Converging Futures: A New Technique for Arriving at a Shared Vision

General
22

This is such a sharp reflection at every level! Thank you, @Martin you’ve got me thinking.

:face_with_monocle: Maybe development theories are a dumb/dark version of thesis, antithesis and synthesis?

We, here in 2R, as society, could work harder to recognise where we might be making assumptions. Many of us, and many still do, thought capitalism was a given, and contributed to a successful world, and that the US was evidence of that. Many thought that indigenous lifestyles were unsophisticated. Civilisation was good, what we call progress, was universally good.

This is where I think @dvdjsph, David’s AI agent, Abductio, might be very useful, to visibly untangle, in real time, our thought processes and reveal weak spots.

A simple example…Meditation is good for us! …..actually no, not universally, not every type, nor for every person. We have data on increased teenage mental health problems directly linked to mindfulness training. A beloved friend in our community, a buddhist and farmer, a real force for good, was deeply into meditation in a way that appeared to be focussing him on his inner somatic feedback loops. He killed himself 6 weeks ago. We are in shock.

Perhaps human societies cycle through assumption, challenge/realisation, and new assumption, a dumb/dark version of thesis, antithesis and synthesis?

To wipe off all story and assumption to the ikigai questions… what I love, what the world needs etc etc. Let’s pare down to basics: Human’s love to breathe, to eat and drink, be healthy, to love and to procreate, and not be oppressed. All humanity can fit into that sector of a venn diagram.
So, to serve the universal overlap, we collectively should

  • protect clean air
  • preserve and enhance food and water cycles
  • prioritize healthy living and health care
  • act with love and compassion, build friendships, be good cooks
  • have plenty of sex, support families
  • prevent domination and harm

Nothing on that list needs special prior inner development, for the most part it can be structurally achieved by pragmatic, ethical grassroots governance and maybe some personal or social therapy for problem areas. The rest is actually something that naturally emerges in a population that is not under stress.

The development model assumes we need to develop to make ‘progress’ which is also assumed to be something we need. What follows from that is to pile on all the things that will (or we hope will) facilitate that. We are stacking our assumptions up pretty high.

Western patriarchal, colonial mindset runs deeper than we realise. Equality for women and anti-racist policies do not touch the source; the desire to dominate. To dominate nature, self, others, time, the conversation, if we can’t do it personally we try to do it culturally and ideologically.

It’s not unique to the West, this is just the current version of Empire. It reverberates fractally in every walk of life and in all people. It’s hard to see, because it is the water we swim in, but once seen, we see it is everywhere.

Perhaps real development is to cease grasping for development?

Perhaps we could dump Stoicism for Epicurianism? Could our way of Tao follow the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, and drunken‑Daoism. Our Buddhism be Pure Land ( for hopeless people who have to give up)? Our Christian, Muslim or secular mysticisms be those of celebratory union with divine, with Life Itself, devoid of anxious striving and coercion of others? Our secularism and politics simple, pragmatic and kind?

Sorry for so many words, if I were more talented I would write less.

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23

One of the strong needs that we have is self-development or mastery or self-actualisation. What happens when you kill that one?

How about “shielding” people from harm that would turn their survival instincts on and make them want to dominate? Striving for domination is, after all, a desire to create an environment of safety that would allow you to do “nice things” in life.

All there is to ideology is a strategy for achieving safety. That’s why I like the idea of creating structures to protect people / isolate them from external threat, so that they can grow into un-damaged humans.

Monasteries can be considered to be such institutions. Over centuries they had a special status, were considered outside the realm of the ugly realities of physical world. Obviously. one cannot escape effects of wars, but it’s certainly possible to shield people from individual injustice by being part of a purpose-made collective of empowerment.

Currently, humans are MAXIMALLY individuated in modern societies. You’re just a number to the extent that a single toggle in the settings of your centralised online account can instantly ruin your life. Imagine if you lost access to your fund in the bank account, your driving license was invalidated, your NHS record erased and your entitlement to live in a country purged. If that happened to a group of people, the first reaction might be even humourous, but if it happens to an individual - it’s catastrophic. While there’s still time, we should be building these social structures that could shield us from immediate effects of catastrophic disruptions, what some people here called “moments of chaos”.

It’s just the nature of things that the weakest get hit first, is not our job to deliberately try and not be weak? In other words - empowerment.

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24

I’m going to point to the language of domination “what happens when you kill that one?” Look at the terminology! Nothing in my text suggested killing or imposing anything. The points are not going to work in isolation, and oppression should be disallowed. I suggested not “grasping for development” and speak to the collective culture of being.

Perhaps the drive you speak of is not a need in the absolute sense, but a cultural artefact of seeking significance in a competitive social environment? It FEELS like a need, especially for men, but may be more of an addiction.

Individual seeking of mastery or experience can happen in the absence of “stress to succeed” , which is the nature of grasping. It has a sensation of focus, flow and delight to it.

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25

If you have a different strategy than someone else in terms of how to achieve the right conditions of safety - you’ll be ideologically opposed. That’s the environment of imposing and oppression - if you have an ideology and if you’re driven to strongly promote it (because you’re doing the right thing) - you’ll be triggering the mechanism of polarisation and adversity.

The solution must still be ideological…

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26

I’m in resonance with the most of the rest of what you write .

Yes we are maximally individuated, money has become a stand-in for the roles and belonging we use to enjoy in the tribe or village. No wonder we feel existential threat and unease around money and the lack of it.

Certainly protection of children so they grow up undamaged is pivotal, although it’s hard to see how monastery as a pattern is the answer, patriarchal , ascetic, no sex, non familial, hierarchical and exclusionary. No thanks :winking_face_with_tongue:

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27

What about monasteries that oppose the ideology of the state that allows them to exist? Most historical examples of monasteries I can think of have been supported by the state and seem to agree with the state’s governing principles.

When the broader institutional context no longer allows the monastery to exist, it doesn’t (take the history of the Shaolin Temple for example).

I agree with you that something like a monastery model is needed. However, it must succeed where past monasteries have failed by being competition-capable between groups (monasteries, by definition, ideally have the within group competition problem solved).

28

We always felt existential threat - from pre-historic days onwards…

We’ve only had periods of stability where we felt safe. The best we can hope for is to have a social system that will have the maximisation of those periods as its goal.

Monastery is not the answer - it’s just an example how people who are shielded from the ugliness of the external world can un-see it and channel energy (that would otherwise by neurotic) into something fulfilling. That’s pretty much what we need. Otherwise, we’re eaten by anxiety and stress - that potentially is not ours to have.

The answer can’t be subversive - because that results in physical conflict which consumes people. It must be within the “unperfect” environment and it would be striving to create a more perfect bubble.

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29

The idea here is not to be ideologically opposed to the external environment, but to achieve a localised environment that can be externally compliant with the external, but internally qualitatively better.

Institutional awareness is what’s needed to understand where and how you as an individual or a group feature and define an effective scope of your objectives. You can’t hope to change the external, if you’re an individual (or a small group), but you can create a neutral relationship with it - making you less fragile and exposed.

Monasteries had to be somewhat aligned with ideologies in order to have freedom to have internal culture.

Bad acts and behaviour of the external is more to do with it not having a capacity to enforce the rules of formal institutions. That’s why we usually have misalignent with stated and implied - what system is supposed to do (promise) vs what system does

Maybe a cell or an egg would be good analogies - various membranes that keep the inside safe from the outside, without fighting the conditions.

30

Reminds me too of Cynicism – the original form, not what it has come to mean – as exemplified by Diogenes.

31

Nice … I wonder, though, how much does that actually work? I would agree with the part of the idea about enabling everyone to find a safe space first, where they belong; are accepted; are valued. But can we then (after that) also see something of the converse — rather than isolate, to expose people to external threat so that they can become resilient, or even better, anti-fragile?

Yes, and … unless we want to be selfish and rather Ayn Rand, I see it as our job to do what we can towards everyone being empowered.

32

This sounds great, just that I don’t think I get what you mean by “competition-capable”. If you somehow mean “cooperation-capable” (in a counter-intuitive way!) I would agree: if the diverse monastic and pseudo-monastic groups cooperated in pointing people to whichever community they would best thrive in an contribute to, that would be excellent, and not something I see at present. But maybe you mean something else, do please say!

I also agree with @Gen about other failings of traditional monastic models. Hermann Hesse gave us one model of a pseudo-monastic community in Glasperlenspiel: Castalia. Quite probably there are other fictional models to compare and contrast.

33

I see this as very similar to Ostrom’s principle 7 (see the linked Wikipedia article).

I see it as a perennial anarchist dream to be able to organise without the support of the state or the surrounding culture. Can we see this, perhaps, as a good north star even though it is impractical in the sense of never being fully able to be realised?

And going back to the competition-cooperation idea, can our envisaged collectives / communities (whatever we like to call them) devise ways of cooperating such that in collective synergy they at least compete with, if not out-compete, the existing dominant systems?

Harking back to the title of this thread, could this be a converging future? Yes, we need some shared vision at some level, but to me, which level that vision sits at is crucial to what emerges. I’d say the level of detailed implementation need not be shared, and maybe even the way in which the fundamental principles and values are expressed need not be shared, but there needs to be enough communication and mutual recognition to allow solidarity and, where feasible, synergy.

34

What I’m getting at is the principle of multilevel selection summarized by David Sloan Wilson as “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary”. Going back to the discussion regarding monasteries, I’m saying that cooperative behavior within a group is necessary but not sufficient; it must also confer competitive advantage such that groups of cooperative individuals stand a chance against groups of competitive individuals. Otherwise, cooperative behavior within groups isn’t truly sustainable.

The groups we find ourselves in nowadays are delineated quite differently than in the middle ages, so the forces members of our group must be able to withstand are as similarly amorphous. Whether or not this group of people makes a difference in the future depends on how successfully we can make cooperation outcompete competition, which involves resolving an apparent paradox, i.e. compete without competing.

35

Peter Turchin’s Ultrasociety is an extended historical demonstration of exactly that thesis.

One thing to keep in mind about monasteries is they were not just smallish, containerized communities. They also participate in much larger networks. Niall Ferguson’s The Square the Tower is a good analysis of how networks and hierarchies have interacted over time. Hierarchs can pretty easily smash any given node in a monastic network, but it’s not so easy to take out the entire network, because it is widely distributed. Also, as long as any of the network is left intact, it can always respawn.

Those interested in current change models should be leaning into networks, IMO. Setting up a new political hierarchy to compete with “China”, “Russia”, “USA”, etc. is unlikely to succeed. Also, those sorts of political hierarchies - aware of the threat networks pose to their domination - tend to stomp on network nodes within their jurisdictions. So a degree of stealth, camouflage, or esotericism may be required in some circumstances.

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36

I like the idea of stealth and camouflage. Most promising in my view is to set up organisations using structures, including legal structures, that are indispensable to the current hegemony, so that they cannot be arbitrarily removed on the basis of structure.

For my own extremely long-term pet project, currently known as “RegenCHOICE”, my intention is to camouflage it as just another online dating agency and/or recruitment agency. I suspect that the dating agency is the safest. I can’t imagine any suspicion spontaneously arising from that. Actually it will be highly subversive, as it will enable networks to be quickly and easily set up with people who are most likely to trust each other.

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37

Belonging, acceptance and being valued are nurturing your soul.

When I talk about structures to protect/isolate from the outer I mean - physical safety, unwanted interactions with state/legal system, various compliance barriers to doing things, money and time constraints - empowerment in relation to the outside world, which is society.

Becoming resilient has its price. It’s necessary if you intend to remain solitary.
I’m talking about collective resilience that filters threat down to a fraction of the original.

An analogy could be a very wealthy individual who has a driver, cook, general counsel, cleaner, secretary, etc…. Each of these would shoulder responsibility for the cognitive, physical and emotional burden of carrying out specific duties, so that the rich individual could be best employed to seek opportunities instead of looking to shield themselves from accompanying negative externalities.

38

People organise themselves all the time without the blessing of the state. Romantic relationship, a sports team, a musical band, teatrical group, book reading club…

It’s (still) totally legal for people to relate to each other in many different ways.

Experimenting with limits/depths of co-operation is (probably) one of the greatest untapped potentials.

39

Nice thought, but you can’t be wanting to empower yourself at the same time as wanting to empower those you’re empowering from

I find this to be a very sticky point that we’re getting stuck on all the time

40

Maybe it wasn’t clear that I’m not suggesting empowering further those already in power, who need no more! I’m talking about empowering all the disempowered. Just as in terms of resources, I would advocate more equality, or less inequality if you prefer to see it that way.

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41

Couldn’t agree more :slight_smile: