Daily pages - September 09, 2021

I totally forgot to write my daily pages this morning and my day has never really gotten started. I feel kind of silly, but it also reassures me that the daily pages are an important way for me to jump-start my brain. It’s a technique that works, and I want to stick with it.

Yesterday, I thought that maybe Infinite Game should move to the front of the book, primarily because I kept wanting to refer to the infinite game in the Global Civilization pattern, and I thought that it might need to be a familiar concept. Now I see myself referring a lot to scarcity and abundance, and I’m wondering if the Abundance pattern should also move up front. Slowly, I’m finding that the “principles of life” are maybe at the front of the book, and human/world/earth is later. It might be that simple.

Certainly, there is a cross-referencing that is happening between these principles, and maybe they need to define the overall goals right away. In my notebook, I wrote a bunch of change vectors that are all related to this first section:

(rivalrous) -> (anti-rivalrous)
finite (game) -> infinite (game)
scarcity -> abundance
independent -> interdependent
(sub-global) -> (global)
centralized -> decentralized
top-down -> flat power structure

These all pretty much coincide with a pattern in the principles section, along with a few others. These are the patterns I have so far:

Infinite Path
Greater Livingness
Abundance
All Sides Win
Decentralized Control
Quality of Life

Looking at the list above, I think a possible addition might be Symmetrical Power or something like that, to address the asymmetry in a top-down power structure. In distinction, the Decentralized Control would be about the concentration of power in one group of people VS spreading that power out more in the organization. I think those are different ideas, but it’s worth thinking about it more.

I’m also wondering about whether we need Success for All as a pattern. The idea is that our scope is global and needs to include all people, nature and Earth.

“The greatest good for the greatest number for the longest period of time is the prime directive in our world.” —Tessa Schlesinger (https://medium.com/humans-being-humane/lifes-most-meaningful-concepts-a687e3b4f6e)

If we look at this article by Tessa Schlesinger, the important concepts are pretty well represented: the greatest good, knowledge is essential, acceptance, connectivity.

So, anyway, I’m looking at this section of the book as a place where we may need a few more patterns, and a place where the order of the patterns may need to be reconsidered. I hadn’t thought that I would refer to the Infinite Path so much in defining the Global Civilization, but as I dug deeper into the concepts, I found myself there. Now scarcity (and consequently abundance) keeps showing up in the Infinite Path pattern.

I’m not sure about that. My thinking is that finite games, especially finite games operating in what are essentially aspects of the infinite game (i.e. business and politics) are the result of scarcity thinking: that there isn’t enough to go around and therefore I need a game I can win in order to get what I want. Finite games are allowed within the infinite game, so they’re not going to go away completely, but their misguided use within the infinite game leads to the infinite game being ignored.

But is that an important force in the Infinite Path? And if it is, do we need to explain that we’re transitioning away from scarcity in order to understand the point? My original writing just said that business and politics were finite games and we needed to evolve. Now I think I understand that they are aspects of the infinite game but are distorted or mutated into finite games by leader with a finite mindset. (I think the tenets of neoliberalism are connected to this.) This is the point I’m using in the Global Civilization pattern to illustrate why we shouldn’t count on business and politics to solve our global problems, at least not in the form they’re in now.

The only issue I have with all this is that these ideas have the book diving into pretty deep waters right away, and I wonder if we can’t ease in a little more gently. I don’t want to scare people or make them feel like the ideas in the book are inaccessible. I’m not sure. I should probably assume people are smart, but I also want to bring them into smart, and in that case, I want to start simpler.