Hi Gien,
I would frame it in terms of how would UTOK shed light on the situation, just to differentiate the whole system (UTOK) from the first key idea (ToK System). The first key idea is about a new map of Big History, science and our origin story, such that we have a coherent naturalistic ontology for our shared base reality.
The UTOK is a holistic philosophy, and the whole unified theory of psychology and unified approach to psychotherapy, which are key in such an analysis. Several angles emerge from a UTOK vantage point, the first being the relationship between the participants, their motives and the UTOK analysis. That is, is it something they would want?
If yes, then one can apply the UTOK to help the participants reframe the opposed positional narrative that has emerged. The idea is that people get stuck in justifying positions and influence and investment pathways that they become diametrically opposed and deconstructive, which results in vicious, maladaptive cycles. That is the process of undesired “neurotic” conflict. By undesired, I mean that the actual ideas, values, and visions of the participants was more or less overlapping and no one reflectively would have wanted a break. Think of a divorce. Sometimes a divorce is a function of the reflective needs of one or both partners. Say, they fell out of love and the system needs to go its separate ways. There are other marriages whereby people get neurotically entangled. This is because of miscommunication, misunderstanding, defensiveness (see, e.g., John Gottman’s four horses), and this drives people into positions that are win/lose or lose/lose, and viciously reciprocal (i.e., you did this thing, so I retaliate, so you retaliate, etc.).
Mike Mascolo has developed a conflict resolution frame called Creating Common Ground that overlaps much with the basic human psychological frame and sensibility and provides ways to understand how people get stuck and how to reverse problematic positions and develop a better foundation for working together to meet needs and solve problems. Here is the website, which I collaborated with him on.
Best,
Gregg
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of James Gien Wong
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Subject: Re: TOK Essay from Michel Bauwens
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Yes, this is the fallout he is referring to. I believe the two opposing parties are not able to see each other's respective views and the result is this conflict and splitting apart. How would ToK shed light on the situation to mediate a solution?
Wishing you WELLth
Gien
Future Ancestor
Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world. - Nadeem Aslam
On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 9:23 PM nysa71 <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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Hi All,
To be honest, I don't know anything about P2P or Michel Bauwens. My initial impression from reading his editorial, though, is that a lot of it sounds dubious --- like something you'd get from alt-right media. I've heard all this panic over this supposed "far left" extremism taking over society many times before, but I've yet to see a shred of convincing evidence of such. If anything, it seems like it's extreme right wing ideology that is the real concern.
Anyways, I did a quick Google search and found this open letter of disassociation from Bauwens. Just thought I'd share it, if for anything, to show a counter-perspective from some other folks on the left.
https://c4ss.org/content/54521
~ Jason Bessey
On Monday, March 29, 2021, 01:50:41 PM EDT, James Gien Wong <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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I've been working very closely with Michel in the last few years on Commons works, especially the concept of Cosmolocal Production as in this collaboration:
In the past year, I've been motivating discussions of the need for a wisdom commons to help people to understand the divisiveness they are falling prey to. From the blowups I've seen in the P2P Foundation FB group, it appears that Jordan Peterson has been one of the lighting rods that has been the source of much of divisiveness. Another is wokism and identity politics. Yes, sadly Michel has been the target of much of this and a wisdom commons that unites humanity is much needed.
Wishing you WELLth
Gien
Future Ancestor
Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world. - Nadeem Aslam
On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 2:57 PM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi TOK List,
Michel Bauwens is the founder of the P2P Foundation, which is a non-profit organization and global network dedicated to advocacy and research of commons-oriented peer to peer (P2P) dynamics in society. Given that the “wisdom commons” was the focus of the final “Body and Soul” series, the P2P Foundation is an organization and vision that is aligned with the vision and values of the TOK Society. I recently have learned that Michel has been embroiled in controversy that parallels many these days in the left. Namely, he has been criticized strongly for critiquing some of the extreme left movements toward a highly racialized society, which I something that I too have deep concerns about. As such, I thought I would share this essay that he shared on his platform. This is an ongoing conversation…
Best,
Gregg
Editorial: Why share dissenting universalist and egalitarian points of view on a p2p/commons oriented forum ?
We have rapidly moved to a new hegemony that aims for racial separation and a return to fragmented tribal identities. In American schools, children as young as 4 years old (though mostly in 8th grade), are taught to identify their racial characteristics, divided into oppressor and oppressed groups, with the former asked to pen down confessions and understand the harm they are doing to others because of their unchosen DNA. In these schools and other institutions, people are asked to divide themselves by racial affinity groups, with people of particular skin and gender, being excluded from meetings. The first thing done at the CHAD in Seattle was to create such an exclusion zone, which is also a standard practice at the main left student union at French universities. Separate dorms have been instituted in about 80 universities along with separate graduation seminaries. Since every difference in outcome has been decreed to be due to systematic racism, and complex inquiries into causation are now off-limits, with scientists asking to retract their findings ‘because they could be mis-interpreted’ (and not because they are wrong). In what is now a routinized policy of what Frederick Douglas called the racism of low expectations, exams are adapted or cancelled, asking for homework is taboo, and it is no longer okay to challenge a 2+2=5 response, seen as an acceptable outcome of cognitive divergence.
Practices that make people more resilient, such as studying hard or working hard, are being racialized and demonized, targeting cultures that excel at it, such as the Confucian cultures.
The boundaries between the decreed intersectional groups are policed through taboos around cultural appropriation. It is no longer ok for novelist to create characters of a different DNA than yourself, to have texts translated by people with a different DNA, to wear dresses of a different culture, or as in Portland, to cook burritos if you are not Mexican.
People are supposed to speak as their group interests dictate. Hard won civil rights, such as women’s rights for protected spaces, even the right to characterize themselves as such, the free choice of sexual partners, and many other really basic rights, are being challenged, and in many cases, have been reversed. The people who dissent with the new hegemony, who more often than not get identified as libertarian left on the political compass, are hounded from their jobs by the thousands, are labelled as extremists for views that were mainstream progressive viewpoints even a few years ago.
The viewpoints of the most sensitive and fragile, who are no longer habituated to autonomous dissent that disagrees with their viewpoint, are posited as the norm from whom majorities cannot dissent, otherwise they would be unsafe. Pluralism is out, people are massively calling for book burnings, and representations of the cultural heritage of peoples and nations are poised for destruction in an iconoclastic fury. Only one ring of interpretation to rule them all, and everything that points to other possibilities should be destroyed. History is to be managed to the demands of the most extreme and fragile current sensibilities. Viewpoint diversity is out, even ‘diversity and inclusion’ are decried, in favour of centering one single political sensibility. Dissenters in the own ranks are de-identified as ‘not really belonging to their tribal group’, even if they share the required DNA.
Reactions to his new hegemony range from denial, “it doesn’t exist, it isn’t there, move on”, to the opinions that these are but marginal phenomenal, even though its rules and regulations are in many cases the constitutions of our online spaces (and now in the US, presidential decree), to enthusiastic ganging up to eliminate the dissenters through rituals of degradation, social shunning, and the systematic campaigns to destroy livelihoods, which hits un-famous working class people the hardest. Identitarian institutions themselves are subject to their own purity spiral campaigns, often the previous deniers being the victims of a process that they denied just 24 hours before being eliminated themselves. These processes are very familiar to those who know but a little of previous history, and realize where racialized and opinion-based purity spirals can lead to. It is no accident that the CHAD in Seattle saw pamphlets against Jewish privilege, since it is the same psychological structure of victimization and blame, which replaces the search for solidarity and commonality across difference, that produces both. The first step to physical violence is the destruction of the possibility of dialogue, hence the importance of rituals of degradation and Berufsverbot, which takes center stage in the neo-identitarian movements. The aim is always to dehumanize you, preparing further and deeper campaigns of purification, depending on the power they can mobilize. The one thing they fear the most is a dialogue amongst peers, before a free audience that can freely make up its minds, hence the need for cancellation and deplatforming.
While it is crucially important to continue the fight for civic and human rights, against discrimination of all kinds, for diversity and inclusion of marginalized social groups, the way forward is not through a universal regime of group separation and group allocation. Between the equality of opportunity of the liberals who refuse to look at material conditions, and the equality of outcomes of the identitarians, which refuse to recognize complex causation, individual freedoms and collective cultures, there is the old socialist (it is centering societies around preferred social outcomes, while honouring individual and collective autonomous initiative) and now common-centric approach, of creating the concrete material, cultural and subjective conditions so that people are really free to choose how they will contribute to the common good, and to the resilience and thriving of their own families, groups and productive communities.
The answer is to look at the concrete conditions, commons of capabilities, of people regardless of their DNA and other biological markers. The answer is to look at class, not in an essentialist and hateful way, but in the very concrete way of people having access to the product of their labour and own value creation, i.e.distributed forms of property and governance. The answer is to have the tools at our disposal to take decisions that take into account all living beings in the web of life, and the resources we all need to thrive across generations.
The answer is to retain the achievements of democracy and a liberal human order, to achieve a deeper, deliberative, super-competent democracy. The answer is to retain universalism and egalitarianism, and not abolish them because they were so imperfectly carried out. The answer is to retain the solidarity mechanisms of the welfare state and to extend them to all the nomadic and marginal existences that fall through the cracks, complementing them with new translocal institutions of solidarity. State and markets, historically responsible for the twin good/bad outcome of consumptive expansion and environmental and social dislocation, have to exist within bounds that make them generative, working with and for commons that protect human and extra human communities.
Some people believe that such a commons-centric successor civilisation is compatible with tribal fragmentation in a segregated social order subject to stringent suppression of free speech and thought. They are wrong and dangerous in that belief. Commons require freedom of thought and individual liberty. The commons are not a top-down stalinist or fascist institution that can freely discriminate in order to be made safe for elite extraction. These 2 solutions are mutually incompatible.
The commons require free peer to peer dynamics of free persons that willingly associate; it requires us to create and work on commons of capabilities so that every citizen and inhabitant can create livelihoods in freely chosen communities. It requires us to design economics not for zero sum games and group allocation that favours elite outcomes within each group, at the expense of the interests and wellbeing of the vast majority of the other people inside and outside those groups. While segregated commons based on elite clientelism are perhaps a theoretical possibility, on their own, in the context of a suppressive racialist order based on group allocation, they will not be able to create a coherent society that builds on the achievements of the current form of civilization. We need to ‘transcend and include’ what is best in premodern, modern and post-modern forms of living and organizing society, not suppress its highest and most noble achievements, which is individual and collective initiative, including entrepreneurship i.e. the right to create livelihoods around common interests and ideals.
People should be judged on their individual merits and behaviour, their intentions should be honoured and treated with dignity; they are all persons, the result of complex identity formations, choices, complex causation and the vagaries of life and society.
If the above is true, this means that while we can readily recognize the original good intentions of those that fall for the separatist, segregationist and free-speech suppressing movements , we also have to point out that they are in fact being conned by a ideologically totalist cult, that peddles a system of unproven pseudo-realities, and that these movements systematic racial profiling and scapegoating, will create a monster, and in fact, has already created a monster. We already know from meta-studies on ‘unconscious bias training’ result in more racist outcomes and that affirmative action and DIE bureaucracies do not seem to have desired outcomes (see the situation at Google itself). As Immanuel Wallerstein is reported to have said before his passing, this whole identitarian wrong path may well meant the loss of a whole generation in terms of emancipatory work, until an explosion and catastrophic event like the Chinese Cultural Revolution leads to a re-awakening to the need to work together across difference. The good news is that this has happened many times in human history, and that people have recoiled from the ultimate consequences of their wrong choices. But like fascism, stalinism and maoism, it can take many decades of catastrophes. The only hope we have is that these institutions are so dysfunctional, destroy progressive social movements at such a rate, that leading activists will recoil from going further into that path of self-destruction.
In the meantime, it is a time of reckoning and knowing where you stand. It is a time of political re-alignment.
We need to defend the advances and achievements of the civil rights movement against the upstart movements that aim to undo them.
We need to defend all people who have been targeted for suppression, and show our solidarity with them.
We need to defend open inquiry, academic freedom and free speech.
The commons are not an exclusively left project, as they have existed at the heart or at the margins of many different types of civilizations. Need we remind ourselves that the world’s most successful and exemplary cooperative, Mondragon, was born in a fascist state ?
The commons are a universal project, the only human institution that has historically been able to maintain and protect resources for the common good of communities the world over, for thousands of years, and that now needs to move center stage.
This requires free persons engaging with each other regardless of their DNA, to judge each other on our mutual contributions, to assist all those who want to contribute but have difficulties doing so. We need to abandon zero sum games which divide us into resource wars, and design infinite games, in which the advance of one person, does not have to happen at the expense of another.
So , in these forums, do not expect dis-engagement from the historical task at hand, nor any compromise with the forces who want to treat people based on their DNA and biological markers. We are with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and the Black Panthers, emancipators who saw themselves within the tradition of universalism and egalitarianism even as they opted for communal forms of organization within that framework. We are most emphatically not with people who want to allocate speech rights and other resources based on DNA (see the Evergreen documentaries to see how this works out in practice).
We denounce the new defenders of a universal apartheid regime, we are with all those who oppose them; we are with all egalitarian and universalist oriented people who believe the commons need to be centered in order to save our civilization. We welcome people of all persuasions, as long as they are not racialist, who align with a belief in free association around common projects. If you do not believe in free association, in free persons, how can you also believe in the commons ?
If you believe it is too partisan to be against racism, segregationism and the defense of complex persons with free speech, you have a whole hegemonic world order to defend, just don’t expect me to be your ally.
There is an enormous amount of pro-commons work to do; and the principles of the commons and peer to peer need to be defended against the advocates of segregation and racial inequality. There is no contradiction, they go hand in hand.
___________________________________________
Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Graduate Psychology
216 Johnston Hall
MSC 7401
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
(540) 568-7857 (phone)
(540) 568-4747 (fax)
Be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity.Check out the Unified Theory Of Knowledge homepage at:
https://www.unifiedtheoryofknowledge.org/
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