*This is a version of material I posted in my LJ: hfx_ben. I lost my 7Gig HD on Sunday … that’s the third time in less than two years (a 2 Gig drive last spring, and my laptop fall of 2003). Three hardware failures in well over a decade, since !thinks! 1987, my first XT. Poverty is a crushingly crude set of inter-locking processes and dynamics.*
Anyhow: email from Richard K Moore today (does that name ring bells?) … his letter resonated deeply with what I’ve been saying all this while about “participatory deliberation” –
A message to all those who have “something to say”
Date: Mon, 9 May 2005 21:07:16 +0100
[…]“Those of us who have “something to say”, and I include myself, have lots of outlets for our ideas these days. Besides the usual magazines and books, by which means we can publish, we can construct websites, create or join online forums, etc. There are many ways for us to express ourselves, and get “the word out” to significant audiences. What we tend to do, and again I include myself, is to “hone our message”, become more persuasive, more educated, and proclaim our insights to audiences that more or less agree with us.
I happened to ask myself, in an idle moment, regarding these traits of ours, “What game are we playing?”. We must admit, at least I admit it to myself, that we are playing the game of “faction building”. That is, we are trying to “spread the word” to a hopefully increasing circle of readers, and eventually we hope that everyone will “see things clearly”, wake up, and things will change.
But the reality, perhaps sad, is that people in a pluralistic society never settle on one viewpoint. They always divide themselves into factions. Partly this is due to upbringing, partly religion, partly psychology and personality types, partly government propaganda – but whatever it is, history shows us that people are never going to wake up, en mass, to a particular perspective on the truth. The only times this has happened have been under coercive theocratic regimes, and I don’t think that’s what any of us are after. In today’s world, it is the fundamentalists, both Christian and Muslim, who are winning the game of “faction building”, if anyone is – certainly it isn’t liberals and progressives.
The thought I would like to share – and I’m not sure how many ears this will be useful to – is that we consider a different approach. And again I admit that for me this advice will be as difficult to act on as for anyone. The approach I am referring to is this: instead of “giving out” (a colorful Irish expression for “expressing”) our viewpoints to “the choir”, why don’t we seek out people we disagree with and listen to them?
Shouting hasn’t converted them; they don’t subscribe to your email list, and they aren’t going to agree with your “giving out”. You know; you’ve tried. Why not try to find out where they’re really coming from? Why not try to understand why what they believe makes sense to them? I don’t mean this as prying, to better argue against them, but rather as a means to understand why everyone doesn’t think the way you do. The answer is not that they are stupid, or that they don’t care about humanity. The answer is not even that they have different deep values. In most cases the answer is that they perceive things differently, or have had different life experiences. Such things are not character defects.
To the extent we pursue faction building, we are playing into the game of adversarial politics. What are our chances of victory, realistically, in that rigged game? Look at the other players at the table: not only the mainstream parties, totally corrupt, but the mass media, the voting machines, etc. To the extent we learn to listen to and understand our brothers and sisters who don’t agree with us, we are undermining the game of adversarial politics. What I am suggesting is an approach to our “audience” based on listening rather than giving out. If we start by giving out, our audience is limited to those who already agree with us. If we start by listening, our audience, in some sense, is limited only by our ability to communicate.
for whomever these words are meaningful,
rkm
I hope this gets folk interested … I really am on the cusp of rolling out but /shrug/ I simply refuse to reinforce conventional wage-slave processes … if someone’s into PairProgramming or some other team paradigm, well, I hope they talk up: authoritarian processes suck; I ain’t into seduction games.
Reply #1, from Sunday:
“Those of us who have “something to say”, and I include myself, have lots of outlets for our ideas these days.”
Greetings!
I invite you to visit the humble site I scrambled together last summer (as my life in Maritime Canada came apart at the seams): … “Participatory Deliberation“. (The material comes from notes to myself that survived the loss of my primary HD the preceeding spring.)
I also invited you to ponder this: the nature of “discourse” as explored by thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas, it seems to me, illustrates two different modes of being in the world: one is essentially egotistical, where I profit by projecting my wishes, by bending people to my will, by reducing the situation to my scenario, and the second where I am responsive in an open and inclusive manner to actualities which include others’ narrative realities as individuals. (I think you can see how this lines up with Kant notion of 1) treating others as means to an end or 2) treating others as ends in themselves.)
We can, I think, enter into processes of “group discernment”. More, I assert with all of my confidence that such processes can be facilitated by the world wide web. If this happy conjunction is tectonic in scale it is not essoteric; my friends and I anticipated something like this as far back as the late 70s. The sad decadence of most online transactions we see presently is merely symptomatic of a community that is fractured and neurotic … the situation is pathological.. The project I have designed (something like Wikipedia in size) applies traditional understandings of discussion and the modern insights brought to us by cognitive psychology, and does so using a set of the more elegant web techniques.
What I’m talking about is ‘participatory deliberation” … or “augmented discourse”. Since my years of voluntary simplicity have resulted in my slipping into abject poverty I have not been able to move this work forward; it’s not in my nature to stand at the head as an exceptional mover and shaker … getting by “with a little help from my friends” is, to my way of thinking, not just the best way but actually the only way to proceed without perpetuating the worst of hiearchical/authoritarian dependency. (Dependence => independence => interdependence, yes?)
With the creation of a collaborative I anticipate an entity that would serve at once the public in general, non-governmental and not for profit entities, and institutions such as government bodies. I foresee the creation of dozens of “right-livelihood” jobs, all in the domain of discourse concerning public policy. (Social justice and humane governance; its time!)
Reply #2, this afternoon:
“How do we go beyond sophistic rhetoric?” Is that a lousy and boring question because it’s rude and pointed? Is it just too academic?
I hope it’s pointed, and bet that it feels “rude” for the same reason: it matters. When sophistry rules we have a population that reacts like a bunch of Pavlov’s dogs; only the unrealistic underestimate the power of slogan (ideological jinjoism anyone?), only the naive think that sophistry doesn’t play a daily role in the unfolding of real power (the quality of Jesuits’ thinking is nowhere more evident than in there understanding that letting a person come to a mistaken conclusion is quite different than lyin
g!), and only the naive think that rhetoric can be done away with … in the absence of a self-directed population charismatic leaders will be looked up to, supported, and followed.
How do we get through to others without using manipulativew techniques developed by behaviourists and refined by marketing wizards? The question has been answered a number of times: Socrates did it (Plato describes him using his method to bring a common labourer to a realization concerning geometry [can someone cite the essay / chapter?]) and, more recently, Paolo Friere did it with works like “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and “Education for Critical Consciousness”.
Why isn’t that commonly known? Why aren’t those techniques implemented universally. *dead silence* Just so.
Discussion, as it is usually practiced (if ever) is very normally hi-jacked by elite cadre who that way fulfill their agenda: “nothing succeeds like success”! Debate is usually so canned and contrived that it’s more a matter of a formalized joust between parties who are very careful to protect their shared interests in the status quo. In both cases there is more heat than light and the arguably sane citizen who ventures in that direction is likely to be disgusted or dismayed. (This reminds me of how Camus reached a profound conclusion concerning capital punishment after observing how his father, a simple working man, had been so deeply upset by his witnessing the public use of a guillotine.)
The nature of my PTSD arose in 1973 over the matter of how we (industrialized countries of the north and west) had acted in concert to overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile; more specifically, I was caught in the Sartrean hell-realm of realizing that people were either too busy, or too self-interested, or too frightened to listen to anything to anything that had real traction … such are the dynamics of denial:folk are likely to stay connected if what’s being said is over the top or fantastic or theatrically dramatic, but if it’s lucid and trenchant then primordial wisdom kicks in and folk glaze over.
My professional training, my three decades’ experience with community organizations, my many years studying cognitive psychology, /realpolitik/, communications, as well as an equal time studying and practicing abhdidharma … plus the inestimable hours spent organizing (howq dare some profess allergy to committee work?!) as a street-level activist … call it “participatory deliberation” or “group discernment” or “augemented discourse” or “cognitive ergonomics”, my conviction that the only security stems from an informed and active membership has brought fruit: using a simple set of techniques, the sort than any technical writer knows, we can construct a community resource of global proprotion. And the interface would be about as difficult to use as google’s (which means the design must be elegantly effective).
I’m also expected to be wealthy and well connected?
/shrug/
An Austrian house-painter magnitized powerful supporters with his talk of the elite’s manifest destiny … it’s group karma that talk of communalism leaves most everyone yawning … socialization … the blue pill … social pathology.
/shrug/
The paradox seems to be that I must act as a charismatic leader to succeed, which effectively contradicts my prime directive. Perhaps I can ride on RKM’s karmic coat-tails? I see nothing odious in that!
So … with WikiPedia in mind … who will comprise the team that brings co[E]llaboration into being?
regards and respect
ben aka Karma Chopal aka WillowBear