Manjit & Many?

I am fulfilling here a promise I made to Ali Anani that I will elaborate further upon the private discussion that transpired on 17th July and the outcome of that was the proposal of this title.

My mother named me Manjit but my name could well be shortened even further to Many.  Many here would not be a nickname but Many as the many.  We live in a different world today, one that sits differently to the way that most people have been brought up to address. 

We often talk of reach, of finding an audience, of spreading our message and participating in conversation with people at scale and for the purposes of being understood.  As noble as that objective may well be, it is not my objective.

We no longer live in a one-to-many world of public broadcasting and broadcasting is far from dead and we also grew up with the notion of "publish or perish" if we took on board the central backbone taught to us in a university education.  This serves the purpose of the vocal majority but not the silent majority which is the many. 

We expect this silent majority to be spoon-fed information because of our familiarity with massive industries that include television, academia and the book publishing industry - and I am not challenging that familiarity, I am simply asking myself whether I am the many or Manjit?

Do I have an obligation to speak one to many or create a following that many to one?  If there is such an obligation then I duly renounce it.  We are no longer knee-deep in information or knowledge, we are overflowing with it and with each passing year this ocean is growing. I want to adjust to this reality, not the reality of traditional publishing and commentary.

The Library of Alexandria is today just one data warehouse in a world that will be filled with thousands upon thousands of data warehouses. We live in a different time that requires a different view of both information access and personal relationships.

Information sources are an abundance and not a scarcity and yet we still want to act like it is tough to get the information we need to learn.  Today we live in a many-to-many world and just because we do, does not mean that at a personal level we see opportunity in the many - because that is the way things have always been done - there is nothing new about this mode of thinking, which is thinking out of the pocket and yet feed this meme as a noble cause.

There have been people whose thoughts have been published which also questions this cause. No matter how brilliant the thinking, this is still one to many.  This thinking does not get me "the many" to be Manjit.  I cannot have a relationship beyond the scale of my own spiritual and cognitive bandwidth.  Why am I addressing relationship at scale?  Relationship is a relationship.

I cannot have a relationship with 7 billion people for I cannot deal with responses of that scale. So we present a model of connection which is wholly unfeasible, unless we are taught to see this scale as something that must follow us and/or that has some unit of value which then exchanges with our "giving".   We don't see ourselves, we engage in publishing and call that relationship - or we call it leadership - or we call it innovation - we don't see the relationship within us, we don't see the leadership within us, we don't see the innovation within us.

If we saw ourselves we would not sit in judgements or views that prescribe how this relationship must come into being, while we have lost the vital form of relationship of all - which can only exist at the most personal scale.  So we declare the professional more important than the personal and warn that the personal must not infect the professional.  So here I am now professing and ironically with every paragraph of professing, I lose sight of the personal.

Today I have got to know that the old is not old and the young are not young - the old through my eyes are those whose mentality is old and fashioned and professional and the young are those whose mentality is young and fresh and personal.  So it is I find young people who are waking up to relationships of the kind that I value as a relationship - as they talk among themselves not discerning any difference between how they talk in a crowded place and a crowded virtual space.  It is the old who chastise the young for doing this forgetting that the act of eavesdropping a conversation in a crowd or public place  is not something they would do.

Ali Anani and myself were conversing with each other about one thing which led to discussion of the fractal heart.  With such a heart, how is it fractal if we cease the desire to be self-similar,  because the fractal is many-to-many, it is not special, it is not a pedestal to stand upon, it is not a megaphone or an opinion for the widest dissemination.  If I find affinity with Goldberger's finding this is my affinity and in theory I should be able to find in networked information an affinity with others who share this affinity.  This view is us being old and looking through old eyes, even if those old eyes are in the container of a teenager.  This is what I actually wrote in my email to Ali Anani

The point is we understand the fractal heart https://www.siam.org/pdf/news/353.pdf The day we deserve is the one that beats within us and those that wait for a heart transplant, they too deserve a good heart - while if our hearts are relatively healthy then that is the joy we deserve. Even if the heart of another is transplanted into us, it is our own heart. The joy of recognizing 7 billion people is a greater joy than the affinity with one. Our heart scales in that.
CityVP Manjit in Personal Email to Ali Anani

This means I want to scale with the diversity I find on BeBee but I have only room for a few relationships, as I do with Ali Anani.  When I last checked I do not have the superpowers of a Marvel comicbook hero and because I know that, that is what CityVP Manjit, Rupy Yuan, Society Manjit, Victor Overmind, Home Manjit, Mark Zorro, Work Manjit, Emeri Gent represent.  That if people want to accept me as a brand then that is there prerogative but not my goal.

I went on to say to Ali Anani

If a buzz does not reach one heart and one mind it is a pointless buzz - so this is exchange is a buzz because so long as it reaches 1 it is not 0. Yet there are 2 in this buzz right here, right now. Like the tribal people in Australia there is a simpler way to count i.e. 1, 2 and many. The many is not my concern, nor the zero - but the one is who I am. Just as you are one. So long as the tribal people begin their count with their own heart first - then I like that counting system. https://numberwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/is-one-two-many-a-myth/
CityVP Manjit in Personal Email to Ali Anani

I am all for "Networked Expertise" and the collaborative power of the network, I look at BeBee's focus on affinity well beyond the traditional marketing and reward mentality because my life does not end because my work does, there is no career path in my life, my life is a lifepath.

Many-to-Many is a different way of seeing and it is a 21st Century way of seeing, even if the technologies that have allowed this to emerge where born of 20th Century minds.  The 20th Century should have been a glorious century of innovation but it will go down as a century marked by great wars and escalations.   The 21st Century has began with that legacy and yet also portends a coming age of Renaissance.  This means that the dark ages are not over but we are heading towards a new evolution, one of the mind, that can either turn the clock back to the mass market and mass educated or forward to the freedom seeker and enlightened individual.

The one is who I am, but not as "I am the One".  I am the Many but I am not a nickname, I am Manjit because that is what my mother chose, I am Man because that is what life chose and I am Human because that is what I chose.  When we individually choose to be human, then we must work everyday to be that, but we are not finished product, in fact we should not be product, but in the world as we know it, that is what we still are - and I am not here to teach people how to find their own humanity, or tell people to engage their own learning journey.  My heart is a fractal of all other hearts but this fractal has begun its emergence, and I seek to emerge from the 20th Century, to become that which transforms me to the 21st Century.

I am the voice of the 21st Century and I must hear that voice myself because I am the only one who can change my own voice, just as every other of the Many hold that as their responsibility to themselves.  The many are not following me and I am thankful for that, but I also want to appreciate the many - and that happens when I see every human as a human being and not a stage for my voice - that is the voice of the 21st Century - living my own life, thinking as I do.

Addendum 23rd July 2016 - The Metaphor Hive

https://www.bebee.com/content/687976/679816

Sara Jacobovici placed in The Metaphor Hive

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