Retrospective 2019-49

This is a look back at last week’s reading and painting.

Painting

I painted a candelabrum designed by Erik Höglund. The play of light in the low-lying sun caught my attention.

Books

I finished reading John Briggs and F. David Peat’s Seven Life Lessons of Chaos. The lessons in the book are attempts to penetrate into a new sense of the world. Briggs and Peat ask many penetrating questions, for example:

• Wouldn’t it be great to participate in vital self-organized workplaces?
• What if we allowed self-organization to create our communities?
• What if what we are seeking doesn’t lie in any answer but at the center of the question?

The next book I’m going to read is F. David Peat’s From Certainty to Uncertainty.

Article

I also read an interesting article–American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation. by Matthew Desmond–in The New York Times. Many of today’s management techniques were developed by and for large plantations. Desmond writes:

Perhaps you’re reading this at work, maybe at a multinational corporation… You report to someone, and someone reports to you. Everything is tracked… It feels like a cutting-edge approach to management, but many of these techniques that we now take for granted were developed by and for large plantations.

Slaves have been replaced by human rentals.