First, or course, comes the Declaration of Independence
Then we had the Declaration of Singularity.
The came the Declaration of Amazing.
But maybe we’ve been doing our Declarations wrong. Are we putting the cart before the horse? The DoI announced the beginning of the United States as an entity, but it didn’t settle the matter. It took an ugly, bloody revolution to do that.
Maybe what we need is a declaration of radical uncertainty–meaning that we don’t really know for sure what’s going on and that we can’t reliably say what’s going to happen next.
Let’s establish clarity around a few key facts we know for sure
Let’s encourage skepticism towards grand sweeping narratives. Let’s work towards practical narratives that are lean and adaptable. (and can be acted on immediately – things that move us incrementally toward a better society. “The arc of the moral universe is a long one, but it bends towards justice.” – Theodore Parker)
Let’s be wary of ideologies. Maybe they were always on the dangerous side, but in the age of social media they seem to all become toxic.
Let’s rediscover the benefit of the doubt. Uncertainty provides huge tactical advantages
Let’s not be too quick to rule things out. (We should think in terms of what is more and less likely,) There are many possible futures in play — good and bad.
Risks: we don’t know for sure what we’re doing and there’s always unintended consequences.
Greater risks: keep pretending we know what we’re doing and bring on disaster anyway. Or maybe just a mediocre future when we could have had an amazing one.
WT 453-770
Eternity Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Image from Pixabay.com
