NBS: With the speed of communication and the Internet, do you think that people are getting closer or further apart?

GSS: Ah…we’re fragmenting.

NBS: We’re fragmenting?

GSS: I think about this a lot. I think about social structures and I’m kind of a wonk on social structures. So, we have churches. That’s a social structure. Kiwanis. We have caucuses, we have family. We have county commissioners, organizations, laws: government. And I’m looking at if they’re coherent, are they coming together on things or are do they fragment and separate, come apart on things?  Is there tolerance? And I don’t see the tolerance growing, nor do I see coherence…This is really Putnam and his book Bowling Alone. Edward Putnam is a black professor at Harvard and he wondered about communities and what makes coherence in communities. He found that bowling allies were so busy making money that there were no bowling leagues…And he asked, “What’s going on?” So he decided to do a study and he matched villages in demographics, economics, and he did a couple tests. One: he looked at the voluntary associations…and he would call City Hall and say, “I have a question” and ask “How many schools are available for my five year-old?” And they’d day, “Well, I don’t know but I’ll connect you.” The city that didn’t have a lot of voluntary associations had a lot of connections before he got an answer. The city that did have a lot of voluntary associations, they knew everything. One big measurable difference: there was a communication system.  He also looked at community-rich assets, Boy Scout Clubs, bridge clubs, parks, museums, galleries, things that actually enhance the quality of life like trails, and the answer was that the number of associations does this.

NBS: And you don’t think they can be replicated on the Internet?

GSS: No, because they’re face-to-face. Flower-to-flower, bowling ball-to-bowling ball. And, this is what I really believe about the Internet. It’s not a relationship. For the following reason: if I’m having a relationship on the Internet and it’s getting nasty (For effect, he closes his laptop.) it’s gone. I don’t have to have a relationship with any negative emotional content. I say all learning has to have an emotional content. If there are not neurotransmitters going on in there, there’s nothing happening. You’re just passing by. You’re not building your own efforts. And there’s so little emotional content emailing and therefore I’m not really building a relationship like face-to-face where you might scream and say, “I’m really aggravated!”

NBS: So, what’s the future look like?

GSS: Fragmentation. As far as absolutely having a little community that works. They’re smaller, and they’re less tolerant, there’s less interaction. As in: “They’re Republicans but they’re a lot of fun bowling,” if that’s not there…

NBS: So, more war?

GSS: Yeah, more wars.

NBS: Apocalyptic?

GSS: Well, here’s my prediction. After oil, what’s the next cheapest electricity you can buy?

NBS: The sun, water?

GSS: Nuclear. Known technology, lots of the shit around, we know how to make them. Cheaper than solar. What does everyone want? Electricity. Light bulbs. So, now the nuclear proliferation becomes very serious…When we went to Iraq and said every single family could keep one AK-47…When we really have a lot of nuclear proliferation and we have these Darfurs and they’ve got the shit, look how bad the control of nuclear weapons is. We were absolutely engaged with an arms race with Russia…that was the nature of the Cold War, was if you’re going to bomb me baby, you’re gonna get two back, and vice versa…But it only involved two powers, but when it’s going to be many powers it’s not clear what happens…It’s not like two Superpowers who come to the agreement that they’re afraid to do it. With Syria and Lebanon, they’re not afraid to do it. What do we do then? If Syria sets off a bomb in Tripoli do we then bomb Syria?…It’s going to be complicated.

NBS: So, you just wait for Jesus to come?

GSS: Well, Jesus isn’t coming. He laughs. Here’s my prediction. We’ll draw a graph. He begins to draw a graph. Here’s time and this is the number of people on the Y-axis…and there’s 1.6% growth every year, it’s exponential. For ever. And what we do know is that there’s a finite Earth…and we aren’t going to inhabit outer space…We can imagine different ways for this to end. He draws the line all the way down to the X-axis. We’re all gone. Too bad. Then another way is that we all get smart, and we just say we don’t want to grow any bigger. Just stay here, at this number. He draws a line that plateaus. We can handle it. There’s enough food for everybody. We don’t fight and we kind of take care of each other…Or an intermediate way, like locusts, we go all the way down but then we start breeding again until we hit saturation and we do something again and we go back down, but you can’t imagine very many endings for this exponential growth…The evolutionary imperative is: feed, fuck, fight, flight. The four Fs.

NBS: But what if our evolution helps us to surpass our ego? Is that possible?

GSS: This is what the evolutionary psychologists say. That we are what we are: feed, fuck, fight, flight, because that was successful as we developed…That’s how we survived…And what these psychologists say is that those characteristics took tens of thousands and thousands of years to gradually evolve. Evolution is a very slow process. So, anyway, my favorite decision is why don’t we sit down together and organize and decide about what stability could be so let’s aim for it, and let’s all agree.

NBS: Why not run for President?

GSS: I don’t want the job.

NBS: Because…? I mean, there are no good candidates –

GSS: There are no good candidates.

NBS: - because they’re all about themselves. You’re not about yourself as much as most people.

GSS:  But if you’re a candidate the first thing is you have to do is get elected. So I have to do what it takes to get elected, and that’s corrupting.

NBS:  But what if other people do the work for you? Would you take the job?

GSS: No. I honestly believe, and this goes back to why I’m not in the Peace Corps, that my role as educator, teacher, community builder, community organizing in the United States, that I am making more change than any President except Franklin Roosevelt.

NBS: He was the best President?

GSS: The best one I knew.

NBS: Lincoln, all the Founders?

GSS: Well, I’m still questioning if Lincoln was right about the War. He certainly bit it and did it, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people suffered, and it did not eliminate the intolerance. We’re two nations. We’re North and South.

NBS: And what are we out here in Colorado?

GSS: We’re West. We’re on the edge. We call it Intermountain Regional, and we’re on the edge of the Southwest. We don’t have a good history of slavery. We do have a good history of taking land, building borders which still exist.

NBS: So you think slavery would have been abolished without the Civil War?

GSS: I don’t think the Civil War abolished slavery. It just changed some laws.

There is a long silence between the two.

Posted in chapters | No Comments