Although I’ve never been in a tank (and I’m curious!) I can’t imagine it’s conducive to good thinking.

Even if it’s not supposed to be that kind of tank, the other image it evokes of supposedly brilliant minds in a room together, finding the wit to shut the door, and then going wild with flip charts, highlighter pens and sticky notes, is not much better.

Perhaps people working in think tanks are slaves to the idea of the tank to a greater extent than they realise; in both its military conquest and intense brainstorming senses. Our underlying drives today should presumably be about peace and openness rather than war or sequestration?

I know many young think tankers from my experience working for The RSA and with a wide range of third sector organisations. Many enter the ‘think tank’ world with the high hopes of achieving a particular kind of career chic. I don’t mean to sound cynical, but I have observed it often enough to feel it is valid. The aim is often to be thought of as a rising star of the intelligentsia with the ear of a powerful minister. To that end, nothing better than to be heard on political prime time: “Oh to be on The BBC Today Programme!” I’ve been on the Today programme four times, and trust me, nothing happens. The world is not noticeably different afterwards.

Alas, people working in think tanks, even at quite senior levels, are invariably obliged to be lobbyists to a greater or lesser extent, however noble their intentions. The impact model entails having an idea that speaks to a specific problem within a limited frame of reference, raising funds to literally buy time to make sense of it, and then scrambling for attention and influence and hoping for the best.

In practice that typically means labouring for months to get seconds, or minutes if you’re very lucky – on national news, hoping that politicians may then talk about the report recommendations, whether or not they actually read the report, and then, on very rare occasions, they may even help to implement some of them, but usually with amendments that you didn’t want. I exaggerate, but not much. Most think tank effort is wasted not just because political events wash away imagined influence, but because the root causes of our problems are much deeper than the level of policy.

One way to understand this is the Geels model of socio-technical transitions, (which I use here not to import or appropriate all its details, but merely as a prominent example highlighting three main levels of activity in any given attempt at societal transition).

Some in Perspectiva’s network are working at the ‘Niche’ level (practice/activist/NGO) attempting to solve particular problems in particular places where need is acute and potential impact is relatively tangible, but where it’s harder to influence systemic political, economic and technological causes. Success here would mean, for instance, getting someone their home back when they’ve been wrongly evicted.

Many others are working at the ‘Regime’ (policy/advocacy/think tank) level, where policymakers and public opinion are key targets, but the underlying meaning of objectives and measurements that shape policy debates (eg ‘growth’, ‘democracy’) is rarely questioned or challenged. When liberal democratic systems appeared hegemonic and political economies seemed relatively stable, think tanks thrived in the UK and US at least. Success here might mean changing a national housing policy such that more affordable homes become available and homeless is reduced.

There was a time when, for some at least, changing the world and changing policy felt like the same thing. But not anymore. Ecology, technology and finance are transnational actors, and more to the point they are the main active ingredients at that higher level of analysis that is not supposed to shift much, or be susceptible to shifting, but is. The landscape level now feels particularly fertile in this time between worlds, where it feels like civilisation is dying, and its far from clear that another can be born without real thinking at this level of overarching complexity.

Perspectiva seeks to support and learn from those working at the niche and regime levels, but we work mostly at the ‘landscape’ (paradigmatic/cultural/philosophical) level of longer term change in ‘the social imaginary’, where the active ingredients in play are cultural norms and practices. Success in influencing change at the landscape level would mean enriching the very idea of home, such that we collectively factor in, at least, bioregional, ecological and planetary considerations to help make decisions about how to protect and improve ‘our home’.

Policy has its place as a pathway to law and therefore to scale, but for Perspectiva, it is neither the main means nor the main end of our activity. When Perspectiva is described as ‘a think tank’ I inwardly forgive the person making that association and do my best to give an alternative description. In this world of ‘define or be defined’, you have to try, so here goes:

Perspectiva is an applied philosophy of education and an urgent one hundred year project.

The word education here could also be learning, or development, and whichever we choose we might also insert ‘transformative’ behind it, but that risks looking like gratuitous spiritual atmosphere; so let’s stick with education for now. Of all these signifiers, education is the most grounded in the civic, the institutional and the political, and least likely to be coopted by corporate training. Our real focus is Bildung, which translates roughly as ‘transformative civic education’, but education at its best is all of those things anyway, and the roots of the word are beautiful, so for now we’re sticking with education. But of course we don’t mean schooling as such – we mean whichever cultural, technological and institutional means society has available to take responsibility for human development in a dynamic societal context.

The urgency is about our ecological emergency. ‘Emergency!’ risks sounding shrill, but it’s all too real, as people recovering from floods in the UK and fires in Australia know. Whatever our metric, risk appetite, or questionable deadline of choice, the climate conclusion is always the same: we have no time to lose. 

Yet the very idea of emergency only gets us so far, so fast. Emissions continue to rise because we cannot disentangle climate collapse from the broader crisis of civilisation, including the fact that there’s no ‘we’ as such, and many of our problems arise through hysteresis — things already in motion that cannot easily be undone. In almost every part of the world, our scope for action on the emergency is constrained by our forms of governance, our political economy, our imperious technology, our institutional logics and our social norms. 

Alas, all rallying cries for transformation arise in cultures and psyches riddled with immunities to change. That conundrum is the meta-crisis lying within, between and beyond the emergency and the crisis, and it’s educational, epistemic and spiritual in nature. 

To put it simply:

Emergency says: Act!
Crisis says: Transform!
Meta-crisis says: How?

Responding to the meta-crisis is the figurative ‘one hundred-year project’ of cultural transformation, which entails better understanding who and what we are, individually and collectively, in order to be able to fundamentally alter what we are living for, why and how. 

The challenge of our time is renaissance; an epistemic, cultural and spiritual renewal. That kind of renewal, however, feels both necessary and impossible in a context of economic, political and technological upheaval and cascading ecological collapse.

In his essay, Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty (2014), the German Philosopher Thomas Metzinger encapsulated the premise of our challenge: 

“Conceived of as an intellectual challenge for humankind, the increasing threat arising from self-induced global warming clearly seems to exceed the present cognitive and emotional abilities of our species. This is the first truly global crisis, experienced by all human beings at the same time and in a single media space, and as we watch it unfold, it will also gradually change our image of ourselves, the conception humankind has of itself as a whole. I predict that during the next decades, we will increasingly experience ourselves as failing beings.”

Failing beings? Maybe. But there is hope in Metzinger’s premise — “the present cognitive and emotional abilities of our species”. Those abilities of our species are not fixed. We know, as well as we know anything, that human beings can grow and change for the better. Education broadly conceived is how we do that, and the philosophy of education is about the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ of that ‘how’, which becomes applied when we decide to start making sense of it in relation to ‘who’ ‘where’ and ‘when’. 

Social entrepreneur Paul Hawken’s framing of our predicament in Drawdown (2017) helps indicate why this kind of endeavour should be the curriculum of civilisation: 

“The build-up of greenhouse gases we experience today occurred in the absence of human understanding…That can tempt us to believe that global warming is something that is happening to us – that we are the victims of a fate that was determined by actions that preceded us. If we change the preposition, and consider that global warming is happening for us – an atmospheric transformation that inspires us to change and reimagine everything we make and do – we begin to live in a different world…We see global warming as…a pathway that awakens creativity, compassion and genius.”​

We need to respond to the emergency, yes, but there is also a crisis with inner and outer dimensions, and layers of complexity that cannot be wished away. The challenge is less about maintenance and more about renewal. Fundamental questions about who we are, and what and how we need to know, have at be at the heart of the societal enterprise of politics, economics and culture – which is why we need an applied philosophy of education.

Perspectiva’s Transformative Education Alliance (TEA) therefore aims to devise new methodologies and institutional niches that respond to a fundamental shift: The significance of the distinction between formal (eg schools and universities) informal (eg clubs and societies) and tacit (eg TV and social media) education has almost completely broken down. We are therefore asking what teaching and learning (not necessarily ‘schools’) should look like today in response to four of our most profound interlocking crises, which together encapsulate our meta crisis (thanks to Perspectiva Associate Zak Stein for an earlier version of this distillation):

• Intelligibility – what is going on? (epistemic/cultural)
• Legitimacy – who has authority to lead and decide and why? (political/legal)
• Capability – do we have what it takes? (educational/economic/anthropological)
• Meaning – what ultimately matters? (spiritual/religious)

Perspectiva believes these questions, properly understood, invariably arise together, and we cannot answer them properly without creating new forms of life in the process. TEA is already underway with work on The Digital Ego (Tom Chatfield and Dan Nixon), Wise Activism(Anthea Lawson), Spiritual formation (Mark Vernon), Experimental Facilitation (Pippa Evans) and The Politics of Waking Up (Indra Adnan), and we hope to build the alliance through external relationships in due course.

TEA is one of Perspectiva’s three main strands of work. We also have a publishing arm, Perspectiva Press, specialising in short books that provide ‘soul food for expert generalists’ and help social innovators advance their causes through their authorship. We have already published The World we Create, and four books are planned for publication later in 2020. 

Perspectiva also has overall responsibility for Emerge, which is a web, podcast and events initiative; our ‘who’ and part of our target audience, a network of networks working on the meta-crisis, with centres of activity currently in Berlin, Stockholm and London. Emerge hosted its first London evening event in collaboration with The Experimental Thought Company on February 18^th, and we have two further events planned for 17^th March and 21^st April – look out for details on social media.

Perspectiva is a registered charity funded by grants from trusts and foundations. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my co-founder Tomas Bjorkman for providing the seed funding that made Perspectiva  possible in 2016, which allowed us to attract the support of The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, The JJ Trust, Friends Provident Foundation, The Edith Ellis Trust and The Schöpflin foundation. We are particularly grateful and excited about our Strategic Partnership with The Fetzer Institute and look forward to building other funding relationships over the next decade.

Watch this space! I hope you’ll help our thinking develop over the next few decades. But keep your tanks to yourself…

@Jonathan_Rowson

Images: Thinker at the Gates of Hell, Musée Rodi, Wikimedia Commons, and from https://www.norrag.org/thinking-about-the-education-think-tank-phenomenon/

Here’s a pub quiz question. Which piece of British legislation was on the statute books longer than any other? Answer: The Charter of the Forest. It was signed in 1217 and lasted 754 years.

The follow-up question is, do you know what it secured? And the answer to that is: The Commons.

The commons are those shared resources that nobody in particular owns; typically including land and forests, water and minerals. The charter asserted the right of common men and women to subsistence, to work and to reparation for loss of commons.

Nowadays, in an age of enclosures, sell-offs, privatisation and imparkments, it’s shocking to learn that in the Middle Ages, fifty per cent or more of the land was commons, accessible to everybody. Fifty per cent. 

It raises the question of how that was possible and I suspect it was because people had a powerful sense of an even more extensive commons. There was also a “spiritual commons”. The land belonged to nobody because it belonged to everybody, which is to say that people were conscious of it as part of life itself.

It’s why, in the ancient world, economics was theorised as a type of knowledge or wisdom. It had to do with the relationship of households and cities to nature and deities. The aim was to facilitate the greatest human goods in conjunction with the gods. 

in the ancient world, economics was theorised as a type of knowledge or wisdom

Similarly, in the medieval period, estates and kingdoms were regarded fundamentally as entrusted patrimonies bestowed by heaven, not capital resources defined by law. It was a world “charged with the grandeur of God”, to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins, equally blessed and terrifying.

Those times were not utopias, of course. But it does suggest that alongside the tangible loss of the commons, the spiritual commons has been lost to us too. My intuition is that matters. The world has been turned into property that can be traded. It can be manipulated because, stripped of its spiritual vitality, its extrinsic value outshines any intrinsic meaning. The unintended byproduct is that we are now viciously spiralling down a vortex of unsustainable consumption because we are caught in an agony of lost meaning, desperately seeking proxies for the spiritual commons in addictive consumption. 

If this is even partly right, we will need to regain sight of this lost dimension to save ourselves and the planet. But can that be done? Can the spiritual commons be re-imagined again for our times? My hypothesis is that the undertaking is hopeful because spiritual commons is not depleted. It is a type of wealth defined not by scarcity but abundance. It cannot be traded, though we can be trained to enjoy it. It’s here, still, already. It’s disappeared from view but not disappeared. So, what does it look like?

Spiritual commons includes the capacities we have to imagine and to relate, to know and to delight. It’s also the practical wisdom about how to live well and thrive. Its nature is akin to the wealth Albert Einstein had in mind when he asked: “Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi with the moneybags of Carnegie?” 

It is the non-material aspects of life that, more often than not, are crucial for finding meaning and purpose, particularly when life involves suffering. The appreciation of what’s good, beautiful and true should be added to the list, therefore, as well as the freedom to orientate one’s life around them. This also implies that love lives in this domain.

My sense is that the rediscovery of spiritual commons would be primarily an imaginative and educative task. We might train ourselves to relate to it again. It would be known through deepening attention and expanding perception. It’s about focusing on what’s implicit as well as measurable; valuing what’s felt as well as what can be kicked. It’s about toying with the possibility that the whole world has an inner life, not just the bit of it that’s my body and yours.

I think time would be a crucial element to re-imagine, too, the spiritual commons given to us freely each day by the sun. Some simple words could help differentiate between types of time, thereby to experience its qualities afresh.

The ancient Greeks might assist. They could tell the difference between several types of time. There was recreation, which was about fostering spiritual commons such as participation and compassion when going to a play or sharing in a sport. There was leisure, which was time for pursuing activities such education or visiting the temple. And there was inactivity, which Aristotle regarded as vital for the highest human experience of all: conscious awareness of how you are living and what qualities it exhibits. 

There was also work, though the Greeks might also advise taking a stand against the use of phrases like “free time”. It implies that work is the owner of time, which is one of our fundamental mistakes, removing it from our spiritual commons.

To care for spiritual commons would involve fights. I think we’d have to make the case for free will and the life of the mind, which means resisting both being reduced to brain products. We’d also have to show that the horizons of human intelligence reach far further than the domains of decision-making and problem-solving, as is assumed by researchers in artificial intelligence. It includes contemplation and appreciation, imagination and inspiration, all of which are truth-bearing too.

To care for spiritual commons would involve fights… We’d have to make the case for free will and the life of the mind, which means resisting both being reduced to brain products.

Another area of contention has been highlighted by Andrew Kimbrell, not least in his publication, Cold Evil: Technology and Modern Ethics. “Cold evil” is the insidious valuing of objectivity over intuition and understanding; efficiency over affection and friendship; competition over help and vulnerability – in other words, another loss of spiritual commons. He cites the dictum that “technology is a way of organising the world so that we do not experience it”. Experience is at the heart of regaining spiritual commons so technology may often, therefore, be an opponent, though the hope is that a rekindled imagination would help us to spot that and see how it can mindfully serve not mindlessly shape us.

Spiritual commons are often manifest in and through the loveliness of the material world, so that matters as well. It’s another area, alongside education, where spiritual commons has practical implications. That was spotted early by John Ruskin. 

Consider his 1884 lecture, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, in which he noted that “one of the last pure sunsets I ever saw” was in 1876, almost a decade previously. The colours back then were “prismatic”, he said, the sun going into “gold and vermillion”. “The brightest pigments we have would look dim beside the truth,” he continued. He had attempted to reflect that glorious manifestation of the spiritual commons in paint.

He also knew that his experience of its beauty was lost because the atmosphere was becoming polluted. As a keen observer of nature, he noted how dust and smoke muddied and thinned the sky’s brilliance. In short, it would be crucial to clean up the environment if the vivid, natural displays were to return. Of course. But the subtler point Ruskin draws our attention to is the one about motivation: he wanted the vivid, natural displays because he had an awareness of, and desire for, spiritual commons.

Imagination, relationship, knowledge, delight. Wisdom and time, truth and love, the implicit and the felt. The meaning of suffering and the purpose of struggle. Life has been organised around spiritual commons before. Might training ourselves to become conscious of their abundance again help us to do so once more?

Mark Vernon is an Associate at Perspectiva and the author of A Secret History of Christianity

Image from thenewforest.co.uk

It has become fashionable to declare a climate emergency so here goes: Emergency!

Nothing happened, which is sad, but hardly surprising. If a recent paper in Nature indicating that the probability of tipping points is higher than we thought doesn’t move us, the sight of Australia on fire probably should. Whatever our metric, risk appetite, or questionable deadline of choice, the climate conclusion is always the same: we have no time to lose.

Yet the very idea of emergency only gets us so far, so fast. Emissions continue to rise because we cannot disentangle climate collapse from the broader crisis of civilisation, including the fact that there’s no ‘we’ as such, and many of our problems are already baked in through hysteresis — things in motion that cannot easily be undone.

In almost every part of the world, our scope for action on the emergency is constrained by our forms of governance, our political economy, our imperious technology, our institutional logics and our social norms. For instance, a recent paper in the journal Science makes a forensic case for why the preeminent and apparently radical policy response to climate change that is congruent with conventional policy, ‘green growth’, is highly unlikely to save us. Our climate emergency calls for action but our crisis calls for the kinds of insightful resolve that make qualitatively different kinds of action possible, sometimes called transformation or systems change.

If only it were that easy. All of our rallying cries arise in cultures and psyches riddled with immunities to change. It behooves us to better understand who and what we are, individually and collectively, in order to be able to fundamentally alter how we act. That conundrum is the meta-crisis lying within, between and beyond the emergency and the crisis, and it’s educational, epistemic and spiritual in nature.

To clarify: the emergency is about the urgency to act. The crisis is about the unreasonable necessity of transformation. The meta-crisis is about the tenacity of our inertia. Once you take the meta-crisis seriously and start looking at it closely however, it seems deep, wide and plural (the meta-crisis, the metacrisis and the meta crisis are subtly different for a start). Trying to define the meta-crisis too briskly is foolish because it’s alive; it lives within us, between us and beyond us, and to some extent defines us — it is as much a part of our nervous system as a part of our social imaginary.

Bonnitta Roy’s multiple meanings of meta all involve oblique or abstract moves that are felt to be necessary or helpful, and meta need not be exotic. Learning how to learn is meta and schools go there all the time. Parents of young children are often tired of being tired; I’ve had meta-fatigue for a decade. And the best Ted talk, in my view, was the one about how bad Ted talks are. More simply, if you ‘go meta’ on oranges and apples, you get that infamous piece of jargon known as fruit. Popular comedies like Seinfeld ran on meta-themes, as did House of Cards when ‘the fourth wall’ was breached. Meta is waiting to be noticed and appreciated. We are already meta.

The term meta-crisis however, is a little too clever for its own good; it’s emotional resonance is limited to those who get excited by abstraction. Most people are not moved even by the distinction between emergency (calling for urgent action) and crisis (calling for a change in the way things change) so the idea of meta-crisis risks sounding, at best, oxymoronic. If it’s really a crisis, surely it can’t be (checks notes) meta? As Zak Stein argues, there are also limits to the wisdom of going meta, which can easily become a pseudo-intelligent love of infinite regress disconnected from the pragmatic purposes of thought.

Two things seem right to me: the idea of meta-crisis is indispensable, but there’s a strong case for holding it lightly as a term, and keeping it in a properly playful perspective. Which means we need to understand it well enough to let it go.

**

Just over a year ago our neighbour Pat came around with an unusual pumpkin pie. I don’t particularly like pumpkin, but the pie hit my philosophical sweet spot. Look closely and you find two things that are really the same thing. The pumpkin on the inside and the pumpkin on the outside are reciprocally defined by each other; they are both one thing and another thing that’s neither of them. It’s a meta pumpkin pie, and it was delicious.

See Exhibit A below.

In The Politics of Virtue, Milbank and Pabst describe a wide range of meta-crises, mostly characterised by a kind of self-referential excess, for instance the meta-crisis of capitalism arises from capital being too free, leading to its abstraction and reification, as money becomes increasingly untethered to the actual material world. In his review of their book, Rowan Williams frames it as follows:

There are crises and there are meta-crises: a system may stagger from one crisis to another but never recognise the underlying mechanisms that subvert its own logic…If we are now panicking about the triumph of a politics of resentment, fear and unchallengeable untruthfulness, we had better investigate what models of human identity we have been working with. Our prevailing notions of what counts as knowledge, our glib reduction of democracy to market terms, our inability to tackle the question of the limits of growth — all these and more have brought us to the polarised, tribal politics of today and the thinning out of skill, tradition and the sense of rootedness. Treating these issues with intellectual honesty is not a sign of political regression but the exact opposite.

This ‘underlying mechanism that subverts its own logic’ is the basis for Patrick Deneen’s paradoxical contention that liberalism has failed because it has succeeded. For instance, through its emphasis on the protection of the individual by the state (mostly through human rights law) liberalism weakened the power of intermediate institutions and became simultaneously more individualist and statist; and by supporting the apparently free market, it has facilitated the coercive power of commerce in ways that make us less free. As Deneen puts it in Why Liberalism Failed: “Liberalism created the conditions, and the tools for the ascent of its own worst nightmare, yet it lacks the self-knowledge to understand its own culpability.”

More generally, the meta-crisis refers to our inability to see how we see, our apparent lack of interest in understanding how we understand; our failure to perceive how we perceive or to know how we know. In this sense, the hyphenated term ‘meta-crisis’ is valuable because that conjunction of words highlights that our relationship to the crisis is part of the crisis.

**

Exhibit B is Willy Wonka’s defective bubble gum.

In Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, the owner Willy Wonka has created a small piece of gum that’s supposed to offer the experience of a three-course meal, but when a character called Violet tastes it, she turns violet during the desert phase, expanding to become a large blueberry before being rolled away for ‘juicing’ to prevent her from exploding. The defective bubble gum represents the idea that small things contain bigger things that are not quite right. I am trying to get at the holographic notion that each part (eg individual, home, country) somehow contains the whole (eg political economy, society, planetary limits) and we often fail to discern that the problems of the parts come from the whole (and vice-versa). A better example might be salty sea water, signifying that there are drops in every ocean, and an ocean in every drop, but that’s not as much fun.

In any case, the metacrisis is the underlying crisis driving a multitude of crises, not just ecological collapse (which is certainly bad enough) but a range of governance and security issues, alongside global economic instability and inequality within countries, a steep rise in mental health problems and a decline in social trust. It’s as if we have a civilisation-level wicked problem. In his first article on The Emergentsia, Brent Cooper writes: “The term refers to the set of root problems behind all major crises. The idea goes back at least to the 1970 Club of Rome report which describes 49 “continuous critical problems” which they also call “meta-problems.” Moreover, in a talk at Google, “Confronting the “Meta-Crisis”: Criteria for Turning the Titanic”, philosopher entrepreneur Terry Patten reflects on the need to speak to meta-crisis as “the sum of our ecological, economic, social, cultural, and political emergencies.”

**

Exhibit C is The Joker’s Omelette.

“You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs” is a familiar line, but I first heard it from the Joker in a scene from the 1989 film version of Batman. At a figurative level, we don’t always recognise that there are broken eggs in the omelette; we don’t always think — what’s inside this? Where did this come from? What’s ‘the thing behind the thing?’ On this framing, ‘the meta crisis’ arises from large swathes of the population being unable or unwilling to make such meta moves or consider them worthwhile.

Human development involves creating an observational gap between what we are defined by and what we seek to relate to. That happened when we first saw Earth from space; it also happens when we stop saying ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ and start asking: is this political spectrum really helping us, and should we perhaps create a new one? A recent example is the debate over Brexit in the UK when numerous positions were described as being more or less democratic, but almost never was the broader question of what democracy might mean discussed.

**

That brisk tour of ‘The MC’ reveals a basic threefold pattern:

The hyphen in ‘meta-crisis’ speaks of a crisis of self-reference and sometimes a paradoxical failure of achievement; too much liberty may kill liberalism, too much voting can weaken democracies, and we don’t always understand how we understand, we tend to deny our denial, and we are struggling to imagine a new imaginary.

The composite word ‘metacrisis’ is inspired by our German friends, and useful for resolving to speak to the cross-pollinating crises of our time as one thing; the aim is to better ‘join the dots’ between apparently disparate phenomena while recognising that no single grand vision or narrative, however textured and inclusive, can fully make sense of itself.

The adjective in ‘meta crisis’ says that’s the kind of crisis it is — a crisis defined by a debilitating lack of epistemic agility –too much abstraction in some ways and too little in others; a cultural inability or unwillingness to ‘go meta’, for instance to think about the political spectrum rather than merely thinking with it, or for economic commentators to question the very idea of ‘the economy’ or what exactly we mean by ‘money’.

There is no getting away from ‘The MC’, a coinage to capture all the meanings at hand. If knowledge of The MC teaches us anything it’s that it works better as an analytical tool than a call for action(to address the emergency) or transformation(to address the crisis). Social change efforts need much more powerful and even psychoactive language to help us stay awake to the challenges of our time. We cannot side-step meta issues, but the challenge is not to shout about them; rather the challenge is to reveal that meta is normal, even mundane, if only so that we can stop talking about it.

While most developmental progress is about ‘the subject-object move’ in which we abstract from something so as to relate to it better, in the case of meta-themes in planetary problems we seem to need an ‘object-subject move’ as well, such that the disposition to abstract becomes immanent, familiar, and assimilated as second nature. The aim is to know the meta-crisis well enough that it ceases to be ‘meta’ and ceases to be a ‘crisis’, thereby freeing us to get back to living meaningfully and purposively, without getting entangled in strange loops.

Or as the poet David Whyte puts it:

Innocence is, in a way, the ability to be found by the world. It’s not a state of naïveté. It’s the ability to be found by the world you’re now inhabiting. Part of what we find is, we’re just supposed to give ourselves away.

**

As we reckon with the gravity of the emergency, the intractability of the crisis and the depth and breadth of our meta-crisis, and then come back to ourselves, I believe all we can say, with sincere irony, is that we’re in a bit of a pickle.

The word ‘pickle’ comes from the Dutch word ‘pekel’. Since the seventeenth century, vegetables of various kinds, not least gherkins, have been preserved in a brine-like substance that took the name. The expression ‘in a pickle’ alludes to difficulty in the sense of being as trapped, mixed up and disoriented as the pickled vegetables in a jar. The etymological fidelity of that claim matters less than whether it helps us sense how we are mixed up with others things, somehow stuck, and struggling to change.

There are also early uses of ‘in a pickle’ by Shakespeare, relating to being drunk, and sometimes being drunk while not knowing we’re drunk; and that’s also appropriate for our current predicament. We are still somehow running on autopilot with the wrong kind of fuel, drunk on ideas of progress, our own significance, and the notion things will somehow be ok.

The pickle is not another name for the meta-crisis but a way of recognising its plurality without getting lost in it, and keeping it connected to the beating heart of the emergency and the materiality of the crisis.

Experiencing the pickle is playing with abstraction enough to know our predicament as fully as possible, but then gladly returning back into everyday existence, crucially in a way that is no longer naïve about the provenance of our situation. It’s the simplicity on the other side of complexity we need, sometimes known as simplexity.

In practice that ‘subject to object to subject move’ will manifest in praxis of various kinds and could mean anything from activism, business or politics to contemplation to better parenting and even just friendship — it’s about living an embodied everyday existence, with civilisation as a whole in mind.

We cannot (and must not!) ‘go meta’ on the pickle, but we may need to taste the pickle more often to save civilization from itself.

Emergency says: Act!

Crisis says: Transform!

Meta-crisis says: How?

The Pickle holds three old friends in its arms, squeezes them tight, and says:

Well, what does it say?

**

Jonathan Rowson is Director of Perspectiva. 

The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life is published by Bloomsbury. 

@Jonathan_Rowson

[1] This short essay is extracted from a longer paper on similar themes that will be published later in 2020.

Header image: Crescent Earth from Space ESA / OSIRIS Team MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / RSSD / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA / Gordan Ugarković

The body has its own intelligence. It can sound strange to put it like that because we live in an age that has become preoccupied with computers as the paradigm of smartness. This approach values the sort of intelligence that solves problems, calculates and works with concepts. But it’s increasingly being recognised that there are other ways of knowing, and that the body plays a key part.

One way it is showing up is in the cognitive sciences. For example, Philip Barnard of Cambridge University has developed a model to understand how the mind works that includes the body. It draws on empirical research in psychology and sees the body as connected to what Barnard calls the ‘implicational subsystem’. 

This implicit mode of understanding is particularly active when we are interacting with the world through relational and social connections or intuitive and practical insights. It is also more open-ended and inclined to go with the flow, rather than attempting to pin things down. You can say you experience it when you recognise the meaning in the touch of a lover, the lift gained by entering a resonant or sacred place, or the mental relaxation offered by a walk or warm bath.

Barnard is not alone in developing the science. Iain McGilchrist’s work on how the two hemispheres of the brain relate to the world differently will be familiar to followers of Perspectiva (see, for example, this interview). He shows how the right hemisphere’s understanding of things can be characterised as implicational, which is not surprising as it is also much more widely connected to the body than the left hemisphere.

Alternatively, anyone who practices mindfulness or other forms of meditation will know that the body is key. It both supports the attention and offers a stream of hints and nudges that can be felt, focused on and amplified to reveal all manner of insights that might otherwise not rise into consciousness. 

Various forms of energy psychotherapy do something similar and are now recognised as effective treatments by NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence). Techniques such as EMDR (Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) and EFT (Emotional freedom technique) can seem strange at first but they are gaining respect because they release awareness held in the body. This can prove invaluable when it comes to treating trauma as well as developing what might be called a more felt or soulful approach to life.

You might say we are reawakening to the importance of the body. But that raises further questions. How can we work with its wisdom? How can we learn from its intelligence and what might it tell us?

This year, I will be running a series of evenings at Perspectiva that use another embodied practice called Constellations. It’s particularly illuminating because it works with groups of people. 

The patterns or movements that the group makes can reveal what the body is saying. I’m particularly excited to be offering this introduction with Perspectiva because the dynamics constellations can show operate at the three levels of life to which Perspectiva attends: the inner life of the individual soul; the more objective social factors within which we live; and the intersubjective systemic flows that link these elements together.

The approach will be safe and gently playful. They will, I hope, be fascinating, too. The evenings are a chance to look at how we’re affected by the groups — from family and workplace, to time and culture — to which we belong. At one level, the embodied approach can open up new ways of relating to ourselves and others. At another, it can help with particular issues and problems.

The body’s intelligence is an important resource for the type of personal formation and social education called Bildung that is important at Perspectiva (see here).  This is the attempt to ask not just what we know or need to know, but also to address how we know and might know differently. Constellations can help with that because it doesn’t just ask what’s going on but invites us to transform how we perceive what’s going, via the body. It generates all sorts of often unexpected, felt realisations.

So please consider these introductory evenings. They will offer an overview of the practice, explain how it arose, and offer a sense of what it can reveal and how it works. I will unpack some of the insights that emerge and the time will include demonstrations and opportunities to test things out in small groups. 

The body has things to say. Constellations is one way of paying it attention and listening.

For more see ‘Constellations: a practical evening to discover soul, system & society‘

Image: Constellation of the Pleiades (NASA, ESA, AURA/Caltech, Palomar Observatory)

I think it’s clear to most of your listeners that the things called news are mostly propaganda—narrative warfare for some agency—and that they aren’t good sources of sense-making. We would hope, though, that there are some sources of high signal, low noise true information like maybe scientific journals, like academia or science itself. I hoped this a long time ago, and I had this continuous kind of disappointment, you know, I started being like, okay, I can’t trust news to be true because news is narrative warfare, I can’t trust science without actually really looking at what was the methodology employed, how was it funded, what were the axioms that the team was using, what were the logical transforms, am I seeing all of their data or is it cherry picked data? As I started to kind of unfold, to say “where are the high signal, low noise sources that I can offload some of the cognitive complexity of making sense of the world to?”. The answer is really sad. I don’t know any sources that are very high signal and low noise across lots of areas. So then I started being like “well, why is that? What would it take to fix that, what would it take to make a world-ahead intact information ecology?”

Well that requires an understanding as to why the current information ecology is as broken as it is, and we’re starting to touch on a couple things here. But this goes deep and how do we make good choices if we don’t have good sense-making? Well, obviously we can’t. But due to increasing technological capacity, increasing population multiplied by increasing impact per person, we’re making more and more consequential choices with worse and worse sense making to inform those choices, which is kind of like running increasingly fast through the woods and increasingly blind. So I think many of the people that you’ve had on rebel wisdom have been in a deep inquiry around, “how do we actually fix our own sense making?”, and it’s some of what has brought us to have conversations with each other because a part of how we work with our own sense making as we recognize the cognitive complexity of issues that the world faces is more than a single person can process. So it requires collective intelligence and collective sense making. But I can’t just offload the cognitive complexity to some authority, because I can’t trust that they’re actually doing good sense making. Maybe they’re doing good sense making within a very limited context, but then the application of that outside of the context is different and maybe there’s even distortions within their context. So I have to try and find other people that are also really endeavouring to sense make well, which means they have to understand what causes failures in sense making. And then we have to see if we can create relationships with each other that remove the distortion basis that is normally there. 

So I think what I have seen of Rebel Wisdom, this is probably the strange attractor of what is bringing everybody to watch it is people who are trying to make sense of the world better themselves and are trying to find sources of content of other people that have been trying to make sense of it well. Which is what I’m excited about and so those are just some opening thoughts and I look forward to getting into why we have as broken and information ecology as we have, and what it would take to correct that at scale and how we can make sense of the world even in the broken information ecology now in terms of practical processes.

I’ve never actually shared publicly these types of frameworks before, so this feels fun and exciting and I hope that it’s useful. As I’ve been trying to make sense of the world, making sense of why sense making it so hard, is pretty central. There’s a famous quote I think attributed to Einstein “make things as simple as possible but not simpler”.  He says as simple as possible, but really the goal is as clear as possible. Simpler would mean it’s wrong like it’s not accurate anymore. You’re going to have to face this doing media work. 

There will be pressures on you from people saying “hey people can’t pay attention to more than sound bites, you got to make it five minute chunks, the word size is too big make it for an eighth grade level”. Which is saying, people are dumb so spoon feed them stuff that dumb people can handle, which to the degree you do that and it’s successful will keep people dumb. But those are the pressures for anyone doing broadcast even for a hopefully good intention and if we want people to actually be able to make sense of the world well you can’t do it in very short periods of time with lots of distraction and oversimplified. 

If you look at anyone who actually increased the sense making capacity of the world, you look at any scientist or philosopher, they didn’t do it in tweets and they didn’t do it radically distracted and they didn’t do it in a dumbed down process. I have so many young people who have written to me saying “we want to create a new kind of education that makes everybody like Bucky Fuller or Leonardos, that conditions polymaths”. They say this because I’ve written some stuff on that topic and that they have some sense that they could lead that, and I’m like “have you read Bucky’s books?” And they say “well, no, we mostly don’t read books”. To which I reply “Have you seen the references in Bucky’s books? Just see the amount that he read and referenced to make sense of things well.”  And so there’s a decoupling of the sense of the agency possible, with what it takes to do it, it’s you know like, there’s a saying in almost all domains to this effect, that “everybody wants to be buff but nobody wants to lift heavy ass weights” or “everybody wants to win and nobody wants to work harder.” There’s something like that, that happens here. If I want to be able to make sense of the world well I have to work at that and if I want to be able to make sense of the world better than I currently do, like attention, requires being trained just like muscles require being trained. Thinking clearly requires being trained and anytime there’s a hormetic process—hormesis is the principle by which you stress an adaptive system to increase its adaptive capacity. I have to stress a muscle to get the muscle to grow. If I’m lifting an amount of weight that’s super easy, there’s  no input that says the muscle needs to be bigger and there’s a cost to getting bigger right so it’s only going to go through that cost if it’s being stressed. And the same is true if I expose myself to more heat and more cold than as comfortable, I actually gain greater metabolic flexibility to deal with heat and cold, which means that if I stay in an environment where I always have heating and air conditioning I’ll actually lose metabolic flexibility. You have to stress the system to be able to grow the system (in a particular kind of way and not all stressors are going to grow the system) but this is definitely true cognitively. Which means if I keep paying attention to hyper normal stimuli, that are moving quickly so I get the stimuli of lots of novelty I’m going to be decreasing my attention. 

But if I want to have any kind of nuanced view, I have to be able to hold multiple partial views in working memory. It’s not that some people have good memory or good attention and other people don’t intrinsically, any more than some people are buff and some aren’t intrinsically. It’s developable, but it has to actually be developed. So the impulse to say, “hey, make it really simple so everybody can get it” and the impulse to say “help people actually make sense of the world well” are different things. Now some people will make stuff technical-seeming intentionally to obscure it as a power game. So that to encourage others to defer their sense making to them, I understand this complex thing you’re not going to be able to understand, so defer your authority to me. If we actually want to empower people, I don’t want them to defer their sense-making to me. But I also don’t want them to do lazy shitty sense-making, or defer it to anyone else. Which means I want them to grow the quality of their own sense making, which means to grow the depth of their care, their anti-nihilism, to grow the depth of their earnestness, their own self-reflexiveness, to pay attention to their biases and where their sloppiness in thinking, their own skills and capacity. I want them to grow their attention span and both the clarity of their logic and the clarity of their intuition, and the noticing when something’s coming from intuition or logic and how to relate all of those things. That’s actually what increasing sovereignty means. 

So information ecology is that there’s a whole ecosystem of information. We have information coming in from marketing, from government sources, from campaigning, from just what our neighbours tell us and our friends tell us from social media. And we use information to make sense of the world, to make choices that are aligned with whatever our goals are and our values and what’s meaningful to us. What we hope is that the information around us is mostly true and representative of reality, so that we can use that to make choices that will be effective. When I say broken information ecology, it means that we can’t trust that most of the information coming in is true and representative of reality and will inform good choice making. So then this is where we have to get into ok, so where does information come from? Signals are being shared by people and by groups of people that have shared agency, like corporations and governments and political parties and religions. And so we want to start getting into, why do people share information other than just sharing what is true and representative of reality? This is actually a really key thing to start to understand, so maybe I’ll actually define something that I was just referencing which is the difference between true and truthful. It’s a first important distinction when we say someone’s being truthful—if you’re being truthful with me, it means that what you are sharing maps to what you believe, that there’s a correspondence between the signal that you’re communicating to me and what you believe is true. So we can look at breakdowns of truthfulness, which is where people are distorting information with some intentionality and that can either be through overt lying or through lying through omission or lying through emphasis bias. So that’s truthful. When we say something is true what we typically mean—and this gets very nuanced and we end up having to get into is like fundamental epistemology and ontology concepts of “what does it mean for something to be true, what are our fundamental axioms about the nature of reality”. 

I’ll put that on hold for now and just say, in general if we say that someone’s saying something that’s true, we don’t just mean that there’s a correspondence between what they’re saying and what they think, but there’s a correspondence between what they’re saying and some independently verifiable reality. So of course someone can be truthful, meaning they say what they believe, but what they believe is misinformed because they did sense-making poorly. So they’re propagating information honestly, but that is not true. So we need to look at distortions in both of these. There’s a third thing, which is representative, which is that it’s possible for someone to be truthful, to share exactly what they think is going on and that what they’re sharing is actually true they’ve actually done good epistemology and empirically validated that what they’re saying maps to reality and in some clear way. And yet the interpretation I get from that will still actually mislead me because the true information is not representative of the entire context. Articles published and famous journals, peer-reviewed scientific journals like Journal of American Medical Association, five years later we’ll see that a major percentage of them — something like fifty percent — are found to be mostly inaccurate. Fifty percent is a coin toss. Or we see the replication crisis, or we see that the things that get studied, even if it’s true information it can be misleading because for the most part, where does the money to fund the research come from? It’s going to come within capitalism mostly where there’s some Return on Investment on the research and so some areas have moral ROI than others so even a bunch of true information that is weighted towards certain parts of the information ecology over others create misrepresentation through preponderance of information. So even a bunch of true information can create distortion. So then you start to say, “oh okay so the essence of science within the philosophy of science, the essence of it is earnestness of inquiry”. It’s empiricism. But then earnestness of inquiry, Eddington defined science as “the earnest endeavour to put into order the facts of experience” and the essence of capitalism is—so you can say the essence of science is no bias, right, at least the idea, the spirit of it. We can get into the fact that even the philosophy of science has built an axiomatic bias later. But in capitalism it is about optimising for bias, like I actually have an agency that I’m trying to get ahead I have intention to increase my balance sheet and so if there is capital funding of science it’s going to fund the things that create ROI on that research so we can keep doing more research that creates both a reason to distort the info and the reason to withhold information so that is a source of competitive advantage, a reason to create disinformation to other competitors and to at least wait, you know, of course in biotech if I can get a patent on a synthetic molecule and I can’t get a patent on a natural molecule, a lot more money is going to go into synthetic molecules in natural and then we look it and say “well there’s not that many phase clinical trials on herbs and there are on pharma meds so the pharma meds must be more accurate”. No. So even true information preponderance of data is going to create problems and that’s actually true information that is being shared truthfully that would still be misrepresentative of reality. So this is where I have to say, “do I have some sense of what the actual territory is and do I have a sense that the map that’s being created actually maps onto the territory reasonably well?” Because sense-making means map generation right to be able to make choices of how we navigate how we do choice making in relationships with some actual territory. So that’s true, truthful and then representative, and we can look at distortions and all three of those. 

So when we look at why does as an individual distort information, the most fundamental way of thinking about it is there’s this idea in terms of signalling. Like, if I’m just in nature watching what is happening with rabbits and trees and birds, I’m getting information about them that they aren’t even intending to transmit, and so the information is just reflective, light is actually reflecting off of them of the nature of reality. As soon as there’s an agent that can share information strategically for an intention, then I don’t know if what they’re sharing is reflective of reality or reflective of what they think will advance their intention. And that’s kind of the key distinction, is that the moment we get abstract signalling—which language allows us and the ability to kind of forecast in our ability to model each other and your well-being and the basis of your agency doesn’t seem coupled with my well-being in the basis of my agency perfectly. In the case of the partner wanting to cheat and get away with it, there’s a decoupling of well-being and agency. In the case of if I’m a marketer of a product and I want you to purchase it, whether my product is actually the best product or not, whether a competitor’s product is better, whether you need the product or not I want you to think that you need it and to think that mine is the best right so there’s a breakdown between what seems to be in my well-being and what seems to be in your well-being. So wherever there is any misalignment in agency and there’s the ability to share signal for strategic purposes then you have a basis to have signal that’s being shared that isn’t just truthful. So then we look at where is that happening, and it’s everywhere—to really gross or subtle degrees—pretty much everywhere and sometimes for dreadful purposes. You’ve got the prosaic purposes which are basically market type dynamics ,which most of the dynamics in the world are market dynamics or at least influenced by market dynamics. Market dynamics are fundamentally, at least partially, if not mostly, rivalries. Meaning my balance sheet can get ahead independent of your balance sheet getting ahead, and definitely independent of the commons. So in a market type dynamic I’m going to be sharing information and this is why “buyer beware”, but buyer beware is not just check to make sure that the car isn’t about to break down, it’s also check to make sure that the information shared is being true, because if I’m actually sharing information as a service and you’re purchasing that information whether you’re paying for it with your attention that’s being monetised through an ad, or you’re paying for it directly or whatever, there’s nothing that says I’m sharing true and truthful information. So in market type dynamics, the goal of marketing is that there is as a company, and from the supply side of supply and demand dynamics, the goal is to compel the purchasers’ action in a particular way. Which means as a company I want to do sense making for you because I want to control your choice making. I at least want to influence your choice making. I’m not actually interested in your sovereignty and I’m not even that interested in your quality of life, I’m interested in you thinking that I’m interested in your quality of life. I’m interested in you believing that my stuff will affect your quality of life, but whether that actually corresponds or not I don’t care, in fact, if I can sell you food that is very addictive or cigarettes or social media or media or porn or whatever it is that actually decreases your baseline happiness but then makes you need another hit faster and it’s addictive that’s really good for lifetime revenue of a customer. And to the degree that my fiduciary responsibility is to maximise profitability for me and my shareholders and so I need to maximise lifetime revenue of my customers multiplied by maximising the customer base, addiction is the most profitable thing I can get. Where that’s never in the best interest of the customer. Now as a corporation where I get to employ a whole bunch of people to do market research into split-test ads and to see what works best and to use psychological insights and to be thinking about your choice making more than you’re thinking about your choice making, not only is the information I’m sharing with you not just truthful and it’s a form of a kind of narrative warfare, because we’re agents that are actually competing for what you do. I want you to do something in particular, you want to do what’s best for you. Those aren’t the same thing. But it’s actually an asymmetric warfare, because I have a lot more ongoing team and focus now especially as you start to look at a big corporation empowered by AI and big data, it’s radically asymmetric info warfare that you don’t even know it’s happening. You don’t even know you’re engaged in it. So we can see that and but all the way down to the little guy in a market who’s just peddling wares, his incentive is to compel people to buy the thing, not to really adequately inform them that he just marked the price up a lot from where he got it down the way and if they go down the way off the beaten path the other stuff is better. And so this is ubiquitous. 

Then as we’re exploring reasons that people share things that are not fully truthful and representative—there are of course things worse than this, I would say most of where the distortion comes from is agency misalignment. Well, it’s always agency misalignment. Mostly we’ll call that market but any sources where you have some agent, whether it’s a company or a country or a person that can think about their own well-being independent of the well-being of other agents and/or the commons, then there is a basis for them to optimise their well-being with some externality. In the same way we externalise cost to the environment, we an externalise the cost to the information environment. An externalised cost to the information environment is like disinformation is pollution to the information ecology, that’s a kind of a good way of thinking about it. And as ubiquitous as pollution is, where we see that the snow on the top of Mount Everest is full of pollution of many different kinds, I would say information ecology pollution is more ubiquitous because it’s not just big industrial players doing it, it’s everybody doing it and you can’t even see it as clearly. But even people will create distortions and information for seemingly positive reasons, like first there’s kind of innocuous reasons like “okay, I’m going to write a testimonial or an endorsement for my friend’s book, because they’re my friend even though I think there’s stuff wrong in their book it wouldn’t be that gracious of me to say that”. And maybe there’s some game theoretic stuff in there like, they wrote a nice testimonial for my book and I want them to keep doing that and so my giving the endorsement of my whatever credibility that other people proxy their sense making to me, I’m now you know proxying that credibility over here is not necessarily true even if it’s not that they did the endorsement on my book and I just am supportive of them taking a positive step, that doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone else who sees that I offered that testimonial and is using that as a method of their own sense making knows why I did it. So here’s the other thing, is a decoupling of the signal that I’m sharing with the intention that I’m sharing it for. And so I might be sharing something with you, and I have four or five complex intentions I might not share any of them with you, or maybe I shared one.

When you’re getting information from a news channel and you’re like, “oh this news channel wants to maximise my time on site and it can do that through appealing to my cognitive biases and my emotional biases and my identity biases”. It can do that through things that are inflammatory, it can do that through all kinds of things that are hyper normal stimulus and that hijack my attention. This is where it’s competing for my attention against where I would want to put my attention, because it’s monetising my attention. So I have to factor the agency, the intention of the news station and try and remove that artefact from the information to try and infer what the true information might be. Basically to infer what the source of distortion might be, the same with the political candidate, the same with science that’s coming forward and I’m looking at, okay so who is seeking more grant funding, and what is easiest to fund and where are their standard model biases where people are only going to share the ones that are going to get them more funding and that’s going to get them tenure where they have to defend the thing that got them the Nobel Prize (even though it may not be true anymore for ego and identity biases) you’ve to factor in all of those kinds of sources of possible bias. And so this is the first, I would say, kind of valuable thing when you’re trying to do sense making, is to recognize that the signal that you’re getting everywhere is mostly strategic, which is just another way to say intentional, on the part of the agent sharing it for their purposes, not yours. And where there is a dis-alignment between your well-being and theirs, or at least an apparent one then, what their basis for intention might actually suck for you and even if there seems to be alignment, you still don’t want to be lied to for your good, you still want true information. So I would say one of the first things we want to do when we start to do sense making is to look at why is anyone sharing what they’re sharing, and not assuming that they are being truthful.

So basically truthful is about game theory. Truthful is about the fact that people are lying all the time. And we’re actually going to say a little bit more about that one formula. When you’re playing poker you learn how to bluff, because it’s not who has the best hand that wins it’s who makes everyone else think that they have the best hand and right there’s a lot that goes on in that. And so because it’s a zero-sum game, that if my win does not equal your win my win is going to equal some other players losses, then I have an incentive to dis-inform you where information about reality is a source of competitive advantage. This is actually the real kind of key way of thinking about it. Because disinformation even happens in nature with other animals. You’ll see a caterpillar that evolved to have something on its tail that looks like a head to dis-inform birds so that they go to pick up the false head and it might still be able to live. That’s actually an involved disinformation strategy, and it’s just that the disinformation in nature happens very slowly and where the selective pressures on the side of the caterpillar and the bird are co-evolving. The bird is getting better at noticing those things as the caterpillar is getting better at dealing with that. Camouflage is a kind of disinformation right it’s an attempt to not signal something fully because there’s rivalrous dynamics between the caterpillar and the bird in that scenario. But with people with our abstract replicators, we can create the distortion much, much faster. We can have a symmetries in the capacity to create the distortion, and even exponential asymmetries. And so it’s actually really quite different. So you think about the poker bluff and you think about, like, even in soccer or football when someone fakes left and then goes right—that’s a disinformation strategy, where if we’re competing in information about the nature of reality where the water is, where the gold is, what the market is going to do next, if this company is going to make it, whatever equals a source of advantage, but we’re an assumed rivalrous dynamic (we’re competing for the same money, competing for the same attention, whatever) then first I have the incentive to withhold information. So I don’t want to tell you where the gold is, or I don’t want you to know the intellectual property that I’m going to monetise. Simply the withholding of information fucks up the information ecology so much because I’m doing cancer research and I’ve had some big breakthroughs but I’m not trying to share that with everyone else just doing cancer research because this is being funded by a for-profit process that needs to be able to monetize that through intellectual property. So we can see how many problems happens as a result of withholding of information, but we can also see how intractable this problem seems within a game theoretic environment like capitalism. I keep saying capitalism, I’m not going to say that any other bad economic system we’ve ever tried is the answer because they aren’t. We have basis for disinformation in communism and socialism and fascism. We’re going to suggest that new structures that have not ever happened are needed, I’m just wanting to say that here so people don’t attach to me criticising capitalism, is probably going to suggest something that doesn’t work. So the first thing is withholding information and we see in business how much focus is on IP and NDA’s and, you know, those types of things. But then it’s not simply withholding information it’s also disinforming, just like the poker bluff for the fake left can go right. And we can see in warfare, we try and have black projects where we withhold the information because we don’t want the other side to know what our military capacities are but we also try to disinform what our military capacities are or where we’re going to attack or whatever else as a source of advantage. That’s been happening forever, Sun Tzu writes about that. We’ve had a basis for disinformation for a long time. We’ve had rivalrous dynamics for a long time. Rivalrous dynamics are a basis by which we can get ahead by war and killing somebody else or lying to them right or ruining the commons it’s just exponential tech leads to, with those same incentives, leads to exponential disinformation, exponential extraction, exponential pollution, exponentially scaled warfare and on a finite playing field that self-destructs. So the underlying cause is the same stuff that’s been happening, but at a speed and scope and scale and level of complexity that forces us to have to actually deal with the underlying structures now, because they can’t continue. So that’s the game theoretic side of it, now what would it take to have an intact information ecology where any information that anyone had, just on the truthfulness side, was being shared, that there was no incentive for disinformation. First let’s just imagine that, no disinformation. Let’s give some other examples of disinformation. There’s not just where I’m intentionally trying to mislead you, there’s also where I’m sharing signal for some purpose for me that might mislead you and I’m not intending to, I just don’t care if I do. So let’s say there I want some increased attention, and this might be because I’m going to monetise that attention, might be because I’m going to get political power, might be simply because I just want attention. So let’s say I comment on what some famous person is doing. Let’s say I disagree with him, I’m instantly going to get some attention if I critique them effectively, that I didn’t necessarily earn and I don’t even have to believe the critique⁠—because via association of that type, I’m going to get some attention. So now people have a basis to focus on something they weren’t focused on before, to criticise it because that will get attention or to compliment it or to play off of it in a way that is not actually what they care about or believe and again you look at how ubiquitous it is, that kind of phenomenon. So the answer to getting over the truthfulness issue is actually post game theoretic world, which is the same answer as “how do we get past warfare?” Well it’s not just kinetic warfare, where we throw bombs or rocks at each other, it’s also info warfare and narrative warfare and economic warfare, which is basically any in-group that is coordinating to compete against an out-group in some kind of zero-sum dynamic. And that’s companies to companies, it’s companies to people, it’s people to people, it’s countries to countries, it’s global economic trading blocs with each other, it’s all of those things. What can people do right now within a game theoretic world to start to create spaces of truthfulness, start to create relationships where one of the highest values is truthfulness with other people that are capable of and want and are committed to that where people are not only not lying to each other, but they are endeavouring to not withhold information which is tremendous intimacy and tremendous vulnerability. And see if you can create enough psychological safety with some people to be able to start exploring what does it mean to actually share information honestly, so that we can have that and all kind of make sense together. That’s one thing. And there’s also something where it’s like, if you don’t throw trash out the window of your car because you don’t pollute the environment, be careful about not polluting the information ecology by rationalising why your own miss or disinformation is okay. And just start to think of it that way, think of anytime you’re sharing a little lies as polluting the information ecology and being like, “oh wow, I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to be part of the fucked up information ecology.” 

Okay, so now on the true side. Which is not just a mapping or a correspondence between what I’m saying and what I think, but between what I’m saying and what shared reality is, which means there has to be a correspondence between what I think in reality that means I had to do since making well before I share something. So this is the topic of epistemology. So one is movement past game theory, the next is epistemology: how do we know stuff. So even if nobody was lying and withholding information, the complexity of the world makes  epistemology hard. And most people aren’t even endeavouring at it. So if no one was lying and I could take all the information as at least truthful, there would be certain epistemic processes that I could apply that I can’t apply if I can’t even take the sources of signal as being signal without a lot of noise. So there’s epistemology that I have to have within the context of an environment has a lot of disinformation. How do I make sense of what is true and what isn’t true about signal coming in, and then how do I parse from lots of signals what might be true about reality? And to just get a sense of why and how big a deal this is, you take any of the biggest issues in the world. Like the issues that could determine whether or not we keep existing as a species. So take big environmental issues, like climate change. There’s disagreement as to whether climate change is really even a thing and to the extent that it is a thing, what the causes are and what the time scales are. Now most people who believe fervently that “climate change is real, 99% of climate scientists agree it’s anthropogenic greenhouse gases, etc”, most of the people that believe that fervently enough to go into narrative warfare for it, have never actually looked at the primary data deeply themselves. And yet there’s an almost religious fervour around it that was based on having proxied their sense making to people who they believe. So the UN said it or the Gates Foundation said it or the whatever it is, I’ve heard it repeated enough times, just through repeatability like I have been programmed to believe this thing is true which is not that different than believing a fundamentalist religious idea. 

Let’s say we take people’s fervent ideas on vaccines or their fervent ideas on the viability of market ideology or almost anything like that. Almost no one who has fervent ideas has a good epistemic basis for the level of certainty they hold. There’s a decoupling between how much certain team they have and how much certainty they should have through right process. And then you look at who are they proxying their sense making to, and most the time they’re not even proxying their sense making to the people who did the original research, many of whom disagree with each other and were funded by somebody to say something that is not fully true in the first place and who maybe were employing epistemic biases themselves. But typically, it’s somebody else who looked at all of that and then someone else who looked at all of that, so you might have like a bunch of climate scientists into someone who is speaking about that as a client’s climate scientists at a more synthetic level like a James Hansen or whatever, to then like a Gore or someone who is actually speaking to the public who we are proxying our sense making to, and we say okay how many steps removed is it and how good was the original data. And so if we think about, okay, how much radiation actually was released into the environment from Fukushima? It seems like a very straightforward thing take a Geiger counter and go out and do the studies, but how many people are equipped to take a Geiger counter out and go do that? Or to be able to actually pay attention to how the flow dynamics and the air and the water are going to work or you know so many things and so we have to take other people’s data to begin with and those other people, let’s say the data was the Japanese government or TEPCO or whoever it was, or it can a conspiracy theory group that is saying no it’s actually releasing huge amounts of ocean all the fish are totally toxified. But they might just be, they have a basis to disinform because they’re getting viewership, they’re monetising through that. So what start to get is like, is AI going to solve a bunch of problems and be relatively safe or is AI the biggest risk and going to kill us and you see the, you see kind of fervent disagreement but you see a still pedal-to-the-metal going as fast forward as we can with AI. And with CRISPR biotech, and with every type of exponential technology that could be catastrophic. And so there’s increasing speed of choice making with decreasing sense-making. And to just think about, like okay, what’s really going on with the Chinese government and its cyber warfare relationship of the US government? And what its actual capacities are, and what its intent and agency is, and those types of issues. Well, we know that’s going to be obscured, we know both sides and all kinds of sides are going to be obscuring information. And it gets even worse because it’s not just that you’ve got this group of people called China and this group of people called the US and that they’re in a game theoretic relationship with each other, but everybody on Team USA cooperates perfectly, you know, of course it’s not that. So even within the intelligence agencies, I might have two different intelligence agencies that are supposed to be cooperating but they’re competing for a bigger percentage of black-budget, and so they might be withholding information from each other or even dis-informing each other. Then I might have two agents within an agency competing for the same promotion who might run disinformation on each other, so I have fractal disinformation right at almost every place because of a game theory incentive system, which is the balance sheet of countries, the balance sheet of organisations, the balance sheet of all the way down to individual people. This separation of agency.

So I’m back to the game theory truthfulness side. But I have to factor that in when I’m trying to make sense of things because I have to be able to parse signal from noise to then be able to synthesise the signal. But then even if that wasn’t the case, I’m just trying to do an epistemology on good signal. And I have to say ok, in a complex system we’re we can’t even forecast the weather ten days out very well, how do I forecast the effect of putting certain kinds of pesticides or genetically modified organisms or whatever into the environments. It’s a complex system that we can’t forecast very well at all, we don’t know the tiniest bit of the actual information of how that complex system is going to regulate. But we’re going to do stuff that affects those systems at scale. What is the right epistemology to be able to make sense of “is this a good choice?” What are all the metrics we have to factor in? Let’s say we’re talking about biotech. So I can give you a drug that is good for some biometric that happens to be associated with the disease that I’m trying to get the doctors to be able to use this drug allowed by the FDA to treat a particular disease and then since the disease is identified by this biomarker I have to affect this biomarker. So let’s say I’m talking about high cholesterol and so we develop a statin for it. How many other metrics are this is the statin effecting. Well every day we’re learning new biometrics we didn’t even know existed. How many of those are being affected they’re part of the unknown unknown set that we don’t even know to be able to do risk calculation on? Now we could say well let’s run the experiment long enough before we release the drug to see if it affects total longevity and all-cause mortality. Well nobody does that, nobody’s going to run a hundred year experiments on something before they release the thing. They’re going to run the shortest ones they can. So where you have a system that has delayed causation, how do I know if that’s creating problems way down the road. Well it does all the time. So we get rid of DDT or parathion or malathion because we see that it’s super poisonous after we’ve been spraying it on everybody, and then we bring in a new drug that we also didn’t do long term studies on. I mean a new pesticide and then we outlaw it after a little while and then we bring in new ones. The new ones aren’t safer, they just haven’t had as much time to show how dangerous they are. So then the question is like, what would the right epistemology be? How many metrics do I have to factor? How do I know how to factor those metrics? What is the total information complexity of the scenario relative to how much I have actually the information complexity of the assessment that we’ve done? So we can get into at some depth, the topic of appropriate epistemology for various contexts but the I guess the first thing I can say is that if people aren’t even thinking about that, their chance of making sense well is pretty close to zero.

If we think about the concept of a meme the way that Dawkins originally put it forward, it’s an abstract pattern replicator where a gene is an instantiated pattern replicator. Which means that it can mutate and change and affect behaviour and propagate much faster. And we can kind of say that in Homo sapiens, our genetics selected for memetics, for higher-order mimetics. Because with most other species, what the selective pressures had them be adaptive to an environment. There’s mutation and then the mutations that survive and make the best are the ones that make it through. But that’s within the context of surviving in that environment and are able to mate successfully in that environment. So they become more fit to their environment. The cheetah does really well in the savannah, it would not do well in the Arctic, and the polar bear wouldn’t do well in the savanna and the orca wouldn’t do well outside of the ocean. So they are well adapted to their environment because of our abstraction capacity, which is both our capacity for language and memes as well as tools, we were able to go and become adaptive and become actually apex predators in the savanna and in the Arctic and in the ocean and everywhere. We were able to go to every environment, which means that as soon as our population would normally—if we were any other animals just level off in relationship with the environmental carrying capacity of an environment—we were able to decimate that environment and move to the next one, into all of them. Since we were going to be adaptive to totally new environments and since we were going to create tools, where what it was to be adaptive was changing, since we modify our environment in ways the other animals don’t we can’t come in genetically fit to a specific environment we have to come in and be able to imprint the environment that we’re in so we know how to be fit two totally different environments. Because it’s not that adaptive for us to throw spears or even climb trees all that well, but it is to be able to like text and drive and stuff that wouldn’t have been adaptive thousand years ago at all. And so this is why human babies are embryonic for so long right compared to any other animal. The thing I like to do here is to think about a horse standing up in like twenty minutes and a human being able to walk in a year, and just think about how many twenty minute segments multiply into a year to get a sense of how much longer we are helpless than anything else is. And even amongst the other primates close to us, there’s really nothing like us in terms of the extended helplessness and that’s because we don’t have inherited knowledge of how to be us since the environment is going to be different, we have to imprint the environment that we’re in to be able to be adaptive to environments that we’re changing. So this is saying that our genetics selected for neuroplasticity, selected for memetics, our hardware selected for faster software updates that could have faster changes in adaptive basis so that we could move our environments and all those types of things. So if we think about a meat and kind of like a gene as a pattern replicator but as an abstract pattern replicator that can mutate much quicker, there’s also a big differences that the other animals are in an environment where the mutation across genes is very evenly distributed. Mutations happening to the gazelles and to the cheetahs at an equal rate right. And there’s co-selective pressures on both of them, so they’re both getting faster—the slowest ones of each are dying off. So there’s this kind of symmetry of power that has the competitive pressures between them have them all up level. But when we start being mostly mimetic and the other species are still mostly genetic (meaning we’re largely getting adaptive based on abstract pattern replicators and they are still in stantia pattern replicators) we can increase our predative capacity much faster than than the environment can increase its resilience to our predative capacity. Which means that we can debase the whole substrate that we depend upon which is self-terminating, you can’t keep debasing that which you depend upon. So in evolution there is a selection process for the genes that make it through, but there is this kind of symmetry of the genes that make it through because of the evenness of mutation and because of the co-selective pressures. Now with mimetics the memes that make it through are the memes that win in a rivalrous context, not the ones that necessarily represents the true or the good or the beautiful. So the propagated memes propagate more than the true memes propagate. This is a super important concept to understand. I was always dumbfounded thinking about the evolution of religions. Take Christianity for instance and you say, okay, so Jesus when they brought Mary Magdalene said ,“let he who has no sins amongst you cast the first stone”. And then when they’re nailing him up he says, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”, and he’s like bringing forgiveness to Judaism. And in his name we did the Crusades in the Inquisition, and said, “we will not just kill but torture anyone who doesn’t accept the Lord of Peace”. How did we do that? How did we do the mental gymnastics to take the guy whose key teachings were forgiveness and torture people in the name of that? Well, we figured out how to do it right, but the key is that we were super adaptive. So you you’ve got an idea, say you’ve got Jesus’ teachings. And then there’s going to be a bunch of mutations on that idea, different interpretations of it. Some of the mutations say “be quiet and don’t push your ideas on anyone”. Like, be contemplative, etc. And those ones don’t catch on because they aren’t being intentionally propagated. And the other ones that say, “go out and propagate these ideas on missions and on Crusades and focus not on the forgiveness parts, but on the like wrath and Leviticus and who God’s enemies”. Focus on those parts and that you actually get better spots in heaven for converting more people. So what you end up getting is that the ideas that catch on are the ones that win in narrative warfare. But they’re having to catch on, so then say, Islam is also competing for some of the same people right, because ultimately the religions become the bases of in-groups that are competing against out-groups for fundamentally political and economic and survival-type bases. So I can hold people together with a political left or political right ideology, or a capitalist-communist ideology or racial identity ideology or religious ideologies. All of those become the basis of an in-group that can bind together to be more successful in competition with assumed out groups. But what that means is that rivalrous game theoretic environment is going to be selecting for what is effective at rivalry not what is true, and definitely not what is good for the whole. And the moment that anybody figures something out that is more effective at rivalry than everybody else, reverse engineers it and creates similar mimetic mutations on other sides and so there’s not that many Jains, right. They’re lovely people and totally nonviolent and aren’t going to hurt anybody, but they’re also not pushing their ideas on anybody so the ideas aren’t spreading that fast, so the ideas that have an artificial focus on the spreading of ideas and figure out how to emotionally manipulate people into believing the idea with heaven and hell and whatever are going to spread more. So this is a key thing to get is, it’s not just—I’m giving the example of the teachings of Jesus turning into the Crusades or the Inquisition, but it’s also, take thinking like Darwin. So take the context in which Darwin came about. Darwin came about just following Malthus. So we’ve got the British Empire’s first real world ruling Empire, the first time that a global inventory of resources was ever conducted, Malthus came up with the fundamental principle of scarcity or inadequacy and says, “hey people are reproducing geometrically, resources reproduce her arithmetically, there’s not going to be enough for everybody, not everybody’s going to make it. Well then, who’s going to make it?” That idea says compassion is not viable, we can’t all make it fundamentally, mathematically there aren’t the resources for it. Now this is gibberish actually, today because we know that populations don’t reproduce exponentially forever, they steady-state and we’ve already seen the population in Japan and in Denmark and another like the most economically successful countries start decreasing. And we also know that we can recycle resources, we don’t have to just have a linear materials economy where we use them up and turn them into trash, and that completely fundamentally changes the underlying scarcity basis we can also share resources in different ways.

So the underlying thinking behind Malthus isn’t true, but he didn’t know that at the time. It seemed quite compelling. So then we say okay, so a solution for everyone, a world that works for all is not even viable. Those who want it are simply not facing up to reality. And so if not everyone’s going to make it who’s going to. And so then Darwin comes out in that context and so the idea of survival of the fittest is the idea we focus on the most, even though that’s not what he emphasised early in the writing hardly at all. So there was again taking Darwin’s idea in one context and then also taking the most propagated version of it that led to social Darwinism that basically reified institutional sociopathy. Which is okay, well if not everybody’s going to make it, some people are going to be like predators other people are going to be like prey. Predators don’t feel bad when prey die, you have to actually call the herd sometimes. And if you start to think about how hierarchical power structures work, to get to the top of a hierarchical power structure, like a big corporation or a government or a religion that’s structured that way (let’s leave that one off for a moment just say corporation or government), I have to win at a lot of win-lose games, I have to get the promotion or win at the campaign over other people, so the top is going to be people who are best at winning out win-lose those games. So if I have a lot of empathy and I actually care about other people’s loss, I’m going to do less well. If I’m a sociopath and don’t give a shit about it, I’m going to do better at. If I’m willing to dis-inform to get ahead I’ll do better at. So this is why we see higher percentage of sociopaths and psychopaths as CEOs and in the normal distribution of population, which also means that the people have the most influence in the world are asymmetrically empowered and asymmetrically sociopathic. But the way that we interpreted Darwin was reifying that as a reasonable thing, and even a good thing.

So we have to recognise that any idea even if it started as true or good or beautiful gets put into the game theoretic mill. And what propagates is the thing that’s propagated. So why do bad ideas catch on?  Largely for this reason. So oftentimes the best ideas are not well marketed and aren’t even easily marketable, and best marketed ideas that are going to catch on the most are not that true and pretty shitty results. So this is again something that people have to really pay attention to is, I think Jordan in one of his interviews with you talked about the difference between real thinking and simulated thinking. So if I’m just taking memes that I’ve heard I’m in a conversation and I’m listening for which of the things I’m going to say that I have heard somewhere else, I’m basically a meme propagator it’s not real thinking. I’m not actually endeavouring to try to make sense of the world in a new way that I’ve never done before. Most people hear something, hear a meme that comes in and because it’s from Fox they believe it or don’t believe it, or because it’s from CNN or whatever it is, they believe it or don’t believe it. So they basically have some cluster of memes that creates like a memetic immune system that says which idea is to accept and which ones to reject and then once it’s accepted then propagates them. That’s not thinking and there’s no sovereignty in that, and groups that have asymmetric meme broadcast capacity are good at making memes that are sticky, customised to specific audiences and being able to split test uptake. And then you get into high tech things like Facebook and it’s like okay, I can actually pay attention to what you click on and do profoundly deep analytics. I can pay attention to mouse hover, I can pay attention to all these types of analytics and customise the disinformation to everybody using the kind of AI that beats the best chess players in the world of chess. This is stuff that Tristan Harris talks about. So the AI that beats Kasparov at chess easily. Nobody is as good at being strategic with themselves as Kasparov is a chess and we don’t even know that we’re engaged in that. And yet it’s competing with us for our attention for its purpose of maximised time on-site. Now it just happens to be that I’m going to scroll and bounce unless than catches my attention. Short things will catch my attention more because I’m in a hurry. So just orientation for small bit size, makes everyone more fundamentalists with shittier attention spans. And then if the headline is more kind of sensational, it’s going to attract attention more so than we get these big platforms that don’t want to make people fundamentalists or how to drive politics, but they do simply as a by-product of the fact that limbic hijacks are sticky and they’re optimising for time on site. 

So first thing is that individual memes don’t get selected for—memes interrelate with other memes to create world views. Because I usually can’t make a choice based on a meme, I have to make a choice based on a representation of the world. Just going to be a bunch of ideas, a bunch of memes, a bunch of data. And so we get these kind of meme complexes, and so we can think about the evolution of meme complexes. So let’s go ahead and look at the evolution of religious ideas. We can look at the evolution of political ideas or scientific ideas, or anything. So, religious ideas. You’ll have some kind of central meme. But then you’ll also have protector memes that emerge with it that also believing them protects against the kind of cognitive processes that could have someone stop believing the primary meme. Because if the primary meme doesn’t have protective memes it won’t last so the question isn’t just what makes a meme propagate but also what makes it endure and resist change. So there’s the evolution of memes, but also the meme complexes’ resilience in the presence of other competing meme complexes. So we’ll give these protector memes and then we’ll also give propagator memes that are trying to take the whole complex and propagate it so there’s a whole football team of defence and offense and carrying the ball. So let’s say we get some kind of fundamentalist religion, so let’s say we look at Christianity, this would be the same for any religion this is just probably the one that most people here will relate to. So you’ll have some kind of central doctrinal teachings about Christ and God and what good is and those types of things. But then protector memes are what could make me not believe these things and how do we protect against those processes. So if we want to have say a literal interpretation, then we don’t want people to doubt the literal interpretation, then we start to have memes like faith is something God likes and doubt (which is another term for critical thinking) is something that God doesn’t like, it actually comes from the devil and you’ll burn in hell for it. And so the more that you just believe in the teaching, the better your chances of heaven are and the more good you are and the more that you doubt it the more that Satan actually got to you. So that’s a very strong protector meme against the kind of critical thinking that could make you question the basis of the religion. You’ll also have other protector memes like if I believe this, if I continue to believe this I get to keep having a family and a community that will take care of me if I’m poor and if I’m sick and will help me out in times of warfare and all those things. And if I stop everybody will disown me or to various degree there will be direct implications to my life regarding the change in these beliefs. And then again you’ll have propagator memes we need to go on mission and share the good word with other people and convert them, so you start to see a memetic ecosystem.

So now, if I’ve got propagator memes coming up against some people who also have protector memes from a previous complex then there’s an evolution, there’s a competition of which memes are more successful. So then, we look at the kind of evolution of the types of meme complexes over time. Now there other people have a lot more expertise in this than I do and I don’t have adequately detailed history to say this is the right historical narrative, it’s an example of the type of thing that could happen so take it as that. So say you look at the evolution of the concept of hell. Hell as a meme, in Western traditions. So first, say you take Eastern traditions like Hinduism or Buddhism, they might have many different hell realms and nobody stays in any of them forever. Most of the interpretations say that everybody gets to moksha or liberation eventually, these are places that people go to learn things as part of the liberation path. So and if you look at the descriptions of Hell at various points in Christianity, Hell got nastier as time went on. And God also got more authoritarian and heaven got better and even if we go before that we look in early cultures and we see most early cultures were animistic—the spirit of the Buffalo and of the tree and of the river and there was the spirit of everything. And so spirit was radically decentralised, and then there was an evolution because of evolutionary pressures on memes that corresponded with little tribes living in nature too early civilisations. There was an evolution to polytheism, which is now not the spirit of everything but some smaller number of more powerful spirit or gods. So there’s starts to be a consolidation of power in the religion, corresponding to a consolidation of actual power and the social structures that are happening and the way that we make sense of the world, in the way that the religious idea actually supports the thing that we’re doing in politics. And then we end up going from polytheism to monotheism and if you think about control systems, some few being able to control a many in ways that are better for the few than they are for the many and how you have systems of kind of institutional controller oppression. So if we’re having consolidation for having increasing power inequality in our social systems and we want to justify that increasing power inequality, and we want to justify increasing authoritarian power, having gods that reflect that is valuable. Those memes are going to actually be adaptive to the social systems doing that. And if you think about an authority that controls a population with reward and punishment, and then we make we actually make a God in our image and we say, “okay well what would the infinite authority be, and what would infinite reward, an infinite punishment be?”. And you just take all the concepts to their logical zenith. That’s what Christianity did. So you have one all-powerful God beyond reproach, with an infinite punishment and an infinite eternal punishment, an infinite reward. If you’re trying to look for maximum behaviour mod, that’s what you end up coming to. But it’s almost like the strange attractor of a landscape that just takes it to zenith, where it’s so terrifying once you’ve been indoctrinated leave that belief system because hell is so bad that any chance of it is so unacceptable that all kind of do Pascal’s wager and just stay in it just because. Now of course, by believing that, I might be going to the Muslim hell if they’re true but that never got its hooks in me when I was young so I’m not as afraid of it unless I grew up there in which case it has the hooks and I’m much more afraid of that than I am of the Christian hell. So we can see that you get an evolution of the Gods getting more powerful and more authoritarian and more propagative and more ideology around propagation and reward and punishment. Those things that you would expect. And specifically it’s that the groups that instantiated those memes would have actually done better in a natural selection determined in warfare. And also if I have a man’s dominion over Earth ideology it says yes destroying the environment for us and it’s okay if we destroy the environment because God’s going to come back and remake everything you know after purgatory anyways and treating animals badly really doesn’t matter because again dominion over—like those ideas are actually going to be adaptive in terms of increasing the game of power. Even though if you take to zenith that game, it self-terminates, it destroys the whole world on the substrate that we depend upon. 

So we’re looking at a kind of Christian worldview, but you can see that a whole worldview of ideas comes up around supporting Trump or climate change or critical thinking and Dawkins kind of scientific materialism. Each of those worldviews have processes of in-group, out-group pressures. Like something bad will happen if you don’t believe in these things. Going to hell is the worst example, but simply being rejected by the in-group and being called like a stupid conspiracy theorist or a pseudo-scientist or an anti-vaccer or whatever it is, or an infidel it goes against whatever the in-group idea. There’s a strong selective pressure to defect on our own thinking to the centre of the in-group. And a lot of advantage will occur if I defect on my own sense making to a centre of the in-group. And I don’t trust my own sense making, so I’d rather be part of an in-group or at least I’ll be safe by being part of an in-group, because I can’t make sense of the world and I can’t take care of myself really in the present. And it’s not safe to disagree with everybody. If I share views that just have me disagree with everybody and I don’t have any in-group, then I seem fucked. So what I do is I look at which in group seems to be closest to what I think and then I defect on my thinking to normalise with the in-group. So we want to just kind of pay attention to you know looking at these different information ecosystems, mimetic ecosystems, to see how they evolve, how they apply in-group out-group types of selective pressures, and how they apply appeal other than good epistemology. Like how they apply rhetorical skills and emotional manipulation skills to compel people to believe something where the basis to believe it should actually be some better epistemic process. Then the key thing is if we can start noticing this in ourselves, and noticing where we feel a kind of bias towards or away from something before we’ve thought about it, based on how it fits with the rest of our mimetic complex that we also haven’t analysed well.

Interviewer: I guess a lot of people a lot of people might be tempted just to give up on trying to make sense of the world.

I think almost everyone has. Again it’s like, is Fukushima still in risk of further breakdown or not, has it already polluted the ocean, should we be eating fish from the Pacific or not? Is 5g actually possibly a problem or not? Is climate change and coral reef die-off an eminent issue in the next five years or not? And if so what is the right way to approach it? Are we approaching our own doom with CRISPR, with AI? Like these are seriously important things to have some clarity on. These are things that we actually want to come to enough certainty on to make choices, because we are making choices. And by not making choices, we’re making choices by default in terms of what market pressures are doing. And almost everyone if they really kind of think about it will admit, I actually don’t know the answer to any of those things. But that doesn’t slow down the rate of first to market for powerful AI or you know anything else. And to the degree that people don’t admit that they have no idea and they think they have an idea, if they’re honest, most of them will say, “I’m pretty sure I have an idea because I proxied my sense making to other people that I trusted, but I didn’t actually do the foundational research”. And to the degree that people did the foundational research if they’re honest enough they’ll say, “the total amount of data that I looked at relative to the complexity of the scenario was orders of magnitude too small”. So most people have given up on sense making about based reality. They just haven’t admitted that. Where I can get ahead in a human ecosystem by affecting what other people believe, independent of what is true, independent of base reality, then we live in a simulated reality where if I can if I can get you to believe something that will lead you to vote in my interest or to purchase things in my interest or whatever, game theory will have me try to optimise distortion and optimise my ability to get ahead at creating and winning at simulations and it won’t have me try to connect to base reality at all. And so we get a world that is so constructed and decoupled from base reality that most of the time what is true isn’t even relevant and it’s even relevant. And it’s even further than. There’s a whole class of people for whom the idea that there are true concepts, doesn’t even appeal to them very much. Now some people might think this sounds like excessively cynical. I’m going to be careful with this because I don’t want to say names that will create conflict unnecessarily but I was talking to someone the other day who was saying that what I believe is give or take the same as what this other person believes and what we believe on this topic couldn’t be more diametrically opposite. But the person who is saying, “yeah you know we all kind of are on the same page, we all believe the same thing” wanted to put on an event where we would all be there that she would sell lots of tickets for. And her orientation is what is actually going to optimise viewership and so how do we get people that are going to be engaging and mix with people who are famous enough in order to optimise viewership. But I was focused on what is actually true. Are we being earnest in what we’re endeavouring to do here? And her sense that we believe kind of the same thing, because we both talked about technology and we both talked about the future and we both kind of want stuff to be good, and we both use the word exponential sometimes—it wasn’t that she thinks that what I think is true or what this other person thinks is true. It’s that the idea of true beliefs is not what she’s optimising for. What she’s optimising for is what’s going to get the most views and then there’s a backfill, a rational backfill that tries to rationalise. That we believe kind of the same thing or whatever. But the orientation isn’t even trying to say, “do I believe what this person saying?”. It’s saying, do I believe that I can make money on what this person is saying so you realise that we live so much in a simulated reality. Like if I’m a venture capitalist, I can make money on a product that is shittier than products that currently exist even though the market is supposed to be a sense making mechanism within the context of demand that there will be mutation—lots of different versions of the same product for the same service, and that the one that’s actually the best at the best price is the one that the market will select for and it’ll be upregulated. So the first part was mutation, then survival selection, and then good parts of a few different ones might combine and that’s kind of mate selection, and that’s kind of how we think of markets as a sense making system. But we all know that the best marketed product will oftentimes beat the actual best product, where the price of product development drops the price of marketing and customer acquisition goes up, which means that it’s a shittier product better marketed. That means the sense making system is broken. It’s not a good sense making system. So but as a venture capitalist I can invest in a company that I know is going to create a massive distortion level and market really successfully. And maybe the company will go bankrupt at some later point but I will have exited by then, so I don’t really care long term. I care that it’s going to market successfully and be successful financially not if it’s actually a better product or service. And so if the if the CEO is a really compelling sociopath that is highly motivated and spins distortion bubbles I’m going to be more motivated by that than thinking that the product is actually fundamentally better, in many cases. That’s not only story but it’s a story. And so then my goal is to actually invest in someone else’s ability to generate a distortion bubble that will pull enough people along that me as an early investor, it’ll lead to adoption of customers and other investors and then I exit before the distortion bubble pops. And so we can see there are whole domains that are fairly decoupled from reality, from base reality, where spinning simulated realities is the whole goal. 

It’s another thing we have to pay attention to, is that the cognitive complexity of a lot of the issues we face is just much vaster than most people have time for, than most people have training for and even vaster than we evolved to process. So this idea of hyper objects, that there’s not just plutonium but all of the plutonium, or all of climate change or all of species extinction. I can’t actually observe that directly but I can infer it know that it’s a real thing. But how do I hold the cognitive complexity of any of those let alone all of them, is a very tricky thing. I still have to feed my kids and pay the bills tomorrow, and so the adaptive pressures on me are to focus on what I need to focus on in the very small and in the short term, even though what I’m doing because of globalised supply chains is affecting the global in the long term. The idea “think globally, act locally” most of us are doing the opposite. We’re actually thinking very locally about having actions that affect the world globally, which means we’re thinking on very short timescales, fairly narcissistic and self-indulgent timescales, but with things that will have enduring and massive impacts. And that is a decoupling of scale, it’s a decoupling of sense making and choice making, a bunch of things. But so for most people the idea of having the luxury of trying to make sense of the world, is something they don’t even feel like they have because they’re nose-down just trying to like do the next couple things they have to do. And then other people who are actually trying to get ahead are optimising for simulations and distortion bubbles rather than trying to make sense of the world. So there’s a lot of people who aren’t actually even trying to make sense of the world. Now when I ask what is meaningful, what is meaningful is going to be bound to what I think is real. And if I give up on knowing what is real, there’s a way in which I’m giving up on the depth of my connectedness to what’s meaningful. So yes giving up on sense making there’s  kind of an expression of a type of nihilism and it and it feeds into further nihilism.

First thing is I stop trying to squish reality into a perspective. This is super important. And then anytime I have a perspective and I am defaulting into thinking of it as the truth, I become dubious of that in myself. And I become curious about the partial truth in other people’s perspectives, including the ones that I think are stupid and crazy. Because none of them have no signal, even if I think there’s a lot of noise. So I want to say why do they think it is true. Well this bias, that bias, okay, and some perception mixed with the bias. What are they perceiving then with the bias is also there. Maybe it’s not that much sense making but it’s something that’s meaningful. So this is St. Francis’s quote of “seek more to understand then to be understood”. That means actually seek to take different perspectives. So the Hegelian dialectic is you’ve got a thesis, and then the antithesis, I actually want to try and take this perspective and construct this case and once I’ve constructed both of these, now I’m stuck with either that I flip-flop between them or I’m just confused, or I just claim paradox or the next step is thesis, antithesis, synthesis. There’s a higher-order truth that is actually not paradoxical, that reconciles them, it just requires a higher order of complexity. It’s paradoxical within too low a level of complexity. Einstein’s “you can’t solve a problem at the level of problem, at the level of complexity” and so since the house is three-dimensional, no two-dimensional picture will actually give me a solid sense on it. If I’m looking at the cylinder, if I’m trying to collapse the cylinder by a dimension and take a cylinder (which is a three dimensional object) and take a 2d slice of it, if I got a cylinder like this, a slice like, this is a circle, a slice like this is a rectangle in 2d. A circle and rectangle are mutually exclusive descriptions of a shape. One has straight lines and corners, the other has no straight lines and no corners. If I try to say, “well it’s both”, that just makes no sense at all, right. If I say, “well it must be part of both so it’s a rounded rectangle”, well that has no truth at all. But I have to actually be able to construct a higher dimensional space in which rectangleness and circleness fit together in a way that makes perfect sense, called a cylinder. But this is what a level of consciousness that isn’t the level that caused the problem, the problem is partiality of perspective that can create then a basis for conflict. So then there is a higher order that is able to reconcile those. And so this is where you know we’re seeking clarity more than simplicity, because the simplicity can happen through reduction. And typically the synthesis comes from novel insight that neither the thesis nor the antithesis held, it’s a little bit of both. So a couple examples. Let’s say we take kind of political left and political right ideology there’s a gazillion examples. And what we call the political left and right today might seem actually quite different than what it was in the past. So let’s take kind of what had previous to recently been some essential ideas in Republican or Democrat platforms. So we kind of have this Republican right oriented idea of wanting to empower the self-responsibility and sovereignty of the individual, and more individualistic and so smaller government, less social services, more empowering of those who are entrepreneuring and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. And you know that kind of thing. And then you have the kind of more Democratic left perspective that says, the collective is actually created by the individual, so we want to empower the individuals that are creative and take agency, because better individuals make a better whole. That’s kind of the gist, over here it’s like, well but the individuals are being conditioned by the environment that they’re born into, by the whole. And so even though I can find that one story of that one guy who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps in the ghetto, there’s a whole lot more people that succeeded who were born into the Hamptons and born into South Central. And so let’s create better environments that actually condition better people because there’s top-down effects. So there’s for many people, some seemingly compelling truth in both of these. And also also problems. So there can be a right oriented perspective that says, hey look if we set up social services in welfare and whatever we actually condition shittier people who are less strong and resilient in the face of the environment, and we de-incentivise those who are most entrepreneuring and creative and we make people who are doing badly still do well, and that actually kind of down regulates the evolutionary pressure in the whole system. Why would we want to do that? And of course over here, we can have a kind of left perspective that says, yeah but some people are getting ahead using shared services that the government pays for from everybody’s tax money that they aren’t actually really accounting for, and they’re affecting the commons negatively in a way that is externalising the cost everyone else, so that they’re claiming to be more entrepreneurial, but it just means they’re extracting from the commons and externalising cost of the commons better. And do we do we really want to let people die on the footsteps of hospitals because they don’t have money or insurance in the fully individualistic libertarian kind of idea and fully libertarian kind of ideology can’t solve multipolar traps. But there’s clearly truth in both of these, and they are clearly neither complex enough to actually handle reality, in which there are bottom-up effects or the individuals effect the whole and there’s also top-down effects for wholes in turn affect the individual and there’s feedback and feed-forward loops and neither of them are factoring those enough. But the debate process doesn’t bring about dialectic. The debate

process here actually makes the idea more polarised to get people on this side to emphasise rhetoric over real sense-making, and emphasise winning over collectively trying to make sense together. So the debate process is not a good sense making process, it’s a narrative warfare process. Dialectic is different where it says, okay, I think we have some truth and not all of it. I think you have some, let’s endeavour together earnestly to figure out the things that we’re all interested in figuring out. And then we start to say okay, well do we want better individuals who are more sovereign independent of environment? Duh, nobody  doesn’t want that. Or do we want the wholes that support all the individuals within them to do better? Well, duh. We want that too, but the way that we’ve done social services oftentimes makes the people not more sovereign, but more dependent. So it’s actually not making better people, it’s making more comfortable but shittier people. And the way that we incent individuals over here, in the sense people who are entrepreneuring but by externalising costs to the commons and creating radical wealth inequality, so it’s not incentivising the most truly creative and intelligent and good people it’s incentivising effective sociopathy and things like that. So neither of these are doing all that good at the thing they’re even claiming to do. So how do we create social services, collective processes, that condition healthier people who are more sovereign? How do we create environments that condition people who do better in any environment? That actually conditions strength and resilience and sovereignty in the individuals who then in turn affect the environments in ways that support the increased sovereignty of everybody else? That’s a totally higher-order way of starting to think about the relationship between them that starts to recognise the inexorable failing on both of those perspectives and that what the approach would take is more complex. 

That’s an example of starting to move towards synthesis, from a thesis and an antithesis. And if you, if you look at even personal things in your life you’re wrestling with. Like okay, “do I want to accept and love reality and people and myself as I am, or do I want to like help strive to make things better?”. They’re similar, those types of things. You’ll find a thesis antithesis everywhere, where the actual insight to synthesis is a novel insight not contained in either of those. If I, when I say, accept you as you are right now, or help work to change you to make you better—and I see those as different, it’s because I’m seeing you as a noun. I’m seeing you as a fixed thing or accept you as you are, in this current state. Whereas if I see you as a process, if I see you as a verb, I see you as a becoming. That is different than you were yesterday and different than you were when you were two. Then accepting you as you are includes dynamism, includes the impulse to change and to grow and evolve, so I can accept and love you fully as you, which includes accepting and loving the impulse to grow and expand and transcend. So I can support you to become more not on the basis of judging you as insufficient but loving you completely, including loving the evolutionary trajectory inside of you. But that insight of you as a verb rather than as a noun, was actually not captured in either of these. So the dialectic process of saying, like okay well how do I see the partial truth here to construct this fully, and then how do I see the partial truth here construct this fully. And then what new insights bring these together in the higher order perspective that is more complex and more nuanced than either of them? So that’s kind of a dialectic process, and it might not just be two thesis-antithesis, it might be lots of perspectives. This is a process that I would love to see people start practising for sense-making. Whenever they’re talking with someone, start by seeking to understand before seeking to be understood. And seek for the truth value in what people are saying not just the wrongness. But then don’t holistically throw out what they’re saying as totally wrong or totally true, but be able to separate that there is signal and noise. And then be able to say, if I see signal from a number of sources, how does that fit together into higher order perspective? This this is another sense making process. 

Interviewer: You mentioned emotion and vulnerability as key components of sense making. That may seem a little bit counterintuitive to people. Can you explain what you mean by that? 

If I want to make sense of the world well and I’m going to engage in some communication processes with other people to make sense of the world with some collective sense making, then I want them to share true information with me to not dis-inform nor withhold. So, how do I create the trust and psychological safety for them to do that? Well I’m probably going to have to do that too. And so how do we create mutual trust and psychologic safety that we’re not going to use the information that we’re sharing with each other and game theoretic ways with each other. That’s a huge part, and if people don’t have some spaces and some relationships where they feel like they can actually share fully, openly, honestly and feel trust in that—their sense making is going to be radically curtailed, to what they can just do on their own. And without anybody’s ability to help error correct them with full sharing. Also one of the sources of bias is identifying with what I believe, because I’m identifying with part of an in-group that believes that thing or because I am special or smart or right or whatever for believing that thing. So the impulse to be right means that I won’t seek to understand other perspectives, and so if I’m going to actually seek to understand the truth value in other perspectives, like earnestly, try and get what they are seeing, where they’re coming from, I have to stop seeing it the way that I’m seeing it for a little while and I also have to completely suspend debate and narrative warfare and the impulse to be right and all of that. And so there is a deeper human connection that’s involved there’s also something, there’s a psychological process that almost seems like a spiritual process where for me to really try and get where you’re coming from on a topic, I have to really take your perspective. What is it in me that is taking your perspective, because it’s not my perspective? It is actually having to drop the way that I see things to really try and see it the way that you see things to make sense of it. So that means that there’s a capacity in me that can witness my perspective, that can also witness your perspective, but it is deeper than the current perspective I have. And we all know we can change our beliefs and there’s still something that is us. So there is an ‘us-ness’, that is deeper than the belief system. To be able to really try to make sense of someone else, I actually have to move into that level of self that is deeper than belief systems. 

Interviewer: What do you hope that people will get from it? 

I would like if they are looking at their own biases and saying, okay, where do I have emotional needs that are affecting what I believe. Where do I have in-group out-group stuff happening, where am I actually doing disinformation, what are my cognitive biases? Let me go look up the list of cognitive biases and start to inventory them. Keep talking about epistemology and what the axioms are: “I don’t even know what that means, how do I actually go and explore what the right steps of logical process of an axiom are? How can I empower my own learning?”. So if people felt inspired to learn how to learn better, and then inspired to create relationships with other people where they actually do care about understanding what is true and real, so that they can also have a better relationship with what is meaningful and being able to make choices lined with that and where they’re endeavouring to understand what is true and real together and also endeavouring to create an intact information ecology where no one is disinforming anybody. Which is as much or even more an emotional process as it is a cognitive one because to really create an intact information ecology involves vulnerability and intimacy. That’s what happens, getting out of a game theoretic context, where I say oh our well-beings are shared. Well what if you defect on me? I have to actually create a situation and trust to be able to share real information, so then I get to see where my own wounds make it make me incapable of trusting or of revealing. So I mean those would be things that I would be happy if people looked at. The emotional and cognitive and overwhelmed by time and lazy and biased, and whatever sources of where they aren’t sense-making well and endeavoured to work on those. And I’d be happy if maybe you guys with rebel wisdom took a lot of people who you interview, who like, maybe one thing they have in common is they’re all people who are endeavouring to make sense well and started to ask them more about sense-making processes that they employ, so people can actually learn like Brett could talk about here’s how evolutionary theory, here’s things that we know from evolution, here’s how you can apply this as an epistemic tool. Or Eric could talk about here our principles in the philosophy of science and in physics that are valuable tools in understanding reality, those types of things. And then if they were even not that many people who started to really think about break downs in information ecology better and write on that more, and those ideas were able to start to become better understood. I’d be happy about that. 

Well if we look at the framework of sharing things that are truthful, true and representative. We start with the truthful side, we would need to remove the incentive for disinformation. And the first major source, there is kind of market—it’s the game theoretic dynamics that emerge from market type dynamics. And so again, if I have two different branches of the government competing for budget or different representatives who are supposedly both seeking to be in benefit of the country competing for percentage of the budget. Now they have the incentive to disinform whoever’s allocating the budget, disinform the public, disinform each other. Which means that the total level of coordination just sucks right and this happens in corporate politics, inside of corporations, this happens everywhere. So as long as we have separate balance sheets, as long as the different intelligence agencies are competing for that, as long as people we have several balance sheets then we have a fundamental basis that my well-being is separable from and oftentimes directly rivalrous with yours and with others and with the commons. So then, we will compete with each other for a lot of things and we will engage in, at the worst case, physical warfare, kinetic warfare, but will mostly engage in economic warfare, competing against each other and at the cost of the commons. And information and narrative warfare also at the cost of the information commons and each other. So to really get over that we would need to couple or we need to create alignment between agencies, between what you have intention to do and what is also in my well-being and vice versa. Which means that we would need to have more coupling between our well-beings, which means we would need to have a different process of resource provisioning and I will say that the type of system that could do that adequately has never been proposed in any kind of major way because obviously none of the systems ever proposed so far or tried do that. But if we have a rivalrous relationship with each other, information will be part of that rivalry and will damage the information ecology in the same way we damage the physical environment or each other kinetically. So that’s a big ask. So our balance sheets are kind of at the foundation of what create rivalrous dynamics. And this is at the level of corporations, at the level of individuals and of the level of nations. So can we still have private nation states that could benefit each other at the expense of others? Or commons that share information perfectly? So like, if we really want to say how do we have a perfectly intact global information ecology, it couldn’t happen within the context of nation states and private balance sheets and political lefts and rights and in-group out-group type structures. It would take us a while to talk about what something post game theoretic might look like, but if you want to just start to intuit it you say well if we look at all of the neurons in your brain or all of the cells in your body they’re all their own agents. Like the cells self-organise; I can take it out of you and put in a petri dish and it will keep self-organising for period controlled by its own internal genetic code. But even in your body there’s something like 70 trillion individual cells, but those cells are organising in a way that’s best for them, as individuals and best for the ones around them and best for the whole simultaneously than either sacrificing themselves for the whole nor they sacrificing others for a game theoretic benefit. And this is true at the level of cell to cell interaction, but it’s also a true at the level of organ to organ interaction or organ system to organ system or cell to organ. Fractally, at all these levels vertical and horizontal, there is a kind of symbiotic process that happens. And if you tried to model like the organs and a capitalist relationship with each other, where the heart and the lungs were competing against each other for scarce resource to hoard as much resource for feature as possible, and you model that out at the cellular level, the body dies very quickly. Cancer cells are actually doing that. A cancer cell is doing what is good for it in the near term but bad for the whole, and it will end up killing the whole and killing itself in the process. But the cancer cell only happened because the body as a whole had some mishealth that had carcinogenesis exceed the immune response capacity to deal with the carcinogenesis, so the whole was already sick to make the individual sick to some degree. There’s a feedback and feed-forward process between the parts and the whole. If you think about like vision and the way that parallax error correction and parallax occurs in vision, one eye doesn’t give me peripheral vision and it doesn’t give me depth perception. Two eyes together give me something that and also the single eye will have errors that aren’t corrected for, but the two eyes together the overlap of what they both see but also the difference of what one sees and the other one doesn’t allows any error in this eye to be corrected for, or error in this eye. And it allows peripheral vision and depth perception. So this is a place where not only are the eyes not in competition for which one is seen as true, but the process of how they’re related in the optical cortex gives me error correction on the imperfections in each of them, and it gives me new synergistic information that neither of them had on their own. That’s fucking amazing to think about right and this is true. Like your brain as a whole process of information that no individual of the types that no individual neuron or sub neural networks are processing. And individual neurons can get something wrong, but there’s error correcting processes that don’t propagate that. But the processes do propagate the true information, so we’re like well how the fuck does it work? The information processing that each of the parts are doing goes through a communication protocol that error corrects the false parts, and also gives parallax on the true parts where we get not only the truth of all the parts but a way of binding that together for synergistically higher-order information. The cells are sense making and they’re communicating, they’re signalling with each other right. A hormone is a communication, a neurotransmitter, like those are all signalling processes but they don’t have a game theoretic relationship with each other right they actually have a mutually symbiotic relationship with each other so they are supporting each other sense making in that way. The lungs obviously do better if the heart’s doing better, as opposed to doing worse if the heart is doing better. So if we just start to kind of imagine into what type of communication processes protocols would have to happen between humans that allowed for error correction on any individuals perceptions, but allowed the true parts of everyone’s perceptions to be separated from the error parts and then all the true parts to be synthesised at a higher order of complexity than individuals could do on their own. When we think about the civilisation of the future and the collective intelligence of the future, we think about it that way.

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Any errors in this transcription are the responsibility of Perspectiva, and will be corrected, with thanks.

Caspar Henderson: A major focus for your recent work has been the challenges of critical thinking. Where does that come from?

Tom Chatfield: For the last decade or more I’ve been thinking about technology in its human context, and have been fascinated by the question of what it means to think well and effectively about the complex systems that we live inside. My doctorate was in literature and philosophy, and even at the time I was studying, in the early 2000s, it was becoming very clear that the ancient enduring questions that still affect just about every aspect of life today—what it means to live well, to have a fair and functional society, to meaningfully communicate with and relate to others—are now mediated through technology and digital systems. And one of the effects of this is that people’s autonomy—their ability to control their own time and space, to think and understand—all of this is under a great deal of pressure.

This is not an entirely new complaint, of course! In 2010 I wrote a book about video games and found myself talking at the start about Plato’s Phaedrus and the laments levelled within it against writing and literacy as practices that divorce human voices and bodies from the stuff of thought and knowledge. But the challenge has greatly intensified. And so my recent work on critical thinking became a way of talking about the habits and skills and practices that allow us to take both intellectual and emotional control — to carve out spaces within which it feels possible to think twice, and to critique assumptions operating beneath our everyday notice. 

The textbook I wrote under the title Critical Thinking homes in on what I care about most: the underlying skills, habits and practices that are associated with thinking well, and that are hopefully transferable. It was important to me to write it as a textbook, and in particular as a book aimed at helping people setting out in further education. Because I feel that it’s by making something teachable and practical, by turning it into a toolkit, that it can become generative and be repurposed by others. You’re not saying, here’s an answer. You’re saying, in the face of contemporary problems and complexities, here are some tools and approaches and ideas that I hope will help you engage more richly. 

What I love about working in this field is that it’s very open. I’ve written a big book about critical thinking. I’ve also written a short book about critical thinking. I’m now writing a medium-sized book about it!  I’ve created an online course. I’ve done a business course. I am working with schools. I never get to a point where I’ve said all I have to say. It’s more than I’m trying to generate ideas and approaches that help people to become less deceived and less overwhelmed, that create spaces for second thoughts — and, very particularly, that encourage them to listen to others and learn from them so that they can move, hopefully, beyond the limitations of their own immediate perspective.

All this matters a great deal in the context of technology, because information systems bear down on us with such weight, today. They have such immense power, and they are full of potentially unexamined—or hidden—assumptions and power dynamics. If you look at where people fit into this, I think our capacities to think about thinking itself, to be critically and creatively engaged, and to collaborate richly and empathetically are becoming more and more important.

Caspar Henderson: In a video introduction you outline ten commandments for critical thinking. I was struck that you start with ‘slow down.’  This brings to mind Will Davies’s starting point in Nervous States. 

Tom Chatfield: I have greatly enjoyed Will Davies’s work on happiness and emotion. And I welcome how in Nervous States he puts up front the idea that “taking more time” is not just a platitude, but an essential component of emotional self regulation.

The sophistication of his analysis of emotion is also important. Many tech business models—and many technocratic models of government—assume that humans emotions are at once irrational and predictable, and thus susceptible to modelling and manipulation. But the role that our emotions actually perform is far more powerful and complex than this kind of thinking can capture; and we need to take this on board if we want to have a hope of understanding the sheer depth and diversity of purposes people can pursue in life, the different ways they make meanings.

Caspar Henderson: Could one usefully apply a different frame from ‘commandments’ for the challenges of critical thinking?

Tom Chatfield: I suppose my framing is in the tradition of rational critical thought, but I think what you might call a therapeutic perspective is also very valuable. This entails not so much lists of do’s and don’ts as the mere act of self-observation and self-acceptance. 

The psychotherapist Philippa Perry writes very well about the importance of simply being able to observe your own emotions unjudgingly. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to change or do things differently, but it does mean first of all valuing the practice of critically alert self-observation. This kind of psychotherapeutic practice is close in some ways to meditative and spiritual practices; and I think there’s a very important emphasis to be found in these upon the power of acceptance of self and others. You’re not just there to be optimised. Your discontent and anxieties are not just there to be banished as rapidly as possible so you can be happier, fitter and more productive! Indeed, most views of the good life are by no means a life of straightforward pleasure or hedonism. There’s much that can be learned from suffering and discontent, and much making of meaning that has to do with sacrifice. 

These perspectives are a very useful counterbalance to the idea of following rules in a rational and aspirational way. And I would like to think that my work tries to build bridges between the two. It was very important to me, for example, to divide my critical thinking textbook into a first half about the habits of reasoning, empiricism, observation and scientifically-rooted research, and then a second half rooted in behavioural economics, psychology, rhetoric and the intractability of the world beyond these things. 

At the heart of all this is the incommensurability of different viewpoints. Depending upon where we start and what our fundamental beliefs are, we will reach different conclusions that reason alone cannot reconcile. There’s a great deal to be said about the importance of empathy, here, which Roman Krznaric among others has written about

What holds all this together for me is that—while it’s hugely important both to listen to others and to be charitable towards their views if you wish to persuade and to understand—it’s also important to be able to move beyond this. You need to be able to forgive others and yourself: to move beyond exchange values, and indeed beyond reason. There’s a long religious and spiritual tradition that is often absent in discourse about topics like technology and AI where, actually, this perspective is urgently needed. Because I think one of the very terrible things for a lot of people about technology can be the inability to forgive, forget and step outside the system—to deal with others in terms of what you might call traditional virtues, according to the absolute value of human life. It can become very difficult to talk about this kind of thing in terms that aren’t either utilitarian or consequentialist.

The American ethicist Evan Selinger co-wrote with Brett Frischmann a book called Reengineering Humanity. It’s a fine example of fundamental ethical thinking about what it is that as humans we owe to each other, and how the building of automated systems can, unless we remain consciously aware of these fundamental questions, undermine aspects of our social and emotional relations. 

The last thing I’d say is that in the very term ‘artificial intelligence,’ which is the focus of a great deal of anxiety and debate around what it means to be human in our digital age —- that perhaps too much emphasis is put upon intelligence as the defining attribute of the human. Whereas to be human, as Will Davies and others point out is to be an embodied, intractably emotional, social being. We are not rational at root. Rationality sometimes come after. David Hume knew this, but we sometimes forget it.

Caspar Henderson: Where do you find hope and inspiration for facing up to the challenges of digital life? 

Tom Chatfield: Jamie Bartlett makes a very important point in his recent writings on technology and politics, that we tend to underestimate people’s collective capacity to change their minds over time. We mistake current norms for enduring norms. It’s easy to assume that the norms we have now with regard to say, privacy, carbon emissions, consumption and democratic participation are enduring. I spent quite a lot of time with young people in schools and universities, and I draw immense hope from the very evident fact that what is politically thinkable — sometimes known as the Overton window — can shift a long way over time. 

It is possible for even the near future to look profoundly different from the present.  We talk about climate crisis and systems of all kinds that can reach tipping points. This can be very frightening.  But when I go to schools and universities, I don’t find disengaged tech-addicted students. Rather, I am struck by the fact that young people are grappling in a very committed way with what the future should look like.

So I draw comfort from youth movements at the moment.  It’s very easy to be dismissive about naivety of various kinds, or hypersensitive to perceived hypocrisies and inconsistencies. But for me that misses the point. Whether it’s Me Too, Extinction Rebellion, or many others, my sense is that young people are willing to challenge and change the status quo much more than we give them credit for, and with much more considered judgement. 

Of course there are plenty of terrifying precedents out there, too. But I think it’s very easy to fall into a trap whereby we attribute enormous power to authoritarians, demagogues and populist manipulators, while simultaneously denying the ability of progressive movements to change anything for the better.

We’re going to need a future that’s profoundly different from the present. I don’t know whether that should take the form of sudden convulsive radical change or ameliorative approaches, or something different again, but I do know that it’s a great failure to be able to think outside of the present moment. This is why we need to be able to combine rigorous critical thinking with a deep interest in what lies outside our immediate experience, and outside the scope of existing systems: to understand how different the past was from the present, how different others are to ourselves, and how different the future can be to where we are now. 

When I meet people who are passionately willing to change and to envision futures profoundly different from the present—when I see the power of new knowledge, new social practices and movements to change the world—for me, that’s hopeful.

Caspar Henderson: Aristotle said that leisure, properly understood, is essential to a flourishing life. I don’t know if this quite counts, but fiction and music are important for you

Tom Chatfield I have written fiction and played music since I was young. I have never felt there is a hard line between these activities and what you might call non-fictional forms of productivity. This is partly because in whatever you do you’re always seeking a narrative thread: you’re trying to take people with you. The act of writing—of wrestling something into words that I hope will be read and found meaningful—gives great, complex pleasure to me, and I hope it’s a way of giving pleasure to others. We are storytelling animals. You mentioned Aristotle, and the tradition of great classical thinkers was one of rhetoric and performance, with an emphasis on learning to communicate effectively while being alive to other people’s rhetorical tricks. 

If you are trying to educate and awaken people, you’re inevitably going to be in competition with countless other things. So it’s very important to speak the language of the times, and to create material that is powerful and resonant and useful in people’s lives. I’m very keen to go wherever people are paying attention, as best I can. I’ve started writing genre fiction largely because it feels like an energetic and exciting space: a place where ideas can win and delight a large audience. 

As for music, I’m a very keen amateur pianist, and it’s a thing I love to do both because I can lose myself in playing — in the flow of a beautiful creative activity that doesn’t require one to prove anything — and because I can engage in music making in a community that brings people together. Music celebrates the flow of the moment. It takes you outside the ordinary. It breaks down barriers. It asserts a commonality on a level other than that of kind of explicit rational belief. It gives you permission to make and share something other than fully articulated ideas.

Caspar Henderson: What are your hopes and plans with Perspectiva?

Tom Chatfield: I am particularly excited by Perspectiva’s advocacy of a deep form of interdisciplinary, spiritually-literate analysis. This is not a utilitarian prescription for right action. It’s much more an exploration of different entwined aspects of humanity and culture, of the journeys that we go along communally and individually.

A lot of people — including perhaps most famously the psychologist Jonathan Haidt — have written in recent years of the impoverishment of appeals to right action when they’re couched only in terms of justice and fairness. Although such appeals are important, they fail to address large aspects of our human and ethical selves to do with continuity, community; with our sense that some things are sacred, and to do with values that are justified not so much at end of the chain of reasoning as by a fundamental sense of worth, significance and resonance. 

I think that too often those who wish to do good and to address problems in a supposedly ‘enlightened’ way speak in exclusively rational utilitarian language. There is a real lack of thinking that talks to the whole human, that talks of change and community in these terms, and that is actively interested in forging grand alliances —  in finding ways to gather people despite profound differences and experiences and perspective, and that isn’t haughtily dismissive of large aspects of human experience to do with faith, belief, tradition, family, home, hearth, continuity and feeling. 

You have to address the whole person, the whole of society, as best you can. You have to find ways to forgive, reconcile, empathise. You can’t stride into a space and proclaim yourself to be a clever person who’s right.  Around Brexit we’ve seen a politics of contempt, where people treat others as idiots. And this is precisely the way to break a society permanently, or indeed to break a planet.

During 2019, climate change became climate crisis, even climate emergency. The tenor has become more urgent and with that shift are raised further, more nuanced reassessments. One interests me, in particular. What might it look like if we learnt to grow and progress and build differently; non-materially?

Put it like this. The genius of capitalism is to channel the insatiable human desire for more in specific directions. It’s fed a yearning for more technology, more travel, more security, more stuff. But could that longing be redirected? 

The good news is that this question has been asked before, many times. It’s a perennial issue in spiritual work. To be human is to realise that you live “between the beasts and the angels”, as Augustine put it. We seek creature comforts and divine delights but routinely confuse the two, so that the former are sought as substitutes for the latter. What, therefore, is it to become more human and foster an awareness that is able to tell the difference? In short, what is it to flourish not fall?

In the medieval period, one of the best known texts to address the issue was The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. Boethius was a Roman senator in the 6^th century CE. He had risen to the top. But then he was accused of treason and, overnight, his luck departed. He spent the last months of his life in prison, facing torture, awaiting a grim execution. 

During his confinement, he was visited in a vision by Lady Philosophy. She caused him to question everything and, in particular, what he regarded as his wealth. He had sought glory, fame, riches, friends, she points out, and usually so as to do good and virtuous things. Now, though, the wheel of fortune had turned. 

He had lost it all and was broken. But gradually, through this encounter, he comes to see that he had lived his life under a mistaken premise. He had pursued riches, yes, of both material and moral kinds. Only he felt they had betrayed him because he had not realised something fundamental: the glories that come and go in this life are reflections and echoes of a reliable and imperishable wealth that human beings are also capable of enjoying.

Lady Philosophy tells the increasingly astonished prisoner that he possesses this true wealth already. Their dialogue becomes a process, akin to an initiation, through which Boethius awakens to the heart of the matter: he had confused worldly progress with spiritual discovery; renown with glory; accumulation with realisation. If he can disentangle the one from the other, he will find a happiness that lasts. So what’s the difference and might it matter now?

Part of my work at Perspectiva is an attempt to find out; to uncover the side of life that our modern preoccupations tend to occlude.

When we are under this spell, we make assumptions that look like self-evident truths. Take the notion of growth. It seems like a good thing. We must grow as individuals to become adults. We must grow in knowledge to understand more. We must grow as a society to lift people out of poverty and suffering.

But were Lady Philosophy to appear again now, as she can to those in dire straits, I believe she would ask us to reconsider how we understand growth. We must grow, yes, but that growth must be in the service of a joy that, of itself, growth doesn’t deliver. Left to its own devices, it can’t find what it seeks. It turns bad when it forgets what it’s for.

This confusion is the stage our culture finds itself in now. Muddle, mayhem and worse will characterise the 2020s. It’s why we’ve started talking about crises and emergencies, feelings that will be amplified by the fear that whatever needs to happen is not. 

But there’s a kind of wisdom in this dark moment. What’s up is not just a problem to be solved, though any means that reduces the destruction is welcome. It’s also a moment to recognise our problem for all that it is. The goals around which we organise life fall short because the way we see life has distorted. Our vision must become unclouded and, like Boethius, a crucial part of the task is to understand what’s happening in depth. Only then might we be transformed.

The writer, Eugene McCarraher, is one person who can help. His new book, The Enchantments of Mammon (Belknap Press, Harvard University), tells the inner story of how capitalism became enchanted by money and unwittingly made our goals monstrous.

Early on in his book, he introduces the poet, John Milton. Milton understood how this can happen and he describes it via the figure of Mammon, one of the fallen angels in Paradise Lost. It’s a revealing section. 

When angels fall from heaven they forget that the material world is an image of spiritual reality. They therefore treat the material world as an end in itself. Mammon is the active spirit of this myopia. He possesses us and makes us shortsighted. 

What delivered pleasure in Eden is now pursued for profit. The sense of wonder morphs into cravings for accumulation. Mammon twists the revelatory joys of discovery into the desire for new powers of manipulation. He induces panic about what’s scarce and blinds us to what’s abundant.

Even when he was in Heaven, Milton writes, Mammon looked downward, “admiring more / The riches of Heaven’s pavement – trodden gold – / Than aught divine or holy”. The spirit who animates the modern attitude to money teaches us to prefer the “hard liberty” which, from a fractured earth and quarried mountains, builds the capital city of hell, Pandemonium.

At the heart of Mammon’s guile is a lie that desire can be satisfied by amassing, intensifying, commandeering. It’s a clever lie because human beings do desire that which is glorious and inspiring. We’re between the beasts and the angels. In Milton’s cosmology, we are made for nothing less than a conscious experience of the Beatific vision of God. But what Mammon doesn’t tell you is that this is an experience that isn’t gained by growth. As William Blake put it: “More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul. Less than All cannot satisfy Man.”

Boethius is told the same thing. If you seek material wealth and moral goodness for its own sake, fortune will turn against you. The key is to recall that the wealth which satisfies is reflected in this world and our lives. The goal is not to possess it but see it; not to construct substitutes but discover realities. As another philosopher, the 18^th century Anthony Shaftesbury, remarked: a shepherd on a hillside gazing at the blue horizon truly owns the land. The so-called “landowner” is only the custodian and what he thinks he possesses is finite, whereas the shepherd, in his reverie, can reach for the infinite. 

That said, Lady Philosophy is not advocating a levelling communism or aristocratic utopia. Neither is she instructing Boethius to become so heavenly minded that he is no earthly good. Her education is more subtle: to know that the material world presences eternal delight; that its inner pulse is wealth and life, much as the sun beams a seamless ray of both physical and spiritual warmth. This world is good when tended for its beauty and cultivated for its goods. But it will only bring happiness when human beings realise that happiness exceeds it. 

Economics will have to be informed by an education, not indulgence, of desire, and this must itself be informed by a renewed spiritual psychology. 

The difference has been recognised by some modern economists. “We are suffering from a metaphysical disease,” wrote E.F. Schumacher, adding “the cure must therefore be metaphysical”. By metaphysical, he meant the truths which the mind sees in this spiritual light and, so seeing, finds itself filled with delight. Everyone senses it from time to time, say, in the moments they are amazed at the brilliance of existence. My guess is that this is what most people most profoundly want, too.

It’s also why there’s hope because in spite of the terrible things we face, there is a wealth that is lovely, that is already ours and that can’t be taken from us. What’s on offer is more, not less; is glorious, not grim.

Our longings can be redirected towards it, though that will take the reconstruction of our vision. Economics will have to be informed by an education, not indulgence, of desire, and this must itself be informed by a renewed spiritual psychology. 

“There is no wealth but life,” John Ruskin famously declared, adding that we must learn to consume it. It is our divine right. And we will do so aright when we know what is meant by true wealth and by life in all its fulness. Lady Philosophy can be a guide, as might Milton, Ruskin and others. One way of putting the task for the new decade is to perceive what they saw; an agenda for the years ahead is to learn how to see it for ourselves.

Mark Vernon is an Associate at Perspectiva, and the author of A Secret History of Christianity

 Image: The Worship of Mammon by Evelyn De Morgan (1909)

This is the first of several concept papers about the scope and mission of the Transformative Education Alliance (TEA), which is an effort undertaken here at Perspectiva, in conjunction with a pan-European bildung-education network, as well as a host of sites in North America. This series of concept papers is intended to put in place the “code” upon which TEA will run, intending only to establish the minimum set of ideas needed for the creation of an alliance. TEA will eventually come to life on the ground in communities all over the world, but the first step is to understand the work that needs to be done. 

See also an interview with Zak Stein and an introduction to TEA by Jonathan Rowson.

Photo credit: Cristian Fattinnanzi

What follows is a sketch, the first of several posts outlining the scope of the Perspectiva-led initiative. Our aim to build an alliance of actors seeking to understand, create, pilot and support forms of transformative educational practice throughout the lifespan while making the cultural and policy case for their development in a broader economic and political context. We have published a position paper by Dr Zachary Stein, further outlining the theoretical basis of TEA, and indicating its potential implications for policy and practice. The initial development of TEA is supported by the JJ Charitable Trust and The Fetzer Institute – thank you, and we are in the process of building further institutional partnerships, both with funders and other organisations working in this domain of inquiry.

Perspectiva believes the most important crisis of our time is the meta crisis lying within, between and beyond the materialist perspectives from which we view our current challenges; we construct problems in ways that confound our capacity to address their root causes. The challenge of our time is epistemic, cultural and spiritual renewal, but that is daunting in a context of economic, political and technological upheaval and cascading ecological collapse. Clarifying what that predicament means and what follows for society requires sustained intellectual leadership and new institutional forms. 

TEA aims to devise new methodologies and institutional niches that recognises the significance of the distinction between formal (eg schools and universities) informal (eg clubs and societies) and tacit (eg TV and social media) education has almost completely broken down. In that fluid context of technological, cultural and educational forms, we seek to devise and coordinate processes of teaching and learning throughout the lifespan that are fit for the purpose of responding to four of our most profound interlocking crises which together encapsulate our meta crisis:

• Intelligibility – what is going on? 
• Legitimacy – who has authority to lead and decide and why? 
• Capability – do we have what it takes? 
• Meaning – what ultimately matters? 

We believe that these core defining questions for civilisation (distilled by Zak Stein) are fundamentally educational in nature (see a recent interview on this site.) We also believe responding to them as co-emergent and inextricably connected phenomena is necessary, but very difficult – we need to learn to reach beyond our current cultural and institutional grasp, which is why TEA is necessary. Such questions cannot be answered definitively, but the survival of civilisation depends upon asking them whenever we are faced with the more familiar question: What should we do?

Realisation

Perhaps the single most important concept at the heart of TEA is Bildung, a Germanic term with English and Greek roots and Nordic and American fruits. As I outlined in a recent essay for CUSP, the direct translation is ‘formation’ but the original includes elements of education, enculturation and perhaps most profoundly realisation, in the sense of fulfilling one’s true nature of purpose. Bildung can be thought of as a combination of societal vision, educational philosophy and policy agenda. The 3^rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, was the first to emphasise the importance of ‘inner Bildung’, our inner formation, not merely for its own sake, but because the nature and quality of our inner formation (and realisation) is reflected in ‘outer Bildung’ in the systems and structures of society, and their nature and purpose. The active ingredient we seek to work with is not so much about what we know, but how we know; that mixture of perception, emotion, thinking, meaning-making and embodied skill that the 3^rd Earl of Shaftesbury grasped as being generative of the formation of society. To give the concept further texture, Bildung includes the following elements:

• Sense and soul. Philosophical Foundations, informed by both biological and theological perspectives: Humans as bio-psycho-social-spiritual organisms. 

• Piaget for adults. A theory of change grounded in scientific psychology about how humans can and do develop throughout the lifespan. 

• A eudaimonistic society. Social critique and vision based on a commitment to a substantive vision of human flourishing (eudaimonia) and the good life, including a sense of shared responsibility to ensure the conditions for the good life are widespread. 

• Social futures. Anticipatory vision on technology: an intuitive grasp of the need for social and moral progress to keep pace with technological change. 

• A lodestar and touchstone. An applied philosophy of education that informs assessments of social and economic policy. For instance, it is conceivable that a fee and dividend approach to ‘taxing’ fossil fuels could help fund a universal basic income, which might help make a four day working week viable, the minimum requirement of both could be some participation in Bildung-related activity. (This is one approach of many of course, and not inherent to Bildung.)

• Growing freedom. A political theory. An emphasis on (positive) freedom to grow rather than (negative) freedom from coercion and on the societal/institutional conditions that enable that. 

• Aesthetic sensibility. A proactive relationship with culture: For instance not just reading a book or watching a movie but engaging with it aesthetically and existentially, considering what moral choices one would make in a similar situation as presented in the story. 

• At home in the world. A reflexive civic nationalism: The importance of roots, place, and belonging, but also firm emphasis on the value of expanding our circles of belonging. 

The authors of The Nordic Secret, Lene Rachel Anderson and Tomas Bjorkman put it like this:

“Bildung is the way that the individual matures and takes upon him or herself ever bigger personal responsibility towards family, friends, fellow citizens, society, humanity, our globe, and the global heritage of our species, while enjoying ever bigger personal, moral and existential freedoms. It is the enculturation and life-long learning that forces us to grow and change, it is existential and emotional depth, it is life-long interaction and struggles with new knowledge, culture, art, science, new perspectives, new people, and new truths, and it is being an active citizen in adulthood. Bildung is a constant process that never ends.” 

This kind of educational vision goes by many names. In Northern Europe they call it Bildung (formation and realisation) which is our initial focus, but in ancient Greece they had a related notion called Paideia (enculturation) which was about preparing citizens to be effective members of civil society or polis; and today, in the context of the first truly planetary civilisation, we need a new global Paideia, as argued by Zak Stein. In the American pragmatist tradition they have sentimental education (e.g. Rorty) and democratic education (e.g. Dewey). In India transformative education has been known as Swa-Raj (‘self-rule’ – Gandhi), in China it is a form of virtue cultivation (Confucian). These forms of education are not identical by any means, but across the world there are a range of initiatives trying to keep transformative education alive. They currently lack the financial capital and political will necessary to revive them and make them policy priorities, but the premise of this project is that they amount to our last best hope to save civilisation from itself. 

In activist circles the expression ‘We must be the change we want to see in the world’ is still popular. It turns out that Mahatma Gandhi never actually said this, or anything very much like it, which on reflection is perhaps no surprise. It is not so easy to change who we are, even harder to meaningfully change the world for the better, and the relationship between the two things is complex to say the least.

Our shared challenge is more subtle, namely to become the change we wish to see together, which means learning to be the change we wish to see, which today means changing the processes of cultural reinforcement and learning, which involves an encounter with power, and takes allies, and time. TEA is therefore an integral part of Perspectiva’s urgent 100 year project.

Dr Jonathan Rowson is Co-founder and Director of Perspectiva and author of the recently published book, The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life. You can follow him on Twitter @Jonathan_Rowson.

Image: Tea of different fermentation by Haneburger. Public domain via Wikipedia

Caspar Henderson: Let’s start with what you call “the central importance of education as an aspect of the global meta crisis.” Tell me something about what that means.

Zachary Stein: We’re in a situation where it seems like in order to have a viable future for humanity the challenge is one of technical and scientific problems to be solved such as the future of computing and ways to tackle environmental problems such as carbon emissions. There is some truth to this. But it’s also the case that none of those problems will be solved without the right educational systems in place. There’s a prior challenge before the technical problems, which is the problem of human capacity, human capability, human understanding. And that is a factor of education. 

How are the educational systems working to prepare people to solve those technical problems? That is one kind of educational issue. OK. But then imagine they are solved? The science and technology actually work. Then after that, what are we living for? That is a cultural or meaning making problem, which is another kind of educational task. This also a factor in the metacrisis. So while the crisis appears to be a scientific technical problem or an economic problem, in actuality it’s an educational problem. It’s a problem with the way humans makes sense of the world, the way humans make meaning. It is a problem of human capability. And that means that although we need to worry about the technical problems, like we really do, way more than we are now, we need to worry first about the educational configurations that humans are in.

Early in the book you quote John Dewey: “all the problems of philosophy are encapsulated in the problem of education.” 

That’s the crux of it. And I would say most of the issues that form part of the planetary crisis are encapsulated in this deeper, broader, more intimate problem of education — who we are? Where we going to? How we can become something else? How we can be differently and more appropriately capacitated? 

We need to be more reflective. The term ‘21st century skills’ gets used a lot, but that’s not actually the right frame. Because the idea that we actually know the skill sets we need, and that those skills can be provided for within current institutional frames of schooling — I question those assumptions. I’m saying we actually need to find a new way to do education.

This brings us on to another theme, which is what you describe as “the inadequacies of approaches to education based on reductive human capital theory.” What’s wrong with education to get a job?

Nothing. In fact, there is something is profoundly correct about human capital theory, in so far as social system need people who can fill the jobs that need to be done. If you are a society that builds ships you need to educate ship builders, or you will no longer be a ship building society, within a single generation.

But reductive human capital theory says that education is only about that. And that is particularly about wage labor employment in a capitalist society. This is very different from the broader and more correct idea that educational systems need to create the humans that in turn create the next society. 

If we reduce schooling to merely a matter of job preparation, then we diffuse the real potency of what education can do in recreating society.

Many of the things we need to prepare people for are the parts of their lives that are not occupied by wage labor. And if we anticipate something like a basic income guarantee, or other things that change the nature of employment, we can actually imagine preparing people for lives where a larger amount of their time is spent doing something which does not involve renumeration.

If we reduce schooling to merely a matter of job preparation, then we diffuse the real potency of what education can do in recreating society. It’s a failure of imagination as to what schools could do and be about. 

In the book you argue that the people who were largely responsible for the financial crisis of 2008 were the products of the best schools, and this points to dysfunction at the heart of the best educational institutions.

Yes. That’s one of the ironies. If you only focus on human capital theory in a reductive sense, you will fail to produce good human capital. If you push too hard towards ‘efficiency’, you become inefficient. Similarly, if you push too hard towards reducing everything to being about your job, when you finally get on the job you won’t be able to do it well, because doing a job well requires context. So when you take someone from an institution, train them very specifically to do a very specific thing, and then they do that specific thing in society, they will do so while ignoring a huge amount everything else.

If you only focus on human capital theory in a reductive sense, you will fail to produce good human capital.

Roy Bhaskar or other ontologists  would say, ‘let’s look at the absence!’  That is, let’s look not so much at the skills you have acquired in education as at what is missing. We need education that provides a sense of context — of what lies beyond specific skills, and what complimentary qualities are needed. Otherwise you end up with a hyper-focus that ultimately backfires. I call this in my first book ‘the inefficiencies of injustice’— which is to say that if you push too far in the direction of efficiency at the expense of justice, you end up undermining efficiency itself.

This brings us to a third theme, which is the interdependence between education organizations, teacherly practice, and the rest of the society and culture.

When done poorly, education isolates the student from the rest of what’s going on in the world. Kids stepping into a school often feel like they’re going back in time. They’re experiencing ways of using technology and forms of interaction which are one or two decades behind life outside the school. 

For centuries there has been a complex relationship between how the schools work and how the culture at large works. When the main mode of economic production was factory labor the school became factory-like. So there’s the fun-house mirroring of the school culture in terms of the outside culture, just as there’s a kind of disconnect between the school culture and the outside culture. This makes schools, at least the way we run them now, particularly unfit to handle the challenges that are actually facing us as a culture in terms of education. School cultures are too confusing, too incoherent. 

What could change that? You write of “the potentially revolutionary impact of computer technologies on educational practice.” What do you have in mind?

I’m saying that we broke the Internet — that we’re misusing technologies that could, potentially, be radically educational. There’s been a sense that computers will change the nature of schooling profoundly. But what they have actually done so far is to make it worse!

I’m arguing that if you have an educational technology that positions students in front of screens and doesn’t direct students away from screens, then you have failed as an educator. 

I’m saying that if you have an educational technology that isolates students from one another and gets them focusing on abstract poorly contextualized keyboarding intensive tasks, then while you may be preparing them for the white collar and gig economy, you have failed as an educator. 

The computer should become a tool for the teacher to better arrange interpersonal interactions rather than being a tool that stops the teacher from actually having interpersonal interactions.

I’m saying that if you have an educational technology that uses what are essentially broadcast methodologies, such as YouTube, and didactic methodology, such as the lecture format, then you fail. Most of the real affordances of digital educational technology have not been made good. 

The affordances I have in mind have to do with facilitating communication, distributed real-world network creation, and customized curation of in person experience for individuals and groups — basically fostering sovereignty of student choice and collaboration outside of a life spent in front of a screen.

So I welcome the idea of time- and skill- sharing networks, the idea of open source GitHub like standards and curricula that empower students to create their own real world experiences and actual engagements with one another facilitated by technology but not dependent upon more screen time, but rather dependent upon the sophisticated use of digital technology to improve actual in-person conversation. 

The computer should become a tool for the teacher to better arrange interpersonal interactions rather than being a tool that stops the teacher from actually having interpersonal interactions. By interpersonal I mean in person, not text-based exchanges involving screens.

So yeah, while I’m a huge champion of the potentials for educational technology, when I look around at what people think of as educational technology, I’m mostly seeing its misuse. 

Educational technology could be wise; and thus, much more potent and powerful. But then we’d have to change the nature of schooling. Right? And we’d have to change the nature of the way educational technologies are brought to market and the profit incentives and other things that are actually driving it.

Another major theme for you identify is “the re-theorising authority in contemporary educational configurations.” Here we come to questions as to the role of teachers, and the nature of their authority. 

This connects to the question of how we use digital technologies, because where’s the teacherly authority upon which something like Wikipedia or Facebook intervenes in the life of a student? Teacherly authority has to do with the epistemic right, or the epistemic duty of a person who knows more, or has more capacity, to shape a person who has less. And so this is relationship between two people  — between me and you — not between me and an abstract world of algorithmically curated ideas that I interact with alone in front of the screen. 

The credence given to the Internet, its pseudo-authority, profoundly disrupts the relationship between teacher and student. This is a really deep issue. It has led to a disruption of intergenerational transmission. And it goes both ways. It’s not just that the kids would rather learn from YouTube than learn from a teacher in person. It is also that the teachers themselves feel they don’t have as much to give as the Internet offers. And so there’s the children who don’t want to learn from the elders, but the there’s also the elders who feel in a way they failed and don’t have anything to teach. 

This is not a good situation because it means that instead of transmitting skills and disposition intergenerationally, they are coming from a medium that is digitally curated in ways that we don’t actually understand.  Why does a young person navigate through one sequence of videos on YouTube, rather than another sequence of videos on YouTube? It’s not the judicious discretion of a wise elder who has your best interests in mind as an educator. It is an algorithm that customized the content to increase engagement. It’s not an educational technology. It is a predatory business model in which kids are used to generate advertising revenue, pretending to be an educational resource. 

That sucks! And so I’d like to see a return to the embodied forms of an actual teacher with authority, which means engaging in real communication and discourse across generational and capacity differences

As an aside, doesn’t something like Wikipedia has a positive side?  The ideal, at least, is there’s a transparency in the creation and editing of an article which — again, ideally — brings together material in an up-to-date and useful way. It’s not for profit and so not driven by commercial gain.  If you want the best that’s available on a given topic like I don’t know, pencil sharpeners, it’s pretty good. My point, in as far as I have one, is there can be virtue in some of the approaches that are out there already?

That’s absolutely true. The idea of what Wikipedia could be is a wonderful idea. But what Wikipedia is, is not that.  For an entry on something like pencil sharpeners it is probably pretty awesome. But for anything that’s controversial it’s actually quite a mess. It is deeply, deeply politicized, and basically corrupt.

 If you work for any major organization or any major [public] figure, you will be aware that there are Wikipedia consultants who charge hundreds of dollars an hour in order to assure the curation of particular Wikipedia pages. So there’s an asymmetric force projection available through the medium of Wikipedia, which is masked by the fact that people think it’s democratically created. 

The ideology surrounding Wikipedia, Google, and Facebook is quite alarming as an educator. When you talk to young people about what’s true, you end up having conversations about what shows up were in Google searches. Now if you know anything about how Google works, that’s an epistemological error of profound proportions in which the capitalist world system is basically running interference between humans and reality in a more basic way than it ever has before, with an ideology that says it’s doing the opposite of that. 

This is about the kids, man. We are allowing an entire generation to be preyed upon by profit seeking technology companies and bankers peddling student loans. 

Another theme in your book is the need to revise the role of religiosity and spirituality in contemporary educational configurations. What do you have in mind here?

If you look at the history of civilizations, you end up seeing that modernity is basically a blip on the radar: a brief period when we believed we could organize a human society without addressing “issues of ultimate concern,” which is Paul Tillich’s phrase for the content matter of religious reflection — the ultimate meanings and significances of human life. And for most of human history, one of the main functions of education has been precisely to address those issues so that young people come to understand the most significant questions regarding human existence in a similar way to how their parents did.

The separation of church and state was an extremely important step forward. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have done that. I’m not saying that Enlightenment-based critiques of religion were wrong. I’m actually saying such critique was, and is, hugely important. But there is a risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and jeopardising the ways humans have long made sense of the universe and created social bonds between generations. Once the baby has been thrown out then the way science says we are officially allowed to make sense of the universe has become untenable. The truth of process has been reduced to the dogma of a set of truths, again, but this time as scientism. 

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we have kids praying in schools as well as reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I’m not suggesting a return to the time before the separation of church and state. But I am saying  — following Charles Taylor, Habermas and others —  that we’re entering a post-secular age, and that most of the main concerns that are going to confront us as a species during the near term crisis have a religious aspect.

Why does the mass migration of vulnerable refugees have a religious dimension?

Because where are the resources we have as a culture to approach a stranger on the road as a good Samaritan? Where do we have the cultural resources to provide for another’s care without expectation of reciprocity or return? Where do we have resources of culture to love people who we might otherwise see as needy and dangerous free riders? There is no solution to the refugee crisis that does not involve some overcoming certain basic kinds of selfishness, fear, and aversion. 

In the gated West, the going has not been tough for a while. We’ve been lucky enough to not have to worry about ourselves being vulnerable on the road as refugees. But as we in the West are put in positions where we become the ones who are vulnerable and in need of help, the question of how we can return to the kinds of ethical frameworks that will allow us to give it and receive it without any animosity and without force becomes important. 

The picture is similar with the environmental crisis, which involves a lot of grief, potential loss of life, and grappling with death. These are also religious questions. When you think about the nature of existential risk itself, which is to say the cascading of the environmental and refugee crises into let’s say, nuclear war, then you’re looking at a situation of thinking about the end of the species.

If we don’t end up having a very reasonable response to extremely profound questions, then people will take unreasonable responses to those same deeply profound questions.

These are some of the big questions that we as a species need to grapple with. I’m seeing a widespread return to religion, whether we like it or not. If we, in the most sophisticated [philosophical] echelons don’t end up having a very reasonable response to extremely profound questions, then people will take unreasonable responses to those same deeply profound questions. So I think it’s our responsibility as educators to provide sophisticated alternatives to fundamentalist religious answers, because that’s what is going to be happening in the time between worlds. 

People are talking about the need to create a new religion. I don’t think we need to create one because we already have plenty, and most of those that already exist are great if you take them at their best. They are capable of renewal and adaptation. 

Let’s turn to what you call “concrete utopian theorising in a time of planetary transformation,”  and “social miracles.” You write that “What stops humanity from living in a world of justice and abundance is not a lack of necessary technology and science [but] the stories we tell about ourselves, the rules we have made up [and] that now govern our cooperation, and the legacies of illusion and dishonesty that continue to blind us to our actual situation as a species.” What is concrete utopian thinking, and what are some examples of it?

So this relates to religion, because the classic critique of religions is that they are “opiates of the people”:  utopian distractions from the hard realities of life.  There’s a lot of truth in this — except that humans run on ideals! We need to strive and create preferable futures for ourselves and those around us. 

The phrase ‘concrete utopian theorising’ was coined by the great philosopher Roy Bhaskar. He was picking up on a long tradition of critical theorists who always knew that if you’re doing critical theory, you need to have a diagnostic moment where you look at society and say, here are the ways that it’s wrong. But you also need the ideal or utopian moment where you say, okay, the current situation is unacceptable precisely because there other preferable ways of being that are possible. 

Unless we do this this kind of thinking we collapse the space of possible futures by reducing our discourse about ourselves to, for example, reductive human capital theory or the ideas of scientism. If as scientism says, we’re just ‘meat machines’ without free will, who evolved in a meaningless universe and are solely designed to compete with one another, then how good could the future be? I mean, maybe it could be good for me for a little while if I build a wall around my house, but that’s about as far as that view goes in terms of ideal behaviors. If we hold a different view of human nature, one that takes the tens of thousands of years of cultural history before science emerged into account, then we see there’s always been a much more profound potential within humanity, a much deeper sense of our humanity that we could use to think about the future. 

Without ‘concrete utopian theorising’ we collapse the space of possible futures by reducing our discourse about ourselves to, for example, reductive human capital theory or the ideas of scientism.

So instead of dystopian projections about the future we can have what I would call robust, concrete utopian theorizing. This doesn’t mean thinking of futures that are thousands of years away, like some science fiction novel. It is about a nearby, just-adjacent reality —  a future that’s just slightly different from the one we usually imagine.

My goal is to do a controlled thought experiment with certain moving pieces, specifically the thirteen examples of ‘social miracles’ that I offer. The question is not so much “how do we make these happen?” as it is: “can we even imagine a coherent future?” How do we create a gestalt, or higher order manner of perceiving social possibilities? I hope my work will spark the social imagination, so that when people look at a political proposal there is some coherent overarching context in which to determine if it is even a small move in the right direction.  Evaluating the value of “next steps” is actually only possible if you have a vision of the future that’s integrative, coherent, and fits with everything known about how humans work. 

Technological change is not the issue.  Social miracles are not a matter of amazing medical cures or other astonishing breakthroughs in so-called “artificial intelligence.” What will be miraculous, rather, is if we would choose to reorganize ourselves in such a way that we would, for example, distribute wealth in a very different way. Or think about how healthcare itself works, not technologically, but socially and culturally.

So, for example, universal healthcare cannot work right now simply because of the way the bureaucracies are structured. It’s economically not feasible given the way we understand what medicine is and how medicine is to be distributed. I’m suggesting something very different: a radically horizontal and distributed health care system in which individuals learn to take care of themselves, and the exclusivity of the expertise of doctors — and in particular the power of pharmaceutical companies — is greatly reduced. It’s not that the doctors become less expert, or that drug development doesn’t go on, but that the social power relations change.   This requires something other than putting more money into the healthcare system as it currently functions, which is actually making it worse. It requires thinking differently about what health really is and about what each individual should be able to know about their own body, the nature of medicine, and the way healing works.  It is about exposing the profit motive and power dynamics at the heart of the current medical system for what they are: exploitive of the most vulnerable.  

What I’m saying is that we actually need to think this out more, in a concrete utopian vein.  More basic work needs doing in the realms of social science and civilizational design, before we move with an action bias towards creating institutions without seeing the whole set of consequences of how they work. So, for example, a basic income guarantee could be a nightmare.  

It hasn’t escaped notice that Peter Thiel is a fan of Universal Basic Income. The economist Diane Coyle calls it a classic neoliberal policy. 

Yes, it could become a tool of neo-feudalism. But there are ways that, with the right complimentary reforms and infrastructures, such as my proposed Education Hub Network, a basic income guarantee could actually save whole swaths of humanity from despair.

The final two chapters of Education in a Time Between Worlds concern spiritual teachers. 

What I’m arguing for here is not the adoption of a particular view of religion or particular view of spirituality. I am especially not saying people should become readers of particular texts and thinkers, although I’m not discouraging that either!  What I am saying is that we can’t coherently run a culture or an educational system without thinking about these topics in much more serious ways.

The dynamics of teacherly authority are complicated enough. When you consider teacherly authority in religious contexts, they become extremely potent and charged. So to my prior point —  about the fact that as the planetary meta-crisis becomes more complicated, people will be looking towards religion — we need to understand how that works. Because that’s where the education will be happening and, whether we like it or not, we are already seeing some power dynamics with certain pop-cultural figures and public intellectuals who take on a guru-like status. People are turning to religion for meaning, as we always have, only now there is a complex polycentric spiritual marketplace.  

These two chapters are laying out how I think about it. They’re also saying, please think about it too, because if we don’t have anything profoundly reasonable to say about deeply profound things, there will be people who step in to answer such deeply profound questions in completely unreasonable ways.  

Say a bit more about as to what “reasonable ways of answering profound questions” means to you.

So: death. What happens when you die? Or what happens when you sleep? Or dream? These are the questions that the mind is always asking. When you have to talk to a kid about death, or have to really think about your own death, you start to ask a profound question that humans have asked since they’ve been humans. 

So that’s an example. And if I were to say, well, you shouldn’t be afraid of death, because you will go to heaven afterwards and you’ll be rewarded with a dozen virgins and so on. And, in fact, you should be so unafraid, you should strap this bomb on and go forth into battle.  This is very unreasonable, but in the absence of more reasonable narratives this answer will stick. 

Scientism, mind you, simply dismisses the question itself as being unreasonable: “Of course, nothing happens when you die! The universe is meaningless matter in motion, that is all!” We need to be able to talk to someone who is looking at a society that’s not working, who doesn’t see a place for themselves in that society. We need to be able to help explain their life to them and give them some meaning to their death, and give them the option to choose a death that’s meaningful, specifically one that is not based on ideologically motivated suicide. 

Consider the mental health crisis. Something like three quarters of young people believe their lives have no meaning.  That’s a situation that calls for new answers to age-old and profound questions. 

Existentialist theologians point out that questions concerning death and suffering are central to what humans have always struggled to make meaning about. The things our culture is going to say about them, like the scientific and humanistic explanations, are obviously not working. People aren’t buying them. What’s next? 

Zak Stein is philosopher of education working at the interface of psychology, metaphysics, and politics. He has published two books, including Education in Time Between Worlds, along with dozens of articles. This writing was done as he worked co-founding a non-profit and think tank, as well as teaching graduate students at Harvard, and consulting with technology start-ups. Zak is a long time meditator, musician and caregiver, which has shaped him more than any professional engagements. You can learn more about him at www.zakstein.org.

Perspectiva’s Transformative Educational Alliance also draws on The Nordic Secret by Lene Rachel Andersen and Tomas Björkman, and Bildung in the 21st Century by Jonathan Rowson. For more see this post.

Images via Bastyr University, Zachary Stein