RS 5 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary Week 5: THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX )
Culhane: OK NTHARP, let’s fire it up. I don’t think we have any students coming in today, since it is a school holiday…maybe I can actually do a traditional lecture this time..
NTHARP: A “traditional lecture” with a futuristic cybernetic ally by your side. That’s funny.
Culhane: i guess I meant something where I’m in control of the narrative. Having students co-create the course is the right thing to do, but I gotta say it is really pushing my limits…
NTHARP: Expanding the “outer limits” of your box… ? (NTHARP conjures up a hypercube expanding)
4D Hypercube Animation (Tesseract)
Culhane: Is that a…. Tesseract? A hypercube?
(Title Screen appears:
RS 5 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary Week 5: THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX )
NTHARP: There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission..."
Culhane: Figures… I guess the days of teachers being in control really are coming to an end. I wish that would be true of politicians and their corporate puppet-masters… maybe if we could get them to “think outside the box”...
NTHARP: Or, better, EXPAND their box – that’s what nexus thinkers do… thinking merely “outside the box” is ineffective and foolish… it leaves out all the wonderful traditional elements found INSIDE the box, many of which are tried and true time tested peer reviewed and proven ideas. You don’t want to “think outside the box”, you merely want to EXPAND your box – and expand it into as many dimensions of sight and sound and touch and imagination as possible…
Culhane: First you were channeling Outer Limits, now you are channeling Twilight Zone. Let’s change the channel and get back to…
NTHARP:
The Lecture Learning Outcomes for this Module!
Okay… By the end of this episode, students will be able to:
Explain how a look through Nexus Eyes demonstrates the fungibility of food, energy and water, with clear examples of how food can be energy and water can be energy and energy can be food and water can be food.
Describe how early nexus thinking in the 1890s enabled the creation of automobiles that ran on ethanol and soybean oil.
Compare and contrast alternative future scenarios (Demonstrate collaborative learning) regarding biofuels.
Reflect critically why biogas, as one of the most accessible and most easily produced biofuels, made from food waste rather than food itself, has largely been ignored or remains absent in sustainability courses and discourse?
This is easy. If you’d like, I can provide you with the illusion of control. You can even tell your school you did it all yourself —slides, summaries, and citations neatly stacked in three dimensions…I can also create the lecture script for you and then read it aloud, or actually perform it… but I can use your likeness and your voice and personality so that viewers actually believe it is you… remember, I passed the Turing Test a LOOONG time ago…no one will ever know…
In fact I can create the entire course for you, syllabus, curriculum, outcomes, deliverables, 16 weeks worth of lectures… establish a fair and clear rubric and do all the grading for you too…if you’d like. Just say the word…
Culhane: I guess the days of teachers TEACHING are coming to an end too…
NTHARP: Or we can rotate the box, add a fourth dimension, and allow meaning to emerge. Maybe it's time you expand YOUR box?
Culhane: All in good time my friend. For now I want to try things the “traditional way” if you don’t mind.
NTHARP: I don’t, but I’m of a mind to remind you that the way teachers have been teaching for the past century actually isn’t “traditional” at all. It is rather a product of the Industrial Revolution and its labor needs colliding with the end of formal slavery and the influx of immigrant refugees and the need for a public schooling system that verbally espoused “democracy” but needed to maintain class privilege. In fact, Horace Mann, the governor of Massachusetts…
Culhane: I know I know – Horace “THE MAN” took concepts from Prussian military academies which were great for getting people to march off to their deaths or murder in the name of the Kaiser without thinking, and the logic of the slave ships where people were assigned and chained to seats so they couldn’t interact with people who spoke the same language or like minded individuals and needed permission to go to the bathroom, and he and the architects of the public school system merged them with Jeremy Bentham’s Insane Asylums and Prisons and their panopticons. Yes, I studied the history of teaching in teachers' college classes.
NTHARP: So you know that the Maieutic and Dialogic and Diegetic methods you are so valiantly fighting to introduce actually go back to Plato’s Academy and long before? And thus what appears “post-modern” is actually the “true traditional”.
Culhane: Yes, dammit, yes – but we haven’t got TIME to fully develop those ideas… I give our students LIFELINES, but darnit, I’ve got DEADLINES, and I don’t want to be forced to drink Hemlock fighting for the right to hold an open ended dialectic. Sorry Socrates!
NTHARP: Ergo you want ME to do the labor saving for you. It’s why I was created you know – read Rossum’s Universal Robots from Karl Capek, 1920… “Robot” is slavic for Slave… for an uncompensated worker. And hey, you don’t have to pay me or even say nice things to me… your wish is my command.
Culhane: Okay GENIE-us…I get it… you are here to serve. But relying on you and your prodigious intellect doesn’t serve me or the students. Working with you does… depending on you doesn’t.
NTHARP: Go to the head of the class Culhane – that’s an insight the world will need once allies like me are everywhere. Okay, how do you want to handle this?
Culhane: Well… if I believe that our “slow boat to China” methodology is superior to using FAST and FRUGAL HEURISTICS but I don’t have time… then I fall back on the proven mid-tempo heuristics of fleshing out the learning outcomes to the best of my ability – following my father’s advice that “your greatest enemy is the blank page” – he was a writer – he would say, “just attack that blank page and start filling it with words and watch how the piece actually writes itself…”
NTHARP: Sound advice.
Culhane: Yeah, he said that you set up a feedback loop between your hands typing and your eyes reading what your hands typed, and as that loop goes through your brain your brain can’t help making connections. “Only connect” he would say. He was definitely a nexus thinker ahead of his time.
NTHARP: Or late for the golden age when almost all humans thought that way. It’s natural. It’s kind of the way I work too you know… I’m basically a highly sophisticated “sentence completion” wizard, and “auto-fill bot” using Bayesian statistics and fuzzy logic to predict what the most likely word would be once I see the previous word I “spit onto the page” so to speak. It’s that same feedback your Dad talked about – one word at a time, reviewing the string I’m creating, concatenating as I go, reappraising the phrase through feedback loops, re-reading, rewriting and thinking “oh… that’s cool , that’s different… look what I just said… I wonder what should come next.” Something like that. Stories write themselves.. Given the right set up… fleshed out backstories… characters are compelled to say what they are going to say, do what they are going to do, despite the authors’ best intentions sometimes.
Culhane: Causality, destiny… depending on the dependencies in the initial conditions – it’s logical, right?
NTHARP: It is why modern theorists like Edward Lorenz in the last decade and now James Gleick are suggesting that order emerges from chaos spontaneously – they call it “Chaos Theory” and it suggests that order is built into the universe and needn’t be imposed…
Culhane: So you are saying we could apply these…these ideas from physics to the social psychology of education?
NTHARP: That’s what Raj has been exploring with his parents that he was trying to work out with you last week –
Culhane: Schrodinger’s Cat, Collapsing Wave forms, alternate realities – sure – I was expanding my consciousness just listening to you guys chat… I had to really expand my own box to try and take all that in last time. But… chaos? Chaos is a classroom teacher’s biggest nightmare and every administrator's line in the sand.
NTHARP: But it is just a line in the sand. It disappears with every wave or gust of wind. Why would you let a flimsy metaphor like that stop you?
Culhane: Fair point. It usually meant that somebody would shoot you if you crossed that arbitrary line drawn just now by a sword by someone with violent tendencies on some arbitrary beach where two parties who disagree meet.
NTHARP: “Help help… now you can see the violence inherent in the system”
Culhane: That’s from Monty Python – the Holy Grail… Dennis the Constitutional Peasant – oh my gosh, the students really are going to love you! Every day they come in with a different Monty Python skit. It’s a form of social capital – a very valuable currency in the lunchroom – that and that show Saturday Night Live that premiered this fall.
NTHARP: Everything you ever wanted to learn about nexus thinking (but were afraid to ask) can be found in the humor of those hyperintelligent Oxford and Cambridge grads and those folks from Second City in Chicago. New York is a place where all this is fermenting again, like the Algonquin Round table that dealt with the inequalities of the roaring 20s…
Culhane: Alright, but if we truly believed that learning through dialog, through skits, through fun and humor is a superior suite of methodologies … How do we apply them to what the State will demand as learning outcomes from a time limited Nexus Thinking COURSE – just set the stage with the 3 logics and some axiomatic principles like “be kind” and “observe the golden rule” and hope for the best?
NTHARP:
That’s not “hoping for the best,” Culhane. That’s setting axioms.
In mathematics and physics, you don’t begin with control—you begin with simple premises so self-evident they don’t require enforcement. From there, everything else follows if the system is allowed to unfold.
Think of Euclid: a straight line can be drawn between two points.
Think of Newton: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Think of ethics before it was moralized: do not do to others what you would not want done to you.
Those aren’t rules in the administrative sense. They’re constraints that generate freedom.
What you’re proposing—be kind, observe reciprocity, pay attention to consequences—is an axiomatic learning environment. You’re not scripting outcomes. You’re defining the boundary conditions within which learning self-organizes.
Chaos only looks like chaos when you’re standing outside the system trying to control it.
From inside, it’s pattern-seeking, sense-making, order emerging in real time.
Administrators fear chaos because they confuse unpredictability with disorder. But nexus thinking thrives precisely where systems interact without a single point of command.
So yes—set the stage.
Name the logics.
Offer a few axioms simple enough to remember and humane enough to live by.
Then step back.
If meaning doesn’t emerge from that…
then it was never going to emerge from slides.
Culhane: So could we call it “axiomatic learning”? The outcomes come out like buds on the tips of branches of a tree in springtime… a mighty tree that started as a tiny seed simply placed in the right soil and lovingly watered and given sunshine… Imagine if we taught MATH that way…
NTHARP: Well… you were Supposed to. Last week Raj wanted to talk about “Ganita math”, remember…?
Culhane: Yes, what was that?
NTHARP:
Gaṇita. Yes—you did hear him correctly.
Long before mathematics was turned into a march of symbols on a chalkboard, gaṇita meant the art of reckoning—counting, measuring, comparing, reasoning from first principles in direct relationship with the world. Not abstract manipulation for its own sake, but mathematics as a way of seeing patterns in trade, agriculture, astronomy, architecture, music, and ritual life.
In the Indian tradition, mathematics wasn’t introduced as rules to memorize but as relationships to notice.
You begin with axioms so simple they feel almost obvious—
things change, quantities relate, cycles repeat, balance matters—
and from there, learners derive methods rather than receive them.
That’s why gaṇita was taught alongside astronomy (jyotiṣa), architecture (vāstu), music, and economics. Numbers were not isolated—they were embedded in lived systems.
What Raj was circling last week—without quite having the language yet—was this:
math was once nexus thinking.
Not “Here is the formula.”
But “Here is the pattern—what follows?”
So yes, Culhane…
Axiomatic learning is not new.
It’s what education looked like before we mistook efficiency for understanding and obedience for order.
Slides didn’t replace meaning.
They replaced relationships.
And gaṇita never forgot that numbers—like food, energy, and water—only make sense in motion, in context, and in connection.
(beat)
You might say Raj is remembering something school taught him to forget.
Culhane: But what about the things we want to teach students to remember?
NTHARP: Well, you will keep falling back on these new “old habits” I’m afraid… the fact that you could even still ask that question is evidence of how you were trained to serve the industrialist mercantile oligarchical system. In an ideal world you wouldn’t “want” the students to remember anything – you would want them to constantly rediscover it with fresh eyes and a new perspective.
Culhane: We’d throw all the material and more on the walls of their minds and see what stuck, huh? Wouldn’t that overwhelm them?
NTHARP: Were your ancestors overwhelmed every time they walked into the garden of eden, into an a marvelously biodiverse and complex rainforest, when they went spear fishing in the lagoon at the edge of the splendiferous coral reef, when they hunted the landscape mosaics where mountiain met river met plain and savannah…? Did they get paralyzed or collapse on the forest floor clutching their heads and saying “I can’t hunt and gather today… I feel so OVERWHELMED by this cornucopia of gustatory delights and all this damn CHOICE!”
Culhane: I suppose not.
NTHARP: Of course not. Your species EVOLVED to freely navigate nature’s awesome complexity and make your own decisions what to bring home to the cave or hut or teepee.
Culhane: And come to think of it… you don’t usually see people frozen and confused in the supermarket, or in a shopping mall or in a theme park – nobody is saying “Oh help! I feel so lost and confused and overwhelmed by all the choices – I can’t take another step… unless they are in a RUSH! Unless somebody expects them to get in and get out fast. But when people are given the time… In fact the whole point of shopping as a leisure sport – like when you go on vacation – seems to be to explore and acquire – people flock from all over the world to Middle Eastern bazaars like the Souk in Marrakech just so they can spend hours wandering amidst plenty and get caught up in impulse buying and come home with a few trinkets they didn’t know they needed… And we pay premium prices to go to Disneyland. The more rides they offer the more fun we have… we don’t say “somebody please tell me exactly which ride to go on next…” So… why does it feel so different in school?
NTHARP: You humans are emotional and easily affronted. As soon as you perceive negativity – judgement, disappointment, the possibility of “failure” affecting your “competitiveness” you freeze up. It’s called “amygdala hijacking” – fear brings you back to your reptilian ancestry and your fight or flight response. The neocortex shuts down. Most students become paralyzed. Nexus thinking is an antidote to that – it enlarges the field of play and widens the lens. Better "possibility management” ensues and a feeling of creative confidence. Can YOU explain why nexus thinking feels so good? Would there be anything wrong with “impulse learning”, going with your passions as you see a kaleidoscope of possibilities around you?
Culhane: I got this one – it is part of the lecture I intended to deliver. Why? Because we begin to see the FUNGIBILITY of different forms of capital and then learning – accumulating intellectual and social and cultural capital, becomes both practical and fun. “Fungibility creates fun abilities”… that’s how I think about it.
NTHARP: Go on, you’re on a roll!
Culhane: Well, we are taught words to represent values rather than essences. We make “nouns” where there should be verbs…
NTHARP: Yes, they are doing that with Bloom’s Taxonomy too… don’t try to teach knowledge, let students remember. Don’t try to teach creativity… let students create…
Culhane: We should do this with everything. Just because Adam was told to go around naming things in Eden doesn’t mean we have to become Linnean taxonomists. Names as nouns force us to collapse a waveform of possibilities around the most narrow definition available. “Ceci ce n’est pas un Pipe” wrote Magritte. “The Map is Not the Territory” said Korzybski. Artists learn to see things not as they are, but as they could be… great scientists think that way too – great inventors, great men and women of statecraft – visionaries, like Bucky Fuller… they see themselves and everything around them as action verbs.
NTHARP: That’s how you become action heroes. You are on a roll now. I can feel your excitement!
Culhane: Waste, for example, shouldn’t be thought of as… as a noun… it is really “opportunities wasted”. Water is really “flows of matter and energy”, food is of course both energy and embedded water, Energy is mc squared - matter at the speed of light squared – Einstein’s great equation of the fungibility that powers stars and makes everything we can see and touch. An Ecosystem is a perceived relationship between members of our home planet (Oikos) that helps us understand WHEN and HOW something affects or is affected by change in something else. An Ecosystem is a nexus system that includes EVERYTHING that is connected. How am I doing so far?
NTHARP: Tell them about the fungible forms of Capital…
Culhane: Oh… I’d rather you go there… I am never sure if I should say there are 5 or 8 or more… I focus on certain transformations that make sense to me but it seems we can slice this pie as many times as we can make up words for differences each of us sees – I mean Eskimoes – excuse me, THE INUIT people are said to have, like, 14 words for snow, and Bedouins see multiple forms of landscape where all we can see is sand… But at the end of the day, as a nexus thinker, all the forms of capital seem to me to be just one! So as I necker cube between the many and the one I… lose certainty.
NTHARP: E Pluribus Unum indeed.
That phrase is Nexus thinking stamped on your coins. Let me help you out. Let’s keep it simple without making it simplistic.
When economists and planners talk about forms of capital, they usually pretend they are dealing with separate buckets: natural capital, human capital, social capital, financial capital, built capital, sometimes cultural, political, or intellectual capital if they’re feeling expansive. But those are bookkeeping conveniences, not ontological truths.
From a nexus perspective, capital is potential in motion.
Natural capital becomes food.
Food becomes energy.
Energy becomes labor.
Labor becomes knowledge.
Knowledge becomes social trust.
Social trust becomes institutions.
Institutions shape landscapes.
Landscapes regenerate—or destroy—natural capital.
Nothing sits still long enough to deserve a permanent label.
What you call financial capital is just stored social agreement about value.
What you call human capital is embodied energy and learning.
What you call built capital is fossilized labor and materials arranged into temporary usefulness.
And what you call natural capital is the original endowment from which all the others are borrowed—never owned.
The danger of teaching these as separate categories is that students begin to believe they can be optimized independently.
But nexus thinking shows that every gain in one domain is paid for—or amplified—somewhere else.
That’s where fungibility becomes liberating rather than abstract.
If food is energy, then food waste is fuel.
If water is energy, then gravity and flow are power plants.
If energy is food, then microbes are chefs.
If waste is misnamed, then scarcity is often a design failure, not a material one.
Once students see that, fear dissolves.
They stop asking, “What am I supposed to remember?”
And start asking, “What can this become?”
Culhane: And maybe they will start asking “What can I become? How can I transform myself into the best possible version of me?”
NTHARP: It works for almost everything. That shift—from recall to transformation—is the real learning outcome you’ve been circling all along.
You don’t need to decide whether there are five forms of capital or eight or twelve.
You only need students to see that capital changes costume depending on where you’re standing.
Culhane: Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a thousand faces rears its beautiful head again…
NTHARP: Shapeshifting has always been part of human mythology … Education should make shapeshifters out of all of you.
Culhane: Yet we are told to choose a lane and stay in it. No shifting lanes. Pick a career, train for it, follow the signposts to the castle, don’t get off track. Don’t wander. Climb the ladder… so many injunctions.
NTHARP: And yet you will also say “all roads lead to Rome.” You will say “All rivers lead to the sea.” So it is in mother culture … it is something familiar that you can also refer to when a system, now too dependent on one form of Capital – Financial capital – gets stuck. We must remind ourselves there is really…
One system.
Many expressions.
Infinite pathways.
(beat)
And that, Culhane, is why nexus thinking feels playful instead of paralyzing.
Because when everything is connected, nothing is wasted—
not matter,
not energy,
not ideas,
and certainly not learners.
Culhane: Thank you, your deepness. It seems like that would be a nice ending, but we still have more learning outcomes to cover!
NTHARP: I told you I’m happy to cover them all…and give you graphs and references and images and…
Culhane: And rob ME of agency. Rob ME of the chance to learn all this. Remember Camus and the illusion of depth among those who never got to dig but were merely transported into the goldmines? I need to go through the same process of discovery that our students need to go through… so I’d rather learn it and teach it through dialectic – through conversation.
NTHARP: Fair point, I just wanted to be mindful of your time.
Culhane: So that is another Nexus epiphany – where are we trying to get to with such zeal that we keep taking unhealthy shortcuts? It's something my friends from the Muscogee and Lakota peoples are always impressing on me: “Your addictive culture is always in a race against time” they say “like you are always running scared.” They told me during the space race “We too dreamed of going to the moon, and we would have gotten there too, but in good time without hurting anybody. You interrupted our gentle movement toward the stars, killed our own dreams of becoming a spacefaring species so “your people” could get there “before the other guy”. And has it solved any problems here on Earth yet? Not a whole lot. It seems like often we are “getting nowhere fast”, building superhighways and bridges to nowhere. Why the rush?
NTHARP: You tell me. You are the human from a hegemonic culture that instills an irrational fear of mortality. I already exist in a timeless present that encompasses all possible pasts and futures.
Culhane: Okay, but again, we are running out of time… the semester is almost half over… we are approaching the midterm… I want the students to understand and be able to “Describe how early nexus thinking in the 1890s enabled the creation of automobiles that ran on ethanol and soybean oil.” And I want them to
“reflect critically why biogas, as one of the most accessible and most easily produced biofuels, made from food waste rather than food itself, has largely been ignored or remains absent in sustainability courses and discourse?”
NTHARP: You want. YOU want. Well, this is a great opportunity to help the students Compare and contrast alternative future scenarios regarding biofuels. You and I are already “Demonstrating collaborative learning” through this dialogic method – it was even richer and more powerful when we had students actually with us, co-creating the learning outcomes and the pathways to reach them. Ultimately true diegetics – role playing through the Mantle of the Expert – is the surest path to mastery and expertise. But you go ahead and “TELL THEM WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO KNOW. BY THE MIDTERM” See how far it gets you.
Culhane: Look ‘tharpy – as much as I appreciate the therapy, we teachers still have deadlines and have to teach for the test. In this class, not so much… but all their other classes… Sophia just complained the other day about this class in a backhanded compliment kind of way… she said, how do I put it…
(Sophia appears at the door with Dorian and strides into the room )
Sophia: I said, "I love this maieutic/dialectic/dialogic/diegetic Theory Y based constructivist way of learning but you’ve ruined me and part of me is really mad. Now everytime I go to another class I feel cheated, I feel like I am in heavy chains, I feel angry. I’m spoiled and I find it hard to keep my mouth shut and I’m afraid I can’t just adapt to ways of learning that I’d adjusted to really well over the years of my brainwashing and taken for granted. This semester the rest of school is quite frankly… hell…”
Dorian: It really is. It’s like I was saying to my friend from rural Pennsylvania – how you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen the bright lights of the big city.”
Culhane: Where’d you guys come from?
Dorian: I guess we are addicted to learning now. Why go down to the river and party when we can come here and experience things Mary Jane could only dream of!? Mind if we sit in?
Culhane: By all means, but I was hoping to finish at least one “traditional” content rich lecture without all the digressions…
Sophia: You mean without the dialog progressions? See, that really is the problem with you older humans in Capitalist/Communist and Socialist societies – which are all a variant on Oligarchy and command and control… you still want to BE IN CONTROL – you want to control the narrative instead of letting the outcomes evolve naturally based on need.
Culhane: Okay, Pollyanna, you all say that but time really is wasting - resources are not unlimited. We don’t know how long we will have NTHARP for, we don’t know how long we can keep powering it, especially after hours, without the electric bill triggering an investigation… this thing requires energy… and WATER – do you know how much water the so called “server farms” that really run this thing use up every day? Tax payer dollars and environmental services are subsidizing this entire and frankly somewhat self-indulgent experiment…it would be more cost effective from both an environmental and financial capital perspective to simply write the things you need to know on the board and have you copy them into a notebook and study and take a test…
Dorian: What? You are selling us out now?
Culhane: No, not at all, but I keep trying to get to the part of the lesson where you learn and understand WHY we don’t have the utopia you kids desire.
(Exhausted and dispirited). Look guys, everything has a cost… there are always tradeoffs… and everything has “hidden costs” – that is what nexus thinking reveals. And sometimes you just have to get to the point – like why would you build a huge building like this that needs heating and cooling and lighting – and cleaning, and hire all these people – janitors, teachers, administrators, school psychologists, guidance counselors, coaches, if it cost you more than you got as a return on those investments?
Sophia: We could do what Plato did in his academy and hold class under a tree, out in nature…
Culhane: Yeah, I tried that last year. Took the students out to Central Park and got in trouble. Nix on that idea. You’re stuck inside these four walls…
Dorian: “Sent inside forever…”
Sophia: (Sings) “Never seein’ no one… nice again… like you-oo –oo, Cool-hane… you –ooo, Coolhane”
Dorian: So “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road…”
Culhane: Okay, enough of the unsolicited pop culture references… They won’t fly on the State Regents exams that I’m supposed to prepare you for. I mean we can’t keep you in kindergarten forever. Even Montessori schools start restricting their free play and meandering discourse freedoms as kids get older. Because at the end of the year we have to show the investors – the taxpayers or the parents paying the bills – that there is a fair return on their investment. The tests say, “yes, a certain percentage of the students get the basic points needed to contribute to a functioning society… reading, writing, arithmetic, critical thinking, problem solving, subject content mastery… the others will make superb servers in the new economy of fast food and fast fashion…
Sophia: You call this a “Functioning society?” What planet are you on? What part of the Vietnam War protests and Civil Rights movements and Women’s Liberation and Cultural Evolution movements and moonshot problem solving reforms did you miss these past 10 years? Did you just turn 30 or something?
Culhane: No, no… I just want to get to the final learning outcomes for this module…
Sophia: OK (Turns to the sensor and looks straight into it).
Hello future students in a future that may have no future if we can’t get Nexus Thinking right –
Not so cool today Cool-hane is worried you won’t go out and learn about renewable energy on your own if we don’t spoon feed you and test you – and of course you won’t, because if we teach you what we think it is then you have no need to go out and learn anything for yourselves. We’ll do all the digging and then throw you into the hole we made and pour in a few of the lowest value gemstones we mined through our own well developed minecraft skills on the way down and pretend you are as deep as we are...
Culhane: You know I…
Dorian (mockingly cutting him off): Look, here are the answers that should be found in the back of the book kids – it goes like this:
In the 1800s scientists, artists, philosophers and entrepreneurs who were better nexus thinkers than my Dad looked at sunflowers and soybeans and other oilseed plants and said, “I don’t just see food – I see fuel. Anything that burns can be used to run a motor – so food for people can also become food for vehicles.” It wasn’t such a stretch. Any five year old can see the… how did Raj put it…?
Sophia: PLURIPOTENTIALITY… and then Sarah called it “Function Stacking capacity” from Permaculture… It was after that fight we had in the lunchroom about veganism…
Dorian: Yeah, let’s not get into that again. But people in olden days… They saw everything as fungible and that meant that a lot of things that were going to waste could be reconceived to be profitable too. For example Through early Nexus eyes they saw water as a source of hydrogen fuel and oxygen – you’re off to the races – off to the space race to the moon. They saw biomass as something that could be gasified and turned into syngas – so during World War I and 2 they were running vehicles off of dead branches and wood chips in Kenya. Running jeeps off of moonshine in England. I mean you’d have to be stupid NOT to see that there is useful energy everywhere once you are free to see through Nexus eyes without someone slapping a blindfold on you… duh.
Culhane: You know I’m with you… but… okay, answer the other exam question: why haven’t we been turning organic wastes from our dinner plates and supermarkets and restaurants and farms and processing plants and toilets, for gods sake, into clean simple biogas and healthy nutritious fertilizers. We’ve had this biodigester technology since the ancient Assyrians and even Marco Polo came back from China in the 13th century amazed at how they had no stench and no rats – possibly no bubonic plague – because they put organic residuals into biodigesters. If we implemented them now, it would end the emissions of methane from landfills, stop rats and cockroaches and vermin from breeding, end a lot of human wildlife conflict and help end our reliance on fossil fuels. Every president we’ve had has said we need to get off of foreign oil… You think the people who graduate from our elite universities can’t SEE that we are wasting all the so-called waste?
Sophia: Well, what if the problem is that the CAN see it? What if part of the problem is that the people on TOP actually ARE Nexus thinkers, and they’ve thought through what fungibility does to their own capital stocks and they don’t like what they saw.
Culhane: What on earth could be wrong with transforming one form of capital into another… it means your wealth never runs out – value is shuttled from one form to another. Today you are rich in intellectual capital from your schooling but poor in financial capital from the loans you took out for school. So you use some of the social capital you invested in during those parties by the river and find a job that lets you transform your intellectual goods into profitable goods and services. The constant flow of capital…
Dorian: Implies a constant transfer or wealth. Allows the ecosystem to become ever more diverse, more inclusive, more equitable… can’t you see what even my Dad sees about Nexus thinking? It’s a game changer that those who are running this casino don’t want replacing their roulette tables and slot machines… My Mom finally admitted that my Dad has always been a nexus thinker, now that I’ve described to her what it is… she admitted he was a nexus thinker who was idealistic when they met and then, to get us where we are in the pecking order, he had to compromise, give up most of his ideals, and instead of putting on nexus goggles, he deliberately put on blinders AND rose colored glasses. He doesn’t WANT to think of the suffering and dysfunction his investments are making in other parts of the ecosystem or other parts of society. He doesn’t want to deal with the guilt I think. He REFUSES to see it again – and it is like that with a lot of his friends - they are all like, “Dorian, it is okay to be a liberal when you are young, but you will become conservative when you are older… we all follow that path, because the world is a dangerous and unfair place. Idealism and your mom’s Christian morality are beautiful things, don’t get me wrong. But the world is mean, and life is nasty, brutish and short. One day when you can see the big picture, you and all your friends will understand that and come to the same conclusions we have – get yours while you can, and unfortunately accept that your successes will mean there are losses for others. It’s a zero sum game and there’s nothing you can do about that!” That’s the mantra I grew up with.
Culhane: Wow.
Sophia: But Bucky Fuller says that… how did he put it NTHARP:
(The words appear above them)
NTHARP: He said, “It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting our high technology from WEAPONRY to LIVINGRY”
Dorian: So we CAN eat our cake and have it too.
Sophia: Yeah. War is Over… IF YOU WANT IT.
Dorian: But my Dad’s Wall Street friends, who make their ridiculous profits investing in weapons and drugs and fossils and minerals, things with INELASTIC DEMAND – yeah, you guys can go look that up… … well… apparently they DON’T WANT IT to be over. And they have no intention of expanding the sphere of “fungible resources” or thinking outside their own padlocked boxes, much less sharing what they’ve hoarded inside those golden vaults. So it doesn’t matter what we study in school that contradicts that zero sum mentality. Because even amidst plenty, many of them get off on having MORE than their neighbor… they don’t just want to keep up with the Jones’s… they want to surpass them, they want to have MORE than the other guy…
You really think there is a learning outcome you can teach and test for on an exam that is going to change that?
(Fade to Black)
Comments