Values
1. Individuality, self-determination, and free expression
2. Community responsibility and gains
3. Communication towards mutual understanding
4. Accessible knowledge and tools
Faith?
This section is mostly for my family, but others might find it helpful for understanding me too.
First off, although I was raised Catholic I no longer belong to any organized religion or recognize any known being as a god. However I do still believe in the power and necessity of faith... just not in any way recognizable by my family.
Fundamentally I believe that everything we "see" (sense generally) we understand through a mesh of concepts that probably only exist in our heads. The trick is matching up our own concepts with each others while we group about in the dark, bumping into and slowly agreeing on "the reality" around us. If we communicate enough and experience enough of "the world," this inevitably forces us to completely change our beliefs.
Go some place different enough from wherever is home and you'll find people with completely different realities of emotion, ability and possibility, race and right, class and money, gender and purpose, etc. Or study enough science and you'll find completely different realities in quantum mechanics, relativity, thermodynamics, information theory, astronomy, or ... Which is Real or True or Correct?
I don't believe any of them are. They're just descriptions in our heads that help us figure things out. But the buck has to stop somewhere; to be sane/healthy we must believe in something underneath it all, at least long enough to keep our feet on the ground while we attend to what matters. And that for me is the first meaning of faith - the choice to not be too distracted by philosophy and instead to call a spade a spade, until it demands to be something else.
The second and more important meaning of faith for me is the active choice to believe in my values or principles, even though they'll surely change in time, to look for hope and resist fatalism, even though I'll surely be wrong a thousand times. I have faith in possibility, especially the possibilities created by people.
End of section.
Core Beliefs
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Constructing Truth: I believe that there is no static thing called "Truth" that we can aspire to. Rather I believe that we construct Truth by choosing to believe in the possibility of an ever-expanding mutual understanding and working towards understanding wherever we can, with respect and humility.
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Power Sharing: I believe that power corrupts and that systems which put people atop one another or which need coercion or force to maintain order are fundamentally brittle. Small groups arranged in a triangle can sometimes be more efficient at accomplishing specific goals in specific moments, but they can't last or grow without terrible costs.
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Learning from History: I believe that honestly confronting the past is difficult, that history gets re-written even by people with the best of intentions. I also believe that there are many people here now and in the past with anything but the best intentions. I believe in confronting and honestly reflecting on History as an equally constructive and necessary act.
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Philosophical Pragmatism: I believe that the most reliably way to understand something in the social world is to look at it's physical conditions and practical consequences, accepting the widest possible array of stories about it, with patience and openness, to find concrete patterns previously hidden by biases.
Practices and Tactics
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Social Ecology: I believe that most of the people alive today live within systems and practices that are out of sync with the ecological world on which we depend. We have forgotten, lost, or abandoned our humility and our reverence for the complexity of the "natural world" and it's power over us. I believe that we must align our human worlds with the systems on which they depend.
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Diversity of Tactics: I believe that most problems can benefit from the redundancy of multiple approaches far more than the unreliable gains from a strained cohesion in approach.