Cory,On balance, religion, or I should say religiosity also acts as a safety valve;if all of the deferred and imagined conflicts had to be resolvedthis time around, we'd be living in the Game of Thrones.I'm with you on this.Also, I'd like to include the impact of religion in the western world. Christianity has a self-destruction motif in most sects of Christianity. They believe that this world is doomed to fail, that a rapture or armageddon will occur, and God will sort it all out. They believe they hold positions of power and wealth on God selecting them. Everything good that happens to them is God and everything against them is a devil trying to sway them from the correct path. This effectively ignores science, facts, and wagers the future survival on invisible forces. They believe they will go to a heaven or paradise, those who stand up to them will go to hell or get eternal punishment, and believe the destruction of the world is gods will. This underpins what we are dealing with: people tryong to put the entire world on a cross to kill it.Cory############################Cory,Thank you."Its has become corrupted".Yes, worth knowing by what. In my view the corporatist influence must be minimized.Here is a diagram I rendered last year showing The New Left and the New Right which pulls aside the curtain to reveal that and how the D party and the R party will exist into perpetuity regardless of "Democracy" (which we do not have), State-Owned Corporatism, or Corporate-Owned Statism.Due to de-regulation, partisan politics has become an agent of corporate interests;corporations have captured the regulatory agencies, and Soviet-style committee bossesoutlast presidents.Bureaucrats and in-line accountants have more job stability and accumulate moreinfluence and power than the 'doers'. The survival of the cabal becomes far morerelevant in terms of operations than any over-arching concern for societal well-being.Corporations, being by necessity, and by law amoral, must operate to foster their ownsurvival Governments have a mandate to keep the nation but have not mandate tosurvive unto themselves. Parliamentary dissolution and re-negotiation of cabinetsand entire governments may be expected to be more resilient and inoculated against corporatistcorruptive influences, but they are not.We live in corporatist fascist states in which overt fascism is masked by puppets of corporationsthat call themselves politicians who answer not to principles, but to platform, dictated bytheir sponsors.I owe these insights to the research done in preparation of and while writing "Cures Vs. Profits",confirmed by my conscription into overt activism for objective science on the steps and in the hallsof state capitals around the country, with politicians in deed and in word echoing the fraudulenttalking points of their corporatist masters.Events caught on camera changing votes due to whispered words coming down from party bosses,leaving the people's true liberties and freedoms in the dustbin... Pick your poison, the right is paid forpolicies and laws tolerant of toxins in the air, water, food, and soils, the nouveau-rich left tolerates themin medicine, shanghai'd by their penchant for lifting up the downtrodden, for the greater good, whichmasterfully being beaten into the minds of Americans right now with the non-science-based universaland outdoors masking nonsense. Not the place for specific debate, but the art of social programmingis so much clearer after a handful of blue pills.Thank you for suffering my diatribes in the search for a name that captures the exigencies of our time.For me, it's corporatism.############################Democracy is already a stage higher than meta systematic, its paradigmatic. Metamodernism has become spinning wheels. Yes, more people are getting inetrested in understanding that we need to go beyond left and right, but metamodernism is not any more complex than democracy. Metamodernism is what democracy already was, going beyond left and right (or going beyond the multiplicity of parties such as in Austria) to have a rule of governance and a way of life that is as satisfiable as possible to the most people. Metamodernism is basically just rediscovering the democratic ideals. But democracy does not work because there are always people who corrupt it. Similarly, just like what happened with democracy, so too is happening with metamodernity, it is fracturing.The United Nations was supposed to be cross paradigmatic, it was supposed to synthesize together across nations, it was supposed to uphold universal human rights. And what has happened? It has become corrupted. We need to go beyond the metacultural to find a solution. Metacultural solutions are building blocks towards but not the overall solution itself. What happens in democracy is proof.I mostly agree with Gregg's 5th joint point, but I do not believe we should be calling it meta. It will not be democracy, but it will build on its (and other forms of governance) best traits. It will be something we've never seen before.C.########################################################Cory,Thank you for this.Complex systems such as you described can succinctly be represented and modeled and explicitly simulated when the maths become intractable.Let's revisit that in a brief moment.I'll risk capturing the issue succinctly: we do not know if how are are governed, and how we govern, are even close to optimal in their structure, form andprocesses. We do know that we are not well-governed due to corruption of an otherwise largely sufficient government process solution.Isn't it an obvious feature of human societies that when leadership fails, they are replaced by those who seek harmony through leadership?Yet in spite of that nature of mankind, we have persistent pathologies, for reasons you describe.Here are my thoughts. We need society-level metacognition processes focused on optimizing process solutions; Gregg's ToK is attractive in that it provides a framework for discussion of systems at different levels, their commonalities and differences. It illuminates possibilities without imposing constraint to one temporally parochial "other-than" process solution.In contrast, the Magna Carta, the US Declaration of Independence, the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf were all dangerous (to the 'establishment' at the time) because they begat awareness in individuals that as a collective they have the power to empower others on their behalf in a different way. Individuals respond to pledges of loyalty, fealty, and Unity in a common bond of "us-ness"; we emotionally surrender a past state of relatedness to a new one,and we pledge our wealth and send our sons and daughters on behalf of that spoken and adopted unity.Let's presume that some of the obvious assumptions inherent in the model you referenced we are discussing are correct:-That "the system" i.e., human societies are inherently, of necessity, and optimally hierarchical-That people acting at their own level of self-interest at every phase can, in fact yield a sustainable governance-That a minority can solve the issue on behalf of the majorityCarrying in our present context, I've looked in Game B a bit, just dabbling, and more into Unity2020, and I appreciate deeply the need to optimizequickly toward AI vs. human conflict and "move beyond" Game A human:human conflict. Tendrils of Game A however are obvious even in the truism that a motive for Game B is that Game A has not served us sufficiently well. To me, Unity2020 will eventually fall under the plow due to the corrupting influences ofcorporate campaign funding. So let's presume that Unity2020 is a temporally parochial defined process reactionary, not proactively optimized solution becausethe broken pieces that eroded both parties in the US remain (this need not be true if, as party, corporatist influences are better contained).An individual has human-recognized options, such as stoicism, or religion, which attribute responsibility outside of theirlocus of control; both are palliative and keep the ego intact via the belief by the individual they are submitting to somethinggreater than themselves. At a societal level, to date, conformity to a man-made power entity backed by the threat of forcehas been the path to peaceful coexistence within societies. Pathological overreach for control of one society over another(even if mostly for resources) leads to the mutual application of force (war)."Government" is a form of metacognition for societies. Our society mentality has any number of pathologies.You wrote: "..(A)lmost all of the participants in economic, political, and corporate systems who can perform meta systematically, are stuck in the negation or oscillation transition step, which is what metamodernism is an attempt to help solve."I love this sentence. Highly illuminating. Spot-on.What we lack, and what the forward-thinking simulations needed to identify process solutions that can help us move from one place to the next.Safely.With prosperity for all.And (real) health for all.Should the new enlightenment include the high utility of prescient modeling, millions of equally optimal process solutions may be identified.I had a discussion with someone close to me which "went well" for the first time in years because I told him that in my mind, I was replacingcomparatively short-sight, subjective (experienced-based) culturally parochial "principles", "norms", "mores" and "ethos" with a "search for optimalprocess solutions".Such a shift de-escalates the perceived threats over what otherwise could be perceived as a threat to one's "identity" and what "one stands for".It helps people remember that support "for Trump" or "for Biden" is an adoption of a different constellation of process solutions, some of which are "optimized" forthe benefit of particular subgroups in society.We have the ability and computational power to model (simulate) the entire world with agent-based simulations; they are used to help route traffic patterns, to optimize design of large hospitals, etc. but they are not used to optimize rules and regulations, or how societies are structured.I'd love to see an arm of the new enlightenment adopt the task of modeling societies as multi-layered processes on well-defined humanist optimizationfunctions if only to find answers to meta-questions on the landscape of solutions such as "how many way are there to structure a government that are equally optimal" (for the sake of knowing) with the residual answer to the footnote: "where does our current system lie on that landscape of optimized solutions"?I would begin with agrarian societies, and modeling societies and nation-states from around the world every 100 years or so. Where could German have gone instead in 1933, for example?For the present day, once we know the landscape of optimal and suboptimal process solutions, the question then becomes; what do we do about them? That becomes less academic and more political. As a tool, of course, interested parties could adopt this approach as a means to their selfish ends, and thus the tail we thought we lost in evolution wraps around the branch once more...JLWThe model of hierarchical complexity is a mathematical behavior model that defines discreet orders (also called stages) of increasing behavioral complexity. Each order of complexity is produced by the coordination of two or more actions at the previous order. The orders are domain-general, universal forms of behavior. There are 8 transition steps between each stage, and they are for fractally identical. And yes, it does apply at all building blocks of social organization, although the calculus to adequately represent it becomes profoundly complex.It is primarily quantitative, not qualitative and therefore not analogy based. However, analogies can be made in so far as an order of hierarchical complexity has been identified to be the same between two or more behaviors, so the characteristics that are shared between those behaviors can be related.The paper explicitly articulate the fundamental behavioral complexity required to resolve the current issues that are occurring right now. The problem is, most people hit a ceiling at formal or systematic stage, and in order for people to resolve the issues, they need to be no less then meta systematic stage, which consists of about 5% of the population. This is because the solution requires the coordination and synthesis of homomorphic principles that govern systems.Democracy was designed specifically for this purpose, for people to come together from different perspectives and design, append, and amend higher order principles (laws) to govern systems. Unfortunately, the systems have been corrupted. This is because almost all of the participants in economic, political, and corporate systems who can perform meta systematically, are stuck in the negation or oscillation transition steps, which is what metamodernism is an attempt to help solve.You cannot resolve the corruption directly. It does not work. Corrupt organizations consist of people who will understand your method for trying to prevent their corruption, and they will adapt to stop you. Anti-corruption only put Band-Aids on a larger problem. The paper I limetnked works, but only if you can get people to sit at the same table in good faith. And we don't see it happen very often. We need something more to solve these problems, but we don't have it yet.C.############################Thank you Cory, theirs (Sonnert & Commons') is a analogy-based general theoretical framework but I'm afraid in my view it fallsshort (as all analogies and models do to some extent) because it attempts to apply and extend a model developed to understandan aspect of the developing human brain, which society is not, and thus is cannot succeed in providing much morethan a descriptive framework.RIght now, I'm more along the lines of "If we are asked to hang those responsible, who are they, and what do we call them" (hanging being ametaphor) and "once the king is dead, who shall be king (if anyone), and how shall we live"? And "do we want to be informed or participate?"Take Greenspan's awakening, for example.How could a society structure its economy on a model of infinite growth in the first place?A presumption that based on interest in one's own resources, one would take good care of them and shepherd them well - with nobuilt-in safe guard for someone to sound an alarm, and practiced routine of changed behavior that would allow a gentleslide into a recession. We don't have any such safeguards, and this is why in 2008 I called and wrote to Hank Paulson (Sec.Treasury) from my office at the University of Pittsburgh the Friday before Black Monday, pleading for him to use allcarrot and no stick, lest a lending freeze hold the bail-out money for months. My solution was a sliding scale incentive plan:The lower the interest rate banks offered to consumers, the larger the size of the bailout a bank could obtain, and the betterthe terms of the payback (longer terms, lower interest) to the Fed.Equitably incentivized transactions at such times would appear to me to dictate such terms - not further trust inthe survival instincts of drowning institutions.Paulson ignored my pleas, instead he forced banks to accept bail-out they did not need to "legitimize" the loans.The banks froze for 3 three months, and millions lost their homes.The absence of creative thought in economic modeling - in spite of trillions of dollars worth of computers and software in whichsimulations could be run to find good outcomes - to me an example of is symptomatic of a larger pathology; parameterizing a strategy (and its models) to an end that serves as a means to its own ends because doing so sanctifies the authority.As base as that may seem, Left and Right have no meaning if their shuffling of platforms are based onmultivariate versions of "Split the country and take the bigger half", which they are. They are based on projections of surrogate outcomes(elections) not long-term health of the country, economy, etc. I'm convinced the two parties would survive quite well side byside regardless of the type of economy or (nearly) government that ruled the US.So who is culpable for not imagining and sharing such better ways? Surely they have been imagined?Is it the drama players themselves?The witting and unwitting electorate?Are there meta-influences who ride the ebbing political waves like an investorwho knows how to make money when the stock market both rises and falls?Or do societies flail - and fail - from the emergent properties of self-serving nature of humans, who see fit to limitthemselves to conformed mold?Something else?Does for-profit medicine lead to medical injuries being the 3rd leading cause of death by institutional negligence, orpersonal callous disregard? More importantly - what do we do NOW to address it?Reflect for a moment on why we so thoroughly enmesh our identities with our positions, and why are we not warned (and do not warn thosewe mentor) that to do so means risk of suffering an unwarranted crisis should your position change?I imagine that there are many, many axes of morality - defined by their ability to render useful and not harmful process solutions, whichsit right before us, but to which we are blinded by our socialization and education:-Conformity to the majority-Appeal to (or deference) to authority-Vague, inexact or unestimated "greater good" cost/benefit calculationsI'm sure everyone can extend this list of behaviors that become "default mode" operations that may have workedoptimally in our tribal and small village past.But now, we confuse "principles" with "process solutions". Principles are subjective and experience-based, andoften outmoded by a rapidly changing world.Principles are held onto dearly, and in staying with them are left unscathed by later-life experience.Process solutions are continuously optimized via intelligence and tested by objective empirical evidence."Principles" can collide and cause societal conflict. "Process solutions" cannot collide, they can only enmesh and adjust to eachother toward some optimal solution.There are many possible outcomes for tomorrow given where we stand today. Are we forbidden orconstrained from using the full suite of tools we have mastered to envision a peaceful, creative, caring, even loving future?I don't know if you've noticed but there is a rising tide of anti-scientism in the US - and it is not anti-science by any means.In part that is because those who call for objective science remain heralded (for better or worse).My overt concern (not yet a fear) is a restructuring based on partial comprehension of science, sociology, psychology,education, economics, and that we may fall short of a society that preserves liberties and freedom that permitevolution or even free expression in these areas.My fear is that the collective academe in the US will wake up too slowly to the reality that at 16.8% of our GDP, 3,600billion dollars are spent on (largely) for-profit healthcare; that means that 1/6 dollars are being spent on for-profit medicine, andthe cost of healthcare is expected to rise dramatically. How will we pay for the rest of what is needed to have a functioningsociety?Most importantly I think is what process solutions can be envisioned to reform an unsustainable model based on infinite growth?And what other sectors are pathological at this time, and what process solutions might exist to help them improve as well?I don't think we can expect all of the answers here, but surely some answers must exist.JLWRead Sonnert and CommonsCory########################################################With your permission, may I inquire on opinions and discussion of root causes of the sociological developments in societies of the current suite of what are easily - and not so easily recognized as societal dysfunctions. My intended scope is US-centric, but need not be. I'll initiate by listing a few issues. Which ones are causal? Which one are symptomatic?*Profit interesting bending Science (esp. medicine and psychiatry)*Financial perverse incentives distorting Science*Lack of meaningful ROI of research translating to effective solutions*"Left vs. Right focus" masking top-down control (cf. middle-out or bottom-up) solutionsPlease add to/extend as you like.We need not agree, of course, but I am keen to see perspectives and learn of voices willing to try to name the issue and offer a definition.It need not be an "ism", but I suspect it is on the scale of "Imperialism, Nazism, Communism".Lately I've been enamored with the phrase "Process Solution"; ie.,the identification of an ever-improving process that makes the identification and adoption of a viable and helpful (valuable) solution more likely - so if you have process solutions in mind and if they help w/finding a name due to the present absence of that solution, I'd be eager to learn of them.James Lyons-Weiler, PhDI support Gregg in this!=Chance############################Well said, Gregg.I’ve not been following this Pinker controversy (nor am I acquainted with his work), but your points regarding contextualization of the broader socio-political landscape of the US (and West, more broadly) and the idealogical protection of egos so as to avoid offense both speak to me. Within the smaller circles of my work, I’ve lately seen the science and greater mission of our work threatened to be crumbled under the fear of offending some big personalities. This is quite worrisome from my position, as others seem to be apt to deferring these feelings toward me. I hope that, within the academy and more broadly, we can work to be able to speak freely [even when it threatens offending others (I’m not speaking here in the context of race)] in the name of the ultimate ideal of helping others through high-quality work.Best,Cole--Good, courageous work, Gregg.M.Michael F. Mascolo, Ph.D.
Academic Director, Compass ProgramProfessor, Department of Psychology
Merrimack College, North Andover, MA 01845
978.837.3503 (office)
978.979.8745 (cell)Political Conversations Study: www.CreatingCommonGround.orgBlog: Values MatterJournal: Pedagogy and the Human SciencesCoaching and Author Website: www.michaelmascolo.comAcademia Home Page: http://merrimack.academia.edu/MichaelMascolo
"Things move, persons act." -- Kenneth Burke"If it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well." -- Donald Hebb############################On Jul 19, 2020, at 8:18 AM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:############################Hi TOK Folks,I thought I would share this post I made this morning on the metamodern forum I am on:Hi All,I think when discussing these issues, such as the petition against Pinker, the Harper letter, and so forth, it is crucial to distinguish the setting/community/cultural context folks have in mind. For example, there is the United States as a whole. That might be one contextual setting. When folks look at the US as a whole, then you see Donald Trump as the President and you see the history of slavery and Jim Crow and the remarkable inequities, and much like @handrews argues, the general complaints about word usage or political positions seem small potatoes.However, when we flip the context to inside the academia or leftist media centers or other left-leaning ideological contexts, the issue is VERY different. I can tell you, I live in the academy, in the social sciences (professional psychology) and the climate here is very different. We are MUCH closer to thought/language police than people seem to realize. Virtue signaling is everywhere, as is an almost Orwellian use of language regarding justice and morality (i.e., more often than not in such contexts, IMO, those who are doing the moralizing and shaming are not operating from a “higher ground”). Not only that, I believe much of it is ideologically misguided. Academics bending over backwards to eliminate anything that could be subjectively perceived by a person educated in postmodern critical race theory as being offensive is not where real change is to be had, IMO. Rather, as I saw firsthand in working on the inner city streets of Philadelphia from 1999-2003, there are deep class/race/structural issues that need to be tackled head on.If one is situated in the academy, one should object strongly to the letter against Pinker. It justifies language police, which is a problem inside hyper-progressive systems and much of the academy has been (is are being) captured by this troubling ideology (see the footnote on pg 122 of this article I wrote back in 2005). The bottom line is that we are living in massively polarized socio-ideological
ecologies and because context is everything there are rarely general positions (i.e., Pinker letter was “bad” versus “an important signal”) that are defensible without specifying the context to apply to argument. Inside the context of academy, the Pinker letter is horrendous and the signatories should be embarrassed for their actions. In the larger context of a society that has elected Trump, it can be seen as a small issue that maybe oversteps but makes an important point on principle.My hope is that those who operate from a metamodern sensibility would have the general capacity to see that the extreme polarization in the US (which is probably infecting the West) is a function of inadequate cultural codes being defined against one another in problematic ways. We need to disentangle those conflicts, eliminate weak positions, and work to seek and create common ground based on a clear, rich sophisticated sense-making and deep value codes that can stretch across the socio-ecological levels of (in)dividual, dyadic, family, small group, community, state, nation, transnational and global.Best,
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james lyons-weiler, phdAuthor, CEO, President, ScientistEditor-in-Chief, Science, Public Health Policy, and the LawGuest Contributor, Children's Health DefenseThe Environmental and Genetic Causes of Autism (Skyhorse Publishing)Ebola: An Evolving Story (World Scientific, 2015)To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1
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