"If we want to change things, we’ve got to look at the underlying structures and learn how to alter them. " - Douglas Rushkoff

Interview excerpt with Douglas Rushkoff, via the PopOcculture Blog:

I’ve read that you don’t believe in God, but have you had any transformative personal spiritual experiences which you might be able to share with us? Where did these experiences come from? Where did they bring you?

Rushkoff - I have them all the time. I mean, there were certainly biggies. Times when I felt there was *meaning*, or at least a connection between everything. But I never really felt the need to personify it. There were times I believed in something I called God - enough to drop a girlfriend because she said she could never believe in such a thing. I thought that was such a dry way of moving through existence.

But now that I don’t believe in a character God, I feel I’m much more open to less predetermined manifestations of order and connection. I can see beauty, deep beauty, in kind acts, coordinated efforts, self-sacrifice, even dogs playing.

As for my own super transformative experiences, well, I suppose I had very typical ones. The psychedelic experience. Poets and writers like Wordsworth, James Joyce, Milton. A few experiences of nature. Sex. Yoga. Doing a particular talk in Croatia.

I’ve come to regard the more dramatic experiences of spiritual awakening with a great deal of suspicion, however. The more dramatic the experience, the more likely it is or will soon be a manifestation of ego. I’ve taken the opposite tack: looking for the sublime in the small. Feeling a sense of connection in the littlest things...

...You’ve said that reality is “up for grabs” and elsewhere that “our realities are designed and can be redesigned.” But might it be that this relentless search for slicker designs, improved systems and updated source-codes is what makes our current situation so complex, tenuous and sometimes cut off from “real life” in the first place? What I am asking I guess is this: who knows more about a building – the person who designed it or the people who live and work there every day?

Rushkoff - Well, I don’t know that there should be such a disconnection between the designers and the people who use things. That’s really my whole point. It’s one thing not to know how your car works, since driving it is not necessarily connected to your intention (of getting somewhere). But media is different. Unless you understand the underlying biases of the media you’re using, you’re not really using the media - it’s using you.

I’m not arguing for updated designs and source codes. I’m arguing that people need to understand that THE REALITY WE ARE LIVING IN DIDN’T JUST TURN OUT THIS WAY. There were real people with real intentions who designed our cities, our education system, our religions, and our money.

Our schools were designed, intentionally, to create docile workers. That’s what Carnegie and Rockefeller were paying for. Our money - centralized currency - was designed to increase the power of the central authorities at the expense of the periphery. It was designed to make it hard for individuals to create value for themselves and one another.

I’m not talking about slick cell phones, here. That’s just nonsense. I’m pushing people - as a very first baby step towards regaining a bit of agency - to consider whether everything around them really is a pre-existing condition ordained by God, or whether people planned things to be this way. I want people to stop assuming everything around them is fixed, and start realizing that there were many decisions made. That much more of our world is software than hardware. That it can be learned, that it’s underlying codes can be changed.

It’s not about the codes in your cell phone or your pager. It’s about the underlying codes that determine how a neighborhood is valued. The ones that lead to black kids getting shot by cops for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The ones that lead to Darfur. The starvation and murder there is not just “the way things are.” It’s the way we *made* them.

If we want to change things, we’ve got to look at the underlying structures and learn how to alter them. This doesn’t take you away from real life at all. It releases you from the artificial barriers to getting involved in the real work of making the world a less cruel place.