Comments on “Pattern and Nebulosity: Deconstructing Yourself podcast”
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Radicalization
I have read only a little. Is there something in particular you had in mind?
Nebulosity
Such a great podcast, perhaps making the concepts of meaningness more consolidated. It seems to me that most people are motivated when they are unaware or unwilling to recognize that they are operating within a fairly well defined system of belief, and nebulosity may create discomfort and thwart change. Could nebulosity create anxiety and then people cling to known systems out of fear?
When you talked about post modernity and no one can really believe in the previous systems, I wondered about how much of our human evolution was animated by these sort of singular belief systems, and once all these systems started to fail, where does that leave the human species in terms of our future (building a better world, being happy people etc.)?
Nebulosity, anxiety, and the future
Could nebulosity create anxiety and then people cling to known systems out of fear?
Yes—there’s the beginnings of a discussion of that here.
once all these systems started to fail, where does that leave the human species in terms of our future?
An important question!
I’ve started to develop a possible answer here.
Which blog post was sort of an apology?
I just listened to this podcast and found it very illuminating. In the section you label “The dangers of self-diagnosing your Kegan stage”, at 1:06:30 you said:
“My most recent blog post actually is sort of an apology really on behalf of myself but also metarationality in general for a kind of snooty, sneery attitude that we call fall into. If we’re going to be helpful, we need to clear the path to metarationality and support people along the way rather than engaging in some kind of one-upmanship and making the path unnecessarily difficult.”
As you and Michael agree, this can be a real problem for anyone offering an -ism. I’m very curious about how you addressed the issue in the blog post you mention. I searched for such a blog post but came up empty. Do you recall which blog post it was?
Ignorant, irrelevant, and inscrutable
The post was “Ignorant, irrelevant, and inscrutable.” I’m not entirely happy with the ways I said what I did there, although I still agree with the general message. It was responding to particular conversations at the tim.
Radicalization
You joked about fundamentalist religion as a form of role-play on this episode, and you’ve written before on the problems with gurus and about extreme beliefs. Have you read any of the work on radicalization that has come out in the last 16 years? Of course a lot of the focus is on fundamentalist Islamist radicalization, but there also seems to be increasing awareness that the same work applies to, say, fascist or anarchist radicalization.