Day: June 9, 2018

A little more context (and expansion) for that Barbara Mann quote I posted earlier. Also the other quote from that talk which came up earlier and prompted me to look at the transcript again.

(Source through those links. There’s more of interest in that talk.)

I don’t have a lot of spoons to comment right now. But, what she’s talking about here is relevant to way too much.

Including some of my frustrations dealing with some people who are coming at things from some very different base assumptions, in a variety of contexts.

Also had to think about that rather disturbing bizarro assertion from a while back that “inclusionist ideas are much more abstract and harder to understand” 🤔

Anyway, long quote time:

And one of the things that tells us is that the One Good Mind of consensus actually requires the active participation of everybody in the community, that it can’t be done without active participation by all. So, everybody matters, everybody counts. And I remember my mother specifically saying, “Don’t leave anyone out, don’t leave anyone out”. And if anything was ever counted up and somebody was left out, you started counting again, from the very beginning. Why? Because somebody was left out. And that’s not acceptable, because exclusivism destroys community. It’s the first and best way to destroy community. Inclusivism, on the other hand, is very important to creating community; it hears absolutely every comment, it hears everything that’s going on, and it hears it in the voices that raised the issue. That’s pretty important.

I think one of the most damaging misunderstanding of Good Mindedness is something that, something that Heidi was just talking about, is the assumption that because everyone is equal, everyone possesses equal amounts of wisdom and talent–and, therefore, everyone should share equal amounts of power. OK, well this is a prescription for disaster if I ever heard one. [laughs] Because people simply do not have the same type or amount of talent or wisdom; everybody has a different thing. That’s why, in the words before all else, we acknowledge the special things that each one is bringing. If everybody was bringing the same thing, there’d be no need for those words. It’s basically patriarchal monotheism that thinks that everybody looks alike. You know, seen one seen ‘em all. That’s a patriarchal idea.

Instead, everyone has a limited amount of wisdom, and a limited amount of talent, and the idea is to make it all work together for the good of everybody. No one person is going to be able to do this alone. And each spirit has a limited amount of knowledge; that goes for human beings, that goes for any of these spirits. For example, if you want to know about corn, what do you do? Well, you go ask Sister Corn, that’s what you do. She sure knows a lot about being corn, she knows more than you and I do. She knows more about being corn than Sister Squash does. But, guess what: if you ask her about Brother Tobacco, she might know a little bit about him, but she doesn’t really know about Brother Tobacco. If you want to know about him, you’d better go and ask him.

And one of the important points spiritually about this is that there’s nothing that’s all-knowing. There’s no all-knowing spirit anywhere. Everything is a collective attempt, we all dump it into the center and see what we’ve got when we’re done collecting up all of what we have…

So, there’s no omniscience… [P]eople have frailties, they have failings, and that’s understood and recognized without any prejudice. It’s just something you’re going to work around. So, no one council arrogates the right to dictate to anybody else, it just is not going to happen, it better not happen… [B]asically claiming more wisdom than you have is actually a crime. It’s actually a crime against the people. And all that’s going to happen is that it’s going to create havoc in its wake.