All of those people who want us to think we need to be specialsts have to convince us of this, if they are ever to control us. And that is what they need: control. At the beginning of the last century, it was decided that society could become near-perfect, if it became highly ordered, with everyone in their place, working on keeping things nice and ordered.

This is breaking down in reality. In real life, if you really stand back and look at it, it takes more energy, more time, more forcing and pushing, whip cracking and mutual/-self psychological mutilation to have everyone specialize.

The path of *least resistance* is to generalize. Before Mass Industrialization, I contend that people knew this, and applied it directly. I think that upon the emergence of Mass Industry, that for a brief period, abundant, but depletable resources made it possible for people who controlled those resources to force us all to specialize. But, once those resources started to dwindle, we were told that we are on our own to replace those things that came cheap, easy, and mass produced. Naturally, people start to follow the path of least resistance, to become an adaptive generalist. But, there is litte infrastrucutre, little support for the generalist. Our systems are set up for the specialist, as you discuss in your article above.

This is what I am interested in. Part of what I am concentrating on these days. *It’s up to us to plant thesseds and grow this dynamic societal infrastructure for generalists.* If we can make a better choice, people will likely choose it. People need generalist-centric alternative ways to solve their basic survival problems. We need new ways to “bank”, new ways to grow food, make the things we want and need, research and develop new things, better insights on how to work together as generalists.

This is what I fantasized all of you folks in Ann Arbor might be interested in trying to do. Not an employee is actually a good start, though. It’s a great start. But we need more. Generalists need to know they are not alone, and that if they work together, they can co-create an alternative infrastructure. They can also learn from the past, from the last time(s) that social systems were hijacked and and reformed like a Victorian Garden into the vision of a few people. Figure out how to keep certain resources voluntarily co-governed, commonly available, and immediately useful.

It pleases me enormously to discover I am not alone in my infinite quest.

betaBonnie

Thank you thank you THANK YOU.

I had a conversation with a woman the other day at my daughters’ school.
She started to leave towards her destination and thought I would head the other way. She said “you must have work to do” and I said “this is my work” as I walked with her. I get paid to be who I am all day. It’s pretty cool, really.

Some days I think I am nuts. I quit my cushy job at the U to do this. This.
This changes a lot with the inflection of the day.

Meanwhile, after quiting the j-o-b and becoming a “consultant”, I also found http://www.freecycle.org and started up a local group. Whoah. My world spun on axis here in Suburban LA. Guess what people? There are good folks here. In LA. Holy chit.

Giving away my stuff and reconsidering my relationship to my crap has changed my life. I could be some typical suburban housewife by this point, with my spa days ( Ok, I do like those) and my doctor bills for mental care. Instead, I am blissfully, crazily integrated into my own life. My work is my home is my life. When I used to be “a specialist” and have the big j-o-b with benefits, my kids had no idea what I did to feed us all. Now when I ask them, they say “she gets money for our school” and that’s what I do most days. They also get to see me a lot. Doing this.

Nikki
Suburban Revolutionary
North Hills, CA

You may be interested in an essay I posted on my generalist blog last month called “What Specifically Do Generalists Do?”: http://creativegeneralist.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-specifically-do-generalists-do.html

Cheers!

Glad to be of service. It’s what I do.

Sepp

I suspect that I may be borderline Asperger’s. Yes, you are, one shrink opined. No, you aren’t, another said, and then added, after I talked about my intellectual interests,

“Have you ever been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder?”

Whew! Being a generalist is not just a waste of time, it’s SICK

How does a specialist pay the rent? If they’re over-specialized, and lose their position, they don’t.

Just as there is no “ideal” specialist who Only Does One Thing All The Time—at least not anybody who isn’t listed in the DSM as a pathological type specimen—there can’t be a valid life for the Über-generalist.

I didn’t say you should stop focusing. I said that there is a place, a balanced place in any community or problem-solving venture, for somebody who knows a little about a lot, who brings a fresh perspective. I said (just checking, yes) that the dominant cultural model we find ourselves in right now, meaning our cultural assumptions about work, education, employment, consumption, sustainability, profit, entitlement… all that stuff, it favors specialization. The American system of primary education, a friend once pointed out, was designed to raise factory workers. Higher education, and particularly postgraduate work, is trade school as well: just ask anybody who’s signed up for a Ph.D. program without intending to be a professor.

If you want to drop straight down to the bottom line, here: I make more money than seems decent, working as a independent consultant. I explain things. I’m not a writer, though I write. I’m not a blogger or a scientist, though I blog and do science. I could be an engineer, except that what I build is understanding in teams of people. As I said the other day, I make people do things, but not in the way you imagine that phrase implies—I make them do what they want to do, and sometimes I make them stop what they don’t want to do.

Clients pay my exorbitant hourly rates not because I know deep esoteric details about the One Crucial Piece they already know about, but because I know more than anybody else they’ve ever met about things they’ve never heard of. And probability theory dictates that now and then, some of those things I know are things they also need to know about… but have never heard of, until they sat me down and engaged my attention for a few hours.

And I charge those exorbitant rates because I do not want to be around when they get boring. And increasingly I make sure they know that, up front. They could pay less money to more moderate people, and get more or less the same effect.

So a generalist pays the rent, in the end, by having a reputation (social capital) and a wide-ranging interest (intellectual capital) and trading those for money.

During Postmodernism, universalism is rejected, but the only alternative is a chaotic nihilism in which there are no solutions.

Under panarchy, the entire notion that we must choose between an oppressive universalism vs. a nihilistic particularity is rejected. There is a whole world of third way possibilities when we come together to share and build them…

…and build and share them.

But this time tell me also what you meant to say, in words that better expose the connections you’re seeing.