Autonomous! Level 8 towards 9

[AxelHeyst]

Here is 5 towards 6, 6 towards 7, 7 towards 8, the main WL's thread, and the wiki page on WLs.

I was reading Reinventing Organizations by Laloux and I think it has a lot to inform the ERE WL 8>9 Transition. Regarding what follows, I suspect what I'm describing is one part of the elephant, not the whole 8>9 elephant. Hopefully we can get more discussion and thought organized here - there's a fair amount of discussion about WL9+ thinking already but it's spread throughout the forum. Please feel free to post interesting quotes/pointers to those other discussions in here.

Quick call-out of a known limitation of what I've written in this post: I think this post of mine might be more/overly focused on the WoG-of-WoGs aspect of 9+ thinking, aka systems of sovereign agents, and make it seem like I think 9+ is *only* about systems composed of humans. I do not think this. I think multi-human-agent systems is one part of 9+ thinking: generally, 9+ thinking is about systems of systems, and some of those component systems may not be humans or even organic/corporeal. They might be hyperobjects. But that's not where I've thought through in an articulable way yet. Just be advised that, again, I'm sure I'm only describing a part of the elephant here (if I am indeed describing the elephant I think I am...)

Also PS, I don't fully understand the "Autonomous" label for WL9 thinking.

Anyway, one reason I'm interested in thinking about WL9 is because, as I said earlier in the WL thread,

The presence of 8 and 9 make 7 seem closer and more attainable than it felt before. I can kinda get 'an idea of' 8/9 now, and that informs my idea of 7 "from above", making it seem less esoterically unobtainable. When 7 only had hand-waving guesswork above it, it seemed like pure Yoda/Zen Koan stuff. Now, and with Daylen's story situating the 7 as the slow child in the conversation, I feel like a mental voice that was saying "you'll never make it there" has been shut up.

The 8>9 Moat
Insofar as WL8 is the 'end' of the 6-8 systems thinking phase of the WL map, 8>9 represents a leap to a new kind of thinking/perspective/skillset. Recall that the idea WL8 is fully self-actualizing, meaning something like they've figured out who they *really* are, have accepted that, and have arranged their WoG to fully actualize their recognized Way. Here are some quotes from around the forum as a warmup:

Actualizers have internalized systems thinking to the point of unconscious competence. The remaining systems focus is on closing the loops and reducing waste, as the major forms of capital are freely available (within reason). As such, money becomes more and more irrelevant in that its main use is in buying off head/poll taxes or costs that are impossible to escape or incorporate into the system. Since the system now meets all the lower needs and wants (shelter, food, transport, stuff) without much effort and attention, the focus switches to maximizing the person's potential as a human being on a full time basis by increasing capital in the form of skills and access.

A strong multidisciplinary skill set allows the autonomous player to access a wide range of different communities, professions, and perspectives. This makes it possible to see possibilities beyond their own system and make novel and serendipitous connections between people, resources, and ideas in different systems. The overall perspective has moved from one's personal system to a system of systems/the bigger world. The personal system may change accordingly.

A conversation between Seven, Eight, and Nine:

Seven: Look at this system I just built! It produces meh and uses meh from this other system but could also go without meh and still produce meh.
Eight: What about the dissipation of meh?
Seven: Will I figured that meh was just some friction in the system. Not sure yet how to reduce meh, yet.
Eight: You could always construct this additional meh system that uses the dissipated meh and outputs meh that could be used in your original system. This new meh system would also work with your pre-existing systems like so..
Seven: Wow, that actually makes sense. What would you do?
Eight: Oh, I wouldn't bother with system A, B, and C, I have systems G and H for that.
Nine: This wasn't possible until now, but I have a proposal. I have been engaged with systems X, Y, and Z recently. It appears that X could output meh to A and B, C could output meh to Z, Z could either output meh to G or H, H could output meh to X or B, and the second and third order effects across all other nodes in each of our networks would be positive.
Seven: That seems like a lot to take on.. but I am too curious to say no.
Eight: That is absurd! You would be opening up loops instead of closing them!
Nine: Depends on where you draw your boundary of agency. You see, even in the case that we were to dissociate from each other, Seven would still retain A, B, and C, you (i.e. Eight) would retain G and H, and I would retain X, Y, and Z. In the events of R, S, or T, loss of G or H would send a shock wave though your network requiring a lengthy recovery-time for some of your more peripheral nodes. These outcomes can be hedged against by opening up H to us and thus receiving output from Z in the case of R, S, or T. So, the question I have for you is why not attempt to utilize Seven and myself as live players in your network?

...it's not my impression that WL9s walk around obsessing about how much social capital they have (WL6) or how to build it into (WL7) or make it part (WL8) of their systems. I think once that's done it's just used well along with all the other capitals. This is similar to how the perception of money changes from a scarce resource (WL1-5) to a sufficient resource (WL6-7) to something that's just there when needed (WL8+).

Generally speaking the idea of capital goes from "unconsciously unaware but affected by deficiencies" to "consciously aware of deficiencies and building them" to "unconsciously using what was previously built up".

WoRgaming
If optimization is the paradigm of up to WL5, and systems thinking is the paradigm of up to WL8, I was trying to think of what the concise phrase for what 9+ thinking is. We've used the term "WoG-of-WoGs" before, but I don't love that. The phrase 'web of relationships' / WoR seems workable.

WoRgaming as a term that references 9+ behavior generally is more than a play on words: the 'gaming' points to the sense of curiosity, play, and joy that tends to accompany self-actualized engagement and activity. I'll get more into this later.

At WL8, your own WoG is about as integrated and actualized as it can be. In the same way that at WL5 your life is as optimized for one type of capital (typically financial as indicated by the ERE WL Table, but not everyone develops in this way) as it is possible to be, and the only way to improve is to transcend and include: develop/optimize multiple capitals (a process you already know how to do) and focus on the interactions between these capital flows, using the paradigm of systems thinking. That's the 5>6 moat.

At the WL8>9 moat you have become unconsciously competent at deploying the potential of systems thinking in your own life. You life functions as an aligned, actualized web of goals with ~zero waste and ~all loops closed (ideally, not actually). You function at a total maximum potential. How can you possibly "improve" this, and what does "improve" even mean? (This echoes "how do you decrease your spend when you're already Pareto optimized?" question from the 5>6 moat)

To go up a level from WL8 is to develop the practice of coordinating >1 WoG/systems, and to focus on the relationships between those WoGs/systems. Why this is different is because each WoG is a self-autonomous/sentient/conscious being, equipped with its own purpose, worldview, experiences, and (in)ability to make decisions. This is what makes WoRgaming categorically different in kind than WoG'ing, in which case there is only one unit of sovereignty over the components of the web and you are working within it.

>>In WL6-8 behavior, other sovereign units are part of 'environment', they are "out there", other.

>>In a WoR, which is up a holon from 6-8 thinking, each 'component' is a sovereign unit. This is a different kind of thing!

I think this is going from systems thinking to ecosystems thinking but I'm not sure/if that's a useful distinction.

I do think it's right that WoRgaming is essentially about effective participation in an organic ecology of relationships, effects, emergent behavior, serendipity, complexity, chaos, tipping points, leverage, and operating paradigms.

Metaphors

• WL5 is a machine/factory operator.
• WL8 is a master gardener.
• WL9+ is entry into a world of Tending the Wild-style horticulture (this is a metaphor!) where the boundaries of Self, Other, and Environment start to break down or at least get re-understood, reconceptualized, in the same way that at a certain level of understanding you might talk about the forest *being* part of your lungs in an actual, real, non-poetical way. (Or, perhaps, yes in a poetical way but not in a sentimental way?)

The New Boundary of the Self and Working with Paradox
A key factor (*the* key factor?) of 9+ thinking is the breakdown/dissolution/reorganization of the ego. The boundary of self expands in the direction of unitive self-understanding. It is not just known but felt that the forest is part of my lungs in a real and not just poetic or mystical sense. The forest is the part of my lungs that exists outside of my skin-bag is just a brass tacks practical piece of knowledge, *not* some esoteric nature-based spirituality mumbo jumbo. It's simply obviously true and, at 9+, felt and understood.

Whereas a WL8 builds a garden, aka constructs a highly cultivated environment with boundaries between it and the rest of Environment, 9+ (having attained a level of unconscious competence at grokking and manipulating systems environments) expands the scope of their realm of control by relinquishing control, internalizing the shift from "master of environment X" to "participant element of the larger entire-life environment", paradoxically increasing their potential power aka ability to impact world-system while decreasing their focus on directing highly specific and local outcomes.

While serendipity began to seep into the operation modes of WoG at WL8 and could to a certain extend be planned for or encouraged, at WL9 serendipity plays a core role. A big conceptual leap is to let go of the last vestiges of deterministic thinking and planning and embrace the swirl, or design/act for all-being beneficial life cycle in non-deterministic ways.

Control vs. Participation
I think a main feature here is a shift in the locus of intent/sovereignty. I think this is important to avoid misundestanding. I think one possible mistake to make is to extend the sense from previous WLs of conscious CONTROL. I think a main attribute of 9+ thinking is RELEASING control and moving towards all-node beneficial participation. Partly this is an ethical thing (we're now dealing with sovereign units, not action/goal nodes!) and part of it is a practical thing: the nature of a WoR is that deterministic masterminded control Does Not Work Well, it is not a feature or a dynamic of 9+ thinking.

Again, think ecosystems. Every element (being) in an ecosystem participates in the creation of the unfolding dynamic of the ecosystem, but in a healthy ecosystem there is no one unit (or small groups of units) that project exactly what they want the ecosystem to do, specifically, in a command and control perspective, and then orchestrate that end. [(This points to a resolution to the "oh my god we've got to fix everything" issue with people working on the metacrisis. The "omg we've got to fix everything" thinking *is perhaps part of the problem* and switching to healthy-ecosystem-participation thinking is part of the 'solution'.)]

In other words, WoRgaming is NOT a kind of top down master of puppets / master of the universe supervillain game. (Although I wonder if a possible corrupted failure mode of WL9+ *is* villainy. Something to consider.)

Healthy WL9+ activity might simultaneously feel like an expansion of influence and a contraction/release of control.

In Teal Organiations (Laloux) the decision making mechanism is self-management based on advice, not commands or permission. Agents make decisions but must seek advice from those their decision may impact. They don't need approval. They just do it. In this way Teal leaders don't really control their orgs so much as influence it via non-coercive advice and guidance. I think there are elements relevant to the 9+ thinking space to be taken from e.g. Reinventing Organization by Laloux.

Comfort with paradox might be a key cognitive skill requirement at 9+.

Understanding agent-agent interactions and how to 'be competent' in that space and what that even means is the essence of 9+ thinking.

Why is self-actualization a pre-requisite for 9+ and how is it included (transcend and include)?
Self-actualization is learning that and how you yourself are unique, that you have a Way, and how to uncover/discover and cultivate the you-ness of you in a full way. Plotkin might talk of your soul's niche. This deep understanding of the existence of actualization and the process of achieving it is necessary to hold the perspective of organizations/compositions of variously-actualized agents. It is necessary prerequisite personal work to not just see agents as cogs, interchangeable parts. Each agent must be seen as a sovereign unit that possesses a niche, a unique Way, at which it realizes its highest function and purpose.

This understanding further dispels the notion of Control - you can't conform or direct-from-above someone else's soul niche/Way any more than you tell a flower precisely how to blossom. (Although you can influence a field or a patch to be a good place for flowers to blossom... expansion of influence, contraction of directed control).

More paradox: only by understanding, respecting, and loving the unique soul(-potential) of beings/systems can you a) begin to appreciate the unfathomable power and beauty of the world while simultaneously b) realizing how futile and ugly and weak command and control systems are.

So this is all my understanding of (one aspect of) the perspective of 9+. I'm not yet sure how to unpack wtf 9+ people actually do. It might not be obvious. They might not engage in what look like very exotic behavior. The proof might only be in the pudding. Some ideas:

• High 'performance' (results/'good' outcomes, aka fields of flowers) but low predictability. Great stuff tends to happen as a result of the 9+'s participation in a WoRgame, but that 'great stuff' may or may not have been an explicit directed desired outcome.
• A common 'result' is more self-actualization. More people influenced by the 9+ to participate in frameworks/orgs/systems that support and encourage the actualization process itself as a first- or second-order effect. (Laloux, the school)
• A definition of WoRgaming == the cultivation of multi-agent environments conducive to actualization in the pursuit of shared, common, possibly emergent non-directed or deterministic purpose? If stated, that purpose might be mundane or typical: run a business/nonprofit, school, event, meeting, game, etc. The magic is in HOW it is run: trust, self-management, etc.
• An actualized (WL8) individual might be intolerant/highly impatient with poison and waste in their own life - to the point of being intolerant of activity that isn't objectionable for any other reason than it not being Their Way.
• A 9+ person might be intolerant of poison/waste/Not The Way in *organization* - in WoRgames in which they participate. Their activity might not be trimming/tuning nodes in their own WoG, but rather trimming/tuning/influencing nodes in the WoR.
• WL9's might find it difficult to spend much time with people who are not in any kind of touch or proximity to their own potential for actualization. It might be painful for them to be around people who act like interchangeable cogs. EDIT: I think actually that might be the WL8 experience. The WL9 experience might be extreme intolerance for poorly run/dysfunctional WoRs. I don't know if this is useful to state -- you don't have to be WL9 to tell that an org is a bag of #nope and dislike it. The difference might be that the WL9 sees alternatives beyond "Whiteknuckle it for own reasons" and "quit".

Some thoughts on 10+

• What's the difference between 9 and 10? Maybe skill? The 9 can *see* it and is striving towards it, like how 6 is starting to grok that relationships between goals/actions exist but essentially must be focused on skill development in order to have anything to work with in terms of systems, but the 9 doesn't yet have the skill at agent influence and cultivation. So, the 9's focus is essentially on building skills at the level of influence and participation in 1:1 agent relations? They can't hold the whole WoR in their head at once so they focus on the dynamics of the simplest form - two agents. Alternatively, their focus might be on more than 1:1 but it might be on one class of influence/effect/dynamic at a time within multi-agent WoRs. I'm not sure.
• The 10 is becoming competent at 'real' WoRgames, able to see/grok a whole community of agents and potentially create such WoRs (organizations that cultivate actualization as an effect).
• Note how this is very different from 'being a manager' or 'leading a team'. It's the actualization-effect and the perspective of participation rather than control/direction that makes this kind of thinking categorically different. I am not describing someone who is working with/in teams or organizations for the first time! I'm describing someone who is embodying *a specific kind* of interaction with teams/organiations/multi-agent systems for the first time.
• If this model is ~correct/useful, then I guess that we can call WL11 unconscious competence at WoRgame participation and we bumped chop wood, carry water to WL12.

A Case Study
Based on all that ^^, @mF is an obvious and well-documented case study of WL9 behavior that comes to my mind. It's difficult (for me) to tell how much his system runs on design/vision versus serendipity; he interacts and engages at the borders and centers of multiple systems of people, his self-understanding is very clear and he acts consistently in alignment with his self-understanding, he creates and shapes systems of people (his art studio, the local art community, the local business community, the nature people community, etc etc), his behaviors *generate* serendipity rather than merely harvesting environmental serendipity, etc. It also seems like his WoRgame has been cohering/crystalizing remarkably in an observable way in the last ~year or so, although the signs are there from before (it's not like his WoRgame fell out of a blue sky one day while he was running through the forest...).

He appears to operate at an insane pace that would overwhelm/exhaust most people. This is probably true, but I suspect that when you're as tapped into your own personal idiosyncratic Way as tightly as mF is, doing what looks like 'too much' becomes natural. Like how it's natural for water to flow rapidly down a smooth chute rather than a slope strewn with boulders. That said, I think it would be a mistake to look at the apparent pace of mF's life and say "ah, mF is great but that isn't attractive to me at all, WL9 is not for me." I'm sure there are calmer/slower *looking* WL9 lifestyles. It would also be a mistake, I think, to attempt to mantle up into WL9 by attempting to Copy mF's pace. His pace may be an effect of being so tightly self-actualizing. So, don't worry about pace. Focus on self-actualizing and follow Cal Newport's advice to "work at a natural pace". You'll discover what your natural pace is as you go.

[jacob]

Also PS, I don't fully understand the "Autonomous" label for WL9 thinking.

It's what the younger generations refer to as a "live player" vis-a-vis an NPC. The term "autonomous" is a couple of generations old---as am I by now---but it pretty much means the same. It's someone who is writing their own script. This is not to be confused with someone immature who just does what they want. There's a rhyme and reason to the script-writing process. Kegan5. Two things: it means knowing enough to 1) see the scripts everybody including themselves are operating under; and 2) create another script.

[Jin+Guice]

Thanks for this long and very detailed and well thought out explanation!

I wish I had something to add or critique but I got nothin' right now.

I think WL8= self-actualization is figuring out what you want to do. Most of us aren't used to having actual autonomy in our lives or grappling with our own inner demons. A WL8 person will not only have that freedom but know what they want to do with it. In this way WL8 is actually the starting point. Frankly I think it's the starting point to how humans ought to live and, if we lived in a more functional society, is where we would train individuals to get to at some point in early adulthood.

I think WL9 naturally flows from that autonomy. Once you are able to write your own scripts, most of us are going to want to find other people who are writing their own scripts and compare notes. To me the hardest part (once you are self-actualized) seems like it is likely finding other people who are writing their own scripts.


ETA: I also want to plug WL6-8. I wasn't really sure what these WLs were about for a long time. I was pretty stoked to just get out from under the thumb of paid employment. I was less stoked about building skills I wasn't sure I was interested in and then doing "systems thinking," which I didn't understand.

What they don't tell you is that WL6-8 fucking rule. They are about self discovery and turning your life into meaningful play. Optimizing and saving money hits this really nice button for a lot of us, but looking back, WL3-5 are kind of a slog through tedious employment watching numbers pile up on a screen while you learn to live without your favorite indulgences. WL6-8 is about engaging with the world in front of you, realizing you can take care of yourself very easily and figuring out what you want to do in the world, now that survival (or the perception of survival) is not a struggle.

[AxelHeyst]

What they don't tell you is that WL6-8 fucking rule.

Amen.

“Okay, fine,” he says. “But this still seems like a lot of complex cognitive effort just to make my life more resilient against potential disasters. Sure, that’d be nice, but I personally do have a lot of social safety nets so I’m not sure why I should put so much effort into this.”

“Well, the other reason to internalize systems thinking is that all your dreams will come true,” I say.

He blinks at me. “What do you mean your dreams will come true?” he says sharply. He seems upset with me. Odd.

“Your dreams will start to come true,” I say. “Obviously, right? Except for the dumb ones. Look, a major reason that people are frustrated in how their lives are going is because their lives are set up to consume so many resources that they have to spend huge amounts of time just gathering resources, typically money, to keep the thing going. Also, since their life systems are fragile, they frequently experience little emergencies they have to scramble to fix. They don’t have any time or resources available to purposefully direct the trajectory of their lives because they spend all their time scrambling to put out fires. This is stressful, and most people cope with the stress of this with numbing agents like alcohol, weed, driving fast, scrolling around on the internet, watching facile entertainments, whatever, which makes it even harder to get in control of their lives.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Yes, normies have terribly delicate and stressful lives, you’ve said that a lot already. Explain the part where your dreams come true if you internalize systems thinking.”

“When you internalize systems thinking you decrease the amount of resources required to run your life, and you reduce the friction. This creates more space for you to think about your life, to simply be, without all of the running around, and to experiment with different activities. You tweak and tune as you go, observing the effect that different behaviors have on your overall experience of life. You remember, or discover, dreams and desires that you’d long forgotten about or didn’t even know you had, and have the space to pursue them. You stop doing things that block your dreams. Your stress levels comes down and you don’t need to use coping or numbing agents like alcohol as much, which improves the overall function of your life system because coping and numbing dissociates you from the experience of life and introduces other sources of friction. Over time your life activities converge on the imprint of interests, desires, and purpose that every human is born with, the grooves everyone has deep down. The closer you get to this imprint the stronger your attraction to it – it functions like a gravity well, the closer you get the stronger you feel it – and it eventually feels effortless to simply do the things you were made to do. Your life becomes consistently amazing.”

(Gratitude to my MMG who pointed out that I was overselling 'resilience' and barely mentioning 'your life will become amazing' in an earlier draft.)

[black_son_of_gray]

To preface what follows, I just want to point out that there are a lot of interesting ideas to digest here. Kudos! It's a great contribution.

For the time being, I mostly have questions. They are genuine - I am not trying to be a pain in the ass or a contrarian (though sometimes I'm probably both).

9+ thinking is about systems of systems, and some of those component systems may not be humans or even organic/corporeal. They might be hyperobjects.

What is the best way of thinking about interrelation: systems of systems? systems within systems? Hierarchical? Lateral? Fractal? I'm guessing the answer is 'yes' to all of them, but it's worth pointing out that each perspective offers valuable nuance. I like the idea you have developed around "sovereignty", but I think that works best for a more lateral perspective. The most obvious example being like the sovereign nation states of the world, each with a seat at the UN table (let's ignore the fact that nations sometimes do not agree on each other's legitimacy). But then what to make of the UN super-government itself (larger order), or self-governing entities within nations like first nations/native peoples, territories, etc (smaller order)?

Also: If a WL8 system were gradually expanded with additional nodes/goals/elements to be bigger and bigger over time (i.e. difference in degree), would it eventually reach a size and complexity so large that it would be indistinguishable from a WL9 system (i.e. difference in kind)? That seems paradoxical, but also kind of makes sense to me.

Recall that the idea WL8 is fully self-actualizing, meaning something like they've figured out who they *really* are, have accepted that, and have arranged their WoG to fully actualize their recognized Way.

The emphasis on -ing above in self-actualizing reminds me of some of the therapy books I've read, which like to reframe mental states as behaviors using a cute little language hack: E.g. "I am anxious" becomes "I am anxietizing ." Reframing this way serves to get away from giving oneself permanent labels ("I am a bad person" vs. "I have done a bad thing"), and also places an emphasis on actions.

I just wanted to point this out because it might be worth thinking about self-actualization that way too. That is, one does not become some final, permanent state of "self-actualized" (...or enlightened, etc.). Rather, self-actualization can be thought of as an ongoing honest/authentic relationship (in WL9 parlance!) with the system that is oneself, and might be better thought of in terms of doing self-actualization rather than being self-actualized.

where the boundaries of Self, Other, and Environment start to break down or at least get re-understood, reconceptualized, in the same way that at a certain level of understanding you might talk about the forest *being* part of your lungs in an actual, real, non-poetical way. (Or, perhaps, yes in a poetical way but not in a sentimental way?)

The New Boundary of the Self and Working with Paradox
A key factor (*the* key factor?) of 9+ thinking is the breakdown/dissolution/reorganization of the ego. The boundary of self expands in the direction of unitive self-understanding. It is not just known but felt that the forest is part of my lungs in a real and not just poetic or mystical sense. The forest is the part of my lungs that exists outside of my skin-bag is just a brass tacks practical piece of knowledge, *not* some esoteric nature-based spirituality mumbo jumbo. It's simply obviously true and, at 9+, felt and understood.

Thought: Mystical thinking forms a kind of horseshoe shape along ERE Wheaton Levels, with low (1-3) and high (8-10) superficially looking closer to each other than the middle levels (5-6). The difference between low and high could maybe be described as 'grokking','perspective','knowledge', or 'understanding'. The middle levels seem to think along the lines of "having it all figured out", while the lower and higher levels are "awash in The Mystery": the lower levels because they literally cannot distinguish events/outcomes from luck/destiny/fate/magic, the higher levels because their actual understanding appreciates the sheer complexity/the beauty/the cosmic spookiness/incomprehensibilities of it all. This underlies the genius/kook line that gurus often straddle.

See also, Aloha Ke Akua by Nahko Bear/Medicine for the People

Lyric snippets:

Lend your ears, lend your hands
Lend your movement, anything you can
Come to teach, come to be taught
Come in the likeness in the image of God
'Cause you can be like that
[...]
The more I understand about the human race
The less I comprehend about our purpose and place
And maybe if there was a clearer line
The curiosity would satisfy
Time-based prophecies that kept me from living
In the moment I am struggling
To trust the divinity of all the gods
And what the hell they have planned for us
I cry for the creatures who get left behind
But everything will change in a blink of an eye
And if you wish to survive
You will find the guide inside
[...]
I go back and forth every single day
The clarity it comes to me in the choppy waves
As the feelings and the places
And the seasons change
The galaxies remain
Energy fields pullin’ up out of this space
The angels that are composting the spiritual waste
The hate that gets me displaced from my spiritual place
Ten fold the manna when the planets are in place, in polar alignment
We’re on assignment
Bodies on consignment
Return them to the circus
And what is the purpose?
What is the purpose and would you believe it?
[...]
If you knew what you were for
And how you became so informed?
Bodies of info performing such miracles
I am a miracle made up of particles
And in this existence
I’ll stay persistent
And I’ll make a difference
And I will have lived it
[...]
I’m not a leader, just a creature
Seeking the features of a teacher
Whether you follow or whether you lead
All mysterious ways of nature and I’m into it (I'm into it)
Change in management
[...]
And the day that I don’t wake up
And transcend the holy make-up
I am capable, I am powerful
The day that I don’t wake up
And transcend the holy make-up
I am on my way to a different place

In other words, WoRgaming is NOT a kind of top down master of puppets / master of the universe supervillain game. (Although I wonder if a possible corrupted failure mode of WL9+ *is* villainy. Something to consider.)

I'm interpreting this to mean that paternalism can't provide a satisfying solution to the metacrisis.

In Teal Organizations (Laloux) the decision making mechanism is self-management based on advice, not commands or permission. Agents make decisions but must seek advice from those their decision may impact. They don't need approval. They just do it. In this way Teal leaders don't really control their orgs so much as influence it via non-coercive advice and guidance. I think there are elements relevant to the 9+ thinking space to be taken from e.g. Reinventing Organization by Laloux.

Ah, so returning to my question about which kind of interrelations of systems...doesn't this example also presuppose a kind of lateral interrelation? Meaning, each agent is roughly similar in skill/ability/orientation? I guess what I'm trying to get at is: are the options for WL9 only WL7 systems and up? Or, said another way, what is the minimum essential unit for inclusion into a web-of-relations? Another system? How big? How complex? How disparate/overlapping? (In the above example, it seems like agents in a Teal Organization have to be...teal. Someone coercive or domineering would screw all that up...right? But isn't it kind of fragile if it can't handle that?)

• An actualized (WL8) individual might be intolerant/highly impatient with poison and waste in their own life - to the point of being intolerant of activity that isn't objectionable for any other reason than it not being Their Way.
• A 9+ person might be intolerant of poison/waste/Not The Way in *organization* - in WoRgames in which they participate. Their activity might not be trimming/tuning nodes in their own WoG, but rather trimming/tuning/influencing nodes in the WoR.

I'm not sure I fully understand the message here. Poison and waste are just elements within a system on some level. They go somewhere, they do something, they play a role. So in that sense, I don't understand "intolerant" because it sounds like the WL9 is not fully embracing the elements of systems that sometimes just are there...It sounds "maximize-y". But I also get that an opposite word, say "indifferent", also doesn't quite work. Maybe if we channel Stoicism, we get a better result? "Intolerant" of waste/poison that one can control, "indifferent" to waste/poison that is inevitably, uncontrollably baked in the cake?

WL9's might find it difficult to spend much time with people who are not in any kind of touch or proximity to their own potential for actualization. It might be painful for them to be around people who act like interchangeable cogs. EDIT: I think actually that might be the WL8 experience. The WL9 experience might be extreme intolerance for poorly run/dysfunctional WoRs. I don't know if this is useful to state -- you don't have to be WL9 to tell that an org is a bag of #nope and dislike it. The difference might be that the WL9 sees alternatives beyond "Whiteknuckle it for own reasons" and "quit".

Yeah, maybe I'm thinking waaaaay too grand in scale here, but if we go turtles all the way up, aren't all those non-WL8+ people just the actual system of people? If one keeps expanding their systems (of systems..and so on), doesn't one eventually get to the top level of just including everything? In this case, all of humanity?

[AxelHeyst]

Also: If a WL8 system were gradually expanded with additional nodes/goals/elements to be bigger and bigger over time (i.e. difference in degree), would it eventually reach a size and complexity so large that it would be indistinguishable from a WL9 system (i.e. difference in kind)? That seems paradoxical, but also kind of makes sense to me.

Sounds like a Zeno's Paradox question to me. In practice, is there an instantaneous moment in time when someone switches from only thinking about their own WoG (WL8), to being capable of Web-of-Relationship / System of Systems thinking? No. So in practice it's a fluid funky liminal time that might feel kind of disorienting while a person is transitioning their perspective from WoG to WoR-thinking. But that's difficult to model, so we just say/think stuff like "there's a moat between WL8 and 9, you go in with WoG thinking and pop out the other side with WoRgame thinking" but of course that's not actually true.

Phase change of materials (latent heat of vaporization/melting) might be a more useful metaphor than 'moat' for the thermodynamically minded.

I'm interpreting this to mean that paternalism can't provide a satisfying solution to the metacrisis.

Wouldn't it be funny if it was, though?

Ah, so returning to my question about which kind of interrelations of systems...doesn't this example also presuppose a kind of lateral interrelation? Meaning, each agent is roughly similar in skill/ability/orientation? I guess what I'm trying to get at is: are the options for WL9 only WL7 systems and up? Or, said another way, what is the minimum essential unit for inclusion into a web-of-relations? Another system? How big? How complex? How disparate/overlapping? (In the above example, it seems like agents in a Teal Organization have to be...teal. Someone coercive or domineering would screw all that up...right? But isn't it kind of fragile if it can't handle that?)

I don't think the component systems of the WL9's WoRgame have to 'be WLx+'. Also, as I kind of mentioned at the beginning of my OP, I think it's not correct to think that all of the sub-systems of a WoRgame are people. The sub-systems could be people, animals, plants, businesses, cultures, hyperobjects, building mechanical systems, economies, political entities, ideas, etc. WoRgaming is not Howlieball, in other words.

And actually I don't think all the agents in a Teal Organization do have to be themselves Teal. Enough of the influencer/leaders/founders have to be Teal, probably, to build/cultivate the system-of-systems that is the Teal Org, but not every component has to itself 'be' Teal. Also, getting into my notion that WoRgames constitute more than just people, the Teal Organization is a Web of Relationships involving employees, customers, machines, economies, the weather, transportation and logistics networks, the Market, ...

I'm not sure I fully understand the message here. Poison and waste are just elements within a system on some level. They go somewhere, they do something, they play a role. So in that sense, I don't understand "intolerant" because it sounds like the WL9 is not fully embracing the elements of systems that sometimes just are there...It sounds "maximize-y". But I also get that an opposite word, say "indifferent", also doesn't quite work. Maybe if we channel Stoicism, we get a better result? "Intolerant" of waste/poison that one can control, "indifferent" to waste/poison that is inevitably, uncontrollably baked in the cake?

That works. I didn't occur to me that a distinction needed to be made regarding waste outside one's locus of control. Although, what we're talking about here is in fact an expansion of one's locus of control/influence/participation, so maybe it is worth fleshing out so things don't slip in between the cracks. Ultmately, though, my thought on this mirrors David Allen's:

If it can be changed, there's some action that will change it. If it can't, it must be considered part of the landscape to be incorporated in strategy and tactics.

However, these points about intolerance of waste are just low-confidence guesses, mostly extrapolated from my current relationship with actions that seem clearly not in alignment with my Way. Extrapolation might not be the move, here, though.

Yeah, maybe I'm thinking waaaaay too grand in scale here, but if we go turtles all the way up, aren't all those non-WL8+ people just the actual system of people? If one keeps expanding their systems (of systems..and so on), doesn't one eventually get to the top level of just including everything? In this case, all of humanity?

Yeah. I think that's WL[chop wood carry water].

[7Wannabe5]

However, these points about intolerance of waste are just low-confidence guesses, mostly extrapolated from my current relationship with actions that seem clearly not in alignment with my Way. Extrapolation might not be the move, here, though.

My guess would be that "intolerant" might be temperament-type negative emotion specific. For example, I might sub in "bored" or "understimulated."

For example, I recently decided that I was bored with the concept/phrase "personal finance", because kind of 1981 time-stamped, like a VIC 20 personal computer, or anything else that was moved from the plural inter-objective to the singular objective by slapping "personal" in front of it. Maybe the prime example of this being "space" -> "personal space." Five minutes of research revealed that the concept of "personal finance" originated in a 1923 amateur economics contest with the top medal going to "A Theory of Consumption" by Hazel Kyrk. A bit more digging and deconstruction led me to the conclusion that a better (more interesting and flexible) term would be "wherewithal", especially because it has been used as a conjunction, a pronoun, and a noun. Thus, "Wherewithal actualization?", "Actualization wherewithal.", and "Self wherewithal actualization" all valid.

I was also bored with "lifestyle" for similar reasons. It originated as "life-style" in Adlerian psychology, which is not all that different from the Myer-Briggs model in that it works from the premise that one's core "life-style" preference is determined by influential factors before age 5. Then, as "life-style" became "lifestyle" it very much merged with the concept of the consumer and consumer choices as first discussed by Kyrk. More recently, how one chooses to spend their time as well as their money became more embedded in the concept. Thus, living one's ideal life-style would be roughly akin to self-actualization, and both the pre-consumerist and the post-consumerist would have it hyphenated, either at last or at first. My DS36 reads more linguistics and history than I do, so I asked him, "What did humans have before they had lifestyles?" and the best he could come up with was "way of life" and/or "customs", but these would rarely be "personal"-ized. So, of course, the next question would be, "What will humans have after "lifestyle" is retired?"

I just wanted to point this out because it might be worth thinking about self-actualization that way too. That is, one does not become some final, permanent state of "self-actualized" (...or enlightened, etc.). Rather, self-actualization can be thought of as an ongoing honest/authentic relationship (in WL9 parlance!) with the system that is oneself, and might be better thought of in terms of doing self-actualization rather than being self-actualized.

One step towards self-transcendence might be self-actualizing-as-other or other-actualizing-as-self, which might just be a different perspectives on exhibiting "care" and "empathy" within ones Web-of Relationships. Of course,it might also be the case that one would develop web-of-relationship prior to developing web-of-goals if one entered a Wheaton model through a door labeled something like "community care" rather than "personal finance." I suppose Level 0 of Community Care would be something like: I know none of my neighbors. I loathe my boss and despise my co-workers. Liz Phair was thinking of me when she wrote "Fuck and Run." My motto is "Foul is fair in hockey and life." Full custody means I paid the child support, so you will take care of the brat. etc. etc. For somebody who is inherently life-style inclined towards "community care", they wouldn't show up on their version of a forum similar to this until they already around Optimization, and then maybe their cross-over at Level 6 might involve expanding skill set towards altering more objective features of the environment. For example, empathetic listening is optimized at one-on-one, but you can cook dinner for 8 in the same time period. Dunno.

[black_son_of_gray]

If a WL8 system were gradually expanded with additional nodes/goals/elements to be bigger and bigger over time (i.e. difference in degree), would it eventually reach a size and complexity so large that it would be indistinguishable from a WL9 system (i.e. difference in kind)? That seems paradoxical, but also kind of makes sense to me.

Sounds like a Zeno's Paradox question to me. In practice, is there an instantaneous moment in time when someone switches from only thinking about their own WoG (WL8), to being capable of Web-of-Relationship / System of Systems thinking? No. So in practice it's a fluid funky liminal time that might feel kind of disorienting while a person is transitioning their perspective from WoG to WoR-thinking. But that's difficult to model, so we just say/think stuff like "there's a moat between WL8 and 9, you go in with WoG thinking and pop out the other side with WoRgame thinking" but of course that's not actually true.

So I thought about this more overnight, and I think an answer for what the "moat" is can be found in what you've already written:

A key factor (*the* key factor?) of 9+ thinking is the breakdown/dissolution/reorganization of the ego. The boundary of self expands in the direction of unitive self-understanding. It is not just known but felt that the forest is part of my lungs in a real and not just poetic or mystical sense. The forest is the part of my lungs that exists outside of my skin-bag is just a brass tacks practical piece of knowledge, *not* some esoteric nature-based spirituality mumbo jumbo. It's simply obviously true and, at 9+, felt and understood.

Specifically, what popped into my head was the Copernican Revolution. Shifting the reference frame from centering on yourself to other loci which happen to include yourself yourself is a difference in kind rather than degree. All of a sudden, a more and more elaborate single system suddenly snaps into multiple interacting systems. I think this might be the moat.

[AxelHeyst]

Shifting the reference frame from centering on yourself to other loci which happen to include yourself yourself is a difference in kind rather than degree. All of a sudden, a more and more elaborate single system suddenly snaps into multiple interacting systems. I think this might be the moat.

I agree. I'm reading Building the Cathedral by Sadie Alwyn Moon and for something else they used the metaphor of one of those visual illusions, where you stare at it and stare at it and all you see is a cat, and then suddenly *pop* you see a castle, or whatever. It was always there, but now you can see it and you can't unsee it.

[AxelHeyst]

...I asked him, "What did humans have before they had lifestyles?" and the best he could come up with was "way of life" and/or "customs", but these would rarely be "personal"-ized. So, of course, the next question would be, "What will humans have after "lifestyle" is retired?"

Personal Mythology towards personal religions!! All the cool metamodernist kids are doing it.

Sadie argues that we all had cultural relgions/mythologies, and then those shattered because modernism/post-modernism and resulted in vertigo or nausea (Neitzche/Sartre), and the move from here is not to revert to naive mythology (New Age guru) but eye's-open personal mythologization (metamodern full-spectrum re-enchantment). They (she?) explains it better in the book.

[jacob]

I think of WL9 as meta-paradigmatic. At this point you understand your own paradigm very well. Your understanding is at the unconscious competence level. You have mastered your paradigm. If you "grew up" with ERE, that paradigm is "individually self-directed rational systems-thinking" complete with its generalized personal competence as organized by multi-dimensional telicity. Effectively, at ERE-WL8 if you see a problem you can come up with a plan to solve it because you know enough of the details to put it together and execute on it. In Chikszentmihaliy terms, you're always in the control/relaxed stage of being able to personally execute on your ideas. It's "monkey have idea, monkey can build it"-stage. (Cf. earlier "monkey see, monkey do"- or "monkey heard about, monkey needs directions"-stages.)

But ...

At this level you start to attract the interest of people from other paradigms. (Note I may be projecting too many personal experiences here.) They wonder how it is that you seem to be able to solve certain problems in under two weeks that they've been spending literally years trying to figure out.

However, just like ERE is a paradigm that forms a complete and self-consistent system at level7, there are other paradigms out there that play by different rules and values and which use different ways of thinking. Some of these are indeed more about "participation" than "control". I don't think this distinction can be generallized. It's rather that some paradigms favor participation and other paradigms favor control (think agency). It's just if you formed your entire world view around one of the two, it's hard to see it any other way.

WL8->WL9 is therefore not about taking it to the next level but about taking it to a different level. For me the greatest struggle has been the "patience to suffer fools gladly" while learning the new paradigm. Initially I probably went too fast. I walked into situations that I could solve in a week as opposed to the 100 weeks that the paradigm had already spent. Two orders of magnitude of a difference. (Think of it as a high school math nerd solving multiplication table exercises for a 3rd grader. I presume that might still be a thing.)

However, I likely also missed key value from other paradigms simply because I had found extremely efficient work-arounds from within my own paradigm.

I'm almost certain that this is the key challenge between WL8 and WL9. This leads to the idea (see somewhere on the forum) in which one may become "overfactored".

Just like when pursing cross-interpersonal applications and just doing it because it's easier than letting someone else, one may become overfactored in terms of paradigms because it's easier to just argue one's very well-known good solution than to make time for other paradigms to learn from their mistakes.

This is perhaps what's required for WL10 and why WL10 and the likes all seem to come around to accepting that everything is a damn process so might as well like it.

[mountainFrugal]

A Case Study
It's difficult (for me) to tell how much his system runs on design/vision versus serendipity; he interacts and engages at the borders and centers of multiple systems of people, his self-understanding is very clear and he acts consistently in alignment with his self-understanding, he creates and shapes systems of people (his art studio, the local art community, the local business community, the nature people community, etc etc), his behaviors *generate* serendipity rather than merely harvesting environmental serendipity, etc.

The system is designed so that each part has an externally facing part to interact with the world, hopefully conveys what I want, and then the serendipity takes care of itself. The system deliberately increases the luck surface area, but I have also have taken the time to think through some likely scenarios (not specific scenarios) so that when a specific scenario comes up that pattern matches one that I imagined, I immediately pounce without hesitation.

[7Wannabe5]

@mF:

So, you're a market maker. The market being represented by either the chaotic edge or a center-point determined by intersection of flows, although it is likely that these are the same thing dependent on scale and perspective.

[mountainFrugal]

That is a good way to think about it. I am trying to make further connections in the community. After doing some work with the chamber of commerce and this non-profit I now see money flows and relationships I had not before. Not because I could not comprehend them, but there are many layers of human interactions even for seemingly simple stuff that I was just not attuned to. Money flows are only one way to look at it. The game I am playing is making the community system more efficient and longer term more resilient with targeted efforts. I need very little (own oxygen mask) so the connections and effort might benefit me in the future, but they do not have to still be worth while. Also, actively dealing with people at different value memes, MHC etc. and taking that all into consideration as to your broader actions is the ultimate human game one can play at a small community scale. It also tests real world understanding of all these abstractions and assumptions in hard to predict scenarios.