c. Passionate Dialogue
All we need to know about how to have productive debates:
The more emotionally triggereable (immature) we are, the quicker we slide down this slope, which gets steeper the more emotionally charged (i.e. important for dismantling the destructo-culture, think homeostasis / defense mechanisms of.. ) the topic is.
For those of us permis with a pattern-spotting eye (and a little imagination) ... you might notice that
A very un-polished article I might get around to writing one day.. these are mostly notes put together from various places and times that I've talked / written about this fascinating topic from Feb 2011 (when I started this page) which I keep adding to.
Some emotive threads in social media like Facebook offer plenty of opportunity (often in a short time) to observe how easy it is to slide down the pyramid model - more mature species manage to stick to the point/s of a conversation.
And *learning* how to climb to the top of that pyramid is a process most quickly learned by making lots of mistakes... especially making mistakes in public. Which something that FB makes very easy (both the speed and relative anonymity of internet make it possible for anyone so inclined to engage or observe as many heated discussions in a day as they might rarely manage in a month or year) ... so maybe we can consider social media as an accellerating-natural-succession tool for emotional intelligence / debating skills.
The Conflict Iceberg
Before exploring the much more ideal model above, I wanted to mention this other one called "The Iceberg of Conflict", which is what - if we are unaware of what the 'issues' actually are about - can keep us stuck to the lower levels of the Disagreement Pyramid, above.
28Oct15 - posted this on Regrarians thread about recent dramas making people leave the group.
18Sept15 - There's a Rhethoric and Enlightenment thread I started in Beautiful World FB group, since most of the discussions end up being "discussions about how we discuss" and I wanted somewhere to move those arguments out of the various threads.
The psychosocial level frequently dominates conflicting events.
The more a conflict escalates, the more this level wins in importance.
Therefore, recognizing and understanding the dynamics of the psychosocial level represents an important step towards understanding a conflict comprehensively.
Elevating the psychosocial level into the consciousness and removing the dynamics of the unconscious means placing the actual object of the conflict back into the field of view and making it (re)negotiable.
from Peace Education
According to Cloke and Goldsmith (2011), conflict is like an iceberg. What we see or understand is only a portion of what is really happening.
Meadow's Iceberg
This is a visual summary of Donella Meadow's famous article:
1 Places to Intervene in a System
- 1.1 9. Numbers.
- 1.2 8. Material stocks and flows.
- 1.3 7. Regulating negative feedback loops.
- 1.4 6. Driving positive feedback loops.
- 1.5 5. Information flows.
- 1.6 4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints).
- 1.7 3. The power of self-organization
- 1.8 2. The goals of the system
- 1.9 1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises
- 1.10 0. The power to transcend paradigms
A brilliant model, and very important to consider together with all these other pyramids / icebergs ...
Paul Graham's Model
The Disagreement Pyramid
I've been interested in observing how people argue forever (since discussion is one of the major ways we learn & evolve our thinking), so I was delighted to find this pyramid model above, Paul_Graham's_hierarchy_of_disagreement ... this is copied from my private blog in the Academy spaces, written November 2014:
I love how the disagreement pyramid illustrates very graphically what "getting to the point" actually means - since my main frustration has always been noticing how it is so incredibly difficult to get 'onto the same page' even, in many debates.
So this model summarizes it brilliantly as all about 'getting on the same level' - it's simply too difficult to communicate with someone who rants instead of debates, getting stuck at Contradiction (and increasingly unlikely when they sink to Tone, Ad Hominem or NameCalling) when one is expecting some decent Counterargument, at the very least.
Am now very grateful for all the very good science training I got, and also for the Debating Club sessions I attended at my secondary school (even if I did only go when it was raining outside, during the lunch hour ... ) and see that basically they were trying to train us to stick to the upper levels of that pyramid, and develop the skills to listen out for the actual relevant points so we could construct decent Refutations. Instead of just ranting.
And it seems obvious to me (after a few decades of seeing people getting caught up in massive confusions about 'issues' instead of doing the internal (painful) work those issues are trying to get us to address) that this is the reason we get so bogged down in the lower levels of the Disagreement Pyramid - even to the point of dragging the argument into the sewers of personal attacks.
Which is a pity when SO much yield could come out of realizing (in those instances) that 'the point' of the discussion has just shifted to whatever deeply hurt someone usually in the remote past - to make them react in such an irrational & confusing way. And usually they are cultural patterns, which we ALL need to address anyhow, but they DO become destructive if in fact the group (project, design, organization..) doesn't actually have the resources to support the personal growth work required, because it needs to get on with the project's aims and objectives.
Intersections
I love exploring new models, especially in finding out how they combine with others, and in a way these two are actually referring to the same thing: that "nothing can change until it becomes what it is" - a great quote by John Bradshaw.
So what I found very useful (and quite exciting :) to notice is that these two pyramids in fact fit quite well in this inverse way, to illustrate that the equivalent of gravity in social situations (= "going with the flow" - of our patterns / prejudices / superficial impressions, in the case of highly messed up / patterned civilized people like ourselves) will tend to drag us downwards when in fact the solutions are found right at the TOP.
Because higher levels of energy / intelligence / resource are required to climb upwards
- toward noticing and resolving our Issues From the Past in the case of the Issues Pyramid on the left,
- or Getting to the Point in terms of the Debating Pyramid to the right, whenever there is some conflict going on
And clearly they are quite intimately related, often.
The Pesky Inner Children
The 'pointy issues' that surface in groups (= when someone is 'triggered' about something or someone, called 'restimulation' in the RC model ) also often in fact 'needle' everyone else's own 'issues' because they're so uncomfortable. And they tend to happen if & when our Pesky Inner Children 'wake up' & start screaming for attention (distracting everyone), and there simply isn't the resource to give them healthy attention. So they either get ignored or get un-healthy attention instead - which of course only makes things worse.
Learning to stay rational is a skill that can be learned but also faked: often very intelligent people just have more sophisticated ways of rationalizing their prejudices.
I've spent the best part of my design efforts (on the social side - the land side usually looks after itself very easily - hence the 15+yrs in developing the Integral PC curriculum!) in most of the projects we've designed with groups in trying to "child-proof the house". And with noticeable lack of success :) ... so I've learned a hell of a lot about all this (lots of mistakes, but usually now just in trying to figure out how to get more people to APPLY the theory we DO know works. Quite exhasperating :/ )
When someone is 'triggered' we (typically)
- start imagining someone is insulting us, or
- we feel 'attacked' by simple disagreements,
- or we simply get jealous of someone (often without even realizing)
- or for whatever reason start feeling our most cherished beliefs / models are being threatened.
These are all irrational responses to actual reality, but totally explainable (even predictable) if we have the models to see them in a different way.
The scientific model is meant to help us avoid this tendency humans seem have in deal with 'distressing' issues<<<
What usually accompanies irrational behaviour are strong feelings coming to the surface, and if we don't know how to process them (discharge them / do the emotional work they are signalling needs doing), we end up dramatizing them.
There's a 'drama' going on when we start blaming people (which looks like ignoring in its mildest forms, but can climb quickly up all the way to demonizing), or actually hurting people (usually by treating them like objects, like the screen for whatever projection is happening in our imagination) and then we can start draining the group / key individuals (leaders are prime victims of projections in any group) with irrational attacks, or other demands of attention, effectively braking up the group / relationships and/or diverting energy away from the group's objectives.
When this starts to happen >>I've learned that a drama is usually well under way... and difficult to stop
It becomes incredibly difficult to distinguish patterns from reality - which is a specialty & characteristic of patterns, as the RC model in M1.6 explains beautifully, and it is important that the group doesn't 'adjust' to the drama (which is all too common, especially if people are taught to ignore rather than address things, and they are used to just lowering their expectations accordingly) but call it out as quickly and effectively as possible for what it is.
Ego to Eco
the Great Transition
From slide 39 in the Peak class, M4.1, we actually talk about our inability to argue constructively being (possibly) even THE greatest block in advancing out of the massive problems that face us now - which require we greatly advance in our collective wisdom.
But I didn't have these two models to put together then, so it made it more difficult to see how it is also related to this other neat little model -
Which we put in the page on Values of EcoEscuela.net because we want to highlight how crucial this is, and how totally inter-connected our interior world is with our exterior world - whether indiviual or collective. And we have to design this transition, which is necessarily going to be fraught, interesting, difficult at times, and even deeply controversial.
The link between moral and cognitive development
Ken Wilber interview on this
Acting not Reacting
I've been very actively and passionately engaged in action-learning about the kind of petty "playground bully /nasty gossip culture" kind of Horizontal Hostility that (all too often) destroys wonderful permaculture projects from the inside, ever since, a few
decades ago, I started noticing the same kinds of patterns repeating over and over again, not just in projects I was involved in but hearing about those of my colleagues. It's the plague that has kept us ineffectual in changing anything globally, despite there being a huge number of people who essentially agree on a sustainability vision.
What is very interesting is that these HH episodes seem to be escalating, both in number and viciousness, and precisely when we need unity, solidarity & cooperation more than ever, & more urgently than ever - amongst all of us who care about justice and who are trying to help create the beautifully sustainable planet - with humans in it! - that we deep down all know is possible.
About Horizontal Hostility
This escalation (in particular some recent particularly shocking attacks on some colleagues of mine) prompted us to get together the HH Conference which we have been thinking about for some years, and this below is the opening presentation I gave for it, on 1st Nov 2014.
Its very long (as usual..) but am very happy with it, as it summarizes quite well, I think, all that I've learned so far about this horrendous and fascinating phenomenon. It attempts to provide a possible wider context, & provoke, if not anwers, at least active questions as to why & how it is (tragically) the most daring activists get most attacked by DestructoCultural patterns - which in fact act through us - whenever we decide to give in to the big pulls to blame others for our own inner conflicts (and, I would argue, the ego-deaths that in fact need to happen, for us to grow up - individually AND collectively).
The great thing about this ... is that it is SUCH a huge example of The Problem = the Solution, if you take the perspective that the stress and yicckyness of getting into those horrible tangles* is just our own internal self-regulation system actually trying to wake us up from the nightmare of egoism... which is precisely one of the (if not the?) major reasons for the mess we're in collectively, in the first place.
Because the crazyness of being so convinced that we are our own little scared egos (so fragile & vulnerable to offense), is the same disease that keep us terrified into keeping to little consumer lives.
We hold on to our egos feeling threatened as a 'very bad thing', when in fact it's a prelude to us getting liberated .. if we only let the process complete, and let those parts of our ego get dismembered, by whatever situation we've (so cleverly!) put ourselves in order to do precisely that very important work (usually unconsciously).
Good Integral Permaculture Designers have to be 'Freethinkers' in this sense.
There is far too much to learn for us to afford to be lazy thinkers / reactionary trigger-happy non-thinkers or hold on to any kind of belief - 'beliefs'
Five Disfunctions of a Team
This might be really about another article .. but it's related.
There's lots more pyramid models out there for some reason ... and this one is another one of the useful ones which I researched recently.
The pyramid diagram is from Patrick Lencioni’s popular team performance model, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
The model is brilliant in its simplicity and comprehensiveness, allowing team-members to get onto the same page easily and begin using common language around team development. As a result, team-members can quickly begin developing the functional elements of Lencioni’s model, namely Trust, Conflict, Commitment, Accountability and Results, respectively. Lencioni suggests that each element serves as a pre-requisite for the next, and the absence or avoidance of any element invites dysfunction into the team.
Lencioni presents these behaviors as a pyramid, with Absence of Trust being the foundation from which each dysfunction builds on the one before it. In other words:
- Absence of Trust yields Fear of Conflict.
- Fear of Conflict yields Lack of Commitment.
- Lack of Commitment yields Avoidance of Accountability.
- Avoidance of Accountability yields Inattention to Results.
In Jeff Balin's experience in working with numerous teams, the Lencioni model has proven highly intuitive and very effective in raising the bar on team-functionality and alignment. By assessing a team's level of functionality and facilitating a customized program that addresses the findings, Jeff is able to help teams become more competent in each of the critical factors that are the hallmark of highly functioning teams.
The New McCarthyism
This great article by Derrick Jensen came out in August 2015.
Some quotes I liked:
Capitalists used the rhetoric of “communism” to blacklist. The pro-Israel lobby uses the rhetoric of “Anti-Semitism.” And the modern-day McCarthys use the rhetoric of “oppression” and “trauma.”
...
I just read an essay by an instructor in which he mentions an adjunct whose contract was not “renewed after students complained that he exposed them to ‘offensive’ texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate.”
...
The sad, sad, sad thing is that radical feminism is the anti-thesis of postmodernism, and they saw decades ago where this was leading (this article which I share whenever I can because it's so brilliant, was written 15 years ago: ) ... but the demonizing and ridiculing of feminism that the corporate media launched precisely when feminism was gaining popularity, in the 80s, has been SO successful that today we have a plague of young women who are proudly anti-feminist, and far too many people who can't even stand a mention of "the labels that divide us so" ... which means they can't begin to engage in seriously confronting the mythologies that are destroying the planet .. and instead become carriers of them.
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This page originally started with this content:
PeopleCare Dialogues
passionatedialogue.pbworks.com
This site was born on the 7th of January 2008, in order to fill in the increasingly important gaps in the understanding of permaculture design (and so knowledge and skills) observed during the last decade. It's main reason and focus is to increase our collective intelligence, by trying to (very broadly speaking) bring our collective PeopleCare wisdom up to match the high levels of our EarthCare wisdom, in the great dynamic science and ethics-based movement that is PermaCulture.
And to approach it from a design perspective.
Feb 2011 - this turned out to be the pre-cursor of Integral Permaculture. Something we at NodoEspiral launched as a proposed long dialogue in november 2010 with a series of free online conferences, and will continue as a year-long online course from April 2011.
See www.PermaCultureScience.com
... to be continued ....