inexorably altering the atmosphere and the vast, voluminous oceans.  Life scientists and poets, the seers of today, tell us we cannot go on like this much longer.  Many observers of the fossil materials industries concur, for reasons of supply and demand.

Thus, some of us understand we must successfully invite all to participate in a great editing project, a remix.  To succeed, those doing the inviting must create attractions.  Humans must converge on choices to eliminate from the massive, highly energized mix (nearly) all devices that do not affirm and enhance life as a whole, and to pursue another - an unprecedented - security.  It will retain and maintain what’s useful, while steadily increasing recognition, appreciation and care of each other's wholeness, as well as all other beings.  It will honor the fact that we and our descendants, not the preservation and worship of our mess of devices, are the point of our striving.  It will answer "What's in it for me?" and it will be just.

"I have always been grateful for the tolerance my parents showed for the ambition I had for a strange profession.  Not many young people have the obsession to draw a comic strip, and it was a difficult ambition to understand, but they never tried to discourage me, or point me in a different direction."

Charles M. Schultz

The creator of Peanuts got what everyone deserves:  acceptance of his being-in-the-world and tolerance of his particular determination to produce something meaningful for his contemporaries.  I am one of those who still believes everyone wishes, more or less consciously, to produce something truly needed by and/or meaningful to others.  I reject the dominant notion that only fear and competition bring out peoples' best.  Being reduced to compared and competing things called workers and consumers is a very poor substitute for passionate engagement in callings.

How many smiles and conversations did Mr. Schultz generate?  His was an energy and resource efficient production process.  We need lots more of such giving, so we can do much less compensatory stuff-ing.

"Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

That we choose is our difference from other beings.  That we collectively have erred, beginning with the devaluations that enable and reinforce domination and absentee ownership, is equally evident in the assorted disparities and overt violence of this moment.  Affirming life and enhancing life, naturally of earth, have taken a distant back seat to endless competition for security in an artifical world on earth.  While successful in absolute human population terms, it's endless competition because no one can get enough security.  Those who seem to be big winners don't feel secure and still want more, making less and less available to the absurdly large majority.  That makes individuals standardize for safety and makes greed seem central to human nature.

So many resources are required daily to prop up and extend the truth-denying systems of the artificial world!  Getting them and putting them into play destroys what all beings need tomorrow and beyond.  This process is not sustainable.

I believe greed is a symptom of a created and sustained insecurity, not an inherent flaw.  We can anytime choose to re-evaluate (elevate) our fellows.  We can join with others, immediately and/or politically, to renew or replace systems so they support the true niche-finding and genuine expression that would let our ancient and persistent dreams of health, justice and peace come true.

Groups of people, especially those that are ad hoc and those with volunteer, self-appointed members, face ongoing challenges in obtaining the best participation and contribution from each person.  Not selected for particular reasons by a founding or authorized entity with a purpose, members most likely will move at some rate, not necessarily steadily, from hopefulness through dissatisfaction to disengagement.  Attracted by perceived accomplishments and/or possibilities of the group, each member strives to get something needed from membership.  If it isn't happening, s/he ordinarily can vote with her/his feet, giving up or looking elsewhere.  If members are blessed with good leadership that somehow avoids burnout or if they know how to replace the likelihood of disintegration, hopes may survive and satisfactions may build group durability.  Goodwill and likemindedness at the outset are not sufficient!

Each  member of a group comes with a personal history that is both factual and mythic.  That is to say, s/he has participated in verifiable events and processes and has constructed a story about herself/himself in them.  The constructed story supplies the spoken self-introduction and, typically, guides personal choice-making from moment to moment, as others introduce themselves and further reveal themselves in participation.  Although the group holds attractions for all, the constructed stories vary greatly, as do the consequent and prioritized needs of each member.  The dynamics are complex, indeed.

Replacing the likelihood of disintegration begins with individuals' recognition of the group's needs and proceeds with steady attention to them all.  They are separate from, but certainly related to, the various needs of the members.  If all members will agree to share responsibility for meeting the needs of the group, they can be reasonably certain of rewards of membership.

In Joining Together:  Group Theory and Group Skills, David W. and Frank P. Johnson identified twenty functions of leadership, ten in each of two sets, that a group requires for effective operation.  To the Johnsons, effective means

• reaches goals
• remains in good working order
• adapts to changes in the environment

Because of the counter-productive nature of domination (a shortcut to nowhere), so prevalent throughout human history and so likely to show up in groups of the kind addressed here, it is best when all members, not just one or a few, perform many of the functions, in turn/as needed.  Plus, it's a lot for one or a pair to respect, remember and juggle; more hearts, minds and hands make it thoroughly feasible.  The first set includes task functions and the second set include maintenance functions.  For now, I'll simply list them:

Task Functions	Maintenance Functions
Information & Opinion Giver	Encourager of Participation
Information & Opinion Seeker	Harmonizer & Compromiser
Starter	Tension Reliever
Direction Giver	Communication Helper
Summarizer	Evaluator of Emotional Climate
Coordinator	Process Observer
Diagnoser	Standard Setter
Energizer	Active Listener
Reality Tester	Trust Builder
Evaluator	Interpersonal Problem Solver

The discipline of limiting and eliminating domination, overt and covert, from group effort is key to group effectiveness and requires firm intention and conscious effort.  Training is an appropriate beginning for both existing groups and individuals who will join groups.

I went berry picking behind my house today (south side).  Ripe black raspberries waited for me in the forest edge zone.  The patch is now about seven years old, and better lit than ever after nearby trees came down so that a roof section full of PV panels could produce more than enough electricity for us (all surplus goes to the grid).  We haven't been pulled to pick the berries before this year.  In the same area was garlic mustard I didn't wade in to pull a couple of months ago when I was pulling it everywhere it was easy to reach.  That's a plant that's not native here.  Wouldn't you know; the garlic mustard has seeded and my reaching and repositioning among the berry canes knocked seeds free.

Location, location, location.  And the timing!

Excerpts I've quoted from books by M. Scott Peck and Stephen R. Covey seem contradictory in one particular, although the two sound similar notes of alarm regarding a general and detrimental diminishment of individual persons that interferes with interdependence.  I wouldn't want to build a case with pieces that don't belong near each other, so I'm taking a closer look, with reference to the contexts of the excerpts.  

Covey flatly says only independent people can choose interdependence; the one possible achievement necessarily precedes the other.  His independent person has matured and developed strength of character sufficient for self-ownership and engagement-with-integrity.  Peck seems to say we cannot ever be independent, but the only way to retain that impression is to filter out two closely associated adjectives, an adverb and his indictment of an ideal he scorns because it mandates lives without integrity, outside of community.  The independence he locates out of reach is the lonely place of total adequacy and total self-sufficiency, that sidesteps give and take with other people.  Elsewhere acknowledging that we are called to be whole and unique individuals, Peck says we never quite get there because interdependence, the truth of being, ultimately does not release us. Covey's language is different, but he more or less agrees:

"Certainly, independence is vital; however, the problem is that we live in an interdependent reality. Our most important work, the problems we hope to solve or the opportunities we hope to realize require working and collaborating with other people in a high-trust, synergistic way—whether at home or at work. Having an interdependent mindset, skills and tools are vital, especially now as we work through challenges unlike anything most of us have ever seen in our life time."

S. Covey blog posted 3/19/09

We need good understanding of the relationship of what these terms refer to because so often we lament and dread choices (or apathy: as if no choice) of many others, and jump to conclusions after giving too little weight to what knocked them off balance and/or dis-integrated them.  In such ways those forces and/or ideals made choices for their dreams seem foolish or impractical, compared to choices of adjustment and substitution.  I believe the dreams are eclipsed, not eliminated, and that choices for them are subject to inspiration.  Because it's so much less demanding (in both senses), we must become inspirations.

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.  And, if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost."

- Martha Graham

 

You, I'll bet, wouldn't dream of blocking this expression on purpose.  The questions, in light of the Industrial Age thing mindset (7/1 post), the pretense that Peck described (6/30 post) and the noise and flash all around, become:

• can you find and secure it and
• can you prevent or move out of eclipse, as necessary?