Naomi Klein on Stories
Larry Victor
segments of
Naomi Klein: From Think Tanks to Battle Tanks, "The Quest to Impose
a Single World Market Has Casualties Now in the Millions"
'Is Another World Possible?' That was the theme of this year's annual
meeting of the American Sociological Association that was held in New
York City this past weekend. "We did not lose the battles of ideas. We
were not outsmarted and we were not out-argued," journalist and author
Naomi Klein said. "We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were
crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks.
And by think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think by the
makers of tanks." Klein is author of the forthcoming book, "The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism."
Worth watching.
Lesson: We are free to tell alternative stories only so long as they
don't gain a growing audience and become effective. Then they are
crushed by the Buzzsaw. We should address this issue at the
conference.
Larry
Brian Good
I first became aware of Naomi Klein a couple of years ago when she
reported on her interview with Giuliana Sgrena, the journalist whose
car was shot up in Iraq. Ms. Klein said that Ms. Segrena's car had not
been rushing on a checkpoint as was reported in the mainstream press,
but was simply driving down the road when it was shot from behind.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/25/1516242
I was baffled by the fact that this report was never picked up in the
mainstream press, which never commented on the fact (if I
remember right) that the Italian investigators weren't allowed to
examine the car. It seemed that the news media either regarded
Ms. Klein as lacking in credibility, or regarded the story as
insignificant. I couldn't understand either position.
I don't know whether news media reform issues are essential to
this conference, or a distraction from the true issues. Readers
confused by your allusion to "the Buzzsaw" can get an introduction
here:
http://www.freedomofthepress.net/intothebuzzsaw.htm
Larry Victor
link. It would have taken me awhile to dig up the Buzzsaw reference.
I also viewed the interview re Iraq that you reference.
The news media (which a LARGE majority of Americans use as their only
media) is tightly controlled. This media fed world IS the world of The
Matrix. There is even controlled media for liberals, to keep them
focused on less than relevant issues, and set the frames and context.
I believe the conference must go beyond creating new stories if it
going to have an impact. There are already many good stories for the
new perspective, but they can't get past the media controllers. If we
want audiences for our new stories, we need to consider the whole
system, including creating the stories, facilitating distribution and
assisting the audience to participate. I don't feel we can ignore the
negative reality at the conference, but our focus should be on the
positive emergence of new visions and stories among more and more of
the planet's population.
Most of the interaction of conference participants seems to be taking
place on the blogs. Maybe we need to put a short intro to this thread
in a blog?
Tom Atlee
that are not seen as an overt threat until they are too widespread to
effectively stop. Focusing on positive vision is one, but only one,
dimension of this. And, as crises increase, the potential for
extremes -- both in positive and negative directions -- increases.
We are entering a super-saturated solution in which anything is
possible -- for better and worse -- which is why such a seemingly
innocuous intervention like the story field conference COULD make a
profound difference. I agree that all this is a good topic for
sessions at the conference. -- Tom
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Larry Victor
The DemNOW link doesn't link.
The link works in the email version, or delete the last character "I"
from the url.
Larry
Larry Victor
super-saturated solution, which is my current state of mind. The
constructed "world" in my mind is a field of potential scenarios, from
negative extremes to positive extremes, and many in between. Yet I can
only ever be conscious of a small part of each potential scenario.
This often leads to paralysis of action.
It is impossible to predict what will be a successful catalyst. I
believe that our understanding of much of the dynamics of change
enables us to design (one of our first tasks) a coordinated set of
projects to create the scaffolding (organizing infrastructure) within
which the self-organizing of the multitudes awakened by the new
stories will be enabled. I feel that this level of complexity and the
complementarity of design (often viewed as only top down) and self-
organizing (often viewed as thoughtless emergence of order from chaos)
is essential to create an exponentially growing movement under the
radar of the contemporary elite.
I see our primary activity "organizing-for-learning-&-learning-for-
organizing", with OUR OWN CHANGING, being the focus. At the same time
recruitment should be one-to-one, with each new member having a
priority of involving select others and co-learn with them. Done
properly this could lead to astounding exponential growth. Most of
this could be done under the umbrella of local sustainability. What
is critical for success is not to attempt changing the existing
systems (where we can't be successful), but focusing on creating a
viable new humanity, the societal butterfly, capable of surviving the
collapse of the caterpillar (which will generate many opportunities as
well as dangers). While keeping aware of our dangerous societal
environment, through which our "wagon trains" must traverse, our
attractor to action is our vision of a new world of our creation. "We
shall overcome" needs to be replaced by "We are becoming".
The mix of persons coming to the conference is awesome. Larry
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