Timothy Wilken, MD
writes: How will we make decisions in a synergic future?

In today’s
world 2008, it is assumed without question that majority rule democracy
is the best way to organize humanity. But what if there were something
better? …

Unanimous Rule Democracy or Synocracy is a much more powerful mechanism of decision making than the majority rule of present day democracy. Synocracy
is a synergic decision making system. Synergy means working
together—operating together as in Co-Operation—laboring together as in
Co-Laboration—acting together as in Co-Action. 

However Synocracy,
which gives us humans the opportunity to accomplish more together than
we can accomplish separately, also requires more from us. It requires synergic consensus.
For any group of humans, synergic consensus can provide a much more
powerful mechanism of decision making than even the best majority rule
democracy carefully following Roberts Rules of Order. Synergic
consensus occurs when a group of humans sit as equals and negotiate to
reach a decision in which they all win and in which no one loses. In
synergic science this is called heterarchy.
That means all members of the deciding group sit on the same level as
“equals”. All decisions within a truly synergic group are made within “decision heterarchy”.
A decision heterarchy is made up of a group of humans with common
purpose. The minimum number is 2 the maximum number is presently
unknown. I believe the ideal size may be ~six or seven individuals.

The
group is organized horizontally with all individuals sharing equal authority and equal responsibility. Synergic consensus occurs when a group of humans sitting in heterarchy negotiate and reach a decision in which they all win and in which no one loses.

In a synergic heterarchy, all members sit on the same level as
“equals”. No one has more authority than anyone else. Every one has
equal responsibility and equal authority within the heterarchy. The
assignment for the heterarchy is to find a plan of action so that all
members win. It is the collective responsibility of the entire
heterarchy to find this “best” solution. Anyone can propose a plan to
accomplish the needs of the group.

All problems related to
accomplishing the needs would be discussed at length in the heterarchy.
The proposed plan of action for solving a problem is examined by all
members of the heterarchy. Anyone can suggest a modification, or even
an alternative action to solve the problem. All members of the
heterarchy serve as information sources for each other. The heterarchy
continues in discussion until a plan of action is found that will work
for everyone. When all are in agreement and only then can the plan be
implemented. The plan insures that all members of the synergic
heterarchy win. …

Originated in the Netherlands in 1945 by Kees
Boeke, a Dutch educator and pacifist, Sociocracy was a way to adapt Quaker egalitarian principles to secular organizations. It uses the decision-making process of consent which
is different than most systems of  ’consensus’. Consent looks for
disagreement and uses the reasons for disagreeing to come up with an amended proposal
that is within everyone’s limits.

Consensus looks for agreement. If a
group wants to paint an outbuilding, consensus would require everyone
agreeing on a color. Consent would require everyone defining their
limits and then allowing the choice to be made within those limits. The
painter might end up with three colors that are acceptable to everyone
and then choose from those. (12/29/08)
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Timothy Wilken, MD
writes: When a task is larger than the abilities of a single individual
it requires co-Operation. If you want to lift a thousand pound sofa you
will need help. Two individuals working together can accomplish more
than one individual working alone.

One thousand individuals working
together can accomplish much more than the same individuals working separately.
Interdependent systems are much more powerful than independent systems.

Humans are the most complex form of life in known universe, and we spin
a web of complex relationships to meet our needs and wants. They allow
for division of labor. It is by dividing labor, and becoming
specialized, that we humans are able to increase our standard of living
almost without limit. If each of us had to provide all our own needs
and wants, we would have to be the jack of all trades, and the master
of none. We humans joined together to gain the advantage of the
division of labor. When we divide labor, each individual can become
master of one trade. The individual can then produce a single product
much more efficiently then he could produce hundreds of different
products.

We humans have created complex webs of interdependence based
on our division of labor. Division of labor can be quite simple, as
when the husband agrees to carry out the trash, while his wife cooks
supper. Or it can be very complex, as in a large company, where the
tasks are divided among hundreds of thousands of employees.

For
humanity, our choice was simple. Become interdependent or retain the
quality of life of the plants and animals. Our mothers and fathers, our
grandmothers and grandfathers, our great grandmothers and great
grandfathers – they have already made the choice for us.

We modern
humans are bound together in total interdependence – this means we are
totally dependent on each other. Whether we like it now or not, really
doesn’t matter. Look in your pockets, we can’t go back 10,000 years
now. We don’t know how to live in a true world of independence.

We
could not survive without the tools of our interdependence. The animals
live their lives without the tools of interdependence. They live life
naked with no possessions. They catch their food with tooth and claw –
killing and consuming plants and animals to survive. They are dependent
on plant and animal tissue for survival.

We humans share the animal
body and are no less dependent on animal and plant tissue for our
survival. However, our intelligence and our interdependence allows us
to cultivate the plant and animal tissue we need in our gardens, farms,
ranches, nurseries, and hatcheries. …

Abraham, Buddha, Confucius, and
Jesus understood the underlying connectedness of all humanity. Their
admonitions to us contain high awareness of our human INTERdependence.
This is why they taught us not to kill, not to steal, not to molest,
not to fraud, not to coerce.

They understood that the conflict of
Adversity was not for humankind. They understood that the indifference
of Neutrality was not for humankind. They understood that humans were
meant to be Synergists.

So, they taught us to be our brother’s keeper. (12/29/08)
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Letter to the President-Elect Barack Obama

Dear Farmer-in-Chief Obama,

Congratulations
on your victory and welcome to your new home on Pennsylvania Ave.
Knowing how much you love fresh vegetables, we’d like to help you tear
up the lawn and plant an organic garden!

In the
tradition of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Victory Garden and inspired by Michael
Pollan’s vision in the New York Times Magazine, we humbly suggest
planting a Hope Garden on the White House Lawn. In these days of rising food prices, global climate change,
and deteriorating health, the President’s Hope Garden could grow as a
model of sustainability for the nation and, indeed, the world. It’s a
model of a simple way to enhance food security while reducing our
ecological footprint and improving our families’ health with fresh local food.

We nominate ourselves to be the White House’s “First Farmers.” Here’s our vision:

• Serve
  fresh organic Hope Garden produce at State dinners and to the First
  Family, to lead by example and improve White House food “security”;
• Give
  tours of the Hope Garden to journalists, students, and other visitors
  as a means of educating the nation about healthy eating, organic
  techniques and the power of growing your own food;
• Use
  the Hope Garden to support urban gardening initiatives in the D.C. area
  to show that eating local is possible for anyone anywhere;
• Donate surplus Hope Garden produce to local food banks to feed those without gardens;
• Produce a variety of organic heirloom fruits and vegetables all year round, using cold frames and hoop houses.

We are Peace Corps Volunteers about to return home after three years of service in Paraguay,
working to improve food security & nutrition, promoting gardening,
and helping Paraguayans diversify their farms sustainably. We have
studied these issues at the University of Wisconsin’s Nelson Institute
of Environmental Studies. More than just avid organic gardeners, we
also have experience in science & environmental education,
research, and program management. And, perhaps most importantly, we are
filled with hope and excitement about working with you!

Sincerely, Justin Mog, Ph.D. & Amanda Fuller, M.S.

Lets hope it receives a positive response. (12/29/08)
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The Independent/UK – Geoffrey Lean writes: One billion people will go hungry around the globe next year for the first time in human history, as the international financial crisis deepens, the United Nations has told The Independent on Sunday. The shocking landmark will be passed – despite a second record worldwide harvest in a row – because people are becoming too destitute to buy the food that is produced.

Decades of progress in reducing hunger are being abruptly reversed, dealing a devastating blow to a pledge by world leaders eight years ago to cut it in half by 2015. Rich countries have failed to provide promised money to boost agriculture in the Third World; the financial crisis is starving developing countries of credit and driving their people into greater poverty, and food aid to the starving is expected to begin drying up next month. Development charities recently called on US president-elect Barack Obama to put the escalating food crisis “front and centre” of his priorities.

Some 963 million people are now undernourished worldwide, according to the most recent survey of the crisis by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and the UN body expects the situation to worsen with the recession. “The number will rise steadily next year,” an FAO spokesman told the IoS last week. “We are looking at a billion people. That is clear.” The FAO fears the tally will go on increasing for years to come. This directly contradicts an undertaking by the world’s leaders at a special summit in September 2000 to “reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger” from 1990 levels by 2015, as part of an ambitious set of Millennium Development Goals.

At the time, and for several years afterwards, the goal looked achievable, if challenging. Between 1990 and 2005 the number of undernourished people stayed more or less the same at between 800 and 850 million, even though world population grew by 1.2 billion, meaning that the proportion of a rapidly increasing humanity that went hungry was steadily falling.

Several countries – including Ghana, Peru, Mexico, Chile, Jamaica and Costa Rica – actually exceeded the target years ahead of time, while others such as Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Mozambique were on track to achieve it. Twenty-five developing nations looked as if they would be able to halve the absolute number of their hungry – not just the proportion of them in their rising populations – by the target date.

But over the past three years that progress has been thrown abruptly into reverse, with the first steep and sustained rise in hunger in decades leaving another 115 million people short of food. The increase began when prosperity was still increasing and has continued despite bumper harvests; a new FAO report shows that this year’s grain crop is set to grow by 5.4 per cent to 2,241 million tons, following a 6 per cent rise last year – ahead of population growth.

So the growth in hunger is not occurring, as in the past, because of shortage of food – but because people cannot afford to buy it even when it is plentiful. The main reason has been that high food prices have priced the poor out of the market. (12/29/08)
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BBC Food Science — A sustainable global food system in the 21st Century needs to be built on a series of “new fundamentals”, according to a leading food expert. Tim Lang warned that the current system, designed in the 1940s, was showing “structural failures”, such as “astronomic” environmental costs. The new approach needed to address key fundamentals like biodiversity, energy, water and urbanisation, he added.

Professor Lang is a member of the UK government’s newly formed Food Council. “Essentially, what we are dealing with at the moment is a food system that was laid down in the 1940s,” he told BBC News. It followed on from the dust bowl in the US, the collapse of food production in Europe and starvation in Asia. At the time, there was clear evidence showing that there was a mismatch between producers and the need of consumers.”

Professor Lang, from City University, London, added that during the post-war period, food scientists and policymakers also thought increasing production would reduce the cost of food, while improving people’s diets and public health. As he explains:

“But by the 1970s, evidence was beginning to emerge that the public health outcomes were not quite as expected. Secondly, there were a whole new set of problems associated with the environment.”

Thirty years on and the world was now facing an even more complex situation, he added. “The level of growth in food production per capita is dropping
off, even dropping, and we have got huge problems ahead with an
explosion in human population.”…

Professor Lang said that in order to feed a projected nine billion
people by 2050, policymakers and scientists face a fundamental
challenge: how can food systems work with the planet and biodiversity,
rather than raiding and pillaging it? …

Professor Lang outlined the challenges facing the global food supply system: “The 21st Century is going to have to produce a new diet for people, more sustainably, and in a way that feeds more people more equitably using less land.” (12/29/08)
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  BBC Medical Science — The facial expressions we make to show or hide our emotions are hardwired into our brains rather than learned during life, a study has concluded. Blind and sighted athletes made the same expressions when they won and lost, US researchers found.

The athlete on the far left is blind. The athlete near left is sighted. They have both just lost their contests.

This, the study reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study suggests, meant the expressions were not picked up by watching others. The researchers believe they could be remnants of evolutionary history. The idea that facial expressions are in-built is not new – scientists have suggested it since the 1960s. However, the study at San Francisco State University provides some of the strongest evidence yet to support it.

Professor David Matsumoto and his team compared 4,800 photographs, capturing the expressions of sighted and blind judo athletes at medal ceremonies at the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic Games. In each case, the faces of gold and silver medal winning athletes were scrutinised. The researchers concluded that sighted and blind competitors showed or controlled their expressions in exactly the same way.

Professor Matsumoto said: “The statistical correlation between the facial expressions of sighted and blind individuals was almost perfect. While the winners frequently showed genuine joy at their victory, those in the lesser medal positions often produced “social smiles” – smiles involving only mouth movement, indicating that they may be artificial rather than spontaneous.

“This suggests something genetically resident within us is the source of facial expressions of emotion.

“Losers pushed their lower lip up as if to control the emotion on their face and many produced social smiles – individuals blind from birth could not have learned to control their emotions in this way through visual learning, so there must be another mechanism.

“It could be that our emotions, and the systems to regulate them, are vestiges of our evolutionary history.” (12/29/08)
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BBC Environmental Science — The past year has been one of the most devastating ever in terms of natural disasters, one of the world’s biggest re-insurance companies has said. Munich Re said the impact of the disasters was greater than in 2007 in both human and economic terms. The company suggested climate change was boosting the destructive power of disasters like hurricanes and flooding.

It has called for stricter curbs on emissions to prevent further uncontrollable weather scenarios.

Although there were fewer “loss-producing events” in 2008 than in the previous year, the impact of natural disasters was higher, said Munich Re in its annual assessment. More than 220,000 people died in events like cyclones, earthquakes and flooding, the most since 2004, the year of the Asian tsunami. Meanwhile, overall global losses totalled about $200bn (£137bn), with uninsured losses totalling $45bn, about 50% more than in 2007.

This makes 2008 the third most expensive year on record, after 1995, when the Kobe earthquake struck Japan, and 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina in the US.

Torsten Jeworrek of Munich Re said the pattern continued a long-term trend already observed. “Climate change has already started and is very probably contributing to increasingly frequent weather extremes and ensuing natural catastrophes,” he said. (12/29/08)
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