A book to blog about!

Tom Atlee 's definition of co-intelligence is "what intelligence would look like if we took wholeness, interconnectedness, and co-creativity seriously." His book, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All, is intelligent in that sense: it is a terrific bricolage of Tom's learnings from his own experiences and from his many friends.

In a nutshell, Tom offers us a persuasive account of what we can do, and how, to change our world -- not for the better as we as individuals might define it, but as we might define it if we listened to each other closely enough to arrived at mutual understanding.

A quote from the Introduction:

Gone are the days when the worst we could do was conquer a neighboring tribe or overgraze a local hillside. We are reaching a point where individuals and small groups will be able to create, or destroy, almost anything. We have moved beyond the scale of centimeters and miles down into the microscopic, even subatomic realms, and up into the planetary and interstellar realms, from angstroms to light years, from nanoseconds to gigabytes. We break up atoms and chromosomes. And collectively we change forests to deserts. We litter the upper atmosphere with layers of space junk zooming around earth at hundreds of miles an hour. Our inventions are transforming the lives of our grandchildren's grandchildren -- and we do not have the foggiest notion how. And we are doing all of this faster and faster, more and more, bigger and bigger.

Meanwhile, individually, we can directly comprehend only a tiny fraction of what we are collectively doing. Our individual senses, nervous systems and brains are not capable of taking in the gigantic effects, both current and potential, that our civilization's creativity is capable of generating. Our nervous systems are set to respond to what is here and now and obvious: we can not feel radiation, the population explosion, the vital information missing from our newspaper, the disappearing ozone layer. And when we are faced with any significant piece of the full information, we get overwhelmed.

Stop and think about this for a minute.

We cannot individually comprehend the range, depth and detail of the consequences we are collectively generating for ourselves.

Well, if we cannot appreciate our circumstances individually, perhaps we can do it collectively. Unfortunately, our democracy is not designed for that. Even in those rare instances when it is not being manipulated by special interests, it operates on elections and polls, on the numerical adding up of our individual opinions. Logically speaking, this cannot do the job that is required; if we can not individually comprehend our circumstances, adding all our individual incomprehensions together will not improve our understanding.

The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All was officially released July 4. You can read a sample chapter, then order it from http://www.taoofdemocracy.com/index.html.

Let's be co-intelligent about this, let's get the word out, let's blog it!

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