The worst things that ever happened to politics is the adoption of the Left/Centre/Right framework. It’s limiting & flawed and does not accurately represent people’s reality or thinking.

All it does is create false narratives, divisions, & opportunities to game the system.

There’s a better way.

Ppl are exhausted by shouting at each other, & the inevitable result is greater extremes of folks who won’t open their ears or their thinking.

A better model is a circle w/ connective lines bridging the distances.

A Dreamcatcher framework.

#allconnected

I have always said that Being fiscally conservative and socially progressive cannot coexist.

That’s why I have always used the term:

#FiscallyResponsible

It’s a term that lets you find a sensible balance.

And it rejects the scourge & ideology of NeoLiberalism completely.

If there’s a sickness in the land it’s the philosophy of selfishness and of poverty being an individual failure rather than a societal failure.

Poverty costs us all more than dealing with and eradicating poverty.

Poverty is fiscally stupid and unsustainable for societies.

The light in the land is the strength of communities helping each other, watching out for each other - lifting each other up.

That’s what energizes me and fuels me to work ever harder to build prosperity.

Strong, supportive community builds lives, builds cities, builds nations.

So that’s the preamble. At some point I’ll unpack the Dreamcatcher Framework.

To begin, a few disclaimers:

-This won’t be even close to comprehensive - there will be errors & gaps. I’m choosing to tweet this which will mean a lot of space to criticize and misunderstand, which is a good thing! It will lead to discussion.
-it will be very high level

-it will take several days or more due to limited time.

-I am sometimes circular and repetitive

-I’ll be learning as we go

-I encourage you to add to this. I believe that’s essential as any big work worth doing becomes constructive group work in the end.

Begin:

When we look at galaxies, solar systems, stars, planets, orbits, etc, we generally see nature trending toward circles, ellipses, etc.

This is the physical nature of things.

We also see this reflected in life, seasons, and so on.

Helixes, fractals, waveforms. Organic.

In the majority of Indigenous cultures around the world, these forms are the basis of many of their teachings and understandings of life. Let’s not idealize here, just acknowledge. In the case of successful cultures this lead to a philosophy of balance.

Picture time:

But humans gonna human and we’re curious. We begin to try to find the order within things and to impose order without. Trails become paths become roads. Earth becomes stone becomes pavement. Soil becomes plots becomes property.

The great divisions begin, and maybe were always there.

The cycles of years & seasons becomes a calendar. That becomes days, becomes hours, minutes, seconds. They’ve always been there, but now we make it the driving force of our lives.

Village markets become quarterly profits.

Scientific exploration, mass markets, political and economic and social systems further bifurcate and separate us and group us as we seek to define and understand.

It’s our strength and our weakness.

Tribal protectionism and survival instinct seeps into everything.

I call this the Grid & the Hoop.

The inherent tension of separation & connection.

The Grid tends toward efficiency. But it also breaks things.

The Hoop tends toward balance. But it also slows things down.

I don’t judge them as good or bad. I’m interested in what works.

So what, right?

Let me circle back (warmed you!)

Let’s look at fractals.

They’re everywhere. WE are fractals. We have a trunk (body) that splits into arms and legs which split into fingers and toes.

River deltas, trees, lightning, lungs, synapses, etc.

Repeating.

Cycling.

What I’m driving at here is that the constructed reality we share in modern times is heavily, heavily weighted toward the Grid side of things. As we compartmentalize something unfortunate begins to happen.

We lose the connections, the interstitial, supportive tissue of life.

In education this is the challenge of ‘cross curricular’ learning: helping students make the connections that what they learn in biology applies to music applies to algebra applies to art applies to engineering etc.

We try to reform the connections we severed through isolation.

Now, the strength of creating isolated areas of study is that you can go deep, you can keep finding further ways to compartmentalize& identify. It’s powerful. But like any silo it can blind us to other things. Hence the drive to reconnect.

Does this suddenly sound like politics?

So, as any Indigenous person will probably tell you, things seems out of balance.

So what’s the answer?

How do we reconcile the Grid and the Hoop? How do we find a way to include segmentation and connection? How do we find a way to allow for simplicity amidst the fractals?

To answer that I have to tell you a story. I heard this so many times growing up and everyone will have their version of it. Here’s mine:

The world was in chaos. Everyone fought. They wanted to have what they needed. If someone had more they became worried there wasn’t enough.

It wasn’t just The People. It was All Our Relations. Every person, animal, insect, tree, cloud, microbe, star, molecule, atom, mountain, and so on.

Everyone felt alone. Everyone was scared. So they were angry and they fought.

Except one: little Grandmother Spider.

She saw all this and was worried. She saw the end of all things approaching. But what could she do? She was so small.

She decided to do the only thing she knew: she would spin her web.

And so she began. She spun her web but did it in a new way.

Grandmother Spider spun her web through every animal, through every plant, through stone & star, through galaxies and waters, minerals and microbe, and through every living heart.

When she was done she used all her might and pulled her web tight.

Suddenly the fighting stopped.

When one individual hurt another it vibrated through the web & they themselves were hurt.

When one loved another, it vibrated through the web & anyone who felt it, felt loved also.

All things began to understand: we are all connected & there is more than enough for everyone.

They felt when a thread was severed. They felt the entire web was weakened.

But there were so many connections they knew the pattern would hold. And they knew they could always count in Grandmother Spider to teach them to create new webs.

And so there was peace & understanding.

That’s the story.

It talks about ecosystems and balance. It talks about the strength of connected communities. It shows how we are more resilient through diversity. It’s not a new story, it’s millennia old.

There’s an object that reminds us of this story.

The Dreamcatcher.

As you can see, it contains in its literal framework, everything we need.

The Hoop

The Grid

Fractals

Separations

Connections

We can see if we sever a thread the pattern holds. We can repair it.

But sever too many & it will collapse.

So that’s our base. Another day I’ll hop into how it applies to:

Politics
Economics
Social systems

And more. In the meantime, feel free to begin your own analysis and explore your own ideas for how this framework could be used to develop better systems & understandings.