https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=De6ZIHThONI
So welcome everybody to Voices with Raviky. I’m very pleased to be having a virtual meeting when I started called Virtual Campfire with Thomas Björdman. Thomas reached out to me a while back. He was watching Awakening from the Meeting Crisis and he felt and I think he turned out to be very accurate that there was a tremendous amount of consonance between his work and my work. Thomas has written two books that I’m aware of. Maybe he’s written more but these are the two that I’ve been reading. This is excellent and I’m hoping that and then more recently this book. These books I think are really important in thinking about some added dimensions to what I’ve been calling the Meeting Crisis and also some added of how we can awake from it and respond to it. So very excited to have Thomas here. So Thomas, welcome and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you John and thank you for having me on your podcast. Thank you very much. So Thomas, obviously you play an important role within the modern movement, metamodernism. I’ve had wonderful voices with Raviky, with Levin Pascal and he said some very really insightful things. I want maybe we could start with what’s your take on metamodernism? What does that mean to you and why do you feel it’s important to you personally and why is it important for you know in general given our current situation? Yeah, thank you John and thank you for speaking kindly of my two latest book, The Nordic Secret. I should mention that I’ve written that one together with my friend and colleague, Lena Anderson, Danish philosopher and author and then I should also mention that actually the first book I wrote which I think is becoming more and more relevant actually was coming out of the banking world. I’ve been an investment banker for many years and before that I was in mathematics and physics and using then my mathematical skills and modeling in investment banking. So when I left investment banking a bit more than 10 years ago and set up my own foundation in Stockholm, the Oak Island Foundation, the first book I wrote is called The Market Myth and it’s really my experience from the inside in the market as an investment banker for more than 20 years thinking about the strength of the market because of course the market is an incredibly strong human invention. But we should remember that it is a human invention, it’s not a natural phenomena. But also we have I think and I argue in that book put a little bit too much faith in the market and the market has sort of become a guiding star for all the human activities in a way that the market is not just suitable to accomplish. So as good as the market is in many ways, the market is cannot help us with a number of things and I think that is at least here in Scandinavia becoming very evident now in the COVID crisis where we in Scandinavia has sort of privatized the most aspects of healthcare and medicine and all of that and it comes a little bit as a surprise now to the society that the market has not really been able to provide those buffers and been able to be long term enough to help us in this crisis. So that was the first book I wrote and then you mentioned the market myth, sorry you mentioned the Nordic secret which is about the fact that we in the Nordic countries actually had very visionary politicians and intellectuals 100 to 150 years ago who really saw the connection between personal inner development and our ability to make meaning I would say and societal change and how this insight really helped to lift all the Nordic countries from being the poorest non-democratic agrarian countries 150 years ago to become just a few generations later the happiest, richest, most stable democracies in the world and that was really this focus on inner development. So making a long story short there what we did back then was that we started actually a huge number of what I sometimes jokingly call retreat centers all over Scandinavia and we later on made it possible for young adults in their 20s to spend six months at one of these centers with the expressed aim of developing your inner capacities to be able to act as what we today might call conscious co-creators in the creation of modernity and democracy. So that’s quite an amazing story and not that well known. Right and very relevant and pertinent today and then in the world that we create you sort of went through also this historical analysis of sort of a sequence of normativities you know there was the normativity around religion and God and then there was a normativity coming out of modernity around you know science and then you say that has fallen under critique with post-modernism that and this is dovetailed with your first book that has left the market as sort of the de facto default normativity governing everybody but as for reasons you have already articulated while it does a lot of things it can’t do everything and we shouldn’t we shouldn’t deify it we shouldn’t let it be that kind of absolute normativity for us. So this takes me back to so like what um what what do you see now that we’re trying to get beyond the post-modern critique and we’re trying to get to a place where we realize sources of normativity other than the market one of the things you point out in the Nordic Secret was exactly that network right that that you know there was it was a cultural project uh that network of retreat centers almost like secular monasteries where people were going in order to you know both individually and collectively and engage in kind of you know profound transformation and cultivate what I would call wisdom you know an ability to get a reflective awareness of their own self-deception inculcate rationality enhance the capacity for meaning making so what I’m trying to now ask to put it sort of in it bring it brought to a point uh Thomas is how does all of this excellent work that you’ve done and you were I would you know I got the term from you you know the meta crisis which you know people are now using about the COVID which I think you deserve a little bit more credit for the idea of the meta crisis about systemic interweaving of crises and one of the things COVID is doing is disclosing that’s this the the systematic meta crisis so what does all of this now what’s the connection between all of this beautiful analysis and well I’ll use your term you know the meta crisis well how do we how do we take the what you’ve given us and how do we apply to the meta crisis is that a fair question yeah absolutely and I mean that’s really how my thinking and writing has been has been going it has really been a starting point of from analyzing the market and looking at the market as a phenomenon as a human-made phenomenon that has almost been deified at least we had deferred a lot of normative power to the market that the market does not have at all really so that brought me into thinking about how we socially construct this world and the starting point of the world we create is really as you say it’s a historical description of how we as humans develop this unique capacity for humans to construct a symbolic universe yes through our language we cannot some animals can can use what you could call an index language which means that they could have one sound for one type of enemy approaching and another sound indicating another natural phenomenon but what is unique with the human symbolic language is that we can abstract from that concrete level and and have concepts that has really no correspondence to the physical reality so for example a stone or a tree of course has uh correspondence in the physical reality but there is no correspondence for justice beauty democracy money corporations nation states or all of these things are in fact a result from our human ability to construct a symbolic language and with the help of this symbolic language we can start creating a symbolic universe or a what some sociologists would would call a social imaginary or even better a collective imaginary yeah something that comes from our imagination but we share it collectively and this is a unique human ability and it’s easier to see this collective imaginary if we look at other societies than ourselves if we look at at a pre-modern society or even an indigenous society then we could see this collective imaginary how you can start believing in concepts like spirits and totem and deities and and we can a bit a bit look down on that and think that that is naive and so on but my point is really that this collective imaginary is something that is evolving throughout human history and very often it’s evolving more or less linearly but at some points in human history we outgrow our collective imaginary and then we have a huge transformation of our whole social world and I think and that’s why I think that the meta crisis is a useful concept because now we realize that all these different crises that we see today like the environmental crisis political crisis or psychological crisis that they cannot be addressed individually because the crisis is on such a fundamental level that it is really in our collective imaginary and that the collective imaginary that we are living under today which we got essentially from from the enlightenment transition when we went from a dogmatic religious way of looking at the world to a rationalistic scientific way of looking at the world and and this worldview this collective imaginary has of course been extremely powerful and useful for humanity because it has given us modern medicine and human rights and democracy and and all of that that we would never want to be without but then at the same time I believe that we have now used the the the capacity and we we reached the end of the capacity of this both worldview and collective imaginary and that we are at this transition point in our social global system and from physics I have got this model of self-organizing complex systems and thinking in systems theory and thinking in self-organizing systems I think that is so useful to do that and that that is something that is applicable of course not just a natural science phenomena but also to your field of cognition yes to see to see the mind not as some sort of a machine made out of neurons but much more like a self-organizing dynamic system that has the potential for evolution and evolving throughout our lives and if you look at culture in the same way you look at culture as a self-organizing complex system then you realize that this can evolve but then also that you come to one of these eventually come to one of these transition points phase shifts point phase shifts point or bifurcation point where system needs a radical transformation that usually entails either a breakdown in complexity or a breakthrough to a more complex more elegant way of of organizing and I think that’s that’s where we are right now humanity we are at one of these bifurcation points and now it’s either breakthrough or or breakdown wow so that’s excellent thank you there’s two two things came up for me when you said that so you you invoked a deep analogy between cultural culture as a dynamical system and cognition and I was thinking about you know one of the phenomenae studies insight and you know you’ve been framing things in a particular way and your frame tells you what’s salient or relevant and then you get to a point where that framing is actually reporting you from solving yeah and then you have to go through like this self-organizing criticality you know the system has to destabilize it has to become critical oh sorry they’re doing some sort of okay the problem you got there uh the system has to become you know critical it breaks down entropy increases for a while you get you get that phase of criticality and as you say criticality criticality can either mean that the system collapses as you said goes to a low state or what happens in insight is right the criticality breaks the structure up enough so that a new structure becomes possible unless you get the aha experience and of course if you do this on a real large scale with your mind that that’s when you have this sort of inner transformation or you have a metanoia yes exactly and as and as with all self-organizing complex system in in these transitions you have the possibility of emergence yes yes something come something completely new emerges that you could not really predict nor explain in the previous state of of the complex system and and that really for me as a physicist that really made me understand that personal inner transformation a metanoia is actually possible i mean before before that i thought that this was some sort of religious nonsense you know a new age spirituality but now i can see how this is actually the probably the the the most straightforward way for nature to organize consciousness it is it is to provide a general function that would then take in and process information and energy and then use that to self-organize and then to to transform that that would be the natural way for nature to in a very efficient way achieve consciousness that’s amazing well you know you know i’m deeply concerned with all of this work and that’s what i was exactly trying to propose with the with the with the analogy to insight because what happens in insight is that you get a new function that’s what the high is you get the emergence of a new understanding emergence of new options and so the idea that the culture might be at that point and and also you were you were putting your finger i’m working on a book with daniel great called the cognitive continuum you know from insight all the way up to you know enlightenment how the same machinery you can see the same machinery at different scales of analysis and complexity when we look at cognition so there’s a there’s the same machinery that’s happening in the aha moment as you said it’s systematic and more comprehensive but that’s what’s ultimately happening when people are going through metanoia the deeply transformative experiences so i mean yes i agree with that absolutely absolutely and now if we then talk about society and our collective imaginary i think that we now are at the point again of criticality where we need to have such a transformation such a collective metanoia yeah again and we should remember and i spend the first part of my book the world we create in in showing that humanity has or different cultures has gone through these sorts of processes many many times when we sort of went from going back to your original question when we went from sort of an indigenous tribal society a hunter-gatherer society into a pre-modern civilization and then from the pre-modern civilization into modernity yeah and now we are through post-modernity transitioning into something beyond post-modernity that we might call meta-modernity or whatever we we would like to to call that and it and then of course it becomes important to to ask ourselves this question what is it then this system that that is about to transform what is this collective imaginary and how does the transformation of this collective imaginary relate to our individual transformations and consciousness and and ability to hold and replicate this collective imaginary and the first thing of course that that is makes this so very difficult is that we do not really today outside academic circles of of anthropologists and sociologists we don’t have a everyday language for this collective imaginary i mean for for for for all of us this collective imaginary is like the water for for the fish yes it’s something we swim in and we take it for granted but we don’t really think about it right but of course um what’s different from from the fish in the water is that for for the fish the water is a natural phenomenon that it’s not aware of whereas for us this collective imaginary is not a natural phenomenon it is a human made phenomenon but mostly made out of our unconscious reproduction and slow evolution of what we inherit from previous generations you mean culture you mean culture yeah exactly i mean culture is part of this collective imaginary so is our world view everything the market is a very important part of our collective imaginary previous collective imaginaries then of course god and religion took up a large part of that collective imaginary and and what is interesting with these collective imaginaries is that we as humans have got this tremendous collective freedom to come up with almost any collective imaginary we we could think of and if going back in history of course i mean uh going back just a thousand years going going back a couple thousand years there were literally thousands or tens of thousands independent cultures that were living in their completely own collective imaginary and and then through a bit of Darwinistic competition between various collective imaginaries some proved stronger and survived like for example judaism has been able to survive as a collective imaginary for for for for such a long time whereas other competing collective imaginaries from 3 000 years ago has has gone uh extinct so so that is amazing that we have this freedom to create all of this but that also creates a problem because we need for a society to function we need to live in the same roughly the same collective imaginary for us even to be able to coordinate communicate and direct the actions of the of the collective so how do we sort of fix this collective imaginary and and then sociologists have come up and this is one of the important postmodern insights is both the existence and the importance of these socially constructed uh realities and the narratives involved and the meta narratives involved in these structures to realize that these are really human constructions but at the same time that we construct these realities these imaginaries we also have to fix them somewhere and that is what the sociologist sometimes calls the ultimate authority yes in that collective imaginary and of course in the pre-modern world that ultimate authority was usually god so not just having a random world no you have you had the ultimate explanation why is the world in this way it is because god has created it in this way why should we believe in these 10 commandments it’s not just that moses gave us and he thought they were good no they need to be absolute if we should fix the collective imaginary so we need to say they are given by god and then when we stop believing in god as an ultimate authority during the enlightenment and we got this this rationalistic scientific scientific worldview then science took a bit the role in our society as this ultimate authority we were looking for the scientific explanation and the scientific answer but then of course with post-modernity we we start to realize that even science is in some important ways a social construct and that science do not have every answer so what happens then and then of course interestingly enough post-modernity does not come up with its own ultimate authority and then as you pointed out earlier i i argue in my book that the fact that in the post-modern world view where we realize the that all these collective imaginaries and narratives are human constructs then our social imaginary becomes completely not anchored any longer and we need to find yeah we need to find some sort of anchor point and that’s where the market comes in and of course the post-modern philosophers are very critical towards the market but somehow the market slips in the the back door as a default because there is no other ultimate authority so then today it’s natural when we ask why is the world the way it is why is it that an investment banker earns five or ten times the salary of a university professor well it’s the market the market has the answer so yeah what should we produce well the market will will will tell you that and then we started to put a lot of authority into the market and again a little bit too much and we are now starting to to realize that so so then of course the the question becomes then so if we had this pre-modern world with its collective imaginary and with god as the ultimate authority then we had the modern world with science as the ultimate authority now a post-modern transition where the market has taken up too much power and now we’re starting to realize that what will be the next step what will come out of this what sort of world view what sort of social imaginary and and what sort of ultimate authority will will emerge here and i wish i could have had an answer on that i wish i could have an answer on that but but but you can only speculate but but just realizing that we are on this evolutionary path and that we are at this very very critical point in history because the previous times where we have had civilizations collapsing and collective imaginaries collapsing there has always been other competing contenders that have been sort of then given the space to rise up and take the power of of of a civilization but now we are really interconnected in one global civilization and that again from the virus right now that becomes evident to everyone that that that we only have one world and we more or less only have one collective imaginary as well now and if that one is falling apart i would argue that then we cannot just trust natural selection and random walk we actually need to to make a conscious step into something new and that will be a collective leap a little bit a collective leap of faith into something that we do not know what it is but we need to dare to let go and and collectively take the leap right right well that was uh that was really that was a fantastic synoptic integration of your argument thomas thank you for that when you laid that out a couple things came to mind um um with you know especially when you were you know when you’re looking at a noia within a collective imaginary and how we are understanding how to deeply interwoven with you know you know interpersonal and interpersonal transformation and um and so um i’ll use a term that i’m unhappy with but we don’t have an alternative one right now there seems to be an important spiritual dimension to everything we’re talking about and we yeah that even things that seem so bottom line like the market have a lot of have almost numinous like deity aspect to them and people serve the market and the market justifies the way the world is and so it seems to me that part of what we are talking about then is well at least i’ll make a point that i’ve been arguing for is that um and i know you’re not claiming this you’re not claiming we can unlearn everything that these previous revolutions have given us and we can sort of go back like to an indigenous world we can’t go back uh to an axial world right so and similarly we can’t unlearn science so it sounds like part of the project has to be uh to overcome some of the the divides that were so fundamental to the grammar of the of the collective imaginary that were falling down that’s falling down like the divides between science and spirituality the divides between mind and body the divides between you know you know subjectivity and objectivity the divides between you know my own personal space and and my own personal cognition and distributed cognition and what i see is um one of the differences i see is postmodernism called those questions called those divides into question but what i see a lot of people doing your work my work that people are talking with is we’re trying to go from oh yes yes those divisions don’t work but simply criticizing them is insufficient what we have to do is actually what does it look like to go beyond those divides what does it look like to try and stitch back science and spirituality try to stitch back you know uh that you know the mind and the body and the person and the world and so although i don’t have an answer either i think that there is a that there’s a both and situation yes yeah here again we we need we need to go beyond the divides but then also the divides can some sometimes be be be helpful and what we definitely need to do is that in the post modern insights that that all of these things are just human construct we tend to tend to mix everything and put everything on the same footing and just say that things like every perspective is equally valid in every situation and things like that and and that is of course not the case so for for example if we look at our world today so today for me as an individual i am equally dependent on air to breathe on oxygen and on money to survive in today’s society i need to have oxygen and i need to have money but we also need to understand that they are fundamentally two different kinds of things they are ontologically different even if i as an individual for me as an individual i am totally dependent on oxygen and on money we as a collective even if every person on earth came together and we decided that we do not want as humans to be dependent on oxygen we can’t do it we can’t do it but if we came together everyone on on on the earth or even just everyone in a nation state and said we don’t want to be depending on money any longer we want to invent some new mechanism to allocate the goods in society money would be gone tomorrow yeah so so it’s there is a fundamental difference between between a natural phenomenon like oxygen and the socially constructed thing as money but what is sad here and is that in many cases we we mix this up so sort of yeah we we tend to believe that that the planetary boundaries is something that is up for negotiation whereas the market forces we just need to obey well of course it’s completely different i mean the the planetary boundaries will always be there whereas the market forces is actually under our collective agency we can change them but we need to do that on a on a collective level so so yes in one way the distinctions are important but then on another way of course every distinction is just an some sort of arbitrary perspective of the world because at the end of the day as you point out there is only one interconnected system it’s just one system but it’s very very difficult to to comprehend and take decisions if you need to keep the whole of the universe from big bang until the end of the universe in mind so then of course it’s a very it’s a strong tool we have in for example science and physics to understand that if we are looking at the stone falling to the ground we don’t actually to understand that particular aspect need to take everything in the universe into account there are no gods interfering in that the stone does not have a will it’s a very simple equation and of course that is strong so sometimes it’s very it’s it’s very powerful and very strong to have this analytical ability to divide this complex world into small small pieces but then in other cases it’s it’s devastating and we need and we need to see it all as a as a one system interacting and that that system also includes the for example the subjective experiences of our consciousness so in this totality of the world there is there are those natural objects there is our subjective experiences that has got real impact on our action and therefore impact on the world but then also the comp the collective subjectivity that we have put into the collective imaginary and reified into some sort of of social reality that meets us as individuals as almost as objective reality as as the stone or the water well that that thank you for that that that was sort of weak where the point i was trying to lead to is that and i like the way you put it at the both end like so the the critique of all of these of all these polarities of course is important destabilizing introducing the criticality but i agree with you that simply letting the complexity fall away is not what we want the criticality to give us so what what’s what what i hear you saying is you know there’s there’s these there’s there’s a you know there’s a scientific aspect there’s a like i said this broadly spiritual aspect part of what i’m understanding what i’m proposing to you is part of the metamodern understanding with spirituality is a recognition and reappropriation of our agency within the collective imaginary and turning that towards the project of facilitating wisdom and yes i think and then and then and but then what you’re now saying in addition to that is we have to we have to take great ontological care in how we’re trying to do the the both end you know when we’re trying to get beyond we don’t want to simply remove the distinction that are actually necessary for for you know appropriately engaging in the reappropriation we don’t want to conflate the spiritual with the scientific so that’s that’s part of what i’m so i think yeah so i think that in in post-modernity we we have this sort of relativistic perspectival that every perspective is equally valid i think the next step is some sort of integrated perspectivism saying that for any problem the more angles the more perspectives you can view this this situation from the more information you will get out but it’s very important to discern the how important the different angles are in analyzing a certain a certain phenomena so it’s not that the yeah you you need as many perspectives as possible but then it’s a little bit more complicated than just throwing them all in in in in a bucket and picking one randomly no you you need to understand what sort of information each perspective is best at best at providing so one of the things that i’ve been trying to use as a model i don’t claim it’s an exhaustive model but is the practice of synoptic integration and cognitive science where you have the different perspectives given to you by the different disciplines the entities they look at the language they use the type of methods they use and you’re not trying to reduce them all to one homogeneous thing you’re not trying to reduce psychology or science right but what you’re trying to do is afford a you know a conceptual a conceptual vocabulary a theoretical grammar so that instead of them right right i’m not trying to reduce them all to one perspective and i’m not just saying oh well they have nothing to do with each other i’m trying to afford a synoptic integration so that they can talk to each other mutually inform and mutually transform each other so if you get that they they right that’s how at least i’m trying to understand how we can steer between you know trying to get a model perspective or just say well all the perspectives are they they’re all incommensible they don’t have anything to do with each other they’re all equally good which is this fundamental presupposition behind relativism right yeah they’re actually atomically isolated from each other i think both the mono perspective and the atomically isolated idea i think those are both false yes for multiple reasons and so trying to get try to as you say you know uh you know when you’re trying to do synoptic integration you’re trying to remember the differences uh because they’re important uh because you know neuroscience can do things that psychology just can’t do and vice versa but they also need to talk to each other they need to transform and inform each other and so that’s the model i’m trying to get you know what how we try to go forward we try to take that that that skill set of bridging so we can get you know this dynamic convergence between perspective and see if we can scale that up to the more comprehensive perspectives that are in our culture right now that’s that’s that’s how i’m trying to afford a way of responding to people yeah absolutely and and as as as many writers have have pointed out so far in in history when we have gone from one collective imaginary or one paradigm of of uh worldview to the next one we have usually um completely disregarded the the previous worldview and we have even developed allergy against it it’s a bit like it’s a bit like also when we as humans grow i mean the the teenager does not at all want to recognize the child he or she was three years ago right but as a really mature person you should be able to integrate your experiences throughout life without these reactions so so when we went from an from a tribal society into a pre-modern monotistic religious society everything tribal was barbaric and and was sort of pushed away and when we went during the enlightenment into the rational scientific worldview everything from religion and spirituality was thrown out and again with the post-modern way of thinking then we are throwing out science and and and everything so what we need to do now that’s a starting point at least of course as many have pointed out is that we need to try to integrate the the insights the very strong insights of all these different ways or modalities or perspectives of viewing the human life and society and and situation without bringing in the the limitations and try to get some sort of integral and that’s of course where integral comes from an integral perspective on on the world but i don’t think it’s just that then we also have that then we also have this emergent phenomena that we don’t really know where what what it is so it will just it will not just be an integration of this a sum of this there will be something more elegant emerging after this as well i think it’ll be complexification the the difference between you know just an integration and a complexification with systems complexified they simultaneously integrate and differentiate yeah the system complexifies that’s when you get emergent functions and i think i think trying to afford complexification within the synoptic integration is a way of trying to not cause but trying to afford that emergence make a space for it you know yeah yeah and that and there is where i think that the connection between our personal inner growth and development the complexification of our cognitive system or our total sort of inner system the complication of our total inner system plays an important role in facilitating the transition the breakthrough to a new more complex and perhaps also more elegant way of organizing our society a more complex and elegant way because in in any any of these different states of the evolution of human human society human society there needs to be a possibility for enough many people in the population to actively engage with the culture and with the collective imaginary otherwise it would just be a dead dead book or something you need to have so you need to have some and i don’t know where where this you need to have five or ten percent at least in the population that are really on a cognitive and emotional level of complexity to really understand and engage and actively not not just passively reproduce but actively be able to reproduce and develop this so i i think that the most important thing that we could actually do to help this emergence of a new more complex civilization is to again just like we did in scandinavia and the nordic secret the nordic secret is to help a critical number of of people to mature enough to be able to participate in actively participate as co-creators as enlightened as conscious co-creators of this new society this new collective imaginary and again just like with a with a nordic society the the amount of people necessary i think is dependent on their distribution in society and the beauty with the nordic secret was that these 10 percent of each generation that were able to participate in these personal development activities retreats they were actually from all sorts of social backgrounds so they were middle class but also a lot of working class and from the farming part of population so you ended up with 10 percent fairly evenly distributed in society and i think that that has much much larger possibility to succeed and even having 20 percent in some sort of isolated elite of of society so so that’s where we are again helping enough many people to develop the inner capacities to become conscious co-creators of the next level of the society and the point of the nordic secret of the nordic secret was exactly the point that this isn’t some idealistic fantasy this is a historical reality this actually happened yeah yeah yeah yeah i usually say that i don’t i don’t see the nordic secret the nordic experience as a blueprint for what we should do today we could certainly do this in other ways we might not have to create these rich small retreat sensors out in nature even if i believe strongly in that concept and that is what we are doing at the oak island foundation but it could be done in different in different ways today and and i’m for example involved in a digital platform to facilitate personal development called 29k.org so i think that we might be able to do to use digital tools to help facilitate this so it’s not a blueprint but it is certainly a case study showing that this is not a fantasy this has actually worked and it worked differently but it worked well in both denmark and norway and sweden and that was three different implementations and fairly independent implementation but about the same time and it worked beautifully in all three countries and we and we still see even though we’ve forgotten about this and even if we are starting to lose it i’m the first one to say that as well that we are starting to lose it in in the scandinavian countries we still see the effect of this effort i said i just i think that’s a really important argument you just made about right how effective it was how it was not just one culture but three different countries um i think these are all important points so it’s always it’s almost like a scientific study you know full-scale scientific in three different societies a bit different implementation and then measure this over 50 100 years to see what happens and you can see that it worked of course now of course now this was going from a pre-modern society into a modern society now we’re going from a modern or post-modern society into some something new so then this becomes even more important but perhaps also more challenging for us as individuals because this becomes more and more complex and you need to be able to hold more and more perspectives and emotions and we are going from a monocultural society into a multicultural society and that complexifies things a lot yeah so this becomes even more important now yes i think there’s going to have to be emerging uh you know emerging new psychotechnologies new emerging ecologies of practices um yeah i yeah i i think it’s important what you just said that you’re not proposing this as some rigid template that we just transposed from the past and now you’re taking it as like as a really as you said you know a really powerfully um comprehensive historical case study that tells us that something like this is possible and that’s an alternative to a kind of utopianism you’re not oh here’s my vision of the future and i can guarantee that if you just do x y and z right if we just do this right that’s a totalitarian you’re not doing that at all you’re saying no no no i’m saying we’re going through a change here’s something deeply analogous let’s try and make the analogy as best we can to where we are right now i think that’s a very important alternative to both a nostalgia that says no let’s go back somehow let’s get back to the world and right or no no a utopianism it says i know for sure what the future looks like it denies the importance of emerging and that and that and that is also of course um um why why this transition is is in many ways more more difficult than the previous one from pre-modernity into modernity and it’s not just that we have this sort of emergence the emergence phenomena that we need to leave leave space for it’s not um just that we have the technological rapid rapid evolution that we do not really uh know what society what the technological possibilities will be in just 10 years and i think that the future arrangement of of society and especially the next implementation of the market and of democracy i think that that will be very much dependent on development in in for example blockchain technology and and other things so exactly what this will be we will truly be emergent but there’s one more thing that complicates things and and that is that a hundred years ago it was actually possible at least plausible to argue for a utopia saying that that this is where we want to be in 20 years in 50 or in 50 years let’s go there and it’s it’s easier to to bring up support for an idea when you can clearly articulate an end state yes and of course we can’t do that because of the rapid technological development because of the emergent properties of of the future but also because i believe that the future will be that rapidly constantly evolving that instead of the future being a state i think we have to realize that the future will be a process yes yes yes okay so so our our idea about the future is not about a future state it is it’s not about supporting the emergence of a future state it’s it’s supporting the emergence of a good future evolutionary process exactly where we become self-conscious about the importance of integrating the inner personal development and actively integrating the co-creation the emergent co-creation of our collective imaginary as well i think that’s excellent yeah yeah i think that’s a very important thing i have a convergent argument about you have to give a kind of a teleology a kind of theological thinking in which we’re trying to get to the end state the completion the perfection you’ve got to give up those ways of understanding how we’re going to move into the future i i think that’s a very very important thing you just said thomas yeah but it’s difficult because again as you mentioned many times in your series our human mind is not made for for these things i mean we we want to see the simple solution we want to see a picture of where we are going we want to know what is right and what is wrong so it puts a huge demand on not not only the thought leaders of societies and the philosophers but also really on every person in society that that should be part of the democratic process of the society about so education and our support the society support for for everyone to be able to develop the inner capacities to be part of this i think that is super important if we are not going to end up with a two tier society or something like that well you’ve been an example i mean you’re you’re not just talking and everybody should know this thomas is out there trying to actually you know put into into existence all these things that he’s talking about you should know that you know and he in a sense you’re running a lot of the case studies that need to be done right now yeah i think that’s what we need to do now we need to prototype yeah we need to experiment and we need to prototype i mean what is it like to be creating a co-living space for example where you try to create a culture that is a deliberately developmental culture a culture that is actually holding everyone’s development and trying to bring out the best in every person how do you create such a culture on small scale how do you experiment with these things so that’s it’s funny it’s funny to do it to to work with these things this has been really really great thomas i mean i’m glad that that you know you you were able to well i’m grateful that you were here and you you so you know you were able to articulate your vision and you’re so much because i want more people to be aware of your work and what you’re thinking and also as i just mentioned what you’re doing and what’s happening and so i wanted to ask you if there’s any sort of final summative not to bring things to completion is there any final summative thing you want to say uh no i think it’s important that we we try to stay open in in in rapid change and when we have virus or war it’s very easy to to want to shut down to go back yes yes shut down go back okay but uh we know that there is no uh no going back there is a lot to learn from history there is a continuing continuity there is a continuum that we shouldn’t we should realize the importance of our roots and the more well we know our roots the more rooted we are the more are to uh explore and experiment and and to dare those leaps of faith both the individual leaps of faith but also the collective ones that we are now facing that’s excellent so um thank you again thomas thank you john to take a look at thomas’s uh books the two i held up and again i know first when you mentioned uh is it the market myth or the myth of the market the market myth yeah and also thomas has some uh some youtube videos that are out there uh that uh maybe thomas you can send me uh some links for things i can put on each of the notes for this video so people can get more in contact with uh with your work so i will do that john so thank you for a uh very nice conversation oh it was excellent and i’m sure we’ll talk again