Member Musings

To Converge or Not Converging

Much to my chagrin, I admit that I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about building alliances or coalitions.  With whom or what organizations can we align?  How many shared values and goals make a good match? What tenets are deal-busters? After encounters with varied possible partners, I have yet to come up with a definitive answer, but believe we need to be both very intuitive and carefully mindful about any formal, codified connections.  This is not to be exclusionary; we share much with many, and each of us is learning, changing, and evolving.  However, as we move forward, we likely want to avoid or delay coalitions that might dilute or distort core values along the way.

Our group has been engaged in identifying potential ally individuals and groups.  Our collective efforts are small scale at this point but recently, one of us came across a treatise of sorts based on the concept of Divine Government.  Could we align with this group? The document was shared and comments solicited, with varying responses.  Those exchanges prompted me to examine my own negative response, with the following result:

Religions and governments are largely antithetical to sovereignty because they build fences around free will.  Both control through approval and reward, disapproval and punishment.  If you follow the law, you will be approved by society. If you break the law, you will be fined or imprisoned.  If you are devout, you will be rewarded.  If you sin, you will suffer the wrath.  For me, in our existing paradigm, the phrase Divine Government describes less a solution and more the double whammy of a theocracy.

Is my reaction valid?  My answer is “Possibly.”  Will this same reaction always be valid?  My answer is “Probably not.”   Adding to that uncertainty, I always reserve the right to simply change my mind.  Still, we shouldn’t be stalled by what might be.  The only way forward is to connect, converse, and by informing and teaching each other, build a growing consensus. 

If you have seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you know that the story revolves around many, many people receiving a mental image of Devil’s Tower from soon-to-visit-earth extra-terrestrials.  Reactions to the message vary, but for the most part people are driven to understand.  Some only wonder, some do countless sketches, and one goes so far as to build a replica of Devil’s Tower on his kitchen table.  The point is, each of the invitees has some portion of the image, but none have the whole picture.  As the few get closer to Devil’s Mountain, they meet and start sharing their individual details, details that finally get the main characters to the landing site. 

Finally, my current thinking is to aim at convergence rather than coalition, community rather than alliance.  As we share, the complete image unfolds.  Picture many ships crossing an ocean, coming from multiple launch points but all heading for the same port.  Through ongoing communication and navigation adjustments, the ships will eventually converge, sailing into harbor in larger and larger groups.