Open Future New Zealand

About John Veitch

Stumbling into a Different World

My Planned but Out of Control Journey

I was a teacher, with an interest in Economics, and a belief in innovation.

I accepted what I was taught as a young man, it never occurred to me that what my teacher or professor said might be wrong.

For most of my life education was important, and "official sources" were the key to that. As a young adult I was firmly convinced that the progress was real and that modern ways of thinking and behaving were always better than what we had done in the past. Innovation in thinking and in technology was to be welcomed.

In the early 1970's, confused about the disconnect between family and community values; what I was being taught, and my life experience didn't align very well.  I wanted to learn more; I began to keep a journal, mostly a record of my unease about what I was learning. In particular about the disconnect between the words we used to tell ourselves that "everything was all right here" and what is actually happening. 

The value of the "Useful Common", (The shared space for action and learning that our culture provides for us.) Is to provide almost unlimited opportunity to learn and cooperate with other people, so that your life becomes a contribution to the world you live in. As Gandhi said, each of us has to "Be the Change" that we need to see in the world. We can act now. We don't need to ask for permission.

That simple activity of keeping a record began a process of "seeing" in new ways. But it's a never ending trap too. In the age of the Internet, the flow of what pretends to be "information" is vast, and trying to cope with that is like trying to drink the ocean. You can become overwhelmed and drown in a sea of "information." Better to understand that the only information you can effectively use is discovered by you, and understood and integrated into your own life. Your journal certainly helps there, but it takes effort. The effort is like exercise, it gives you the strength to take a position, the strength to act, the strength to be yourself.

Major insight: Things I first wrote in my journal 20 or more years ago, often reappear over and over, gaining in support, at least in my mind.

Ideas have roots, and they take time to develop.

Can Politics and Economics Save Us?

For a long time I believed that the secret of getting sensible things done was to find an economic justification for the change. That doesn't work. Then I looked to political solutions, but that's another failure zone. Over the last 10 years I've looked to science for solutions and once again there is no salvation to be found. Science is corrupted too. The world is a mess because people, each of us, has the power to make it so. Perhaps the only way to fix it is to take people out of the picture. That may be exactly what the future holds for humanity. - We may, in our choice of blindness, and denial, trigger a process that eliminates ourselves.

Learning from a Health Problem

In 2011-12 I got sick. My healthy way of eating and living became "unhealthy" and I developed an itchy rash all over my body that my doctor called hives. Why? Not sure. Too much fruit? Too much milk? Psychological stress? Something else? My doctor helped with hydrocortisone cream and antihistamines, and as he said, one day it will go away, and you will never know why. He was right.

Trying to eliminate the cause of the rash, I began to eliminate specific foods from my diet. Eventually I was eating mostly animal foods, and the problem seemed to resolve itself. On the way I discovered the Banting Diet, or the Ketogenic Diet that Prof. Timothy Noakes speaks about. I found his advice particularly helpful.

There is a companion site, "Open Future Health" which you can find here.