Buddhists and Futurists

Art Harkins on Personal Culture

After a recent Thursday Thirsters meeting in Portland, OR, Art Harkins wrote the following email to Robert Textor and others:

The idea germinating in my mind is based on the Thirsters' respect for individual thought and expression for the benefit of all. Years ago I came up with the concept of personal culture. I haven't done much with it except in a few papers. Personal culture is the individualized expression of collective culture(s) that have been part of the individual's en/acculturation experiences, as well as the result of singular personal experiences and their individualized interpretations. Personal culture is the wellspring of personal capital, or the operationable features of personal culture. Operational features can change according to context, mood, mindset, etc.

My sense is that the long-range future of humanity depends upon personal culture as much as collective culture. Now, some may say that this observation is specious in that personal/collective cultures are essentially inseparable and probably virtually identical. I don't think so. On the contrary, I think most personal cultures are tacit, waiting in the wings much like unexpressed genes. My interest: finding ways to express personal cultures within virtual/projected/imagined/anticipated/envisioned contexts that can lead to new futures and altered immediate realities. In other words, I'm pragmatically interested in the existential impacts of personalized futures: the selective expression of these futures within the life of an individual and the lives of associates and collectives through the impacts of expressed personal capital.

I think the Thirsters, or more probably a spinoff involving selected Thirsters and others, can become the birthplace for an anthropology of the teleological, culture-and-capital-creating/innovating individual. [Robert Textor] would be the leader of this development (Arthur Harkins, 8/7/2004).

Buddhists and Futurists both can work to make explicit the tacit expression of an individual's personal cultures (paradigmatic, intercontextual selves). The collaborative work of Buddhists and Futurists will be to work with individuals to design contexts in which these multiplistic selves can be expressed and utilized effectively to develop one's personal capital effectively. This is the key work of Buddhists and Futurists in anticipating The Singularity.