Humberto Schwab

Training teachers from a poor district school made me once again aware of the impact the genetics of a system have on people. They are basically transformed in certain industrial workers, put in front of students in difficult cultural  circumstances,  living in the idea that this situation is the best for everybody.   But  we have to make an environment in which young people feel motivated, we have to organize communal approach by teachers, they have to construct dialogues with one another about there basic task: dialogue with the kids.  In order to do so, it is paramount that teachers have a sensibility for questions that concerns the meaning of learning, working and living. What is a meanigfull life?  is the organising question that should be in the core of our eduactional sytem. For teachers and pupils alike. Let us make learning an atractive part of all our lives by designing  learner userfriendly environments.

As a moderator I chaired the Energylab of the Club of Amsterdam in Girona held 17 and 18 april. It was really an exciting experience: we had gathered  experts from nucleair energy,  biofuel,  nanotech, fuelcel technology, politics and academia. We redesigned the questions om energy and worked from a standpoint of oportunities in stead of problems. We did a lot of socratic brainstorms and used the scenariomethod (so we did the Eurolab method). The exchange between experts on a philosophical level is bares lots of fruits. The cross disciplined brainstorm needs socartic approaches.

We really emphasized the fact that values should be at the base of the reflection on energy:

Children, free access, the quality of life, open dialogue, the person as part of the community and energy as en enabler to realize goals. We do think that considering human beings as fundamental embedded in communities, is creating models of quality which can lead to meaningfull goals for individuals. Energy is then the enabler.

We have four scenarios which can be situated as bottom up society in an emerging country (harvesting energy), a top down society in an emerging country (central energy planning), a top down society in a developed country ( caps and tax) and a bottom up society in a developed country (communicating energy). We see different routes for different countries, but we will end with a bottom up scenario in accordance with the web 2.0 developments in the world. The file will be published later.

As a speaker I was, by Mediaguild invited to assist the digital tv event in Cannes. It is realy exciting to see all the mediapower walking on the sunny red carpet lanes of the seaside of Cannes. Here is the place where people design our visual environments be it for entertainment, education or business. More and more it is of course big money, but in a way there is also the question of artistic quality and professional standards. The 360 content competition, in which film, documentary or webbased productions were pitched by ambitious professionals, was a very nice manifestation of the touch between money and good value. There were also a lot of money persons from Korea or other tiger economies. It is important that people in this domain start reflecting about there activities, that was also my reason for adressing the people . You are designing our world, that is bloody hell doing philosophy so let ’s do it well. The basic question in these domains is: ” how can your product stimulate the search for the quality of life?”. This question is the corner stone of new business that is not only money driven, but mainly value driven. We can, with our products, enhance lower and higher desires within people. A lower desire, I would call a desire that forces a retreat in the evolutionary levels of our innerworld. A lower desire stimulates the digestion of easymades and mostly satisfies desires we had also when we were in the phase of the dinosaurus. Obesity is the most pregnant manifestation of ourselves triggering ourselves in the lower parts.

A higher desire is a desire that enhances activities in my highest levels, that means in the level of creativity, consiousness and reflection. This higher desire product triggers my integral being as a producing and creating being, making all levels active in the service of the higher. A product like chess gives you a real improving of the quality of your life in a sustainable way. Media are so penetrating into our innerworld, they have probably the biggest influence on the way we experience our life, value it and reproduce it. Without fear of being totalitarean we can reflect on the power of media to influence our selves. We can watch pornography which will probably influence your sexual desires and maybe also your sexual fantasies and praxis. We can also ask great talented film directors to make more beautifull movies about the subtile and delicate experience of a soul based love erotic story. Do you want to come out of the movie feeling better or feeling worse?

You can sell your wine to anyone who is willing to pay for it. It takes a lot of effort to make a  good wine. I am not only talking about the work “en el campo”, it is the selection process, the fermentation process and the final phases all need a lot of perseverence and love. It is then a little bit akward to see others earn a lot of money (200%) out of your loveproduct. It is normal for raw materials  - used in different product - to generate a lot of more money then the costprice. But wine is like a lovebaby, it has personality and feeling, it is only available at a certain local aerea  and the caracter is the most important aspect of the wine. In a value orientated businessplan, you do not sell to just anonimous persons, you will share the wine experience with friends and with people who wants to follow your taste and your interpretations of quality. In this way you create value in society by selling a product. So a good businessplan is to make an association with real fans of your wine, you can then sustain your energy.

Art is perhaps one of the most strongest ways of communication, in art we recreate an experience within ourselves that is as strong as the experience of the artist. The artist creates an experience which is basically an attempt to reach the highest level of innerhuman experience which combines sensing, intuition, feeling, thinking and reflecting in a fluid presence experience. In art we see how interchangeable we are deep inside us. The artist tries to make an entity which is so strong that this piece of art will impose the way it will be judged by us on us, it creates its own sphere of judgements.

Art is a way to transcend all contexts, meta contextual human communication is the source in which we find basic human values and ways of human experience.

In our search for new sustainable social technospheres we need art as an innovationspace as such.

We are raised in a century of cumulating freedom. It started with the restoring of democracy in Europe. The postwar industrial high provoked a richness which still is growing in unheard intensity. The embarassing of richness is the cause of a lot of unhappy rich lives. Yet the most strong movement of all, triggered by the widespread rich consumers society, is the freedom movement. This movement was in the hearts and minds of youngsters and adults alike. This freedom is strongly interpreted as the absence of rules, duties and chains. It means strongly an abolishment of any regulating restrictions, be it religious, political, legal or cultural. This “I want to break free” movement suggested an end of slavery but in real was the starting of a new slavery.

The abolishment of cultural and religious restrictions left people with the ideology of post modernity or of “the anything goes’” ideology: it resulted in the feeling that in order to be modern or post modern you should be completely free of any determinating factors in your live. It errased all sort of ignorant and blocking traditional values and parctices. The new citizen will decide for himself what values and which traditions he will absorb. The innerworld got empty.

The synergy between the abolishment of constraints and the enrollment of the consumers society lead to a strong hybrid vulcano of free choices in the market dimension. This market driven and money driven system did gave free space to inhale all the aspects of a pleasure driven paradise. We talk then of course about the western industrialized society. Free from any constraints, the only value that keeps the whole thing together is this freedom of choosing your consumers life. Yet probably we overlooked the impact of these swap on our innerworld and on the growth of the innerworld of youngsters. We see immnes social, ecological problems now, but we have weakened our characters with pleasure satisfaction, relativistic approaches, cool fantasies. Maybe we weaken our internal system by the way we organize our extern world that triggers us. We need proudness, honour and compassion yet we see fear for anything. We see a consumer society that is completely obsessed with risk avoidance. We have so many people useless because of their richness or because of their poorness. We have so many systems that simulate for people their thinking, acting and feeling; systems that take away from them any risky action. Systems that suggest that you can buy your happy live buy buying insurances as if it were consumersgood. We forget that the happiness of people lies within their inner experiences. At the same time we need now strong characters, we know the context that engulfe us now. Probably we need to create again meaningfull context in which we make ourselves stronger. We cannot do this on our own. Just like animals stick togther to beat external natural dangers, we should stick together to beat our common internal dangers. Social contexts constrain you and at the same time give you the medium to evolve to a social character that gives and receives meaning from the fellow social characters. In the end we want recognition from other social characters, we want to be seen by other eyes, we want to be respected. The funny thing with consumersgood satisfaction is that it is fundamentally a yearning for recognition and a way to mimetise the ideal character.

We have to rethink our money driven system as opposed to the traditional value system. Probably we have to integrate again traditions in our public life. Traditions are treasures of community wisdom, that is why we can make new traditions. Designed traditions should entail industrial and consumers values, it should put people in risky human horizons.

We can put education, governmental health and jusitice and safety aside as contraproductive system buttons; we have to design a society around personal growth . Put learning, good life and responability in a model of honour and proud.

Yes Africa has maybe something to offer in this aspect.

There is the possibility of doing some real innovation. Innovation is not doing “new things”, it is about rethinking and reconsidering the way we organize our system that is steering us. Human beings are not fixed or closed entities. They are not like atoms (at least what people think atoms are), as most cultural theories and scientific approaches regard them, without any awareness of this fact. We are interactional creatures which in fact have their identities at the level of the skin, at the boundaries between inside and outside world. The inside and the outside world are both “objective”. We are just positioned between them. The external surroundings trigger our internal world. Different surroundings are caused by different buttons being pushed on. The funny thing is now that we can just switch on the buttons that trigger us: that is the amazing thing called human experience. Only you cannot change the buttons on your own, we need to do this in orchestrated action. Innovation is about creating new surroundings so that we can have a more satisfactory human experience, but this depends of our choice to elect the buttons we push. Therefore we need deep wisdom about our real nature and most delighted state of being. You will not find any of these wisdom in de industrial knowledge society; that is knowledge about fixed atoms (which again do not exist as such). In order to create “good” human experiences we need to question the classical and renaissance thinkers, their topic was the most delighted and happy human state of being.

Now that we are almost freed from heavy industrial thinking and wil come into i-thinking or light industrial thinking, we can start again with he renaissance and dream the best dream. The point is that most people have only heavy industrial dreams and have lost the capacity for light industrial dreams. That is why innovation is always a socratic search: we need a continuous stream of collaborative thinking in socratic dialogues. Without daily training you will fall back in heavy industrial thinking, feeling and acting.

Europe needs self confidence on real facts, it needs courage to express these facts and then use the European dialogue tradition to develop new realities based on these facts.
Central value should be the ongoing dialogue on the quality of life, started with Socrates and still going strong nowadays with people like Russell and other philosophers and Beuys and other artists. This Socratic dialogue is the format for active citizens.

We should change the industrial system invented by Europeans to a system in which the production of good things is stimulated and awarded.
Growth in this system is the growth of value for more and more people.
The web 2.0 change is a start for changing systematically in stead of improvement of a bad system.
We can realize the dream of maximum democracy that means maximum participations of civilians in deciding on regulations that regulates them.
Essential in that system is the sustainable dialog about the system itself, not the system is in charge but the dialogue rules the system.

We can do this by rethinking radically some buttons of our system, let us change these buttons.

Since it is about the quality of the good life, we need to submit our research, politics and business to the valuable and meaningful needs we have not only as individuals but also as a community of individuals with a long term horizon. We will not need false politics if we have good dialogues about the meaningfulness of our needs.

This means transform the economy of desires nto a culture of preferences.

Walking in the hallucinating nature of the Albera I experienced the sublime in the way Gary Zukav felt the quantum radiation of the plants communicating with him. Reading about Buddhism and the retreat from the consumers society towards nature, gave me a strong point for enhancing the sublime nature experience. This is a way of experiencing your body and soul in a complete aesthetic form, leading to a radical transformation of the soul and body to higher levels.

People are constantly asking the question, why should I practice philosophy? There are two types of philosophers.

Those who make simple life experiences immensely complex or even incomprehensible; only clear for them. They are constructing abstraction of abstraction in their own closed mind. They ask us to follow their strict individual mind tour. This sort of philosophy is like art: it is esthetical enjoyable, although not for all.

There are also philosophers who can make complex life experiences understandable, they give clarifications which can help you grasp your own life better. This is so useful that it should be done by everybody. These philosophers help you to start thinking fundamental about your own life. This is a human competence, if you do not do this you miss the whole point of living a human life.