The next meeting of the 17 Group will take place on Wednesday the 5th of September in unit 6 at 20 Drury St. West End at 7 pm. The speaker will be Shakti and his topic will be:
“Has Politics (as we know it) Reached Its ‘Use-by’ Date?”
Here is a brief summary of the remarks that will introduce the discussion of this topic:
There are some powerful alternatives for social design starting to emerge, and it is time to start seriously considering alternatives to the present dysfunction of society. Amongst the challenges is a need to look at how we communicate, and consider what it means to be sane. Most of the world as we know it was built upon violence and exploitation. Is progress the result of the violence, or despite it? There are certainly many reality distortions. I wish to tease them out and find a language to encourage the transformation of the current dysfunction in politics into an emergent society using the current state of technology. A new word for this may be Cooperacy. I am finding it necessary to redefine most of what we take for granted, for our technical reality today is far more exciting than the way, in the past, we have imagined the future. The new revolution is not of guns, but ideas.
Here are some short biographical notes by the speaker:
I had decided to retire from what I thought was an abomination of a system in my early 20’s by choosing to live in a Yoga Ashram (upon invitation) in the 70’s (thus the shortened version of my name). This was an excellent escape because I learned how to be self sufficient, with a community of people who all had their own idea of something different. Here I learned how to be useful, solving problems and finding how things work so I could fix them. Most people there thought of it as a “spiritual” journey, but I just wanted something different from that in which I was being socially conditioned. Following my time there I was then sufficiently charged to allowed me to then follow my passion which was to play music, and I have done successfully for 30 years with tens of thousands of hours of performance. It is only 12 years ago that I started to use a computer and this certainly opened doors to learning I had never imagined. It has been a very interesting journey of discovery, uninfluenced by conventional indoctrination. Having been abused by the education system, the door to learning has opened at last. The most important part is that data is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom. Over the last 5 years I have discovered something very profound in society, which is not just me, but a large quantity of others coming to similar trains of thought. It is a meme that builds upon itself, each person building into it with their own experience. I am sure that it is not different from the great thinkers of the past, however each period has its unique opportunity to restate what it understands as reality.
Of course Leon is an old-school sort of guy. He apparently made some passing reference in a sniffy way to Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and he’s very doubtful, according to our emissary, if he could take part in this sort of discussion without running his own line rather vehemently, so it depends on his dyspepsia, he says, whether he’ll turn up. But in case he doesn’t he’s sent this short summary of his life and work and doctrine and influence:
Please don’t send yours. Just come yourself.