Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2005 - 11:15 p.m.

Alpha and Omega

For the past couple of years, I have claimed to be working on a nonfiction book titled, FunSmart 1.0, a combination self-help book and (anti-)political manifesto (I see the personal sphere and the societal sphere as mutually causative.) Much procrastination ensued, most of it in one form or another of chasing the almighty dollar in order to maintain my poverty-level lifestyle, but also from my competing passions of singing and animation.

My object all sublime is to create a new “ism”. I want it to have as strong an impact on the world as, say, Marxism, yet without the horrors and mass stupidity that Marxism has wrought. Can I have it both ways? I think I can, if I am careful to make my principles integral to the means I employ. The centralized authoritarianism implicit in writing and distributing a book contradicts my principles, and I’m worried about this, but I can’t think of a more effective way to elaborate the long deductive chains which have lead me to my present tentative conclusions. I am writing FunSmart 1.0 first and foremost for myself, so that I can get clear on exactly what I think.

My hope is that the book will just get the ball rolling, and then I can use the book to help start affinity groups of peers to further develop FunSmart as an evolving praxis, rooted in our everyday direct lived experience.

Here are the first drafts of the introduction and afterword. A lot of hype, these two slices of bread may leave you wondering, “where’s the beef?”. I’m working on the intervening chapters. Will I have the discipline to complete the project? Time will tell.

Introduction

Identifying My Target Audience

If you are completely satisfied with your life, put this book down now. It is not for you.

Ask yourself if you are ready for a drastic change in the way you think and approach life. If you’re not ready, put this book aside until you are.

If you’re pretty sure that a small adjustment here or there in your life is all you need to bring you satisfaction, put this book back where you found it and try one of the thousands of other self-help books out there.

This book is for people who have tried many different options, and were disappointed with what they found, but who have not stopped searching for a better way to live.

This book is also for young people who may not have yet experimented with many options, but who have an intuition that nothing currently available out there will be enough to fulfill them.

This book is for dreamers and yearners who are at the same time critical thinkers and doers ready to take action. If you only want some soothing words and pleasant fantasies to distract you or numb you to your present existence, look elsewhere. If you only like to complain, and refuse to take a chance with your own life until something perfect comes along, stick to what you’re comfortable with.

This book is for people who seek wisdom, and have the courage to put that wisdom to good use after they find it.

This book is for people willing to challenge themselves, for people willing to try out what it recommends, for people willing to try hard to give up old habits and expectations that are not working for them.

This book is also for people who want to challenge this book, who like aspects of it, but who think they could make something even better. People with the gusto to not just criticize, but make something even better.

What Is FunSmart?

FunSmart is an approach, a way of seeing the world. FunSmart is also a set of methods for taking action based on that worldview. FunSmart is also a culture of people who share that worldview and act in those ways. Lastly, FunSmart can become the basis for a complete way of life through which all human needs can be provided for.

I put together FunSmart in hopes that it could help you live a very fulfilling life. I meant FunSmart to work better than most current popular approaches, methods, cultures, and ways of life. I intended FunSmart to solve the most prevalent personal and societal problems out there today.

FunSmart is fun. I want to help people be able to tap into the deepest joys possible, as often as possible, and to be motivated by intense passions, all without ignoring the suffering and horrors in this world.

FunSmart is smart. By smart, I mean intelligent, but more than that, I mean wise. Not the kind of intelligence that designed nuclear weapons, but the wisdom to know that doing so was not a good idea. It will take deep wisdom to make a culture that works for all participants. Emotionally intelligent and intuitive as well as rational.

In terms of creating a culture that really works well for the people who live in it, it would be very hard to outdo the various indigenous cultures that slowly developed over millions of years through trial and error, adapting to, and co-evolving with, their specific local environments. However, as civilized people, indigenous ways of life are not options available to us, for the most part. Indeed, the encroachment of civilization makes those ways of life less and less viable to the indigenous peoples themselves. The fatal flaw of indigenous cultures is that they did not develop with an innate capacity to withstand a larger culture’s concerted attempt to wipe them out. A culture capable of surviving and thriving here and now must be one that can exist within, and despite, the civilized global culture that exists today. I attempted to design FunSmart with that kind of resilience.

This book is merely an outline for a culture. Readers can fill in the details by reading other things, and most importantly by reflecting on their experiences. A culture must be lived.

Radical Analysis

This book contains my radical analysis. By radical, I mean getting to the root. I have been disappointed in so many of the solutions to personal and social problems that are commonly offered, because they only deal with the symptoms, and never deal with the root of the problem. Shallow problem-solving leads to solutions that don’t work to end the problem, so the problem keeps coming back, again and again. I want to solve the problems that I address in this book once and for all, by getting to the bottom of them. I intend my book to be different that most of what’s out there because it goes far deeper.

My Vision

Rather than make you read the whole book before stating my conclusion, I’ll start with the punchline. Here is my vision of the kind of changes I think FunSmart could ideally bring about:

An end to war. An end to poverty. An end to environmental degradation. An end to monotony in the workplace, alienation in the marketplace, and boredom in school. An end to domestic violence, child abuse, and rape. An end to oppression, exploitation, and self-sacrifice. An end to repression, compromise, and resignation. An end to shallowness and meaninglessness. An end to self-defeating strategies. An end to addictions of every kind. An end to depression. An end to a way of life based on fear. An end to loneliness.

People coming together in small groups based on common affinities. In these groups, people finding acceptance, understanding, and intimacy. Group members helping one another to meet practical, everyday needs. Networks arising amongst these groups to help one another, and share important information. A society in which all activity is centered around care, compassion, and deep wisdom. Imagination, passion for life, contentment, safety, faith in the future, love, happiness, joy, fulfillment.

Individuals free to be themselves, and supported in doing so by their groups. Meaningful existence. Honesty, authenticity, integrity.

Local self-sufficency. Living in harmony with the natural environment. Human impact enhancing biodiversity. A material and social culture which is sustainable indefinitely.

This is my vision. Do you want to make it yours as well? In the rest of this book, I make a case for this vision, and I lay a foundation that I think supports it, and discuss the problems I see with other visions popular today. I propose some structures and approaches to make this vision into practical ways to live.

Source Material

Most of the ideas in this book originated somewhere else. What is new about this book is the way I brought together and integrated these disparate ideas. I was not the first to discover that some of these ideas complemented one another, but I wrote this book because no other source I am aware of has yet integrated all of them. I also carefully gleaned from these ideas and practices, taking what looked the most useful to me, and leaving behind what I did not consider useful.

Some of these ideas are not usually associated with one another in the world these days. Practitioners of one idea may even consider themselves enemies, or at least unfriendly to, practitioners of another idea. I think this is unfortunate because people frequently make assumptions about something they don’t understand based on an incomplete understanding. Sometimes even the name of an idea can turn someone off. To try to avoid this problem, I do not name my sources within the text. Please try to judge these ideas on their own merits. The footnotes and the bibliography lead back to the original sources. Please read them with an active mind.

Part of my plan for FunSmart is for it to be its own thing, independent from other movements and writers. I’m not saying isolation is possible or even desirable—interaction with differently-thinking people can lead to powerful insights not otherwise possible—but that I think FunSmart will be at its most vital by taking on a life of its own, not constrained by being a subsection of any other school of thought, nor hampered by the expectations and limitations of any other movement.

Language

I tried to make this book an example of the way I recommend using language. Part of that is to use active verbs wherever I can, avoiding the verb “to be”, and identifying the subject of each sentence. Thus, you’ll find me saying “I think” a lot, and similar phrases. This is not because I am an egotist or wish to claim ownership over these ideas, but rather because it feels more honest to me, than the common style of writing in which writers state opinions in an objective voice, as though they were facts.

Positive and Negative

Stating what you are for is more important than stating what you are against. Critiquing things is seldom enough. Even when someone takes your advice and refrains from doing something you asked them to refrain from doing, what they do instead might be even worse. Better to ask for what you do want. A positive recommendation can also contain indispensable information on how to avoid doing what is recommended against. With out such information, people often continue in the status quo even when they detest it, because they don’t know another way.

FunSmart has a positive approach that in no way depends on having something, or some group of people to oppose. However, I think it is vital to clarify what FunSmart is not. I fear FunSmart could lose its integrity as an approach unless I clarify what differentiates it from other approaches. I developed even the positive approach of FunSmart as a radical negation of some other currently popular approaches.

The FunSmart positive approach can be read separately, if you wish. It appears in black letters on a white background, as you see here. .

The FunSmart negative approach (critiques of other practices and schools of thought) can also be read separately. It appears in white letters on a black background, as you see here.

If this is your first time reading this book, I recommend reading them both together to get a full understanding of where FunSmart stands, and where FunSmart does not stand.

Versioning

The culture outlined in this book is not the one true way.

The culture outlined in this book is not a final solution. Though some parts of it have been tested for millennia, as an integrated whole it is untested. Those who are passionate and willing can put these ideas to the test in their own lives. Some parts may work well, and others may work less well. FunSmarters need information about the failures as well as the successes, in order to improve the FunSmart way of life. Indeed, part of that way of life is constant evaluation and improvement of the methods and approaches.

Thus, I will number each edition of the book with a version number, in the style of computer software, both to keep track of the sequence of editions, and also to serve as a reminder that FunSmart is a project that always evolves. It is forever a work in progress.

A Request

I do not intend the proposals I write in these pages to be commandments, or ultimatums. FunSmart is not for everyone. A FunSmart way of life could be universal, hypothetically, but I don’t see that as likely, or even desirable

When people disagree with my ideas, I do not see them as enemies, degenerates, or obstacles. If you disagree with my ideas, I know this is because of some values or concerns that you have. I care about your values and concerns, and we could discuss them, if such a discussion would please both of us. I want to emphasize that I am not making any overt or implied threats to harm or disapprove of those who disagree with the ideas in this book.

My request to the reader is: Please take the contents of this book as an open-ended request, not as a demand.

Afterword

A Warning

If there is one overarching point to this book which I’d like readers to take away with them, if everything else in the book were forgotten (or were never read in the first place), it would be that I think it’s important to retain one’s active mind, to stay curious, to cultivate a sense of wonder, to continually question everything (even one’s most cherished beliefs), to seek to discover and expose one’s unconscious assumptions, to seek out fresh perspectives, and to avoid the stagnation of ideas into ideologies and the petrification of ideologies into dogma.

I recognize that by bonding several ideas together into this volume, and by giving the package a name, and by presenting the package in the static, one-sided medium of a book, I run the immanent risk of FunSmart becoming an ideology, a position to defend, a litany for people pursuing strategies of conformity and herd mentality to use to snare converts and berate unbelievers. Though the ideas I present in FunSmart would seem to preclude the emergence of a new ruling elite who would demand eternal loyalty to FunSmart thought and who would order the mass executions of heretics, history contains numerous examples of similar occurrences, so I do not presume FunSmart is immune.

These ideas are yours now, and you can and will do with them as you like. I would, however, like to convey my wishes for how I’d like them to be used: I would prefer FunSmart to be used as a stance rather than a stand, as a means rather than an end, as a vehicle rather than a destination. I hope that FunSmart can be a useful stepping stone on the way to something even better than FunSmart. I believe that everyone has an important perspective to contribute to a larger trans-cultural dialog, thus the one perspective of FunSmart can never encompass all that humans might value. Nevertheless, I take great hope from the prospect of the FunSmart perspective’s inclusion in larger trans-cultural dialogs. The resulting syntheses will likely not be recognizable as FunSmart, but I think that FunSmart will be an invaluable contribution.

Ask not what you can do for FunSmart; ask what FunSmart can do for you.

I wrote this book intending to articulate these ideas more cogently than I knew how to in any shorter or more casual form, but if FunSmart fulfills my strongest yearnings by blossoming into the culture I think it can be, this book will be rendered trivial compared to the depth and complexity of FunSmarters’ lived experience. I hope that FunSmart culture will encourage individuals to experience more passion and meaning in their lives, I hope that FunSmart culture will inspire genuine, heartfelt interactions between people, and I hope that FunSmart culture will generate the collective wisdom necessary to live together compassionately and sustainably.

Whatever happens with FunSmart is in your hands now.

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