Mapping the Real Deal…
The Community Wizard of Sebastopol
Part One of Three
With Special Thanks to
Caroline W. Casey
And the
Reuniting Magic & Money Tour
How knowledge behaves as an economic resource, we do not yet fully understand…We need an economic theory that puts
knowledge into the center of the wealth-producing process. —Peter F. Drucker
IMAGE: Map Of Sebastopol
A Community Wizard’s Magic
You can tell them by the twinkle and intelligence that emerges when they are present. Indeed, there is nothing outwardly
about a Community Wizard that gives them away –they prefer to go unnoticed.
I am sitting in a pizza parlor in Sebastopol, California, a town of approximately 8,000 in Sonoma County north of San
Francisco. I am in the presence of a powerful Community Wizard. After years of experience in banking systems and
community banking, this Community Wizard of Sebastopol insists that he is not knowledgeable about financial engineering.
He says he is interested in people.
Community Wizards organize their lives around people and relationships. No matter how rich their technical expertise,
they make it their business to know who makes things work and to understand how they do it. They are interested in
people and take the time to listen. Their mastery at understanding how things look from the other person’s point of view
and how to translate that into getting things done reflects years of paying attention.
Community Wizards love their family. Their kids and grandkids always come first. They know their neighbors. They know
who is connected to the electricity, water, gas, cable, pest control and other services that come into their home. They
are the first to welcome a newcomer. They help people meet other people. They are perpetually useful.
Experts are generally people who understand the "power of one" when they are dealing with exceptional people or lots of
money. A Community Wizard’s magic comes from helping the exceptional emerge from what appears to be mundane and
ordinary. They perceive the divine in people the experts see as ordinary. Their appreciation for that divine spark in
every person is part of a Wizard’s magic.
Community Wizards are masters of project and risk management. They enjoy working "on the line." They are trusted not
just for their personal integrity and discretion, but because they have mastered how to make the mundane and essential
transactional aspects of life flow and integrate with a precision and grace that respects other people's time. Community
Wizards excel at finding ways of getting things done with little resources because they know how to get the right people
in alignment around a project. They appreciate that "a penny saved is a penny earned."
IMAGE: The Original Mary's Pizza Shack Near Sebastopol
Community Wizards include the local school principal who taught for many years and the independent trucker who runs the
volunteer fire brigade. Community Wizards started the community bank or were the county executive. They sit on the town
council and support the local business, farm, sports or civic group. They include the pastor and co-pastor that created
scores of jobs building their storefront church to thousands of members. Community Wizards started the local Internet
service provider in their parent’s gas station garage, and got the local funeral home on line as the first website
marketing caskets through the web.
Community Wizards include the accountant or attorney that handles their family and friends most sensitive problems. They
have a small cotton farm, a dental practice, a cleaning company, a tree service, a nursery, a natural healing center or
a hardware store. They are a leader in the local temple who makes sure that money quickly and quietly goes to a family
in need. Their beauty parlor is an incubator for community and home businesses.
Community Wizard's respect for other people is matched by their reverence for all living things. Their pets and plants
are happy. They often have a garden or orchard. In California, they like to go for long walks in redwood forests.
Community Wizards are the farmers who often win awards for their conservation efforts. They become architects and urban
planners. They revitalize shipyards and navigate the local rivers. Community Wizards love weather maps and study the
patterns of the tides and stars around them. They can explain the rock formations under their street in terms of what
happened during the Paleolithic Age. They donate to the upkeep of trees and bushes around the local historical monument.
Like the Community Wizard of Sebastopol, they are worthy stewards of the resources in a place. Community Wizards have
earned what the Chinese call t'ien ming ---“the mandate of heaven. [1]” A place has a soul and an intelligence that is independent of any person or organization. Community Wizards know this
and delight in cultivating the soul and intelligence of the place they call home.
IMAGE: In Sebastopol – A Cretan Retreat
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The Fiduciary of a Place
The world of investment is organized around the notion of a fiduciary. A great fiduciary is someone who cares for the
resources in his or her care as if they were their own. Webster’s dictionary defines a fiduciary (noun) as “ one that holds a fiduciary relation or acts in a fiduciary capacity” and a fiduciary (adjective) as “ of relating to, or involving a confidence or trust: as a. held or founded in trust or confidence, b. holding in trust, c. depending on public confidence for value or currency.”
When we manage financial capital, life is much more simple than when we manage a business or a place. A portfolio of
stocks, go up and down and performance can be measured mathematically. A money manager can relate to the concept of the
different businesses, and is freed from direct and organic involvement with lots of different very human employees and
customers. Indeed, over time, investment fiduciaries have tried to build their investments to be as insulated from
dependency on humans and the risks associated with human greed and emotion. That is part of the fear that gives rise to
the type of government credit and insurance programs that we are now experiencing and that end up destroying economies,
as accountability is lost.
Functioning as the fiduciary of a place is in many respects much more complex than as an investment fiduciary. Value creation relates to numerous forms of
human and intellectual capital that are difficult to measure and rarely priced mathematically, let alone in a way that
their relation to financial capital can be understood. Yet, as knowledge becomes an increasingly larger component of our
wealth creation, this place based fiduciary role takes on an increasingly pivotal importance.
The way we grow a great civilization or economy starts with raising one child well, one at a time, and moves into the
management and stewardship of all the people and living things within a place as well as the infrastructure that support
them. Optimizing all of these resources within a place involves a mind boggling level of complexity in a world in which
there are no information and pricing maps and few useful incentive systems designed to make place based optimization an
easy and professional process.
In America, most school systems do not teach the fundamental economics and operations necessary for the average citizen
to understand how their place works. Recently, our local pastor asked me to prepare such a curriculum for his high
school students. Doing so illuminated how little is currently taught compared to the literacy that is easily possible.
A Community Wizard is someone who can be trusted to act as a fiduciary of his or her place. Their mastery is all the
more special as they have typically acquired it through long years of hard work and patience in an environment that was
not conducive to achieving mastery. The knowledge of how to become a great Wizard was not particular accessible, more
often than not it was handed down within a family, or through a network organized around the Farm Bureau, the Chamber of
Commerce, the women’s club or some local organization or network.
There are two things that are critical to understand about our present condition. Community Wizards are the trustworthy
fiduciaries of a place. As we start to finance communities with equity, their fiduciary status will begin to be
recognized. Their “mandate of heaven” will start to evolve to a more powerful and concrete material mandate giving them
the authority and ability to start to link up in more meaningful ways.
Second, the Community Wizards current level of performance reflects decades of hard work with little support or
recognition under grueling conditions. Their successful creation of local equity has been rewarded with years of
draining centralization by federal credit and programs, corporate media, organized crime and Wall Street. These
centralizing headwinds slowing down and draining their physical and financial security were made worse by the support
that the centralizing forces have enjoyed within their own communities. Hence, the potential opportunity for what the
Wizards can do with decentralizing wind in their sails is rarely understood
ENDNOTES:
[1] Eventually this concept would gain a wider application in ancient China. By Confucius' time, the t'ien ming applied to
everyone and their obligations to see to the welfare of the people they are related to. The Mandate of Heaven, through
which Heaven worked out its efforts to guarantee the well being of humanity, applied to each and every obligation and
action one took and so represented what might be called the moral order of the universe. Allied with this idea was the
concept Ming, or destiny. Heaven also ruled the physical world: earthquakes, sickness, wealth, rain, etc, but it ruled
the physical world directly. All things that happen in the physical world are the direct result of Heaven's actions and
are completely out of human control. The proper venue for human action, then, is in the realm of t'ien ming . These two
concepts, t'ien ming, or the moral order of the universe, and ming, or the physical order of the universe, combined make
the Tao, or "Way" of Heaven.
----Richard Hooker
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http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0303/S00242.htm
In Part Two, we learn about the potential of Community Wizards to turn around our culture and economy, including the five financial
drains that are draining every community in America: centralized government, central and centralized banking, currency
and debt, centralized savings and investment, centralized purchases, and centralized narcotics trafficking and organized
crime.
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Catherine Austin Fitts is the President of Solari, Inc. ( http://solari.com) and a former Assistant Secretary of Housing – Federal Housing Commissioner in Bush I. She is currently litigating with
Ervin and Associates (acting on behalf of the government ) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. If you
would like to support her litigation efforts, you can through Affero/ Venture Collective: http://www.solari.com/vote.php
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Anti©opyright Catherine Austin Fitts, March 2003