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Paradigm-Shifting Questions

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This section of the site will be continually evolving. I am initially seeding the site with a few questions that have been asking me —  rarely asked questions (RAQs) that interrupt my sleep at obscenely early hours. Below I'm taking a first pass at responding to them. I don't expect to ever achieve the perfect list of questions, much less the "right answers." I'll be presenting my responses as they evolve. I expect to be engaging wiser souls who will help upgrade this from a self-dialogue into a more useful collective imagining. and, as the site becomes known, I will begin including actual FAQs.

Why is our world in the state it's in?

Below is my view of the planet from 100,000 feet.

I believe the current state of our nation and our world is the direct and inevitable consequence of a worldview that has been dominating the corridors of organizational power in industry, governments, media, health, education, even the structures of our major religions, for quite some time.

In After the Clockwork Universe, Sally Goerner does a wonderfully comprehensive and articulate job of describing this pandemic worldview. She refers to the dominator culture that has pretty much been dominant in civilizations for the last 5000 years. This dominator culture has been augmented and strengthened by what she calls clockwork thinking, the mechanistic, reductionistic, separatist way of seeing reality that began with Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, et al, some 400 years ago.

This clockwork-enhanced dominator worldview has become as water to the fish throughout our organizing forms throughout all sectors of society. This cultural web has become woven into the fabric of our beliefs, our ways of seeing, our thinking and our language.

This dominator worldview has brought us much "progress"—but is proving to be disastrous for life on this planet. As Gregory Bateson might put it, we've made a major "category error" in applying clockwork thinking to our social systems—our organizations—our social organisms. Clockwork thinking works pretty well for inanimate things but can be toxic for life.

This dominant dominator worldview skews us at every turn. It warps who we think we are and why we think we're put on this planet. It defines success in very narrow and self/other destructive ways. It justifies weaponry in the service of "morality." In deifying the finite win-lose game in the world of organizations and leadership, this worldview is moving our planet toward a lose-lose conclusion.

All of life, especially our most complex natural and social ecosystems is increasingly endangered by this old, but pervasively dominant worldview.

This worldview sets people against nature and people against people — a vicious accelerating cycle of increasing waste, contamination, poverty, violence, global warming, We are doing an incredibly efficient and effective job of fouling our nest! We are approaching a point of no return.

Can these potentially disastrous global trends be reversed?

We've more than enough resources and intelligence available not only to reverse these disastrous trends, but also to evolve life on this planet to unimagined levels of true wealth.

This web site is one of countless initiatives to contribute to such an evolutionary shift. In TheInfiniteGames.org (TIG) we focus on supporting those "infinite players" who are committed to transforming organizations and systems of organizations. Generative Capacity-Building as a Core Organizing Strategy provides an overview of why such a shift will inevitably become attractive for all organizations whose purpose is to contribute to the true wealth of their stakeholders.

What do you mean by true wealth?

By true wealth, we mean all of the core/foundational aspects of well-being — physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. We see financial well-being as being an important precondition to some of these core aspects for most people. We see adequate food, clean air, water, shelter and our basic freedoms as being vital to the core well-being of all.

Our dominant worldview has resulted in our defining success mostly in terms of the accumulation of financial wealth and control over people. This myopic one-dimensional focus has distracted us from understanding what contributes to and detracts from the generation of true wealth for ourselves and for others. From the perspective of this world-view the only game turns out to be a devastatingly finite game.

What do you mean by "unimagined levels of true wealth?"

If you think about physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual well-being for just a moment, you can see that they are life-based and not machine-based realities. They are both/and rather than either/or phenomena.

The greater the true wealth of others, the more accessible true wealth is to me.

My mental, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being is enhanced when I'm with others who are healthy, whole and mature beings. True wealth naturally multiplies itself. There is no upper limit to the true wealth we can evolve to as a species when we finally accept that we are all interconnected—and then begin to operate out of that worldview. When we begin to apply the same level of genius to inventing and playing infinite games as we have to our finite games, things will begin to change in a hurry. And, we'll have a helluva lot more fun in the process. I guarantee!