🔥Welcome to volume 000023!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
Hope everyone is staying safe and active while we ride this out.
📏Baselines📏
“Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him. - Fyodor Dostoyesky
If you told me at the beginning of the year that my wife and I would be working from home every single day, I would have laughed. If you told me my living room becomes my office, gym, and family hangout area, it would evoke more chuckles.
The idea of WFH being a possibility seemed ridiculous. Yet here we are. Three months into it with no end in site.
What began as impossible turned into not only possible, but the baseline. Habit experts suggest that it takes 30 days for a habit to stick. WFH took a little bit longer, but it became the norm. The means of communicating with coworkers changed. Our desks changed. The flow of the “house office” needed to be established. New \routines sprung up creating the everyday patterns of the new normal.
The far fetched idea became doable, repeatable and easy. We ran the experiment, we adjusted and it became the baseline.
Like anything there are positives and negatives of WFH versus the office. Life always contains a series of trade offs. We miss the energy of our coworkers. We miss chopping it up during a strategy or investment session. We miss reading the room and each other’s reactions and body language. On occasion a child screams in the background, but everyone on the call relates and laughs.
Our flexibility to adjust and thrive during ever evolving landscapes and challenges is immense. We can do so much more than we believe possible. When we let go of the mindstate of the impossible, we get to radically alter our baselines and our possibilities. We ride the waves we get and we end up in places we didn’t even dream of.
Baselines aren’t reality. They are as real as invisible lines on a map. They can be helpful constraints when we want to focus. They act as barriers and limit us when we fail to see them as placeholders. We morph our baselines by putting in time, energy and effort in creating something new. We morphy our baselines by trying something new.
Run experiments. Create new baselines and compare them to the old ones. Try things and see what happens. Right now is the perfect time to experiment and play. If you don’t like the outcome, you get to back to the old baseline. If you like the outcome, you’ve shifted your position in the game of life.
📓Articles to Read📓
Defund (and redesign) Everything by Jordan Hall
It’s that Bruce Lee moment where we need to “Research your own experience. Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own. “
Jordan notes the systems that are failing and how we need to redesign them vs. doubling down on what is broken or not working. Writing bad code on top of bad code isn’t the right answer.
It is not stretching the truth to say that effectively all of our social institutions are a bad combination of corrupt and obsolete. Our education system. Our healthcare system. Our food production systems. Our banking and finance systems. Our journalism and science systems. Our political systems.
They are all beyond the pale and they all should be defunded and redesigned.
Thinking about whole systems
The primary risk that I see in the defund the police movement is that it (might) fail to take into consideration the intrinsic complexity of human systems. For example, one risk might be the naive notion that the right thing to do is to take money from police budgets and to (simply) move it into places like education and healthcare.
From my point of view, this is an error for two reasons.
(1) The education and healthcare systems are just as broken as the policing system. Moving dimes from one broken place to another isn’t going to do much good.
(2) The problem isn’t really that much about funding — the problem is that the institutions are corrupt and obsolete. On the one hand, taking money from the policing system doesn’t really address the deep question of how we might really go about radically upgrading the presence of lived justice. On the other hand, giving money to the education system doesn’t really address the deep question of how we might go about radically upgrading how we support healthy human development.
The whole system needs to be replaced. Not burnt down, but carefully and thoughtfully replaced.
Santa Fe Institute’s Michael Garfield “We Will Fight Diseases of Our Networks by Realizing We Are Networks"
We’re in a world where what the poet John Keats called “negative capability” is king: the skill of not congealing on an answer prematurely, the capacity to hedge one’s mental bets and keep one’s models open, fluid, and provisional. This looks a lot like having a diverse gut microbiome that can handle wide varieties of foods, or how a virus like SARS-CoV2 is less a fixed point in the genotypic space than a loose cloud of possibilities, evolvable enough to pivot to new hosts as they are offered. It’s why hyperconnected bank loan networks are vulnerable to cascading failures, but an archipelago can breed and harbor innovations that repopulate the mainland after mass extinctions. It’s why investors call for a diverse portfolio of assets and high-beta strategies are suited for a moment of extraordinary volatility. It’s why food webs that don’t depend entirely on one key species fare much better through catastrophe. It’s why sometimes stalemates lead to better answers than a fast agreement.
Ed Batista with a blog post On Bullshit
Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the way things are may become attenuated or lost. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the respond of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. [pp 59-61]
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Zac Stein’s Education in a Time Between Worlds
Education is the new planetary frontier
Human development and education are the elephants in the room when it comes to system level change
There is a false sense of scarcity around 1. Human Development 2. Learning and 3. Education
Schools switched from the good and the beautiful to the transmission of “official knowledge” and marketable skills
Postmodern world is missing a meta-narrative and a meta-theory
The mind is an evolving complex ecosystem (he likes complex ecosystem vs. mind as a computer metaphor)
The mind is an evolving organism. It is growing and self regulating --> like an ecosystem
What are schools for? How do schools serve? What kind of civilization do they perpetuate?
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Zac Stein talks to Jim Rutt PartII - (Spotify / Transcript)
Zak has been focused on rebuilding the education system and where we go from here.
Zak: There are several different models, including esoteric models from people like Rudolf Steiner, where looking at this notion that there are periods when, although we’re still on the same earth, we are moving to a different world. We are in one of those periods right now. Basically, when you’re in one of those periods, education itself becomes one of the primary vectors of collapsing the new world into order. That’s the way I’m framing the educational thinking I’m doing in the book, which is to say this isn’t the thinking I would have been doing back in the 1950s or 19060s, let alone 1890s or something. This is the thinking you do when you’re literally between worlds, when you are trying to reboot a very basic human infrastructure, like a hard reboot. Obviously, you can see how this links into the thinking around GameB, and there’s other groups that are holding similar notions. That’s a little bit about that notion of the, “Between Worlds.”
Jim: We actually have more capability now than we did in 1850, but we’re confronting a much more complex world. It’s really a mismatch between exponentially rising complexity, and probably also exponentially rising capability, but rising on a lower exponential.
Zak: Yeah, that’s right. We’ve ended up building a civilization where the problems we’re confronting have become so complex so quickly that there’s a lag in the human capacity upgrade needed to meet them. That’s one classic dimension of educational crisis as the meta-crisis. You’re that capability crisis, but there’s also a legitimation crisis. This is also a dimension of the educational crisis, which is to say that it’s not just that we can’t figure stuff out from a capability standpoint, we can’t figure out who is the one with the legitimate authority, even say, they’ve figured it out. This is touching on the political crisis, but it’s even deeper because it’s about the legitimacy of authority, period.
Zac Stein talks to Jim Rutt Part II - (Spotify / Transcrpit)
Jim: I’m going to jump back in with a little bit of a slightly obnoxious question, which is you say that oppressive and unjust educational systems can undermine. Suppose it turned out that oppressive and unjust systems were the right way to maintain stability, and what makes you think that they’re not?
Zak: This gets into just theory of learning. How do people learn, how do… We talk about the limits of growth of an extractive civilization in the biosphere, right? That there’s only so much you can do to quote unquote nature before you’re a self-terminating process. This is also true of quote unquote human nature, that there are limits the human mind brain in terms of its ability to actually build capacity, motivation, earnest sense-making, a whole bunch of other factors which are actually necessary to do some of these jobs I’m describing. Which, although you could maybe simulate doing it for a little while with a totalitarian completely oppressive and unjust educational system in the long run, you would undermine at the level of individual motivation and identity formation the capacity for that kind of complex skill development.
Zak: And so you just have to look at the research on how learning works in kids who are growing up in traumatic environments to see that this is true. So, yeah, so this is basically what I talk about as the inefficiency of injustice in my book.
My fellow Toastmaster from the Viewmasters Club in Chicago, Amy Segami, offers a timely reminder that Everything New Emerges from Turbulence.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
If we throw up our hands when the going gets tough, we get what we deserve. So take a deep breath, do some gentle stretching, and make the world a better place. Do a favor for a stranger. Be kind when instinct calls for harshness. Question your assumptions. Make good art. Tell your loved ones how grateful you are to have them in your life. Lend a hand to those in need. Take real risks to do the right thing. Oh, and remember that in an age of acceleration, contemplation is power. The feed can only define you if you let it.
Becoming Wise - Krista Tippett
I can disagree with your opinion, it turns out, but I can’t disagree with your experience. And once I have a sense of your experience, you and I are in relationship, acknowledging the complexity in each other’s position, listening less guardedly. The difference in our opinions will probably remain intact, but it no longer defines what is possible between us
How Buildings Learn - Stewart Brand
First we shape our buildings, then they shape us, then we shape them again—ad infinitum. Function reforms form, perpetually.
Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts
The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world
🙏Thanks for reading.🙏
What baselines do you want to shift? What is something impossible that you want to make possible?
Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.
Namaste,
Christian
