"First will what is necessary.
Then love what you will."
And he recited a policy at his company, O'Reilly, "Create more value than you capture," and observed that the companies that were collapsing, which the Wall Street Journal was reporting on almost daily had not done that. They had captured more value than they had created.
I have to think that Tim O'Reilly has been reading David Korten, who has written about he post-corporate world, and possibly Riane Eisler, who Korten has credited with inspiring him along these lines.
Then O'Reilly talked about Pascal's wager, applying it to global warming. Wikipedia explains it:
Pascal's Wager (or Pascal's Gambit) is a suggestion posed by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal that even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should "wager" as though God exists, because so living has potentially everything to gain, and certainly nothing to lose. It was set out in note 233 of his Pensées, a posthumously published collection of notes made by Pascal in his last years
O'Reilly suggested that if you take his approach with global warming you end up with new jobs and technologies whether global warming is true or not, and if you don't, you end up with a lot of dead people.
We have to ask ourselves how we can make a difference, and he observes that there are more slaves now than any time before in human history. (I met a former slave earlier this summer-- who'd been in Darfur-- What a noble man!)
And he cites Eliot Janeway, "A victory small enough to be organized is too small to be decisive."
I think this is an extraordinary quote for activists. It goes nicely with the quotation I put after my signature in my emails, by Woody Guthrie,
"I honestly believe the future's going to be millions of little things saving us."
And of course, both of these support the idea of the bottom-up revolution that I've been talking about.
Well, digging up the words for the Janeway quote, I found someone else's blog on O'Reilly's talk, here.
O'Reilly talks about a whole slew of websites that have been built to make a difference:
Google.orgProsper.comPatientsLikeMe : Patients Helping Patients Live Better Every Day23andMe - Beyond genetic testing: Personal DNA analysis and ...And he suggest we "think about the potential in solving big problems-- Build companies that matter, create technology that makes the world a better place."
He cites Rilke's The Man Watching Please read it.
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