I think David Bohm would have observed something similar in Oppenheimer’s nature - bringing in a new student or colleague very close to him and then suddenly throwing them away with a hurtful comment or action. Of course Oppenheimer himself was also obscessed with power. He was even willing to give the names of his students to the security services in order to confirm his position as someone politically reliable to run the Manhatten Project.

“To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our heart”

The middle ground is there and I believe that the climate is right to cultivate (much needed) change. The key for environmentalists like Adam Werbach was to work with “the opposition” [Walmart] to turn the vital message from message from the environmental domain from GREEN to “Sustainability BLUE”. Blue, apparently, being the colour that straddles environmental - social - cultural - ECOMONIC domains.

Adam argues that we tend as individuals naturally to favour either the power drive or the love drive - and should therefore practise strengthening the weaker drive. I am a love man myself - so naturally agree with you in finding ‘Love and Power’ more powerful.

You will recall Napier one of our good friends commenting on his difficulties ’selling’ the ‘love and fear’ model we developed in IFF. It is clear, he said, that all the answers lie in the love loop. But it is only the fear loop that gets you through the door of an organisation. He hoped to be able to smuggle the love loop in later….

It would be most interesting to follow up this article with a gathering of the Forum to take some aspect of it and create a 3Horizon story and add at that to thump knowledge base. Or, more simply just to create their own take on your topic and add that here to it.

Very worth the read. Thanks.

His fellow prisoners were shocked. Hope is dangerous, they said. What neither they, the prison authorities, nor perhaps the cinema audience realise is that in this incident, Dufresne comes closest to exposing his true purpose, because it was hope, sustained over 20 years, that led to his escape and the destruction of the corrupt regime that governed the prison.

Our problem with hope is that it admits of uncertainty. What we want, apparently, is an assurance of certainty and we’re not prepared to wait 20 years for it. We want to be assured of what is going to happen within as short a time as possible(the longer future can go jump) so that if it doesn’t happen, blame can be apportioned to those who gave us the assurance while they’re still alive. We also like to call this this scenario the real world.

It is self-evident that the future is uncertain, and that the most realistic attitude towards it is hope. So what allows us to indulge in the delusion of certainty? The only certainty that the future holds is death, which we’d prefer to avoid, so we look to the opposite of the future; the past. We know that happened, so we can comfort ourselves with it. Moreover, there is so much of the past, and an ever-growing amount of it, that we can we go on finding out more and more about it, without ever having to draw any conclusion about what it all means.

Perhaps some of this is behind the decision to close a contemporary art gallery and street-art festival in Falkirk, while museums and more traditional civic events are protected. The arts have flourished since My Futures began, the future orientation offering a framework for the questions posed by the arts, but it may be that the Falkirk Bairns are not yet ready to embrace this, and prefer the answers provided by the past. The closure of the Park Gallery is not strictly a closure, but a relocation into the neighbouring Callendar House, Falkirk’s premier heritage venue. The contemporary arts are thus protected as well, as is the public by the heritage packaging.

Of course, the past cannot be relied upon to yield answers and certainty. What it consists of changes with the passage of time and the multitude of views. Even facts cannot be relied on. It is in many ways more uncertain than the future, more shocking in its revelation of ‘truths’. Its big messages, rather than its details, we can use for the future. Once we realise this, perhaps we can get back to valuing hope.