Learning to Talk; or The Message of ‘Medium’
By Joe Ross & Tomas Björkman
If you search the books section on Amazon for “listening skills” you’ll get over 8,000 results. If you choose other search phrases like ‘how to listen’, ‘become a better listener’, ‘active listening’ etc; the sheer volume of results, while not all of them are actual books, clearly makes it obvious that there is a ‘problem’.
While many people are interested in listening skills, we propose that this is not the correct problem/solution situation where a reader hopes to find the right book of solutions. As we have suggested before that problem/solution orientation is itself reductionist and therefore both inadequate and incomplete.
We suggest that rather than there being a set of problematic areas for people to work on; they are collectively symptomatic manifestations of a faulty collective imaginary in which we are no longer fully functionally able to meaningfully communicate and act. We suggest that their needs to be personal development with a level of growth where we evolve communications between people authentically, and meaningfully over the twitter/social media noise. This necessitates a shift in perspectives.
After all, Medium was not built for collaboration and cooperation, but for single hierarchical voices! Well, seems we have uncovered the Message of the ‘Medium’ then. Marshal would be pleased, no?’
In our last article, Building Bridges Into The Fog, we laid out some of the underlining conditions of the meta-crisis we are currently facing; and began to sketch out a way to constructively find our way through the fog by encouraging attempts, experiments, and innovative interventions based upon a set of shifts in our collective world view and principled intentions as markers upon which to responsibly act. If you haven’t read that article yet, we highly encourage you to do so now, then come back to this follow up piece.
We know that the process of change we are undergoing is both systemic and emergent and will thus have properties that are unknowable in advance. On one hand, that may land as a show stopper. If you know already in advance that you cannot knowingly predict the likely outcomes of actions, then why even bother trying?
Well, if we can’t fully know the desired outcomes in advance, might there be ways to orientate towards the entire complex system and participate in actions which produce likely outcomes in a direction towards what we’d like to see now?
We think we can, and it in part depends on the stories we create and those which we tell ourselves, and adhere to — willfully & knowledgably, or not.
In our previous article, we urged that we all become aware of the water in which we swim — our collective imaginary. In this article, we would like to examine how we might become aware of the collective stories, conscious and unconscious, that hold us spellbound and may perhaps be pushing us in less than desirable directions, i.e. off the cliff.
Realize the need for individual and collective agency
Perhaps the most vexing conundrum we must solve is how to ignite a two prawned global transformation which simultaneously operates at the individual level as well as at the local and global collective level. We often get asked what is best to do? Work with individuals on their personal growth and maturation, or to work with larger sets of individuals at the community, state, national, or trans-national levels? Individuals or Institutions, Private property or the Global commons?
This is very much a ‘chicken or egg’ problem; and the problem with that problem is that it is not the question to pose! In its very formulation it is reductionist and thus is looking for a binary, yes or no / on or off resolution. The true solve is in beginning to see that all is in constant and instant connection to everything else. The individual is both the solo actor and collective participant in the reproduction and creation of society; each mutually influencing that shaping the other entwined in the complexity of interrelated and mutually influencing ecosystems of being. There is perhaps only one planetary system indeed, but for sake of metaphoric untangling and to point to paths of potential individual and collective actions, we will keep the imaginary separation of individual and collective while retaining the larger notion that this is both the case, and not the case, i.e. linguistically artificial in nature. We must learn to live in and with the paradox, attempts to resolve it is a fool’s errand.
The need to start to see the world with new eyes.
The over-arching task at hand is simply too huge and too interdependent to be ‘known’ or ‘seen’ in its entirety. This is because we are embedded in the social/natural ecology and this social/natural ecosystem is constantly in flow. To try to “change”, or “fix” the system is a mistaken notion which we must rapidly disabuse ourselves. Rather, we need to understand that we do not experience the ecosystem — we are it.
We need a new world view, more relevant for the 21st century.
We need new perspectives on ourselves, society and the world. Exactly what these new perspectives will be, we do not know, but a good starting point could be the following five expanded perspectives:
- Our view of ourselves:
We need to rapidly rewrite the origin story we tell ourselves. We are not born to become individuals separated from the universe and one another; rather we are always in deep connection and relation to one another and all that is. As the idea of Ubuntu expresses, ‘I am because we are’. Our sense of interbeing must be fostered to the point where the notion of separation becomes a logical fallacy. And we have to do this without losing our individual selves, without regressing into an undifferentiated collective.
Currently all our systems, institutions, models of governance are premised on the myth of separation. The way we have organized to manage ourselves begins with the mistaken notion that people are just individuals whose actions must be regulated towards developing a fully functional independent being capable of contributing to the well-being of the collective. If you find yourself nodding your head in agreement with that statement and are saying of course that is how it is; that goes to show you how integrated into that story you are!
We are not born to become individuals separated from the universe and one another; rather we are always in deep connection and relation to one another and all that is.
As young adults, it is important to establish our individuality, to differentiate out of the family or our peer group and find your own will and purpose. But as we mature, we should be able to — from that point of individuality — see, feel and in an embodied way perceive our interdependence with all other humans and with the planetary ecosystem. We can then start to realize that I as an individual has a unique gift to contribute to the greater whole.
This perspective also humbles me when I realize how dependent I am on the flukes of history and the randomness of all my ancestors lives that led up to me being here on earth and how all my actions today leave a trace — big or small — into the future of humanity.
This greater perspective on interdependence is not easy for a young person to hold as an embodied and experienced truth. But by making interdependence part of our collective narrative, we can convey a perspective we all can aspire to grow into as we mature.
- Our view of the world:
In our day to day lives we typically understand our surroundings in simple terms of cause and effect. We tend to divide the world into fixed ‘things’ and grouping them into simple categories. This formed the basis of Newtonian science and of reductionist analytical thinking that was at the heart of the industrial revolution and economic progress during the last two hundred years.
The limitations of this world view are that reductionist thinking, as strong as its utility is in some situations, cannot explain the properties of complex, interdependent systems. The reductionistic, analytical way of seeing the world has to be complemented by a holistic, systemic way of understanding the world. This way of seeing the world enables us to appreciate self-organisation and emergence as important aspects of your world.
The limitations of this world view are that reductionist thinking cannot explain the properties of complex, interdependent systems.
When we look out into the world we must move from seeing static things which are personally owned or instrumental in nature and function; to a world of constant becoming and processes. And through the lens of systems thinking we can better nudge our built environments towards a continually enriching and evolving direction which increases the level of abundance while decreasing the systemic entropic pressures on the environment. We also become more comfortable with the fact that the world in not ‘manageable’ but that we can still consciously and proactively contribute to the process of emergence.
- Our view of our mind:
Likewise, we must evolve the way we think of our minds. Our minds are complex, self-organizing systems that are constantly evolving and growing, and we need to shake loose the notion of a fixed end state of being. As individuals and as collectives formed of and by those individuals, we need both to develop our capacities for inner growth while fostering a greater collective imaginary of an evolutionary development landscape which is living, constantly learning, and adapting.
Our minds are complex, self-organizing systems that are constantly evolving and growing.
We must leave behind our Enlightenment view of our mind as a rational machine and the popular concept of ‘homo economicus’: the always relational and self-serving individual. We need to realise that our individual minds are under constant evolution and that this evolution can be supported or hindered by the environment and that well-functioning of our societies are dependent on supporting that evolution in as many of us as possible.
Through this life-long evolution, the strengthening of our inner capacities for perspective taking, meaning making and compassion is not only important for us individuals to survive and thrive in a more and more complex and rapidly evolving world, they are also essential for the survival and thriving of our society.
- Our view of society:
Clearly, we can begin to see that society is not something given which we are born into, but rather is something socially constructed out of our thinking and acting today. We are the players acting out our parts in the play we are scripting in real time.
It is vital that we keep in mind that our human world view is a constructed one. It is built upon the often invisible myths we tell ourselves are true and in turn live according to their precepts. When we say myths, we do not mean that it is not true, rather we are referring to the mythopoetic foundational stories we live by and are too often entrapped in. In our previous article we referred to this as learning to see the water we swim in and we called this deep layer in society our Collective Imaginary.
We can begin to see that society is not something given which we are born into, but rather is something socially constructed out of our thinking and acting today.
Our collective imaginaries are often easier to see in hindsight of course, such as the imaginary which found slavery acceptable due to constructed hierarchal ranking of human beings by race, or origin. Or in Western Democracies the view in which women were too inferior to be given the right to vote. We are vastly simplifying here, as the underlying foundations of these imaginaries are not totally absent today, and this of course is tragic. But this serves to point to what we mean when we say we need to become aware of the water we are swimming in, and where needed, to change it.
Once we begin to change our views of ourselves and how that in turn shapes our views of our world; it becomes perhaps a bit easier to see through the stories we are telling ourselves about our society and cultures.
Here we begin to see that all of our institutions and governance systems were created from a particular stage of human development working with a particular world view. We live as those these are natural laws instead of recognizing them as constructs which may be currently outdated.
We start to realist that even of our need for oxygen and for money can feel equally important for us as individuals, collectively we have very different relationship to oxygen and money. We might even say that they are two completely different kinds of things. Oxygen belongs to our natural world and money to the world of our collective making. Even if all of humanity would come together and decide that we no longer would want to be dependent on oxygen, we could do nothing about this natural fact. Whereas if all of humanity — or even just a nation state — would come together and decide that we no longer want to be dependent on money, money could be gone tomorrow replaced by some other system of allocation. The said, it is that we often think it is the other way around. That our natural planetary boundaries are up for negotiation, but that we blindly need to obey our socially contracted market forces.
- Our view of our lives:
This all naturally shifts how we think of our lives. We realize that we have much more agency, both individually and collectively, than we perhaps thought before. As our ability to provide for humanity’s material needs — but certainly not wants — we will pivot from a focus on individual material success as an end in itself, to a focus on purpose and meaning where one’s richness arises through the web of interbeing with each act a sacred connection in the dance of always learning and becoming.
We will pivot from a focus on individual material success as an end in itself, to a focus on purpose and meaning.
Conclusion
Our hope is that this article serves to illuminate some of the areas which we need to first become aware of, and second to begin to design ways of being and living which will move us towards a state of personal meaningfulness and contentment; in societies organized in such a way where we achieve fair and just governance, equality in production and distribution of both material and immaterial resources, and in a thriving and flourishing balanced planetary ecosystem.
Now that we see the water we are swimming in; we too see that those waters which we need to change run very deep.
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By Joe Ross & Tomas Björkman
