[p2p-research] IMPORTANT, seven pathways to social power

Sat Nov 7 17:59:57 CET 2009

Hi Sam,

your remark is remarkably consistent with the shift from yellow to turqouise
as described below:

 « How the internet reshapes healthcare and
e-patients<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/how-the-internet-reshapes-healthcare-and-e-patients/2009/11/07>

Robin Wood on Shifts in Value Exchange as related to phases in Human
Development<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/robin-wood-on-shifts-in-value-exchange-as-related-to-phases-in-human-development/2009/11/11>
[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
Michel Bauwens
11th November 2009

 A contribution by Robin
Wood<http://r2meshwork.ning.com/group/complementarycurrency>,
applying the Spiral Dynamics theory of human developmental phases to value
exchange.

*Robin Wood:*

*“I believe it is helpful to context how value is created, appropriated and
exchanged at different levels of development. We need to answer the first
question posed by this group: What are all the different types of value in
our civilisation?*

*Today we are living in a modernist world where financial capital created by
banks is the dominant means of exchange and unit of value. Complementary
currencies enable us to create, allocate and exchange value outside of this
global financial system when classic money limits what is possible. Yet we
need to be clear about what we are creating, allocating and exchanging, and
why, otherwise even the cleverest system will not work.*

*Below is an overview of what I believe are the dominant sources of
“capital” (or “value”) on each of the levels of human development. (I’ve
mapped these onto the Spiral Dynamics and integral models for convenience):*

*• Beige - food, clothing, housing= physical survival of the hunter gatherer
clan. Primary exchanges are with nature and within the clan.*

*• Purple - land, territory, tribal power= ethnocentric wellbeing. Engages
in barter and trade between tribes, including arranged marriages.*

*• Red – physical dominance, means of coercion incl weaponry= exchanging
means of physical power and symbols of power. Engages in trade and wages
war/uses threats for what it cannot get by peaceful means.*

*• Blue - being right, domination through rules and “the truth”= moral
capital. Start of the first banking systems in the first Renaissance in
Florence. Conservative with money and failure to repay debts carries a heavy
social price.*

*• Orange – progress and accumulation of symbolic wealth = financial
capital. Money now equals information and becomes the primary scorecard.
Business failure is now acceptable provided the entrepreneur/borrower “did
their best”. Risk becomes a statistical property and is depersonalised.
Cause of our global economic crisis.*

*• Green- authentic human bonding, social justice and healing of pathologies
in first tier = social capital. Green is egalitarian; driven by feelings;
authentic; sharing and caring; focused on being part of and creating
community. Where green gets stuck is in trying to create consensus where
this is impossible, falling back into passive desiderata such as “peace” and
“dialog”.*

*• At the Entering green/YELLOW range, other people’s opinions still weigh
heavily. Their input can sway decisions emotionally. But tempered
individualism is also rising from the collective without confinement to
ORANGE islands of independence or tough RED exploitiveness. This
interdependence releases one to be as he or she chooses on personal terms,
sometimes seeking inclusion and cooperating. If challenged or threatened,
the same person becomes cold and ruthless as necessary.”*

*• Yellow – knowledge power = intellectual capital. YELLOW engages a number
of unique problem- resolution and decision-making processes that are both
highly complex in design and remarkably simple in execution . People who are
centered elsewhere along the Spiral are befuddled by YELLOW. To PURPLE they
are virtually invisible. To RED they are strange, but sometimes fun to hang
out with. To BLUE they appear inconsistent, disrespectful, and out-of-focus.
To ORANGE they seem unwilling to commit themselves fully to achieving
objectives. From the GREEN standpoint, they seem cool and reserved,
intellectualizing emotions without joining wholeheartedly into the group
experience.*

*• Turquoise – Yet, as the Spiral zig zags once again between a focus on
‘me’ and ‘us,’ a new sense of community begins to replace individualism.
TURQUOISE, the global collective of individuals, rises to enfold YELLOW, the
information elites. It turns out that the great YELLOW questions cannot be
answered - indeed, cannot even be adequately addressed - by lone human
beings, no matter how much they know or how often they link up in
cyberspace. *

*Other shifts occur and trend lines begin to form at this transition: *

*o The search for universal causality and the means necessary to reorder the
chaos of the world are revived. *

*o A sense of communitarian experiences resurfaces, but without the heavy
emotional loadings of the GREEN group’s grope. *

*o Knowledge develops a life of its own, suggesting that a focus on
particles and entities will be replaced by an understanding of groups,
fields and waves *

*o We develop collective social and spiritual capital, and collective
intelligence.” *

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 11:55 PM, Samuel Rose <samuel.rose at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 11:55 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Dear friends in cc, I have a particular request for you to engage in
> > discussion, and to describe the 8th way to social power, the p2p way,
> which
> > may be missing from this list
> >
> > It concerns an excellent conceptual article on political strategies for
> > emancipation, by Eric Olin Wright, see
> > http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22074
> >
>
> I will dig in deeper, but some initial thoughts
>
> One thing that strikes me about "p2p" oriented "social power"  is that
> while it makes potentially all power mechanisms available to the
> individual, the individual tends to discover that there is a limit to
> their individual expression. The individual discovers that there are
> cases where expression is enhanced by working in
> cooperation/coordination with others. "P2P" affords the individual the
> flexibility to adaptively act as an individual, and with others with
> little cost to the overall system. Social learning, memory/prediction,
> self-selected coordination, and the empowerment of any individual to
> connect existing networks, makes this possible.
>
> "P2P" is the first system that can embed exponential potential for
> adaptive expression in any given participant. (a metaphor is) that
> genes can exponentially adaptively express based on their neighbors.
>
>
>
>
> --
> --
> Sam Rose
> Social Synergy
> Tel:+1(517) 639-1552
> Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451
> skype: samuelrose
> email: samuel.rose at gmail.com
> http://socialsynergyweb.com
> http://socialsynergyweb.org/culturing
> http://flowsbook.panarchy.com/
> http://socialmediaclassroom.com
> http://localfoodsystems.org
> http://notanemployee.net
> http://communitywiki.org
>
> "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human
> ambition." - Carl Sagan
>

-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

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