This is such a complex subject and can seem quite academic when we get down to definitions. At the heart of it, though, is identity. We communicate to be seen, heard and validated as a human being and the person we are. This does not minimise the content of the communication which is often vitally important but we ignore the personal context at our peril.
More voices would be a really good way to explore this further, voices that are not all already aligned as challenge is essential to deriving a meaningful outcome. Those voices do, however, need to be aware of the many different levels on which communication occurs.
Deliberative democracy offers a route with lotteries + citizen assemblies to shatter such reality siloes.
It is analogous to replica exchange in Monte Carlo simulations on parallel computer simulations. Instead of an energy landscape of a molecule though, we are exploring the political landscape.
The end result is “citizen learning”. (As opposed to machine learning). In which we find people learning to see the world as others experience it through citizen assemblies.
There’s only so many times I can scream this at the world and hope they understand.
If you have such a round table then I can suggest some people from the deliberative democracy community to include because they’ve done a lot of leg work already!
It’s due to our schools having been taken over by fascists about 40 years ago and people not aware of that or how important authentic schools are. Mostly, teacher whistleblowers have been trying to expose this since 2002 at WhiteChalkCrime.com and EndTeacherAbuse.org to no avail. Take a look at what they’re saying and you’ll understand how we lost humanity. The place that used to teach it stopped teaching it years ago. The lack of critical thinking due to this is also why so many people voted for Trump thinking he could fix things.
This was such an absorbing conversation and so very relevant on a personal level. In my corner of the world I am participating in a struggle to preserve one of the largest contiguous open space of hard wood forests, wetlands, and meadows, complete with an aquifer, in our region from massive overdevelopment. The new owners (who plan to sell it off in parcels for a wide range of development) are local businessmen, which has created a contentious and ugly clash between those who think “growth” and ”progress” will fix our town’s problems, and those of us who see the severe ecological consequences this would have if realized. Last night was the first public hearing on the draft environmental impact review and it was a long and very tense and exhausting evening. Your conversation with Damien gave me a much needed dose of perspective on why we just can’t seem to hear each other, which has been very discouraging. Thank you for this conversation, for your podcast, and all you do. I hope there can be more on this with Damien and others.
The round table about how we use language you mention in the youtube video, i really hope you create and may I contribute a little about we use language pre-reflectively in ideology.
I have been exploring what i call Critical Theory Deservedness in how we divide nearly everything into groups or categories of deserving and undeserving based on socially constructed attributes or qualities. Like women’s work is less deserving of pay than mens work. It literally is in every aspect of life.
We do not think when we do this trick of language. We often interchange words in our daily usage. We say we love a food as an example. To my point, we often use the word deserve when we mean ought or should or even need.
People say everyone deserves respect or dignity. But more accurately they mean everyone should be treated with respect or dignity. The word ‘deserve’ implies that someone or something has a quality that justifies a suspension of the normal rules of ethics. For instance we often invoke meritocracy: “Joe completed his apprenticeship and he deserves more pay.” This seems reasonable. It implies that those who have not completed their apprenticeship do not deserve more pay.
While i do challenge even this notion of deservedness in other writings, i think it is important to understand that this is the exact language and logic behind sexism, racism, colonialism, homophobia, war, class, capitalism, ecocide, nationalism and so many other ways we divide nearly everything into groups or categories of deserving or undeserving.
But our language is fluid and not precise. So when we say everyone deserves love, we really mean everyone should be loved. We are not saying that everyone has some quality that makes them deserving of love. Or respect. Or dignity. Or to have their needs met.
How we use language often disguises some things. It is interesting which language seem to have made a differentiation between the words ‘deserve’ and ‘should/ought’.
When i asked ChatGPT to analyze which languages used deservedness it gave me the following:
“Roughly 30 to 40 percent of the world’s languages—mostly from colonial and Indo-European traditions—clearly distinguish between “deserve” and “should” using separate words. These languages often reflect a worldview where individual merit, moral worth, or earned entitlement plays a central role in justifying what a person ought to receive. In contrast, about 60 to 70 percent of languages—most commonly Indigenous, East Asian, Pacific, and many African languages—do not draw a sharp lexical line between “deserve” and “should.” Instead, they express obligation through relational, contextual, or situational language, focusing on what is fitting, appropriate, or harmonious within a relationship or setting, rather than what someone has earned. In these languages, the moral logic of obligation tends to be embedded in social roles or circumstances, not in personal merit. This difference reflects a broader cultural divide: colonial and hierarchical societies often linguistically encode individual desert, while many Indigenous and egalitarian societies frame moral action relationally, without invoking the deservingness of the subject.”
What a golden conversation! I loved the comment from Damien about anti-elitism and anti-expertise.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but when it comes to why we can't communicate, I think a large part of the reason is that our educational system is not geared towards helping people develop their humanity, and their ability to think and analyze their thoughts and arguments.
When he attracts followers by getting them to focus on who they don’t like rather than what they might need, Trump demonstrates that, as emotions can sway us more than our intellect can, a population educated to embrace and exhibit emotions more than intellect are more easily fooled by appeals to their emotions than to their intellect. So Trump’s audience does not care about facts, they care about how they feel. He can be successful saying things that make them feel good even when doing things that are bad for them.
Successful actors within a society based on competition and aggressive capitalism need to master the art of deception, because that society will produce a glut of nearly every product or service that can be bought and sold, which eventually leads to a competition to get consumers to choose products that are nearly all the same, so how to make them stand out? Deception. This is a flaw of this type of social system.
Rachel’s experience with the Canadians who were former Left-wingers and described being anti-science based on their frustration with scientists appearing to deny facts of biology they had come to accept reveals again the problem with our educational systems, which explains so much of what ails us. At our 5th anniversary event for MEER.org Dr. Tao began his presentation talking about the need to focus on upstream solutions in climate change rather than inefficient downstream solutions like direct air capture, because upstream solutions have knock-on downstream effects that produce more impact. One cure for the Canadians could have been the upstream strategy of improving how to think. When we don’t educate people to think well and be able to analyse arguments, and simply focus on producing good worker bees, they end up like the Canadians Rachel spoke with. Unable to distinguish between finer points. Trans acceptance does not require rejecting biology. If it appears that this is what’s happening, the solution is to dig deeper, pay more attention to the arguments and find out why things appear the way they do. The solution is not to throw your hands up and declare science to be simply wrong or untrustworthy. But no matter what you do, don’t try to solve this by holding a competitive event, which is the misguided tool of the current system. Having discussions, rather than debates where people expect a winner and loser to emerge, are the way to go. But instead of learning events, we have oodles of debates on social media pitting one person against another, trying to win, with audiences cheering one or the other as if they were at a football match. Why? It keeps people ignorant and creates exciting and profitable social media fodder. Learning is boring. It’s what you (were supposed to) do in school.
Finally, while I did appreciate the early part of the conversation about reality, and how one might argue that we have come to have our own unique realities which, while expressed through a shared language, results in us talking around each other rather than with each other, I also see the problems with that kind of description. One can always argue that despite having a shared language, we can never really know if we both mean the same things using the same words. At some point we need to have the feeling, and to expect, that we essentially mean the same thing most of the time. But when describing the "different realities" we each inhabit, we can fall into the trap of relativism which can be taken to extremes such that we all feel selfishly confident in our own utterances and do not feel obliged to cooperate with others or obey any rules, because what I know is real and what you know is fake...
IF 10,000 words are the approximate lexicon size for each specialty (medical, legal, architectural, etc), imagine if humans included the etymological collections of art, emotion, and feeling too?
Not even including the spiritual...gads.
But this is a 'windmill' worthy to build and tilt at.
At 27:38 quote "that a man is woman, and a woman is a man" referencing gender identity misses basic Biology - - - and highlights those who think climate change is false because of that perceived 'inconsistency' in science did not take high school biology. X and Y chromosomes in pairs is not the full range of options. Klinefelters and Turner syndrome are just a few of several varied syndromes where extra or missing gender chromosomes occurs and has been identified for many decades. Indigenous cultures acknowledge this range of human beings... so no gender range is as SCIENTIFIC as is CLIMATE CHANGE https://scienceline.org/2020/10/beyond-x-y-chromosomes-and-sex-organs/
I look forward to future conversations on this issue of communication. So many important points were addressed, and a deeper dive would be much appreciated.
Facebook changed as soon as Obama was elected and the world with it. I remember a photo of Zuckerberg at Davos, hands in jeans, wearing a hoodie and surrounded by the wealthy, white elite who understood what he didn't. He had the most powerful propaganda machine ever imagine in his hands and he was oblivious. Not anymore sadly. Mainstream media threw in the towel when they broadcast the Trump "grab them by the pussy" tape and swapped clicks for ethics. Musk bought X to control the narrative and help build Thiel's infosys of personal data. All this combined with 40 years deliberate destruction of education and community space has yielded what we have today, when everyone is famous for 15 minutes no matter who or what they have to trample on to get there.
This was an excellent start to really important discussion of one of the most fundamental and peculiarly postmodern challenges we face today when it comes to effecting positive change or even arresting further extremism and societal disintegration. Please bring Damien back soon, Rachel —even better if you can assemble a roundtable. Would love to know who you’d like to participate in that. Might have some suggestions.
This is such a complex subject and can seem quite academic when we get down to definitions. At the heart of it, though, is identity. We communicate to be seen, heard and validated as a human being and the person we are. This does not minimise the content of the communication which is often vitally important but we ignore the personal context at our peril.
More voices would be a really good way to explore this further, voices that are not all already aligned as challenge is essential to deriving a meaningful outcome. Those voices do, however, need to be aware of the many different levels on which communication occurs.
Great subject - thanks, Rachel.
Yes, I would like to see this conversation pursued further.
Yes, please continue this conversation!
More talking!! 😜 Teasing out the space behind the words.
Deliberative democracy offers a route with lotteries + citizen assemblies to shatter such reality siloes.
It is analogous to replica exchange in Monte Carlo simulations on parallel computer simulations. Instead of an energy landscape of a molecule though, we are exploring the political landscape.
The end result is “citizen learning”. (As opposed to machine learning). In which we find people learning to see the world as others experience it through citizen assemblies.
There’s only so many times I can scream this at the world and hope they understand.
If you have such a round table then I can suggest some people from the deliberative democracy community to include because they’ve done a lot of leg work already!
It’s due to our schools having been taken over by fascists about 40 years ago and people not aware of that or how important authentic schools are. Mostly, teacher whistleblowers have been trying to expose this since 2002 at WhiteChalkCrime.com and EndTeacherAbuse.org to no avail. Take a look at what they’re saying and you’ll understand how we lost humanity. The place that used to teach it stopped teaching it years ago. The lack of critical thinking due to this is also why so many people voted for Trump thinking he could fix things.
This was such an absorbing conversation and so very relevant on a personal level. In my corner of the world I am participating in a struggle to preserve one of the largest contiguous open space of hard wood forests, wetlands, and meadows, complete with an aquifer, in our region from massive overdevelopment. The new owners (who plan to sell it off in parcels for a wide range of development) are local businessmen, which has created a contentious and ugly clash between those who think “growth” and ”progress” will fix our town’s problems, and those of us who see the severe ecological consequences this would have if realized. Last night was the first public hearing on the draft environmental impact review and it was a long and very tense and exhausting evening. Your conversation with Damien gave me a much needed dose of perspective on why we just can’t seem to hear each other, which has been very discouraging. Thank you for this conversation, for your podcast, and all you do. I hope there can be more on this with Damien and others.
The round table about how we use language you mention in the youtube video, i really hope you create and may I contribute a little about we use language pre-reflectively in ideology.
I have been exploring what i call Critical Theory Deservedness in how we divide nearly everything into groups or categories of deserving and undeserving based on socially constructed attributes or qualities. Like women’s work is less deserving of pay than mens work. It literally is in every aspect of life.
We do not think when we do this trick of language. We often interchange words in our daily usage. We say we love a food as an example. To my point, we often use the word deserve when we mean ought or should or even need.
People say everyone deserves respect or dignity. But more accurately they mean everyone should be treated with respect or dignity. The word ‘deserve’ implies that someone or something has a quality that justifies a suspension of the normal rules of ethics. For instance we often invoke meritocracy: “Joe completed his apprenticeship and he deserves more pay.” This seems reasonable. It implies that those who have not completed their apprenticeship do not deserve more pay.
While i do challenge even this notion of deservedness in other writings, i think it is important to understand that this is the exact language and logic behind sexism, racism, colonialism, homophobia, war, class, capitalism, ecocide, nationalism and so many other ways we divide nearly everything into groups or categories of deserving or undeserving.
But our language is fluid and not precise. So when we say everyone deserves love, we really mean everyone should be loved. We are not saying that everyone has some quality that makes them deserving of love. Or respect. Or dignity. Or to have their needs met.
How we use language often disguises some things. It is interesting which language seem to have made a differentiation between the words ‘deserve’ and ‘should/ought’.
When i asked ChatGPT to analyze which languages used deservedness it gave me the following:
“Roughly 30 to 40 percent of the world’s languages—mostly from colonial and Indo-European traditions—clearly distinguish between “deserve” and “should” using separate words. These languages often reflect a worldview where individual merit, moral worth, or earned entitlement plays a central role in justifying what a person ought to receive. In contrast, about 60 to 70 percent of languages—most commonly Indigenous, East Asian, Pacific, and many African languages—do not draw a sharp lexical line between “deserve” and “should.” Instead, they express obligation through relational, contextual, or situational language, focusing on what is fitting, appropriate, or harmonious within a relationship or setting, rather than what someone has earned. In these languages, the moral logic of obligation tends to be embedded in social roles or circumstances, not in personal merit. This difference reflects a broader cultural divide: colonial and hierarchical societies often linguistically encode individual desert, while many Indigenous and egalitarian societies frame moral action relationally, without invoking the deservingness of the subject.”
What a golden conversation! I loved the comment from Damien about anti-elitism and anti-expertise.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but when it comes to why we can't communicate, I think a large part of the reason is that our educational system is not geared towards helping people develop their humanity, and their ability to think and analyze their thoughts and arguments.
When he attracts followers by getting them to focus on who they don’t like rather than what they might need, Trump demonstrates that, as emotions can sway us more than our intellect can, a population educated to embrace and exhibit emotions more than intellect are more easily fooled by appeals to their emotions than to their intellect. So Trump’s audience does not care about facts, they care about how they feel. He can be successful saying things that make them feel good even when doing things that are bad for them.
Successful actors within a society based on competition and aggressive capitalism need to master the art of deception, because that society will produce a glut of nearly every product or service that can be bought and sold, which eventually leads to a competition to get consumers to choose products that are nearly all the same, so how to make them stand out? Deception. This is a flaw of this type of social system.
Rachel’s experience with the Canadians who were former Left-wingers and described being anti-science based on their frustration with scientists appearing to deny facts of biology they had come to accept reveals again the problem with our educational systems, which explains so much of what ails us. At our 5th anniversary event for MEER.org Dr. Tao began his presentation talking about the need to focus on upstream solutions in climate change rather than inefficient downstream solutions like direct air capture, because upstream solutions have knock-on downstream effects that produce more impact. One cure for the Canadians could have been the upstream strategy of improving how to think. When we don’t educate people to think well and be able to analyse arguments, and simply focus on producing good worker bees, they end up like the Canadians Rachel spoke with. Unable to distinguish between finer points. Trans acceptance does not require rejecting biology. If it appears that this is what’s happening, the solution is to dig deeper, pay more attention to the arguments and find out why things appear the way they do. The solution is not to throw your hands up and declare science to be simply wrong or untrustworthy. But no matter what you do, don’t try to solve this by holding a competitive event, which is the misguided tool of the current system. Having discussions, rather than debates where people expect a winner and loser to emerge, are the way to go. But instead of learning events, we have oodles of debates on social media pitting one person against another, trying to win, with audiences cheering one or the other as if they were at a football match. Why? It keeps people ignorant and creates exciting and profitable social media fodder. Learning is boring. It’s what you (were supposed to) do in school.
Finally, while I did appreciate the early part of the conversation about reality, and how one might argue that we have come to have our own unique realities which, while expressed through a shared language, results in us talking around each other rather than with each other, I also see the problems with that kind of description. One can always argue that despite having a shared language, we can never really know if we both mean the same things using the same words. At some point we need to have the feeling, and to expect, that we essentially mean the same thing most of the time. But when describing the "different realities" we each inhabit, we can fall into the trap of relativism which can be taken to extremes such that we all feel selfishly confident in our own utterances and do not feel obliged to cooperate with others or obey any rules, because what I know is real and what you know is fake...
IF 10,000 words are the approximate lexicon size for each specialty (medical, legal, architectural, etc), imagine if humans included the etymological collections of art, emotion, and feeling too?
Not even including the spiritual...gads.
But this is a 'windmill' worthy to build and tilt at.
At 27:38 quote "that a man is woman, and a woman is a man" referencing gender identity misses basic Biology - - - and highlights those who think climate change is false because of that perceived 'inconsistency' in science did not take high school biology. X and Y chromosomes in pairs is not the full range of options. Klinefelters and Turner syndrome are just a few of several varied syndromes where extra or missing gender chromosomes occurs and has been identified for many decades. Indigenous cultures acknowledge this range of human beings... so no gender range is as SCIENTIFIC as is CLIMATE CHANGE https://scienceline.org/2020/10/beyond-x-y-chromosomes-and-sex-organs/
Yes, I would like to see this conversation pursued further.
Yes, please, we need more discussion and more philosophy!
I look forward to future conversations on this issue of communication. So many important points were addressed, and a deeper dive would be much appreciated.
Facebook changed as soon as Obama was elected and the world with it. I remember a photo of Zuckerberg at Davos, hands in jeans, wearing a hoodie and surrounded by the wealthy, white elite who understood what he didn't. He had the most powerful propaganda machine ever imagine in his hands and he was oblivious. Not anymore sadly. Mainstream media threw in the towel when they broadcast the Trump "grab them by the pussy" tape and swapped clicks for ethics. Musk bought X to control the narrative and help build Thiel's infosys of personal data. All this combined with 40 years deliberate destruction of education and community space has yielded what we have today, when everyone is famous for 15 minutes no matter who or what they have to trample on to get there.
This was an excellent start to really important discussion of one of the most fundamental and peculiarly postmodern challenges we face today when it comes to effecting positive change or even arresting further extremism and societal disintegration. Please bring Damien back soon, Rachel —even better if you can assemble a roundtable. Would love to know who you’d like to participate in that. Might have some suggestions.