What and how you write, how long it is, and the medium you choose to use express your ideas in reveal your relationship to your beliefs. Every time you sit down to write is an opportunity for you to use your beliefs to inspire your best work. As part of the human family, we share many truths. How we express them depends on nature and nurture, the family and culture we grow up in, our vision, our personalities, our creative gifts, and how we see our mission.
The Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes believed that truth is what we can’t help believe. People made tools 1.7 million years ago, painted caves and invented the flute 35,000 years ago, and built religious sites 9,000 years ago. Like us, they were born to be free and to create tools to communicate their truths in words, music and art.
Truths I Can’t Help Believe
Seven decades have brought me these irreducible truths:
- Pain may be an early warning sign. It helps us learn and grow, but most of the time, it only hurts.
- Injustice and unjustified suffering are obscene.
- Human needs, fears, desires, and aspirations unite the human family more than money, power, culture, history, resources, religion, and politics divide them.
- To be born gives one the right to food, clothing, shelter, health care, a healthy environment, freedom, an education that prepares one for the work that’s available, jobs that sustain those who do them, and the chance to develop all of one’s potential. These needs aren’t gifts; they are as essential to the health of a community as they are to the individual. Providing them is a test of government; if it fails, the people must replace it.
- Systems can’t work. Why?
–They were created imperfectly with compromises, lack of foresight, and by the same committee that was asked to create a horse but produced a camel.
–They can’t encompass or respond well to all of the possibilities they encounter.
–The world is changing faster than they can change the system to cope with it.
–They are run by bureaucrats who try to justify their existence, shift responsibility, and resist change.
–There are people who try to undermine them and take advantage of them.
Increasingly ineffective systems become part of the problems they were created to solve. They magnify our burden, because we have to fix both the problem and the systems, which resist change. What would the founding fathers think about how their inability to end slavery led to the Civil War? How would they respond to the challenges we face?
- Decisions generate trade-offs, so the challenge is to make the decision with the best set of tradeoffs.
- Morality is a luxury of peace and prosperity. If people’s identity, beliefs, or well-being is threatened, they will fight to preserve them.
- Nobody has a monopoly on truth, wisdom, or virtue.
- Being a multicultural country will be an essential source of strength for our future.
- Whether in art or politics, it’s easy to mistake technique for content.
The Effect of Technology
The rate at which the technology business is relentlessly transforming civilization is accelerating yet
- No one understands it
- No one is in charge of it
- No one knows where it’s going
- No one can control it.
But we still have to keep coming to terms with technology at home and at work. Author Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2045, computing power will be greater than the collective human intellect. What could go wrong with that?
Technology helped bring about the miraculous changes in the Arab Spring that led to the Occupy Movement. But how do we balance technology’s potential for helping to create change with its potential for political and economic control?
The Laws of Power
- Power corrupts. What individuals and institutions need is enough power to be effective but not enough to be corrupted.
- Nobody who wants power should be allowed to have it without controls, including time limits.
- The first job of those with economic and political power is to maintain the status quo so they can keep it. It takes a quarter of a mile for an oil tanker to make a right turn. The larger and older businesses and institutions are, and the larger–and newer the challenges they face–the harder it is for them to respond effectively, even if they want to.
- The Golden Rule of Politics: He who has the money makes the rules. Contributions force politicians to favor those who provide them, which is why we have the best government money can buy.
- People and institutions don’t yield power willingly.
- If a society must choose between order and freedom, it will choose order.
The Greatest Opportunity Writers Have Ever Had
When Mohammed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor, immolated himself in a Tunisian marketplace, he set the world ablaze with the unstoppable urge to do whatever it takes to be free, because being human creates the need for freedom. Part of that freedom is the need to learn and share the truth.
Thanks to freedom and technology–writers of prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction–have the greatest opportunity writers have ever had to express their truths. In the void left by government, business, and religion, they can use their wisdom, guidance, and inspiration to push humanity in the right direction by helping people to understand what’s in their best interests, and to act on it. Not to do so, in what may become one of the most important years of the century, is to leave the world at the mercy of those whose words and actions benefit themselves, not the human family or the planet.
IBOR: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Two suggestions that will help from Kirk Boyd, a client I met at the conference and author of the regional bestseller, 2048: Humanity’s Written Agreement to Live Together (Berrett-Koehler):
- Fostering a global consciousness based on what all of us have in common
- Having an online forum so anyone connected to the Web can express and discuss their ideas with links to different subjects and countries.
- Having an enforceable International Bill of Rights (IBOR) that’s posted on www.internationalbillofrights.com that you can sign and share. Kirk and I are collaborating on a book about the IBOR.
Another suggestion: Continuing online international groups of representatives, dedicated to the public good, discussing, mediating, and adjudicating issues. Have these discussions streamed live on the Web, so the public can comment and vote on them.
Three Questions That Will Determine Your Future
What’s bedrock for you?
What beliefs sustain you?
What is the best way for you to use your beliefs to serve your readers, your community, and yourself?
Your life will be the answer to these questions. Not to ask them and answer them honestly is to deny the only person and the writer you were born to be.
I will be moderating a panel about writing for change at the San Francisco Writers Conference, and we will be organizing a Writing for Change Conference this year.
I write the blog to help you and me understand writing and publishing. Did I get this post right? Rants, comments, suggestions for changes, questions (or answers) are most appreciated.
The 9th San Francisco Writers Conference/A Celebration of Craft, Commerce & Community/February 16-20, 2012/www.sfwriters.org / sfwriterscon@aol.com / http://sfwriters.org/blog /@SFWC/ www.facebook.com/SanFranciscoWritersConference
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Michael Larsen is a literary agent and consultant to nonfiction writers. He and his partner Elizabeth Pomada are co-directors of the San Francisco Writers Conference and the San Francisco Writing for Change Conference.
