A Tale of Individual Minds

Millions of individual minds flock to great cities to be in the thick of it. Maybe to be close to others. Maybe to be close to great business. Maybe to be close to great culture and subculture.
Millions of individual minds flock to London yet Populus polls illuminate a hidden darkness in the bright lights of the capital: do a quarter of  London-dwellers really feel alone?
Dickens describes the secrets of individual minds in A Tale of Two Cities. It feels as though Dickens celebrates the hidden depths of each individual while echoing a tragic yearning for human connectedness.

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!"
Charles Dickens

It feels unusual to acknowledge just how unfathomable and opaque we might be, even to our closest ones. To admit we are all natural introverts with the very best of our thoughts destined to remain privy to ourself. Only the highlights shared and only the headlines understood. What a wonderful fact to reflect on Dickens.

Through the eyes of Empiricism

In my eyes, empiricism is a logical scientific approach to derive basic truths through our eyes.

We derive the most reliable truths about the physical world with our eyes, measured by evermore technical devices with our eyes. How do you know about length? Temperature? Maths? Wavelengths? Geography? All based on perception. And largely, if not completely, through your eyes.

Empiricism is the most objective scientific method from which to derive truths, and we naturally fall in to the trap of presuming empiricism is the path to absolute truths yet we forget that the eyes of empiricism are perhaps in their natural subjective. We may not be seeing the bigger picture.

The following link shows just how subjective our perspective is and always will be

Collaborative Consumerism

Facing an economic apocalypse a conceptual revolution is taking place. ‘Waste and want’ are being nakedly exposed and collaboratism has its clothes. The economic malaise has spawned a thriving hub of niche communities who aim to serve where others are failing. Where banks fail, Zopa thrives, where Hotels are checking-out , Airbnb is checking-in and where the high-street homogenises , ebay innovates.

These are but some of the collaborative consumerism ideas that are shaping not only the landscape of what we own but how we interact. This wave of interactionary collaboratism will minimilise our purchases, we will become a culture of share, barter and interaction. Our 20th century model of excessive cosumerist ownership will look self aggrandizing and socially awkward compared to a minimalist culture of owning little and sharing a lot.

This may sound like hippy hogwash but allow us to explore the notion for a while: What is it you actually need? I challenge you to assess it? A £15,000 car that sits wasted in your drive for 90% of its life or a £6 an hour car-rental for the necessities?The power tool which gets used for 16 minutes in your entire life but costs you £100 or £3 an hour neighbour share scheme on www.neighbourgoods.com. Remember the TV, well it lost its battle with the internet a long time ago. I mean why wait for you advert soaked tv programme when you can stream it live at any time of the day from anywhere in the world and all for less than a tv licence (Netflix £72 a year - half the price of a £140 TV licence and arguably better content!).

Why own when you can borrow for less?

Make a move to minimise the stuff you own and see how it can maximise your spare time. Last week, I tried an experiment, I removed all the excess kitchen equipment from my flat. I have out just enough cutlery and plates to serve my families needs. I’ve reclaimed hours, freed myself from excessive washing up and removed clutter. A happier, lighter mind and tens of minutes more a day, just from one simple action.

Imagine the possibilities of enacting this throughout your life?

Out of an economic depression a counter societal trend has driven a new vanguard, a vanguard of utility and multifunctionality, of collectivism not individualism, of ourlife not i-life. Whether it be clothing, furniture, space or transport, minimalism provides freedom and peace to reject the stuff in our lives and enjoy the people.

Sustainability as an identity or a tool?

Sustainability. To me, it seems like a worthwhile goal in itself. I see non-sustainable business as the equivalent of permanently living off 27.4% APR credit card. Only we may only get the environmental-, health- and social- bill a few generations down the line.

Coming across cynicism towards sustainability draws attention to some difficulties. Forum of the Future set the aim as "business models that achieve commercial success by delivering social value within natural limits". It is being successful now without detriment to future success. But the difficulty is that sustainability by its nature has to be adapted to each sector and every company.

Coca-Cola, who scooped the Best Sustainability Report this week at Sustainability Leaders Awards, use the "Me, We, World" triad to draw together their CSR activities. Virgin and Sky set out their view of the Bigger Picture. CSR is now so entwined with brand identity, but there is a distinction between a company using sustainability to enhance their brand identity and a company for which the two terms are interchangeable. If we are to take Forum for the Future's definition seriously then a company's sustainability strategy is their corporate identity.

Dr Todd Cort, of Two Tomorrows noticed a frustrating trend in the 2012 Tomorrow's Value Research with the way sustainability efforts are currently heading (from CSR Wire):

“Large companies around the world are providing greater and greater transparency in the form of metrics, targets and descriptions of their management approaches. This is evident in the continual rise in GRI reporters and in the improved scores year on year in our research.  However, it is evident that companies are losing sight of the big picture: are we successfully addressing the global challenges that we all face?  Such challenges require collaborative solutions.  

“We have seen through the research that the vast majority of metrics, targets and management approaches look away from the impact or success of collaborative efforts to tackle sustainability challenges.  Instead, these indicators focus increasingly on the sustainability aspects within the company’s sphere of control.  

Companies are becoming too introspective in their reports. The result is corporate sustainability reports that paint legitimate pictures of success in sustainability but a global reality where we are far from achieving solutions.

“In 2000, sustainability came dangerously close to green-washing. Reporting standards since have persuaded reporting companies to disclose management approaches, but the pendulum has now swung too far.   In 2012, sustainability reporting has become an almost obligatory box-ticking exercise demanded by stakeholders.

“Sustainability reporting should instead be an opportunity to drive continuous improvement toward the big challenges that we face as a society.”  

The attention paid to sustainability is no doubt positive, and cynicism may be out of frustration or having to do something the harder-than-it-used-to-be way. But clearly transparent business is intended to reveal the true heart of the business. Sustainability will come into its own when it is the heart of the business, not a peripheral "tick-box" or marketing ploy (as some discount it as).

The journey we have embarked on since the 1950s towards responsible business has gone a long way for Dr Todd Cort to be able to pick at the sustainability reports as being detailed but "too introspective". This, it should be noted, shows the bar is being ever-raised.

And where are we heading if we are to meet this newer and higher bar? Every company has a idiosyncratic approach to sustainability and the challenge for the next 20-50 years will be forming a cohesive approach to sustainability in companies, in city, in the UK and world-wide. It may take a generation - developing sustainable kids with such long-term approaches to life ingrained that perhaps society just cannot embed fully in our generations - but once we all commit and all have the real bigger picture in view sustainability will be in our identity and companies will finally hold sustainability at their heart.

The Dance of La Javanaise

Some songs can be listened to over and over again, time after time, and for me La Javanaise, by the enigmatic french crooner Serge Gainsbourg, is one of them.

La Javanaise, a dance, a fictitious dance, a phonological dance, a dance of words.

Serge's ears, as well as being a protruding burden he carried around with him, hear a beauty in language which he catches in his net and lets fly in our direction, but only les temps d'un chanson.

Oh 1975 Woody!

"You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. I think that the worst you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."

Woody "Boris" Allen's assertions in Love and Death (1975) are unabashed Russian-enlightenment-one-liners. You know, that classic ilk of comedy.

 

Sonja rants: "But judgment of any system of phenomena exists in any rational, metaphysical or epistemological contradiction to an abstracted empirical concept such as being, or to be, or to occur in the thing itself, or of the thing itself." Boris sighs: "Yeah, I've said that many times..."

Boris: a) Socrates is a man.(b) All men are mortal.(c) All men are Socrates. That means all men are homosexuals. I'm not a homosexual. Once, some Cossacks whistled at me. I happen to have the kind of body that excites both persuasions.

I don't question his logic or ambition when he took on this 18th Century Russian comedy, as unexpected as it was when it popped onto my radar, though I do wonder whether Woody Allen saw this is a ludicrous challenge to make a comedy of the enlightenment or an obvious choice. He does it with such slight of hand it seems an obvious choice for a comedy.

“But I was, alas, a juvenile, and juvenility was my only cultural institution”

Witold Grombrowicz's Ferdydurke. This book whisked me away on a grotesque roller-coaster. 

Or perhaps it illuminated something within, routinely banished from the intellectual spotlight.

A stunning and playful whirlwind, the "thirty year old" school boy meets his match with the "modern schoolgirl", with youth and immaturity laughing at all things pompous, mature and proper. But it is not about a school boy, it is about Grombrowicz refusing to simmer down and be "adult", when it is clearly more fun to be daft and unconstrained.

Gombrowicz has that knack of elevating the reader with his visionary and perceptive rants on human nature, punctuated by mundane-slang ("the mug") and farcical slap-stick which has a refreshing freedom to it.

He writes in what can only be described as Gombrowicz-tongue and attributes the greatest nuance to everyday objects no one would care to notice:

The calf. 

The mug. 

Innocence. 

At the same time he effortlessly interweaves broad philosophical criticisms of school, art, literature and time that creep up on you out of the mayhem, given extra punch being framed by the juxta.

What a joy to find such a playful and artistic celebration of juvenility. Rarely does a literary genius target that inner child in us, let alone suggest that it is THE part we should celebrate. A slap in the mug for the constraints of maturity.

Moral Backlash

Greg Smith's public letter illuminates a glimmer of hope in the 'morally bankrupt' world of banking. Arguable our world today.

It may not make that much impact today and I am sure I place more value on his statement than he is really due, but with wikileaks disclosures, News of the World exposures I can help but feel there is a moral backlash that has built up over time. A backlash which is allowing people to choose which side of the moral line we stand.

Principles are there to be tested. We have to put our hands up when we break them and resist apathetic compliance when other stray too far from the path.

Perhaps Greg Smith's public resignation has helped redraw a bit of that collective moral line that is so faded and flexed we have struggle to see it anymore.

Why I resigned from Goldman Sachs

In Pursuit of Intellectual Promiscuity

"..Not thinking within the narrow confines that define an academic field but branching out to all domains of knowledge. We were intellectually promiscuous, and proud of it!"

Mark D. Hauser