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• 1 media/background_roots_WHITE background.png 2020-04-20T00:07:23-07:00 Part II: On the Constraints of Recurrent Language 30 plain 980458 2020-05-13T13:52:05-07:00 The eco-literacy of interconnections and underlying features of complex systems, and the need for these dynamic living patterns to inform our daily lives, decision making processes, alliances, treaties and institutions is pressing if we are to develop robust resilient, regenerative and inclusive economies. However, what informs these processes and structures are the repetitive textual, auditory and visual language and ensuing outlooks that shape both how we perceive and experience the world — what we see and how we know. Politics, advertising and various forms of media are a few sources of recurrent emphasis on human individualism,autonomy and the belief that these are mutually exclusive from collective arrangements and united forces. Further attention is placed on the pursuit of social security, economic comfort and pleasure. There is nothing wrong with these values. However, by failing to underscore them with our interdependence, with the partnership and symbiosis that is inherent in the organizational patterns of living systems, these goals are able to nurture mechanisms of power, greed, fear, mistrust, division, and paternalism; mechanisms that lead to the accumulation of wealth and spur power differentials, socioeconomic stratas, and exploitation; mechanisms that enable prestige, position, academic and corporate ladder climbing, and constrain bubbling civic potential. 
  
  Mainstream norms penetrate more deeply than we tend to admit. As American evolutionary theorist and biologist, Lynn Margulis put it, “any idea we conceive as fact or truth is integrated into an entire school of thought, of which we are usually unaware” (3). (Often) subconsciously ingrained assumptions ground everyone’s perceptions. Much of the mythos that in effect inform decision-making and organize society in various ways (the global economy, food, energy, waste, consumption, production and education systems, etc) are often accepted at face value. While it is common to understand the need for change, getting past residual mental models is much more difficult in practice. Rampant polarization reveals that both those who label themselves as “conservatives” and “progressives” may perhaps subconsciously think they know more than others, directing their understandings of issues with contempt, moral judgment, and elitism, pointing fingers at groups of people and banging heads; “If only they just understood. . .” “If only that group of people just got it. . .”
  
  Excuse me as I break this fourth wall. In this very act of conveying information, my own assumptions creep in. Shall I include the definition of confirmation bias? What to me seems a simple concept where we seek information to support our own attitudes potentially not worth mentioning, to many, is a new term. Not only this, but the experimental basis supporting the very phenomenon can also be questioned and unraveled, perhaps even suggesting a more adaptive quality rather than an undesirable one (4). Who would have thought that assumptions can blockade the facilitation of knowledge? :o And, further, I wrestle with the fact that the very language I use in this piece has the potential to come off as obscure or estranging . . . serving as motivation to transform it into various forms. Alas, *self-referential-moment-over* perceiving our interpretations of reality as truth stalls progress. 
  
  Due to their interesting drama, it is common to speak about and visualize our future in either dystopian language — showcasing our world gone to s*** — or utopian fantasy language often used to dismiss and de-legitimize imaginative ideas. Alenda Y. Chang, assistant professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, unpacks the recent prevalence of dystopic and post-apocalyptic games, the common central premises of social and environmental breakdown and the insertion of players into hostile environments in her book “Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games” (5). A thread can be drawn into young adult fiction as well where characters are found in dark, post-nuclear fallout futures. Todd Mitchel argues this is an embodiment of the deep-seated social need or anxiety towards the time, writing that "Right now, we know on some deeply unconscious (or maybe even conscious) level that we’re screwing things up” (6). 
  
  On the other hand, grassroots endeavors at creating alternative structures and value systems that foster community, belonging and sustainability are often deemed as impossible and idealized utopias.
  Our understanding of the present inhibits efforts, funding and legitimate attention to arrangements that do not fall within the generalizations we have outlined. In situations involving common pool resources, for example, it is often held that if there is no outside force imposing management or privatization, the “good” will be over-exploited. A large literature of “prisoner’s dilemma” experiments claims to show how rational individuals behave when confronted with social dilemmas, such as how to allocate a limited resource (7). Every unsecured transaction is a good example of a prisoner’s dilemma, a story overlaid on a mathematical matrix that comes out of game theory which posits that actions depend on expectations and anticipation (8). Modeling common pool resource decisions as a prisoner's dilemma, actors will choose their dominant strategy which is to defect no matter what the other player chooses. Strategies leading to a Nash Equilibrium provide considerably less utility for each participant than what would be feasible with a cooperative strategy (9). These common goods/resources are caught in a trap. Humans will despoil any common pool resource in which people cannot be restrained from using it. Garrett Hardin refers to this as a tragedy in his 1968 article, the “Tragedy of the Commons” which has become a highly quoted expression (10). The article “has been embraced as a sacred text by scholars and professionals in the practice of designing futures for others and imposing their own economic and environmental rationality on other social systems of which they have incomplete understanding and knowledge,” according to noted anthropologist Dr. G.N. Appell (11). He goes on to say that like most sacred texts, “The Tragedy of the Commons” is more often cited than read. Mutual defection as a solution to the game is merely the endogenously stable state or equilibrium which “might never be directly observed because the systems in question are never isolated from exogenous influences that move and destabilize them” (8) In classical mechanics and in economics, equilibrium concepts are tools for analysis, not predictions of what is expected to be observed. However, this logic has been described within a World Bank Discussion Paper as “the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues” (12). Elinor Ostrom,the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, illustrates the reality that a private owner will “overuse” a commons just as much as will a series of unorganized co-owners in cases where dividing and privatizing community-managed property have had disastrous results, illuminated by the destruction of ecosystems around the world (i.e. rampant deforestation, overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, soil erosion and depletion, etc) (7). According to Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School Yochai Benkler, rationalized modernization programs implemented as “regulatory interventions or state-sponsored public works, or as “privatization” through parcelizing common property resource (CPR) into individualized property rights, were likely to cause greater disruption and loss of local knowledge about proper management of the common pool resource than leaving the existing CPR in place (13). Ostrom’s extensive empirical fieldwork reveals various places negotiating cooperative schemes, dealing with people who may try to get around established rules and blending social systems with local ecosystems. All of this to say, narratives deemed as truth and accepted at face value inform conversations between friends and policymakers alike, as well as shape the spaces individuals are given to engage, make decisions and create together. 
  
  Humans have an amplified capacity for imagination, but what we see often fills our vision, and it is hard to see beyond what is on the other side. In effect, the language we utilize in passing and are surrounded by enables yet also limits our imagination by creating narrow frames and mental models. We are the stories we tell ourselves, or more accurately, we are the stories that are told to us again and again. The words, images and mediascapes that surround us are a few means by which society, often unconsciously, shapes who we think we are and how we can act. What we are taught and the paintbrush with which people, groups, concepts or events are rendered allows for certain ideologies to be perpetuated and others to be extinguished.