🦅 SoundEagle in Longevity and the Living Society 🏘🏡🏙🌇

Notes and Treats

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Environmental Sensitivity
Persona
Tolerance
Frugality

🏘🏡 The Living Society 🏙🌇

Preface

Designed and administered by SoundEagle, this website has served as a multimedia playground to investigate the polyphonic dance of ideas, to consider their manifold eddies, their unexpected simultaneities or juxtapositions, as well as their multiple embodiments and modes of expressions, as they unfurled through the lenses of plurality, the faces of diversity, and the facets of multidisciplinarity, intermingling from time to time, and topic to topic, with the semantic fields of culture, the speculative realms of philosophy, the aesthetic worlds of art, and the analytic spheres of science.

In this post, the unit of analysis is an aggregate of individuals forming a social system, group or community. The focus is on the longevity of such aggregate, as characterized and bolstered by four desirable characteristics identifiable in many long-lived social entities or collectives. To that extent, this post can provide an abiding meta-narrative or meta-blueprint for any aggregated entity or social enterprise seeking a consolidated, farsighted and adaptive approach towards achieving and maintaining cohesive practices, constructive relationships, sustainable management and holistic governance in order to amplify the capacity to realize social and environmental goals, rather than just being more financially valuable.

Definition

Over the years, SoundEagle has encountered various communities, cooperatives, associations, organizations, institutions, departments, faculties, companies, groups, classes, forums, networks, clubs and societies, observing, participating in and learning from them in various contexts and capacities, some of which have entailed the creation and maintenance of websites. The styles and contents of these websites, as much as they have been conceived, structured and composed by SoundEagle, reveal in varying degrees certain underlying commitments to values, people, learning, innovation, and preservation of written and intellectual knowledge, all of which define “The Living Society”.

The definition, or rather, the attribution, is valid and justifiable insofar as a living society comprises like-minded people who are attracted, identified or governed by their own norms, shared values and mutual interests within a dominant, larger society, or within a distinctive culture and institution. In other words, a living society arises from the relationships and interactions among its constituent members, including those emerging or thriving under new social forms and relations, whether in cyberspace or via the application of knowledge to social, economic and cultural activities.

Problems

To the extent that a living society is collaborative, it can enable its members to benefit in ways that would not otherwise be possible on an individual basis. However, collaboration also brings with it challenges, many of which concern not just the strengths and weaknesses of those members, but also the opportunities and threats both within and without the society, affecting its health and status. Whilst medical and scientific advances as well as higher living standards and better governance have dramatically raised the average lifespan of human beings in many regions of the world, the same cannot be readily claimed about the longevity of businesses, enterprises and other social entities, many of which have suffered from early decline or premature demise.

At times of turbulence or transition triggered or accompanied by inevitable socio-economic and socio-demographic changes, many societies (whether online or offline) have not escaped the fates and troubles that have fallen upon numerous companies and corporations. They are facing challenges that threaten their viability and even validity, including rising rent and public liability insurance premium, dwindling or aging membership, waning or diversion of interest, disruptive internal politics, lack of prospective officials, declining voluntarism, rising individualism, shifting social moray, widening generation gap, changing public taste, altered cultural capital, persisting nuclear-family syndrome, dramatic technological change, as well as external factors such as recurrent flooding, fire threat, prolonged drought, water restriction and other natural disasters.

Even though the presence of a democratic process of voting as well as the observance of agendas and charters have many benefits, they do not necessarily guarantee the quality and quantity as well as the validity and reliability of the executive members’ deliberations, decisions and outcomes, which are, after all, highly dependent on the calibre, knowledge, wisdom, upbringing, mental horizon and other human qualities, faculties and/or professional qualifications of the members. In particular, asserting or insisting that any decision by the committee of a society is always the right, valid and only one to follow to the exclusion of any much needed change, objection, amendment, (re)assessment, (re)evaluation and/or any other recourse is to act in a rigid, unhelpful, disruptive, foolhardy, bureaucratic and/or irresponsible manner.

That the problem of attrition is escalating in some societies is well-known. However, attrition is often only a symptom and hardly the sole cause of the demise of a society. What tends to be more pressing and vexing than attrition is that many new ideas, social media, community engagements and essential sustainability measures are unimplemented or very slow in their adoption by clubs and societies. Their introductions, features and benefits can frequently fall on deaf ears, or are continually resisted and/or misunderstood by older members due to inertia, fear, ignorance, complacency and other factors.

Furthermore, one of the most serious issues is that many or most members just want to remain and retain more or less the same, year after year, and have done little else to promote the longevity, diversity and robustness of their societies. Instead of being more benevolent, receptive, open-minded and inclusive, some members and/or officials continue to be quite tight-fisted, small-minded and even indifferent, especially on issues of governance and sustainability, which are much exacerbated by attrition and by a culture of denial, exclusion and entrenchment, even in the face of looming crises.

Solutions

Various pressures and challenges notwithstanding, and regardless of specific goals and visions to be realized in the medium and long terms, on the whole, societies rise or fall according to the ways in which they gather and manage their resources: people, information and money. They need to create the conditions in which their people will voluntarily give their best, and set the contexts for the rest of the organisations’ members to perform tasks, partake benefits and participate in activities.

Enduring companies and long-lived societies not only maximize improvements in human and environmental wellbeing but also regard their peoples and enterprises as ecological systems, symbiotic networks and “living work communities” rather than purely or predominantly financial entities, fiscal engines, investment portfolios or economic machines. They are holistic caretakers and all-round stewards of resources, both internally and externally, being able to cherish, adapt and/or renew their resources to gain both peripheral and systemic advantages. Appropriating from the wisdom of Arie de Geus, the following four characteristics are applicable to societies in good health and longevity:

• Environmental Sensitivity

  1. Long-lived societies sample, learn and adapt to what is going on around them.
  2. Sensitivity to the environment represents a society’s ability to learn and adapt.

• Persona

  1. Long-lived societies are cohesive and have a strong sense of identity based on the ability to build a shared community.
  2. Cohesion and identity are aspects of a society’s innate ability to build a community and a persona for itself.

• Tolerance

  1. Long-lived societies are patient, generally decentralized, with widespread decision-making authority, and tolerant of “non-core” activities on their periphery (which may well become tomorrow’s core).
  2. Tolerance and its corollary, decentralization, are both symptoms of a society’s awareness of ecology: its ability to build constructive relationships with other entities, within and outside itself.

• Frugality

  1. Long-lived societies are conservative with their money, which they use to govern their own growth and to give them options.
  2. Conservative financing is one element in a very critical societal attribute: the ability to govern its own growth and evolution effectively.

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