Re: 4th, 5th, 6th Person Perspective
Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2023 9:08 am
@ffj - Well, yes ... and at one point I actually contemplated writing a beginner's book... and an edited compendium of the blog posts has also been in the works. However, I learned that books alone don't provide an education. If it was that easy, we could get rid of all teachers and replace all schools and institutions with libraries. Many can't teach others and few can really teach themselves. Most just copy the behavior of those they relate to or look up to. I am not the former and at best the latter. (This is tangentially related to the thread, because the half of humans take at best a 2nd person perspective (how do I look to you?); troublemakers (about 1/6) take at best a 1st person perspective (FU, I do what I want). The remaining 1/3 take a 3rd person perspective or more (how we look to others?) which makes them efficiently employable and promoteable and thus not likely to remain poor for long.)
This project thus needs someone to create some material AND subsequently push it into people's minds; like I did with the book and the forum. This experience showed me that I'm no Dave Ramsey. It would need a Suze Orman of the "relatively poor" ... and technically the world already has that. It needs a relatable messenger.
To give an adjacent example. I'm somewhat active on Deep Adaptation, which is an organization dealing with the impacts of catastrophic climate change. The subject is not important. I just use it as an example to illustrate the "teaching" or the "change" problem. This organization is dominated by people who are high on anxiety and low on agency and many are convinced they're a victim of the situation. I think these psychological traits have things in common with the "relatively poor". Now, for over a year I have negotiated back and forth about making a zoom presentation of a few things people can do to avoid getting a Darwin award from the next tornado, hurricane, wildfire, pandemic, etc. and maybe stop worrying a bit. However, they're just not all that interested. The solution I'm offering ("A few simple steps on how not to die due to personal inaction") is not the problem they're seeing ("How to cope emotionally with a tragic world", etc.) and rather incompatible with the solution they're offering ("Join a circle to process our emotions to ground ourselves in what remains of nature"). Indeed, the latest workshop on "practical action" was basically a zoom meeting to "discuss how climate change makes you feel on a day to day basis".
To even make inroads in such a paradigm, it's impossible to take the solution from one paradigm, simplified or not, and introduce it into another paradigm. For example, ERE in its current form is constructed around the paradigm that objective reality is important and that by learning as much about this reality as possible, you can control it, and in turn make subjective reality better (e.g. become happier). This works on modernists who tend to take objective reality for granted. It does not work very well on postmodernists, who are more concerned about their subjective emotional reality, or traditionalists, who only find meaning in a God-given order. In order to communicate, ERE would basically have to be reconstructed from scratch within those paradigms. For example, prosperity gospel is capitalism in church language.
Thus ... it would require understanding the paradigm (4th order perspective) of the relatively poor---that's basically the water they swim in---and then craft a message based on ERE that gets them to see that water and behave differently. This is what the ERE book does for the educated modernist and that works because educated modernists include the swimming habits of reading technical books, debating, and being persuaded by logical arguments. However, other paradigms will require different methods such as deep emotional listening, preaching, games, festivals, outright fights, or what have you ...
This project thus needs someone to create some material AND subsequently push it into people's minds; like I did with the book and the forum. This experience showed me that I'm no Dave Ramsey. It would need a Suze Orman of the "relatively poor" ... and technically the world already has that. It needs a relatable messenger.
To give an adjacent example. I'm somewhat active on Deep Adaptation, which is an organization dealing with the impacts of catastrophic climate change. The subject is not important. I just use it as an example to illustrate the "teaching" or the "change" problem. This organization is dominated by people who are high on anxiety and low on agency and many are convinced they're a victim of the situation. I think these psychological traits have things in common with the "relatively poor". Now, for over a year I have negotiated back and forth about making a zoom presentation of a few things people can do to avoid getting a Darwin award from the next tornado, hurricane, wildfire, pandemic, etc. and maybe stop worrying a bit. However, they're just not all that interested. The solution I'm offering ("A few simple steps on how not to die due to personal inaction") is not the problem they're seeing ("How to cope emotionally with a tragic world", etc.) and rather incompatible with the solution they're offering ("Join a circle to process our emotions to ground ourselves in what remains of nature"). Indeed, the latest workshop on "practical action" was basically a zoom meeting to "discuss how climate change makes you feel on a day to day basis".
To even make inroads in such a paradigm, it's impossible to take the solution from one paradigm, simplified or not, and introduce it into another paradigm. For example, ERE in its current form is constructed around the paradigm that objective reality is important and that by learning as much about this reality as possible, you can control it, and in turn make subjective reality better (e.g. become happier). This works on modernists who tend to take objective reality for granted. It does not work very well on postmodernists, who are more concerned about their subjective emotional reality, or traditionalists, who only find meaning in a God-given order. In order to communicate, ERE would basically have to be reconstructed from scratch within those paradigms. For example, prosperity gospel is capitalism in church language.
Thus ... it would require understanding the paradigm (4th order perspective) of the relatively poor---that's basically the water they swim in---and then craft a message based on ERE that gets them to see that water and behave differently. This is what the ERE book does for the educated modernist and that works because educated modernists include the swimming habits of reading technical books, debating, and being persuaded by logical arguments. However, other paradigms will require different methods such as deep emotional listening, preaching, games, festivals, outright fights, or what have you ...