Friday 8 June 2018

mildly ECSTATIC - "City Limits"


What guidelines does the NHC staff follow when choosing what to publish? How do we decide what won’t work? What are our biases, our goals?

To embrace and protect

There’s a powerful model called Systems of Survival,[1] whereby there are two so-called syndromes that lie on top of the everyday set of decent behaviours (ethics) that glue society together. Here at NHC, we’re putting the two syndromes into our practice: the Guardian stance for protecting our brand/reputation; the Trader stance for embracing strangers and their potentially disruptive influence.

It’s sometimes difficult to agree on an editorial choice that challenges either our guardian or trader roles. As Jacobs warned, the greatest evils in society (corruption, unfettered greed, oppression, white sugar) flourish when the two syndromes are blended—as they are in organized crime, for example.

Whoa!

Ok, we’re really not about tackling the evils in society here, nor will finding a workable balance between protecting our rep and being open to sharing this site with myriad voices from the conscious community contribute to said evils. It’s not very hard for us to stick to the NHC vision a) because we like each other and communicate well and b) we are humble (smart?) enough to recognize that the vision is as delicate as our individual hopes for it are.

The path to world dominance through cosmic harmony—our goal—recedes eternally into a future defined by the outcomes of billions of choices made by billions of people. Our faith in the existence of a unifying power, a faith based on our experiences in the conscious community, defines our biases and guides our choices. Moreover, the “our” theoretically signifies the high goal and humble biases of not just the NHC staff but of the conscious community that NHC exists to encourage.

Break, mend

Despite humanity’s potential for good, humanity always builds on what came before (even when trying not to… communism, anyone?) Humanity has never before come to see the cliff (wall), the looming end of the road, the fact that we will not survive unless we change—all of us—radically and quickly. Now we’re starting to, so it’s very cool that humanity includes a lot of people who have faith in aspects of humanity that have not been universally embraced. “What’s so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding?”[2]

The New Human City can express that faith because the conscious community is real, active (oh, YEAH!), broad-based and very very powerful. Editorial choices made in this little online mag are as easy as pie—there’s so much out there that’s right on…

It must be said, though, that the driving bias for this mag is for a break with the past and a mending with the tools at hand. Nobody has a corner on that grand scheme; nobody has a corner on our attention. After every edition of NHC, we’re all left with the question, “How do we get there from here?” and we all continue to depend on each other for answers.



[1] Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival, A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1993/Random House, NY)
[2] The Other Elvis

First published by newhumancity on November 17, 2016

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