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A Kind of Innocence We'd Never Seen Before: Thoughts on the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, and Collective Consciousness.
Suddenly people were stripped before one another and behold! as we looked on, we all made a great discovery: we were beautiful. Naked and helpless and sensitive as a snake after skinning, but far more human than that shining nightmare that had stood creaking in previous parade rest. We were alive and life was us. We joined hands and danced barefoot amongst the rubble. We had been cleansed, liberated! We would never don the old armors again.
This is a new article in What is Englightenment magazine, which is one of the few magazines I purchase when it hits the shelves.
Astronomers have discovered a large rocky planet about 14 times the size of the earth with an atmosophere orbiting a mere 50 light years away. It also appear to be orbiting in a possibly life-friendly distance from its parent star. This is the smallest of the exo-solar planets discovered so far, with all the others being large gas giants like Jupiter. The reason for this deviation in planet type is because our current techniques of finding planets are limited to only large planets circling close to their parent star. This ups the ante for future discoveries of other non gas giant planets.
This is very cool. I wondered if this fictional material out of Star Trek was even physically possible. Looks like some scientists have figured out how to make it. (via Nova Spivack)
OK, it is a lot easier to criticise other people's predictions than to make one's own. But it might get one going on thinking of better ones. I was just reading an article, It’s 2014, and life is the same. Only better by Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer. And, well, as his title honestly says, he's describing life the same, just a little better. And it struck me how much it sounded like essays I would write about the future when I was around 11. That's about 34 years ago. He writes better than I did, but then again my predictions were about the year 2000, which was considered "The Future" back then.
I thought that in the year 2000 we'd be able to work at home if we wanted, and we'd be able to shop in stores through video screens at home, and that we'd be able to get our own personalized newspaper printed out every morning, with exactly the kind of news we'd prefer. I'd be able to speak commands to machines around me, and robots in my kitchen could make me breakfast on their own, and clean the house. We'd have self-driving cars. Or flying cars if we were going into the country. We'd be able to easily travel up to a space station, or to the Moon or Mars.
The first part of my predictions were quite spot on. That's called the Internet. The rest is, shockingly, hardly any closer than in 1970. The space program was more active and vibrant back then. The test projects for self-driving cars look about the same as they did back then. You still can't buy a flying car.
Cars and houses look about the same. Oh, they have different styling, but nothing fundamentally different at all. Air bags? They could have made a balloon be blown up really quickly back then too, if anybody had asked for it.
The stuff that has changed unbelivably much is the virtual. The stuff we can do inside computers. Even though we're still strangely conservative about what we make them do. We manage to make computers 10,000 faster, and still word processing seems no faster than way back when. But the greater power leverages other things to happen. Like, the way we connect things together and how we network information - that suddenly puts us on a different plane.
Notice that the features of my old prediction that require AI didn't happen. Because, surprisingly to some, AI didn't really happen. I can buy a vacuum cleaner that will move around on the floor and clean by itself, fairly well, if you have certain types of flooer surfaces, and not too difficult things in its way. One could probably have made that mechanically in 1970 or 1950, if it were a priority, and not much worse. Today I can speak to a computer and it might type my words pretty well, if I've trained it, but it still doesn't understand what I say, even vaguely. No, it wasn't so much the AI that advanced. It was the ability to calculate much faster, and to connect lots of things together, and to make various kinds of virtual realities possible.
Interestingly, the material technologies that are most promising, and that really might give us a profoundly, drastically different future are all in the realm of the virtual. Making matter virtual. Nano-tech, quantum physics, genetics. Really small stuff that, if we find out how to program it, suddenly allows us to rebuild reality in a drastically different way.
Will we have done so by 2014? Will it really just be that your toilet analyzes your urine and tells you you've got a cold? And that your kitchen cooks a low-carb breakfast for you by itself? I hope not, although those might possibly be good things.
Predictions of daily life in the future easily end up sounding sort of sugar coated and problem free. So, if one 35 years ago predicted that I today could have a custom newspaper on a screen and shop in stores and talk with people in other countries on a video phone, it would be presented as if it somehow made life leisurely and problem-free. But life is no less stressful today, and my life isn't suddenly leisurely because I have those things. It is kind of like an architect's mock-up of a new building, with stylized people who stroll about between green trees and pathways, with conveniently located service facilities. But when it is actually built, it is just some mall, and it is filled with real people who're stressed and on their way somewhere. Usually never looks as leisurely and perfect as in the vision. At least not unless it stays as a virtual simulation of some kind.
But, again, in 10 years, will anything have managed to REALLY change how we live. The Internet changed it more in a couple of years than anything else I can think of in the past 100 years. It was a disruptive change. Most forecasters have a hard time guessing which disruptive changes will come along. Although we have a few very likely ones in our focus. Nano, genetics. And some people center it all around an expected major AI breakthrough. In part because that might potentially solve some of the huge dangers inherent in some of the other things.
It is entirely possible that somebody might invent cheap universal nano-tech within the next 10 years. I mean something that can construct whatever you imagine, or rather whatever you can program, or download the blueprint for, as long as the needed atoms are around. Like an inkjet printer that spits out atoms and print objects. Suddenly objects are virtual, and the game would totally change. How we live would change thoroughly and drastically within just a few months.
The future is so open now, with such a range of possibilies, that it becomes almost laughable to predict a world in 10 years that just has more, and a little cooler stuff, that is essentially the same. But many of the bold predictions from 35 years ago didn't happen at all, and we just got more of the same. So of course we might have just more of the same in 10 years. Maybe a better electronic voting system for choosing between your favorite Republican presidential candidate and your favorite Democratic candidate. Yawn, gasp! The FCC releases some more spectrum, and technology gets better, so you can have 100Mbits to your cellphone, and watch movies in 3D in the bus, which will be charged to your credit card, and which then self-destructs in 5 hours. All cars would have nagivation systems, and maybe collision detection systems. Just enough stuff every year to make you keep buying. The US army would have robotic bombers that more efficiently could kill more people in foreign places, without even having to send any people there. Microsoft would've come out with some updated version of the paperclip, which can make more wide-spanning stupid assumptions about everything you're trying to do, and correct even more things that didn't need to be corrected.
I'd be leaning towards hoping for some disruptive and more pervasive change. Something so disruptive that it kills most of those factors that would otherwise ensure that we'd just have more of the same. Something that destroys the current economic power structure. In a good way, in making it instantly obsolete and replaced with something better. I hope for such things because, despite increasingly rapid change in some areas, the future is at risk of being boring and stagnant.
I also expect disruptive change for the reason that progress in many areas is held back by backwards economics. The future that was expected from the year 2000 a few decades before was quite reasonable and logical. It would have happened if it weren't because there weren't any terribly profitable reason for investing capital in making it so. What was profitable was to give us apparently a little more of the same every year, in a new model, with new features, but nothing that really changed things. Weren't any profit in giving us space stations. Certainly weren't any in even attempting to feed us all, or even get us clean drinking water. Weren't any profit in taking good care of our environment.
Collectively I think we'll discover that we've been cheated, and that we're living in a falsely retarded world that doesn't have to be that way at all. Some forces are going to clash. Disruptive paradigm shifts sometimes come about because of pent-up problems that weren't solved, and pent-up solutions that existed, but weren't applied. At some point it breaks through, and things have to change rather quickly, because they failed to change gradually.
Our greatest leverage is in the areas that aren't artificially retarded, because nobody figured out yet how to do so, because they didn't start trying before it was too late. Our ability to network ourselves with each other and with information, electronically, and the likelihood we'll be free to do that faster and better. It is a way we can create something very different, which might at first be somewhat invisible. Not a different kind of car or microwave for me and my family. Not just something a few people are consuming. Something millions of people are doing together. A whole new collective organism. Which needs to start dealing better with meaning. And which, once it gets smarter, or we get smarter through it, needs to feed back to our material world and make it smarter and more fun and livable, on our own collective terms.
Being creatures who tend to live in certain mental grooves, when asked to predict the future, we usually extrapolate more of the same. Which might be right. But we usually forget to predict the changed behavior that comes about when certain things go through certain thresholds. For many years we had telephones. And for years one could very expensively get a portable one. We didn't expect the changed behavior patterns that would come about by a majority of people in the world having a cheap portable phone in their pocket at all times. One could have predicted that electronic networks would have allowed us to send electronic mail to each other, and it would be more efficient than paper mail. But the social aspects of what happened when enough of us were online would have been hard to predict. We can predict many things one could do if one had self-replicating nano-tech. But is hard to predict what will change and what will happen once those things are accepted and widespread, and we use that as a springboard for something else. We might see the next hilltop, but have a hard time seeing the valleys and bigger hills beyond it. There are event horizons beyond which we can't see, no matter the strength of our glasses, so we have to imagine.
I predict that within the next 10 years there will be at least one, but probably several disruptive changes that are so surprising and pervasive that life will be very different from how we know it or how we project it to be. There won't be a Ford Taurus 2014 or an NBC Nightline News or an aisle in the supermarket with fruit juice with 10% more real fruit. Other than in a retro simulation for people who like them for atmosphere. I don't know. There is no future, really. There's just right now, and there still will be just now in 10 years. Thinking about the future as separate from the now is just one of those mind games we play with ourselves, when we are bored or inspired, or fearful or hopeful. A mind game that sometimes helps us knowing which fork in the road to take right now, by examining which of the imagined journeys would suit us best.
This is a call for conversation. I’ve tried very hard to stay away from politics with this blog, but now it’s become impossible for me. This morning on my way to work, I heard on the radio the ruling that journalist’s freedom to protect their sources is in serious jeopardy. Such a freedom is the bedrock of a free press. If journalist can’t protect their sources, then no source will ever trust them with valuable information. Thus the major door of accountability of our government has just been shut, and our first amendment just got a lot weaker. We’ve seen many attacks on our freedoms over the years, the drug war essentially wiped out the 4th and 10th amendments, and the US PATRIOT Act has obliterated many other parts of the bill of rights. And in recent years, as in this year's DNC, peaceful protest are being put into free-speech zones which resemble a Guantonomo Detention Center. Thus freedom of assembly has been effectively wiped out as well. There is a reason why the 1st amendment is the FIRST. It is the most important right we have. Without it we are no longer a free society. So I ask you, what is the point of all this psychedelic futurist talk? What is the point of this blog – what good is it anymore? What is the point of all the visionaries, the insights, and all our drug-inspired visions, if all around us everything we hold dear, all of our hopes, dreams and visions of a better world seem to be rapidly becoming moot in the this "new world of terror". Terror indeed, just not from terrorists.
I plan on going to this years Burning Man – simply because I need to feel a sense of community and connection with kindred spirits. But in the end, Burning Man will burn, and I’m increasingly wondering what relevance it has in the long run. Are we planting the seeds of the New Aeon or are we reveling in our own decadent narcissim just as the Romans did right before the end? With the end of the Roman Empire came over a 1000 years of disease, pestilence, famine and chaos - the Dark Ages. Will the end of our empire result in a similar period of darkness or will somethng better rise out of the ashes? And will it happen in our lifetimes, or do we need to prepare ourselves for living out the rest of our lives forsaking all of our transhumanist visions of immortality, space migration and intelligence increase to our distant decendents? One thing is for certain, the current course of western civilization can not last much longer - it is not sustainable. Even if we are not reaching Hubberts Peak (Oil is now surpassing $50 a barrel!), so many aspects of our society, especially coporate greed is in direct opposition to life itself - to the environment, to the free market of people. Capitalism has become so dominated by the big players in collusion with big government that it no longer is a free market. As Mussolini said Facism is the unification of corporate and government power.
Within a few weeks there will be nothing left of Burning Man, no evidence it was ever there, other than in the minds and hearts of the people who left. That’s because Burning Man is a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). And I think the prevailing reason it’s temporary is that our society and increasingly our government would never allow anything close to something like Burning Man become a permanent community. And that IS the question I'm asking you - why not? Am I wrong? Do you believe that we can form a Permanent Autonomous Zone (PAZ)? People have talked about it for years – offshore ocean communities, etc. But none of them have ever materialized. If so, where would we create this community? Various local, state and federal laws would prohibit 90% of the activity that takes place out there on the playa. Don't deny it, for those who've been - you know this to be true. so how exactly would we do this? Personally I've resigned myself to finding my own sense of autonomy within myself... but increasingly this doesn't seem to be enough anymore.
Ever since I first read Hakim Bey 15 years ago, it was not the TAZ that excited me but the PAZ (Permanent Autonomous Zone). But as time goes on, it seems like the hope of TAZ’s – of permanent free communities is withering. For the longest time I pinned my hopes on space migration, but now I’m not so sure that is in the cards either. Even if a sufficiently large population managed to construct some kind of ocean colony, there would then arise the problem of defense and ultimately subversion by the United States. The evidence that the US has no interest in spreading democracy around the world is everywhere. So where does that leave all of us? I don’t see any other nation moving in a positive direction. What I see are a few countries left that have somehow maintained a relatively free state – Sweeden, New Zealand… but for how much longer can they hold out?
Meanwhile the technologies of surveillance are getting smaller and more sophisticated by the day. That means before too long our governments won't need telescreens, they'll be the proverbial fly on the wall. Can this surveillance technology be used the other way around as Stephen Mann is trying to do? Can the technologies of sousveillance keep up with surveillance, to create a truly transparent pluralistic society as David Brin is hoping for? I think we are way passed asking whether we will have privacy in the future, so the question now is will this transparency apply to everyone, and will such transparency finally bring an end to the all the ludicrous laws that if universally enforced would put most everyone in jail?
So I ask you this, what is the future of Psychedelic Futurism? Does it have a future? As much as I respect old thinkers ideas for my personal and inner development, what relevance do they have about our actions today? Can we afford to continue as dettached hippies, or should we become more involved like John Perry Barlow is now doing? In either case I think we are long overdue for some new visionaries, new pioneers, new ideas put into action, and a new hope that directly addresses all that we are faced with today, because all of the old values are ill equipped to deal with them.
Let the conversations begin!
Rolling along the cracked white playa at night is a phenomenal experience. There's the crackle of alkali crust as the hardened surface breaks under the weight of my tires, kicking up little powdery puffs of dust in my wake. Then there are the random little bits of artworks that suddenly appear, like a field of green LED's sticking through the playa mirroring the myriad of stars above. And the moonlight dancing through the Black Rock desert, setting it aglow beneath its reddened ochre cat eye.
But the most stunning moment is upon turning back to take in the sudden ephemeral majesty of the pulsing, throbbing, shining, flashing, thumping, burning wonder of creative freedom that is the psychedelic Vegas of Black Rock City.
I marvel every time I see it.
My first trip to Burning Man we arrived at night. You have to crawl through 70 miles or so of thick inky darkness to to get to Gerlach. Aside from this small outpost there is nothing but black mountains and salt flats extending off into infinity. But out past Gerlach the night was broken by an unbelievable city of lights strobing against the interminable emptiness of the desert. I was thunderstruck at just how large the festival was... and how electric. In spite of the intense hostility of the land to life and limb, these technopagan freaks had wired the playa and flipped the switch.
A few hours later I was in a strobe-lit booth coming on to a tab, watching a friend in a reclined dentist chair get playfully beat with styrofoam pool toys by three random burners. I never looked back.
The most overt element of Burning Man is the sheer degree of pure, unfettered human creativity that transpires. The 2.5 miles of silt filling the ancient lack bed of Black Rock becomes a blank canvas, a tabula rasa upon which to paint the kaleidoscope of imagination convening between its rocky hills. My impression to this day is total awe at the ludicrously psychedelic playground that manifests in that shining eternal moment. Works of art stand by themselves, unattended, as offerings to the spirit of the event. They are there simply to be, and be enjoyed. In most cases here is no ownership, no one charging admission or even standing by looking for adoration or gratification.
Ranging from minute to monumental, covering every sense, the art of Black Rock stands as a testament to the devotion of its acolytes. Some spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to create something spectacular that will last 5 or 6 days, then be destroyed. Witness the temples of David Best: vastly detailed and intricate buildings ornately buttressed and festooned with spires and symbols all uniquely reminiscent of some sci-fi Indian or Thai holy shrine. His temples are places of worship, explicitly constructed to honor those lost to death's bittersweet embrace. By Saturday it is covered in scrawled and shaky messages to the departed. I love you dad. Mom, I miss you. On Sunday night, the last night of Burning Man, the temple is set ablaze, and through the flaming vortices tearing out of its incinerating husk, you can just make out the faint wisps of Spirit...
This year the temple will span over 3/4 of a mile. It's conflagration will no doubt set the blackness of the Black Rock mountains on fire themselves under the stellar firmament above.
Each year there is a theme that sets the tone for the whole event. One year was Hell. Another, The Body. The Floating World was the year my wife and I were married at the Temple of Joy. This year the theme is The Vault of Heaven. Accordingly, costumes and art will will tend to highlight this theme. One piece is a playa-wide night kite flying. The organizers are hoping to get at least ten thousand lighted kites flying Thursday night, bringing the body of Nuit a bit closer to earth.
Less tangible than the art and general costumery and freakishness is the community of Burning Man. There's a general feeling in the air of coming together - of communing. Everyone comes for their own reason but everyone's there to participate in something powerfully unique and meaningful, something that humanity desperately needs: a grand party with a big heart and an incredible wardrobe.
But beyond the conviviality and celebration lies a deeper tone of release and transformation. Burning man is, at its core, about the cycle of creation - birth, life, death, and rebirth. This theme is enacted on the desert floor as life rises from its empty wasteland and gathers tens of thousands of digital apes with all of the tools and technologies, dreams and visions, tears and laughter they bring with them. The vast chaotic jubilee accretes around the central figure - the Burning Man - swirling out to the event horizon at the edge of Black Rock City. At the apex of the festival the masses gather around The Man and set him to flame. This is the central moment of Burning Man. This is the ultimate reason people come to the playa. To Burn The Man. It is the mythic transformation ritualized in a great pagan celebration of fire.
Properly phoenixed the burners march inward towards the flaming, smoldering pile of debris, drums pounding, chants and calls resonating through the thick, churning crowd. For whatever reason, whatever innate impulse or orchestrated symbol, we always move counter-clockwise around the fire, perhaps hoping to turn back the hands of time and relive this wondrous week under the desert sun...
Afterwards the night becomes a thunderous din of sound and fury, wailing against the emptiness of mechanized life, commodified nature, and co-opted meaning, branded, packaged, and sold back to us. At Burning Man there is no vending allowed. Large corporate logos - like the ones on the sides of rental trucks - are requested to be covered up. Video cameras must be registered and visiting press is highly regulated. Ice and coffee at Center Camp are the only products available for purchase. Everything else is based upon a gift economy. Give what you can. everything comes back around. One year there was a bar around the corner from our camp. 3 guys spent $1500 on liquor, built a bar, and poured drinks for anyoone. They ran out by Thursday, but the patrons kept bringing over more alcohol from their camps to keep the bar stocked. Gift economy.
It is this freedom from commercialization, this brief moment of living the ideal and casting off the shackles of capitalism that make Burning Man such an oasis. Indeed, much of Silicon Valley leaves their cubes and offices for the playa, finding release, escape, and inspiration to bring back home. For now, the ideal can only exist if we work the rest of the year. But for one week we can drop our guard a little, fly our freak flag higher, talk to strangers and invite them into our temporary homes, embrace the land and the beautiful fury of nature, and walk amongst the human imagination as it manifests its vast mysteries into the arms of creation, unfettered and ever on the wing.
Below is a world-flipper of a quote in Timothy Leary's Autobiography
But first, some introductions...
Timothy Leary - Harvard psychologist who kick-started the psychedelic 60s by going around the country "turning on" the intellectual elite in the hopes of passing chemical wisdom into the mainstream.
Neal Cassady - inspiration for the Beat Movement, and friends with Jack Keroac, Ken Kesey, and Allen Ginsberg. You can read more about the Psychedelic 60s and more here
December 1960, Leary invites Cassady to his house to play with drugs. They are chatting it up, and Leary, a novice drug user (compared to Cassady), is describing his challenges.
Timothy Leary
said:
We're doing our best. We've read everything that's been written in the last four thousand years on the subject.
You're cracking me up, man. There are no books written by scientists about ecstasy and cosmic orgasms. it's oral history and poetry. The history books are about meaningless public events like wars and elections and revolutions. (emphasis added) The only important things happen in the bodies and brains of individuals, you understand. That's the great secret of human life that scientists never talk about.
to which Timothy Leary responds, "Is that right."
(Page 52)
Man, that is great! It did a 180 on my perspective on the world.
Such an ugly chunk of my brain is devoted to imitating the gloom laden in the 24/hour news and history books. If you read history, if you watch the news, it feels like the world is this killer cannibal run by a cabal of sinisters. But really, I bike, I laugh with friends, eat good food every day, life is in general good.
The inner story is the ultimate story.
Via Bruce Eisner, "The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies or MAPS for those who wish to avoid tounge twisters has the Summer Issue of their interesting MAPS Bullitin online".
This is the most amazing optical illusion I have ever seen of this kind. The artist is Akiyoshi Itaoka.
Click on the picture for a full size pic.
I have somehow managed to reach a major, if not the most significant crossroads of my life. If you've noticed there has been little blogging from me for a couple of months. Part of the reason is that I have been very busy. Actually more busy than I desire to be, although occupied with things that need to be done. In any case I am going though some kind of crisis. It’s not particularly painful or unpleasant, which is one of the many reasons I think that makes it so damn disconcerting. Deep, unsettling change is supposed to be unpleasant, even painful right? In either case, I have no idea what this crisis is or what I am supposed to be doing about it! The best way I can describe it is that all of my major focal points, or if you will, my underlying, life-guiding zeitgeist, has evaporated. In other words, the one thing that has never changed, despite what has otherwise been profound change in my life across the board, is gone. The only problem is nothing new has emerged to replace it. There is no new zeitgeist to define my life going forward. So for the last couple of months I've been sitting in limbo, and for the first time in my life having no idea what to do next, other than to keep plugging away at the more mundane necessities. What makes this crisis particularly troubling, is I have always felt things deeply and generally connected to what makes life satisfying and authentic. So, this particularly new found emptiness is especially unsettling. I don’t know much of what a mid-life crisis is, other than watching older men (is that me now that I"m 39?) go though various attempts, ranging from pathetic to heroic, to re-live their adolescence. Is this my problem? I'm not sure if identifying it makes it any easier. But if what I'm going through is a mid-life crisis, I suppose it adds a humorous twist to it. :)
Lets see. I now feel that I am old enough to not allow any outside stimulus influence my attitudes, behaviors or desires, regardless of how taboo they are. This is not to say that I have lots of these, only that my locus of control and sense of identity has become increasingly self-defined as I get older. Although I try to participate in socially constructed reality with as much joy and fun as possible, the increasing set of rules, regulations and plain old bullshit have become increasingly irrelevant and/or downright toxic to living an authentic life. I do my best to follow my own ethical guidelines which are in the spirit of Aleister Crowley’s maxim, “Love, and do what thou wilt”. I especially like Robert Anton Wilson’s view that reality is what you can get away with. One thing is for certain, the quote, "I'm not going to take it anymore" really hits home.
So what does all of this mean for Future Hi? Well, there has been a LOT of work put into this site. I expect to keep growing it as I find the time, and keep blogging when the spirit moves me. Flemming, LVX23 and Philip are the other contributors. The last month or so, nothing has inspired me to write anything. I’m much more interested in listening to others. I feel especially receptive to new and fresh ideas, and I’m particularly looking for some hopeful messages percolating out of the otherwise barren spiritual wasteland that corporate globalism (as opposed to democratic globalism) has left in its wake. If the spirit moves you to write in this forum, please contact me.
At this moment, I am reminded of something Cornel West said, "I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic, I am hopeful. But don't confuse hope with optimism. Hope cuts against the grain. Hope is participatory... it's an agent in the world. Optimism looks at the evidence to see if we can do X or Y. Hope says I don't give a damn, I'm going to do it anyway!" (video source).
Here's raising a glass to hope!
Robin Green has written an insightful piece over at Cyborg Democracy about Hakim Bey's current cynical attitudes about technology, the internet, and possibilities of authentic change. I understand Hakim's cynicism all too well. There have been so many disappointments, and so much stupidity in the wake of 9-11. Along with the mass mobilization of centralized corporate and media control, including controlling the internet, it is easy to get depressed about how all these emerging technologies (so far) have done nothing to reverse the tide towards facism.
Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) has obviously become quite depressed as a result of this relentless onslaught of negativity. Because of it, it can become habit to not see any other perspective, as crying wolf has happened so much, that good news is easily discounted. I suspect this can account for much of the luddite on the left on a variety of issues. Fear is what seems to rule these people, just as it rules the luddites on the right. From a psychological point of view, both of these people need to transcend their ego's for a short while and get a glimpse of the big picture. If more people can do this, we have a better chance of seeing alternatives to the current course, and not discounting signs of those alternatives when they become available. It's been my experience that those signs can come when we least expect it and in places we never imagined previously.