The Ecology of Joy

The Ecology of Joy is a philosophy, a way of understanding the world around us, a way to stop the violence, a way to approach peace. The parts of this philosophy are:

Personal motivation
Links between people
Effects of media & technology

Joy is the most powerful human motivator. Fear has been used effectively to control people, but people achieve their best when motivated by joy.

The way that links form between people influence the nature of the resulting culture. One way to look at these links uses the concepts of heterarchy and heirarchy. Another way to explore different forms of culture is found in the explorations of Partnership by Riane Eisler. In her work, Riane talks about partnership thinking and dominator thinking.

Marshall McLuhan proposed that media and technology have a great effect on culture, and that this effect is due more to the way that information is represented and interpreted than to the content itself. For example, whether the programming is news, talk or music, radio has a unique effect on culture that is different that the effect of speech, magazines, newspapers, movies or television.

These three parts interact with each other. The motivation of joy works best with heterarchical cultural links; fear works better when combined with heirarchical cultural links. Media and technology contain embedded ways that we think about the links between people.

Some of the attributes of partnership thinking:

Dominator thinking exhibits an external locus of control, or, put another way, other people decide how you should act. Partnership thinking exhibits an internal locus of control - you are the best person to decide how to act.

Latest update December 29, 2007