https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=468zolkwgZ8
Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveki. I’m here again with John Stewart. This is second time here. Last time we had a very deep conversation, lots of points of convergence and of insight. John has made an argument in publication and we reviewed it obviously at a much higher level because we’re talking. You can’t convey as much, but this very, very powerful argument that there is a non-teleological, and that was important that we talked about that, a non-teleological trajectory to the course of evolution of not mere increased complexity, a thesis that I think is vague and when you make it specific is often falsified. John has a much more specific and I think important point which is what tends to survive, what evolution seems to be broadly meta-selecting for in addition to selecting for specific features or species, it seems to be meta-selecting for increased cooperation and increased entification, the creation of more sophisticated organisms, entities that are built out of intricate cooperation of lower order entities. We explore that in great depth. John has proposed that we can appropriate that unlike previous parts of that history where it has occurred automatically in a merely brute causal fashion. We are now at the stage where we can consciously appropriate and apprehend this or perhaps direct it or misdirect it and that part of human spirituality should function to make us more properly attuned to affording this new emergent cooperative entification, the creation of a superorganism in some fashion. We talked quite a bit about the left and the right hand kinds of or left and right spiritualities of freedom, sort of absorption spiritualities versus which I think John you called die will be done and then more agentic spiritualities, my will and we’re at a place where we can properly consider integrating them and this was all very profound and I thought very enriching. The fact that it is simultaneously non-teleological but has a normative demand on it, normative demand on us, I think I find very very promising. I find that to be something very very interesting about what John is doing. One of the things I’d like to do today after I give John a chance to just identify himself again is I’d like to examine two possible connecting points between that overarching model that John built for us last time around enhanced cooperation and the spiritual apprehension and appropriation of that and what that has to say about a lot of the discussion that is emerging in this corner of the internet around hyper objects and hyper agents and agregores and collective intelligence etc and how that seems simultaneously cutting edge and very ancient. It seems to bring together the mythological and the scientific in a weird way that some of you have seen conversations for example the most recent one between Jonathan Paget, Jordan Hall and myself. So that’s one thing I’d like to explore with John and then the other one was something we touched upon but I’d like to come back to it which is like how is this super organism going to be different or how should we try to shape it so that it does not become totalitarian Kafka-esque kinds of entities that degrade human life and we and Jonathan and Jordan and I, Jordan Hall and I talked about this in terms of you know avoiding the parasitic processing version of this. So that’s the framing that we’re in and now I hope I did justice to it. I’m sure I missed out things that you would consider important and I might have misrepresented things to some degree but hopefully enough I get enough John to set our context and to appropriately welcome you into discussion again so thank you for coming again. Thanks very much John. That was a great overview. I think I can go home now so nothing more to say. Well let’s pick it up on that point which is the first point. There’s a lot of emerging discussion about you know the next Buddha is the Sangha, we’ve got agregores, we’ve got the idea of hyper agents, we’ve got the idea of you know collectivities, things that take on a life of their own, collective intelligence running on distributed cognition, this is you know swarms and there’s all kinds of terms floating around in different conceptions and I’m trying to participate in the conversations bringing some clarity but what do you think about all of these? Do you think that these are intimations of something happening? Do you think they are an attempt to bring the spirituality to bear on appropriating the trajectory of evolution? What’s your reflections on this sort of effervescence and fervor around this right now? Do you think it points to something or converges with your work in some way? Yes I think it does in a number of ways. I mean first and foremost analytical rational cognition, the first enlightenment thinking has great difficulty in understanding collectives because they’re complex, they can’t be thought through, they’re unanalyzable. So when you start to get the emergence of what I can call second enlightenment thinking or metasystemic thinking, the ability to mentally model complex systems in motion as they evolve, as they interact and so on, when you get the beginning of the emergence of that capacity then you get the beginning of the emergence of the understanding of collectives. So to give a sort of concrete example of where the absence of that metasystemic thinking leads to a very impoverished view of the world and reality. If we look at the transhumanist movement which is that clearly at the analytical rational level is highly analytical and so on, then its vision of the future and of future evolution is basically highly individualistic. So the notion is that individuals will have their capacities greatly extended and so on and that that’s the next great step in the evolution of life on Earth. What it ignores and almost extraordinarily ignores once you see it is that we already have the emergence of post-human intelligence, post-human entities and so on in this planet that are far far superior in terms of cognitive capacity and so on than individuals enhanced or otherwise and that’s the emergence of collectives. So I wrote an article once about Nietzsche’s Juba-Mensch and the basic theme of the argument is that the Juba-Mensch is already here emerging and the Juba-Mensch is the collector, the Juba-Mensch is the society, the Juba-Mensch is for example the collective organized through the internet and so on. So the collective of humanity now has capacities far far greater than any individual can ever have. I mean it’s it’s it’s trivially obvious but in the context of you know the limitations of analytical rational cognition that doesn’t see it, you know it needs to be said. So and that’s where the you know the evolutionary perspective comes in loud and clear that the whole history of life on Earth, the the trajectory of life on Earth is towards the successive integration of living processes into cooperatives of increasing scale and it’s a stepwise process in which the the cooperatives at one level that form at one level form cooperatives that become the entities of the next level and so on and so on and the critically important thing that the evolutionary perspective gives it is that it points to how that’s achieved, it points towards the specific mechanisms that organize those collectives that are necessary to organize those collectives. So then so it enables us then to develop this meta-narrative that points to what we have to do to advance the evolutionary trajectory further on on Earth and how we achieve that specifically. So it’s not just about you know that yes we need to have a you know form a global entity, it’s the specific ways in which that needs to be arranged that are pointed to by how higher level collectives were arranged at lower levels of of evolution and organization and there governance becomes critically important and that’s the second issue you raised you know how can we ensure that governance becomes operates as enabling constraints that is governance that increases diversity, increases availability, increases creativity, increases from the perspective of the individuals within the collective, increases the freedom, increases creativity, increases opportunities for individuals and so on. So we’ll get into that but that’s broad you know that’s the broad perspective of collectives that the next the next great stages in the evolution of of life on Earth are about the collective, are about societies, are about larger scale cooperation and so on. So I would suggest that yes the you know the the information that are emerging about the importance of collectives basically are fueled by this the beginning of the emergence of of post-first enlightenment thinking and so on that can begin to see and appreciate the collectives. However this movement as I understand it hasn’t yet moved into you know the societal level of organization it’s more focused on lower level collectives, lower level agents and so on and because it’s founded on and driven by information rather than you know by systematic mental modeling of collectives then it tends to be more spiritually orientated, less cognitively inclined and so on. So where does that where does that lead these smaller scale collectives and their collective intelligence and so on? And broadly I’d suggest that you know they are an important part of the picture but they’re not they’re not the main part of the picture and that to get a meta narrative that can that can guide metamodernism and guide integralism you need to go to the big picture in evolution you need to look at the emergence of you know global entity and how that can be achieved and so on. The the other the basically humanities you can look at the trajectory of evolution in this regard in humanity in three steps. In the beginning pre-modern times our meaning and purpose in existence came from from grand narratives from meta narratives that involved the postulation of supernatural entities. So the only stories that human beings could generate that made some sense of their existence were ones that involved gods, spirits, supernatural entities and so on. Then the the second stage in this this three-step transition was the emergence of analytical rational first enlightenment thinking which basically was like an asset that dissolved the the these grand narratives the meta narratives that previously gave meaning and purpose to human existence because it basically you know pointed out the the lack of foundation for belief in supernatural entities it undid the stories it dissolved them. And basically we’re you know in the midst of that hopefully moving towards the end of that phase but the but the next phase is is the reinstatement of grand narratives the reinstatement of meta narratives that that is is not able to be undermined by first enlightenment thinking analytical rational thinking it doesn’t entail supernatural entities it’s a science based grand narrative a science based meta narrative and it can fill the gap that that I would argue is is clearly evidently missing in movements like metamodernism and integralism which basically you know start off with great fervor and energy and so on but integralism’s past its peak you know it’s yeah it’s on the way down and I would suggest that the the reason why it is is because of the absence of any meta narrative that you know gives meaning and purpose and direction and a measuring stick that can be used to to assess you know the values and so on that drive a project like integralism so they’re broadly so to me it’s you know the meta narrative of most important so where where do these more spiritually orientated practices where are they relevant in this? I would suggest that their cognitive capacity their ability to develop mental models cognitive capacity their ability to develop mental models that can underpin and and generate you know the grand narrative is fairly limited the the practices and approaches that I that I’ve been you know I’ve had knowledge of they’re largely about collective presence the attainment of collective presence and the attainment of collective presence you know is an extremely powerful tool but it’s only a tool within the the general toolbox and its fundamental limitation is is that if it does as it can produce collective insights that that are significant and insightful and so on it has difficulty in holding on to those outside or you know once the groups dissolve and that’s because if it produces if it produces insights into you know that that entail complex thinking about complex phenomenon then if the individuals in the group don’t have the you know the mental modeling capacity if they don’t have sufficient cognitive capacity at the the second enlightenment level then the scaffolding provided by the group once it’s removed you get a collapsing of the yeah yeah yeah of the insights and so on yeah I agree with that very fundamentally one of the things well first of all both directions one of the things I’ve been trying to do with work with Guy Sandstock and Christopher Mastietro and Johannes Niederhäuser and Daniel Zaruba is build this notion of dialectic into dialogos in which exactly that the capacity the the the the we presencing gets internalized back into also an individual capacity for self-transcendence in some important way which is much more the ancient platonic model you don’t have just the dialogos the dialogos the dialectic isn’t just you know the the collective it’s also the self-transcending right and the the horizontal and the vertical dimensions I think for the reasons you just gave have to be integrated together if we just get caught up in the we space right exactly like you said it will it will be it there won’t be a way to preserve and transfer the insights coming out of that we space into you know the everyday lives of everyday people and that that will just mean it will not go anywhere as a project of cultural transformation towards your first criticism which I also agree with I’m responding to them in reverse order sorry I yeah I I’m involved in the project of trying to come up with the design features for stitching these various emerging communities together into a more comprehensive culture and therefore which would be meso it wouldn’t be at the the level you’re talking about but I think it’s the needed thing to get them towards that greater collective you’re pointing to and so I I totally agree with both your points and I see my agreement is such that it translates in me trying to actively address those criticisms in the you know in the in the culture building that I’m engaged with and in the in the understanding of you know dialectic which is an attempt to integrate metasystemic cognition with this you know collective we presencing and enable it to be transferable and to get both of those things actually those two dimensions integrated together it’s at the core of what I’m trying to do right now so I think I I your criticisms I take well I I’m I’m I mean in agreement with them indeed the original meaning of the word indeed so I I take it that’s very well said I’m wondering what you what you what you think then of like you made some very good criticisms of integral do you therefore I think I foresee your answer but I want to hear it from you do you think that metamodernism is probably going to recapitulate that trajectory there will be sort of an expanse and then a collapse or do you think metamodernism is trying to build the metasystemic cognition and the cultural collective in a way that integral didn’t do you see a difference historically between integral and metamodernism or is it too soon to tell or what do you what yeah what do you see right well yes I think it’s already demonstrating that it is recapitulating it’s in the process of recapitulating the trajectory of integralism but it is different the the key difference is that it’s highly political so it is it is about developing you know political movements having political parties in fact it probably arose you know to a significant extent you know apart from the artistic side but it arose from political movements and that and that was missing in integralism in integralism you know was sort of like it was irrelevant to it saw the you know all the political goings on as irrelevant largely it went on as if they weren’t important but it’s recapitulating the trajectory in the sense that that it already seems to me is losing energy and you know and is starting to dissipate there were great hopes around it now on the issue of you know is it is it going further in an important way by for example promoting higher cognitive capacities and developing technologies for achieving that absolutely not I mean that’s that’s I’m actually on you know the Meta Modern Forum and that’s one issue I raised there that’s about this it seems to me there are two great deficiencies in the Meta Modern Project one is the absence of this I’m an overarching grand narrative you know it takes political issues as as important in themselves and doesn’t embed them in this bigger structure that can discipline them and and guide them and so on so that’s one great deficiency the absence of you know the grand narrative and the second is the absence of any technology designed to in to develop what it sees as critically important which is the you know the development of a metasystemic cognitive capacity the ability to see complexity and understand it and manipulate it and so on so on that point you know Hansi Freinach’s you know Meta Modernism books basically you know suggests that the the possibly genetic limitations to the development of metasystemic cognition cast doubt on whether it can be technologised and cast doubt on the you know a project that that is central to my current interest and that is the development of an escalator a developmental escalator which will take people from analytical rational cognition to metasystemic cognition and the you know and the social emotional development that that enables us to transcend our you know the influences of our biological and cultural past and move it right angles to them so the in fact you know there’s a statement in the second Hansi Freinach book that basically says that the hope for developing these higher capacities might you know might depend upon the development of transhumanism so it’s very pessimistic about that so and I don’t see any shift in that I don’t see them you know that there’s any movement in the direction of technologising these things so one thing I want to mention that the because that’s something that I’ve been getting re-involved in is this this project of developing an escalator I’m not sure whether I mentioned my during during our last discussion about the first planning meeting for the second enlightenment yes you did I think I didn’t it’s coming back to me now so so that was part of that project you know it the integral people involved and so on but basically there was very little happening in the world as far as it that meeting could ascertain about the development of such an escalator I’ve got re-involved in it unfortunately now there seems to be there still seems to be very little happening you know in the world about it but one one area that I might cross-fertilise with your you know similarly directed project is on the the issue of Otto Lasky’s work and before him a guy called Michael Beseechers on dialectical thinking yes yes so you’re aware of their work I ordered the one book on your recommendation I haven’t read it yet but I do have okay so so basically what what what Beseechers did yeah early in his academic career was that he he wanted to find out what constituted dialect what he called dialectical thinking but can be called metasystemic thinking yeah so he interviewed a range of thinkers and looked for their movements in thought so he didn’t look at the content of what they were doing with him yeah he looked at the the movements in thought that they went through when they you know were dealing with some complex issue and then and he tried to identify them group them into categories and so on and Otto Lasky continued that work and came up with four quadrants of dialectic and 28 thought forms which constitute those quadrants they’re the movements in thought and so on and broadly just very broadly speaking analytical rational cognition focuses down on on isolated parts of reality that it can think through and that it can develop mechanistic mechanistic models of and and it’s been very successful at you know that you know the small proportion of phenomenon that can be adequately described and modeled by those kinds of limited mechanistic models what it misses out on and this is what you know Beseechers and Lasky identified what it misses out on is the context and particularly the multi-layered context in which everything everything is embedded including us and and so on second so apart from context it missed out on process so it reifies processes as objects when in fact there’s no such thing as an object an object you know all objects are theory laden and any object in the sense that it’s isn’t represented as a process is clearly theory laden because everything’s in flux everything’s in change and so on so I’ve missed out on context process uh co-evolving relationships that’s you know components that co-evolve together don’t just interact according to laws like Newton’s laws but actually co-evolve and mutually influence one another and then the fourth quadrant is is putting these together as and seeing them as as the world is constituted by evolving interacting complex systems um so this has been you know regularized this has been the this kind of the thinking uh that you need to have to right move um to uh escape the strictures of analytical rational thinking have been identified you need you need to move your attention to these four quadrants and in particular the 28 thought forms now the significance of this for these group processes and moving out of the limited presencing the group presencing you know the the really fun uh no effort part the the absorption part you know to go back to that right and left to move out of that the this scaffolding you know uh this this uh analysis of of uh the movements and thought necessary to move you from analytical rational thinking to uh metasystemic thinking um that can be used within these groups to scaffold the dialogue process yes and it’s very basic it’s like a checklist you know so uh but Otto Lasky you know he he uh used his analysis to train uh uh interview practices where the the function of the interviewer was to identify the uh the current movements in thought used by the interviewee uh identify any deficiencies draw the attention of the interviewee to these deficiencies and thereby scaffold their thinking more towards you know metasystemic thinking so that can be so it seems to me that you know in the Socratic dialogues you know which have been uh and because I’ve never dived into that as deeply as you so to me I’ve my perception of them has been filtered by the understandings of of the Socratic processes and so on arrived at by analytical rational thinkers right right right which pale you know which missed the point almost entirely yes the Socratic Socratic dialogues are not about critical thinking you know or not in the analytical rational sense at all to me no they’re about they’re about scaffolding uh the in a group process scaffolding the thinking of others and oneself to fill in these gaps to correct the absences to remediate the absences even the thinking of the others uh and that’s that’s and it seems to me that that can be that process can be turbocharged um by the use of the the four quadrants and the the 28 thought forms yes um within this group process yeah I hope to I hope to work on that integration um I’m going back to the stuff I’ve written on dialectic and dialogous and I hope to work that integration that you’re proposing to specifically undertake it uh this summer uh so you know it’s it’s also it’s always about the time but uh I should be able to do it uh and so yeah I definitely followed up I haven’t read the book I have it and but I the proposal you just made I think is beautiful and exciting um and it’s it’s very much uh something uh again um I agree with and I’m trying to undertake in response to our previous discussion so I think that’s exactly right I think understood that way uh it the way you’ve extended it I I I think that what’s missing from a lot of these groups is that Socratic dialectic metasystemic capacity and I agree that that is very much something that needs to be given more priority I’m I’m very happy that third wave started by Gonzales and others about reading you know the the you know how much the non-propositional that’s their term for it is actually the crucial thing happening in the platonic uh dialogues that that’s now coming to the forefront I think affords um you know a kind of philosophical provenance for what we’re talking about that lends plausibility and legitimacy to the overall proposal um it’s like no no this there was a reason why this was a deep like for sluice that you know this this was the backbone of you know western spirituality for a good reason there was something going on here that needs to be re you know recovered recovered in in a powerful way um so again um I’m sorry I know we’re you were hoping that there’d be points of significant divergence but once again I mean I’ve already um not as much as the first two points but I’ve at least begun the process of the proposals that you’ve just made the point of convergence um and I I think that’s exactly right I I’m I’m I’ve been trying to get people to recover that ancient notion of rationality as the capacity for genuine self-transcendence as opposed to the the inferential repair of technical argumentation we have limited the notion of rationality down to that and it’s we’ve lost that platonic breadth although there are you know DC Schindler’s book Plato’s critique of impure reason goes to great length at restoring that more comprehensive notion of rationality that I think you’re putting your finger on and it goes back to ratio the proper proportioning rather than right you know uh like I say um you know technologies of validity which we’ve tended to reduce uh uh rationality too so I think this is part uh again I think there’s again given that understanding of rationality not logicality but rationality as we’re talking about there isn’t there’s an insufficient account of the deep role of rationality in what we’re talking about here in this proposal for the spiritual appropriation of the trajectory of evolution I to use some of your language if I didn’t trespass on it too much um and so that that is that is a significant concern for me one of one area where that shows up very practically for me is there’s while there is a lot of sense of irony and fallow fallibility in metamodernism which which is good um it counterbalances Cartesian hubris I don’t see enough I don’t see enough actual self-correction going on right about oh no right which is you know the hallmark one of the hallmarks of taking the critical and making it the truly rational is that that that people have a capacity to undergo a process that’s not just correcting but also transcending how they have framed the original you know their their original way of thinking about something I’m sorry I’m being a little bit vague here but what what I mean is that to make it more simple I don’t see enough of the self-correcting and the self-transcending aspects of rationality being properly integrated together within metamodernism I see discussion of self-transcendence and I see some stuff about self-correction but I don’t see them properly integrated together in a way in which I think you and I are talking about right now that’s what I was trying to get to all right yeah yeah so you mentioned that the you know the western tradition yeah has certain characteristics for good reason yeah yeah which is very very appropriate because you need it for good reason yeah yes good well said nice play on words that’s very good john that’s very good that’s very good yeah yeah so so one thing that’s influenced me and this is so so one thing that’s influenced me and this is you know the integration of self-transcendence with the cognitive scaffolding which yeah yeah yeah to me is critically important so I see that as epitomized by a central theme of the western tradition which is the the marriage of the bride and the groom yeah so the concept that the concept that um that the next great stage is is the marriage of the bride and the groom uh broadly speaking in a non-gendered sense the female principle with the male principle yes so they you know that’s the cognitive with the social emotional yeah with the transcendence with the presencing and so on so and the you know the question is how you know how do you achieve that so another way of attacking that is um it’s you know I’ve worked on the development of this escalator and to take uh to to achieve the marriage of the bride and the groom um to move from first enlightenment thinking to second enlightenment thinking and a critic and the importance of the capacity to achieve presencing in that um is significant in in two respects first of all there’s the need to disembed from your current thinking so if you’re at the analytical rational level of thinking then if you encounter a problem in the world you narrow down your attention you look for ways in which you can reduce that problem to parts and understand it through the interaction of those parts and so on so that’s your go-to method and and it’s easy to underestimate the stickiness of that capacity but these these levels are levels and stages for reasons they’re equilibrium points they they they’re defended from change they’re defended from transcendence that’s the reason why they persist through time and are recognizable you know so widely so the the importance of presencing is that you know in the keegan the robert keegan sense it enables the formation of a a higher level subject this that is disembedded from what it was previously embedded in right right and what it was previously embedded in becomes an object to this new higher level subject so these presencing technologies uh you know including meditation at the individual level and these group uh these group processes of presencing um they you know they they can be brought to bear to achieve this disembedding either group disembedding or the individual disembedding from analytical rational cognition creating the new form of organization with a higher level disembed itself but then can have the higher level cognition installed in it but that second step is equally important to then install the cognition right and how do you scaffold it and so on and and it seems to me the the odd alaskian uh work moves in that direction the second um significance of the presence in capacity is that it brings in new factors in uh that are needed for metasystemic thinking that aren’t purely cognitive that can’t you know identified cognitively in in in with alaskian approach um that need to draw on uh our our capacities that are more generally associated with our emotional capacities uh their pattern recognition abilities and so on um so then this is the marriage of the bride and the groom right so the the female uh principle in a non-gendered sense i have to keep saying that i have a daughter who’s you know wonderful in studies and so on who will keeps me on track there but the but the uh the the female principle involves the access in these pattern recognition intuitive capacities that that can only be accessed through that while they’re in the unconscious mind and therefore generally excluded so the analytical rational level embeddedness in analytical rational thinking excludes our ability to access these capacities yes yeah they they were easily accessible at the pre-modern level you know for mythic level yeah uh at the level of of story but we contracted down to analytical rational thinking which excluded and closed the door to these more more general intuitive capacities and we need to open the door to those for metasystemic thinking so metasystemic thinking is more than just what you would see by straight cognition if you take an analytical rational perspective it can it has to be powered by supplemented by um the these uh social emotional capacities um that can be accessed only by switching off the analytical rational thinking by disembedding from the analytical rational thinking enable impressions and so on to go through to the unconscious and to evoke these these things so that’s you know that’s to me that’s my understanding um of what needs to be achieved by the uh you know in order to produce the marriage of the bride and the groom yeah i see that i see that very much happening in this credit dialogue obviously you have argumentation but you also have socrates daemon and you have following the logos of the argument and you have all the drama uh and you know that is is as equally as important as the argument uh for understanding what’s going on in the dialogues so the dialogues are very much dynamically multi-dimensional and uh and and you know we have people like juhailand and gonzalez and others to thank for saying you know all that stuff wasn’t ornamentation around the argument i remember being taught that as an under here’s the arguments in play dough and it’s like no no all that stuff isn’t arg isn’t ornamentation around the argument it is as equal a value if not more value than the propositional argumentation that’s running at the center of the like you say that the analytic approach so i yeah i i think uh that that marriage of the yin and the yang or the the left and the right if we use ian mcgillcrest i try to use the non-gendered languages to avoid all the culture war stuff surrounding it um i think i i i i i i’m in deep agreement with that and again that that was brought out and high and made central in the neo-platonic tradition nicholas of kusa proposing the coincidence of the opposites and all of that sort of thing as a as a you know you can understand learned ignorance of nicholas of kusa as you know the summation of that socratic process and exactly the integration of uh of the bride and the groom uh like you said and that’s that’s the proper understanding of it but of course if you take take just an analytic uh approach to it you well why would i want how can what the learned ignorance doesn’t mean anything it’s just an oxymoron it’s just right but but it’s it’s failing to grab anyways i’m that’s a core theme that i’m working on in the in the next big lecture series i’m developing you’ll be pleased to know though that that lecture series will not just be a lecture series there’ll be each episode will have you know the the theoretical argumentation but each episode will also have a practice a set of practices i will be teaching to go along so there will be you know practices running in tandem uh with the theoretical argument so that people are right from the beginning set to see this in a more meta-systemic transformative context rather than just an argumentative context um so i you can tell i’m getting very excited talking to you john there’s there’s a lot that you’re sparking in me but we’re running out of time and we’re sort of already touching on the thing you you did a bit of a of a foreshadow but i want to return to the other concern that came up in the comments what and i did raise it last time and you said a bit and you’ve also foreshadowed it a bit it which is how do how what what should we do and what what should be those design features of our spirituality if i can use that extended term or use that term in extension to prevent this movement towards the super organism or what i would call the hyper agent right from becoming a totalitarian tyrant from becoming the next star trek the next generation the borg right we don’t the borg represent the the borg represent the liberal individualist terror of the collective it’s the nightmare of the collective and and it’s supposed to it’s supposed to make oh no liberal individualism is is the only secure path that’s what the the nightmare of the board was supposed to do all right and then right and so i’m using that just as a popular myth right or mythogram as a way of referring to it how do we how do we challenge the individualism that you are properly challenging here and you’re not challenging individual responsibility i wish people would cleanly and completely separate those two from each other right how are you challenging you are this individualism without throwing us into the nightmare of the borg right if i i hope you’re aware of the the star trek reference it’s been in enough movies and tv shows i’m trying to get but so that’s the question and well like i said you’ve foreshadowed a bit but now’s a chance let’s go into it in depth because the like i say the classical liberal individualist sees that the only alternative to individualism is the borg is the kafka s bureaucracy is the stalinist gulag right what like and you’re saying no no no that is not the only alternative so can you unpack that in depth please yes well we if we go back to the evolutionary history of life on earth we can see how evolution solved that problem or we can see what succeeded in evolutionary terms with the formation of collectives at lower levels and you know for example each of us is you know a galaxy of of trillions of cells we are we are an organization of cells and and we’re a highly creative and adaptive organization and so on how has that been achieved by evolution why has evolution produced the kind of collective that we are right and so on so the i mean first and foremost evolution favors collectives that are highly available right and so on right right right right so a borg is machine-like i mean the borg is born of the analytical rational mind right right yeah because the only the only so most nearly all complexity science at present is an analytical rational reduction of true complexity there they that’s why they produce diagrams with you know circles and arrows between them and and so on you know that’s supposedly you know how you represent complex systems but no you that’s static that’s mechanistic so so the analytical rational mind looks at complexity and sees a borg you know that’s its natural thing to do but that metasystemic cognition looks at at living collectives and sees a highly adaptable highly available highly creative system and it begins to see how to achieve that and you can’t achieve a highly adaptable available system with a mechanistic organization you certainly can’t achieve it with a totalitarian organization right you you need variety within the organization itself you need to use an old cybernetic term and the of ross ashbury ashby you need requisite variety so to be able to deal with a variety you know to be able to deal with the world in a high of a high variety world then an entity a collective needs to have high variety within itself right um so the the question then the question is becomes how do you achieve that right and right and this is this is a problem of governance so when i was writing my book evolutions arrow and and i was going through you know the evolutionary trajectory um and it’s all about governance it’s it’s all about the so the the way in which evolution achieved highly available collective highly available collectives was through the institution of of governance the way it solved the cooperation problem um where you begin with competing entities where self-interest prevails the selfish gene prevails speaking metaphorically and you don’t get cooperatives even though cooperatives are in principle far more adaptable and available and successful than than individuals isolated individuals acting acting alone so the way that that evolution solves the cooperation problem is through governance that punishes free riders and rewards cooperators basically so i was writing the book and i was thinking you know this is going to be abhorrent everything i say it’s going to be abhorrent particularly to people at the post-modern level you know who are anti-hierarchy anti-authority allergic to it and so on um and and i knew that the you know that there was an answer but the question was you know that i had to come up with the answer in a concrete way that would be understandable by people and so on the uh the and so that was a major you know task in the book was to to overcome this argument and basically the the you know the theme is is that so we’re sitting here now um we we see the dangers of totalitarian organization and so on and how governance can easily lead the power could lead to exploitation and exploitation um rather than benevolence and so on the and we you can stop your thinking there and that’s largely where the world is at the moment where it says yeah so even even guys like schmackenberger and and so on um you know and and and in the in the game b yeah uh space basically reject governance reject global governance and so on and are looking for bottom up approaches um and jim rutt you know who’s central in the the game b movement um is very explicit about that he says we don’t know the answer to how to organize highly evolvable highly adaptive organizations but we’re going to explore bottom up possibilities they’ve rejected the notion that the answer could be in in top down governance orientated possibilities um so so the current state of thinking of the world is well you know yeah we need so the world’s going to hell in a hand basket we need solutions but the answer can’t be you know governance and global governance in particular because that leads to exploitation and so on the the the sort of internal feeling i had that that identified the task i had in the book was to move people to think there’s something the other side of our current analytical rational conceptions of governance that you need to push through that you don’t hit the wall and turn away and and start looking at you know wishful thinking bottom up approaches you have to push through the the um you know the mechanistic exploitative borg-like uh conceptions of governance to the other side where there’s a far more flexible uh creative uh constrained form of governance that will govern effectively and do what you know there’s an old chinese proverb that um you know the good governor you you should govern the way you fry a fish lightly right uh and there are you know there are emerging conceptions in the leadership literature and so on about how you should do that and so on and it’s it’s instructed in the sense that it’s about um it’s to solve this problem how how can you govern how can you manage in such a way as you preserve the what you absolutely need if you’re going to have a highly available organization that is the creativity the individualism uh entrepreneurialism and so on of the constituent entities within the collective um so so broadly so uh so that’s that’s the importance also of the you know the evolutionary worldview the evolutionary worldview is is saleable in my view is saleable to um to all humans including those who who are currently power hungry in positions of power um you know the one percent um the the ones who who collectively through collective processes actually currently run our western societies and convince us that they’re democratic and we have choices and and so on and everything else so the evolutionary worldview basically um you know says to anyone who’s in a position of power or anyone who wants to be politically involved um that we need governance but we need to arrange that governance in such a way that uh that it has it has the interests of the collective um uh first and foremost when it goes about designing and implementing its governance so that’s that’s the the key how can you constrain the governors so to speak even though they’re processes rather than individuals metasystemically they’re clearly it’s it’s governance processes that you know there’s the president doesn’t run america you know um to an extent putin possibly does run russia but he’s embedded in circumstances that highly constrain what he can do so you need to embed the the the governance processes in constraints that align their interests with the interests of the society as a whole um and so the question then becomes how do you do that and arguably you know the emergence of the magna carta then democracy and so on were attempts to achieve that i think i mentioned in our our first discussion that evolution achieves it through the competition of collectors so at all lower levels you have um multiple multiple proto-collectives emerge uh they’re managed organizations managers will tend initially to use their power to exploit the organizations and not manage the interests the the organization and the interest of the organization as a whole but when you get a large population of of managed collectives competing with one another then the only managed collectives that can survive and do best in evolutionary terms are those that manage for the interests of the organization as a whole right yeah don’t don’t exploit and so on so that’s the mechanism that’s got us up to up to now uh because we had large even at the tribal stage we had large populations of tribes competing with one another that kept them on us so to speak right um but but as the number decreased then exploitation was less constrained by this evolutionary competitive dynamic between societies and that led to um you know that led to revolutions and so on where the individuals rebelled against the exploitation of the the rulers led to democracy and so on but democracy is a very um you know it’s a it’s a an early approximation of what you need to constrain the governors um so the question is you know so you absolutely need constraints uh you start off with raw and simple constraints like democracy the system gets gamed and and they’re less effective than they were a hundred years ago you need you need to introduce new constraints and so on so so in in my writing i’ve got a complex proposal um for a appropriately constraining governance and in effect disaggregating the processes that govern societies and it’s called a vertical market system and i’ll just try and give a very quick flavor for please please right but it is it is complex and and requires you know the the building of complex mental models in order to to sort of see it in its dynamical uh dimensions but but basically so so economic markets were an enormous leap forward in availability uh collectively humans and they at essence what they achieved was that they created a circumstance in which any individual in a society that saw an unmet need that could be satisfied by a product or a service they had the opportunity to to entrepreneurially um develop a product for that unmet need and offer it in exchange for money and which which and they got money which then they could use to to buy what other individuals were producing to meet the you know that individual’s unmet needs so that unleashed enormous the enormous creativity of markets and while markets you know have a bad name not as bad as hierarchies not as bad as the borg they are extraordinarily creative and so on but as a collective intelligence process uh they have what the you know they have the key characteristic of effective collective intelligence um processes that is they can solve problems that no individual within the process can understand or know how to solve yes so a product you know it’s very basic a corporation or an individual can can produce a product that succeeds and sells and is highly successful um uh even though their reasons and analysis of the market when they developed the product and tried to sell it got it totally wrong right right right yeah so that’s the collective trial and error process that’s involved in in markets and and somewhat so but it’s basically this unleashing this thing where any individual has the right to develop a product uh that they can try and sell and if it works if it’ll satisfy an unmet need a previously unmet need so that’s horizontal that’s what i call horizontal markets or economic markets vertical markets are where you do the same the products that can’t be bought and sold on the economic market in the economic market they can’t be uh you know treated as as discrete products that have that don’t have externalities that that can’t be free written with and so on so the products of governance that’s in essence that’s what the products of governance are that’s what distinguishes them from goods and services traded in the economic markets the the products of governance are um uh actions constraints that have collective benefits right right that operate across the collective that that have effects that aren’t isolatable to individuals therefore can’t be bought and sold by transactions between individuals the so another way of saying it is is that the the the elements of governance um that can be bought and sold on what i call a vertical market are the things that can’t be bought and sold on the economic market and they’re often the things that are most important to human beings so we live in this absurd situation at the moment where where we can buy and sell freely and produce um goods in the economic market but we can’t do the same with with governance so uh which produce you know uh the kind of society that you want to live in right yeah a non-borg like society you you so so how do you build a system uh where the creativity of an economic market is translated into a vertical market where you buy and sell elements of governance so basically the economic market was where individuals whether they be corporations or actual persons um you know can develop products for unmet needs in the vertical market um then it’s collective products that are bought and sold by collectors so it’s a disaggregation of democracy democracy is is almost like the democracy is like a an economic market in which you can only buy your products every three years and you have to buy them as you know as a parcel it’s an absurd situation imagine if you have to buy you know economic markets if if they work on that principle they wouldn’t be creative they wouldn’t be dynamic um you know particularly if there are only two suppliers right you have to buy everything as a package every three years that’s how we do governance so you need to disaggregate governance so that the the the whole package is disaggregated bits of governance they can be bought and sold by collectives the collectives that are impacted by those um elements they can be bought and sold in the vertical market so you end up with a a system of of um governance that is that is as dynamic and creative and supports the evolvability that an economic market does but so this is how you you for example um you know you deal with externalities so if a vertical market exists an externality is like an unmet personal need in an economic market it’s a profit opportunity it’s a profit opportunity for any entrepreneur who wants to develop an element of governance that closes corrects that externality and ensures that you know the system works can work cooperatively so so what I say is is just you know the end result is this and it’s the way a society should be organized I mean it’s seems to me trivially obvious that if you want to sell for it the key characteristic of a self-organizing society that self-organizes the good as opposed to our current societies that self-organize destruction of civilization so you need to arrange the society in such a way that it self-organizes the good and you do that by aligning the interests of individuals and collectives with the interests of the whole and governance is an essential component of that if a society is organized in such a way so the good self-organizes so that it’s in the interest of individuals to act in ways that benefit the society then I say that you know when when Rupert Murdoch’s grandchild wakes up in the morning in such a society and he might be as as little concerned about the society the good of the society as his grandfather you know he has no yes he might have you know no pro-social motivations at all yet nonetheless when he thinks when he wakes up in the morning and thinks how he’s going to make a fortune and how he’s going to make his name he will include in his assessment of how for example he might solve the problem of you know the million children who who die of malnutrition in the world today and the many millions more whose cognitive capacity is stunted permanently you know through inadequate diet and so on that will be a profit opportunity things that are going wrong in the world will be a profit opportunity you profit opportunities won’t be limited to making a better tasting ice cream or a more popular breakfast cereal they will extend to you know developing and producing and implementing appropriate governance so anyway that’s no no that’s that’s really really intriguing so this is in your book or this is in other other works it’s in it’s in the it’s in the book it’s but the best explication of it is in and and about the self-organising society that is how to produce how to organise society so that the good self-organises and and the good that’s the antidote to the borg just to bring it back yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that’s that’s in a paper um it’s uh called the self-organising society a grower’s guide um the grower’s guide is a reference to a you know marijuana a grower’s guide which was important in my youth but yeah yeah the i was a child of the 60s um so uh it’s also but it got published as future possibilities uh can a society be uh be constrained so that the good self-organises but but i think it’s in the yeah so but self-organising society grower’s guide a search on google will find that um uh or i could give the link to it probably probably it’s important to give the link to it because it is the answer this yeah if you could provide me the link i’d like to put it in the description for this video that would be great that would be great there’s one final comment i i need to make though is is that an important comment is that you know this this is a highly conceptual um highly complex you know meta solution to the you know to the problem and you know it’s not going to be implemented today tomorrow or whatever um i i often say well you know i don’t know when it will happen on this planet but i know that when galaxies you know self-organize when galaxies are organized as a living entity they will have vertical markets they won’t have democracy and this so so but is it practical in the short term no but the but the what what is important is is as a heuristic as a heuristic that enables uh enables us it’s a mental tool that enables us to stand outside our current systems of governance it’s a regulative ideal like yeah exactly that’s yeah yeah that’s it and so it identifies um you know the how to do you know it make it more mechanistically in the first instance in a way that will produce the greatest benefit constrained governance the most without being a full vertical market so it enable it’s a guide so it’s and and it’s a guide to i mean i worked in government as a policy advisor for years developing um uh wages policy industrial relations policy union policy and so on and it’s basically the the process i use to develop um government policy so so you can disagree you can use the vertical market concepts um to design elements of governance within our current system and you basically design them you know any effective policy will will will it’s the the impositions it imposes will be the minimal necessary to align the interests of uh of those who are going to be affected by the policy with the interests of the whole right and so within such a society uh it maximizes freedom so the the in a in a an effectively governed society the interests of individuals of associations of corporations of nation states is aligned with the interests of the whole so from the perspective of the components of the society um they act with they always act within their own interests they make choices within the these minimal constraints highly evolvable constraints constrained constraints they make choices within those um but they actually have more more choices because in a cooperative system like our bodies as opposed to you know the proto um uh multicellular organisms you have enormous differentiation you have division of labor and so on that’s what characterizes once you solve the cooperation problem as you do in markets as you do within our bodies as you do within cells and so on you get this enormous uh multiplication of diversity you get division of labor you get specialization so you get a multiplication of choices you don’t get a you know constriction of choices uh you don’t get a mechanistic system you get a highly evolvable uh organic system that’s well i think you answered that question very well and i i really want to read that that uh that paper uh about this and if you could provide me with that link i think it’d be crucial to put it in the notes john this has been fantastic and very exciting to to participate in this discussion with you i always like to give my guests the chance to make sort of a final brief comment or uh you know final final word if they before i close things up yeah because you do that i thought there is some short thing i should emphasize and that is that the the critical significance of the evolutionary worldview uh you know the understanding of these large-scale evolutionary processes in which are embedded uh the critical import of it for us as individuals and collectively is this that the nature of the system is such that it only completes successfully with the formation of this global super organism um uh organizing a highly diverse cooperative organization it only completes successfully if we intentionally drive the process forward so it’s a process where we have to wake up to what’s going on uh on this larger scale we have to wake up to it uh and for that we need metasystemic cognition unfortunately because it’s just beginning to emerge we need to wake up to it we need to see that we have a role an active role in completing the process and we then have to as individuals and collectively commit to driving that process forward and completing this the big show the grand project of life on earth you know and then there’ll be there’ll be sequels beyond that but the but in the foreseeable future that’s that’s where we need to go so it depends on us we don’t have a free choice as a lot of the conscious evolution thinking says we have now reached the stage where we have a free choice to guide our own evolution and do you know choose our own evolution no once we understand the big picture we have work to do we have tasks to do um we we have to from henceforth if it’s to be successful drive the process intentionally thank you so much john that was a great summation this has been a great pleasure for me i hope you’ve enjoyed this discussion as well um thank you so very much for coming i really appreciate it it’s been wonderful to talk john and as before it’s wonderful to talk with someone with a mind like yours so thank you thank you john