A Murmuration of Human Beings
Sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting to consider the world we are weaving together
World Weavers
May 6, 2023
A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.
Trimtab
Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, “Call me Trim Tab.”
The truth is that you get the low pressure to do things, rather than getting on the other side and trying to push the bow of the ship around. And you build that low pressure by getting rid of a little nonsense, getting rid of things that don’t work and aren’t true until you start to get that trim-tab motion. It works every time. That’s the grand strategy you’re going for. So I’m positive that what you do with yourself, just the little things you do yourself, these are the things that count. To be a real trim tab, you’ve got to start with yourself, and soon you’ll feel that low pressure, and suddenly things begin to work in a beautiful way. Of course, they happen only when you’re dealing with really great integrity.
— Buckminster Fuller
A Writing Prompt
Murmuration
The World Weavers gatherings are for human beings. Some human beings may have forgotten that they are creative. We make language, sing songs, invent alphabets, share ideas, create images, build cities, and organize social systems.
When we think of a murmuration of starlings, we are amazed at the way birds will fly together as a group, swirling around in the air as if they were one organism. What does a murmuration of human beings look like? When we look around at the modern world, we can witness the way humans work together to build architecture that draws from various traditions and styles. Ideas, tools, and systems spread around the world. We do this with language, education, commerce, and politics. We can do this with technologies, such as the internal combustion engine. We are social creatures, and we have amplified our ability to travel and gather together with trains, planes, and automobiles.
But, now we have seen what can go wrong when we design without thinking about the possible consequences of our actions. If technology scales, accelerates, and amplifies our abilities and capacities as human beings, we need to think carefully about who we want to be. We are discovering that we can project our intentions into the world and build our own reality.
Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.
We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.