On the previous episodes of Fractal Coalitions Theory…
In the second post, I tell the story of a group of people attempting to create a kind of all-welcoming evolving meta-coalition, but which was systematically unable to welcome certain perspectives, and instead seemed to incentivize me to repress those. In this post I’m going to talk about what happened when I noticed this was happening, and how that played out over the following years.
(This post may not make much sense without the previous one; the first one is less critical.)
Up until my “Non-Naive Trust Dance” insight in 2020, I had oscillated between two broad coalitions:
This structure maps loosely onto what The Guru Papers calls “goodself” and “badself”. This is ironic because part of the whole aim of the culture was be post-dualistic, not talking in terms of good or bad, but it turns out that if you try to get rid of certain ideas on a conceptual level, you don’t necessarily get rid of the underlying dynamics of social power and perspective.
(Of course, there were other moments when if you asked why I was doing what I was doing, the answer would have been orthogonal to this: eg “I’m trying to win this ultimate frisbee game” or “I’m figuring out whether today is a good day to get groceries” or “I’m trying to grow my business”. Although sometimes even in such cases there would have been some sense of “and I’m doing this collaboratively (or not)”.)
And in spring of 2020 I realized that I was going kind of crazy oscillating between these two views, and desperately prayed for some sort of way to hold them both at the same time. And, after a few months of grappling with my confusion, I was graced with an insight that I’ve come to refer to as my “NNTD insight” (NNTD stands for “non-naive trust dance”).
The NNTD insight in large part consisted of:
» read the rest of this entry »I would like to give a caveat that this whole essay is more reified and more confident in what it says than I would like it to be. I am currently finding that I need to write it that way in order to be able to write it at all, and it longs to be written. I should probably write this on all my posts but shh.
I observed to my friend Conor that for a given conversation you can ask:
what forces are running this conversation?
In other words, you can treat the conversation as having a mind of its own, or a life of its own (cf Michael Levin; these are essentially the same thing). It has some homeostatic properties—attempting to make it do a different thing may be met with resistance—sometimes even if all of the participants in the conversation would prefer it!
From here, you can ask:
if the conversation has a mind of its own, what is that mind’s relationship with the minds of the individuals who make up the conversation?
(Note that “conversation” here spans everything from “a few people talking for a few minutes” up to Public Discourse At Large. A marriage or friendship can also be seen as an extended conversation.)
This lens provides a helpful frame for talking straightforwardly about the ecstatically satisfying experiences of group flow that I had as part of an experimental culture incubator in my 20s, and why I came to view those experiences as somewhat confused and misleading and even somewhat harmful—while simultaneously, I don’t regret doing it, and I maintain that they were meaningful and real! (And re “harmful”—we talked at the time about it being an extreme sport, so that’s not an issue in the way it would be if it were advertising itself as safe.)
My previous post, Conversations are Alive, began its life as a short intro to this post, but it got so long that it needed to be its own post. It describes many kinds of ways that something can be in charge of a conversation that’s not any one individual in it, but an emergent dynamic. What begins as bottom-up emergence becomes top-down control, which we may feel delight to surrender to the flow of, or we may feel jerked around and coerced by. Even oppressive silences aren’t mere deadness but an active force. And sometimes multiple conversational creatures are fighting for dominance of the frame of the conversation.
These are all descriptions of what happens when the mind of the conversation doesn’t know how to be self-aware (we-aware?) and to directly negotiate with its participants. But what about when it does?
When I look at the kinds of conversations we were working to co-create in the culture incubator I lived in in my 20s, they were characterized by a deliberate intention to have a strong sense of collective mind, but to have it be a mind that is awake (not on autopilot) and that is actively dialoguing with the participants of the group such that they are knowingly choosing to surrender to it, to open to it, etc. And sometimes, we would have an experience of succeeding at this, which (as I mentioned above) was ecstatic.
The satisfaction of surrendering to a larger intelligence which includes you and accounts for you and incorporates what you care about is hard to overstate. And where you’re not just taking someone’s word for it that it’s accounting for your cares—you can tell that it does! You can feel it in real-time! It is incredibly compelling and life-changing for many people. It gives an immediate taste of a possibility for how people can relate and decisions can get made, that is obviously in some key way more sane than what is usually going on. Imagine the flow of when you get into a really good jam with someone on an intellectual topic you both care about… except it’s incorporating many different levels of abstraction of what’s going on in different peoples’ lives, and is capable of navigating tricky territory of interpersonal feedback and differences of values.
It’s awesome. People feel more alive and sometimes their faces even become dramatically more attractive. Shame falls away. Judgment gives way to curiosity. Things get talked about that had felt unspeakable. Apparently incompatible viewpoints appear as part of a larger whole. The nature of humans as learners and the cosmos as an upward spiral become apparent and obvious. These experiences have been the inspiration for many hundreds of hours I’ve since spent researching and experimenting with collaborative culture, trust, and the evolution of consciousness.
Everything I’ve said above is true, good, and beautiful. It’s real. It happened to me, countless times, and continues to happen to and for others, and I yearn for more of it in my life. It continues to feel like a huge pointer towards what humanity needs in order to handle its current constellation of crises.
So what’s the thing that I said at the top seems to me to be confusing, misleading, and even harmful?
» read the rest of this entry »Every now and then, one finds oneself in a cosmic struggle between two truths that have a hard time being seen at once. I’ve been in one of those for a few years, and thought I would try to describe what I see from my current position.
A story to help illustrate it: I was talking with a good friend of mine a few years ago, and he described a feeling that he was stuck in a pit, trying to get out, and asking others for help, and kept getting back this message to the effect of “you’re doing this to yourself. we can’t help you until you decide to stop doing it to yourself.” There was a sense that he was unworthy of even being considered for help without somehow changing first.
And I said: yeah. I see you in the pit. And on behalf of the universe, *we are doing what we can* to help you out of the pit, without you needing to fix yourself first. You are not unworthy. And also, our capacity is very limited right now—including that some people themselves are still confused about all this. And so to the extent that you CAN help yourself out of your pits, even a little, that helps bridge the gap and helps us help you. But if we knew how, we would meet you fully, exactly where you are, without demanding anything.
This view of mine was hard-won, having spent years struggling with a similar issue only to suddenly have this insight where I GOT that the kosmos contained a force that fully wanted to meet me where I was at, and I could tell that it did because *I was a participant in that force*—I could feel its will flow through me, in my desire to meet others where they were at. (And sometimes parts of me are others to other parts of me.).
And yet, over the years, both before and after this insight, I have tasted the other side of it. I’ve gotten glimmers of the truth in C.S. Lewis’s “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” I’ve felt strain and struggle suddenly shift into eternal boundless perfection—perfection that, when I look in the rearview mirror, was there the whole time, through the struggle. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve arrived in such a place. And there was truth to “nobody else could do it for me”, truth that it involved letting go of my grievances without trying to sort them all out first, and truth that that loving presence was always there holding me and supporting me and rooting for me.
» read the rest of this entry »Suppose you and I are out having a canoe trip. We’re spending the day out, and won’t be back for hours. Suppose there’s a surprise wave or gust of wind and… you drop your sandwich in the water. Now we only have one sandwich between us, and no other food.
If we were in this situation, I’d want you to have half of my sandwich.
That wouldn’t be a favour to you, or an obligation, or a compromise. I’d be happy to give you half my sandwich. It would be what I want. It would be what I want, under the circumstances. Neither of us wanted the circumstances of you having dropped your sandwich, but given that that happened, we’d want you to have half of mine.
Yes—this is more accurate: we would want you to have half of my sandwich.
However, this requires us having a We that’s capable of wanting things.
To explore this, let’s flip the roles—suppose it’s me who dropped my sandwich. I’m assuming that you feel the sense in which of course you’d want me to have some of yours. If you need to tweak the story in order to make that true, go for it. Eg maybe you wouldn’t if “I” dropped my sandwich but you would if say an animal ran off with it—not a version though where you lost my sandwich and you’re trying to make it up to me! That’s a very different thing.
So suppose my sandwich has been lost and your initial response is like “of course I’d want you to have half of mine”.
However… suppose that in response to this event, I’m kind of aggressive & entitled about the whole thing and I’m demanding some of your sandwich (or all of it, for that matter). My guess is that this would dramatically reduce the sense in which you would want to give some to me. You might anyway, from fear or obligation or conflict-avoidance or “wanting to be a good friend” or whatever, but it would no longer directly feel like “oh yeah of course I’d want that.” Part of why, is the breakdown of the sense of We that is implied by my demand—my demand enacts a world where what you want and what I want are at odds, which didn’t seem to be the case back when you felt that sharing the sandwich would be what you wanted. I seem to only care about my needs, not yours, thus I’m not caring about our needs, so it seems like you might get exploited or overdrawn if you try to open yourself towards my needs. (And by “seems”, I don’t at all mean to imply that this isn’t what’s happening—maybe it is! “If you give them an inch they’ll take a mile” is a real interpersonal pattern.)
» read the rest of this entry »
