https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=N6YhhgrLb1c
So, welcome everyone to another episode of Voices with Rovaki. It’s my great pleasure to have my friend and dialogic partner. You’ve seen him in many of my conversations, Jordan Hall. It’s one of the great gifts of my Awakening from the Meeting crisis series was I got to meet and form a relationship with Jordan and we’ve had an ongoing, and I believe it’s mutually beneficial dialogue that’s been going on between us. And what I want to, well, what we’re both going to talk about, I just want to give you a bit of context for that. What we want to talk about is I have, as many of you know, this project and it’s being exemplified in Voices with Rovaki of trying to understand the set of practices that I’m collectively calling dialectic and how they afford this emergent way of cultivating collective intelligence into collective wisdom. I call that dialogos, the work I’m doing with Chris and also with Jordan, Guy, and Peter Lindbergh. And some of you have also seen some conversations I’ve had with Andrew Sini and Zach Stein about this and how this has a connection to a revisioning of what education means. And then Jordan has expressed that he’s very interested now in this connection between education more broadly understood as a way, I think maybe a better term might even be, you know, like enculturation, not just education, and how that intersects with dialectic as a practice and dialogos as a phenomena. So is that a fair representation, Jordan, of the context of the discussion? Yeah, it’s great. So I’m going to begin with what I said towards, you know, before we started recording, as maybe giving you something to riff on, because I’m very interested. In fact, I see if dialectic as a practice and dialogos as a process is ultimately, you know, that you’re seeking information through transformation. The idea that we only can be informed by what transcends us by going through a process of transformation. That’s the only way. And so we’re trying to reconfigure the notion of gathering information and education and relinking it back to transformation. And then that puts me into the notion that this is ultimately an aspirational process. This transformation is the aspiration to transcend who and what you are becomes something other than you are. And then that leads me into this idea that we were discussing about education. And I think and Zach seems to resonate with this, too, education not being primary about providing information, but affording a place in which people can seriously play with ways of life, ways of being that will afford afford that aspiration and transformation. And I see this deeply exemplified in Socratic practice. A lot of authors point out that a lot of the dialogues often don’t come to an argumentative conclusion because the arguments are rather important, are not actually focal. What’s focal, what’s really being compared and Socrates is exemplifying are ways of life, ways of being. And the enactment of dialogos is a way in which you get a taste for a different way of being, a different way of thinking, a different way of seeing, a different way of being with other people, a different way of living, a different way of life. And so I’m very interested, deeply interested in this connection between dialectic, dialogos, transformation, inculturation, and this idea of education being much more about what used to be called virtue. Yeah, very nice. Yeah, it’s a few things that come up there are we can talk about the notion of enculturation. Yep. Immediately what comes to mind is the, I think in many cases, the intent or the accident of an endeavor to generate an enculturation which orients towards stasis, a culture that consciously endeavors to enculturate itself without change. Right. Much of education has that characteristic. You might say, for example, that there’s a nice distinction between the word true and what is relevant. Right. And that an education that is focused on true is very much oriented towards stasis because it assumes relevance as a basis and then tries to get you those things that are true subject to that relevance. Right. An education that focuses on relevance recognizes that what is relevant may in fact be changing continuously and our job is to maintain a coherent capacity to enculturate, to maintain some kind of coherent integrity or wholeness, beingness of culture in a context that is adaptive to what is really actually changing and therefore is sort of a surfing through reality. Wow, it’s funny that that Buckminster Fuller phrase, and I can’t remember exactly how he said it, but he said like, you know, I’m a knot of causation. Like this loop is a knot of cause. Like every, every, I’m a dynamic phenomena of self-replicating processes, but there’s no moment at which if you did like a frozen snapshot of me and tried to say that was me, you’d be wrong. Like all the atoms that I breathe in and breathe out, every, every phenomenon that could be considered material is just, well, it’s like a wave in the ocean, right? The wave in the ocean is not the water molecules. It’s the process that’s moving through the way, through the ocean. And so a culture which is able to consciously be aware of this and endeavor to embody a method of enculturation, which has this focus on virtue, which is to say, focus on those aspects that are actually invariant about how to go about creating something which is able to identify relevance and cultivate capacity to perceive relevance and then respond to relevance in a generative fashion, ongoingly, would be the holy grail, would be the end point of the question of how do we actually learn about learning, something like that. And I was thinking about this when you talked about dialogos, which is that the subject is actually how does one become an agent of dialogos? That’s the zero, the first thing. Before you can enter into dialogos, you must first become an agent who can participate in dialogos. Yes, yes, very much. Then the dialogos is self-supportive because one of the loops of dialogos is that it supports in yourself and in those who are participating, increasing clarity of how to be an agent in dialogos. You get that now for free if you’re participating in it. Then you get the other stuff on top. That’s excellent. There’s two points that I wanted to first, what you said about relevance and the second about agency. The first is that that distinction is analogous to a distinction that I’ve been working on, that I’m drawing out of the literature, especially the philosophy of science literature and also the cognitive science of wisdom literature, which is the distinction between knowledge and understanding. The idea is knowledge has its normativity, as you said, the standard normativity of truth, especially when we’re talking about propositional knowledge. I think skills have power, perspectives have presence, and participatory knowing has affordance, connectedness. Putting that aside, the difference between knowledge and understanding is that understanding is emphasized and a lot of the people, they extend towards this, but they’re trying to unpack it has been a challenge. Understanding is to grasp the significance of what you know, which immediately I have taken, as you might expect, to be what you’re talking about, grasping the relevance of it. And as you say, not in some just merely epistemic fashion, but grasping it existentially. Relevance, not in the sense of this is just interesting, but relevance in, this is where I will commit my precious cognitive resources, my precious time, my precious relationships. This is where I feel I have the best chance, the best back of placing my commitment. So it’s grasping the significance and how it calls you into commitment. So this is understanding. And so there’s, and then there’s parts to what’s going on in understanding, because I think understanding, especially if you want it to have that dynamic coupling to emergence that you’re talking about, it’s also going to be aligned with aspiration. Because if you’re feeling called, right, and you’re really understanding, then if there’s any epistemic humility in your sense of relevance, you’re also understanding what you do not yet grasp, what you do not yet understand. Right. The understanding should always be, and this is, of course, you know, a platonic theme, it should always be on the horizon of wonder. It should always be on the edge of where you’re right. You have the horizon of intelligibility. You see what you grasp, but you’re also realizing, right, in a relevant manner what you have not yet grasped. You have an inkling, I think, is a great term for it. And so I think that’s very important. And then that brings up your second point, I think, because now we’re talking about agency, we’re talking about aspiration, we’re talking about, right, there’s always this pairing. When something is disclosed, which means more than I know it, when something is disclosed, I’m being a pie to go here, I’m grasping it significantly. And then there’s a demand on there’s a call to me that how I have to transform, right, in order to come into proper relationship with what’s emerging. And then that’s the question of agency that you brought up. I see the question of agency is, you know, what kind of person do I have to be in order to stay in contact with this? What’s emerging? Yeah, yeah. So let’s, so imagine, so we’re in a so many crises going on right now. There’ll be many that enumerate them as itself a crisis. The crisis that I was just noticing is the crisis of information, which is to say there was a time when knowing stuff really mattered a lot because it’s very difficult to know stuff. And most people didn’t know most stuff. And so if you had certain stuff that you do, the other people didn’t know that was valuable. These days, most stuff is already known by the Internet. And so it’s a matter of finding it as much more important than knowing it. And sorry, the visual image I have here is the thing I’m trying to figure out how to express it. So it’s. The challenge is a challenge of learning how to dance through a perpetually changing space. The space of what could be known, the space of what is known is expanding exponentially. And so there is no more power. There is no more agency really to be had by simply to know stuff because it’s whatever you know is the tiny territory of an expanding universe and increasingly available to anybody who decides to search for it. So the new center of agency is this capacity. And gosh, I wish I didn’t just look up the language you’re using, but it’s this capacity to to follow that threat, to flow with, to unfold into an expanding or receding horizon. And it’s the skillfulness. And I guess it’s just a capacity, even a disposition. That’s probably it. It’s a skillfulness, a capacity to understand what’s happening. Skillfulness, a capacity and a disposition to orient towards that perpetual renewal, that moving into the newness that is happening, not to just sit here as the horizon recedes, but actually to sail with the horizon, to turn the movement of the horizon into a wind that blows your ship forward into that, into that, into that new place. That’s a very, very different orientation, a very different sensibility of what it means. I think that actually gives maybe a bit more clarity to the kinds of to the essence of virtues. If you want to return back to virtue. Yeah, I think that’s it. I think I think the term I wanted to use what you’re talking about. I mean, I think of a virtue. I mean, the original meaning is, you know, the power and the possibility, right? Virtue. Right. So it’s a potency. It’s a potential that is ready to action. Right. Yeah. So and then what powers are we talking about here? I think you’re talking about I would call it like a sensibility and a sensitivity to what’s to significance, right? To like I said, grasping what’s significant. And then also, you know, there’s the way in which you honed that to your ability to actually commit. So I’m thinking more about these two sides. Like I said, the sensing the significance and then taking it seriously and proposing this, in fact, as the kind of normativity we should be trying to use instead of the old normativities we had for knowledge, which were the normativities of certainty and probability. Instead, what do we take seriously? Right. Which is not the same thing. Right. So I’ve been exploring a lot this notion of plausibility. There’s two meanings of plausibility. One is just a synonym for the other. That’s not what I’m talking about. There’s a whole other and people philosophers have been talking about this where plausibility means I take something seriously. It’s something that I will commit myself to. I’m not saying it’s true. I’m not even claiming it’s certain or even I don’t I’m not even sure what its probabilities, but it’s worthy of being taken seriously. It has a significance. I was just to say that I will attend to it. I will venture into it. I will spend time on it. I will venture into it. I will spend the most precious resource in the universe, which is the finite amount of time that I am on this earth, orienting myself in that direction, which is OK. That’s an ethical act. That is the ethical act. Yeah. I would choose that path. That sounds great. And then let me just use a different metaphor, which is the metaphor of network. Right. Because what you’re talking about is in an open graph network, the question for a given node is what edges what edges shall be formed and what communication shall flow across those edges. And the question you’re asking is that same question. What is the shape of the network? So instead of thinking about what is content of the network, we’re actually talking about what is the topology of the network. Exactly is the primary question. Yeah, exactly. I don’t know if it better way that that little insight right there, if you happen to be watching this, that’s a very important one. That’s a big insight. I think so. I do think that that’s ultimately. Well, two things. First of all, on that and then back on what you said about the ethical aspect of this. I think that that insight is, I mean, this is that sort of the core of what I know, what I take back. But I think we also have to reconstruct what I have been trying to do. What we mean by being rational. And we don’t mean, you know, we’re not going to hold ourselves to the logical manipulation of inferences because that’s that’s around the normativity of certainty, or at least with induction probability. Instead, what should rationality mean? It should mean, you know, these two things in the overcoming of self-deception as much as possible and the affording of, you know, a good connection as much as possible, good connectedness. And so what I was getting on there is that one of the primary insights that makes that new sense of rationality possible is that rationality is about shifting off our fixation on the products of our cognition and our communication and coming to take a deep interest and commitment to the process. And so I think that insight that you just mentioned of shifting from the content to the topology, I think is I think it’s consonant with, you know, this and I think it has to be, you know, if we’re if we’re going to be reformulating education, we have to be reformulating what rationality means. And then I want to know what, you know, the rationality of plausibility, as I’m using it to mean that virtue of properly sensing the significance and taking seriously in a wise manner. I want to know what what that looks like. And then back to the point that you started with, I agree with you. And this comes out of Iris Murdoch’s, the sovereignty of good. The primary ethical act is the act of paying attention, giving things their due attention, which is exactly what we’re talking about. Am I giving things the attention they deserve? This is this is a different conception of justice. It’s giving things, you know, a just attention, just the right amount of attention. I’m playing with the word just right. But that’s what she’s talking about in the sovereignty of the good. And so this is I think this is a deeply important virtue that we’re trying to zero in on. You know, it’s got it’s got some rationality. It’s got sensibility. It’s got the potency of being able to commit and take seriously. I think this is all really, really exciting. So let’s domain shift to I like to put two new domains into the mix. Then we get stack overflowing domains and slide into the transcendent. So so one domain, very concrete, actually, that I’ve lived with a little bit in the past couple of months is the very specific. Whoa, sorry. Manuel de Landa wrote about how oftentimes the things that are coming you will first see in the military. So special forces is the exploration in the military domain of the inquiry that you and I are currently having. Right. Right. Ordinary forces, right. You have special forces. Everything that isn’t that is ordinary forces are mostly around doctrine. They have a optimization function around doctrine. There may be multiple different ordinary forces. You may have the Marines who have a focused domain that they’re optimizing for. And the Army that has several different focused domain that they’re optimizing for. But they have an established doctrine they execute on that. So this has to do with actualization as opposed to potentiography. It has to be effective, efficient in a context where the domain is relatively well understood and relatively well mapped. So the way that you are successful using ordinary forces mode is you have a plan. And that plan is a comprehensive plan that when you’ve identified the domain, you identify what domain you’re in, you pull out the plan and you execute on the plan. So it’s a finite state machine that has a series of execution functions, computational in nature. And then you train all of the agents to play their role effectively in the context of this plan. In Forrest Landau’s language, this would be an omniscient operator or a computational actualization operator. Right. Right. Special forces does the exact opposite. Special forces, you by definition are planning for any possible circumstance, which means you don’t have a plan. You have no notion of what the domain is. And in fact, you may be domain switching willy nilly. You may be diving out of an airplane into the ocean, landing on a beach, going into the jungle, heading into a city. Right. And not even knowing which of those are going to happen and what’s going to happen in which case. Right. So you’re actually operating in full uncertainty. So special forces adopted the doctrine of flexibility, the doctrine of relevance, the doctrine of how to be fluid in response to what’s actually happening and embedding fluidity into the individuals. So the individuals are not now specialized role players that can be pieces of a machine that is optimized against a particular domain, but rather are generalists who live in the space of potentia. So instead of living in the domain of actual, they live in the domain of the individual. So instead of living in the domain of actual, they live in the space of potentia and their expertise is how to move from potentia into actuality with the finite, with the very, very limited amount of attention. Right. So to apply appropriate or just attention is their skill set. You know, I’m in the water. What are the things I need to attend to now? Well, now I’m on the beach and not in the water anymore. What are the things I need to attend to now? Where are the threats that are the most meaningful now? What are the opportunities that are most relevant now? Like that kind of a capacity is a special forces capacity. OK, great. Slide. Next one is the world is now very much so paying the price. We’re having a hangover from a overdependence, hyper, hyper overdependence on optimization in actuality, efficiency. We’ve become a hyper efficient, therefore hyper fragile and hyper non flexible global economy in every means, like education, families, housing, logistics, politics. It’s all like this super actualized, optimized for a certain subdomain. It’s ordinary forces. And this return is this this forced requirement where we can’t we’re in we’re in it now. So we’re just going to have to learn how to become special forces and to become special forces, which I believe is the new normal. The new normal is not temporarily special forces. We return back to actuality, but rather the new normal is we ought to become agents of that kind. We all become sort of Omni Navy SEALs who can be in any environment and can adapt fluidly and adaptably to continuous change. Because remember, not only have we learned the hard lesson that an over reliance on optimization is an unwise choice, but also recognize that we are on a very nonlinear path. It’s accelerating change. The technology that we’ve chosen to become dependent on is every iteration. It doesn’t just change the world. It changes the rate of change. Yeah. And so the world is going to continue to be one where to be special forces is the only way to survive. So I’d like to throw those into the into the. That’s excellent. I love that. I love that. I mean, so the martial art metaphors often come to my mind, too. And so there’s a couple of things here. One is I know you’re familiar with it and the model that I’ve worked out with Tim Lillicobb and Blake Richards and Leo Ferraro. Relevance realization is constantly trading between efficiency and resiliency. And we push, as you say, I think we push too far into efficiency and planning. And we’ve lost resiliency and coping. We so our coping abilities are very untrained, very, very untrained, because what we’ve tried to do is we’ve tried to make everything. I think it’s both efficiency and also a kind of security. And those are often aligned together. This goes back to your notion of stability. What we’re trying to do is, you know, can we can we get things as efficiently non-challenging as possible? If I can put it that way. And so coping. So the thing about the thing about coping and the special forces is especially you have to get into a state of mind where you are, which doesn’t feel very efficient, because what you have to do is you have to keep various options alive at the same time. You have to have a form of thinking. Even when we’re talking, notice how we’re doing this. We like we’re not just getting to the bottom line. What we’re doing is we’re throwing out and we’re keeping multiple things alive, multiple options, multiple ways in which things can go. And we’re we’ll we’ll compress towards some convergence, but then we’ll open it up again and we’ll open up and we keep this is the deep learning cycle, which I think is this is what we’re coming out of machine learning. This is how you make a system really good at coping, really good at making it more adaptive. You’re constantly cycling. Yes, we do gather together. We come to convergence, you know, because we have to have points. Right. But at the same time, we are also committed to the resilience. We’re committed to keeping the options open, keeping them live. And what’s really interesting is you take a look. And this is another riff in our culture. We have tended to put aside older people because they don’t have efficient working memory. And so we give them all these tests about how fast can they come to a conclusion, how quickly can they get the correct answer? And they’re not say, oh, look, the decline. But what Lynn Hashir has showed is, yeah, but you know what’s actually going on with older brains? They keep many more things as potentially relevant live. That’s why they seem so distracted. That’s why it’s harder for them to come to a conclusion. And when you give them a well-defined problem, yes, you outcompete them. But if you put you and them into an ill-defined problem, they outcompete you. And so the youth culture and all of that is also part of the way in which we’ve enacted this, the way we marginalize and exclude the elderly. And they are just diminished versions of us. And so I think that’s also important that we start to remember coping, resiliency, keeping things alive and taking because role models matter in what we’re talking about. Paying attention again to old people as our model for cognition, as opposed to just the 20-somethings as the model for how cognition should be operating. Yeah, there’s something really, how do I say this? Yeah, I’m aware of, I’m familiar with. I’ve actually spent meaningful time with the archetype of this other kind, which we could call smart. Yeah. But I used to say I used to be smart, optimizing for clock speed, optimizing for quick, quickness and rapid computation. You’re just taking information and processing it quickly. And it’s a very different thing that happens when you shift into this other mode. Yes, has a. Yeah, I guess I wrote about it a little bit in that essay, Thinking and Not Thinking. It has a characteristic that it can seem a bit slow. Yes. But it’s actually not. It’s like still water runs deep. It’s deep. More volume of water is moving. You just can’t tell. Yeah, exactly. Or maybe it’s not as obvious. You could tell if you immersed yourself in it and felt the weight of it. And I see this also with a certain set of personality types. It’s not necessarily strictly age. Not my wife, for example. There’s great relief and revelation for her to realize that she was what is known as a slow processor. And I would refer to it and say, hey, take the time you need to take, because my experience is that whatever comes out of your process will always be better. I rely on that. And so if it’s if we’re in a situation with having coming to an OK solution rapidly is the thing, I’ll take that. I can get us to 85 percent of the right answer almost instantaneously. But if it’s necessary to actually get a really good answer, then take the time you need to take. And over and over again, that has worked really well. It’s super interesting, too. Just the way like her whole mode of knowing will clearly be operating like nine or 10 different modes of knowing and allowing each one to kind of do its thing and then kind of like doing it again in a different way. And she’ll go work on art or she’ll go for long walks or she’ll be cooking or she’ll be talking to people. She’s just processing it all over the place. But when something finally becomes clear, it’s solid. And it’s something you can use to build stuff with. Well, so there’s two things I wanted to say about that, because one is like so this educating for virtuous adaptivity. Maybe we can put it together. Right. And that and that adaptivity shouldn’t be confused or equated to speed of reactivity. This is, again, a martial art thing. Like the person you know, you I want to have fast. I want to fast reflex. No, you don’t. You want to have spontaneous responses. Spontaneous responses are ones in which you can intervene and you can finesse the move. If you just have fast reflexes, right, you can’t you can’t you can’t do it. But if I if I’m just about to make the punch. Right. And I decide, no, I’m going to flip it like this. Right. Right. Go around something that you just put up at the last second. Then that’s what we’re after. We’re after. So we shouldn’t be confusing. I mean, we shouldn’t be confusing adaptivity with speed of reactivity. We should be we should bring bringing out finesse. And then I wanted to bring out what I think your your wife exemplifies. I think I hope this is taken correctly because I don’t like to use masculine and feminine. I try to I try to use Yang and Yin because masculine and feminine are so politicized. But the Yin way of doing things is much more about that. It’s much more about deepening the resources of resilience before you respond rather than striking out. So like right. And so, you know, that I think we need to also be bringing in more of the Yin aspect into our understanding of this educational project. Absolutely. And so, yeah, if you think about it, the project. So kind of to loop back to an earlier thread, but also to expand it is, is your educational project oriented towards training managers to run a culture that somebody else built? Right. Or is it in giving capacity to give people responsibility for continually renewing and constructing the culture that they themselves are living in and are passing down? Those are just different. Those are completely different intents. And obviously, the latter is how you build something that lasts. And I think it’s really interesting how we seem to have really fallen into a universal pitfall of becoming the former. Becoming the witch? Of the former, of training managers to manage a culture that was built by other people, many of whom are in fact no longer alive. So there even how, why or what was the basis? It’s just a weird place that we find ourselves in. But all of the capacities that you’ve been talking about, we’ve been talking about in this dialogue that show up in this other mode, this way that we’re talking about it, like the special forces approach. Fluid response have to do with responsibility. Yes, yes. You are not you are not merely managing something. You are building it. You are responsible for it. How funny. One of the things I’ve noticed is public spaces in society are usually really sad. Like you go to a public park. There’s usually trash in the public park. Right, right. Really, really, really high function. And it’s not the best. Whereas oftentimes, if you replace it is held by people who have who live there. What’s the phrase? Like I remember in school, a teacher would say something like, would you do that in your own house? Yeah, yeah. The answer, of course, is no. Obviously, I wouldn’t just throw my trash on the ground in my own house. Or if I if I did, I’m not a specific person, I’m not a mature person. And there’s something about that. There’s something about if I live in a culture that is not my own culture and I’m merely managing it and I’m paying other people to take responsibility for functions and they’re each kind of playing a managerial role, it’s almost like a feeling of indifference or feeling it’s OK to not take care of it. Whereas if I actually am responsible for it, one, I feel a burden of that responsibility. But then, of course, I feel the responsibility for it. And if I have the agency to be responsible, then you’ve got a vital culture that renews itself and keeps itself clean and picks up its own trash and repairs its broken infrastructure and things like that. Sorry, that was a. That’s good. I think that’s good. I think that’s really good. I think that’s I think that’s important. The idea of I mean, the management is, yeah, I think you’re right. It creates a distancing. It creates an eye yet relationship with things rather than an eye though. Yeah, there’s not a shared sense of identity. And I like the way you’re picking up on the ability to respond, but also, again, as we’ve said, the ethical component of responsibility, treating things the way they deserve to be treated, which means firstly and foremost, attending to them in the way they need, right, giving them the time, giving them their cognitive space. Yeah. Right. Right. And so I’m wondering also if this and and I think that’s a good question. And you know more about this than I do, but Zach and I were talking about this, about trying to move the normativity of education off being solely focused sort of on the market. We’re talking a lot about culture here. And one of the covid crisis is reminding us is that, you know, I think Thomas Bjornman is right. We’ve sort of gotten down to the de facto normativity for us as the market. But what we’re realizing is no, no, no, that actually fits within culture. And we got to remember that. And then the culture ultimately sits within the environment, the ecology. And if we don’t get that back, we’re screwed. We’re in deep trouble. So what that comes up to my mind, given what I just said and given what you said, is, you know, broadening the notion of responsibility beyond that which I own. Because that’s what you’re talking about. When I’ve talked to people about it’s a little bit different here in Canada. Our parks are usually trash free. But because you know, we negotiated our independence, we didn’t have a revolution. Right. By the way, are they trash free because the parks are well funded and have lots of paid people who clean up or because the people in the parks clean up the parks? So both. So both there is, you know, they’re well funded. People would and there isn’t an objection to that. People don’t say, no, I don’t want that. I don’t own the park. So I don’t want to fund it. Right. There’s not that. I mean, we’re talking about an ideal contrast. Obviously, there’s a continuum here between the two countries. So I hope that’s understood. But also, if I were to just be in a park and throw trash on the ground, there’s a very good chance somebody would say, what are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? Right. Right. Right. And so that’s what I mean about the sense of that we have a responsibility that’s born of participation in our culture, which is different than the responsibility that is born out of ownership. Right. And the way we are interacting with market forces. I’m not I’m not I’m not saying I’m not a Marxist. I’m not saying, oh, you’re away with the market. I’m not saying that, but I’m trying to say again, we have to situate our normativity back into what I think you’re putting your finger on that. Not even in fact, I want to say it’s not even the process of enculturation. It’s the process of continually evolving enculturation. That’s right. What we’re talking about here. That’s exactly it. Exactly. And so so let’s just rewind a little bit and then come back from there. So what I would say is I would say that the proposition that you previously making is the exact opposite of Marxist. Right. OK. What Marx Marxism does wrong. I think the thing that is said is it’s category error. And it’s interesting, I guess, exactly the wrong direction is alienates everyone from responsibility for the culture. It turns the entire culture into management. So I’d like what I’d like to propose is like this notion of management, this notion of managing something that you do not have responsibility for, that is not yours. Like if I’m managing a company where the shareholders own it and I manage it like that relation, that alienation, that’s Marx’s term. Right. Yeah. Yet, Marxism is does that instead of getting rid of that, it actually makes that ubiquitous. I’m not alienated from everything. The state runs everything and everybody are managers. All right. We’re all managers, which is exactly the worst. You’re actually pointing in the exact opposite direction. Well, how can we create a context? And by the way, what I want to say here is obviously crucial that we not load people with responsibility, that is not theirs to carry and they cannot carry. Right. Totally. Yeah, totally. I’m not suggesting that. What I’m suggesting is a continuous process of empowering people to be able to, A, take more responsibility and B, to discern what responsibility is theirs and to take it. So those are three distinct things. Yes, yes, yes. And this that that that triad, those three elements, that empowerment, discernment and responsibility mesh together into a culture that is a evolving culture. This is a culture that is no longer attached to what it is, but rather is empowered in what it is becoming. It is always moving forward to that, to that receding horizon. And this is again. So now we did it at the individual level and the individual level. Having expertise is now an extinction event because the thing you’re an expert in is becoming a commodity and irrelevant. Having adaptiveness is the new normal. But the same thing just came true for cultures. And all cultures that are biased towards efficiency, biased towards optimization, biased towards stasis, biased towards training managers of what is, are an extinction event. It is only those cultures that are able to enculturate, to develop individuals who are increasing their capacity to have response, to take appropriate responsibility. And then, and then, by the way, in collaboration with everyone else, they have the capacity at all as cultures to have this responsive adaptiveness to what is becoming. Right. Right. That’s excellent. And I like the way you made the proper, the proper reformulation of my take on Marxism. I think you’re right about that. That that’s well said. I mean, it’s been a longstanding critique of Marxism that it was just as bad as capitalism at taking account of culture, taking account of the ecology. It did no better. And so there’s something about shared presuppositions that need to be challenged across the board there, which I think. Yeah, it’s by the way, here’s a throwaway. But the critique I had of, and by the way, I’m not an expert at all on feminism, but the critique I had of feminism is that there was a point at which feminism could have chosen to liberate all of us from shitty jobs. But instead, what decided to do is to have all of us, men and women included, both equal in shitty jobs. Wow, I see. Like, boy, gosh, the road not taken in 1972, it’s been awesome. We could have picked the other road. Now we’d all be sitting with none of us being in shitty jobs. We’ve been a really better place to be. Well, why it became, and I get it, there was a past dependency on history and possibility and consciousness, but how it became the thing that the virtue was to become a director of marketing at a Madison Avenue advertising firm is an interesting case study of how bad people can go down the wrong path. So, yes, specifically casting aspersions at all directors of marketing at Madison Avenue. I take that. So, so I want to try and get the I guess the proper, the theoretical interface between we’ve got these two levels of scale we’re talking about. Talking about sort of, you know, how education being oriented towards evolving and culturation and adaptivity. And then we said that that’s going to give giving people the virtue of, you know, adaptivity, the sensing what’s significant, being able to take serious, being able to commit themselves, you know, a sense, you know, you and I’ve talked about this before, a sense of the course of things. When we had a discussion about faith, right, that virtue of being able, you know, I like the way you’re faithful to your wife. You don’t you don’t try and get I’m going to try to get my optimal set of beliefs about my wife. And I’m going to try and get that so I can manage her appropriately, because that’s a disaster about to happen. But instead, what you mean is faithfulness is I’m going to try and cultivate a potency of resiliency so that I can adapt and stay in continuity of contact with her. As she changes, I can maintain, you know, the continuity of the contact in the relationship. I can constantly evolve and afford how she’s unfolding. So that notion of faithfulness as opposed to closure or management. And so there’s a virtue there. Over and over again, that dichotomy, I think, just continues to come up. We can just build a fluidity of noticing, OK, to what degree am I on this path of closure and to what degree am I on this path of reciprocal opening? Yes, just in every location. Yeah, exactly. The sensitivity towards reciprocal opening. And so, again, I’m trying to understand what that means. I don’t want to I don’t want to say social engineering because I think that’s the managerial frame of mind. But what would that mean for the disposition of resources and the structuring of institutions that we used to call education? What would it be? No pun intended. But what would that mean concretely about these? Are we decentralizing education? What does it mean? Are we trying to get something like that in the platonic? Go ahead. Go ahead. This is to try this is a really sweet use of a phrase inverted. So we talked about from one direction, this notion of giving the attention that is just. Yes. Yeah. OK. Flip it around. Imagine the child is that object, that thing, that phenomenon to which we are endeavoring to give the attention that is just. Yeah. Right. That’s going to be a core principle of any future any new education system. How do I truly attend to this being, this unfolding being? How do I have faith? How do I operate in good faith in relationship with that developing human? Any education system worth its salt must operate in that way. So I can immediately now show how our current education system fails. It does not do that. It does not give the child the attention to this. Is there do it gives the child the whatever cookie cutter repetitive attention is available in a scalable, hierarchical system where the only way to give any attention at all is to repeat. And none of it has to do with what is due. So one, of course, is to work to invert. It is best both. It is for sure bespoke. And it’s just the same describing your relationship with your wife is bespoke. It is it is what it is. So any educational system that is vital to the future must always take each individual human as a singular event and cultivate a context that lifts them in the in their beingness and their becoming this as singular events. All right. Now, this is how you do meta design, by the way. I’m going to I’m describing what is necessary. Now, if it sounds hard, oh, well, too bad. It’s necessary. So we have to work backwards and figure out how we get that and how we get better at it. By the way, it may be a thousand generations before we can pull off what I just described again. We’re working for meta design. Then we’ll work on design. So the meta design is we are always going to be taking every distinct sentient, every distinct human as a singular event, which is on its own evolutionary developmental trajectory. And our job is to is to create context that allow it to cultivate itself in its becoming and its singular becoming, which, of course, means that we will need to have a network that has this each node in the network, each being you and I, everyone who participates in this, has as first order, very high discernment about what relationships to create and where to attend to those relationships and what flows across those relationships. So if you imagine a context, imagine a village in that village, every adult, in fact, every child, every person is building an increasing discernment in exactly this capacity. Right. So a child, a six year old is flowing through the village, playing as it is the perfect educational domain or mode and come across a group of people who are building a wall and feels intrigued by that. Right. Lesson one. There were question one, is this actually the thing that is your just attention? And an inquiry, can you can cultivate in that child and every encounter where their attention is attending to something and awareness of meta awareness. Is this the place where my attention is just? Is this where I should be attending? Right. Two, a relationship has not been formed. We now have two nodes that are in graph relationship, the group that is working on the wall and the child. Let’s say, for example, the answer is yes. Child, is this, is this where you should be attending? Yes. Okay, great. Now we have a bespoke educational opportunity. What is the possibility in this space? Potentia, not actua. We’re not trying to create a system that is optimized. We’re trying to actually be special forces in the educational domain. An opportunity has emerged that has an invitation, a child’s natural native capacities has oriented their attention to this space. Okay, great. We now who are working here, how do we sense in ourselves? What is the best possibility that can be made of this particular moment? And there are so many. An infinite number of possibilities in the moment of building a wall. And who knows what they are? Only the people on the ground even have a chance of knowing what they are. So this notion of deal logos, this notion of being able to enter into an opportunity for an expansion of capacity in our co-evolutionary journey as the primary capacity to become an agent of deal logos embedded in every person in the context of communities, I think is the answer. Right. Right. I think that’s right. It’s funny. You’re saying that my son, Jason, he’s living with me right now. And we’re watching through the pandemic, we’re watching the old David Carradine Kung Fu series from the seventies. I watched it as a kid and now looking back and then sharing it with him. And he’s really, really enjoying it. It doesn’t have the martial arts of daredevil or anything like that. But what you’ve got, I think, I mean, and I mean, it’s a TV show, so it has a limitation, et cetera, but what he’s resonating with and what I’m seeing in it is exactly what you’re talking about. Because what, what the show is, if you watch, it’s not primarily a martial arts show, it’s an educational show and the way that you’re talking about, that’s why they do all the, they keep doing the retrospectives of when he’s in the Shaolin temple, when he’s in the monastery and the kind of education he was giving. And then what he does when he’s interacting with people is he’s doing exactly what you’re talking about. He’s, he naturally enters and he knows how we can convey and communicate with silence as well as with speech. And he’s doing that all the time. He’s doing exactly, there’s that, there’s that, there’s a deep into your penetration of like spirituality and this kind of education we’re talking about. And it’s been really interesting for me to see a millennial, my son. I mean, obviously there’s selection bias. He’s my son. He’s been influenced by me. But nevertheless, seeing how much he like, like, yeah, there’s ways in which the show, you know, like I said, the martial arts are so clunky compared to what you see it today and you know, it’s, you know, the production values aren’t as great, but you know, he’s, he’s willing to put aside all of that because he getting, like he’s getting that sense of, you know, I’m learning something here, right? And so I’m sorry, I just, it just, it just came from my mind that I was thinking, yeah, what’s happening is that, you know, for all the stuff I teach him, sharing this with him and we’re going through it together is exactly the kind of thing you’re talking about. It’s kind of this, it’s kind of this intersection between, you know, apprenticing somebody, apprenticing with somebody and modeling with them and also co-creating because he is also, it’s not just that I’m apprenticing him, but he’s also affording me seeing something that I thought I knew, you know, in a renewed way, right? Powerful way, powerful way. Yeah, I think that that’s, you glued together the term spirituality and education, I think that’s going to be a minimum requirement. Right, right. I think we’re going to need to make those terms become educationist spiritual practice or something along those lines. And an insight, I think that comes from that is to recognize that it is always symmetric, that, you know, if I’m interacting with a three year old and there is a moment of, of educatio in that moment, it is fully symmetric, right? I’m in learning as much as I am teaching. And if I’m not open to that, if I’m not open to that, I’m not teaching anything. All I’m teaching is in fact, the lesson that I am not a good teacher. Yes. And nor am I a good learner, right? So that’s, that’s, so that’s one piece. The other is I’m mindful now also of this character, Foucault. And what I’d like to do is I’d like to pull out the virtue. I think Foucault had a lot of really powerful insights. And one was he specifically named these eras of society. And maybe I’m actually stealing a bit from Deloitte. So if you, if you, if you’re a Deloitte and you think I’m stealing from Deloitte, then great. If you’re Deloitte, you know that Deloitte likes people to steal. So I’ll do that. Um, but he distinguishes between this notion of the society of discipline. Yep. And when he talks about in society of discipline, this notion of vertically integrated specialization, so that one is a teacher in the context of the school. Right. Right. And all teacherliness, all education is domain specific to the institution of the school. Right. Right. Right. Okay. That’s gone. I would like to just kill that. It’s dead. It’s no longer. We may be living through a little bit longer, but not a lot. If you have to pay any attention with schools or trying to do in the context of the coronavirus or the pandemic. Uh, yeah, that’s done. So what’s the thing that comes after the whole system? So it’s a society of discipline, meaning that you are in prison or in the hospital or at the factory or at the office, right? Each one of these, these vertically integrated, you have these identity structures where I’m only, I’m dad at home and working at work. Right. These are in this new place. The stack goes from being vertically integrated to being horizontally integrated. So you’re now a full load. Right. So I am always in education and my experience is always open to the possibility of education. I’m always parenting. My experience is always open to the possibility of parent. I’m always working. My experience is also open to the possibility of working. And I must maintain in myself, each human must have wholeness of all those possibilities, at least as STEM cells, at least as potentials that they can activate in moments where there’s a moment to rise. So then the question is this skillful capacity, this, this, um, wow, I think you like, we keep kind of hitting on the same things, but now the resonance just gets bigger and bigger of just being, having a discernment and awareness of what the moment portends, right? Between you and I, there is a moment in that moment with adjust attention. Let’s just just say, what is the highest possibility this moment affords and all of the modalities of human possibility? I can’t hug you. So unfortunately hugging is not one of them, although it would be good if we could. Can I break bread with you? I can talk with you. And that’s neat because you actually have very far away. It’s a really interesting possibility. Um, so that’s right. So to what degree can we constantly kind of dancing through the encounters that are possible? And then in the moments that are, that emerge out of that possibility, how do them play into the emergent moments of possibility to create the highest possibility that is available to, to, in good faith, right in relationship that is towards the unfolding of the highest in each of us so that as we shift from those encounters and move each of these ripples, each of these acquisition moments, just increasing possibility and increasing discernment and just get in and think about the potential that builds and something that has that orientation instead of sucking the potential out of the universe and moving into actual to try to get this material that makes us feel safe, we’re actually building a recombinant potential that is blowing up in potential because every encounter expands the potential more so even than the actual. That’s fantastic. I love that imagery. That’s really cool. I like that idea about instead of trying to collapse to safety, we keep, I mean, you’re talking about a kind of metaphysical empowerment where power, I’m going back to the original meaning of power, which is a, you know, a, a, a, a potential that you can actualize as needed. Right. Right. And, and, you know, dynana, dynamas, right. That kind of notion of it. So I’m also trying to think about what I like that idea. I mean, one of my pedagogical principles as a teacher is that I’m doing my best teaching when I’m sharing learning with you rather than disseminating information to you. So if I can get to my place, if I can get to a place where I’m experiencing insider flow in teaching, then I’m actually doing, right. If I can get on the edge of the induction, right. To draw forth, educe, right. If I can get into a place where things are being drawn from me that I didn’t see before as I’m teaching. So, right. So the distinction between me teaching you and me learning within the teaching, you it’s completely blurred. That for me is, is good, good teaching. But what that calls to mind then, the way you talked about that, I mean, because I’ve been increasingly sort of zeroing in on the critique of the way our culture has collapsed. And I think this goes with the managerial imperative you’ve been talking about how we’ve collapsed into a monologic understanding of the mind. The mind works monologically rather than dialogically, although there’s now just increasingly good evidence that we work much better dialogically than we do monologically. Right. That the monophasic, that there’s sort of one state of consciousness we should always be in. And that’s sort of the ultimate. I’m thinking about sort of the enlightenment heritage. They gave us, you know, this sort of, you know, your mom, you have, there’s this one state of consciousness and then think about how much this is like a managerial state. Right. And then there’s, there’s a monologue, right. Because I’m managing, right. And then, and then there, you know, and I said there’s monophasic and there’s monological and then monolithic. It’s only oriented propositionally. But there’s, there’s a fourth one I want to try and get here that you’re putting your finger on that I think resonates with those three. The degree to which people, right. The degree to which people see themselves. What do I want to say? Almost like an ecology. They see themselves like the thing you did, right. You know what Arendt said about Eichmann and the Nazis. They took that vertical integration into compartmentalization that allowed them to do great evil. You know, he’s a great father at home and then he’s the manager of the numbers. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. That there’s that kind, there’s, there’s that verticality, there’s a monism of the verticality that you’re trying to break. You see what I’m trying to get at? That people don’t have a mono identity, right. That they’re always, they’re, they’re always, they’re multi-role. It’s like, you know, you know, martial art, when you take a stance, I don’t actually fight with this stance. This stance is multi-app. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a nexus that allows me access. It activates in potential many possible states that I can get to. And I’m not, I’m not trying to hold this. What I’m trying to do is get to that because it activates them and accesses them. So what I need to do this, I can do that. You see what I’m trying to get at? I’m trying to get at that, that there’s absolutely, you’re trying to break up the, you know, the monophasic, monolithic, monological mind, and also this, this, this completely compartmentalized, you know, mono identity that people, I’m, I’m right now, I’m the dad right now. I’m the teacher. But what you said was, no, no, I multi-app. I’ve got this stance where I’ve sort of had a nexus place in which all of my potential roles and potentially new roles are accessible and activatable for me in this fluid and adaptive manner. How does that sit with you? Yeah, absolutely. So the martial arts metaphor is really nice because obviously if I truly want to be effective at martial arts, what I want to make is that every move increases the potential for the next move, right? Yes. Yeah. So it’s, it’s energy is increasing. I’m not actually deploying energy. I’m not like, you know, exercise. It’s actually every move creates a potential for more possibility. Yes. Like that’s it. That’s the, that’s a very nice concrete version of the same story. And, and yes, yes, yes, yes. So I’m trying to get at a sort of a multi-appness of identity. That’s what I’m trying to. Okay, cool. Check this out. All right. So I try this. All right. So this is really cool stuff you guys have been talking about. What do I do? I’ll give you an example. Learn some new shit. Yeah. You’re sitting at home right now. You probably, if you’re not, then you probably should be, or maybe you do something very important if you are, then ignore what I just said. But one of the games I’d like to get out there is the game of what did I learn during quarantine, what 10 new skills did I not have that I learned? Because right now you can learn all kinds of stuff. It can be simple. Like you learn how to cut somebody’s hair. You can learn how to make sourdough bread. You can learn all kinds of new skills. Well, one of the very first things is to enter into the consciousness that your possibility for self-learning a new skill is largely unfettered. Yeah. Beach entrance, beach entrance is like these pools where it’s instead of steps, it’s like smooth beach entrance. You don’t have to dive into learning how to fly rocket ships first order, learn how to do something simple first. So you can teach yourself, you can teach yourself. And bite off more than you can chew. Next step, teach yourself a little bit more, but everybody right now should be taking it as a primary ethical obligation that instead of watching Netflix, by the way, Kung Flu is fine. And I mean, I recommend that to my kids. It’s a great idea. I thought about, forgot about that. But instead of, instead of sort of binge watching friends, I’ll use that as an example of what not to be watching. Um, teach yourself new skills, educate all kinds of skills, make cheese, make yogurt, uh, repair stuff like, but the point is not the skills you’re learning. The point is the skill to learn skills. And then from behind it’s the consciousness of the capacity to become a STEM cell and by the way, meta skills, like, okay, watch some YouTube videos on how to have really rich dialogue with your parent, with your partner, become a better partner, how to become a better parent. Like those are meta skills that are, are skills that you should definitely be learning now. So like the, the capacity of just to take opportunity and saying, geez, everybody’s kind of stuck in this weird limbo space. What should I do? Well, first thing you should do is that like learn how to learn. Like that’s the thing you can do now. You actually have this weird opportunity to be going back to college as it were. Yeah. Um, take advantage of it. Sorry. So that’s like a little, uh, words from our sponsor. If you, if you’re looking for a thing to actualize what John and I are talking about that right there is a very straightforward app for sure. Awesome thing that came from by most people right now. That’s excellent. And I also liked it. I mean, that advice is great. And I also liked the meta advice you gave in it. You, you, you, you, you told people to like, you advise people, I should say, to move between learning and meta learning, learning about learning. Right. And, and, and this is that compression variation thing, right? Again, like what do all the learnings have in common? Right. And you, and then, and then what, and then look at the variations and then, okay, use the, what I have in common to acquire a new skill, the new variation, and then read, Oh, now I know new things that they all have in common and that affords me learning a new skill and, you know, do that cycle where you track what’s invariant so you can learn some, you can transfer and learn a new thing. You can introduce more. You’re basically enacting evolution, right? You know, very, you’re, you’re processing then call from it. And then from that, vary it again. And so forth and like evolve your, like literally evolve your learning. Don’t just learn. I think that’s also what you were saying. It was so cool. Exactly. The ball learning then, and then the very top of that stack, we have Socrates, which is they know that in this process of, of learning, of evolving your learning and coming into this relationship of development is of evolutionary relationship with life, one of the things that was, is the only invariant, the thing that will always be there is yourself. And so you will be able to notice what is it? What am I in this context? What is my trajectory? Yeah. I learned so far in quarantine is how to grill. As it turns out, it was a needed thing. So I started grilling and I was, I went from kind of like, okay, pretty darn good. Not great, but pretty darn good. Um, and I noticed that I liked it. It was a skill that I enjoyed having, having added to, to, to who I am. So that told me a little bit about myself and I learned some interesting things about how I learned. But when you learn about how you learn, that tells you a lot about who you are. Oh, I think, I think that’s, I think that’s a great Socratic insight. I mean, and Christopher Moore and his book on Socratic self-knowledge and, and, and, and Gonzalez and others, as I’m doing research for after Socrates, that’s the thing, you know, we, we, we’ve got to give up the romantic idea that we know ourselves by introspecting or reflecting on our autobiography, what you’re, how you best know yourself, right? Is dialogically when, when you, when you’re learning and being challenged and, and you know, what do you care about? What can you come to care about? What do you commit to? What can you come to commit to? This is how you actually deep, you, you most learn about yourself the way you’re talking about. You look, you learn about yourself while you’re learning about other things, especially when you’re learning about other people. That is how you best, that’s how you best get to self-knowledge. Yeah. And then, and then you can play the role of being a, a steward of emergent culture and not a cog aspiring to be a manager in a static extinctionary culture. I think that’s well put. I think that’s a good place to maybe draw it to a close. I think that’s really, I think this was really, really excellent. I think that’s a good place to maybe draw it to a close. I think that’s really, I think this was really, really excellent. Yeah. I’d like, at some point I’d like to have a follow-up conversation sort of, cause we, we, we, I think this was nice the way this rounded out, but we rounded back on Socrates and then I maybe next time come into, okay, what does this mean for dialectic and dialogos? I’d like, because I think you’re right. I think it is, I mean, I got the idea from you that dialectic and dialogos are the meta-psycho-technology. They’re at the top of the stack, as you put it. And I’d like to know, as you know, I just, I’m trying to enact Socrates. I’m talking about, not in the sense of, you know, trying to refute everybody, but I’m trying to talk to everybody who I think is in good faith about trying to wrestle with this and trying, and trying to practice it and commit to it. Cause I want to understand it. I want to understand as deeply as possible what this is, because I think you’re right. I think it is at the top of the stack in some very, very important way. Sounds good. I, as you know, I’m journeying right now. Right now I’m at a temporary stopping point where I have an eye yurt that has some connectivity. I hope it was okay. I don’t know if this actually recorded. I don’t know what the, it felt like we were able to. Yep. No, you were periodically, the video, you were periodically blurry. The audio was mostly constant. There was one or two very brief gaps, but nothing. Not bad in context. But I think actually by our, by next week, certainly in two weeks, I’ll be again, to an Oasis that has good connectivity. So hopefully we can continue to just to row our canoe together. Yeah, I’d like that. Well, you let me know, you let me know, cause you know, you’re in transit and in transition. So let me know, the two words are related, of course, that you let me know, you know, if next week or two weeks from now is better for you. Just let me know. Will do. Okay. Great talking to you. Bye bye. Thank you so much, my friend. I’m going to stop the recording now.