Ignoring your present distrust because you trusted before is as foolish as ignoring today’s thirst because you drank enough yesterday.
Some examples where this sort of thing comes up:
There’s a common confusion people make, which is to try to hang onto some previous trusted experience, in the face of new distrust.1 Or, to try to get someone else to do so.
This is failing to treat distrust as the sense organ that, in my view, it is. This is why I like the analogy with thirst. Now, trust is more like temperature perhaps than thirst, because you don’t need a steady input of new trust-water in order to maintain homeostasis. You just need the right conditions.
But the point is, whatever trust or distrust you have in the present is your system’s current best assessment of what’s going on, that you’re encountering and dealing with. You may have some memory of trusting this person or institution or group or whatever at some other time, but that memory affects you only exactly as much as it does. Theoretically what I’m talking about here could happen in the reverse direction, but it’s rarer.
I’d like to highlight a difference between two types of moves that someone can make, in relation to such a memory.
Move 1: attempted trust-laundering: A says to B, or B says to themself, “but remember that incident/moment/etc last week? see, I’m/it’s totally trustworthy!” This is an attempt to overwrite the present distrust with some trust from another time and situation. It sees the current distrust as an obstacle to something, and attempts to bludgeon it into submission with the old trust. If it seems to work, that’s likely to be because it results in an inner-coalitional coup, bringing to power some subsystem that trusts, which is suppressing the by ignoring the distrust.
One of the reasons I’ve seen this happen is that A really trusts themself in some way, and so the world makes a lot more sense to them when B also trusts them in that way. Thus, when they encounter B not trusting them, they think “B is in a state of confusion” and they try to fix that by bringing B back into the state of trust, openness, etc.
Move 2: non-naive trust integration-encouraging: A says to B, or B says to themself, “but remember that incident/moment/etc last week? how does this situation look in light of that? does that change things at all, to bring it into awareness? maybe not, but let’s consider.” This is an attempt to synthesize the present distrust with the trust from another time and situation. It recognizes that the present skin-in-the-game is where things ultimately ground out, and offers the old trust to that present skin-in-the-game, as a resource for it to use as its sees fit.
This requires adopting a kind of epistemically neutral/spacious stance, where you honor the person’s learning system and let it do its thing. It helps also to see the other person as containing multitudes, and to be allied with all of the subsystems and attempting to welcome all of them, rather than trying to elicit your preferred face.
Relatedly, I have on occasion invited someone to basically recompute their trust in me, after I said something. I don’t demand that the result come out different—well, I don’t even demand that they in fact do the recomputation. But it’s more a chance to just say “hey, does that affect things?” and to really find out what the answer is.
Non-naive trust is all about finding out, not about asserting.
The “Non-Naive Trust Dance” is, at present, the main topic of this site, malcolmocean.com, albeit obliquely (only some of the relevant posts use “NNTD” or even the word “trust”, but even many of the ones that don’t are still pointing at it or generated by it). It’s a bit of an overloaded term, ie a term that means a slightly different thing depending on context. These usages below are non-exclusive—often it means several at once!
Usually, it is: my bespoke personal insight, framework, a generally-available insight, a perspective, a practice, or a deep law. Sometimes it’s a game or a process.
So I figured it might be helpful to investigate these and make them a bit more explicit.
Generally, on my blog, I mostly refer to NNTD, because it’s not in the commonground space between us—I’m forever explaining it again. But in general we don’t actually usually learn words by reading explanations or definitions. We learn them by seeing them used.
So for this post, I’ve done an archaeological dig to include quotes where I’ve just used the phrase “NNTD” as part of my thinking/journalling or communicating with someone else who already gets it well enough for that to work (often my friend and collaborator Michael Smith, whose NNTD intro you can read here.)
It’s a funny time to write this: I’ve been seriously thinking about renaming the framework. I’m confident that “trust” and “trust-dancing” continue to be central to my thinking, but the core of what I’m trying to say isn’t that well-captured by “non-naive trust”. Better would be “non-fake trust” or “non-pretend trust” or “non-bullshit trust”, perhaps. If I do rename things, this blog post will help archaeologically translate earlier ones; if not, it’ll help disambiguate when people keep asking “wait what exactly does NNTD mean?”
Sometimes NNTD means “a particular insight Malcolm Ocean had in 2020”. Unverified personal gnosis.
I’ve found it helpful, for understanding the nature of insights, to reference a frame John Vervaeke uses (tho he probably got it elsewhere—Piaget?) of insight being what happens when you go from systematically making a certain class of error or mistake, to systematically NOT making it. This very much fits that quality, although also it hasn’t propagated fully into my system, so while I’m always capable of identifying the error, I still do sometimes make it.
I’ve found references in my notes/messages to “before NNTD” or “since NNTD”, and these all refer to that insight. I often treat it as if it happened in a distinct moment in July—and it’s true there was a particular internal coup and new worldview order established then, but the first clues showed up in March, and the seeds were sown the previous year with BioEmotive and Unlocking the Emotional Brain.
Sometimes NNTD means “the whole framework Malcolm developed based on that insight”, including theories, practices, phrases, etc. Put a different way, NNTD feels kind of like a body of work. I certainly speak of “my NNTD writing”.
Sometimes, I would say somewhat accidentally, I’ve lumped under NNTD “all of the subsequent ways in which Malcolm came to have his own perspective on culture stuff, following that insight”. I wrote about the feeling of an iron curtain falling away in my mind such that I could now develop my own views about what’s going on with culture, group flow, etc. And that framework/worldview is personal and particular, and is not the core insight.
About a year ago I texted Michael and wrote:
shared this convo recording of me & Jess with you. the first chunk involves us exploring some of the tradeoffs I made in developing NNTD in the context of what I needed it to do while I was trying to relate to Jean/LSA. and directions for it to mature more.
it feels like a cool moment in my development to be able to differentiate “NNTD as I’ve constructed it” and “my best sense of things”
That’s definitely taking it as a framework with limitations, not simply a self-evident deep law. I don’t expect the law to be violated, but I do expect to realize ways in which I was confused about its limitations.
» read the rest of this entry »When I had my Non-Naive Trust Insight in mid-2020, I initially conceived of it as a patch on what we were doing at the cultural incubator I’d been living in for years, and I drafted this intro in Roam intended to convey it to the people I was living with. Things got pretty weird and I didn’t quite get it to the point of finishing it to share it with them at the time (although it wasn’t private—technically they could have looked, since it was in our shared Roam). So we’ll never know how it would have landed at that time. Some of the terminology or assumptions referenced below may be opaque to readers outside of that context. I’ve tried to add a bit of context but feel free to comment asking for more clarity.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” – Marcus Aurelius
“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” – Rudyard Kipling
Malcolm’s initial introduction to the Non-Naive Trust Dance, mostly written early October 2020
The [[[[non-naive trust]] dance]] is a framework created by [[Malcolm]] for modeling how [[non-naive trust]] is developed within and between people, which of course includes the nurturing of self-trust within each individual.
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 »how do we bootstrap from trust we already have, to the trust we want to have to thrive (and need to have for problems we care about)?
[This post written in about 15 minutes, as part of my new experiment in Writing It Live!]For a much much longer take on the same question, with more examples and angles, read my mini ebook How we get there: a manual for bootstrapping meta-trust.
If you like one-pager bullet-list style posts, I have more:
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 »Ninth and final (for now) post in “I can tell for myself” sequence.
I know the secret to co-gnosis, aka “we can tell for ourselves”. In a sentence the secret is:
Nobody knows the secret, in the sense that nobody can simply say “I know how it works and this is it and if you’re not doing it then well idk what to tell you but it isn’t gonna work.” There is no once-and-for-all secret, articulable or ineffable.
Everybody knows the secret, in the sense that everybody is acutely sensitive to what it feels like for their sense of “I can tell for myself” to be respected in a dialogue, and so if you’re in a dialogue with them, then the secret of how to have “we can tell for ourselves” is right there inside the “I can tell for myself” and “you can tell for yourself”. It’s whatever satisfies both.
I’ve been having trouble finishing my “I can tell for myself” / gnosis sequence, and part of why it’s been hard is that my answer to the problem I spend the sequence framing is the same thing I’m already trying to point at in most of my posts. This is the meta-protocol all over again.
And so every time I went to write the conclusion to this sequence, it felt like it was just another post I’d been meaning to write for awhile and which might stand better on its own. Having said that, since we’ve built up some new ways of talking, let’s see if I can give some reflections on the meta-protocol puzzle in terms of “I can tell for myself” and “we can tell for ourself”.
I wrote in the previous post: merely getting everybody in touch with their own knowing isn’t enough. When multiple people are both operating from a grounded sense of what they know, they tend to avoid each other because they see things differently and either don’t know how or don’t want to bother sorting out those differences. It’s HARD. But it’s possible.
Bridging between what I can tell for myself and what you can tell for yourself is an additional skill beyond each of us being in touch with our respective knowings in the first place.
On further thought… it’s a bunch of skills.
» read the rest of this entry »Part 8 of “I can tell for myself” sequence. Previously: The eyes-open student: “I can see things my teacher can’t acknowledge”.
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.
— Bertrand Russell
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the messes wouldn’t end if we could just somehow get everybody (within some context) to have grounded confidence in their sense of “I can tell for myself” even when others say something that seems to contradict it (or find enough people who already have it and herd them into the same room).
Instead we get new messes!
If I can tell for myself that “X”, and you can tell for yourself that “Y”, and it seems to us that it’s not possible for both X and Y to be true at the same time, then we’re going to be pretty stuck! The resulting communicational impasses can be pretty intense, depending on what’s at stake (and how emotionally resilient participants are, such that physical stakes feel more or less gripping). I described above how it tends to play out when there’s a major power imbalance on some relevant axis. What happens when there’s not?
When the conflict isn’t too central, what happens is: they have relationships that work out. This is pretty good! They have enough overlap in what they each want, and how they each already see the world, that they’re able to found a company together or get married and have kids, or co-run a community or some other kind of project, or just be lifelong friends. There may be other arenas where they don’t see eye-to-eye, and can’t figure out how to bridge, but those arenas are sufficiently inconsequential to the relationship that they can be ignored (or periodically explored in a low-stakes way, as friends sometimes do with philosophical questions).
But when the conflict is at the core of their identity and/or purpose and/or worldview (which is broadly the case when we’re talking about spiritual teachers and/or those who are aiming to discover and embody pragmatically & philosophically workable answers to life’s big questions (I count myself as one of these))… well, I may be missing something, but as far as I can tell what usually happens is, oddly: “nothing”. The really high-self-trust people just don’t interact that much. They keep to their own contexts where nobody is self-trustfully challenging their worldviews that are based on generalizations of their direct-knowings. They run their training center, or monastery, or company, or online community, or whatever, where their wisdom can flow and so can others’… to the extent it doesn’t contradict theirs. These contradictions may not even be on the level of “what’s so”; they can even just be “what’s relevant”.
» read the rest of this entry »Sixth post in “I can tell for myself” sequence. On the last episode… Reality distortion: “I can tell, but you can’t”, which opened up our exploration of interactions between one person who is in touch with their own direct-knowing and another person who is more just taking others’ word for it. With this post we’re finally reaching some of the core ideas that the other posts have been a foundation for.
(I left “guru” in the title of this part, because “guru dynamics” are what I call this phenomenon, but I decided not to use the word “guru” in the body of the text. It’s a loanword that originally means “teacher” but of course in English has the connotations associated both with spiritual teaching in particular and thus also with the dynamics I want to talk about here, some of which are well-documented in The Guru Papers. To be clear, I don’t think guru’ing, as a role, is necessarily bad—it’s just extraordinarily hard to do well. But “guru” as a frame… the roles are probably best not thought of as a student-teacher relationship at all. Instead, perhaps, “one who’s remembering” and “one who’s reminding”: ancient wisdom tradition words for this like “sati”, and “aletheia” mean “remembering” or “unforgetting”. Those are awkward though.)
Things get weird when a person who has consistent access to their sense of “I can tell for myself” across many domains—especially spiritual, interpersonal, esoteric, subtle, ineffable., ones—finds their way into a position where they’re trying to help others develop this capacity for themselves.
This happens remarkably often! There are many factors that contribute to this, of which here are six:
So it’s very common for someone who has developed their sense of self-authored direct-knowing to find themselves surrounded by a bunch of people who also want to develop this capacity. (We’ll explore in a later post why there’s often precisely one teacher per learning context; the previous post also hints at it.)
But attempting to teach “I can tell for myself” (or self-trust, or whatever you call it) leads to what is nearly a paradox:
Suppose that when someone says something you don’t understand or resonate with, your two available moves are either to (1) reject what they’re saying or (2) “take their word for it”—a condition which is tautologically the starting point for someone who has learned to not trust themselves in the face of what someone else is saying, and is wanting to develop that self-trust—then if I’m trying to convey “how to tell for yourself”, you’ll either… reject what I’m saying as senseless, or… take my word for it that this is in fact how to tell for yourself and you just need to do it exactly as I say yessirree!
…which is not “I can tell for myself”. Or is it?
» read the rest of this entry »There’s a capacity for knowing, that every human being has, that as a society we’re out of touch with in many important domains. It’s the knowing that comes from trusting our own experience and understanding. It’s not incidental that we’re out of touch with it—our societies are largely organized around this fact. But we could organize a different kind of society where everyone is in touch with it. It’s not easy or straightforward, but it seems to me to be both possible and worthwhile.
There are various fancy terms for this kind of direct-knowing—eg “self-trust” or “trust in one’s own experience” or “wise knowing” or “gnosis”—but in this piece of writing I will speak of it in plain language: “I can tell for myself”. This phrasing is cumbersome but concrete, and forces me to be very clear about what I’m talking about rather than letting the idea float off into some vague attribute one “has” or “doesn’t have”, or some accomplishment or attainment, like “awakeness”. It’s also particularly useful for contrasting it with a different kind of knowing we can call “taking someone’s word for it”. It could also be “received knowing”. I’m particularly interested in what happens when what we can tell for ourselves seems in conflict with what someone else says, and problems that occur when we override what we can tell for ourselves by taking someone else’s word, which I’ll get into in a future piece.
All of this is part of a project you could refer to as “descriptivist epistemology”. Epistemology is the study of how we know things. Much of epistemology is sort of external and prescriptivist: it is the study of “how people should go about knowing things”. Descriptivist Epistemology instead asks: how do we actually go about knowing things? There’s a thing it feels like to know something. Where does that come from? Sometimes we discover that things we knew before, we would now consider incorrect, not because the world has changed but because we’ve learned something or matured in some way. When and why does that happen? And when someone’s very way of knowing evolves, how does it evolve? In what sense did we nonetheless “know” something that was in some sense untrue? How is this different from simply “being misled” or “being confused”?
In order to explore all of those questions, let’s first, explore, concretely and intuitively, the kinds of things that we can know for ourselves, where we don’t have to take someone’s word for it.
Here’s a wide sampling but still totally incomplete list of some examples of different kinds of direct-knowing:
» read the rest of this entry »
