The Listening Society

[jacob]

...and a simplistic moral code that doesn't meet all humans needs (hence all the depression, nihilism, etc.)...

Care to paraphrase?

... humans require recognition in a number of different ways, but modern (and postmodern) society only recognize people in a limited number of ways like "specialized job", "eat at restaurant", "buy experiences and stuff", "join club", and "create account and post on the internet", which consequentially has limited meaning; especially in how recognition is commodified---people are turned into workers, customers, and clients. The job doesn't care who does it. The restaurant doesn't care who it serves. The therapist doesn't care who they treat. This detachment easily leads to the belief that since only some of the things appear to matter, maybe none of the things matter. And this can lead lead to depression (of the anomic variety).

[guitarplayer]

@Stahlmann, also check out this interview with James Ellis posted elsewhere on the forum. Worthwhile listening to, even at 1x speed as a leisure activity. There is a pertinent bit he says

We've got to a state where human meaning and human life is so meaningless that you can be like "you know what, I am just gonna lay down, and nothing will happen to me.

When I first listened to it, it reminded me of a documentary about welfare state in the Nordic countries I once watched. Everyone is cared for, but in some perverse sense it's like nobody in particular is being addressed. This perhaps also in relation to your recent pondering of moving up north for the welfare.

[jennypenny]

I don't know how you guys got through this book.

[jacob]

I don't know how you guys got through this book.

I struggled a bit with the first half.

[7Wannabe5]

I found it immediately engaging, but that may have been due in part to being amused by his "playing with the reader" approach.

I don't mean to delve into politics, but I noticed an article in NYT this morning suggesting that candidates who don't stick to the party line are becoming more appealing to voters. I thought the manner of "not sticking to party lines" described kind of hinted at meta-modern perspective.

" The basic theory of Fetterman's candidacy is that personality and authenticiy matter at least as much as policy positions...has supported Bernie Sanders and taken progressive positions on Medicare, marijuana, criminal justice reform, and L.G.B.T. rights...he is also 6-foot-8, bearded and tattooed, and he doesn't like to wear suits...he declined to move into the governor's mansion...talks about having been around guns for most of his life...his opposition to a fracking ban."

My point being that the fact that he is a Democrat doesn't matter, because the meta-modern perspective moves well beyond that dichotomy, and works from a higher perspective where the options for putting together the tinker toys become more open. Or, maybe, like the Pennsylvania voters, I am of the mindset that humans that seem to be "all of a piece" are rather boring and somewhat suspect.

[Lemur]

@Stahlmann, also check out this interview with James Ellis posted elsewhere on the forum. Worthwhile listening to, even at 1x speed as a leisure activity. There is a pertinent bit he says



When I first listened to it, it reminded me of a documentary about welfare state in the Nordic countries I once watched. Everyone is cared for, but in some perverse sense it's like nobody in particular is being addressed. This perhaps also in relation to your recent pondering of moving up north for the welfare.

Thanks for sharing this - was an interesting listen.

[oldbeyond]

Regarding the nordics, least in Sweden, I’d say that politics today mainly revolve around managing Green/postmodern excesses, be it concerning immigration/integration, multiculturalism, energy, rule of law, defense, education or administrative efficiency. There are other issues of course but to a considerable extent, the public discourse revolves around issues such as these, where Green perspectives became increasingly hegemonic during the 90s, peaking around 2010-2015, replacing the older modernist/Orange ones of traditional social democracy. Around 2010 the populist Sweden Democrats (starting out Red, now rather Blue) came along, opening these cans of worms before the public eye. The response, after an initial period of doubling down on Green, has included quite a bit of regression to Orange and Blue, but as it becomes obvious that they can’t overcome the issues created by Green, I feel that more and more Yellow is entering the discourse. You can’t deny the frayed social fabric in our ”Vulnerable urban areas” for example (which Green did), but reducing welfare payments (Orange) or being tough on crime (Blue) won’t in themselves be enough. There is less dogmatic “either/or” thinking and more “yes, and” thinking making the lines between different parties (especially the three major ones) increasingly blurry. Remnant of a culture war lingers, but recent crises (gang violence, covid, NATO ascension, energy crises) have demonstrated a considerable amount of cohesion, where a consensus rapidly formed, with other voices becoming quite marginal.

[7Wannabe5]

@oldbeyond:

It's interesting that you see it playing out as movement towards a "natural" attraction point beyond Green.

[J_]

@jacob wrote somewhere: it is one thing to read/build a theory, something else to grok it, and quite different to apply it.
I am now more or less in the phase of looking to implement the fascinating ideas in this book in daily life. (Inclusive in this forum)

A main point in this book is to become less judging and instead looking for common traits. Using those traits to reach progress () in a given societal moment. And not to enlarge the different views. Even if there are manifest different stages of development. According to Hanzi: one has reached the metamodern level if you are able to communicate with people of all stages of development.
@jacob ( and some others) goes at lengths to explain all kind of interesting knowledge or skills to forumites of different stages of development. Even if he thinks it is a hard and repetitive task.

To me it is hard to learn to postphone, or better,to give up judging and listen first carefully to what reason the person, I want to react, brings to her point of view. Is it trainable..?

[jacob]

Is it trainable..?

I think it's trainable but I also don't think everybody can be trained. Aristotle noted that the mark of an educated man was to be able to entertain a thought from multiple perspectives (within reason). However, developing the capacity to hold multiple perspectives is not something that is innate to humans. Most humans are only born with one [perspective]. Through experience they may come to see that other perspectives are possible and learn what they are but that is by no means guaranteed. Some live a whole life without being able to see other perspectives beyond judging them as wrong from their own perspective.

The difficulty is that not every mind thinks the same way. Therefore there's no one-size-fits-all training method to bring about the idea that there are possibly many different perspectives on the same thing. Even my own evolution in "spreading the gospel of ERE" shows this. In the beginning, I was arguing logically but only from my own point of view figuring that once people saw the logic they would instantly understand. This, however, only works on engineering minds. The social mindset (which is the most common one) much rather prefers to follow an example of another human, but most of the social minds thought me too much of an outlier, logical arguments be damned.

Creating the ERE WLs from scratch took following hundreds of journals. This is not something that very many has the opportunity to behold. This is also why most people's Overton windows are constrained to the nearest 3 WLs (themself + those who inspire them + those they find lacking). Only a wide experience of the territory makes it possible to see the structure of the map.

Growing up, "literature" was the subject that had been allocated the most teaching hours. We spent countless hours doing character-analysis and guessing at "what the author meant". (A very postmodern approach---I only realized that much later.) The only thing I learned from that was to read and write which I considered "good enough" by the second grade. The next ten years was just a hell scape of boredom and irrelevance. I daresay I learned nothing from these classes. Not even to debate or argue a point---I learned that from internet forums. While I didn't realize it back then was that my mind is simply not normal compared to the average author or literary character. I simply did not connect with them. As such the fictional characters struck me as crazy, bland, vapid, typical, unrelatable... just like most humans. My [also in retrospect, gifted] "engineering mind" simply lacked the interface to understand the "average mind". I wish somebody would have told me. I can only surmise that the teachers weren't aware of the water they were swimming in either.

Even today I find little relatable when it comes to conversation with humans or relating to accounts of fictional characters. (Something that comes naturally to the majority of people.) However, having a map of the territory worked for me. It made it possible to see myself as the edge-case that I am ... and what life in the Gaussian norm is like. Later, I added ever more maps. It is these maps that make it possible for me to connect with people at different "points" in the temperamental universe. Yet, if your mind is not constructed to latch onto "a mapping structure of categories" but instead prefer to more common "narratives", training by maps is going to be just as useless to you as training by narrative was to me.

Given your engineering background, my approach works much like a Kalman filter. For any given person, I have a model (technically several different models) and an observation of the person's response function, i.e. what did they actually do cf. what I thought they were going to do. I can adjust the weighing between these two. Sometimes it's possible to understand a given person better than they understand themselves. Yet, sometimes---not that often anymore---I also get it completely wrong and so I update the model instead. When encountering someone new, I'll spend much time calibrating the model. The Kalman filter is weighing observations over the yet to known model. As such I'm holding back judgment, etc. This all flips later on when my model gets more accurate than my observations. An unfortunate side-effect of this is having to experience a lot of "I told you so"/"I saw that coming from a mile away". It takes a lot of "mystery" out of the human condition and it's entirely anti-romanticism.

I'm not entirely sure I recommend this approach except it's better than ignorance. Without it I'd be a 50yo crank libertarian trying to compute an ideal utopia based on my own rational preferences. At least having maps, I know better than that.

PS: Any of you fiction writers out there could do the world a favor by writing a stories about a character that fall two sigma away from the norm. It's a small market, but it's an underserved HIGHLY concentrated one.

[7Wannabe5]

PS: Any of you fiction writers out there could do the world a favor by writing a stories about a character that fall two sigma away from the norm. It's a small market, but it's an underserved HIGHLY concentrated one.

Hmm, not so much underserved. Beyond the realm of engineering-brain-lite Tom Clancy and not-engineering-brain-lite Nora Roberts, only 5% of the population reads 95% of literary novels published, so bound to be a good many written by those two sigma away from the norm and also about those two sigma away from the norm, or with a structural complexity that is two sigma away from the norm. I only included a few authors mostly known for science-fiction, because that would be too obvious. Enjoy!

Arthur Conan Doyle
Umberto Eco
Vladimir Nabokov
Jorge Luis Borges
William Gibson
Octavia Butler
Don DeLillo
Anthony Burgess
Louis Zukofsky
Rachel Cusk
Jan Potocki
Kingsley Amis
Paolo Giordano
Lewis Carroll
Greg Egan
Donna Tartt
Susan Sontag
Penelope Fitzgerald
Geraldine Brooks
Elena Ferrante
Iris Murdoch
Sylvia Plath
Sally Rooney
Joseph Conrad
Mikhail Bulgakov
J.G. Ballard
John Fowles
Tom Stoppard
Rebecca Goldstein
Walter Tevis
Osamu Dazai
Mark Haddon
Haruki Murikami
Stefan Zweig
Stanislaw Lem
Shirley Jackson
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Jose Saramago
Ambrose Bierce
Thomas Pynchon
Gerald Durrell

[J_]

@jacob "However, developing the capacity to hold multiple perspectives is not something that is innate to humans. Most humans are only born with one [perspective]. Through experience they may come to see that other perspectives are possible and learn what they are but that is by no means guaranteed'

About my inborn reaction of judging and seeing that there are more points of view:
I know that I have this character trait. As manager of my own project-developing company during the regular building meetings, I had a rather direct way of telling people how I was angry about something that was wrong executed. It is sometimes good to react in such way to get things change for the better. But after the recognition by the faulty party there had to be a kind of “smoothing” again to keep a good working working atmosphere. Then my business partner, who was more phlegmatic than I am, steered the discussion to a solution.
So we used mine and his trait to get things done.

In the meta-modern vision of the Listening Society, where a very special mindset is necessary to (calmly) understand a (lot of ) different views of people (societies) in several stages of development, my temperament is not suited.
However I understand the method to find within all those differences the common (universal) denominators of all societies to strive to an extremely social, extremely libertarian and extremely green (environmental stable) society. (the listening society)
To conclude: Jacob has find a way to convey his visions to other wired people as himself. For me the knowledge of this trait of mine is helpful to find ways to reduce this limitation, and which positions I better do not take.

[7Wannabe5]

I had a rather direct way of telling people how I was angry about something that was wrong executed. It is sometimes good to react in such way to get things change for the better. But after the recognition by the faulty party there had to be a kind of “smoothing” again to keep a good working working atmosphere. Then my business partner, who was more phlegmatic than I am, steered the discussion to a solution.
So we used mine and his trait to get things done.

Highly interesting. In real life (as opposed to realms where I am for the most part only known through my writing voice), I very frequently have the opposite problem because my external temperament/presence generally stays within the range of "phlegmatic" to "sanguine." So, I very often in work and relationships find myself teamed up with somebody with temperament/execution-style as you describe yours. IOW, I very frequently find myself playing "good cop" to somebody else's "bad cop" or "cool feminine energy wife with martini" to "hot hassled executive." I am very good with colicky babies and "grouchy old men" and co-teaching with female colleagues who wish it was still legal to snap a student on the hand with a ruler. For example, my second "husband" was engaged in a major lawsuit with a very large corporation and there was a good possibility that he was going to blow up in the negotiations if I didn't attend them with him. So, my serious question for you would be "Who smoothed out the relationship/atmosphere if/when you lost your temper with your phlegmatic partner?"

With a temperament such as mine, if I am over-tired or otherwise in low-functioning mode, and I am surprised by an outburst of directive (My tools are not functioning as they should be!) anger directed towards me, I have the unfortunate tendency to feel a quick spark of anger that momentarily moves me from warm/sanguine to "hot", but then in the next moment I will burst into tears*, like a spring storm that lacks the energy to build to rumbling thunder. If I am well-rested and otherwise in higher functioning mode, and I am less surprised by an angry outburst from other, I will move from cool/phlegmatic into my "cold" logical secondary Ti functioning where I retreat into my head and start very unemotionally performing a spreadsheet analysis of whether or not relationship/contract with Directive Hot-Head Partner is of continuing value for me. If my determination is "No", then I will make a To Do list for severing relationship/contract which I will generally complete in short order if there are no third-party complications/responsibilities to consider, and if I do not block communications completely, any texts received pleading for my return will generally receive a reply approximating "I will reconsider the possibility of further engagement in relationship with you upon receipt of your certificate of completion of Anger Management Course." The occasions where I actually get and stay hot-angry long enough to yell at somebody are so infrequent and out of character for me, the result is often that the person(s) I yell at burst into surprised laughter. I suppose it is funny because it is like hearing your grandmother use profanity.

*I've only burst into tears in a work/school situation twice in my life under extreme duress, because I am much more likely to be in either cool Professional or cool Don't Give a Fuck mode in a work/school situation. My "bursting into tears' reaction usually happens when I am feeling/behaving "warm" and then find myself surprised by "directive anger." For example, if I am cooking breakfast for someone I care about and they suddenly start loudly yelling that I am preparing the eggs incorrectly. What usually happens next in those situations is that the blood very quickly drops from the HotHead's head down to his boots, and he says something like, "Oh, nooooo, baby, don't cry. Please don't cry. You usually cook things the right way. It's okay if you fucked up the eggs." and my internal Ti will be thinking something like "You idiot. I have zero respect and hold zero value for your judgment of my competency in egg preparation." yet my external Ne/Fe might be jollied into continued relationship if HotHead's next move was something like tossing me into bed or suggesting an interesting adventure.

NOTE: This explication may be of strictly limited value for most relationships, because eNTP/XNTP is a rare type for females to inhabit/exhibit. The vast majority of females do not have a cold, silent logician running as background process.

[philipreal]

I finished reading this book today and certainly found it exciting/interesting/valuable. It articulated some of the issues I've had with post-modernism very well, and I found the developmental section, especially in regards to subjective state/depth, helpful as I try to integrate the reasons/benefits of people doing woo combined with personal non-belief. Since I read Kegan Evolving Self early upon my arrival to the forum I've been more concerned with trying to understand others and I've noticed how much I don't. I think this has offered me both more motivation to work on that and more tools to do it with.

In the beginning, I was arguing logically but only from my own point of view figuring that once people saw the logic they would instantly understand. This, however, only works on engineering minds. The social mindset (which is the most common one) much rather prefers to follow an example of another human, but most of the social minds thought me too much of an outlier, logical arguments be damned.

Would you say you've encountered other common mindsets during encounters/arguments? I assume social would correspond with Kegan3 and/or potentially green, would engineering correspond with higher MHC more than other dimensions (whether Hanzi's or not)?

I'll also be interested in reading more about the MHC, as that's clearly the most fleshed out of the four developmental dimensions Hanzi describes, and might have information on to what extent/how it's trainable(?)

I know that I have this character trait. As manager of my own project-developing company during the regular building meetings, I had a rather direct way of telling people how I was angry about something that was wrong executed. It is sometimes good to react in such way to get things change for the better. But after the recognition by the faulty party there had to be a kind of “smoothing” again to keep a good working working atmosphere. Then my business partner, who was more phlegmatic than I am, steered the discussion to a solution.
So we used mine and his trait to get things done.

In the meta-modern vision of the Listening Society, where a very special mindset is necessary to (calmly) understand a (lot of ) different views of people (societies) in several stages of development, my temperament is not suited.

But you are able to recognize the other traits (and thus to some extent, perspectives) of others and find that theirs may be more valuable/better suited to different tasks, or that multiple perspectives put together may be significantly more valuable than either of them individually. I may be trying to mix together too much here, but I'd think you're at least "Comparing", in CCCCCC skill development from ERE book. Your temperament may not be suited to calmly understand many perspectives, but you can see how other perspectives from your own are valuable at times, so you can keep working from there. At least that's my perspective.

[jacob]

Would you say you've encountered other common mindsets during encounters/arguments? I assume social would correspond with Kegan3 and/or potentially green, would engineering correspond with higher MHC more than other dimensions (whether Hanzi's or not)?

I'll also be interested in reading more about the MHC, as that's clearly the most fleshed out of the four developmental dimensions Hanzi describes, and might have information on to what extent/how it's trainable(?)

I use a bunch of different models to understand where people are coming from. Specifically,
MBTI - temperamental preference/way of thinking/interaction, like logical, emotional, intuitive, concrete, time-orientation
Kegan - extent of social perspectives
Spiral - cultural values
MHC - educational development as in "what remains after forgetting everything you learned in school". What is the depth of task analysis habitually done? Is it concrete (monkey see, money do/repeat), abstract (generalizations), formal (detached from specific instances along a variable), systems (ditto but more than one variable), ...

If each theory has some dimensions (like MBTI has 8, Kegan has 5, ...) and we consider them all at once, it becomes apparent that they can be reduced to a smaller number of dimensions. IOW, there's overlap or "dependence". That's another way of saying that the models are sometimes but not always talking about the same thing but in different ways. Part of this is because the inventors of the models were mostly formal thinkers who prioritized their own variable and disregarded other variables.

If you sort of do a scatter plot of humans in this dimensional space, there will be certain groupings. These groupings are what eneagrams have named, e.g. the Helper, the Thinker, the Loyalist, etc. Another way would be to compare these groupings to arch-types or literary characters, but my mind doesn't work well like that. I'm much better at computing formal frameworks on the fly than remembering long or even short lists of [stereotypical] characters.

I'm personally somewhat of an outlier along several dimensions, so I use the maps to try to understand "territory" I have little personal experience with. When one is off the center of the territory, there's little expectation that 2/3 of random people are just idiosyncratic variations of oneself only differing by personal narratives and lived histories as opposed to complete different ways of thinking. Then, having such maps is very very useful.

I use the above 4 mapping tools and I've added them to my arsenal in that order. The only reason that I can label a grouping as a "typical" engineer is because I'm personally close enough to that group (as a scientist) and I have enough experience with engineers to do so. However, for someone much further away I would rather refer to the maps e.g. ESFJ/Kegan3/Abstract/Green. That's a more accurate "position" and at least one I can try to understand as opposed to not having a "measure" of position and distance at all.

[J_]

@7w5 asked: So, my serious question for you would be "Who smoothed out the relationship/atmosphere if/when you lost your temper with your phlegmatic partner?"

Heh, he is a friend now for 60 years. I have never lost my temper with him, nor he with me.

More general: I can control my reactions. Only as I think it is useful ánd it can have a positive effect, I let go (within reason).

The discussion about how to behave/communicate to/and connect with people( societies) with wide distances of development requires a very high development in handling complexity, (according to the book)

I do not have such a trait. Therefore I do not strive to be in such a position.I think there are people who are better equipped.

Nevertheless I think the long term solutions as very subtle and clever approached in “ The listening society “ are an eye-opener for me. You can say perhaps what ERE can reach on a personal level, the visions of the writers of this book can reach/bring together complete societies.

[7Wannabe5]

More general: I can control my reactions. Only as I think it is useful ánd it can have a positive effect, I let go (within reason).

Gotcha. If it is within your control, that seems more like a "response" than a "reaction." You are holding it at the level of "I have anger" rather than "I am anger" or "You made me angry." Although, it is also true that sometimes we hold back an emotional "reaction" in order the exhibit a more appropriate "response" and sometimes it is more like we have to pull up a behavioral "response" absent an associated emotion. For example, if I am caring for a 3 year old who is running too close to the road, I will feel the emotion and exhibit the behavior necessary to take charge, but in the case of a 15 year old trying to sneak out of my classroom, I will exhibit the appropriate authoritative behavior, because it is in my job description, without feeling any associated emotion, because I don't core believe adolescents should be held captive in school buildings against their will.

Many years ago, a manager who was grooming me as possible replacement in his position told me, "This is the level where you are going to get yelled at." and my immediate thought was "No thanks.", but as with most anything, rational evaluation might suggest a dollar value. In a situation where I knew that yelling was going to occur, maybe $250 per brief incident would seem adequate compensation. I hate being startled, so in a situation where yelling wasn't expected or occured at random intervals, maybe I would double the fine to $500. Although, both of those figures seem far too low if I project over the long-term or continual vs. a short-term boot-camp type situation. Actually, I can wrap this back round to one of the themes of "The Listening Society" by considering the cost of recovery/therapy hours vs. the stress/trauma of yelling incidents. And once I go there, it becomes very clear that I've now introduced some friction in the form of heterotelic tactic or strategy. IOW, people with tendency towards reactive or random yelling in one's social circle are analogous to processed meats in one's diet. Okay occasionally in small quantity if otherwise tasty, but generally to be avoided, unless the apocalypse has come and you are locked down in a gas station with nothing but Slim Jims to provide needful kcals.

So, that was a helpful analysis, because now I feel less unkind or "unable to handle Tier 2 perspective social complexity" about my decision to not invite grouchy old Level Blue/Orange Trump-voter to my centered at Level Green family Thanksgiving/Cayuga Heritage Maple Festival/NerdJam even though he used the phrase "just another lonely old man" to describe himself and his plans. As Jacob noted in the book, humans get what they "deserve" as outcome of their behavior even if it was not their intent. Maybe I will offer to bring him some of my special Level Blue homemade apple cranberry walnut pie and some of the Level Green Vegetarian Alternative Nut-Mushroom-Loaf. Thank you for listening!